Derren Brown: UNLOCK The Secret Power Of Your Mind!
Guests: Derren Brown
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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I've been asked by the FBI, I've been asked by the police to help.
What would the FBI or the police want help with?
Nah. Ladies and gentlemen, the incredible Derren Brown.
A psychological illusionist doing extraordinary television and even better live shows. Derren is a national treasure. Welcome to the show.
The story we tell ourselves is not what's real. Like for example, I did a show called *Miracle*.
The Lord has his work cut out tonight!
And the second half was healing. A woman came up and she'd been paralyzed down one side of her body since she was four, in floods of tears because she could move her left arm for the first time. What you're seeing is the psychological component of suffering. Nothing's happened, nothing's changed, but their relationship to their suffering, that's been made to change. It's not the things in life that cause your problems; it's the story that you tell yourself about them, the judgments that you make about them.
There's a lot of people that are trying to sell you on this bullshit that they can take your traumas or your insecurities to zero.
I've never seen it happen. We've completely obliterated the idea of just fortune in life. Sometimes life's throwing stuff back at us we have no control over, and anxiety is still somehow the demon. But without anxiety, how do you know to change anything? You can't do that without embracing anxiety to an extent.
Your work is predominantly based in psychology, right? So have you ever done anything and thought, "How the fuck did that happen?"
Don't go home and start doing that! Two things come to mind.
I've spent the last few days reading all about your childhood. Truly fascinating. I've actually got a picture here of you.
How strange that you have that picture. Yes, that's me with a parrot on my shoulder, a photograph that you have.
This little boy—what do I need to understand about him and the world he lived in and the way he saw the world to understand you?
Well, I was an only child till I was nine, so I guess that's a pretty formative thing. I was quite creative, always drawing and building things, Lego. I was always been a bit of a people pleaser, and maybe at that age, I was kind of happy. I didn't have a lot of friends; there wasn't like a big gang. I never really did; I've always gone through life just with a small number of good friends. But I think that feels like a happy time to think back on.
I remember sitting with Jimmy Carr and him telling me that people often think of comedians as being depressed, trying to impress other people to get some kind of thrill for their own self-gratification. But Jimmy said to me, "You should actually ask which one of my parents was depressed that I was trying to impress to understand how I became a comedian." I wonder in you—you said there you're a bit of a people pleaser, you clearly had this huge affinity towards entertaining and getting the reaction back from people, the amazement. Where did that start? Can you pinpoint where that started in your childhood?
Yes, I think I could. So when I was at school, my dad was a swimming teacher at school and I wasn't very sporty. It shielded me from being bullied as a non-sporty kid, but I didn't love school mainly because of that. I found a lot of the sporty kids quite intimidating. My dad teaching there helped. And then when I got to—and I was in with the wrong group, the classical music-loving group, or the "poof gang" as we were less charitably known. I didn't even like classical music, so it was a pretty miserable group to be stuck with.
In sixth form, I remember everybody seemed to grow up suddenly and become a lot more friendly. I sort of exploded in a way into attention-seeking. I went from being very quiet and a bit intimidated by these kids to suddenly they seemed to like me, or at least they were fine. So I started doing impressions of teachers and I would draw caricatures of them, and I became a kind of really, I would imagine, quite irritating attention-seeker.
So I think it all happened around then. And then it just progressed into university. Most of my 20s were probably based around that. It was quite a handy thing if you're going to perform; it takes care of that need to just impress. I think it was probably a good thing.
Were you picked on or teased or anything in school before that point?
No, as I said, I think because my dad taught there, it helped. But I was definitely always chosen last for the teams and things. I hated sports. There were a couple of kids that were probably generally fairly nasty anyway, but I certainly got a bit from them. But no, I think I sort of did alright. I think I generally didn't enjoy school that much, and I felt like I was intimidated. But I don't really remember ever getting beaten up or bullied, or no one was making my life particularly miserable. I think it was just the general feeling of not quite fitting in.
And religion. I was incredibly religious when I was younger. Then I lost it at about 18 and became incredibly atheist. I read a similar sort of journey in your story. At six or something, you'd asked your parents if you could go to Bible readings?
That's right. Mrs. Whitaker, one of our teachers at school, I really liked a lot and she ran what was called "Crusader Class," which was basically like a Sunday school thing. Because I was six and she asked me if I wanted to go to it, I just sort of presumed everybody did. I didn't know any different, so I asked my parents if I could go and they said yes, of course. So I did.
By the time I realized that this is actually a thing that I now believe in, I was pretty much inculcated, so it was hard to step out of it. But I did eventually at university. Many years later, through doing hypnosis first and magic, they always give you quite a skeptical outlook on things because you just see how people fool themselves. You naturally start to view a lot of belief systems through those eyes, including your own. I don't know how it was for you.
Also, the very idea of doing hypnosis—I just remember that was—I was a member of the Christian Union in my first year at university. I went to Bristol and they were just totally up in arms. I had members of the Christian Union at the back of one of my shows exorcising me and casting out demons whilst I was hypnotizing people on stage. So again, all of that just sort of made me quite—just helped with the general skepticism. It took a little while to properly come out of it.
In fact, the Richard Dawkins book, *The God Delusion*, came out around the time that I had sort of mentally made that step but didn't quite have the proper language for it. So that was a helpful book, actually, as I'm sure it was for many people in terms of giving that lack of belief a kind of structure.
It was for me, one of the very pivotal books in my life when I was about 18 years old.
I also read about compulsive behaviors from your childhood, things like knocking your knees together and a series of other things.
Really twitchy, yeah. A little on that sort of Tourette's-ish scale. I think there's a wedge that ends with quite severe things, but a lot of people have that experience of making funny little tickly noises in their throat or having to not step on the cracks. Then there's all the kind of OCD thing that starts to get accompanied by feelings of dread and so on, which I never had.
But yeah, I was twitchy. I find a lot of creative kids are. I don't really know what it is. It seems to be a form of auto-suggestion. It's like when you get the idea in your head and then it's very hard to let it go. Sometimes I get it now, sometimes I get it on stage because there's a lot of muscle memory with doing a stage show. So if something, if a little twitchy thing has crept in at one point during the show, it'll just creep in every night.
So I'm still aware of it, a little more over the last few years because obviously it's been such a weird few years for everyone's mental health. So I've noticed it more than I have before. But it was a lot. My parents were quite despairing with it because I think it's a very painful thing to watch your child do and not know how to help.
What were they watching?
Knees knocking, sniffing, terrible sniffing. Like, but really loud. I went to see Alfred Brendel, the pianist, playing in Berlin once when I was studying out there, or did my gap year out there. This guy's playing the Beethoven piano sonatas, just him on his own on the stage at the Berlin Philharmonic. And there's this incredibly loud sniffing that I'm doing. By the second half, everybody had cleared out. I was basically a whole empty area of the audience.
It's such a bizarre thing. You just can't really stop it. With the best will in the world, you can't stop yourself from doing these things. Also, you don't have the language for it as a kid. That's the worst part of it. You don't have the language to explain that it's a compulsion. You sort of feel like you're in control of it, so you feel therefore the only thing you can say is that you want to do it. But you don't want to do it because it's horrible; you would really, really want to stop. And it's hard and frightening because you can't articulate it. I think there's no answer to it other than it just sort of passes.
As you've matured, has your perspective of your childhood evolved? Because I've found that mine certainly has. It's almost like with a bit more wisdom—I say that, I'm 30 years old now—but with a little more wisdom, I've kind of had a different perspective now on the events of my childhood. At one point, I would have narrated them differently, but now I see different truths and throughlines in my early experience.
I think I'm quite fond of my memories of myself as a child. It felt like there was quite a clean break once I went off to university; it felt like life sort of stopped and started again. So when I think back to the story of myself that I guess I'm sort of quietly living out in the back of my head, I sort of don't really go much beyond university age.
I'll happily find anything excruciating, like more than anything I've said or done 10 minutes ago. I find that quite easy. That feeling kind of gets weaker and weaker the further I go back in terms of finding myself embarrassing. By the time I get to childhood, it all feels fine. I'm aware that I was kind of would sort of just get on with my own things.
I think I was sensitive, and I think I still am. I was quite a sensitive child. I did used to cry a lot. I know that makes me sound unhappy, but it didn't take much to make me cry. I think I probably retained a sort of sensitivity, which is interesting because I write a lot about Stoicism. A lot of the things people tend to write about are things that they either need to learn for themselves or are learning. You express those things often better because you're discovering them for yourself. So perhaps like a lot of Stoics, I'm secretly quite sensitive too. So I remember that, but not really unhappy, not particularly blissfully happy either, just a kind of fairly content, solitary kind of kid.
