The Jordan Harbinger Show - 150: Derren Brown | Using the Power of Suggestion for Good

Episode Date: January 22, 2019

Derren Brown (@DerrenBrown) is a mentalist, illusionist, magician, artist, photographer, collector of curiosities, and author. What We Discuss with Derren Brown: How did Derren Brown make the transition from law student to career hypnotist? How does psychological manipulation and hypnotic suggestion work to make people operate counter to their own desires? How does Derren use his own manipulative skills for good? How do faith healers and psychics ply their trades so convincingly? What are the limits to hypnotic influence? And much more... The One You Feed is a podcast by Eric Zimmer and Chris Forbes that hosts inspiring conversations about creating a life worth living. Check it out here! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger, and I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. Man, I'm excited for this one. I have been trying to get Darren Brown on this show for over a decade, and finally, it's happening. If you heard Feedback Friday, you know that I went to his house, and he's got props from his shows there. He's got all these taxidermy animals like two-headed snakes and two-headed calves and six-legged piglets and his house is just like something out of Sherlock Holmes, antiques everywhere, secret passageways, and he is just the coolest guy. I'm trying to fanboy out so much here, but I just can't help myself. This guy, Darren, is a genius. First of all, if you haven't seen any of his work, imagine a magician or illusionist, I don't even know what you

call him at this point. He convinces people to, in theory, murder someone by throwing them off roof. Of course, the guy's harnessed in. But, you know, convincing people to do that, convincing people who are racist to jump in front of a bullet for who they think is an illegal immigrant. I mean, it's just his mind tricks are insane, not to mention fake faith healing, hypnosis, all kinds of illusion. It's just absolutely, he's one of the most incredible people alive today. I'm not even kidding. I just love what he does. Jason, you're obviously familiar with Darren I am. I was introduced to Darren Brown about seven years ago when we first met and you sent me some of his videos and I've been a fanboy ever since and I am so jealous that I did not get to come

to London to meet Darren in person because I am a huge fan of his work. He's just, like you said, he's a genius. His house sounds like everything that I would expect it to be. Exactly. Exactly. And today we're talking about how psychological manipulation works, hypnotic suggestion. We're talking about all kinds of elements of the show that you just can't get anywhere else. There's so much in this episode from how psychic fraud works to how faith healing works, to how he comes up with his tricks and his illusions, how he tests the shows and the experiments. There's just everything I always wanted to know in this episode and more. So please enjoy, I hope you enjoy this a fraction as much as I loved recording it and being able to do it. It's just, it's

really incredible. And if you want to know how I get people like this in my network and create connections with people like this, well, I'm teaching it to you. Level 1, the course is free. It takes a few minutes per day. Check it out, Jordan Harbinger.com slash level 1. All right, after trying for over 10 years to get them on the show, here's Darren Brown. One of the things that I've liked about your work for a long time. Well, first of all, this was a pleasure to prepare for it because very rarely do I get to watch 20 to 30 hours of magic and illusions and read a good book about happiness and stoicism. Oh, wow, you've done your research.

Oh, yeah. And then, of course, go and try things that I tried 10 years ago. I was telling you before the show with the switch of the painting. And I'll link to this in the show notes, the YouTube video, where people are walking by. I remember trying this in law school, I guess us sort of failed or escape ex-lawyers, escape-e, ex-loyers? Oh, you're an ex-lawyer as well. Yeah. Right, right.

We're always like, I have a hypothesis that we just went that way because we didn't know what else to do with ourselves and then went, screw it, I can't do this anymore. I think it's exactly correct. Yeah. It's sort of like, we have what it takes to do something and we aim our energy in the wrong place because can't go wrong being a lawyer. Exactly, which is exactly my, yeah, everyone's telling you, because here in this country, you're making those decisions. You're going to, you can do your A levels when you're 16, 17, around, already having an idea of what you're going to study at university. which of course is only the one, your one subject, so that's going to be law.

So at 16, you're choosing the A levels you're going to do to support that, which means in the level below A levels, your GCSEs, which are kind of like 14, you're already beginning to think what direction you've got ahead in because you're narrowing your subjects down. And it's just ludicrous. By the time you're actually old enough to know what you want to do, it's that thing of always thinking in the future, isn't it?

Always thinking these rungs up the ladder as opposed to just, you know, Yeah, of course, one of the reasons I went was because I didn't know what else to do with my life. Couldn't get the most basic of retail jobs other than maybe selling CDs at Best Buy, which I think here is called like J.B. High-Fi or Virgin Tower Records, whatever. And I just thought, well, I'm not going to do that with my four-year education. And somebody who doesn't know you from Adam is like, you should be a lawyer. You like arguing, oh, okay, let me spend $120,000 in three more years of my life. You're unbearable. You should be a lawyer.

Yeah, yeah. You'd fit right in with all these other people. everyone hates. So why don't you join them? It pays well from what I hear. Yeah. So you never did it. You never did. I actually did. I went through past the bar in New York City, went to work on Wall Street, and then when this is not what I want to do, but I'll only do it for four years. And luckily, well, my luck, no one else was lucky. How old? Is you look about 19? How old are? 38. 38, right. Well, yeah, it's long enough to. Next month. Yeah. Well, I passed the bar. I go and work there for a couple years, the economy tanks, and I'm doing mortgage-backed securities, which is exactly what no longer works, right? The subprime mortgage loan pool things. And so they go, hey, look, all you have

to find a new job more likely, you know? So I apply to be like a patent lawyer and they go, great, you've got to do all this other stuff. And I went, screw this. I just like doing interviews. I'm going to do these interviews for a little while. And then once I really have to get a real job, then I'll figure it out. And luckily, I'm still waiting for the. that moment where this all comes crashing down. I would imagine that happens with any creative career. You ever wake up and go, what happens if nothing works out for me anymore and I have to start over?

I feel I've got a lot of strings to my bow now, so I don't worry about it too much, because actually the stuff that is leased under sort of my control, like a broadcaster going, that's it. That's all the stuff I kind of enjoy least anyway. The stuff I really do enjoy is just me getting up. It doesn't not necessarily the stuff that earns me money, I suppose, but it would probably just kind of enough to tick by,

but I enjoy it more, so that's, I kind of don't worry about it too much. Yeah, I suppose at the point of which you're doing a Broadway show coming soon, with any sunny luck, and then double Netflix all over the UK, household name, there's a point at which, if everything comes crashing down,

you're just like, I'm retired, it's over. Yeah, that would be nice, but I don't know whether I'd stop. What would be interesting then is, you know, you realize what you do because you have to and what you feel a bit lost without. You know, I'd think I'd happily, I'd happily not make TV,

but I wouldn't want to not tour. But then if you're going to tour, you kind of need, you need to have the presence that TV gives you. Otherwise, no one wants to come and see you on stage. So I don't know, don't know how it would work. But I'd paint and take pictures. Right.

And write, that'd be my... How would you describe what you do? Because magician doesn't really... It doesn't seem like that's quite the same thing. You know, we think magician you think, pick a card, any card. Oh, my. gosh, I barely saw that. Where's the coin? Right? And there's like, not that there's anything wrong

with that, but what you're doing is kind of like, wait, how did you convince someone to murder that man? Which is, right? And where's the coin? And where's the coin? And both, you see, that's, that's, yeah. I, I, uh, I started off as a hypnotist. So I, when I was at university, I studied law, as we've said, and I, uh, saw a guy do a show, which, uh, unusually for a hypnotist, It wasn't a kind of embarrassing, you know, festival of horrendousness like a lot of stage hypnosis is. It was actually, it was fascinating and hilarious, but it was intelligent and it wasn't embarrassing.

So I left the show that night thinking and saying to my friend, I remember, I'm going to do this. So that was my first love was learning how to hypnotize. So I was a student with lots of other students around me that were really interested in being hypnotized. So I, and I was, you know, just desperate. for the tension and had that perform a thing in me and I was insecure

and I think hypnosis really taps into a desire to control obviously as does magic in its own way. So if you don't feel very impressive in yourself, both of those really tick that box. And

so it kind of became a real passion and then I drifted in more into doing close up magic because it was a bit more commercial. It was an easier thing to to actually make a living out of them, hypnosis, where you kind of want certain conditions to work under and so on. And then I wrote, I lived, I never worked as a lawyer.

I was just ticking by performing. I wrote a couple of books for magicians, which got me well known in that world. And I drifted into this psychological type of magic called mentalism. And at the time, I think they're really only like four or five mentalists around. There's a lot more now. Yeah. Probably because of the shows I did in the UK.

It became a very popular thing in the UK, and I guess that's spread out of it. And I got signed up by a TV company that spent a couple of years looking for someone that could do that kind of thing. This was back in 99, 2000. The first special went out in 2000 on Channel 4 in Britain. And they repeated the show,

and the repeat did quite well, so they commissioned another one. And then, and that point, it was David Blaine had just become a, it'd been a big thing. and I think we in Britain wanted like an answer to that. So I think I sort of fit that niche for a bit. And then slowly it kind of became its own thing.

