Derren Brown

00:02four three two boom what's up man how are you hello thanks for being here well i'm pleased to get here it's a kind of a strange day in this part of l.a this is as strange as it ever gets there the big concern in los angeles has always been according to a firefighter that i've talked to once that the right wind catches a fire and it takes it all the way through los angeles down to the coast yeah it's not quite that it didn't go through hollywood it didn't go they think one day it's gonna happen and with the right wind they're not gonna be able to stop it but jesus yeah this is pretty bad this is about as bad as i've ever seen it happen all in one day yeah it was extraordinary driving down the road to get here just this huge just just huge pillowy i thought it was just you know mountains and i thought it was a strange cloud formation but it was just smoke smoke yeah it looks like a

01:00giant gray mountain in the distance yeah it's it's insane how bad it's gotten i've had it happen um three this is the third time i've been evacuated since i've moved here 20 plus years ago wow yeah it gets rough but this is the roughest i've ever seen jamie and i were doing the podcast yesterday and when it was over i had like five text messages from friends that live in my neighborhood saying how bad it was and then when we got home the win was just crazy and it just it's just it's humbling you know i mean it's super unfortunate for all the people that are losing their homes and losing their you know losing their property but the reality is this is um it's nature you know this is just something that you just can't avoid there's nothing you can do about it it gets dry like this and i don't know what started it i hope it wasn't a cigarette that's the big i see so many morons of

01:52throwing cigarettes it's not just a weather thing that just happens it's it is literally things like cigarettes and yeah unfortunately a lot of the times i mean the the weather certainly accentuates it because it's dry and windy yeah this is fire season well please anyway thanks for being here man on these incredibly comfortable chairs they're not bad right they're amazing because they support your back as well which is a 47 year old man is uh this is a helpful time i'm keep bouncing away from the microphone which i'm sure isn't good but yeah they're incredible they keep you sitting straight that's what they do they accentuate your posture they do there you go so what's up man what are you doing in town shoulders back chest out yeah would be proud there you go i'm here yeah i'm here doing uh i'm here for a week i've been uh i've got a show on netflix that's come out so i'm just kind of

02:45generally here to uh talk about it i guess and uh seen a couple of friends and it's been a really nice really nice week yeah this is a good way to end it too the giant fire let's just say the giant fight darren get the out of here quickly these people are crazy living here with no water it never rains yeah it'll be it's very different back home it'll be a yeah it's uh it's it's it's amazing just at this time of year leaving england and coming to somewhere like i mean i'm sure i'm sure you don't take it for granted but you know it's it is amazing just for uh the weather just for a bit do you like would you like la as a like as a place and a home and a and uh does it i mean you've got an amazing sort of setup here is it just is it just a dream place to you it's uh it's a love-hate relationship certainly the the the real problem is the population is just so insane there's more than 20

03:42million people plus who knows people you know how many they really don't have no idea how many people have snuck in you know it's it's just a chaotic place there's no public transport it just hit me the other day there's like there's no there is no trains there's no infrastructure so everyone's driving these huge vehicles everyone has an escalator yeah a tesla or something yeah it's uh it's just a strange place there's the highways are massive you know you have five six lanes on each side and they're jammed solid where nothing's moving either way and if you can see it from to really when you realize how preposterous it is when you're flying into lax and you see the 405 highway in the distance and it's all stopped for as long as you could see miles one way and miles the other way just complete parking lot and just realized wow what are we doing here

04:29they found a spot with great weather and you know and then the entertainment industry draws people in i don't know maybe it's better to be in england to keep the rain a little bit a little bit of dreary yeah actually i like a little bit of that i like i do like a bit of the old uh so i take a lot of pictures and it's very nice like when the rain clears and everything sort of glistens and that's a nice yeah your instagram is interesting you know it's surprising i well yeah i mainly put i paint and i do a lot of street photography so those those i've only gone into instagram recently and i've just been putting putting that stuff on there which i don't know how uh interesting it is generally to the world but it's a nice place to put that kind of stuff i paint like these big portraits and they just end up sitting around my house no one wants to buy it no one wants to you know buy a giant

05:14picture of my mother so they i don't really sell them so they just sit around so actually yeah putting them on yeah oh they go that's not my mother just for clarity your stuff is really good oh thank you but these are just old caricatures tom waits one's excellent it's surprisingly good you know i mean you think someone is really good at something like magic and you say well that's about as good as he's gonna get it's not like he's gonna be that good at something else but you are yeah and you're literally flicking through my instagram yeah i mean you're you're a really good artist thank you very much have you done this your whole life uh not yet um yeah pretty much like as a as a kid i used to draw and paint a lot and uh always faces like i'm you know no good anything else but uh faces has always been my thing so i used to do like these kind of you know caricatures and

06:02now i paint more sort of straight pictures i guess but it's nice if you do something that's kind of you know public it's nice to do something that's private and yeah it's that thing of something bigger than yourself to throw yourself into and to lose yourself you know it's great you know days weeks of you know just being in my studios is just it's lovely it's a great thing do you find that stuff like that clears your mind for your other work i think it's it's just the sheer contrast you know one of my favorite parts of the year is touring and i get to do the shows in the evening and then the days are free and i'm like i'm not in london i'm in some other city so no one can no one can like get me in for a meeting or anything i just have the days free and i can write so i had a book on happiness that i wrote which i wrote while i was on tour and it was just this amazing routine of just

06:53finding a coffee shop spending the day writing and then if that does get a bit you know a bit boring or a bit you know sad or something if it's not quite coming together you then you then get to go out and be this amazingly charismatic well-rehearsed version of yourself on stage which is you know full of adrenaline and lovely so that that's an amazing routine i think that's my favorite favorite thing so yeah the painting and all that photography is an interesting one because you you you find yourself on the one hand kind of slightly because i do street photography so it's kind of you know out taking pictures of candid moments i guess so you're you're a step out of it but you're also very open and engaged and and that feels like a really prime state that's a very kind of porous lovely state to be in and having been used to keeping my head down out in public because

07:39i realize i'm not known here at all but the uk i am a bit so if i if i was out in public i'd generally kind of naturally kind of stay located yeah hunker down a bit and now it's the opposite it's a totally changed uh that relationship so that's interesting it's all good yeah it's nice just photography just being out there taking pictures yeah because you're you're having to be you know mindful and open and alert and uh but at the same time because i'm probably a little bit shy so having that little step back thing as well because you're you know taking pictures is uh i find that really a really great state and it's a lovely contrast to the uh the shows and the you know the rest of it were you always shy or did you become more shy because of becoming really famous i was always well not always i thought i think i grew quite um that's probably quite insecure as a kid i was very charming

08:31and very um uh quite bright and quite like socially you know that was that was all good but i think like inside i was um i was very intimidated by the kind of sporty kids you would have terrified me as a as a child um and uh i athletic kids like yeah just sports yeah yeah just that exactly cause i really didn't fit in with any of that um and so like when i first saw i might like i started my career as a hypnotist and i i saw this guy performing at university and i uh i just thought i'm gonna i'm gonna do that it just i didn't realize at the time all these boxes that it was ticking you know performing that sort of you know need for affirmation and and love and center of attention and also the control aspect of it you know the kind of um uh yeah the control aspect and also the kind of people that particularly the sort of guys that would respond well to hypnosis

