The New Yorker Radio Hour - Derren Brown’s Big Secret

Episode Date: August 20, 2019

Derren Brown wants you to know that he is not a magician. The term he prefers to use is “psychological illusionist,” and his acts mix psychology, misdirection, and showmanship. When he performs, he’s explicit about engaging with audiences’ minds and beliefs. “If you’re an audience member, the most interesting process is you,” he tells Adam Green, at the New Yorker Festival. Like most of the best mentalists in recent decades, Brown is open about the fact that his one big trick is his ability to manipulate a roomful of people.  Brown’s show “Secret” opens on Broadway in early September.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If there is one thing that Darren Brown wants you to know, it's that he's not a magician. He doesn't believe in magic, although he does seem to read your mind.

His preferred term for this is psychological illusionist, some kind of mix of psychologist, and showman. And like most of the best magicians in recent decades, Darren Brown is completely open about his one big trick, the ability to manipulate an entire room full of people. Stand up, stand up. Exciting. I'm going to count down from 10 to 0.

By the time I reach 0, I'd like you all please to have both hands behind your back. And a small object, like a bill or a coin or a key or something held between the fingers of both hands, but behind your back, Of we go, 10, 9, 8. Brown is pretty famous in Britain. His television shows ran for more than 10 years.

He's written books, and he's performed countless times. He hasn't been as well known here in the U.S., but that might change pretty soon. Brown has a show opening on Broadway next month called Secret. Darren Brown spoke with the writer Adam Green at the 2018 New Yorker Festival. And he started out with a little trick. Zero. Good. So in a moment, I'll ask you to bring out your hands like,

This can sit not yet, bless you for your enthusiasm, thank you, sir. Concealing the object in either hand, but don't make up your mind yet which hand you're going to put it into, because I will attempt to influence this decision for you. So for now, just keep it to help between the fingers of both hands. It feels like a 50-50 choice. It really does. You can either put it in a hand on this side. The left, yes, that is not my left, that is your left, as you look at me, on the left,

or the other side, it's entirely up to you. So when you do this, in a moment, you will bring it. out your hands in such a way that the hand on one side will be empty and the hand that's left will have the object, the thing in. So think about it, make a conscious decision and when you are ready, bring out your hands. And this just tells me what sort of an audience you are. I tell you, I'm going to try and influence your decision. That should make you listen out for any attempt on my part to do that and then just do the exact opposite. So at the moment I slightly overemphasise the word left as I did, I'm counting on most of you putting it in your right.

right hand sit down, you are out of the game. All right, those of you still standing, drop your hands, but stay standing for me. You are out of this audience. The people most difficult for me to work with. Probably for anyone to work with. But I would like, I'll use one of you for this because it does kind of make it more fun.

So stay standing. Look at me, sir. You should stay right there. Take your cap off a minute. Jesus, terrifying. No, no. Lady here. What's your name? Felicity.

Would you come up for a second? Let's get Felicity. hand up your hand. I become, Felicity. Hi, oh, you can get rid of anything in your hand, by the way, let's get rid of that. I'll stick it on the table if you like, just say, yeah. Come stand over here.

It's very exciting. $20, Felicity. $20 says that I can now catch you out of this four times in a row. That I can guess correctly, four times in a row, which hand you put this 20 in. If I get it wrong at any point, you may keep the 20. Right.

Make sense? Yeah. So take it behind your back, scrunch it up, behind your back. And then whenever you're ready, bring out your hands. It's exciting. Good. So the first one's always interesting because Felicity knows that what most of you tend to do

is to keep it in the same hand a second time, right? That's why she was left standing, but she knows that I know that. So Felicity is sort of in this interesting world, but she can't really put it back in the same hand, right? She's just established that as a thing that makes her stand out. She has to change hands, which, by the way, is the one furthest from me on that side, even though she knows that I know that that's kind of like her natural pattern. So for this first round, I'm saying it's the hand furthest from me over there. And the clearest way of showing people is just to open the one hand that it's in like that,

just so it's sort of super clear. Could you open the hand that it's in? Good. One out of four. Back behind your back. We do it again. Change it around a little. Adam's not there, is it?

No, good. I don't think anyone's watching. Okay. Change it around. Whenever you're ready, bring your hands out. And turn and face me for this. We'll do it differently. Turn a face me?

Like that. Okay. Separate hands a little more. So this, oops, this time I will ask you, is it in this hand? Is it in this hand? I want you to say yes both times. So one should you'll be lying and one should be telling the truth, but try not to give way which is which.

Just a nice, clear yes, both times. Ready? Is it in this hand? Is it in this hand? God, look at that face. So good at this. Christ, I'd hate to be in a relationship, wasn't it? And that's it, thank you.