And that was 2000s. It was a while ago. And as I grew up, the desire to kind of go, hey, look at me, aren't I clever. It became less interesting. And I realized that I think one of the reasons why magic becomes, or magicians start off being interesting and then after a while become easily kind of lampooned

and, you know, fun to make fun of, is that you're kind of, you're just sort of posturing and people sense that after a while. So I tried to move, because there is something, there is something interesting about magic, but it certainly isn't a magician pretending to have special powers. That's not interesting. What's interesting to me is that taps into the way we tell ourselves stories

about what's real, and the way we're constantly editing our, our experience to sustain a narrative for ourselves, which we need to is the only way we can navigate through life. But weirdly, a magician is providing a really neat sort of example of how that works. You know, if you watch a cart trick and you go, well, I picked a card, and then he never touched the cards, and the car disappeared, it was in my pocket. How did you do that? Probably everything you need to answer that question, you've seen, and this happened right in front of you, but you've edited those bits out because they did.

didn't seem important at the time. And of course, we do this in life right, all the time. So I've tried to move over the last few years away from that standard remit of, look at me, I'm clever, to I take more of a backseat. And the stars of the shows, if you like, are the members of the public that are going through normally big Truman show like psychological experiments where they don't know they're part of a show, and they're surrounded by actors, and big kind of dramatic, like we ended the world for one guy as a show I did called Apocalypse. Yeah, so there's quite big, high concept things. He wakes up in a zombie infested post-apocalyptic.

After we'd spent, like, months putting cameras in his house, putting fake news feeds into his phone and his TV. We were recording special editions, special episodes of TV shows that he'd watch that would have, like, news guests on, so we could get well-known scientists going on and talking about a meteor strike that was going to happen. So we ended the world. But actually it was the whole thing for him was a lesson in valuing what you have.

There's an old stoic lesson about to value what you have and not take it for granted. You should rehearse not having those things, you know. And you kind of forced him. We sort of forced that, yeah, forced that situation on him. But, you know, it worked. It was a lovely, lovely thing. So yeah, they've sort of grown up with me over the years. So it's a really long waffling answer.

No, it's okay. I loved Apocalypse. And I'll back up a little because I think a lot of people are going, What are you talking about? What we're seeing with, like, sacrifice, which is on Netflix, The Push, which is on Netflix, Apocalypse, which is on YouTube. Sorry, we're encouraging people to, like, steal your productions here. Steal, steal away.

These are, like you said, the Truman Show, if people have seen that movie, this is, everything around them is sort of staged and or fake. And so this kid wakes up, he thinks he's going to a concert or something like that with his brother, I guess, wakes up in a fake hospital, zombies all over the place, some guy picks him up in a van, he's got to rescue this little girl who actually turns out to be,

well, I don't want to spoil it, but he actually has to rescue this little girl, and he sort of finds all these levels of courage that he previously never had, because this is a guy who can't keep a job, sleeps on the couch, and goes drinking every night, and, like, doesn't value it. What I try and do is find a strong dramatic hook

and a good reason for doing it. That's the real message of the show. So sacrifice. which is the new ones. This is on Netflix. It's a bit more accessible. I take a guy who's a very right-wing American guy with strong anti-immigration views. As he says, I'm not racist. I just prefer white people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's actually his words. Maybe you should Google what racism is actually defined as. Yeah. And I have him lay down his life for a Mexican illegal immigrant to take a bullet for an illegal immigrant in essentially a gun standoff gun fight.

Not a gun fight. There's one gun. It's not really a fight with one gun, is it? But a standoff. It's fired twice. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the idea. So it's part of this world. He knows that there's some filming happening because he thinks it's part of a documentary. So I'm not completely out of it. Normally I'm not in the show at all because obviously people know me, at least in the UK. So this was, we had a sort of a half fiction thing where he felt he was part of one show that had then finished and was being filmed in England. Then he goes back home. So he's gone, the change process has happened for him. I use these psychological techniques to change him and change his feelings about immigrants in particular, open up some empathy and change that. and then as I do this a lot with the shows,

the idea is then if they know they've been part of one show, for the actual final test, there has to be no sense that it's part of a TV show at all. It has to be a real life and a life-changing thing for him. So he goes back home and then a couple of months later, we've staged a thing that he doesn't realize. He thinks he's going to see a friend in Vegas, but gets stuck in El.

LA, outside of LA in the desert, the car breaks down. And one thing leads to another, and he's in the middle of this hidden camera, elaborate experiment where he has a gun pointed out of him. He has a chance to step up and save a life by laying down his own. And it's extraordinary, and they're really emotional things to go, not a clearly, I mean, clearly for the guy, these are huge emotional things, but also for us and for me going through it. They're very, Yeah. She spent like a year making these things and, you know, they're very ambitious and difficult. You have to sustain a whole fiction for the person going through it as well as actually do it. So, yes, I've done a number of these, and they've taken an interest in illusion and persuasion

and just, you know, good ways of living and thinking and that whole business of the stories that we live by and trying to put them to sort of, you know, good and entertaining use. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Darren Brown. We'll be right back. Don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode, so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Darren Brown. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Thanks for listening and supporting the show.

To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger. dot com slash subscribe now back to our show with darren brown what are we actually seeing here because i think a lot of people when they think hypnosis they're thinking and i've seen this elsewhere in your work where they're carrying the guy outside and he wakes up on the lawn and he's like wow how did i get outside and then he walks back in people or that somebody's going to walk around on the stage and then click like a chicken we don't necessarily think of a subtle psychological manipulation or hypnotic

suggestion, which is kind of what's happening with, especially in sacrifice where you're playing a jingle and it queues something up. Yeah. These sort of suggestions to get people to take certain courses of action, if you don't know anything about what you're doing, there's probably plenty of people online, and I haven't seen this, but I would imagine there's a lot of people that go, this is just fake, the guy's pretending, it's all stage. And I've always had a lot of that.

I think it's maybe because it's not necessarily stuff. that would work on everybody. So with most of the shows, and it varies, but most of the shows, I'm using people that I've selected from a group of applicants. And you see this, this is how the shows start. Here are the applicants, and I've got to choose one, and I'll choose the person that I think is suitable.

So in the sacrifice, the guy Phil that we use, I needed somebody with these strong views, but also somebody who's suggestible. And also, it's important with him. He's not like a monster racist guy. He's actually, although you probably start off not liking him very quickly, you kind of, uh, you kind of fall in love with the guy, really, as it goes on. I felt bad for him initially. He just didn't seem like the sharpest, like something,

he'd obviously gone through something that made him dislike people that weren't white. Yeah. He said it was his upbringing, but it might have also been maybe he couldn't get a job and he was having a rough time. Yeah, it's an easy scapegoat. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, I wanted a kind of every man figure that we kind of sort of relate to as well, not just a monster, monster racist guy. So, so maybe that's one reason that people, I totally understand people are skeptical, because they're quite ambitious things.

But if you choose a guy, if you choose somebody that, if you choose the right person, it obviously makes life a lot easier. So I'm not saying these techniques that I use would just work on everybody at the drop of a hat. They wouldn't. And I try to explain that through. the show. Once I've got my guy, what I'm generally doing is attaching strong emotions to certain triggers. So either overtly with my involvement or completely covertly and just something that happens in the guy's life, normally I'll make some event happen that makes him feel something

very like a strong emotion. And then there'll be a sound or a thing that he sees or something that happens in that environment that steals that. It's like, you know, when you break up with a girlfriend and there was some song playing on the radio a lot of the time. And you don't hear the song for five years, and then you hear it again. It brings back all those feelings, right? So it's actually very straightforward sort of conditioning, really.

Anchoring? Is that what that's called? Yeah, in an LP language, it's angering, or it's conditioning or it's triggering, whatever. Yeah, but that's the idea. You're just kind of attaching emotions to triggers. So, again, normally with that, these shows and sacrifice is a good example. I want to get somebody into a point where they do something extraordinary and life-changing for them without them knowing that that's what the show's

about. So I can never approach it directly. But what I can do is break down, I kind of look at this final thing. Like I want him to put his own life on the line and save a life for somebody else who's the last person he'd ever stand up for. So I kind of break that down. I think, what are the components of that that are needed? And then normally those things on their own. can be framed as entirely positive and quite sort of benign things that why wouldn't anybody want a bit more of? Like the desire to act and to feel more empathy or be more open or whatever. So I create situations where those things can be explored and created within him. And then I attach them secretly to triggers.

And then in the end scenario, I can play or present those triggers at the same time. And hopefully with a rush of all those things as they come together. the situation that's being presented in front of him and this sort of opportunity that's, that's there, hopefully he takes the bait. That's kind of, that's the idea. And he is, you know, he is a changed man because of it. Yeah, I would imagine he has to rationalize that he did that of his own free will so he couldn't possibly actually dislike. Yeah, but also he did, he did. He did. Yeah. I mean, with some of the shows, I did one that was about taking actually a very similar structure that to make people, hold up a security van and steal

100,000 pounds. Oh yeah, it's called the highest. Again, it's an older show, it'll be on YouTube somewhere. Yeah, we'll put links to all these so that people can watch. Oh, great. Because I highly recommend, because sometimes they're hard to find. There's little clips. Or you can't watch them in the US, like fake ones. Yeah. That one was fascinating, the one where they're holding up.

Because I just thought, all you did was, well, there was all this prep one, but then the trigger was you're just on the phone with them and then suddenly they're walking down this empty street and they decide to hold up the armored car. And I thought, wait a minute. But there's like five different triggers that are going off.

Right. The color, if this is, color has been important. There's a slogan. There's a bit of music that plays in a car that drives past. So I use similar techniques as well to create an assassination. So the idea was to see whether, so Sahan Sahan, who's the guy still in prison for assassinating Bobby Kennedy, always said that he was hypnotized by the CIA.