09:28and come up on stage and you know and respond well to it tended to be exactly the kind of guys that would have really intimidated me before so that was like at an unconscious level and i hope i've grown out of that now mainly but uh yeah it takes a lot of it takes a lot of boxes so that that was that's how i started and yeah i was definitely driven by insecurity because any sort of magic which sort of followed for me on from the hypnosis you're basically it is the quickest most fraudulent route to impressing people that's you know the subtext is only you know look at me aren't i great which is not that interesting after after a while so i've tried to you know as i've as i've grown up i've tried to move it into a different area and one that's a little more resonant than just showing off that's fascinating that you started out doing a hypnosis show was it a comedy show

10:15no it was sort of um i would mainly perform at like uh colleges and i'd do a demonstration and then have questions and after uh questions and answers afterwards and i wasn't making people look stupid it was an entertainment show and i guess it was kind of you know funny but it was um it was uh it's just a really interesting thing and the trouble with doing it on stage is of course it gets mixed up with people just kind of playing along and stuff so it's but if you take that out of it it's just a really interesting area and i've done this stuff for you know 20 years back home and i'm not i don't think of myself as a hypnotist that was just kind of where i started but the the suggestion based techniques of that is something i've continued with and brought into different areas and i still don't fully understand it you know now it's there's you can never quite climb in inside someone's head

11:04and know what they're experiencing like i used to do in the when i used to do these like stage hypnosis shows the last thing i did was to i tell these people on stage that i was invisible right and i'd i'd float something through the air right like this bottle i've got here and it was normally something bigger like a chair and they'd be freaking out you know running off stage and so on but afterwards when i'd have this kind of q a i'd um i'd ask them well what was your what was your actual experience like like the show's over now be honest what were you what were you experiencing and you'd get some people that would say well yeah you were obviously just floating that you were just holding it but i kind of felt like i had to play along and then you'd get this interesting area in the middle of of like well i kind of i now when i think back yes of course it

11:44was you but it was and i sort of knew it was you but i emotionally just completely i could only experience it as a terrifying floating bottle or whatever it was so that's a bit like an actor like getting caught up in a role i guess like they know they know they're on stage and it's a character but nonetheless emotionally committed and the other extreme people that would not accept that it was me floating it just they that must have been on a wire or something there's no there's no way that i can drop you back in the picture in my memory of that thing so how do you know how do you how do you judge what that experience is and are those people that are saying no you were really invisible are they just saying that because they want to be like the best subjects in that in that group i mean how do you tease it all apart it's that is the is that that must be a real

12:25issue right the people that just want to please you and are playing along how can you tell if you were hypnotizing people yeah i can tell but i the way i use it now is kind of i use it quite sort of subtly in the show i don't like overtly you know hypnotize people um so that means it can be one of two things it either means it just i'm not interested in people playing along because i'm not just trying to create the effect of someone hypnotized they need to genuinely be responding to this thing in order for the next bit to work uh in which case i have to filter out anybody playing along but occasionally occasionally it doesn't matter like a lot of the time like i'll get people up on stage and i'll shake their hand and they're this rapid handshake induction that the guy just you know just falls to the floor um and there are times that that matters and they have to be that has to be a

13:14really honest response other times i can tell they're sort of half into it and they're just a bit intimidated and but for the two thousand people looking that might look they kind of might look like the same thing and then it works exactly does that work the handshake induction well it's it's a uh i take no responsibility for explaining this to your tens of millions of listeners and viewers um but uh it's it's you're you're interrupting a an automatic process right this is the this is the key to it it was made popular by um made popular by i guess richard bandler who's the guy behind nlp and so on um i don't know if he kind of created this thing but perhaps perhaps erickson did before him i don't know anyway you you you take an automatic process and you interrupt it in the middle so like when you're shaking hands with somebody that's like such a familiar process that

14:03when you start you're not thinking okay i'm going to grip this person's hand now and i'm going to move my hand up and down with them a few times then i'll take my hand away you just kind of do it automatically and there's something about interrupting that that leaves people really flummoxed and bewildered because they're really really caught off guard like imagine somebody comes up to you in the street and says it's not half past seven you know your reaction isn't to go yeah yeah i know it's uh 20 plus nine your reaction is a sort of you think like you've missed something like you're trying to make sense of it it's a strange uh kind of put you on the back foot and at that point if you if you've got somebody who's fairly suggestible and people coming up on stage is such an odd moment for them anyway they're naturally very suggestible that a clear instruction

14:48to sleep or whatever you want to give them tends to be taken very deeply and very often then you'll see i'll shake hands and i'll i'll break the pattern of the handshakes well i'll often take their hand and lift it up to their face and say sleep and show them their hand like that and they just sleep and well it's not sleep but it's a kind of um it looks like i mean they they'll do anything from eyes closed head drops down to just drop like a like a dead weight on the floor you know what i found this most interesting actually was um like applying this in slightly more useful everyday situations was as a sort of um like a self-defense technique i was walking uh between so i was like must have been like 20 or something and i was at a magic convention and i was walking from one hotel to another and i'm dressing like a three-piece velvet suit as this skinny british i

15:40might as well have you know punch me in the throat tattooed across my face and this guy comes up and it's like he's drunk it's about three in the morning drunk aggressive is with his girlfriend clearly looking for a fight and he sort of he comes up to me and he says what are you what are you looking at what are you looking at and because i'd spoken about this how to deal with this sort of thing but had never found myself in this situation i kind of had it all mentally rehearsed so i said to him i said the wall outside my house isn't four foot high and i guess there's an equivalent of this with a sort of adrenaline dump i think it's called in uh in martial arts but there's a it just like he's got all this adrenaline and then a thing like that from me which is just out of context like it makes sense i'm not like talking gibberish it makes sense but it's just out of context

16:27so now suddenly he's thinking i've what i've missed something so now he he said he went what and i said his girlfriend walked off and i said the wall outside my house isn't four foot high i spent some time in spain the walls that were very high but if you look at the ones here that they're tiny they're nothing and then he just sort of broke down he sort of went and uh started crying well you know he no it wasn't quite crying but it was just it was like all the adrenaline and everything just just flooded out of him and he sat down and i ended up sitting next to him on the uh like you know on the roadside um asking him you know so what i was the plan was i was going to try and stick his feet to the floor and i had his whole plan but he just kind of collapsed and sat down so i stick his feet in here yeah that was because i knew it'd be like this highly suggestible state and like either

17:14way the moment of aggression had passed but i ended up ended up weirdly sitting with him asking him what had happened that evening and his girlfriend i think she'd bottled somebody or something horrible that happened oh excuse me so we've gone out with all this aggression but it's a good one isn't it if you just have like um it could be just a song lyric or just some some weird kind of thing that you can just go into in those situations i mean if someone's running you with a knife it's a bit difficult but you just you you're kind of strangely taking control of a situation otherwise what you're going to do if they say what are you looking at you can't there's no way you can answer that without being on the back foot so it just kind of nicely kind of inverts the situation and puts them on the back foot which anyway it worked it was uh it was kind of fun isn't there like a process