So look, it's the difference between the conscious and the unconscious communication. The conscious communication is you saying yes, as I asked you to, which, thank you. The unconscious comes when I make the silly joke, and she sort of moves a bit and relaxes. When she did, the hand nearest you didn't move as much as the other one. So it's more tense. So it is probably the one with the 20. In other words, I don't think she's changed hands.

So again, turn and face the front. I'm saying again, it's the one furthest from me, but let's have a look. Open the hand that it's in. Good. That's two. Back behind your back. All right. Back behind you back.

Place the front, place the front. Let's talk this through. Don't make up your mind yet. Because you have established a pattern now of putting it in that hand. I would expect... Don't make up your mind you. I would expect you... I think most people here would at this point

just to put it back in that hand again. So, maybe the way to catch me out would be to now break that rather mindless pattern and change the hand on this side. There's nothing to stop you doing that apart from the fact that I just mentioned it.

So you put it in the hand that feels right. Felicity, leave the hand that's left empty. Which is our left. Don't let that put you off. When you're ready? Bring your hands out. I'm going to... Actually, maybe drop your hands of this.

Drop your hands. I'm going to ask you three questions. Relax, relax your bit. I can ask you three questions. Look at me. You have to give me honest answers. All right. If at any point, while I'm asking you these questions,

you have a ton of little... Oh, I can't believe you just fell for that. That one there. That hand? The hand. Can't believe you fell for that. Same one. Last round.

Actually, last round, I'll mix it up a little. I'm going to... For this last round... Count on you giving yourself away quite nicely. Where is it? By raising the stakes to 50 of your Earth dollars on one final round. And I'll do it a little differently as well. So take it again, scrunch it up behind your back.

I suggest behind your back is more of a challenge for me. So final round. Don't make up your mind yet. Turn and face me so I can look at you and not see anything. Don't make up your mind yet. When you bring your hands out in a minute, not yet, don't bring out. I will say left. I'll tell you what I'm going to say.

I'll say left, which is the hand on this side for people closest to them. So you don't need to believe me. I'm just telling you that I'll say left, which means you probably want to put it in the right. 50 bucks for this last one. You may not believe me, and that's fine. But what you do is you'll bring your hands out in a minute, and then I'll guess left.

That would be my guess left. So I was going to just get ready to say left. Left, left. All right. entirely up to you. I swear on the life of my wives and children. I will say left. That'll be my guess.

But it's up to you whether you believe me. Choose a hand. Bring your hands out whenever you're ready. Left. I did everything I could. I'm so sorry. Felicity, everybody. Thank you.

That was excellent. And I did get off the stage because I did not want to be implicated as a... Something you might be there looking like you were looking at a stud or an assistant. One of your chief contributions to mentalism is the fact that you put an emphasis on the process of what you're doing rather than on just the result. Certainly with the stage, to me, it's all about the process. Because that way the show is about you. It's about an audience. It's not about me.

I'm not a guy that can, even if I was a guy that could do anything by just clicking his fingers, that's terrible drama. Like, that's not, it's interesting for a minute, but it's not interesting beyond that. What's interesting is people struggling to do things. So my TV shows are now about that.

They're members of the public going through real-life dramas that they may or may not know they're caught up in, and I'm kind of behind the scenes. And when I do perform mentalism, It's always about the process. It's always about the people, because the audience, because that is hopefully the most interesting, if you're an audience member,

the most interesting process of it is you. Now, what is a broad question, but what do you think is the appeal of mentalism and what makes it stronger than more traditional, straightforward magic? Well, I started off as a hypnotist and then got into doing magic, like sort of, close-up magic and for a long time I was working around tables in restaurants and so on.

And I, it just felt to me as I moved into the sort of psychological area and mentalism effects, that it's just more interesting. It's more interesting to tell someone what they're thinking than it is to find their playing card or something. It just, that seemed a natural thing. And it kind of sat well with me. So that's one answer. I think it's also interesting in the sense that classic conjuring magics ask you to, ask you just to suspend your, disbelief, whereas mentalism, for one of a better word, or whatever that is, has the potential to sort of engage your belief or take your belief into sort of interesting areas. I think that's theatrically more interesting because you're not quite sure what you're supposed to take away from it.