And it sort of become one of those, conspiracy. Right, like, oh, maybe he was. Yeah, well, it's just, it's sort of, the question for me was, regardless of whether he was or wasn't, is it even possible, is it even plausible that the sort of and he laid out what they did and how they did it. Oh, he did? Yeah, yeah. He's got the whole story of how they did it, which is, you know, his story. I mean, he's, he's also quite a plausible guy, so it was a really enticing premise. Could you do that? Could you have somebody genuinely believe? I mean, at the last minute, it's a blank bullet. It's not a really. real, it's not a real bullet. It's not actually going to harm anybody. But as far as he's concerned

is assassinating somebody using the same techniques. Wait, wasn't he, you said he was on stage? Was the audience in on it? The audience were not in on it. So they must have freaked out. Well, that was another whole thing that was interesting. So, yeah, so we've, basically, the guy has gone through, again, what he thinks is a documentary about hypnosis, which allows me to set up some of these triggers without him realizing what they're for, because I can openly hypnotize him as part of one TV show he thinks as part of when actually. there's a hidden agenda. So the situation arises when he's just gone to an event, nothing to do with us, has no idea it's being filmed, the audience are not in on it at all.

And Stephen Frye, who's his target, is, Stephen is on it, and he's wearing squibs and everything. He knows, he knows this may happen. So he's out on stage, and then we set off these triggers, and it was a polka dot dress, which Sahan Sahan said was one of the triggers that they used. They conditioned him to feel certain things with a polka-dot dress. dress. There was a ringtone that we used. Someone's phone went off and it was a little jingle, little tune that he'd also been conditioned with. And would he do it? Now, he does do it. It's a spoiler, but he does do it. But it was interesting because we had this whole crowd control thing set up because what happens when the 300 people in the audience freak out.

Stampede. Yeah. Everyone's running out in the road. They didn't. Because there was this thing called normalcy bias, which means in these emergency situations, you just, you sit and you look around, no one else is panicking, so you don't. And then, of course, I had the thing of everyone going, oh, it's fake, because why didn't the audience freak out? But they didn't freak out because they don't freak out.

There was a story of a Pan Am flight that had landed in a foggy runway at night, and another plane had taken off over the top of it and ripped the side of this plane off. And there was a period of a few minutes that people could escape, before this plane was engulfed in flames. And the only people that did were ones that had either been in a similar situation before or had training in this kind of world. Everyone else just sat there and just burnt because they looked around and

someone will take care of it. It's fine. It's almost like a bystander effect. Yeah, it is. It is. It's like if you have an emergency, you know, there's going to be a flood or there's going to be, you know, you just sort of, oh, it'll be fine. It's not really going to affect me.

Right. It's that natural bias towards it. It'll be fine. If this house was on fire right now and you didn't move, move I'd probably be like oh it's just one of Darren's like things that he's yeah well a fire alarm is such a great example of it isn't it a fire alarm goes off the one thing you know is it isn't a real fire you know the one thing you don't think it actually is a fire so anyway so that was that was that was an interesting aspect of it but yeah so that's sort of what I do my background is in magic and

the sort of mind reading area of magic and over the years I've tried to move into this other area but I also do stage shows so yeah hopefully I should be in Broadway this year I did an off Broadway show for which we won the Drama Disc Award, which is a thing, no big deal. I think it was most unique, uniqueness stage production. Unique is one of those words we're like. I don't know what the award would be, but it was something like that, which was very, which was amazing. But yeah, so that, that, I did this off-broadway version a couple of years ago and hopefully, hopefully this year, hopefully in the spring, I should be there doing a Broadway version. So that is more of a kind of more traditional kind of stage show with it. But even then I try, no, the last show was about

faith healing. I did faith healing. That was awesome. This is not Netflix as well. It's called Miracle. It's really good. I'm trying not to be super fanning all over because it's hard to conduct the in. Yes. Yes. Oh no. Let's, please. Fluck my ego. That's fine. That was really interesting. And that's something I want to ask about more later. But I know you were a Christian until, was it was your mid-20s? Yeah, yeah, I was until like, yeah, it's all sort of, yeah, mid-university. at a time. When you look at historical healers, old biblical, miracle, stories and things like that, knowing what you know now about influence, persuasion, psychology, illusions, how much of the stuff, how much are illusions high tech? And how much do you think, wait a minute, this,

this technology, if you will, was around 3,000 years ago. This could be fake. This could have been something somebody did to, as a scam. And now it's, now it's this lore that we base our lives upon. I think, well, I think in terms of, I do sort of have people ask. sometimes, or do you think the miracles in the Bible were just magic tricks? I think it's sort of the wrong question. I think the, um, how those stories arrive is more, I think more to do with how those, how those tales get formed after the event so that you can, you know, if you're, if you're a young Christian community growing up in some other part of the world and you kind of need your, um, you need your backstory to justify your response to the difficulties that you're facing in your own

time so you need your stories and it was very sounded in those days to recreate stories and put words in the mouth of people, of your figure, your guru that long since died. So I think a lot of those stories are really just things that have come out

since in order to tell a story or teach a lesson that is useful for those communities, you know, 100, 200, 300, years later. So I think that's more the world you're in rather than actually, how did he turn the water into wine or whatever. Oh, chemistry. Which They didn't have.

No, it's this. Yeah. That makes sense. You hear about, like, Roman writings, then having some quote from, like, I don't know, Marcus or really, whatever. And then it's like, oh, wait a minute. Now, that was said by this prophet.

And it's like, well, we have this written over here in this other part of the world, and then it went out through Greece, and then suddenly it was said by this religious guy. Yeah. I mean, when you look at the oracle at Delphi, that people were, you know,

receiving these amazing messages, and there may be in all sorts of hallucinetics involved, but essentially it seemed to be people sort of wanting to believe something and letting information sit and taking ideas that were probably quite general and symbolic and letting them fit the specifics. And that's really no different to what a medium does today. I mean, I think that at its heart, our capacity for self-deception or at least to form a narrative that serves us from whatever information we're being given, that seems to be ages old and just part of who we are. It is interesting to see even now something that you would think people have gotten the memo about, such as cold reading and psychic fraud.

Yeah. There was a video you did, I don't know, 10 plus years ago now where I'll show people this because they'll go, oh, a friend of my goes, I went to this fair at my university when I was visiting my sister or his alma mater. And they had a psychic there. And I thought, oh, what the hell? And oh my gosh, I think maybe there's something to this. And I said, let me guess. He's an Indian guy who's a graphic designer. And I said, I'll cold read you.

You know, I'm not psychic. Here's what I got. Your parents are disappointed in your choice of occupation. They want you to be a doctor or lawyer or a professional. Your mom's really sad, but she's just glad you're happy. She really is more concerned with who you marry. Your dad, however, he wishes that you could have done something a little bit more, quote unquote, respectable. They don't understand the work that goes into your craft.

And he's like, whoa, are you psychic? And I'm like, I'm telling you. I told you. No, you're just. You're just like every other Indian dude in America whose parents are immigrants. Every other graphic design. Literally. Yeah.

You didn't become a doctor or a lawyer. Part of your family is disappointed. Your mom wants you to marry a nice Indian girl, and your dad is kind of annoyed that you didn't become an engineer. The end. Like, this is universal. And then you get the, I mean, the one of the worst things I've seen are sitting in a studio audience. You know, the psychics that come out on a TV show and they have their audience. And then before they started filming, this guy comes out and says,

is anybody hoping that someone's going to come through today? And all these hands go up. And he just asked people, so who did you lose? How did they die? What was their name? Is there some bit of information that would prove to you that it's genuinely there? And people are just giving this information. Then they start the cameras rolling.

And he comes out and just says all that stuff straight back. And it's, and if you have a dose of skepticism, you're sat there going, this is so transparent. This is, I think, because the lie is so ugly, it's just so much easier to believe, oh, he must be doing it for real. because he wouldn't just be asking us what to say and then just saying it just to make us cry because it looks good on camera.

Surely it wouldn't just be doing that. Right, you'd have to be like a proper bastard. Yeah, it'd have to be really nasty. So I think it's easier to believe the lie because it's sometimes the truth is so ugly. Having said that, I mean, although I've spent a lot of my career debunking that stuff, again, I think the, I think it's more interesting.

I think the question of, oh, are psychic powers real? Are the mediums real? Well, I mean, no, but I think that's not really that interesting. The interesting question to me is, you know, why are the mediums so perennially popular? And, you know, what is it about our narratives around death, for example, that, you know, as we've dispensed with superstitions so much over the last couple of hundred years, particularly anything morbid and that now, you know,

death is now something that is to be, you know, fought off at all means, It became the enemy. I mean, our system of medicine a couple of five hundred years ago was still the ancient Greek medicine about, you know, the humours and the phlegm and the fire and the bile and all of that. I mean, it was only fairly recently we've sort of embraced what to us now seems, you know, proper medicine, really a few hundred years ago. So given that and given the lack of cultural narrative now around death

that would provide us with any sort of real meaning, we don't have any meanings around death. unlike a lot of cultures that do. So there's, so how about, the only, the only real narrative we have in place now is, is the, the, um, the brave battle that someone's fighting. That's, that's, that's, that's sort of a narrative that tends to fit into place, but it doesn't do any good for the poor person that's dying, of course, makes everybody else, I think, feel better.