That sensitivity—I've always wondered if we're particularly taken by the applause, are we therefore also taken by the criticism? People that end up committing their lives to being public entertainers and living for the response and the reaction that their work has—are those then also the people that are most susceptible to the opposite of applause?
Yes, I guess so. You're definitely putting yourself out there, aren't you? If you perform of any sort, you are kind of opening yourself up to both extremes of reaction. But it wasn't really about that for me. I think it was about control; that was a big part of it. Also, I didn't come out until I was actually sort of quite late in my 30s.
Around the time that I was getting into the hypnosis, so that was university time really, I think first of all it was—and this all wasn't clear to me at the time but with hindsight—the control aspect of it was very clear. Well, if you watch a hypnotist hypnotizing people, it's just the whole thing is a big exercise in control. I think I sort of—that was appealing to me.
Also, I think the old outmoded cliché of the gay man in particular being a hairdresser or an interior designer—all of those horrible old clichés—what they have in common is the notion of being able to create dazzling surfaces. Because they deflect people from the more difficult things if you're feeling shame about what's underneath.
I think magic is very good for that as well. You're creating this bubble around yourself; you're literally hiding behind a trick. People will look at that trick and go, "Oh gosh, you're amazing! How do you do that? You're amazing!" That's a very appealing thing. A lot of kids get into magic because they're underconfident. A lot of people even going through magic into adults, they've learned to rely on that to impress people and haven't had to go back and just work through normal social skills that most people do. So it's a very appealing thing. I think all of that was helpful to me as somebody that was not out and kind of working all that stuff out.
You used the word "shame" there. It reminded me of listening to your audiobook where you talk about those two kids beating you up in your sleeping bag—I can't remember the exact outfit you were wearing.
Oh yeah, that's right.
And one of the lines you said in that section of the book is that you were very good at—I think you said embodying shame, but I know that's not the exact word you used—but that you were very good at holding shame. You were full of shame; I think that was the message.
Yeah, I can't remember exactly what I wrote, but it kind of creeps up on you. I find now it's—I'm prone to it. If I feel I've upset my partner, it's shame that I'll go to rather than defensiveness or whatever. I easily get back to a feeling of like, "Oof, I've been bad, I've just sort of let this person down."
What does shame mean to you? Because I think I've been using the word a little bit without a very focused definition. I've been saying that I felt a lot of shame because I was the only black kid in an all-white school and we were the poorest family. So that feeling of shame turned into a motivation which made me want to become a happy, sexy millionaire. But what does shame mean to you in that context?
Well, I suppose if you distinguish it from embarrassment—embarrassment is sort of where you've let yourself down in front of other people, it's a feeling you're going to get from other people. They're important in that; it's how you've appeared before them. Whereas I suppose shame is how you've appeared before yourself, that you've sort of let something down within yourself. It's that, isn't it?
But I think the experience of it is just a sort of—it just becomes an easy resting place. Whatever it is—for someone else it could be anger or fury or whatever—if there's just an emotional throughline that was a familiar place when you were young, you just find yourself settling back into that. Part of getting older is recognizing those kind of things, aren't they? Recognizing, "Ah, that is a needless pattern."
And as you said with your own experience, those things can be really helpful; they can provide a real impetus and a motivation to do things you wouldn't have. Like not being out—all that energy was going into creating this "Mr. Magic" kind of persona. Although it's easy to say you should always come out and all the rest of it, of course those things are important too, but I don't think I'd be sitting here talking to you now if that had been an easy ride.
Shame being a familiar resting place, as you describe it, and you said that kind of starts in your childhood. I just want to be sure that I'm clear on the context here. That has a familiar history in your childhood because of the social dynamics of your childhood, because you felt like a bit different and a bit like a loner? Is that what you're saying, or is there other dynamics with parents?
No, I think it's specifically with the gay thing. I think that's what it is. If you feel—and hopefully it's different now, but this is going back a bit; I'm 51 now—but if you feel like those things are just embarrassing and awkward, and you're finding it out in real-time about yourself, aren't you? So there's just—it becomes an uncomfortable center of everything that starts to affect so much of what happens on the surface.
There's a real experience, I think, if you're not out, which I've recognized in many friends as well, where there's just a bit of a bubble around you because you're having to maintain a sort of curated exterior. Part of that then is what's happening underneath is uncomfortable and difficult and feels shameful. So I think that's it; I think that's where. I don't remember feeling that as a kid. As I said, quiet and so on, but I don't remember feeling that as an experience.
But it just sort of kind of crept in. And the more I was leaning into the magic persona thing, the more the outside becomes harder and more opaque. I think it goes hand-in-hand with a more shameful interior. Until in the end, you just sort of go, "Oh, fuck that," and just let it all be fine.
Was there a point—and this might be the really naive question as a straight guy—but was there a point where it became crystal clear to you that your sexual preference was different? Or was it slow realizations?
It was kind of—because you can never really climb into anyone else's head and understand what their experience is, it's often difficult to really know. And of course, at the time I was also proper Christian, which slightly messes the whole thing up and slightly gets in the way of the whole thing.
I had a friend who went through some of that "Living Waters" movement, which is the kind of gay conversion—it's got called gay conversion therapy. It was a bit more subtle than that, but nonetheless is basically that. So he was going through that. Although I didn't, I was kind of skirted it a little bit because I was his friend and it was something we were talking about a lot. So all of those things—and obviously by the way, it doesn't work, just in case anyone was wondering. I went in straight; it worked for me.
So yeah, it was sort of—I don't know, there's never just a clear moment. It's just, I think as I just got in the public eye, I thought, "I don't want this to be some weird sort of thing that's like a secret." So in the end, you come out about it. And then actually, the joy, the reason why it's liberating—at least it was for me and probably hopefully most people now—is that people just don't care.
Like this thing that you've carried around, and that experience, that shameful center that's there—again, shame is a really strong word, but nonetheless it is kind of just this sort of awkward thing—eventually when you are open about it, people don't care. Why would they care? So that's the why it's liberating. It's not because suddenly you can spin around in the street with your shopping bags. It is just that no one cares about your own difficult private stuff, in the best way. So actually, and you've done the big one, so now anything else after this will be fine. I think that's why it's a liberating thing.
I read a quote, I think it was in *The Telegraph*, where you had said that—or maybe the journalist was commentating that—something as simple as misplacing your keys can trigger a whole new wave of self-hatred.
God, was that me saying that? Yeah, that's just fury, though, isn't it? When you can't find a sock or you can't find your keys or your pen.
Self-hatred, I mean, is a strong word.
Maybe it does. Yeah, I probably would, yes. I would reflect it back on myself rather than being angry at my partner or anybody else who's probably lost it. That's what he'd do; he'd be angry that I must have put his keys somewhere because he can't find them. I would just be beating myself up for why am I always losing stuff, why can't I remember where I've put things. Yeah, I definitely would do that.
Interesting. I wouldn't.
You wouldn't?
No, it wouldn't reflect on my own self-image if I'd lost the keys. Or even if it did, it wouldn't negatively reflect. I'd think, "That's just who I am. I'm unorganized," versus like, "Ugh, I'm so unorganized, I hate that about myself."
Yeah, well I don't know when I said that. That was probably quite a while ago and I don't know if I'd necessarily be that hard on myself now. Plus sometimes you exaggerate these things for rhetorical effect.
Has anything changed? Like on a really fundamental level. I'm so curious about how good we are at actually changing some of these things. Because we say it, we talk about it, but as I've got older and older and as I've done more and more of these interviews, I tend to find that the real fundamental stuff is never healed. It never goes away. And I actually think that's really good news for people, because there's a lot of people that are trying to sell you on this bullshit that they can take your traumas or your insecurities to zero. I've never seen it happen.
No, that's all wrong. And even Stoicism in a way is sort of a little guilty of that. Even some things that talk about rolling with the punches of life is still kind of suggesting that if you get this right, you won't be disturbed, you won't experience anxiety. That is all a little bit off, really. I think the nature of life is that it is difficult and, not all the time, but a lot of the time things really go badly. They certainly don't go as you planned, and you actually start to get older, you realize your plans probably have nothing to do with how things are turning out. But the illusion that they are is what propels you through the first half of life.
So actually, I think the project, the task, our task is a certain amount is sort of personal development and integrating ourselves with the parts of us that we are uncomfortable with. So again, that's the project of relating to what's difficult within ourselves, and then how we do that in life as well, how we relate to things that are difficult and tricky in life.