17:58required to hypnotize someone you could just do it that way and say just talk them through some sort of a program that makes them think their foot is stuck to the floor i it it all depends on the moment i had i used to hypnotize people in my um in my room when i was a student right so i was the guy that did hypnosis i'd have people coming you know regularly coming to try it out and um i had this this one time i used to leave people with like if they were responsive to it and this was like i was really early days just like you know 20 minutes half an hour of relaxing somebody and maybe suggesting that their hands were getting light and floating or heavy and they couldn't lift them so kind of you know kind of basic stuff but i would leave them if they were very suggestible with the instruction that when you come back if i click my fingers you'll go back into the sleep state

18:44and they you know they kind of get conditioned to that and it you know it'll often work even like a week later and this guy came and uh i thought i'd seen him before i thought he'd been on a previous week so he sat down and went okay look at me and sleep clicked my fingers and he went out whatever that means right and then we did whatever it was maybe you know perhaps he wanted to stop smoking or his hands floating in the whatever it wasn't at the end of it i realized in talking to him that i hadn't met him before so then i'm like well how did how did why did you respond to me clicking my fingers and because i don't have magic fingers there's nothing like anything going on here other than and i realized it was just that it was just that moment of my kind of confidence with it and the fact fortuitously that he was also very suggestible and put those two things together that's

19:28what made it work it was just that that psychological moment for him that was more important than the nature of the 20-minute script that i'd been learning and using up to that point so that was kind of a that was a seminal so your confidence in that he had already been under yeah i didn't question it because i really i believed he had and it just kind of it just sort of happened and then he just if he hadn't been a suggestible type then it probably wouldn't have worked yeah but luckily he was and that kind of really really changed the way that i uh that i you know thought about hypnosis it also started this you know this realization that ultimately my my kind of tool kit with what i do is is the stories that people are telling themselves that's that's kind of that's really you know all there is even a magician showing you a card trick is just getting you to tell yourself a story

20:18edit edit this event in such a way that you go oh you know i picked a card and then it disappeared it was it was in my pocket he never went near me and you edit out all the bits that don't seem important like when he complimented you on your jacket earlier on in the day and may have stuck a card in there or the bit where he took the card back for a moment whatever because you don't you know you're you're being sold a story with particular sort of edit points and you know to me that's interesting because that's what that's what life is you know we have this infinite data source coming at us and we can we just we have to kind of reduce it to stories to make to make sense so i think stripping aside all the kind of vaudeville and tacky associations of hypnotists and magicians and so on i think there's something there's something interesting at the heart of it i think that that our

21:02storytelling capacity is kind of endlessly fascinating to me well it's fascinating in that regard but it's also fascinating that there seems to be like some cheat code to the human mind like there's a there's a way you can like lock into like an admin panel and all of a sudden you're you're doing things like telling people they don't really don't want to be smoking or putting them into this hypnotic mindset by just snapping your fingers and saying sleep like it's odd i don't think i don't think it is that i think it looks like that and that's the problem because it look it it it's you so often see it when performers are doing it when they're often going for a kind of theatrical effect if you go and look at like a clinical uh environment where hypnosis is being investigated it isn't like that at all um it's much more uh kind of boring in a way so it doesn't have any theater attached to it

21:54it's much more on you know kind of intuitively understandable have you been hypnotized yourself i'm terrible i'm a really bad really bad subject i had one experience where i only won when i was um in like a workshop thing that i was there as a like a you know a paying person i wasn't giving the workshop and um i was sat with the the the exercise was it it really worked for me it may work for others so you split into pairs and uh the idea is you start to describe a scene so you sat up a sat with this woman you close your eyes you start to describe a scene and you go back and forth adding details right so she says okay i'm laying on a beach and i'm so i just imagine that like okay laying on a beach and i can i can feel the warmth of the sun on my face so i'm just kind of like imagining it and joining him with the story and then i just remember somebody going

22:46okay guys time up time for lunch and i i had been on a i'd be on a beach and i had completely just i'd been there like a dream it was completely real at some point it had tipped into that that's the only experience i've had of it other than that i don't respond to i'm just not i think it's just it's just suggestibility it's something about uh and we get it when you know we get it when a doctor gives us a placebo and we respond to that because this authority figure is giving us that or or the way we absorb uh opinions of people that we admire and experts that we admire how we just more easily take those on board unquestioningly this is all the same thing it's just suggestion um the trouble is it most of the time it's done through the the world of the performing hypnotist which isn't isn't giving really a very clear and fair view of what's what's going on because it's so theatrical and so

23:36yeah because often you you know it you're you're relishing in things like i clicked my fingers and this guy went to sleep yeah but that's not really you know the what are they doing they're are they just are they just kind of responding because you've just asked them to and you they know that when you click the fingers they're supposed to go to sleep is there's a real range of possible experiences that you it might look like a power but it doesn't mean it is they might just be just complying yeah i don't i was going to do some of this stuff on stage without using the hypnosis to show that this i don't think there's anything that happens under hypnosis that can't be done without uh and i was uh having this discussion with my friend andy who directs and co-writes my stage shows with me and uh i was saying like that thing of you know when you when a hypnotist gets someone to eat an

24:22onion and says you know this is a classic hypnotic stunt gives them a raw onion and says it's a delicious juicy apple now eat it and enjoy it you get somebody munching into an onion and like having no problem eating it and i was like i'm sure that feels like if you're just going to pull it off without hypnosis would that just happen anyway and andy said i bet i bet you can just do it anyway and he went to my fridge took out an onion took a big bite of it and it was fine because he's right so he's proving a point there right so he's in a different mental state than somebody going god i dare you to take a bite of that onion when suddenly you're like you're preempting the you know the disgust and all the reasons not to do it but the fact that he was just going i bet you can do it and trying to prove a point meant he did it and it was fine so that that was a different mental state and it

25:05worked that wasn't hypnosis right but the end result still if you did that on stage and pretended to hypnotize somebody first it would look like you've done something amazing so i don't know is it it's it's to me it's just it's just that story that someone's telling themselves well didn't it did it taste like an onion to him or did it yeah but it just it's just it would have no no it would have tasted like an onion there was no suggestion does it taste like an apple to them well i don't know it's like invisible what are they seeing i think for some of them it will you know taste and pain and things like that and discomfort it's all very subjective but the end result of doing this thing that looks like it couldn't happen without some magical process that's the key and none of these things really demand that even even when you look at people being undergoing surgery through hypnosis and

25:55being wide awake and being cut open so you think well that must be evidence that hypnosis is some special thing because that couldn't happen otherwise but of course it can you know the layer of skin that feels pain is actually sort of quite thin so once you get through that when you're moving organs around that's not that's not a painful process anyway plus very often they tend to use a bit a little bit of like a local anesthetic anyway just to numb the very top layer of skin so again what looks amazing very often isn't it's a it's an endlessly rich and bizarre area to me and i kind of um as i said i don't really think of myself as a hypnotist but the the that process that kind of uh ability for people to get into this space where they can have that kind of experience is um is something i you know i'll always find interesting the one of the recent stage shows i did uh it's called

26:50miracle i don't know if you've seen it but i'm faith healing in the second half so using exactly the same idea and i've i've got an audience that are like me you know they don't believe in that and i'm saying look you know i'm an atheist i don't believe in this either but will you just kind of go with me at least at the start because the results are really interesting and i um i just started doing this this um faith healing not really knowing if it was going to work i thought well i can get some adrenaline going and i know could see the techniques that the charlatan faith healers were using and uh i thought well i'll just you know i'll do that and i thought well the adrenaline kills pain so if i get some adrenaline going there's bound to be people that said i had a pain in my back and now it's gone but the actual results admittedly with like small percentages