Sure. But for that, that one person, you're now adding failure to a long list of problems that already exists. So it kind of makes sense that at that one time when actually, because it is the one time and you need to be most aware of the narrative that you're forming, when you want to take authorship of your story, because when a book finishes that last scene, or when a film finishes that last scene,

it makes sense of everything that's happened before. This doesn't happen in life, right? So we have to, it just ends. So we have to really find our own stories at this time that matters most. And there's nothing there to help us with that if we don't find it on our own, because there's all those narratives have sort of gone. We don't really respect that anymore. But of course, this opens up a big gap.

for any tawdry peddler of some semblance of meaning to come along and pack out. Right. We're filling the gap in. Pack out of theaters. You see the guys like Uri Geller, like outright charlatans that just have no shame whatsoever. That guy must be some kind of sociopath or something. I mean, he just has no qualms about telling people that he's talking with their dead relative or taking money and going, this is where your family members buried.

He doesn't think he does. I think he's avoided that. I think he's avoided that. And he's very just into positive thinking now. Oh, I think he's a more self-help guy now. Yeah. I don't know, but certainly there are plenty of people that do. But in one of my stage shows, I had 50 people up on stage,

and I would do this kind of thing, right? And I would do the mediumship, and at the same time be debunking it. So I would be giving information that was totally correct. You know, I'd say, I've got your grandmother here, her name's Alice, and she's saying, and she's not saying anything, I'm lying to you, you understand this, but she's saying that she had a little dog called Teddy

and that you used to play with Teddy when you were young. I'm just making this up, but is this true? Yes. So I was sort of trying to keep it in that interesting. It's fake, it's real. And really early on in the run, I went out to stage door and, you know, I was talking to people afterwards and signing things. And this girl said to me, can you put me in touch with my dead grandmother?

And I said, well, you do get from the show that I'm not really doing it. I'm trying to kind of debunk it and show that it's not real. And she said, oh, no, no, yeah, I know. I know it's not real. But could you put me in touch with it? Oh, man. It was fascinating. Just how, first of all, how you can complete.

hold those two realities. Right. Yeah. And just what that is, just what that appeal. I mean, I'm, you know, I don't, I don't believe in any of that. But if, when I lost my grandfather, shortly afterwards, I was talking to a woman who said she was psychic, and when she started to say, oh, no, he's here, is here in the room now, it's hard to just let that mean nothing and just brush over you. I mean, you're either going to get annoyed about it, which actually was my response. I was like, oh, don't, don't, you know. It's tacky. It's just tacky. Or you want to, what does you, what does you say? But it's, it's very hard just to let that.

Right. Like, you want it so bad, and then if there's a 0.001% chance that this is real, like, I'm going to hear this person out. And you just get emotionally invested in the crap that they're feeding you, I guess, at that point. Yeah. And I did a whole, I did a documentary series called Derham Brown Investigates. And I would just spend time with people that were making some sort of supernatural claims of some sort.

And one of these guys was a psychic. And I think by any standards, he was, fake. I mean, looking back on it, I mean, we just caught him as close you can absolutely, I mean, you can't prove a negative, can you? But it's close you can catch someone to cheating. I mean, we just sort of did again and again. So there's really no doubt about it in that sense. But despite the fact that he seemed to be clearly just getting information from here and passing it off as something else, he's still, I think in a strange way, maybe I'm just being charitable, but sort of still believed it. And if he was having people say to him, oh, yes, you,

you must be psychic and you're helping me by saying this. He was sort of helping people in a normal way. So he was able to rationalize this in his own mind? Yeah, it just felt like a strange sort of closed loop that he was in. I thought, well, maybe in a weird way, maybe he is the psychic. He's playing that role. And also, why is he letting me in to even film him anyway if he knows, if you know that you're just fake, why would you risk that sort of, you know,

exposure. And it was just, it was interesting just seeing how you, when you get close to it, how it's a very gray, complex area. From the outside, it's an easy yes or no. You know, is it real, is it not? Well, no. But as you get into it, I think it's a very rich, interesting area about, again, how we just, how the stories that we form and what we, what we need to hear. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Darren Brown. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the

worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of our interview with Darren Brown. You're an amazing performer, but I think there's a little heroic aspect in a way. I'll take it. Yeah, of deep, well, of course, right, of debunking the psychic fraud and the faith healing and things like that. And one of the performances was, you train this, I think it was a scuba instructor. Oh, yeah. And you take it for like six months and you're like, you're going to be a faith healer. And he really looked apart. He had long hair. And he kind of dressed up sharply in a suit. And then he comes to the United States and he fills, half fills this room

because he didn't want to, he didn't want to abuse this publicist to fill the room up massively. He's trying to convince people that he's a faith healer. And then at the end, he's kind of like, and this is completely fake. And people are just crying because they wanted to believe it. And it's almost like a medical procedure on a child where you're like, I hate hurting this kid, but I can't leave this tumor. Yes, it was really sensitive. It was a tricky, it was a tricky thing. That was, yes, that was my first taste of the faith healing.

So in the last, this last stage show, which is the one on Netflix called Miracle, I did it myself because I was, I just really got the bug for it from training this other guy. So that other show is called Miracles for Sale, which was a Channel 4 show a few years ago. And yeah, it's just a documentary following this guy. It was so interesting. I think what I learned from doing it myself in the stage show is the, it's the psychological component of suffering. So, yeah, cutting forward to the stage show that I did.

So an audience that are skeptical, like me, they are not coming to the show thinking there's going to be any healing, which is your biggest, your biggest weapon, really, as a healer to weapons, perhaps the wrong word, but, you know, what makes it work normally is you have an audience of believers. That are already expecting to see something. Yeah, so they're bringing, they're already psychologically prepared for it. And I, first night I'm going out doing this show, I've got 2,000 people in the audience. I'm thinking, I really don't know if this is going to work.

I had enough things that I could kind of work mechanically, like some of the tricks that they use. So I thought, well, I can get through that section and get to the end and have an ending. But if it doesn't really work much beyond that, then I'll think of something else. But I just say to the audience, look, I know you don't believe in this any more than I do, but just go along. I'm going to play the part of the healer and just go with it, because it's interesting. And people did. And then, like, within, and it isn't just, I thought people would come up and they'd say, oh, well, you know, my back hurt and now it doesn't. And there'd be these small improvements. But I had people, you know, slain in the spirit, which is when, you know, you touch them on the head and they collapse out and they're shaking on the floor and all this. How does that work? What's going on there? Well, I found what did work was showing little clips of, when I'm talking about faith evening, just little clips that would just show those little scenes like that. And it's just which they kind of know what to do.

Yeah, which is, of exactly what happens at the churches anyway, because you're seeing it happen again. again on stage. So you're sort of being educated as an audience member without realizing the suggestion is settling in. But I remember within the first week there was a woman who came up. She'd been paralyzed on one side of her body since she was a kid and she's in floods of tears.

She's 40 something I guess. And can move her arm. And night after night there were these, it varied but very often quite dramatic very physical things. I mean nothing's changing. Like if you had an x-ray before

and after, clearly there's no change. But in that grey area that's more about, again, to repeat myself, the story that they've settled into about their ailment. You know, if you wake up every day believing, well, I can't do this because I have this, does that after a world create the problem where maybe the physical side might have, like, I had a bad shoulder for a long time, I still have, and I got so used to putting on my jacket with like a bit of a dead arm and pulling the sleeve up with this.

I still do that. I don't know if I really need to do that now. And if somebody got me up on stage and said, your shoulder is healed and made a big fuss. I said, now, go on. Now put your jacket on and do it normally. And with a bit of adrenaline

that's going to kill the pain anyway, but I'd probably be fooled into thinking, oh my God, you've just healed my shoulder. I've had that for years. So it's that sort of process. But the results were extraordinary. And even then I started to think, well, maybe I could do this

on a grand scale. and I could tell people it's this entirely secular thing and it may not work. It may only work for the 10 minutes you're on stage or it may stay or it may, you know, but that's when you do start to go mad and get into a whole ethical world of pain because, you know. Like, am I doing this for their own good?

And so it's okay if I'm listening to them about this. So how do you not start to go mad once you've seen that? But God, it was extraordinary and really eye-opening, and literally eye-opening sometimes, you know, blind, things like, again, not, not, full, like, you know, organic blindness, but... So it's like if they're kind of, they say, on death by my left ear, but they're only like maybe 80% deaf, so now they're convinced they can hear out of that ear.

Yeah, there's, there's lots of tricks around that that they use. Then you're into the world of sort of moving out of the suggestion that makes it work into just tricks. Some of the mechanical tricks that I've sort of been put through by healers, there's a lovely one way. You see it on YouTube a lot. If you type in, um, leg lengthening. Oh, that's the one, yeah. You see it? One where they just loosen up the person's shoe. Yeah. It's like the most obvious kind of look.

Well, it's sort of, yeah, again, if you believe it, it's such a stupid trick that I think if you believe, if you approach it as someone that believes it, it looks like someone's, so you're showing like, here's a guy with a short leg, which is why they limp. And now we're going to lengthen, the Lord's going to lengthen this person's leg. And as you look, this person's leg, I mean, the heels are sort of in the healers' palms like this. You see this leg stretch out. and then they walk without a limp. And it's one of the oldest tricks in the book.