Because the thing about it, although that experience can be very isolating, those feelings of when life lets you down or you feel you've failed—they tend to be quite isolating experiences, like shame, right? That's a very isolating thing. Whereas actually—and weirdly, I'm doing this show *Showman* at the moment and this is entirely what the show's about—those isolating experiences are exactly the things that join us all up. That is the human experience: how do we deal with the difficulties of life? When things are going badly and we feel like we've failed, that's what we all have to find our way through. So the things that feel most isolating are the things that tend to connect us.
So I don't think it's about trying to bury them under some sort of forced optimism, and it isn't about reaching a nirvana of a problem-free life. I think that's a really sort of terrible project because you're going to end up blaming yourself for failing. You weren't a good enough Stoic, or you weren't a good enough optimist, or whatever.
It always reminded me of the faith healers that I spent a lot of time watching, and when they do that thing of saying, "Throw away your pills, and if your illness returns, it's because you didn't have enough faith," like it's your fault. And that's no different from *The Secret*, you know, the "Law of Attraction." Oh, fucking hell. But it's the same thing. You have to completely commit yourself, and if it doesn't work out, if the universe doesn't provide you with—it's always jewelry and money and cars, a bit odd—then you didn't have enough faith. It wasn't—it was your own fault. So it's a perfect cycle of blame which exonerates the actual system completely and puts the blame entirely on you.
There's a bit of an irony in the fact that people choose those books because they don't want responsibility, but failure puts responsibility back on them. Because I think of like the Law of Attraction—I actually had a conversation with a girl I was dating many years ago in New York, and she actually got out the cab and walked off because I said to her that I she believed that she could visualize anything into existence. I went, "So you believe that you can just think about something and then it will happen? So you could think about becoming a billionaire and it would happen?" She went, "Yes." And I was like, "Nah, I don't agree with that." And I go, "But how?" She goes, "You put out into the universe and then it comes back."
And what they're doing in there, to me it seems like they're alleviating their own sense of responsibility. They're putting it up to the puppet master in the universe. But as you've described then, when that fails, the blame is ultimately on them for not doing it right.
Yeah, it must be your fault as opposed to it was just a bad idea to begin with. And more helpfully, how do we live comfortably with a universe that doesn't give a fuck what our plans are? Why would it? It doesn't make any sense. So how do we navigate?
There is an ancient image—it's appeared in so many different forms—of an x=y diagonal. So if you imagine a graph and you've got along one axis—the x-axis is the stuff you want to achieve in life, your aims and your plans—and then the other axis, the y-axis, is just life, what they used to call "fortune." It's all the stuff that just gets thrown at you.
If you imagine the line that we lead in our lives, it's a sort of an x=y line, right? It's sort of an undulating line. So sometimes our plans are winning and we're doing great, and sometimes life's throwing stuff back at us we have no control over and things have gone horrible and someone's got ill or whatever it is. So there's this sort of undulating x=y diagonal where we're being pulled in these two different directions. That's what we live. That's just sort of reality.
And the nature of the kind of the American optimistic model is that by believing in ourselves, we can—and this is an old hangover from Protestantism, this sort of work ethic—that you can, by believing in yourself, you can crank that line up so it's in line with your aims and your goals. And we've completely obliterated the idea of just fortune and life from that. We used to call people unfortunate; now we call them losers. So there's a lack of respect now for just the fact that life is throwing stuff back at you.
So how do you navigate that? And I think actually Stoicism is a very good toolkit. The bottom line of it is that the things in life—it's not the things in life that cause your problems; it's the story that you tell yourself about them, it's the judgments that you make about them. Which is a very good and sensible idea that's made its way down to us over the last couple of thousand years.
And then allied to that, you take all the stuff that you have no control over—outcomes, what other people do and what they think and so on—and you can just decide that that stuff is fine as it is. And you can just focus on the stuff only try and change the stuff you can actually change, which is the world of your own thoughts and your own actions. And that's where we should put our attention.
And then there's interesting there is a middle ground of success of any sort. There's parts of that you're in control of and parts that you're not. So it's like—a best analogy I've read for it is like going into a game of tennis. If you go in determined to win, and then your opponent is playing better than you, you're probably going to get anxious and you're going to feel that you're failing. Whereas if you go in determined to play as well as you can—again, just to control the part you're in charge of—then it sort of doesn't matter if your opponent's a bit better than you or they start to win; you're not failing.
And the same goes for—the Stoics were big movers and shakers. If you want to change the world, you can, but you're only going to emotionally commit yourself to your intention and your actions, not the outcomes which may happen a generation after you've died. That's something out of your hands. So I think all that's very helpful and very useful, if you see it as a toolkit to be leant into when it's helpful.
But even that, if you take it as a sort of a spiritual way of life, can fall into the problem of, "And therefore we shouldn't have any anxiety. Therefore anxiety is still somehow the demon." But without anxiety, how do you know to change anything in your life? How do you know to change your job unless the current job is making you feel bad? Things have to become anxious and things have to fall away in order for us to move forward and grow. You can't do that without embracing anxiety to an extent.
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Are you really buying a car online on AutoTrader right now?
Really.
At a playground?
Yeah, really. Look at these listings from dealers.
Wow, your search can really get that specific.
Really. And you just put in your info and boom, cars in your budget.
Mommy!
Mom needs a second, honey.
You can really have it delivered?
Really. Or I can pick it up at the dealership.
Mommy!
One sec, sweetie. Mommy's buying a car.
Mommy, look!
Uh, I think your kid is walking up the slide.
Hi all, again, really?
AutoTrader. Buy your car online. Really.
As I've aged, I've started to realize that the kind of compass of my life is how I feel. And that's kind of what you've alluded to there, that we have this signal. Sometimes it comes in the form of anxiety, sometimes it comes in the form of fear, but these are all really useful signals. Do you resonate with what I just said there in terms of like feelings that our body is giving us are the greatest signals for us to navigate versus narratives, versus like what my mom wants or I end up in a working in the city in like a suit and a tie because that's what society had an expectation of? But I'm feeling a signal inside which is, I don't know, depression or I'm feeling, you know...
I think those things are very important to listen to. I think we do live out stories very easily. We do tend to see things in terms of a narrative, and that's an interestingly double-edged thing. Because on the one hand, whether someone's written in or out of a story has become very important; language and harm and all those things have all got suddenly very tied up and story—the very notion of story has become so important, taking authorship of your story and so on.
But the other side to that, which I live out in my job as a magician, is that stories are just stories. If a magician fools you with a trick in a way that works, what you're being shown is that your story that you were forming of the world isn't quite right. Like there's something you missed. And you always feel like you've properly paid attention, you saw everything, you were taking in all the information. But it shows you that you've missed something, that your narrative of what reality is isn't the same as the world.
And so the story side of things seems to be part of just our makeup, but it's important not to fall in love with it too much and to realize that the nature of a story is that there's stuff you're excluding. There's an image, isn't there, of telling a story over a campfire in a clearing and it's cozy. But then there's all the forest in the darkness with all the stuff that you're excluding from that story. And that's where the monsters live, and the nature of monsters are they come and bite you.
All the stuff that we don't include in a story, whether it's the story we tell ourselves about ourselves or whether it's the story we tell ourselves about our nation or our culture—whether it's a social thing or whether it's a private thing—the stuff that we bury and the stuff that we don't include within the narrative because the narrative is really too simple is—goes deep. It sort of gets buried. It gets buried in our own unconscious, or it gets buried in the untold story of whatever the thing is. And that's what comes back and bites us. That's the stuff that comes to own us in our own lives and in our societal life as well, as the stuff that we've buried.
I think as you get older, and this is where those feeling signals come in, I think it becomes more and more important to pay attention to the things that we are banishing from our stories. If we think about what makes us feel resentful or what we envy, or what are those things? Because those are the things that we're burying somehow.
I think there's a shift in the second half of life—and I'm obviously a chunk older than you—where we can disengage a bit with the story that we've been telling of how to move forward in life. That's all about a dialogue with the external world. That's where we're getting our cues from—people showing us what we need to be successful, what we need to look or act in a certain way that denotes moving forward and progress. And we do that for the first half of life, and it is sustained a little by this optimistic illusion that the castles that we're chasing in the air that we'll reach if we just—a lot of happiness deferring going on and a lot of focusing on the future.
And then something happens around mid-life where actually the project shifts to taking the cues from within rather than from the outside world. And I think then that's a good time for priorities to shift from what will give me success in the future to what is actually what might bring pleasure and satisfaction and meaning now in the present. I think that's a useful thing to lean into towards the second half of life.
It was university that sort of sparked your interest in hypnosis, right? You saw someone on campus doing...