That, to me, is more rewarding. When you started in your early television specials, it was very much, here's a guy who can use psychology to influence you, and what you do is based on a combination of magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship, and then you also sometimes add, and the power of the well-placed lie. Yes, I do. And so, I mean, what appeals to you about working in this sort of, that more ambiguous sort of in-between space? I think life is very complex and ambiguous, especially given how sort of polarize we are

nowadays and how tribalize we are, and then we live in these fills of bubbles, and we all think whoever disagrees this must be just mad or evil or deeply deeply ignorant and of course that's you know not not the case there's the dialogue between sides where humanity emerges so life is difficult and the truths can be equally valid and held even though they they conflict so I just think ambiguity is a really interesting rewarding area and it's fine to let it sit it's a it's quite a infantilizing thing to always want to always want a definite answer. Also, if you're

debunking us something like psychic ability, it's pointless to go, oh, here's how I do it. Because then a believer in those things will go, oh, right, okay, that's how you do it. But that certainly isn't how the psychic, the I saw, did it. Because she was able to do, you know, X, Y, Z. So you have to, the best I can do is to kind of go, well, I'll recreate it and I'll do it in a way that is more impressive because that's kind of a thing

that if you go and see these people for real and you believe in it, they don't have to prove themselves at all. Darren Brown with Adam Green at the 2018 New Yorker Festival. Our conversation continues in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. Today we're talking with the illusionist Darren Brown and he's gaining a reputation as one of the premier magic performers in the world. His show's secret opens on Broadway and early September. Now, Brown likes to say he's honest about his dishonesty, and he seems to have required a taste for misdirection in childhood. Here's Darren Brown talking with Adam Green.

I want to talk a little bit about your background and where you're from, and kids who go on to be magic are sort of obsessively practicing magic as kids, but, I mean, to what extent was magic a part of your life as a boy? I had a, I did have a magic set when I was very, very, young, but it didn't really, didn't really sort of kick off or go anywhere. I was kind of a, I was sort of, sort of an only child. My brother's nine years younger than me, so for a long time I was an only child. Not very sporty. My dad was a swimming teacher at the school I was in. So it's very hard to get out of sports because my dad was part of that world. So I wasn't bullied or anything, but I was definitely a kind of, I was just intimidated by the kind of sporty kids.

I was quite quiet as I was growing up, quite sort of isolated. And then when I got to the last couple of years of, so like 16, 17, 18, that age, I sort of suddenly really came out, Michelle, and I started performing, and I was desperate for attention and became very kind of, a bit of a dick, really.

No way around it. So I, when I then went to university after that to study law and German, I saw a hypnotist in my first year and I just went right I'm going to, it ticked all the boxes of wanting to perform the control thing

to, you know, that sort of that whole insecurity thing around that. Also the very people that responded well to hypnosis were typically the kind of very social, sporty kind of guys I guess that were I'd otherwise find intimidating. So that was like a big box, lots of box being ticked by

being a hypnotist. So it really it just sort of struck a chord a minute. that I graduated, didn't want to be a lawyer, or a German. So by that point, I was just about earning a living doing it. So it just carried on from there. And then I grew out of, hopefully, I grew out of those initial urges. And now it's, you know, I think I would have stopped doing it in my 30s. But by that point, my career had sort of taken off.

And I felt like I, it would be silly to walk away from it. So I tried to take it in a different direction. And, you know, throughout, you know, your childhood, and then up until the beginning part of university, you sort of had two sort of separate, in some ways, opposing streams running through your life, one of them being that you were a Christian. Did you talk a little bit about how you became a Christian

and what that gave you? Yes, I'm no longer a Christian, but when I got into it, I was very young. There was a teacher at my primary school I liked, and she said, oh, do you want to come to my Bible reading class? So I just presumed everybody goes to Bible reading class, and she was a great teacher. I liked her, so I went to Bible reading class. by the time I was old enough to realize,

oh, this is now a belief that I've got. It was too late, you know, I was kind of inculcated. It was too late to change. So it took me longer to then sort of come out of it, which I did. What I didn't have, though, was a particularly Christian environment. I didn't have Christian family or friends. It was easy to come out of it as I did at university and leave it behind. The other stream that was running through your childhood,

which is something that you talk about at the beginning of your new show secret, You said that, you know, as an adolescent, you had a secret of your own, which was that when you were about 15, you sort of started to figure out that you were gay. Something about which you had a lot of shame, and it was something that no one could possibly know, and you didn't even want to really know it. And I just want to quote it because it's such a great... You said, no one must ever know, which is silly, because when you do eventually come out, you realize no one gives a fuck. Yes. Which is a little disappointing. All the things about ourselves that we think are so terrible to other people, it's...

is just a bit more information about us. We would worry a lot less about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do. I just think we'd just... What was it like keeping that secret from others and even from yourself? And I'm wondering, did it in any way dovetailed with Christianity for you? Yes, I think the Christian thing did...