And I have sat on stage and had the guy do it to me. You choose someone with shoes that you can loosen. And actually what you do is you, everyone's watching this leg lengthen. So you don't do the trick on that leg. You do the trick on the other leg. You've pulled, first of all, they don't limp, right? There is no problem with the leg. You just say, look, they're limping.

Oh, so they just sort of go, well, I didn't see him limp, but he said he was limping. Yeah, so he must have been, I must have just missed that, but you think you've seen it. Then they hold their feet like this and they pull out one. So the other foot, the other shoe is just pulled off a heel a little bit. So now it does look like if you measure the legs that this, this leg is a little longer. Therefore this one's too short. Actually, this leg's fine. This one, you've just pulled the heel off.

And then as everyone's watching this foot and you're saying this foot is lengthening, you're just slowly pushing this heel of the shoe slowly back onto that foot. But it does look like, if you're watching the other leg, it kind of looked like... Oh, because I'm watching the short leg. Yeah, you're watching the other one. So it's sort of believable. Interesting.

And then you get them to run around and say, look, no, limping, they can run around fine, and everyone thinks the healing has happened. They could run fine anyway. And I have been brought out the audience and had this done on me by a quite big name healer in Dallas while we're making that documentary show. And the really interesting part of it I left with was it isn't remotely fooling for the person going through it. and just how oddly kind of insulting that is,

there's no sense of doing any good for that person. It's just about the showmanship. It's just about creating an effect for the audience. You're really kind of, I mean, I wasn't bothered by it, but you're exploiting a potentially very vulnerable person who's there wanting a healing. God knows what's wrong with them for just that. I mean, it was a sort of quite ugly, ugly thing.

But yeah. It reminds me of Andy Cowell. You know this Andy Cowell movie? Yes, Andy Cowell. That's right. He goes to the Filipino or, I don't know, like Thailand, Bush healer. and he just starts laughing because he's looking down as this guy sort of like scrapes bloody chicken meat out of his guts. And he's like, oh, man.

Same thing, right? He's, since it's being done on him and he sees it, he just goes, oh, this is all bullshit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I've done that on stage as well. That's all that's... Pulling out the chicken from... Pulling out the bits of, I used little bits of sponge. It was a bit less gross to do every night.

But yeah, otherwise chicken entrails is what gets used. Yeah, and you're kind of reaching into someone's stomach and pulling the stuff out. And again, not always very convincing for the person. Yeah, because it's like, oh, I'm not feeling anything. Oh, well, I have a magic spell so you don't feel the pain. This is your cancerous bad stuff. Where do people learn this stuff? There's, there can't be, I haven't looked online,

but I assume there's no school for like, hey, you want to become a con artist? Here's a bunch of faith healing tricks. Yeah. And again, do you know, for me, the interesting part of it, it's a strange parallel between that and say, you know, the secret, you know, the Rondraber. Right, if you meant the manifesting thing?

Yeah, because the message is, and it's a sort of a faith model, but the message is like, you know, throw your pills away, the Lord has healed you, and if at any point this illness returns, which of course it's going to, right, that's because you didn't have enough faith. Maybe you even thought about taking a pill again, or either way it's your fault. Certainly isn't the Lord's fault, and it certainly isn't the healer's fault. It's your fault because you didn't have enough faith. And in the secret, she explicitly says that.

It is your fault. You didn't believe enough. You didn't, you know, you know how you're supposed to visualize whatever it is you want, which is sadly always about money and jewelry. Yeah, I want Ferrari. Yeah. Like, I want to be really good. Or a new necklace.

Yeah. And then you have to act as if you've already got the thing. You have to totally commit to it, which I think is such a damaging. A, it's the same thing. The problem is it just creates anxiety. in a feeling of failure and self-blame when, of course, that is sometimes not going to work. That model of believe in yourself, ignore the haters, ignore the haters, ignore the naysayers, believe in yourself, have a vision and stick to it, is occasionally a model of success.

It's also a perfect model for failure. The trouble is we never read the biographies of the businessman who failed because we don't read those. I think it's called Survivor bias. Yes. Someone says, follow your dreams. And it's like, oh, that sounds great. look, Mark Kuhn. This rich entrepreneur says it.

Well, there's a 10,000 other people for each one of them who is at home in their mom's couch, like the guy from Apocalypse. He's gone, I'm following my passion, but I'm just not making any money. Yeah, exactly. And you don't tend to read. I got lucky. I got really lucky. Right, right, yeah.

No, no, we see the guy who spent 30,000 hours trying to figure out how to get people to be persuaded by a jingle and a fake news story and a bunch of other psychological triggers. How much practice do you think you've had altogether? Like 40,000 hours, 30,000 hours? Have you ever tried to do the math? No, I don't know. I started when I was 20 and I'm 47 now. Very soft skin.

Good. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of practice and a lot of trial and error, I would imagine. Yeah, I remember having a real seminal moment. I had people would come to my rooms when I was a student and I'd hypnotize them. And I remember I'd leave them, if they were responsive, if they were good, I'd leave them with a suggestion that if they came back and I said, sleep, click my fingers, they'd go straight to sleep.

You need that. Jen needs that. We got jetlight for days. She's gone. She's gone. Sorry. That's not a toy. And I had this guy come back.

Oh, I thought I'd hypnotize before. And I said, okay, sit down, look at me and sleep. And he went straight out. And then I, we did whatever the hypnosis was. And then afterwards, I realized I'd never met him before. So then I'm thinking, well, how? How did you... So none of the groundwork was there?

No, none of the groundwork was there. So why did he respond to me clicking my fingers and saying, sleep? Which clearly there's nothing magical about doing that. And then I thought, okay, well, it was actually just my belief and my confidence at the time. And the fact that he, again, luckily he was very suggestible, made that work. So things like that just come not from necessarily the hours and hours of... I mean, they do, I guess, but then it's not about technique per se other than just realization.

of, I think all I do is, all, everything I do is about seeing the thing from another person's point of view and just, that's the toolbox. That's the, that's the toolkit is someone else's ongoing. What percentage of the population is that suggestible where you think maybe you can just get them to sleep or maybe not quite that suggestible, but. It probably ties in the people that respond well to placebo. It's probably, you're dealing with the same kind of, you know, in the Venn diagram of those things. It's probably about 30% maybe, something like that. Okay. But like when I'm doing...

It's a lot. It's still a lot. Well, then it depends what you want. So when I'm doing my stage shows, and I've got a couple thousand people, like with the faith healing that I was doing, you know, I might get 300 people come forward from an audience of, say, say, 3,000. And then I might get, like, the best 10 up.

So now you're dealing with such a small percentage anyway. That's always going to be... That 1% in a room is always going to be kind of extraordinary, isn't it? So that helps. That kind of thing helps. It doesn't mean... They might feel like the whole audience is responding to something, whereas the reality is you're whittling down to the best.

So you can create the illusion of it being more successful than it is. Yeah, that makes sense. What are you looking for with these suggestible people? Like in the push, for example, you test them. Hey, who stands up and sits down when they hear the bell? Yeah, yeah. But are other things where, are you ever just walking down the street and you see somebody and you go,

this person has these nonverbal characteristics of a highly suggestible type of person? Does that exist? I've done it for a long time. And I've given up trying to do that because I don't, I'm always surprised by, I mean, you know, openness and a natural tendency to sort of go along with ideas and so on feels like it should be a good signifier of suggestibility. And a lot of the time it is. But I know how I am socially with people. I probably seem like that, because I'm not a very good hypnotic subject. But I probably am quite responsive to maybe things like placebo or things like, um,

I don't know, just an expert that I admire telling me stuff that I'm going to absorb and take on as my own, which is another form of suggestibility. But I'm not very responsive to a hypnotist hypnotize me. I think something in my ego sort of blocks that. And likewise, people that seem very standoffish and seem very kind of, you know, detached, arms folded, like the last person you'd think would respond. Sometimes that all comes from an oddly insecure place. And if you get them into the right sort of type of interaction that hypnosis is,

they suddenly become hyper-responsive. So I've given up trying to predict it. I do it in situations where I can throw it out over a large number of people and work with the ones that... Right, and look for the right responses. Interesting. How do you come up with some of the tricks or the illusions? Do you just kind of like, you're walking through the mall

with your partner and you're like, you know, what if I made something like that come to life and then vanish? That would be pretty cool, right? No, I don't know. I maybe... No, I normally have a two-week period where or say with the stage shows, it's like maybe a month. With the TV shows, it's maybe a couple of weeks,

where I've got to think of an idea. So with the TV, it's nothing to do with, like, magic effects of any sort. It's something like, what can we, like in The Push, for example, which is another one on Netflix, we were thinking about coming up with all ideas for sort of plots, for one of these things to put somebody through. And then out of a sort of frustration,

it's, oh, can't we just, it's a big party, everyone's an actor, apart from one person, person and can we make that one person throw someone off a roof? You know, just, so sometimes out of a, right, can't we just blur? There's an idea that's like, oh, actually, that's quite, that's quite cool. So now it's an exercise in social compliance. So the first thing they're asking out at the party, the first thing they're asked to do is to mislabel meat-filled sausage rolls as vegetarian sausage rolls.