27:33of the audience right not everybody but uh the people that were coming up and saying i had this problem and now it's gone and there was a woman that had a she'd been paralyzed down one side of her body since a kid and she's like in her 40s now she's in floods of tears going i could move my arm and this was this is a skeptical audience like me that know that there's kind of playing along with something and nonetheless again small percentage not not everybody but having having these kind of experiences uh it is so that's a psychological component of suffering which is which is which was really eye-opening doing that show night after night after night well faith healing has got to be a form of hypnosis right yeah it's all this exactly it's the same world it's playing they both what they're both joined by is the idea of suggestibility and uh it doesn't and sometimes those

28:25healings are sort of i mean if you take an x-ray before and afterwards nothing's changing but in as much as a lot can depend on this psychological component it can can really make a difference again as the percentages are getting smaller so 3000 people in the audience 300 people come up 10 people come up on stage and i'm you know involving them in the show but getting even smaller there are people that like a year later were getting in touch and saying just so you know that thing did actually clear like it hasn't come back because i thought it would only last for 10 minutes while they're on stage and then yeah which is why you don't tell people to throw their pills away and so on right but eight we're in probably like that half a percent now which is always going to be kind of pretty extraordinary but um uh it was like a real a real thing so but still if you had 200 people and one

29:10of them actually gets cured from that that is immensely bizarre it's immensely bizarre but it's it's bizarre and and um like i've i had this some bad shoulder for a long time and i uh i got really used to when i put a jacket on kind of putting this in my left arm putting it in like letting my left arm go dead and then using my right arm to pull the thing up right now i don't know how much i really need to do that anymore or whether i'm just doing it out of habit but if somebody got me up on stage and said your left shoulder is healed it's happened now and kind of made me feel a bit now go on try it try move your move your arm i think in the surprise of it and the sheer kind of just snapping out of that habit of being like this is my dead arm i probably would be very surprised that i could actually move it as much as i can you know it's just it's like when

29:59you break it down it's like not that amazing but when you when you when you see the the the more kind of extreme and exciting ends of that it's it is mind-blowing and then you realize how these performers how you start to go mad yourself and think well i've got this special gift and i could pack out stadia doing like i did think at one point why don't i do like a secular healing show i could say well this is it's just you know it doesn't work on everybody and it may only work for 10 minutes but it certainly works in some meaning of the word anyway i didn't do that but you know you can start to go mad well the processes of the mind i mean the idea of the placebo effect is fascinating the idea that your mind has some ability that you can't tap into consciously but you can in some sort of a subconscious sense someone gives you something and if you're convinced that it's doing

30:50something positive it actually will have some benefit to you a real tangible measurable benefit and it doesn't seem to make sense there's there's no mechanism that we can trace there's no mechanism no it's what i found works really well is i've done a few shows on placebo is for me i find the key is the person gets to absolve any responsibility for the change themselves so they i've done a couple of things where this new show i have on netflix now called sacrifice a guy thinks he's got a microchip implanted in him which is doing all the work uh another show i've done is was placebo injections they were getting so they feel the drug is doing the work but the key is they don't have to they don't think they don't think they're doing any work at all this thing is taking care of that for me and that's really powerful because suddenly it's it's um that thing if i i don't have to do

31:42i don't the person thinking i don't have to make this happen myself there is no onus on me i don't have to do any anything this this magic formula is somehow doing it is hugely powerful um so that yeah that's that's a that's a i think that's a big a big part of it which is why a lot of the when we when we did the placebo program we created this whole like um fake uh pharmacological building we had a building we just you know fitted it out with actors and equipment and stuff to just create this environment that was going to be convincing before the injections were even given these are on people that had various like fears or problems or things that we're just going to just investigate and see how well the placebo worked and uh yeah it did but that's a helpful thing feeling there's just something in you making it making it happen yeah almost like a subconscious optimism or something like

32:33that yeah i've wondered if that sort of mindset that allows you to experience a beneficial result of a placebo if that in some way transfers over to everyday life events if having this maybe unfounded sense of optimism or this uh bizarrely positive outlook or this uh almost undue confidence actually can have some sort of a beneficial tangible result in the real world in terms of actual events that take place whether it's because of the way you interact with other human beings that they are being influenced by your positive attitude and energy and confidence and enthusiasm and then therefore things go smoother or whether it's really some sort of a factor of the way you interchange with reality itself and that your attitude actually has an effect on events i think it gets vastly overrated i'm a big advocate of strategic pessimism i think the the problem with that kind of um

33:44the problem with unwavering self-belief yes is that it just doesn't that doesn't quite map into how life works right i think like i think the greeks had this down so if you imagine a kind of a graph so you've got your your is it the y-axis going up here of your aims and things you want to achieve and then your x-axis is just what they used to call fortune stuff that life throws back at you that you have no control over no control at all so we are told a lot nowadays that you just you know set your goals believe in yourself visualize this and as if we can crank up the sort of the line that we're living yes right up in line with our goals and our you know aims and so on the reality is there's always life like pushing back yeah so actually what we lead is an x equals y line that that's a kind of more realistic i think appraisal of what our life is so actually kind of sort of i think

34:41making peace with that which allows for all the optimism you want but also makes peace with the fact that at some point that might let you down you know you can spend your life climbing a ladder and then realize you had it against the wrong wall uh to quote joseph joseph campbell you know you can set goals that they may just be the wrong goals and or you may achieve them and then like you know now what i've got you know a friend who um uh spent a long time building up a company and selling it he'd been driven to do this all his life because he like needed to sort of achieve to feel like you know that he was uh um kind of really worth something that was he was all about achievement and then he you know sells the company and achieves that dream and then he didn't know what to do with his life because that urge was still there now it had nowhere to go and actually ended up

35:29in therapy because of it it was such a strangely uh counter-intuitive thing so i you know i'm all about changing the world for the better but i think we have to make mental space for the fact that um like when freud created psychoanalysis he wasn't trying to make people happy he called it he called it restoring uh restoring natural unhappiness like you know life is basically going to be unhappy sometimes and he was trying to get rid of unnatural unhappiness as he saw it like a sort of neurotic unhappiness and restore a kind of an easy relationship to life and fortune so to me that's that's the case i'm always a bit i was a bit skeptical of the kind of uh just unwavering positivity yeah no i agree with you i mean i think that unwavering positivity is usually delusional yeah but a certain amount of positivity a school so yeah of course a certain amount a certain amount of

36:25the dangers it's like the faith healers right so the faith healing thing of you go away you don't take your pills and if this condition returns which it's going to it's your own fault because you didn't have enough faith right now that's a quite a toxic cycle of self-blame it's exactly the same cycle that you get when you read like the secret for example yes it's quite explicitly if these great things don't come your way it's because your self-belief wavered for a second you only have yourself to blame she's very explicit about that um and that that's the problem it's it it's great if you can put it in a certain context if not it sadly can be a recipe i think for anxiety and a just a feeling of failure that you don't understand where it's come from well what i was trying to get at was i wonder if it's a component in a much larger picture not that it's the one thing like the key