Martin Taylor was doing a show. It was in my Freshers' Week and it was amazing. I left and walked back that night with a friend and said, "I'm going to learn how to do this." And my friend Nick said, "Oh yeah, so am I." But I knew I meant it. I knew that I'd never seen it before, never come across hypnosis. I obviously had heard of it, but it was a good show; it wasn't embarrassing people or making them look stupid, it was sort of just jaw-dropping.
How did you know that you meant it? Because I've had that feeling in my life before where something just connects.
Yeah, well I think it was the—again, those boxes were being ticked. Something about performing, something about control. I didn't really know it; it just felt like "I have to do that." It's the most amazing thing I've seen. And it was appealing in ways that just weren't really—in ways I hadn't really thought about. I hadn't thought about performing.
But yeah, I think that's what's happening, isn't it? There's something is resonating unconsciously; it's something that you kind of need. And yeah, it was absolutely no doubt. So I just bought, borrowed, stole any books I could find on the subject. You'd probably just learn on YouTube nowadays, but it's probably a dodgy thing because you need to learn it the long way around so that if you run into problems or if someone's having a weird time when you're hypnotizing them, you can't be fumbling around trying to Google what to do. You need to have the skills there and the wherewithal to deal with it. So I definitely learned the long way around.
And then you became, I think from what I was reading, pretty obsessed with magic and hypnosis to the point that you have a conversation with your parents and you tell them that you're going to...
Yeah, I remember saying to my mom, I think, "I'm not going to be a lawyer." I was studying law and German. I said, "I'm not going to be a lawyer, I'm going to be a magician." She said, "Oh fine, that sounds great! Sounds much more fun!" Which actually made me stop and think, "Okay, hang on, probably being a bit rash."
What did they say? So they were okay with it?
Totally, yeah. That's what she said. She said, "Oh that sounds great, sounds much more fun." It's nice, isn't it? Actually I wrote them a letter at the end of my first year saying—because I saw all these other law students really fretting about their exams because of what their parents were going to think if they didn't pass. And that had never occurred to me as a thing that your parents would make you feel. So I wrote them a letter thanking them for that, just for letting me always do what I wanted to do. The only thing they ever put any pressure on me to do was learn how to drive, and I don't drive.
You still don't drive?
I still don't drive.
It's quite a common story I have to say, that your obsession seemed to come from or at least be driven by some kind of insecurity. As in, the reason why hypnosis initially resonated so much was because it was giving you something it felt like it might offer you something that you were looking for or didn't have yourself. That's a story I hear all the time. Just the level of obsession I saw from that day when you discovered hypnosis, like getting all the books, teaching yourself. And then even beyond university where you start working in restaurants for many, many years. How long from that first day when you saw hypnosis for the first time until let's say before the TV stuff began? How long is that tenure?
I think the tenure is about 10 years. graduation '94, and then by that point I was doing the odd hypnosis show for students. I—oh actually, the first TV show went out in December 2000. So I was into it all. It was about 10 years, but that also included my university career. But there was a six-year period after university by which point I was already doing it mainly for students, when I was just then signing on or just about scraping a living, doing hypnosis shows but a lot more magic. I was doing magic in restaurants in Bristol and then people would book me for their parties. And I wrote a book for magicians which kind of got me known within that world, which that then led to being picked out for a TV show. That led to me getting a phone call and my name getting passed around in that world.
So that's almost 10 years of practicing without any real money. And when you say "signing on" for people that are in America...
Signing on as in welfare, I guess you'd call it. I was—I lived in my student flat I stayed in; it was quite a nice flat. I had all my books in it, my parrot, and so that didn't cost me very much. And I just loved this life. I would go out dreaming up magic tricks during the day and then I would go out and do them in the evening.
So I developed my own sort of approach to it all. And that—yeah, I just remember thinking—I've never had any ambition at all. I just remember thinking if I can take a cross-section of my life, is everything in the right place? Like, am I—I'd like to get up whenever I like to get up. I'd like to feel like I can make my own decisions about what I do from day to day. And I just had a vague idea of those sorts of things that were important to me. And if anything didn't feel right, it'd be easy to sort of change.
And that was all—that was always how I—it was never about looking forward into the future; it was never about "Where do I want to be?" It was just, "Is this day, this week, sort of the life that I'd like to be living?" And that's never changed. I suppose the difference is as you get successful, you start to have people around you that are doing those other jobs for you, the grown-up jobs. I've got a manager and I've worked with producers and all that kind of thing. So it's not like that doesn't have to happen somewhere along the line, but it doesn't come from me. I can feel like a kid a little bit, a bit like a child in a world of grown-ups. So I feel that sometimes. Except now the grown-ups are younger than me, which is strange. But also I think maybe that's a good way to feel; maybe that's a nice way to be.
If you contrast yourself from today to that young man in those restaurants in Bristol doing the magic tricks, is there a difference in your level of happiness?
I think about this. I think it's about the same but it's different. I mean, the a bit like being a kid and playing on my own, most of my 20s were—well, my 20s were sort of fairly solitary as well. That's another template that settles in. That's again an easy place to go back to. I love my own company. All my interests, the things I love doing out of my job—painting, writing, and reading—they're all like solitary things. That's a comfortable place for me.
Part of me had more of that then, so I slightly miss that. But actually that's, you know, also aware that was that was lonely sometimes, and you know, I like being in a relationship too. So it's different; it had a different feel about it. But I think the freedom to just do what I wanted to do and kind of create this sort of world for myself—that was kind of lovely. And it's hard to do that as you grow up and you do have responsibilities and, you know, you're contributing to a household and you've got a partner and you've got dogs and all of that. It's not quite as easy. So a childish part of me would kind of quite like the idea of going back to that, but not really. Not really. I wouldn't really press a button to make it happen. It's just a nice little sort of back-of-the-head dream, as we probably all have, maybe don't we? Slight kind of fantasy thing that we'd never really live it out, but there's just something nice about that about that.
It's almost like—I feel like you were in Bristol, minding your own business, enjoying the simple life. And then they pulled you, they ripped you out of Bristol. You were really successful so they put you on TV, that was really successful. And sometimes when people are successful, they sometimes forget—and I think I've done this in my life a few times—kind of we forget to take the moment of pause and consider how intentional this journey and direction and direction of travel is. We kind of get pulled and dragged, and then it ends up feeling a bit like you're throwing the coal in the steam engine of the train just to keep it moving. Has there ever been a moment of pause in your life where you've gone, "Do you know what? I need to take some time and just think about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it"? Because I've been successful and then I've climbed the ladder. People do that a lot in the corporate world: they become a good lawyer, then they get promoted, then they're a partner, and then they go, "Fuck, what am I doing here?"
Yeah, I think we drift towards the things we're second best at. It's like the great teacher that becomes a headmaster, but would have been a better teacher than—that's an easy thing to do, isn't it? And I think that sometimes I think about, "Oh, it might be quite nice to act." And I think I'm doing exactly that thing of sort of going from being someone who's really good at what I do now and I just—to sort of "Why would I want to do that?" It might be fun, but like what a strange thing we naturally start to drift towards things that we're not as good at.
The only I would say when you said that I was thinking of the early the early TV shows when I was sort of which were very much a response to David Blaine's success in the states. So I'm out doing you know mind-reading tricks and things. And I kind of felt like I'd grown out of it, but that was the mode that I was caught in and I definitely felt like "I'm not really enjoying this."
And that led to a shift in the type of shows I was doing. So I mean the last show I've done is on Netflix called *Sacrifice*, if people have no idea who I am and they've listened this far. And generally what I've been doing for the last decade or so with the TV shows is putting people through these kind of *Truman Show*-style big social experiments, often quite life-or-death situations they find themselves in without realizing they're part of a show. And what that allowed me to do was not be the center of attention.
And the reason—the reason for it is, actually apart from just my own slight dissatisfaction with it, but just magically, if you can click your fingers and make anything happen, which is sort of what a magician does, dramatically that's a very unsound place to be. And you know Penn and Teller?
Yeah, yeah.
So something that Teller, who apart from being a beautiful magician is a wonderful thinker as well, he's spoken a lot about this: that it's actually very bad drama if you can make anything happen. What we want dramatically are heroes, people that are struggling with a situation. Maybe they are trying to get to point A, but actually they end up at point B. And his thoughts and my own sort of slight dissatisfaction, I guess, with that first stage of my career led to this shift where I could be in the background, pulling the strings, but actually you're watching a real member of the public go through quite intense drama. And that has to be more appealing than somebody going, "Hey, look at me! Aren't I clever?" which is sort of the bottom line of what most magic is. So I think that was a kind of semi-deliberate shift that came from a moment of pause.