So they like, there's that little bit of kind of, you know, you get your foot in the door with a little thing they're asked to do, and then bit by bit, could you build that to the point that they would actually kill somebody because they're told to. So that became the show. So it's that really. It's trying to come up with a fun, strong hook

and then make sure that the show's kind of got a good reason, you know, and a good message. And actually the show on social compliance, that one, the push, went out in Britain a few years. I was quite, 2000, I don't know, 16 or something. But some over the last few years, that idea of like good people. people doing bad things and how we can get persuaded by these narratives that we buy into

has sort of become more relevant. So it sort of became a different show somehow when it was put on Netflix. The push is probably one of my favorites, if not my absolute favorite, because of the social compliance aspect. And because when you watch that, unless you are really good at rationalizing things to yourself, even I who I know at certain extent what you're doing with the little vegetarian flags or like getting people to sort of do. dig a little deeper into the lie that they're telling. Unless you are really, really in denial, I think all of us can watch that and go, shoot, I could have probably done up to this point.

Like, oh, I wouldn't have killed the guy, but, you know, I would have given the speech about how I'm the donor. I probably would have, like, not have hidden the body, or I wouldn't have kicked the dead guy. But I would I have kicked the dead guy? I mean, he's dead and I didn't think anyone was watching. Well, I've, through most of my career, I've had people say to me, oh, I wouldn't I wouldn't do this or I'd have done that, but I wouldn't have done that.

And I think what's interesting to me is how we think about what we would do with this sense of a self that we have, which we think of in isolation. We think of ourselves, and again, this is an enlightenment idea that's stuck around, that we are sort of these, that we should be, these separate entities that are not being influenced by other people around us, that we should be, you know, separate independence. I'm too smart for this. I'm too, this wouldn't work on me. I'm too smart. I'm too principled. I'm too insert good positive quality here. Yeah. This guy would never be able to fool me. And of that idea of the self like that was born at a time when it was important not to be influenced too much by the church or the king. There was actually making a statement of saying, look, we are, we should be free individuals as important. But we've brought so much into that idea that we miss that actually the self, I think, is a is a verb. I think we self.

You know, it's something that's very active and it expands out fluidly into our environment and into our relationships. And it's very hard to make judgments about what you would do in a situation when you're not in that situation. And that's even something that extreme as murder, it's, you just can't judge

and you can't judge from a distance and say, well, I wouldn't do that because you're making that decision in isolation. And it's totally different. And that's when you're the, there. And to me, that is, it's fascinating because it's, I mean, the shows, it's, it's a funny and it's a bit like sort of weekend at Berners. That was the kind of inspiration from it. And the guy's called Bernie, the character that dies in it.

Oh, that's right. Yeah. I never caught that. There you go. And it's, but, but actually at its heart was, I think, to me, it's that thing of what, yes, the social, how far can compliance go, but also what, what our sense of self is and how that. drastically changes from context to context. How do you test this kind of stuff? Because I'm imagining, how do you test whether someone's going to rob an armored car?

You can't really. No. Right? I mean, the whole thing could just end up not working. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So then, well, there's different ways of doing it. So in some shows, we can be following four or five people. Yeah.

So it doesn't just hoping that one. It just doesn't need to work on all of them, because either way you've got, you know, that's your result. If it worked on one out of five, worked on one out of five. In a show like Sacrifice, which is the current one, if he doesn't do the thing at the end, there's no going back and doing it again. You can't say, we're going to retake that. So you'd have to find a way of letting that failure sit within a narrative that would

then maybe continue and find another way of going or a way of finishing that we're still leave you with a satisfying ending. So that's the joy of TV. It's not changing what happened, but you can you can let what happens sit within a story that can, of course, you know, continue and you can be truthful, but still make the story satisfying. So failure is important, and there are failures within that show sacrifice that are part of it, and they sit, they sit fine within it. I think it's a bit like a juggler dropping a ball, actually, occasionally. It's good to be reminded. These things aren't just going to happen through some kind of magic. The guy didn't want to jump off into the rock court. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's all right, that failure. But like, if he was like,

I'm not taking a bullet for that. Like, I shoot him, shoot him, Kip. You know, then he was like, uh, now, now what do we do with the production where he just looks terrible. But it would have been, I mean, it would have been amazing to watch that and see it fail. And then you'd be like, what are they going to do? Right. How are they going to get out of it or something?

And then, so that's still an interesting, dramatically interesting place is that up to us to make sure that it, we do do something interesting with that. I'm always nervous for you when I see that, though, because I'm imagining you're in this control room going, just shoot them and then jump in there, please. You know, I've got to go to the bathroom. I'm hungry. Yeah. Desert shithole town for like three weeks filming this.

Just shoot him and get it over with, man. Shoot him before I shoot myself. Yeah, yeah. Shoot them or give me the gun. Yeah, exactly. Have you ever had any close calls where it's like someone almost blows it? Like they're setting something up and the guy gets home from work early and you're like, don't leave the shed.

Oh, we've had, um, God, don't leave the shed. There was actually in one of the show, in Apocalypse. So this is the end of the world one. So yeah. So we had, um, it's just, just a glimpse of how much work goes into these shows. So we had, we'd recorded a special episode of a TV show that he watched. Oh, no, no, it wasn't that.

It was the electrical interference from the meteors. So we were taking things out of his car that he, so this car wouldn't start. And the phone, his phone would die. And the TV suddenly just died, right, as they're watching it. And it's all being explained by, there's been warnings on the radio about electrical interference. So to make that happen, we got two guys in the shed in the garden. I don't know why we had two, but we did, who were going to pull the, just the cable.

But they couldn't then leave this little garden shed to go because the room that is watching TV and backs onto the back garden so he might see them. His bedroom does the same. So they had to sleep. These two guys had to sleep in this shed.

This is after like three months without a day off anyway because the sheer level of work on these is just enormous. For this one little moment that no one really remembers from the show. It's not a great part of the drama.

It's just a fun little bit. So yeah, it does happen. But the other thing is, which has... sort of, I've realized over the years of making them that we're all a lot more nervous about the fiction being rumbled than we need to be. Because if you were having dinner with Jen here, perhaps in a fashionable London restaurant

and you spotted a camera behind a curtain, you wouldn't think, okay, all right, this whole thing is fake, all these people are actors. I'm on a TV show. Where's Darren Brown? I would be excited of, yeah. You'd be like, oh, there's a weird. Somebody left a camera here. That's going to get stolen. We've had a couple of nearnesses like that that we've all been, you know, like that about.

And actually hasn't. I love that. I've never seen that expression, but I know exactly what that means. I am definitely going to use that. For those of you who couldn't see that, it's this. Question to do that. Yes. I spent a lot of my career like that.

I can't believe I have. What have I done my whole life, not having this exact end gesture? No, you have it. to symbol like, that's, oh, couldn't be more perfect. Yeah, because I'm imagining, and imagine those two guys in the shed going, you know, I think I'm going to apply to that job, that office job after all. Yeah. Freezing their ass off in the shed in the middle of winter.

Yeah, that was a tough, it was a tough job for everyone that. Because, yeah, it's eight months and there's never enough budget for these things. So there's just, everyone's living it. And God, yeah. Who writes all the dialogue? Because for people to really understand this, it very much is the Truman Show. Like, there's a fake charity in the push. There's a fake charity gala.

There's security team for the gala. There's a catering team for the gala. There's all these gits. There's all these people attending. There's car service. There's the assistant and there's performers or whatever. And the hotel, everybody's in on that. You can't have people wandering in that aren't part of it.

No. Well, that's where a production team is really helpful. But they have to be like secret production team. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is like you're putting somebody through something quite, potentially quite dark, even if the end result is a positive one, less so in the push.

It was all quite dark. So you've got to make sure that they're robust enough psychologically. So there's a whole vetting procedure that has to happen with those people as well. But again, they can't know that normally they're told they're not being used. You know, so they apply to be part of the show. Then they're told, sorry, we're not going to use you. And then by that point they've signed the thing that lets us use them. And then months later it'll happen.

So you have to vet them. So they have to go through a sort of independent psychological procedures with a psychologist to make sure they're robust enough. Because if they're going to, like, witness a car crash, for example, You can't have them having witnessed a traumatic car crash and they were younger, that sort of thing. So you've got a psychiatrist who knows, or a psychologist who knows the plot. But you've got to, they have to do that, but also believe that everybody else is doing that because otherwise it would tip to them that they're being used for it.

You know, so there's totally out of things that you never even see in the show, but just the level of work. Yeah. That has to exist around it to make sure that it. And all the people that, like, you've got to have that person's wife or girlfriend or boyfriend or boyfriend. from whatever involved to make sure that they actually go to this event that we've staged. What if they changed their mind at the last meeting? I can't have a headache. I'm going to bail on this.

Why don't you go instead? Just bring the check. So much. Yeah. Oh, man. It reminds me of a surprise birthday party I had in Germany in like 1998. And I wasn't going to go out that night. And I told my friend Peggy, who had set the whole thing up.

I said, I didn't really want to come out tonight. What were you going to do if I was like, nah, I got a headache? And she's like, yeah, we thought about that. Because, you know, I'm Mr. I don't want to go out tonight. Like back then I was like, oh, it's far. I don't want to get on the bus. It's cold. She's like, we had...

I've got to go the way to Germany. Yeah, yeah. We had this elaborate plan of her coming over and being like, she had a whole big idea. She was going to like, she said the idea that was in her back pocket was she was going to tell me that her friend and her wanted to like give me some sort of special birthday present, if you will. And I was like, yeah, that would have worked. Keep it close to the truth. Close to the truth is always good, isn't it? But I would have been really disappointed if all I got was this surprise.