37:15like the real problem with the secret is the idea that you're taking all these people that are already successful they've achieved a certain result and then you're asking them how did you achieve that result well i thought positive and i just really put my mind to it and i dreamt on it they all have this in common yes well you know who also thought positive bunch of losers yeah you know they all they tried and you know they got hit in the head by asteroids or car accidents or the the world turned bad on them i mean that that actually can happen too yeah so it's just you're using you have a biased focus group exactly everybody yes exactly it's exactly and the the idea of setting a goal fixating on it and ignoring all the haters and ignoring all the people that will bring you down is a perfect recipe for failure as much as as it's a common anecdotal story of

38:01success well the problem with that is if you just focus on the one the the thing about human beings i think is that we really do need other people's input and interaction the idea that you're going to work in a vacuum and create this great masterpiece without any interaction with other human beings that's this doesn't really it doesn't really work like that it doesn't because life is active and messy and ambiguous and ambivalent and i think the trouble is we get hung up on nouns like happiness or meaning or even the self right because i think i think actually these things are verbs they're maybe we sell as a verb you know maybe it's something that happens dynamically in the relationships that we're in maybe our self is something that kind of extends out into the world and is you know kind of fluid in that way and happiness maybe it's maybe that's an activity meaning is maybe an activity

38:46but we we reduce these things to nouns like they're really neat easy isolated things and uh they're really not so like in the in the a lot of the tv shows that i do i'm putting people through like a transformative process and they they're reacting to kind of really extreme situations and i always have people saying oh i wouldn't do that although they think it's all fake because i would never do that but they're viewing themselves as this isolated it's just this sort of individual kind of separated from everything else watching that and thinking how they behave what they're not doing is thinking and if i were in that situation with those same pressures yes what and then that's that's amazing that that does change us that we're not these you know for two or three hundred years we've had this idea that we are these um kind of uh it all goes back to like not being influenced by

39:40kings and priests like it was this is john locke it's like the the beginnings of that that idea that no no we we we should not we should have this kind of personal authority and it's drifted into uh through kant i think it's drifted into a really unrealistic and unfair sense of how isolated we are we're not we're clearly social uh creatures i did there's a show on netflix called the push uh which i did which was to see whether if you create this environment um of social compliance so it's a big party right there's one guy who doesn't know that this is being filmed that is part of a tv show everybody else is an actor and the plot was to see could you get him to murder somebody to push someone off the roof to their death as far as he's concerned obviously it doesn't no one really dies right right and it just starts with he kind of gets roped into helping out at this event

40:28and it's a big high stakes event everyone's in um you know tuxedos but he didn't get the memo for the dress codes he already comes in feeling a bit like and then he gets he gets roped into helping out and like the first thing he's asked to do is to label um meat-filled sausage roll snacks as vegetarian right because the vegetarian ones haven't been delivered so it's just like a little kind of foot in the door thing and it just builds and it builds and uh it gets to this point when he's on a roof having been through this really like dark extraordinary and sort of hilarious and massively anxiety juicing journeys a lot of emotions you go through and you watch it um and then faced with this massive pressure to to kill this guy and i don't don't want to spoil the ending because it's a stonker but um this is like it's that's what it's all about you know how your uh

41:18how your sense of it's like the story you tell yourself about who you are it just isn't isn't isn't real can i talk about the new shocking talk about net uh the um sacrifice because you talk about anything you want but can i ask you one question about this what kind i mean do you feel a certain sense of moral confusion when you're trying to talk someone into potentially and you realize that if this wasn't a show if a similar or maybe even more powerful pressures were in play and this guy was suggestible and he found himself in very unusual circumstances where it seemed like a good idea to kill this person like you're you're introducing this thought and this this scenario into a person's mind that perhaps could go cradle to the grave and never have that it's it's kind of the opposite but it actually it's just hard about somebody giving away the ending but the what it

42:16does is actually mentally rehearse somebody what this guy took away from it is the knowledge that if he was ever in a situation again where there was anything like that nature of compliance that he now has the tools to just like stand up to it because you you need that kind of promotional rehearsal and likewise for viewers hopefully watching it too that's kind of the idea you're all we're all emotionally rehearsing it with him um and unless you've been trained in stuff and you know it like that you you need like an emotional experience of it to know right when that thing happens to just have the resources to understand that you can be manipulative so these are very although it does i realize it doesn't sound like it and that showed the pushes i mean it's kind of like the darkest of all the shows but they are they are there for a like a good reason there's like a

43:00there's a reason for doing it everybody that comes away is always like you know that's that's that is that was a great thing to do best thing i've ever done you know these kind even though the journeys themselves look do look very dark well he sounds like the guy who had a positive outlook on it sounds like a person who it can learn from their mistakes yeah and but there's some people that when confronted with some new situation like wow i really was gonna push that guy off the roof like this is me like i didn't think that was me now i know now i know that i'm capable of doing that if i get manipulated to the point like wow and then they have a lot of like real confusion and and and perhaps a lack of faith in themselves and their ability to make that decision that's kind of that's kind of my job to make sure that that they don't they're framing and then yeah that's kind of you

43:48know i mean i get these are ethical questions that are worth asking my ultimately my concern with these i've done a lot of these shows where people have put through these dark journeys to reach a valuable point more valuable than perhaps the end of the push which is quite dark but um my my only real concern is their experience so the guy that has just done this new show for example i said to him before i came out and started talking about the show i said what do you what do you want me to say about your experience and he said aside from having my kids that is the best thing i've ever done but i know other people watching the show will say how can you now can you justify that you're manipulating somebody and and why did you not just want to kill you at the end of it and and but that the reality is it's just this one guy's experience that i care about and that's something that i can

44:33manage and create and make sure that he's left in the right way and also these are people i just like will remain friends with for the rest of my life so it's not like great you've done the tv show thank you goodbye this is right there's a genuine um intimate bond yeah well we all like we all end up falling in love a bit like me and the production team falling in love with these people we should you're putting them through these are like ten month projects um half that it was a little different with um sacrifice because he um he thought he was taking part in one show which was a documentary when actually there was this whole other thing going on but a lot of the time they have no idea how long was push for like push was well that was only like a that was a it was only like one evening of actual filming wow but because it was just one like real-time event

45:14um but the preparation for it you know it goes back a bit i did the biggest one was i did a show called apocalypse which isn't on netflix i mean if you go down the rabbit hole it'll be somewhere on youtube where we ended the world for somebody so we we took control of his uh news feed uh his tv we filmed like special editions of tv shows like new shows that he'd watched fed them into his tv oh no drip by drip created the idea the world was going away and there was going to be this meteor strike even i could be out in a cafe and the radio and the cafe because we'd know he'd be in that cafe there's a radio playing with djs that he knows that are talking about this thing that is supposed to happen and then we stage it we staged this pyrotechnic end of the world thing and this kind of uh sort of controlled enough environment we could get him into where we could stage that

46:00convincingly and then he wakes up in the second sort of episode two episode thing in this post-apocalyptic seemingly like weeks later in a hospital like everyone's gone the place is abandoned some infection has spread so there is like this zombie plot and he then lives through the plot of the wizard of oz to find his way back home and the point of it was this stoic idea of valuing what you have because this was somebody who by all reports was you know lazy selfish took advantage of his parents who was living with never had a proper job he was just kind of like needed to value what he had so the stoics would say you know just rehearse taking everything away so when you return to the stuff you have you value that rather than just always desiring more so that was that idea kind of writ large take everything away and the world but again like he was transformed by it really changes you're