Was it quite intentional for you to take—you know, I've seen multiple documentaries you've done where you're proving that magic or the supernatural isn't real. And again, that's super compelling because we would expect you to be leaning into that and persuading us of the supernatural. Whereas some of the most compelling stuff I've watched you do is where you're confronting like a psychic that's pretending to speak to the dead. Or I remember that reading you did where the woman had pulled up outside in the Mini.
In a Mini, yeah.
And you had—you basically—what was it? You basically read her—not her future, you read into her life.
I think it was that the psychic that I was challenging had mentioned the Mini, that she drove a little red Mini and she'd been really impressed by that. But actually I'd seen him pull up his car right next to her in the car park.
Yeah, well actually I think it's the opposite. I think the there's a long tradition of magicians pulling apart psychics and charlatans. And I think it's because we end up with a knowledge of how those things work. And it goes right back to Houdini and the séances and exposing the fraudulent mediums in the dark. It's a long, long—and probably before that—but there's a long history of it.
So I—the only thing about it is that you're if you're just going, "No, this is fake," you're not being very entertaining. And by the nature of what those people do, they're more entertaining. So they've kind of won the game. So I've tried to avoid making when I when I have sort of attacked those areas, rather than just attack them and make it negative, I've always tried to recreate something and make it more interesting and better while at the same time saying "I'm not really doing this."
So for example, there was a in one of the shows I did, I had an audience on stage—this was in *Infamous*, which was a previous stage show—and I was giving them mediumship readings, right? So I say, "Come up if you've lost somebody, if there's somebody that you'd want to get in touch with if you went to see a medium." And a skeptical audience kind of like me, right? Because they're my audiences.
So they'd come up and sit down and I would start to give them these readings and I would say, "You know, I'm getting a message from your Auntie Jill. Is that right? Do you have an Auntie Jill that passed away?" "Yes." "And she's saying—she's not saying anything, I'm just making this up—but she's saying that you've got—oh, you've got a little dog called Bella that she really loves. Is that right?" "Yes!" "And—and I'm lying to you, but she's saying..." And so I would like pepper these like impossible information that I was giving with reminders that I was making it up.
And I just found that really, really sort of interesting and theatrically it was really interesting. And much more interesting than saying, "These people are fake and prove it, and if you can prove it I'll give you a million dollars" or whatever. So I've tried to find a more creative approach to that.
Do some people think you are supernatural in your powers?
Some well, I was going to say actually after that about a week into that show I came out there was a girl at stage door said, "I wondered if you could put me..." I say "girl," she was, you know, in her 20s. "But I wondered if you could put me in touch with my grandmother who's passed on." And I said, "Oh God, I'm so sorry, I hoped it was clear from the show that I can't really do that, that that stuff isn't real." And she said, "Oh no, I know, I know you can't really do it and it's not real, but I just wondered if you could just put me in touch with her."
It was extraordinary how we kind of can balance these things in our in our heads. So yeah, I I'm sure people believe all sorts of things about me. I think the way of the way I look at it is a bell curve. So at one end of the bell curve, it's people that think it's all fake, it's all stooges, it's all set up—and I never use stooges and that's not what it is. And at the other extreme, people saying I'm psychic and I won't admit to it, which is also not true. And then there's this main swell in the middle where people sort of get it. And that's really all you can, I think, take responsibility for. Really, there's always going to be people at the far edges that will have strange and extreme reactions.
And then, you know, my I think there's a certain license on stage which is different from TV. If you're doing stuff down the barrel of a TV, if you're talking to people at home, there's a level of directness and honesty there. Whereas it feels like on stage there's a kind of theatrical quotation marks around the whole thing. So I feel like I can do things on stage which I wouldn't do on TV. So that changes it too.
It's quite an interesting line sort of treading treading that. I kind of in the very early shows, very early TV shows, it was very much like, "I am doing this for real." That's what I said: "These are not tricks." And then once the shows realized once we realized there was going to be some longevity and there were going to be more shows, it was important to me just to bring it back to a place that was honest and kind of ambiguous as well and to—and I enjoy that now. I like leaning into the ambiguity of what I'm doing. Because again, it means that you can do more interesting stuff with it. If there's a lesson in it about how we see the world, how the story we tell ourselves is not what's real, how we mistake that story for reality—we mistake the limits of our own field of vision for the for the horizons of the world—if there's something in there to be said in something as childish as magic, if there's some some something worthwhile to be said, it's much easier to say that if you're not trying to make it about yourself.
Has anything ever stumped you in terms of the supernatural? You know, your work is predominantly based in psychology, right? So has there—have you ever done anything and thought, "How the fuck did that happen?"
Two things come to mind. One, I was in a restaurant in Bristol, approaching a table, which is always excruciating if people don't aren't interested. And I'm walking up with a deck of cards and I sort of introduce myself, and it's two businessmen. And one of them says, "Oh no, no thank you, sorry." And I said, "Okay." And as I walked away, the other one went, "But Queen of Hearts, 13 cards down." And I sort of laughed and walked away and then went into a corner and counted the cards down, and the 13th one down was the Queen of Hearts. No idea how he did that! If you are listening, please get in touch; that's bugged me for 20 years.
And the other thing was actually doing I did a show called *Miracle*, which is so this is also on Netflix, it was a previous stage show—a few stage shows ago. And the second half was healing. It was like evangelical healing, people being slain in the spirit and had no idea if it was going to work. Because again, very skeptical audience, like not you know if you I've been to these events with these big big-name healers, and of course people are arriving expecting it to work and they've got a certain amount of readiness for it, which obviously helps. And I didn't know if it was going to work at all. But it did.
And again, I'm sort of undercutting it; like I'm doing it and I'm creating these healings in inverted commas for people in the audience, but at the same time I'm kind of undercutting it too. But it was extraordinary. I mean, I remember in the first week a woman came up and she'd been paralyzed—she was probably in her 40s—she'd been paralyzed down one side of her body since she was four or something, in floods of tears because she could move her left arm for the first time. And night after night, things like that. Sometimes as I imagine just you know some people with a bad back that felt better, but sometimes really quite dramatic things too.
And it was although I could explain it because I knew what I was doing, it was what what you're seeing is the psychological component of suffering, right? Like if you take an x-ray before and after, nothing's happened, nothing's changed, but that how that person is living out their affliction, how they live their relationship to their suffering, has that's been made to change.
So what you're seeing it's a mixture of two things that are going on. There's adrenaline, which is a natural painkiller, so you make the you make the whole experience full of adrenaline. And you know in the same way if a lion walked into this room and you'd previously stubbed your toe, you'd run away and you wouldn't feel the pain of your toe, right? Because there's a bigger threat. So that's just adrenaline; that's fine. And then but this other thing that which is maybe kick-started by the experience of the adrenaline, that you you this thing that you've lived out—like presumably this woman her arm had been fine for many years, but she hadn't she'd just continued to live as if it wasn't. And all the stuff that you build up around pain, you know the way people respond to you, so you there's a whole network of social aspects to it, overprotecting something that doesn't need protecting anymore. It's much more complicated than simply the organic cause of of of your pain; there's lots of other things that sustain it and can keep it going beyond really where it's useful. So there she was having this extraordinary experience she couldn't explain when really nothing had happened beyond she was had been snapped out of something.
That was sort of amazing and kind of wonderful. Then I started to, you know, do the thing of going, "Oh, maybe I could do this, maybe I could offer this as a show of like secular healing." It'll only work on some people and you're only dealing with relatively small percentages. And I did start to think that. And of course that's where you start to go mad, that's where you start to think you're playing God.
And then of course people because I when you go to these events, the big name healers I've seen—Benny Hinn and others—what you what you don't really see when you watch those things on TV is that there are in some of these big venues hospital beds that have been brought in. There are people with, you know, a kid with Down Syndrome that I spoke to the mom and she had she'd taken her son to so many shows, following him around the country. And things that just they're not going to get they're not going to get healed by those kind of dynamics.
So that's an uglier sort of side of it because people become very dependent on it and are not going to get any help. And then there's the lack of any sort of follow-up. You know, there's plenty of infrastructure in place if you want to donate, but no infrastructure if you've been in any way adversely affected by it and you want help. Or if you've had a healing and now you you don't know how to sustain that or what you're supposed to do other than being told to give more money.
You know when people discovered through your TV work that you had this skill and talent, I imagine you got lots of approaches to use it for less ethical reasons. Because I mean, "Help me get the girlfriend back," "Help me close the deal," "Help me rob a bank."
A little. Not I suppose people would have to ask that, wouldn't they? But the only I remember I've been asked by the FBI, I've been asked by the police to...
Really?