Yeah, yeah, great. And where's my, sorry, there was a present. Oh, that was fake? I'm going back home now. You often show that people are being primed to pick the giraffe or to draw something. How much of it, and then you say, well, look, here's how we primed them. This display, this billboard had a giraffe on it, and this kid's t-shirt had a giraffe on it. And then when they were on the bus, there was the word giraffe was written on the window.

Is that the real explanation? Or is that like, oh, crap, we did this trick, and now we got to show the audience why this person did this. It really varies. I mean, there's the sort of stuff that I used to do years ago and haven't done for a long time now. But in the same way that when Penn and Teller would reveal a trick, it wasn't just a witless reveal or here's how we did it. You'd show the method when the method was more interesting actually than the trick. So what you go away with is, oh, it was amazing. They showed how it was done.

It was really clever. And it was probably more clever than how you have to do that. because the overall effect that you want to communicate is the joy of watching how it's done. So that was sort of the approach that I took as well with those things. So they're a mixture of kind of real or sort of tweaked. I'd say certainly theatrically kind of tweaked because ultimately that's the bit. You know that's going to be the really fun part of seeing how it was done. And also you can really show the stuff that's sort of visual because it's like that's watching it on TV.

And some of the stuff is when you're trying to be. trying to tell a story very neatly of how you did it, doesn't always lend itself to those, you know, that kind of clear visual narrative. So there's, yeah, it's sort of a mix, but I kind of figured I had license to approach it with the same kind of, uh, sense of theater as the, as the trick itself. I think you have to, right? Because if, if the answer is, oh, well, that's just a guy with my same build in a mask, it's like, oh, but if it's like, no, this group of kids had the T-shirt and then there's the sign on the pub. And as they were driving, they saw three billboards, and they've been here all week driving back and forth.

So it's been repeated in their brains. It's just like the principles are sound enough that they would theoretically have worked. So that's a better explanation than, well, actually, they picked a bunch of other things. And this giraffe happened to be like the most convenient item for them to pick up at the time. It can be a mixture. It can be a mixture. I think it's part of the fun of it for me, particularly with that early stuff, was kind of, you know, some of it's real, some bit isn't and what where's the um because my background is you know hypnosis

suggestion all that stuff that's real in whatever real means but that's real that's not like people sort of playing along or it's it is what it is and then and then the magic side the conjuring side the you know trickster side where you're going for an effect and you know you're going for the an illusion so everything was sort of sitting somewhere in both of those worlds and i think i think that's sort of what made it fun yeah i i like the idea of the idea of that, is it perception without awareness? Perception without a wish, yeah, PWA. Is there something that we can do, should we even think about this?

Is there something that we can do to counteract that? Because it seems a little dangerous. If we're so easily influenced by these things, should we strive to maybe pay attention to that? Because not everybody's doing it and then goes, see, now your life is really happy. Now you value your family more because of this fake zombie apocalypse. There's going to be plenty of other people that go,

now we're doing this horrible thing as a country because we were all convinced that it's the Jews. Or like, now we're doing this horrible thing to this because it makes us all money. Forget it. Like, it's scary to think that we're so easily influenced and we don't understand it. Yeah.

And we're not able to counteract it. Yeah. Is there kind of like a self-defense for this? I think there's no obvious self-defense. I think a lot of those things that happen sort of environmentally, those kind of influences and things that are going on that we don't realize are influencing us, have their parallels within us psychologically.

Carl Jung said that the greatest burden a child has to bear is the unlived life of its parents, right? That's what I worry about with my kids. I'm like, they're going to have every welcome. I've got a lot of insecurities. Get a notebook. Yeah. So that's your starting point.

And then you, you know, from an early age, we develop these templates of what relationships should be, what love is, what are, who we are in relation to this world. You know, we get essentially the message, you're small and weak, and the world is big and strong. And this is all a kind of priming, isn't it? It's the same thing that happens environmentally. And then you grow up and all of that feeds into, well, your relationships, most obviously, what you demand from your partner, what you project onto them, the things that you try and hide from yourself. And those things always come back and bite you in some way.

your things you overcompensate for, become addicted to. You know, this is, it's happening all the time within us, and the best we can do is try and be more conscious of those things that are essentially unconscious, because they only own you when they're unconscious. And the moment you have some sort of conscious appreciation, and they lose some of that power.

And I think that's the best that we can do, and we can only do that within ourselves, that we can only work on ourselves and do the best, you know, we can. So I think there's a parallel, there. I think it's just, and you can never entirely, that Jungian path of individuation, as he called it, you know, you can never quite get to the end when you've become the self that you're really truly supposed to be outside of all these influences. It's only a journey, and I think

that's the best we can hope for in that parallel example of what's going on environmentally. If we have all these influences around us, and we have hypnosis that is not fake, right? It's realistic and we're creating compliance in people. At what point do we decide that humans in our level of free will is maybe a lot more limited than like, do you believe in free will? It's a sort of more philosophical concept, I think. I think in life, what we,

a big part of growing up is realizing that things in life are ambivalent and they are ambiguous and they're complex and they're messy and they're active. things like happiness. We reduce to nouns, and when we do that, they suddenly become neat things that we can put in the box, and they're not. Happiness is really, it's an active, it's a messy verb thing.

And likewise, we love and hate things at the same time. Things are right and wrong, and hard as it is to accept left and right are both doing a valid and important thing. The right-wing world is protecting the group, and the left-wing world is protecting the individual, and we do actually need both of those things in some form or another. So life's complex and ambiguous.

And I think where simple yes and noes and simple right and wrongs exist, then the point is both of those things need to exist. So my answer is the free will thing is I think both. I think I'm very happy to let both sit. I think in some ways, of course, you can argue that everything is caused by the previous things that makes no sense to talk about free will. But then the trouble with that is it's almost too easy. You go, okay, right, then it makes no sense to talk about free will.

So then why bother doing anything or trying to change anything about yourself or trying to gain any mastery over anything, at least of all yourself? So I think that it also makes sense to talk about it as if it is real. And I think they're just two models for understanding the same thing. I just don't think it quite makes any sense to go yes or no and then end it there. I just don't think it's useful. I don't think it's a reflection of how we live. The dangerous, of course, with that approach, you just end up agreeing with everything.

But I think it reflects more than reality. Is there a way to use some of the mentalism for either personal growth or I think self-defense was one of the uses? In the highest, the guy gets caught shoplifting. Yes, yeah, this happened to me. The wall around my house is not four foot high. The guy's like, whatever, man. Yeah, well, okay, that's a good example.

This actually happened to me in real life. I wasn't shoplifting, but I was... Sure you weren't. Just borrowing it. Just borrowing. I was walking from one hotel to another, quite late at night. I was at a magic convention in Wales. I was wearing a three-piece of velvet suit.

Because why not? Because why not? And I... I mean, short of having punched me hard in the throat, tattooed across my face, I was, yeah, clearly looking to be fought. And so this guy is, you know, he's really drunk and is clearly, yeah, looking for a fight. And he's with his girlfriend and all his adrenaline is kind of, you know, up here. And he starts shouting at me and says something like, what are you looking at or what's your problem or something?

So I, and again, my only toolkit is just the other person's experience. That's really all I can work with. So I said to him, because in that situation, you can't respond. with, oh, I'm not looking at anything because then you're on the back foot and they've got power. Or, yeah, I'm looking at you. What's your problem? Because either way, you're going to get hit probably, right? You're sort of, you're furthering that dynamic that they've set up, where you can just not play that game right from the outset. So I said, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high. This is where this phrase came from because I said it on that time, that occasion.

So it makes sense as a statement. It makes no sense within that context. So he now feels he's missed something. so now he's on the back foot so his reaction to that is a bit of a pause and he's like, what? And I said oh the wall outside of my house isn't four foot high when I lived in Spain the walls there were quite high but here they're tiny

I mean they're nothing so so he then I think there's a martial arts technique which is an adrenaline dump a similar thing I think where you before you strike you have somebody you make somebody relax you essentially take them off guard

so this is why happened to him all his adrenaline just kind of dumped I was hoping to just basically confuse him and then stick his feet to the floor or do something more overtly hypnotic because that confusion state renders as very suggestible but what actually happened was

he just went oh fuck and started crying his girlfriend walked off and he sat down by the side of the road I sat down next to him and started asking about what had gone wrong that night I think his girlfriend had bottled somebody

there'd been some fight and weirdly that I'm giving him advice but it was it only happened because I been talking about what to do in those sort of situations at Q&A things that I'd been doing after hypnosis shows. And I'd sort of, so the only reason why it was in my head and ready to go to, to play it like that was because I'd sort of spoken about it theoretically. But so the idea is have, I mean, it can be a song lyric. It can be, uh, it's just not playing that game that the other person is setting up and making them feel that they've missed something.

and then the dynamics completely changed immediately. If they're running you with a knife, all right, there's not much room for this kind of thing. But, you know, it's like if you're on a train and you want to keep the seat next to you free, don't put your bag there because that's what everybody else does. So they know what you're doing and they're going to get annoyed. Pat the seat, nod and smile at people as they walk,

but no one's going to want to sit next. Sit here. Just unbutton your shirt while you're doing. Yeah, I'm ready. Have a seat. So, yeah, so that ended up being my sort of self-defense technique, was have a song lyric or something or a... I was talking to a friend of mine about this thing, and he was an artist, and he used to walk home from his studio late at night through a rough bit of London.