46:50still in touch with this person yeah yeah absolutely yeah and so it's just this is a permanent shift permanent shift he ended up being a teacher in a special needs school that he's kind of worked his way up through and is now like you know he's getting married and it's just yeah it's lovely that's crazy i'm not that i can take credit for all of that but you know it was definitely a big part of that well near-death experiences are often incredibly beneficial to people they make big giant shifts in their attitude and their their perception of the world and they realize that time really is finite and then it could have been taken away from them and they feel like they have a new lease on life i mean you really can become a totally different person after something like that i think so well that's that's also what's happened with this guy phil so in the in this

47:29new show which is also the first like brand new thing i've done for for netflix there's a couple of other shows and what is it called it's called sacrifice sacrifice so the plot is i take this guy phil who is an american guy his father's uh his father's british got a few sort of british links but he's an american guy living in um florida cocoa beach florida big uh right right-wing guy strong views against immigration and i using these covert psychological techniques try and get him to the point where he will willingly lay down his life and take a bullet for an illegal mexican immigrant or at least someone he believes is you know it's an actor because it's the whole thing yeah whole thing with actors so um so he went through this journey which is not a it's not a political story at all i mean obviously it kind of it resonates but it was ultimately a story about compassion and

48:25and uh and humanity and this ultimately very human moment that he that he found himself in um and you know the guys like made a huge difference to him you know it's it's uh so this is i don't i kind of don't want to give away exactly how it turns out did the process take it was about 10 months for him for him it was like a maybe three four months it was like the beginning block of this year but there's like two levels to make in these shows you've got to write the i you know that this is the plot of the show and find that and make that happen for him but you've also got to create this the whole thing has it's like this kind of truman show all you creating a fiction for somebody that has to be completely convincing there's a whole other level of of kind of work plus you know you've got to make sure this guy's robust enough to go through something like that so there's a whole

49:09vetting procedure that has to happen without him realizing what it's all about that's a great way of putting it robust enough psychologically right yeah yeah that is a crazy amount of preparation and production work it's yeah it's it's it's huge in the apocalypse show there was like one moment when we had to just make this guy's because there was the idea there was electrical interference with the meteors just had to make his tv pop off in his room like just sort of you know cut out and to do that there were two guys out in his garden shed waiting had to be there all day because they couldn't come in at the garden because he might see them pulling a cable at this moment to make the tv go but then they couldn't leave because he might see them so they had to spend the night in this garden shed and this is like after three months of not having a day off as well

49:51so that's like a nothing moment that no one will ever remember from the show but yeah a huge amount of um huge amount of work i always get people saying oh it's all fake you haven't really done it i think it's just it's they don't believe you'd actually go to all that trouble wow for the paranoid like if you if you did that to a naturally paranoid person or person with a touch of schizophrenia which is why they have to be vetted very carefully very carefully and at any point during the process of course we can like stop it i can you know i can but that would suck wouldn't it that would suck ten months of preparation and you see a guy starting to question reality and look at clouds in an odd way next thing you know oh boy i think i think he's slipping away yeah so yeah that's never happened it's always been it's always been hugely uh that is an amazing process though i mean

50:37it's it's that's amazing how much prep work is involved in something like that it's just set up the radio where they walk into a place yeah different news broadcasts that's i mean that is that's fun the most terrifying bit was the was the for him was the kind of um end of the world moment because we had this fake fake radio broadcast from from the bbc which was so convincing it was just wow major blood go called war of worlds type stuff but in this like in this thing in uh in sacrifice there was a like a amazing pivotal moment in it when he um we do this staring um test which was developed by a new york psychology professor and the idea is you you just you might have come across it you just stare silently into someone's eyes for four minutes and it's it's the most amazing thing because obviously the first thing is you get a list of awkwardness and this kind of you know giggling and

51:27and then that tends to stop and then you're just facing a human being and like you've sort of somehow broken through all the kind of crap and then you just see like a person that's like living and struggling like you are and someone with a private life that like that's a big thing for me like you know we we go through life seeing people generally generally at their best like you know generally people will present their best version of themselves to you if you have a couple over for dinner you'll tend to see that couple at their best so you have this skewed idea of how together other people are how impressive other people are how great other couples are compared to how you are with your partner and we miss that like because we know for us we have this big clumsy embarrassing lumbering giant of a of a private life that's just following us around and it's particularly now you know with

52:19instagram and all that people are branding themselves so yeah i mean it's like it's so unfair in terms of the the difference between how you perceive yourself and how you perceive everybody else um so again you know there's the the the stories that we're kind of uh living out so they you know it takes like four minutes of this bizarre staring thing to kind of reach a moment of just suddenly i think hitting a point of just seeing another human being and everything that comes with that it was a big moment for this guy phil going through it it was a really we tried a couple of things with him that you see in the show don't don't work out quite well and then um and then this uh really emotional moment when he he just has this you know big change yeah it's uh it was i think also just being able to do a tv show that really like changes somebody quite aside from how

53:08popular the show is or how well it works as a show or who watches it whatever just to actually feel like you know at some point in my life i've like done a positive thing just for one person with tv which is like you know generally kind of a pretty um moronic kind of medium so to be able to just do something meaningful as you know is is good well listen it sounds amazing it doesn't just sound good it sounds like quite a work of art that you've managed to figure out a way to coordinate all these moving parts and trick someone into accepting a bunch of different versions of reality that you're presenting yeah and get these results it's a well it's i've got a big production crew that you know it's not all me i've got to write the thing and you know design it and so on but but the um the we kind of worked on it over the years we had small like little things that involved

54:02uh involve those kind of plots like that was the first show i did like that was uh um a guy who if that as with phil in sacrifice out she's bringing out someone's hero right that's really what it's about that's kind of the story you're seeing somebody go through a big change but bringing out the hero and the um the first show he did like that involved this guy who at the end of this his own like journey he had been through finds himself on an airplane he's terrified of flying but he you know we created this situation where he had to be on a flight and he didn't know there's anything to do with us everyone's an actor in the plane we've got hidden cameras throughout the plane then there's this meta there is a medical emergency and will somebody land the plane someone needs to land would he would he step up and do it yeah it's called hero 30 000 feet oh jesus

54:52and just just to talk through the ending because like it's not like it's kind of a spoiler but it doesn't matter he like he does it right he rises up has this moment he goes to the cockpit now he is highly suggestible right i've used him because he's suggestible so i know that i can put him to sleep in inverted commerce by clicking my fingers right he's conditioned to that yeah so i step out before he enters the cockpit click my fingers he sort of zonks out he's got very conditioned to this throughout the process stick him in a wheelchair we land the plane he wakes up in a about to walk into one of those convincing simulators you know that they use for uh for pilot training uh and it's kind of a night flight so that was we found out that was the most convincing thing was to have it when it's dark so he now goes in believing he's in the real cockpit of a real plane 30 feet at

55:3730 000 feet up in the air he's got the guy on ground control who is you know in on it obviously as everybody is talking him down getting him to land the plane and he just it's just amazing this guy this guy as in his mind you know is landing this plane saving the lives of 300 people and then he steps out and then the thing is revealed to him and it's so emotional and then there's a you know the game the michael douglas film you know there's that so there's there's always been a point of reference to me so he comes out there's like a big party of everyone that's been on his journey all these people these actors that have been you know taking him in this direction yeah so amazing so i've i've over the years kind of work with these kind of uh these plots these kind of immersive truman show style uh plots while at the same time doing stage shows you know i do a live show every year as