It sort of dragged out the sort of inevitable coming out, I suppose. You just realize that thing, that thing of realizing, oh, God, people don't care. They don't care. It's interesting if you're hiding something, then people care, because obviously they can tell or it's intriguing. And they obviously talk about that, but with their friends and your friends,

that's clearly going to be a topic of discussion if you're hiding something. But other than that, whatever you do and give out, people really don't care. And once you've done that with a big thing that you'd been carrying around with for a long time and feeling I was just awful, I couldn't possibly tell anybody.

Then after that, you realize, oh, well, it's all fair game. It's fine. There's like no reason to. to hide anything. There's just, you know, it was a very, that's, I think, what's liberating about it. Not the kind of, oh, I'm gay.

Not that, not a sort of like, oh, I'm free, but just the fact, oh, it's, oh, people don't, people don't care. I've carried this warped idea around with me of how important my inner life is to other people. I have about 14 million questions, I'm gonna have to start skipping over some of them. Okay.

I hope so you can move away from shame and failure. Shame and failure, I think is a good, A bold suggestion. I was hoping to explore that avenue in great detail. You know, mentalism, even though, I mean, obviously there have been oracles and soothsayers since, you know, since the beginning of civilization. But I guess modern mentalism started with the rise of the, you know, the spiritualism movement in the mid-19th century. And in your shows, you've used various things from, you know, I mean, you know, straight out, you've done like a spiritualism. Spirit cabinet, yeah.

Seance. You've done, I guess, what you call the Oracle Act, which was a question and answer act. And I'm just, you know, which is, they're markedly different from the sort of much more modern approach to what you generally take. What for you is the appeal of those sort of classics and old-fashioned pieces of mentalism?

I think it's, they're very theatrical and they're creepy, if they're done well, and actually they're creepy. So in terms of putting a show together, it's a very different flavor of something that can come in. And it also allows me to kind of have my cake and eat it because I can go, this is what the fake, let me show you what a fake psychic would have done, and then just present it and do it for real and kind of commit to that. And without having to sort of constantly be going, oh, but remember, this isn't real. You know, when you tell a magic trick, when you tell somebody what happened after a trick,

and a good magician Moses, you do half the trick, the spectator, the person, the participant, is doing half the trick after the event when they're describing it to somebody else. So you put little things in so that when they recreate the memory of it, they have essentially a false memory of what happened so that when they tell somebody else,

a bit like telling somebody about a great holiday, of course you exaggerate all the things that were great about it because that's the narrative you want to get across. And when you want to get across, this guy did this amazing trick, and I was amazed by it, you don't want to look stupid. You don't want to look like you were easily fooled.

So, of course, you exaggerate the impossibility of the trick. But in doing so, you kind of start to believe in it yourselves. I think, you know, one of the things that you've done that really is completely about what's going on in the minds of the audience is in miracle when you do some, you do sort of fake faith healing that works. What's your name? Danielle. Danielle, just come and stand here for me, Danielle.

Okay, come and stand right there. Take your glasses off for me? Thank you. Let's have a look. Wow. The Lord has his work cut out tonight. All right. Could you hold Daniel's glasses for me? Thank you, sir.

Be careful with them. Grab the mic for me, Daniel. So if you've got a brochure, turn to page four. That's actually quite a good one. There's lots of little writing on it. There's some big numbers and big writing, but it's the little writing we're going to look at. If you have a brochure, turn to page four.

Can you, yes or no? I imagine you can't. Bring the mic up. Can you read small writing without your glasses on? No. No. Can you read this paragraph any clearer? No.

No. imagine you could. The idea was I had done a special on faith healing before where I trained somebody up to do it and then took him to Dallas and tried to pass him off as a real healer. And I was teaching him, but in doing that, I started to get a real, like, feeling, I kind of want to do it and see what that's like. So then it came to writing the miracle show and I said, well, we were all kind of keen, the three of us that were writing and making the show, were keen to revisit it. I really wanted to do it. But it's the worst thing. It's like it makes no sense. If you go and see those evangelical faith healers, you're in an audience and you yourself would be somebody who, A, believes in it, and B, is there wanting a healing, and you're bringing everything to it that makes it work.

But sort of wanted to try it, because I could see, well, I could definitely get something out of it, even if it didn't really turn into a, didn't have the feeling of, like, proper healing. But it did. It did. And not only were these healings happening, I just sort of asked the audience to kind of just, Just sort of go with it and I'll sort of play the part, but I want you just to sort of, you know, just do what I say, and we'll just see what happens. And from the first night, in the first week a woman came up and she'd been paralyzed down one side of her body since she was a kid. And she was in floods of tears.