And there were always these kind of like gangs on one side of the road. So he'd always cross over away from them. And then, of course, they'd always see that. And it was always this horrible, uncomfortable, intimidating thing. So we spoke about it. And then the next night, he crossed over the road to them and said, Good evening as he walked past them. And of course they left him alone because he just seemed like a strange.

Yeah. I don't touch the he's crazy. He's just weird. Yeah. Good evening. So, yeah. Who wants to see a magic trick? No thanks, man.

Get away from us. Yeah. What do your parents think about your career friends? Like, I'm imagining they're watching your show and they're like, the audience is ooing and eyeing. And they're like, oh, you think that's a surprise? Our son, the religious Christian boy. You haven't picked up his pants. He's a gay atheist now.

You want a surprise? That was a surprise. Gaytheist. I'm claiming gaytheist now. He should trademark that. They seem proud and happy. Neither parent went to university or anything like that. So I think when I came home and went, I'm not going to be a...

I actually had this conversation. I'm not going to be an international lawyer. So I was doing law in German. I'm going to be a magician. My mom said, oh, great. That sounds lovely. In fact, she was so okay with it that I thought, ah, okay, maybe I need to rethink that.

Maybe that's a bit of a rash decision on my part. But, yeah, it all worked out. That's where the persuasion comes from, right? Like, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. Would you tell him when you said he was going to become a magician? I told him it was a great idea. He's never going to do it now. Yeah.

Yeah. But as it turned out, I did. But yeah, they always had a very relaxed approach. I wrote them a letter in my first year at university. Because I was with all these law students that were feeling terrible, they weren't going to pass their exams, not for themselves, at what their parents might think. And I'd never experienced that. So I wrote the letter saying, thank you so much. I realized that you just let me do what made me happy, which I just presumed everybody.

did and I see now that isn't that isn't the case so thank you'll have kids at some point is that in the cards for you oh I don't know we've been talking about that I've I so I'm 47s I said and I'm find myself very caught between that you know how Nietzsche spoke about become who you are so there's that what I think of as a vertical sense of like this is my life and I need to be doing that and everything else needs to clear out the way and it's all quite selfish but there's that urge, which doesn't sit well with taking on other responsibilities. Like, I've got two dogs, and that's kind of enough

of an affront to that urge. And then the other urge, which is the sort of leveling vertical urge of, well, maybe that sense of self becoming who you are, is already in the relationships that you have and these things that are, maybe that's who I am. And, you know, so I'm

of an age where I'm, which I think is partly what middle age is about, isn't it? When you kind of get a bit caught between that, your ego has to step down. That's the, again, Jungian terms, you've slain the dragon in the first half of your life, and now you have to rescue the princess. You have to... Second half of life, I think, is about serving something else,

finding the thing that's bigger than you, and finding meaning in that. I think it's quite... Which kids naturally will sort of do. I just haven't quite made my peace fully with that idea. So I, at the moment, no. But it's a, yeah, it's a discussion. But I'm still...

There's so many things that I just do and demand my time I don't know. And you've got all this whiskey out. And I've got a lot of whiskey to drink as well, which isn't compatible with having children. Not necessarily, no. Although kids are not. The reason why they're here, by the way,

is I don't drink that much. Otherwise, they would all be that gone just before I pass myself off as an alcohol. Right, yeah. Yeah, you might have to, that would be a different. There's a whole lot of whiskey in here. People can't see it, but maybe we'll do some B-roll. Some cuts of ways.

Yeah. Well, thank you for using your platform as well to help people. because a lot of TV is, I mean, to say the least, it doesn't help humanity. And you see things like apocalypse, the push, sacrifice, where these people's lives are changed. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you. Well, that's, those are the, there'll be the things that I'm, you know, am and will be proud of. You know, television is a fairly fatuous occupation.

But if you occasionally, you know, when something happens in the real world that's helped that. that person. That is genuinely is a nice thing. I don't do these shows so often that people are just being churned out on some kind of conveyor belt

of some sort of makeover process. I only do like one of these things a year. So it's, and all these people have become friends. You know, I've stayed in touch with them. And part of me wants to make sure that the work of the show continues.

Right. That they do actually, it isn't just a show that they did and they felt great for a bit and then they went back to where they were. So that's important to me as well. So, yeah, thank you. What are you designing now?

A Broadway show, you said, was a show that you'd done before. Are you constantly designing new things or thinking of new illusions or new tricks that you can put in somewhere? Okay, so where am I now? So I'm hoping for a Broadway show in the spring. So just waiting to hear on a theatre for that. So it could suddenly happen. And I might be out there in like April or not. It might be later in the year or not at all.

I'm starting a new book. or getting my head around a new book. So I wrote this book on happiness. Right, which is... It'll be linked to the show notes. Thank you. That's available in America now, which is quite a new thing. And a lot of it's about stoicism and an approach to happiness.

It's very different from the sort of normal self-help book approach. So I'm starting to get my head around a second book around those sort of questions of, you know, what it is to flourish and be human, really. And then I'm... I guess there'll be another... TV thing. At the moment, there are three shows on Netflix. There's the push, which is the guy getting pushed off the building story. Miracle, which is the stage show. I do the faith healing and sacrifices that is the new one. So we're working on a fourth. That is all projects for this year.

And then maybe even looking at sort of Europe, there's some other sort of countries that seem to, they've had my TV shows for a while, but I've never gone over there and performed. That'll be, that'll be fun. So, yeah, there's lots of fun things to explore. Broadway is the, I enjoy myself so much out there before. I'm shocked that hasn't happened yet. It seems so... I've gone to some Broadway shows that are nowhere near as interesting as watching something that you would do live.

But I've also been really surprised at how long it's taken us to go, hey, this Darren Brown guy kind of knows what he's doing. Because I used to find these things on YouTube 10 years ago or whatever, maybe not even YouTube, maybe some other video site 10 years ago. And I was like, this is amazing. How is this not more popular? And I would be sharing these things.

and then I'd say, have you heard of, you've heard of Darren Brown, right? And people go, oh, I don't know. And I'm like, the guy in the Netflix. And then, of course, now I show people and they're like, whoa, this is incredible. I'm thinking, like, how long is it going to take for people to get it? Like, what is going on here? Well, that's partly us. We sort of held the shows back a bit from the States.

So we sold them into around Europe, but we held back from the States because it meant that we could kind of do that properly at some point and in a more kind of concerted effort. and make it all happen part of a plan at some point. I have no, I never have any ambition or anything with these things at all, so I leave that to the grown-ups that sort of, you know, plan my career like that. I just like to do what's enjoyable or feels worthwhile at the time. But that's why, we actually held it back. And in the last few years, we've sort of gone, right, let's start doing some stuff.

So that's why it's slowly now. Well, that's exciting. That's exciting. I mean, because you're essentially a household name in the UK. Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know, but, yeah. Certainly no one knows me in this. in the States.

Yeah, we're you. Yeah. And Jen. And now a lot of other people as well. So. Hi. Yes. Thank you very much.

Lovely to me. Likewise. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you. And thanks, Jen. So Jason, this episode did not disappoint, I assume. Oh, absolutely not.

I've listened to it twice so far, but that's also my job. But it was still, it was one of those pleasures that I get to go to work in the morning and listen to you, talk to Darren and hear about the behind the behind the scenes of how he makes these amazing shows. And it's fascinating. It's utterly fascinating. He's just one of the most brilliant entertainers slash magicians alive. And it was just awesome to be in his house with all of the atmosphere of his house and his secret passageways and his two-headed, six-legged animals and stuff like that in the house.

It's just absolutely incredible. And his art is up all over the place. You got to check out Darren Brown's stuff. We're going to link to a bunch of his videos in the show notes. If you have Netflix, which I assume you do, search Darren Brown, D-E-R-R-E-N, and watch the push. Watch sacrifice. You will just be blown away. And also, he's an amazing author. I read his book happy. I've read it twice so far. So I highly recommend checking that out. That'll be linked in the show notes as well. It is a great treatise on stoicism and what it takes to be happy and how to deal with the thought of death. And it's a deep book. It's an extraordinarily deep book that I did not expect when I opened it up because the title is happy on the front. So it was a really, a really amazing book and definitely check out his work on instagram i had no idea he was such an amazing photographer and painter as well yeah the dude's good at pretty much everything i assume he's

you know sucks at billiards or ping pong or something like that there's got to be it's got to be a balance somewhere right i don't know yeah i don't know he's like not no i'm not sure and he's a lovely lovely guy i really enjoyed meeting him he's just an amazing amazing person and i'm looking forward to seeing everything that he does in the future and keeping in touch with them for a long, long time. And I'm very excited for his Broadway show coming up. We'll let you guys know about that. I'm maybe going to bring a group to New York once that opens up because I just can't wait

to see what that's all about as well. And if you want to know how I managed to book great people like Darren and create a network with people like Darren in it, well, systems. That's how you do it. Tiny habits, a little bits each day. And I'm teaching you how to do this for free. The Level One course is over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash Level One. Don't kick the can down the road.

Don't lie to yourself and tell yourself you're going to do it later. You're not. Dig the well before you're thirsty. Jordan Harbinger.com slash level one. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Darren Brown. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show is produced in association with Podcast One, and this episode was co-produced by Jason, taking a bullet to Philippo and Jen Harbinger.

Show notes by Robert Fogarty, worksheets by Caleb Bacon, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The feat for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every single episode, especially this one. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. Lots more coming up in 2019. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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