56:27well which is kind of a bit more like an old-fashioned sort of magic mind-reading kind of kind of show um but uh yeah they are they are these you know these extraordinary journeys but i just do like maybe one a year because they take you know they just take so it seems like not only does it take too much time but it also you rely so heavily on the improvisational abilities of all these other people their ability to adjust and act normal yeah and and to be convincing yeah and to follow the plot not deviate at all and the la actors we use for sacrifice were so good it's just like it's just like in your blood over here you're ever so so good uh and they were like big at the end they're like big sort of aggressive racist biker characters that we use that's terrifying and uh yeah which is they're that hilarious thing of like they are because they were bikers as well so they are big like hairy

57:15intimidating people but at the same time they want to know about their motivation and whether they did it right in this scene odd yeah odd combination wow what a fantastic idea for a show and so uniquely original i mean it's it just seems like there's so much work involved in something like this you must obsess over that i the is i come up with an idea so like let's which is normally we normally sit i sit with a couple of guys that i write the shows with we normally drive ourselves mad thinking of ideas and then one of us normally me goes oh can't we just let's just end the world and it's zombies or let's uh see if someone we can get someone to push up off a building or with this one because i'd done the push i wanted to kind of do the opposite of it something that would be saving a life a much more redemptive story than the push um so that idea is the first thing and i

58:09try and combine a really strong dramatic hook with a really like a good reason for doing it otherwise you're just making like a controversial shocking thing for the sake right which is of no interest so uh well that's a beautiful perspective too that you actually want to benefit someone through this crazy prank you're playing on them yeah yeah otherwise exactly it would just be a crazy horrible yeah there's there is like part of the enjoyment of the show i guess is a little bit of that it's kind of funny sure you know a little bit but that's that's uh they're they're you know the the shows i think they have a lot of heart and a lot of um thoughts your intent to be beneficial to these people is what transforms it you have empathy for these folks yeah and you you you truly care that that alone makes everything else better it makes the whole like if the whole thing is just like i'm smarter

59:01than these dummies and i'm just going to trick them i mean we've had that show before many many times and make people feel terrible and it's cringe inducing when you watch it and you can't look away but that you're doing this and the end result is actually it benefits their perspective and actually might change their life for the better that's extraordinary that's amazing thank you well that's that's that's the hope um the way that i do it the way that i change him is through conditioning so i um this is a technique i've used a lot over the years of you kind of take the emotional state you want the person to have at the end uh break it down into components and then attach each one of those to a to a trigger so this guy phil uh in sacrifice is using um like an app which he thinks is sort of talking to this um the microchip he has in him because he thinks he thinks we can

59:53and we really do like cut him open and seemingly yeah we just don't you know it's a placebo we don't really put it in but now you actually do cut him yeah we caught him stitch it back up again and stitch it back up yeah wow i don't think he needs nothing needs stitches for it's a kind of kind of a small card but it's a scalpel going in horrible um so he thinks he's using this app which is kind of um helping motivate him but what it's doing it's attac it's giving him this sound like this little jingle that gets attached to all those feelings of motivation so that means that when he finds himself in this kind of final scene where he has this choice to step in and save a life that we can have the same jingle on the radio that plays and you know it's like that thing of you hear a song when you're breaking up with someone and it's a horrible period of your life and then five years later

60:39you hear the same song and it just brings it advertising is the big example of that isn't that the premise behind something like the manchurian candidate that there's some way they can snap and then you go back to the state of mind well yeah that's more kind of i guess overtly hypnotic that's like a post-hypnotic suggestion this isn't this is more gentle because he needed to make the decision himself the idea was not that it'd be some kind of hypnotized robot um if that wouldn't even work anyway you know this is this is this is about a creating i trigger these feelings of empathy are important a lot of the shows about empathy and a lot of the show is about the desire to act and then he's he finds himself in this situation which is extreme he has no idea at this point it's anything to do with the filming's finished that will happen in england as far as it's concerned he's

61:25gone back home had time to forget all about it and then ends up stranded in this situation where it all happens um and then i trigger these things off so i'm giving in this kind of psychological nudge and then it's you know what what will happen will he will he will he rise up and take it like the guy landing the plane is kind of like what what ultimately you know it's that guy's decision and it's also i think it's a story about stepping out of the kind of you know the the i guess the show resonates politically but it's not a political show there's like there are political narratives we get constrained by and we forget that actually it's the dialogue between the sides that you know where humanity emerges and where we find truth so this is also i guess a story about a guy coming out of his particular socio-political narrative and just finding something that ultimately is just a a human

62:19you know human quality kindness compassion and these are not political qualities although they end up getting politicized but you know they're not they're not i think that a lot of people are going to watch this and want that to happen to them like i need some sort of a transformative prank played on me to because i think people do i mean we do get caught in ruts right we do get stuck on momentum we get stuck following the same patterns over and over again it's very difficult to change your life this is this is it this is it well the thing that makes us so great at evolving our ability to adapt is the same thing that just it um ties us down so like all through life so from an early age like we emerge in this world and we're very quickly given messages about what our relations with that ship to that world is this is what people are like this is what they'll want from you you are

63:06not powerful the world is powerful you know and that that is it's going to be skewed jung said that you know i love this that the greatest burden a child has to bear is the unlived life of its parents such a great thing so your starting point is this skewed story yes and then you just you go through life looking for things that just fit and recreate those those patterns because they feel so comfortable you know you're what you learn about love from your parents you start to bring to your adult relationships and project all that stuff on uh on your partner if you think about you know the if you've had a nice loving upbringing you are getting a ridiculously skewed version of what love means like we know as adults how difficult it is raising kids we never saw that as kids we never saw our parents going off and screaming at each other in the next room once we've gone to bed

63:56we just have this sort of impossibly uh hopefully you know if we've had a had a happy one we get this impossible um template of what love is and should be and then we just dump that on our poor adult partners which nobody can live up to so our ability to adapt to internalize stories about who we are and then like mistake that for reality is just uh is just what makes living just difficult and complex and also the narratives that come through fiction narratives from films and books and even songs the the the versions of romance and yes interaction particularly with that yeah i love the idea that um i don't know if you know a lander bottom is a british philosopher and writer and he said you know if you go to bed twice a week with your partner thinking what the am i doing with this person that's normal right that's a normal thing i like to me that's more useful information than

64:56you know how to make your relationship perfect like these things aren't perfect and again living living with the understanding that you know life is different but what about three times a week three times a week i think that's probably pretty normal as well he was probably he's probably being generous what's the number where you should start to reach i don't know is it five two good nights we have two good nights though five nights a hell with two of them she's the best yeah what do you do what do you do yeah i think the the narratives that we get from fiction are they're very confusing to people you know particularly people that are very romantic they have these ideas that you know their life is going to be like one of their favorite films and that's what they're looking for they're holding out you know they're holding out for when the music plays and the close-up is