To help. I mean it's never gone beyond that discussion because I just—I mean even plenty of businesses as well, but it's just it's not my world. I feel like I'm an entertainer. I'm also quite introverted. I don't quite have that thing of like, "Yeah, let me get out there and A, change the world, or B..." I don't have the whatever that thing is that I feel like I could just apply this to anyone and everything.
What did the FBI or the police want help with?
I don't know, because it never went beyond them saying, "Would you come and talk to us about something?" and us getting back and saying, "No, it's not appropriate." So I don't know. Now I want to know!
Your skill stack—when I think about the, you know, because there's lots of people that might have studied hypnosis or they might have studied magic or sleight of hand or whatever, but they didn't end up on the level you're on, at the table you're at, on the shows you're on. When you think about why you got there—I understand the 10 years of the graft. And I see that in a lot of people that sit here; I see it in Jimmy Carr: leaves university, goes and does all of these like shit gigs for 20 quid for years and years and years. I see it in Lewis Capaldi, the musician who went and played in pubs in Scotland for years and years and years and just absolutely loved it, wanted to stay there. I see the 10-year bit which a lot of young kids don't appreciate because we all want it now, and we want it for the wrong reasons. But what else was it about you? The way your delivery, your style, that you think in hindsight made you compelling?
Oh it's a really difficult one to answer. It's difficult even if I knew the answer; it'd be hard to say it. I think I don't think it's that I think it's sort of it's not quite that intentional. I think you've probably grafted and done those things—and I can't speak for Jimmy and others—but probably just because you really enjoyed them in and of themselves. You probably weren't thinking, "Oh, if I do this, if I get ahead, I can secure this for myself." Probably. And if that is the case, if you are just doing it because you love it, and that feels like in and of itself what you're doing and there's no particular need for a plan beyond that, then you'll keep at it. You'll get very good at it if if if that feels like all you need in the moment. Anyway, then why why wouldn't you, you know, love it and put your all your passion into it and get very good at it?
So that helped. And then when things did sort of take off a bit, my manager also had a similar ethos of just sort of slow burn, slow burn. There was never any sense of me, you know, being thrown at a public or any sort of overnight success or anything like that. It was a very deliberate thing of just slowly kind of letting it get out there. And that so that was helpful.
I think as I I've had a good team around me. It's not like a one-man not really a one-man thing. There's always although I had had my own experience for those 10 years of doing it on my own, once I got into the TV there was like a little group of us which I'm sure is fairly common. And then I think I think what does help is letting it grow up with me as I as I've got older. I've just let the thing develop with me.
Like I don't really know what job to—you know, you asked me before we started how I'd refer to myself, and I never really know. I mean, mentalist I think technically is what I am, but I mean I remember a couple of years ago I had the book on happy happiness come out, which is essentially book of Greek philosophy, come out the same same month as a ghost train opened at Thorpe Park. And I do remember thinking, "I don't know what I don't know what job that is that allows for those two things." It certainly isn't mentalism.
So so yeah, just allowing allowing the thing to grow up with me. And in terms of like, you know, occasionally you know people talk about the brand and so on, it's it's a very helpful thing I think just to let the let the thing just be you and not particularly be driven by the limitations of what it—when I first started, I remember reading I used to go on magic discussion forums and so on and see what magicians were saying about me, and there was a lot of like, "Oh, this isn't even mentalism." Like there's a certain type of magic called mentalism and I wasn't quite doing that. I was doing stuff that wasn't tech—and they would see that as a real sort of negative.
And I always thought, "Well, that's why that's interesting that that would bother anybody. A, who knows what the word even means? Who cares? And B, that there would that I wasn't somehow sticking within that." So and that's another thing about playing on your own, isn't it? And you or being if you if you feel like an outsider as a kid, I think as you get older you start you value that. That becomes like a bit of a superpower; you hang on to that feeling of of being an outsider and you kind of use that.
So that's always helped me, and I've just followed my nose for what feels fun and interesting and worthwhile. And as I've got older, I've let those things grow with me. And I find a lot of life much more interesting than magic. Magic's quite a childish thing really. So it means that the stuff I find more interesting about life I can bring into magic, you know. I think if you've got if you've got both feet in your craft or your artform or whatever—if as in if the thing is feels to you so huge and expansive and all that you know—you can't you're sort of a bit overwhelmed by it and you can't move it anywhere. Whereas if you've got one foot in that thing and your other foot in the rest of life, at least you've got some leverage then to take this thing that you do somewhere interesting. So maybe that's helped as well.
I see that in your shows. I see how your other passions are riddled throughout the show. I remember watching your show in New York, which was just astounding. It's funny because I think of myself as a smart person, you know. I think, "I'll figure this out. He won't be able to make me look the other way, or he won't be able to control my narrative, he won't be able to get me." And every single time—I've been to your shows in London, New York—they're all just—I leave in silence. I think, "How the fuck did he do that?" Like because you're right, that like misdirection where you've got me thinking this thing, and then I go, "What the hell?" Like it's this constant like disappointment with myself that I'm not as smart as I think I am.
Oh that's so nice. Well it's always like—I always look at it as there's 2,000 people trapped in a room with me, what can what can I do with them? It's always a it's always a lovely feeling to start with.
And that the section on when you have the the painting—I don't want to give anything away.
The painting—is this in the show that you saw in New York?
I believe it was New York. I've seen—I've been to two, London and New York. One with my family in London, which was many years ago, probably I'd say five years ago. And then the one in New York I think was pre-pandemic.
Yeah, it was just before the pandemic.
So I'm painting a picture that someone comes up and thinks of a famous person and I start to do a painting and then it's upside down and I flip it around at the end. Is that what you're thinking of?
Yeah, yeah. And the thing that I think stuns me the most is how unbelievable you are as a painter.
Thank you very much! Something to fall back on.
And the fact that you could do that upside down. You can paint such an incredible image upside down is also stunning. But that clearly is describing what you've described there where you've pulled in a love of painting.
Yeah, I think it is, yeah. I think all that's really otherwise what's left, you know? Just it's just, "Hey, look at me! Aren't I clever?" and that's just not, you know. That might be interesting for audiences for a little bit, maybe once, and then that's that's kind of it. So I, yeah, I bring what I can to it and I just make I make sure the shows are about something else. You know, *Showman* is about how the things in life that are difficult are actually the very things that we share. Which weirdly was written just before it was all due to go out before lockdown started and it was going to go out the first week of lockdown and was a show about how the things in life that isolate us are actually the things that we all tend to have in common. Which then gets played out literally for two years during lockdown.
So I've always tried to make them about something else, something of value. And I don't think I love magic, obviously, but I don't think in and of itself it has tremendous value as a childish way of impressing people. So it's what what can you bring to it that will give it value? And then I think then you're into a much more interesting, worthwhile area.
In your books about happiness, *Happy* and *A Little Happier*, one of the things that surprises a lot of people is that you're not a fan of goal setting. And having spoken to you now, I can kind of understand because you have a much more "today, this week, do my best" approach to life. But what's wrong with goal setting in your point of view?
Oh, I don't think there's anything wrong with goal setting for short-term goals. That's obviously can be very useful. It's the long-term stuff. I think we just get a bit hung up on it as a as a way of life. You know, a friend of mine was a bit of a always been a workaholic and he certainly by his own account when he was younger was made to feel that kind of needed to achieve stuff in order to feel valued, you know, which is obviously what most workaholics will say. So he decided he was going to build up a company and sell it and become a multi-millionaire, and that was sort of the goal.
And then did, spent and all the time that I knew him, he was building up a company and sold it relatively young and had a huge amount of money. And then just didn't know what to do with his life. It was miserable. And actually found himself going to a support group with a bunch of similar millionaires that had all made the same mistake. And he'd sort of missed the fact that actually it was the it was the building up of the company that was is what gave him meaning in his life. That was that was what was important.
And it's that old thing, isn't it, of, you know, the the arrival at the end of the journey is just it might just be taking your coat off and putting your bag down. That might be all it is. It's not necessarily the destination, you know, it's the you know it's the old thing, isn't it, of the journey being what was important. But he certainly realized that. And that really changed his life actually, realizing that what he thought was going to be important wasn't important.
Plus, how do we know what's going to make us happy that so many years before, you know? We're so terrible at gauging that. We lose flexibility, depending how we set those goals, but we become too rigid in them. And it's like playing it's like playing a game of chess. Schopenhauer talks about this. That was a really good analogy, that it's like starting a game of chess, deciding how you're going to play and the strategy you're going to use and your how you're going to maneuver from the start. There is this other thing playing, which is, you know, life, fortune, stuff that's going to get throw get thrown back at you. So how can you decide those things?
Why do we want goals? Do you think it's that it gives us a sense of certainty?