She could move her arm. And I was gobsmacked by. It's not me. It's nothing I'm doing. I mean, it sort of is, but obviously it's not my skills that are making it happening. What making it happen, what became clear was there was this, psychological component to suffering. And it depends on what the situation is,

depends on the person and what the condition is. But there is clearly just this interesting middle ground where what appears to be a physical problem and may at one point have been a physical problem has actually just sort of become a thing that we're just living out because we've got so used to living it out and we tell ourselves, I got a bad shoulder, I had a bad shoulder for a while,

and I got so used to when I put a jacket on doing it like that and using this arm that if somebody said to me, your shoulder is healed, I'd made me go, oh, give me a bit of a jumps, a bit of adrenaline going through my body anyway, and said, go on, it's healed. Now I'm trying to put your jacket on normally.

I could probably do it, and I might think, I haven't been able to do that for years, because I could have done it. I just hadn't, I just had sort of identified with not being able to do it for so long. It's a strange thing,

and I think that's what it was tapping into. Anyway, so it was extraordinary, and then I thought it would just be, for the 10 minutes they're on stage, and of course, for most people, it was, but there were people that were writing years later, saying, well, it's been three years,

I think, more than that, saying they're still healed. There was a guy that watched it on TV, whose wife was a makeup artist, who was doing my makeup for something, and she said, her husband had a golfing injury, had watched the show on television, it had cured it. He was so embarrassed that he had responded to it. It took him a year

before he admitted to her that this golfing injury had gone. So, obviously, I'm not saying that to make, like to try and take any credit for it, just how fascinating that strange middle ground is between a psychological thing and a physical thing. And it just finished. Can it open your eyes? Let's have a look. Thank you.

Does it look any clearer to you? Fuck me sideways. I take it there's a clear improvement. Can you, look, you couldn't make it, can you read any of these words now? Any hotels so small they may mysteriously vanish during the act of showering. Effortless. And this paragraph here you couldn't read either? Remembering to come back and turn off the shower if you've been out for a week.

This is effortless. Your eyesight is healed. You don't need this anymore. She did have the best reaction of anybody. Yes, that was so pleased it was the night we were filming. It was just a great, lovely reaction from it. It's really interesting doing shows in here in America with people that don't know me as well, if at all,

because there isn't the same, there's a sort of prestige that happens, which makes it more easy. It makes the suggestion stuff easier because people's expectations are higher, because you're bringing more to it. As course, the people don't know you. That isn't there, so I have to work harder to make the things work. And over the years in England, it's been easier to get things working quite quickly with seemingly very little effort from me.

Nothing you can really see that I'm doing to make it work. It was very interesting doing the Off-Broll boy show here and just seeing how that was different with an audience that didn't know me as well. Very different. Doing shows in, I don't know how many of you are from New York, so different. Like in England, you have this crowd response, like a sort of group response of, you know, gasping or applause or whatever.

It was like 200 individuals narrating their own experience. There was just this kind of like, no, fuck, no. Oh my God, it did like all the way. I mean, there is no British equivalent to that. I was genuinely taken aback. I don't know what we do. But it was, there wasn't the kind of the group thing. It was a very different experience.

It was amazing. It was amazing as a performer to have that because it felt like it was, you know, 3,000 people. Yeah, but I love that. It's a bit like a good theory, isn't it? Dawkins talks about it as the theory of evolution. What makes it a good theory is a very simple thing that explains so much. And I think equally the best, the stuff I enjoy the most in performing is the simplest.

The method is sometimes just a choice of wording or just a tiny little thing that creates a whole big thing out of really, out of nothing. It's a very, it's a wonderful, joyful thing. Thank you, Darren. This has been a pleasure. I could have talked to you for another couple of hours very easily. And thank you all for coming. And please, let's thank Darren again for coming. Darren Brown talking with the New Yorker's Adam Green last October. Now, I've confessed that in another week I'm probably going to be a little distracted because once the U.S. open starts, it's hard to concentrate on anything else, or at least anything else on TV. But just before that, we're going to have on the show a master of the game.

Quite simply the greatest tennis player of all time, I think, Roger Federer. I like being out there, you know, and as long as I'm really enjoying myself and I feel that way, I think it's nice to keep on playing and sort of really squeezing that last drop of lemon out of it. You know, I'm not leaving the game of tennis feeling like, I could have, I should have stayed longer. Roger Federer, winner of 20 Grand Slam titles, joins me next week. week. That's our show for this week. I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank you for joining us, and I hope you'll join us next time. Be sure to keep in touch on Twitter, and you can always find us at New Yorker Radio. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

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