Well, we need it's about moving forward, isn't it? We need it's important because we need to navigate through life. And in the first half of life, I think it it's it's really important. If you didn't have that optimistic sense that you can chase the castle in the air and somehow get it just by setting those goals, I think life would be very difficult. I think actually it's I think it has evolutionary value. I think like it's part of our impetus. So it's not a bad thing, really, but like all those things, we just need to check it and just see its limitations, I think.
A story—I see the goals that I had as a story that gave my life meaning when I was younger. The meaning was kind of misunderstood. It was I thought if I got the Lamborghini, then I'd be happy and important and worthy and my shame would be alleviated. But as I as that failed me, I realized that I was going to have to set about pursuing something else, which...
Well, those are the two problems: you either get the goal, you succeed in it and then what? Or you don't and you've failed. I mean you're sort of and the very thing that's giving you pleasure, the very thing that's giving your life meaning, which is moving towards, you know, building up the company or whatever it is, you're doing yourself out of. You're you're purposely and intentionally moving to the point where you're going to remove that meaning from your life.
Have you developed any coping mechanisms for adversity? Chapter 3 in your book, *A Book of Secrets*, is about the role friction has, the relationship it has with happiness. And you've—we've talked a few times about adversity, but is there any sort of tools that you've learned that you might be able to impart that have helped you to deal with when life throws shit at you?
Well, the big Stoic thing of "How can this thing be fine?" And it's not—they don't exactly put it in that language, but that's the language I found. "How could this thing be fine?" So first of all, is what's happened which side of the line is it? Is it within my control? Is it my thoughts and actions? Or is it out of my control? Is it something out in the world? Of course it's always the latter; it's always something out in the world. In which case, how could it be fine? How how how could that how could it be okay that this thing is like that?
And not just to go, "Oh it's fine, it's fine." It's not just about saying it, but to actually let that thought sort of drip into the soul. I find that very helpful. That's also partly just my personality. My partner's has a much more sort of anxious personality than I have, and that stuff doesn't help him at all. But it certainly helps me.
§02Transcript — part 2
Another thing, there's a great book by David DeSteno called *Emotional Success*. And I thought it was great; he was talking about motivation and how a lot of our tools for motivation are very sort of top-down in the sense that, "Well, if you do this for 10,000 hours or you put in an hour a day for a whatever," like a lot of kind of work to change one habit.
And he's talking about a bottom-up approach of there are certain emotions that if you get them into place, they naturally create a more motivational state. And he he's a psychologist and his when he talks about motivation, the way he's tested this, he's talking about where you value your future self and what your future self needs more than what you need in the moment, right?
So if you take the example of are you going to study for your exam or are you going to go out and party? Well, the person that is going to not party and study for the exam is valuing the needs of that future self that's done well in the exam more than the current self that's sat there and would like to go out, right? So he's taking that as the sort of the world of motivation we're talking about.
So he sets up various experiments to see what can you do to maximize people's, you know, the value that they place on that future self. And the three emotions again and again which help: compassion, gratitude, and having the right sort of pride about what you do, a good pride for the stuff that you do well. Not the bad sort of pride where you go, "Well, I'm good at this, therefore I'm great at everything," but just having a good sort of comfortable pride in the stuff that you do well.
So he would, you know, experiments would be something happens outside the room before the person comes in to do the experiment that makes them feel grateful about something. And then they come in and they have to do a task that's impossible, but how long do they spend trying to do it? And they'll spend 40% longer than somebody that wasn't primed to feel grateful before they came in. And the gratitude has nothing to do with the experiment, so seemingly completely independent thing.
Something happens that make you make you feel compassion, and then you come in and you have to do some task and you do it better or for longer or whatever these sort of skills are that the motivated person has more of. One of the questions was, "How many dollars—it's always dollars—but how many dollars like if you could have $100 a year from now, or X amount now, what would that X amount be that would balance it out?" And it's normally $17. This like a really makes no fiscal sense at all, but most people will say, "Okay, I'll take 17 now rather than 100, right, a year from now." That seems to be the number that people go for.
But if you're primed to feel grateful, if you're asked the same question when you're in a state of gratitude for something again totally unrelated, it goes up to $31. That was his that was a great sort of by-the-way finding. When they did the experiment, it averaged out at 31. In other words, people were valuing the future needs more than the needs now if that makes sense. It could actually be shown with something as simple as that.
It makes perfect sense. I mean, I read a bit—Chapter 12 of your book was on exactly that. And I actually said before you arrived, I sent it to my friends. I sent that one paragraph in your book about that that instant gratification/delayed gratification because it when I say it makes sense, it makes absolute no sense in the sense of like I can't understand how gratitude, how making someone feel grateful with a completely unrelated incident would make them choose to have more money, well, will make them delay their gratification in life as relates to money.
It does, exactly. And I think the reason why there's no kind of rational link is because it's a sort of—it's like an emotional basis. He's talking about an emotional heart that then kind of spirals upwards. Because if you if you find yourself acting more compassionately, which say just sometimes happens anyway, right? You might just be feeling compassion, you might be feeling very grateful to somebody, that then affects that person's behavior and then that feeds back and affects yours. And there's a certain kind of upward spiral thing that happens that definitely puts us in, I think, a more just a better kind of state than say when we're feeling the opposite of those things, feeling hateful and resentful.
Does that mean that people that are lower in gratitude are more short-termist in their decision making? They probably binge foods that they probably shouldn't have, they probably make other kind of reckless decisions they probably shouldn't make, because of their own state of emotions and gratefulness and compassion?
Perhaps. I mean it sounds like it; you'd have to ask him. I don't know, I don't think he says that in his book. But I can certainly imagine that again say if you're going through your life feeling generally resentful, I can't imagine that person being very motivated.
It's so interesting. It answers actually a lot of questions that I've had with friends of mine where I've wondered why they make such short-termist decisions. But I think there's an emotional question that I should really be asking, which is like "How do you feel?" And we don't we don't often pause to ask that. We kind of assume that their character is they are lazy or just stupid or like bad at decisions. Whereas really, like, go to work on the emotions and you can change that, which is...
It's a very it's a very compelling way round of looking at it. Rather than the normal top-down approach we come across.
Love. You described yourself as a bit of an introvert and someone that likes their own company. Sounds a little bit like me. What's your journey been like with understanding love? And then at 35 you came out. What's that journey been like?
Well, I've had two long relationships and then a few little bits in between. And I think there was definitely a lot of learning in the first one that I think I've now brought to the second one. And of course that's what we do, isn't it? You have another relationship, you bring all those lessons that you can't you can't change them when you're in one, but you you get to start afresh the next time.
We're quite different as well. It's not like we're not similar people at all. I I have that sort of a bit of emotional detachment that I can easily go to. He is very engaged. And as as people that on the anxious side tend to be, very sort of hypervigilant about stuff. So you know, packing to come to London to do this show is two very, very different worlds. Always leads to argument. I'm kind of travel light and he's, "No, no, but we might need this, we might need this!" Bags and bags and bags.
So we see each other sometimes, you know, as caricatures of ourselves because because we're quite different in in those in those ways. My kind of Stoic whatever will seem to him just sometimes just to be laziness or not really engaging with something, not that thing not being not taking it seriously. And for me, his what I see as anxiety or impatience to him is a strong sense of justice. He has a real strong sense of justice; if something's not right, he'll want to go and sort that thing out and fix it.
And I think love for me is allowing that other person to be another person. We probably start off our relationships just projecting everything we need onto a person, and we barely do them the service of, you know, allowing them to exist as as an independent creature. We sort of we just want them to be the thing that we want them to be. And I think if relationships are going to have any longevity, at some point that has to shift into actually this person is a mystery and I might spend the rest of my life trying to get to know this person. And that I think that's okay.
And I think that's also the same within ourselves, in the parts of ourselves that we're alienated from. Again, the things that we just put outside of the story. That sense of what the other is, of the great mystery, you know? It's there in magic, it's there in within ourselves, the sides of us that, you know, we need to live more comfortably with. And in our relationships as well. Here is a great mystery that we sit down with every day and have breakfast with and talk to and misunderstand and disappoint and occasionally delight in each other and and it's, you know, it's kind of wonderful and sometimes it's hard work and and I think seeing your partner is somebody you could spend a lifetime getting to know and as a source of wonder and mystery, I think is a very helpful thing.
One of the messages that I took from that is about expectations and being really conscious that you keep your expectations in check. Because when you don't, frustration and unhappiness might prevail. And I think about this a lot with my partner who's the complete opposite. I consider myself to be like very logical, I need to I need to understand everything, I'm very maybe scientific in my viewpoint. Whatever the opposite of that is, she is. And so you can find yourself in conversations where the basis of reality you're conversing from is completely different. She she will believe that that a rock has energy and that and I will obviously not believe that, but we're complete opposites. But that's also why it works because there's not an expectation that we become the other person. She will tell me something she knows I don't believe, and at the end of her saying it, she will not wait for me to nod and agree because she knows I don't believe it and that's fine. And vice versa.
And it's that's what when you saying accept that we're two different people—actually being able to do that and her not trying to change me into like a spiritual whatever and me not trying to turn her into a scientist allows for the upside of that difference, which is like I can marvel at the world she lives in and go, "Oh, that's interesting, I might try that," you know what I mean?
And also I think a big allied to that is the thing of not—which is such a guy thing to do, isn't it?—is not fixing. Not most of our frustrations come from the fact we just haven't really been heard or seen or understood during the day. So we've been bashing our heads against some wall. We come home and hers...
And hers.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we, they come home and then just offload this stuff. And when because I know I do it when my partner does this to me, where he sort of offloads all this frustration—and I'm sure you do it too, it sounds like you do—is to go into this mode where we're saying, "Well, it's okay, it's probably just this and why don't we think about it in this different way?" And we're just doing exactly the same thing they've had all day: we're just not hearing. But it's just not it's not an intuitive thing, is it? That you sort of that is such an easy mode to go into.
Derren, are you happy? That was the name of your book.
I think so. Yeah, I think as I've got older happiness is—it was easy to say. I remember being asked that when I was single for a while by Hugh Grant, of all people. We were sat opposite each other at dinner and talking about happiness—maybe I was writing the book at the time, I don't know—and he said, "Are you—are you happy though?" And it was he said it in a sort of a mood of like, "No one's really no one's really happy, are they?" And maybe it was just the way he asked it, but I said yes and said it very confidently and felt it very confidently. And he didn't I think he didn't know what to make of that, or maybe just didn't believe it.
And now when you ask, I still feel it's yes, but I think I think things are more complicated. I think they're more complicated in relationships. I've got older. I'm 51, and I think I think that's a good sort of, you know, as I said, things things just change. The currents of life shift a little bit. So I am, but I think it's it's a I don't think it's about happiness first of all. I think it's about meaning, and it's about, you know, things in life that are bigger than you and what you how you throw yourselves into those things, which is what gives religion its meaning, you know? That that need for transcendence or finding the thing that's bigger than you. We all need it somewhere. Because if you don't have meaning in your life, that's that's when you have problems. Not really happiness is sort of a very difficult thing to pin down. But we can be unhappy, but it's when we when we feel meaningless that it's that things get bad.
It's a bit of a shit question, isn't it? "Are you happy?" In many respects.
Yeah, it sort of is. And it's also hard to, you know, "Well what does it mean?" you know. They used to that used to mean the story of a life; it was something you couldn't say about anybody until they were dying and could look back over their whole life. You know, it's meant our relationship with God—we weren't even supposed to be happy on this earth because of, you know, because we it was something that we could only have through union with with God. It's meant so many things over the ages. But now it does just sort of mean a mood, which is a makes it sort of a difficult one to answer. But I think I think life is life is good; it's just interesting and sometimes difficult, but in a ultimately good way.
I think life is full of shit questions. And in some respects, it's like a form of misdirection. The fact that I we never pause to reflect if questions are actually valid. Because if I'd said, "What number is fork?" you would it mean you would say that's not a valid question. But because "Are you happy?" or questions like "Have you found your passion?" There's an assumption in there that there's one of them, there's one passion you have to go searching for. All in loaded into the question. And nobody nobody when you ask those questions pauses to think of whether the question's valid. And then the the frustration we encounter when we can't properly fit into an invalid question. I see I see that causing so many young people so much pain because culture pops up these like questions you've got to answer. "Is it love?"
Yeah, well "I love peanut butter."
"Is this person right for me?" is another is another really unhelpful...
Well, "Is it love?" mean alludes to a yes or no answer. And then I have to know your definition of love. What you mean by that. Because as I was saying, like I love peanut butter, I love my dog, I love my mom. And it's all very unhelpful. Like this is why I love going back to what we said at the start: "How do you feel?" Nice open question which allows for a bit more maneuvering. And I think people are tormented by these invalid questions, yeah.
Your show—there's nothing like it that exists in in the event space, really on TV. I mean I prefer doing seeing it in person because obviously cameras can create certain dimensions which but seeing it in person just bends the the mind. Because it makes almost anything seem possible in life. I'm talking about sales and ambition and creativity and imagination. If that's possible, then anything can become possible. and I think that's a cause of great inspiration.
So I would just implore anyone that's listening to this, if you're looking for a once-in-a-lifetime, very unique experience that you can't get anywhere else, they've got to go and see the show. They've got and I really mean that. I'm not just saying you didn't tell me to say this; I really mean that. You'll never know, but thank you. But I really, really mean that. It's there's nothing like it. So great date idea, great family idea, so I'm definitely going to come. What can I expect that's different from the other shows that I've been to?
Well, it is it's got a real heart to it, this one. It you get all the feels, as some people say. It's it's I it's also got I mean it's got the best if this is all right to say, the best reviews of anything I've ever done in 20-odd years. Which is nice to know because it is such a personal show. So that's a that's a lovely thing that it's been received so well.
I do swear the audience to secrecy, so it's hard to go into details. Other than yeah, it is about the things that connect us as people and then how the difficult things in life are the things that join us up. It's also show based on audience participation, like like they all are. And I should say I I would hate the idea of being dragged up on stage, so I throw out frisbees to choose people, which means it's the easiest thing to hand to the person next to you if if it lands on your lap and you don't want to get involved. So there's no pressure to get involved at all, but it is a it's a big show of audience participation and it's it's more than more than people expect, I hope. We always try and make the show properly over-deliver and give you give you more than you thought it would.
I'm so excited. I genuinely am, really, really excited. Thank you so much for your time.
We we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest, and they don't know who they're leaving it the question for. I get to see it when I open the book, so excuse me if I take a while to read the handwriting. Oh this is for me, right? Yes, great. Oh God. Okay. "Top or bottom?" Imagine, imagine if that was the question.
"If you could only speak with, call, see, touch four people for the next four years, who would they be?"
I feel this is quite a yeah, boring answer, but it's honest. So my mom, my partner, probably my two really good friends Sharky and Steven. I'd have to include Jenny in there somewhere, so maybe they could alternate weekends or something. Yeah, friendship's really meaning a lot to me now as I get as I get older—I'm not old, but, you know, getting older. I think it happens something like on your 50th birthday or something, suddenly your friendships really mean a huge amount to you.
And they didn't before?
They always did, but just not in such a conscious way. I don't know, it's just a real real sentimental like valuing of them. Nostalgia as well, like really I just find myself just those kind of yeah, sentimental sort of leanings. And my friends just suddenly they've obviously always meant lots to me because they've been my friends, but suddenly even more so. I love meeting up with people I haven't seen for years now. I love doing that much more than I used to. So yeah, I'm that's it: mom, partner, and a couple of really good friends. That doesn't include my dogs. I forgot I had two dogs, but I have a clear favorite, which is unfortunate for the other one. I was only thinking of Doodle and I forgot about Humbug. It's okay, it said people, so that's fine. So sorry, that's not a very clear answer, but lovely question.
Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the inspiration, thank you for coming and doing this. You're someone that I've been honestly quite obsessed with for the last 10 years, watching on TV, watching on Channel 4, coming to your shows and stuff. So it feels like a real honor to get to speak with you and as I said, I read your book in the jungle—it was very much the basis of inspiration.
In the jungle? You didn't say that!
Yeah, so I took it I took a suitcase out to the jungle and I was I wanted books on happiness and yours was on the shelf, so I took it.
Was it that one, or was it *Happy*?
It was the yellow one.
*Happy*, yeah.
And I'll be honest, this sounds like a really because I bought it not knowing it was you, interestingly.
Yeah, yeah.
And then when I saw I got to the jungle and I saw the name on it, I couldn't I had to Google to check it was you because I couldn't believe you'd written a book on happiness. And you get this a lot, don't you?
Yeah, I do. In fact, a while back I got the only time I've ever dropped my own name trying to get a restaurant table in Soho, and I did, and I got the table suddenly, which I felt, "Wow, I pulled that off." Went in, and then at the end of the meal the waiter said, "Oh, would you mind signing one of your books?" I said, "Yeah, of course," and he came back with *Angels and Demons*. Oh, fuck. It's fantastic.
Thank you so much, Derren.
Thank you so much for having me. What a joy. Thank you. Thank you.
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