65:40there and and those stories stopped going back to this guy landed bottom he read a lovely book on this those the trouble with those films of those stories they stop when the people fall in love and get together that's what's that's when it starts that's when the tough stuff starts that we could do with some good strong fictional frameworks to sort of you know absorb that that's when the tough start it's like it's like death is the same thing isn't it we have no we've kind of lost touch with the cultural narratives around death that gave it some meaning so now when it happens it's just this absurd scary thing that we don't know what to do with the only narrative we have that we have absorbed i guess is that of the um the brave battle that someone's fighting which is so unhelpful for the person that's in that situation makes everyone else maybe feel better

66:23but just adds like eventual failure and letting everyone else down to this person's burdens what they should what they should what we should feel in that at that time is you know that this is this is when we can bring our if we have the opportunity to bring our stories to some kind of ending you know if you watch a if you watch a film or read a book that final scene makes sense of everything that's happened before this doesn't happen in life it just kind of ends so we we should be like author of our stories more than at any point before death and you know if we have the opportunity what happens is the opposite we become like cameos in this story you know the main characters are our loved ones or the doctors or people making all these decisions and we kind of get sidelined so yeah these fictional or or mythical stories just these things that just give us a sense

67:12of where our experience fits into a wider sense of meaning we you know we've we've kind of lost touch with that the last couple of hundred years and there's a lot of good stuff that's come with that because we've embraced you know science and knowledge at the expense of superstition of course but i you know we've kind of lost touch of something so we've lost a little bit of touch with nature and the the natural laws of things living and dying and i think we as human beings today are probably more alienated from particularly the death of farm animals and things along those lines like where where a food comes from like actually seeing death even if your dog is sick you bring them to the vet the vet puts them down you know all these things that people probably experienced firsthand for hundreds and hundreds of years particularly like raising animals and that is that is just completely

68:04removed from the equation for most folks yeah that sort of embodied dialogue with that dialogue with with ecology with nature is interesting there's um the like our view of like what what the kind of indigenous peoples uh and like the idea of the shame and our view of what the shaman is is so skewed by our kind of western mode that the what they're they're tapping into is not like it isn't the supernatural that's not sort of the um that's not really the mode what you have and you still have it in these uh indigenous peoples that sort of say live like um rural asia and so on that where these these these uh ways of living are still uh going on is what's clear is it's not the supernatural it isn't the spirits it's it's all about a really easy relationship with the natural world so an example of this is a great book called the spell of the sensuous by david abrams who actually was a

69:02magician originally who went out and lived amongst his people and he he talks about this and he said there was uh he was staying in this compound this shaman's compound and the um the shaman's wife would bring him some fruit every morning but she also had these little like banana leaves with rice in and she would she was going off and doing something else with those and he asked where they were going and she said oh those are the spirits of the house right so and then she'd come back and without them he was just wondering kind of what that meant and what he was doing so one day he just kind of followed and watched her and she was placing these little pockets of these little things of rice out around the perimeter of this compound and he was watching it and from a distance and he saw the rice start to move and he had a moment of like oh this is the spirit what is this

69:48and then the rice moved along the ground and oh it's ants it's ants so what she's actually doing she's putting out rice for the ants so then he had the thought of oh it isn't spirits it's just ants and then you realize no of course the ants kind of are the spirits right so this is a house where food is prepared where they have a lot of kind of big events and an ant infestation would be just disastrous for them so the spirit the offering to the spirits of the house is a kind of a dialogue with the ants it's gonna if we we're gonna put this rice out can you just if you just have the rice if we do this every day will you leave us alone um and then you know that's it like it's it's kind of that's it's quite simple dialogue and a sort of this lovely kind of embodied relationship with with nature that of course we're so far from here so interestingly we do tend to pack a

70:40lot of ideas into the you know the supernatural even like the unconscious and depth psychology and so much i'm a big fan of but we can take all this the unknown stuff and shove it into these kind of bottomless pits um whereas actually interestingly if you trace it back it seems like it just wasn't like that it was this very uh well doesn't it depend on what they're doing particularly with shamans if if a shaman is concentrating on psychedelic drugs they're an ayahuasca church and they're giving people dimethyltryptamine like this is they are dealing with the supernatural that's a very bizarre and intense transformative experience they're putting people through yeah and there's different like that term shaman it really it kind of was very rare very rare to be discussed up until about maybe 20 plus years ago yeah and it seems like there's been some sort of a psychedelic revolution

71:35over the last couple of decades and it's almost become a little bit too popular here where a bunch of people are profiting from it or they're they're opportunists and they're they're labeling themselves as shaman i think the term that they use in peru they call them plastic shaman and they're setting up shop and putting together this ayahuasca brew and having all these americans come in flying in europeans that are looking for you know air quote spiritual experience and these are not necessarily pure shaman in the greatest sense of the word it's a different this is what we think of when we think of shaman today we think of someone who conducts a psychedelic ritual exactly which i know very little of you know have you had any experience i'm excited if i put you know real calf real coffee with the decaf how come why haven't you tried something nothing psilocybin nothing

72:23no i never even like smoked a cigarette or anything i'm it's it's it's a real magician's thing it's kind of like uh penduluts like that too yeah it's very common it's sort of a i think it's like a neurotic control thing yeah during that kind of period where if you're going to do it you're going to be doing it then and then and then that kind of time passes and it just ends up being something that gets missed like a lot of blood magicians don't drink don't smoke pen had the strangest response when i asked him about that he said uh wow i think we figured out everything we can from those things already i was like but you haven't yeah you haven't you you've learned we've learned everything we can learn from these psychedelic trips was what his uh perception was i don't know if he's amended that since then this is over a decade ago we had this conversation but

73:11that thought process is fascinating to me because uh you mean talking about like this transformative experience that you've put through people through with these shows setting them up these you know they think the world is different and changed and then they change because of that i think what we're missing is our is our uh is the is the experience of transcendence that's important yeah you know religions originally gave people that there was a time in history where where a religion was being born and it was giving people a phenomenological embodied experience of the transcendent whatever that was whatever that meant and then time moves on and then that kind of moves out of living memory and so you kind of have to you need to recreate it recreate those feelings through practices and and then those practices start to become you know rituals and and dogma and by this point you're

74:02creating a sort of recreating a belief but the the sort of the that embodied experience has sort of kind of faded into the background and then you know i i'm a i'm an atheist but that i i could see that what you left with thousands of years later is is quite easy to knock down um and kind of poke fun off but actually it's at some level i think it's it is not doing a very good job of but pointing back to the original experience the importance of transcendence now you can de-spiritualize that doesn't have to be about anything overly spiritual but like finding something bigger than yourself in life and throwing yourself into that thing is how we find meaning right a meaning trumps happiness or anything else um and that might be through your kids i guess this is why people generally sort of we have kids at a certain point you know our ego gets to sort of step down

74:53um so that you know that that's and if you what we what we do instead i guess is hence the you know interest in these dodgy shamans um we just put it in all the wrong places money fame and so on that don't supply it they do not supply those feelings and transcendence we think they will because we think you know a rich and glamorous life will lift us up and out of our boring everyday lives but of course you know they don't work there's something there's something about that relationship to the mysterious that even even me as an atheist and the rest of it i kind of it's important we have to have that somewhere somewhere in our lives there needs to be some kind of space for that it doesn't need to be anything um spiritual it just is a kind of a respect for an understanding that serving something bigger than yourself whatever whatever that is and whoever you know is is

75:41a important part of being human i like that that keeps coming back to you this recognition of your work as being something that's bigger than yourself you pour yourself into this and through that experience you somehow transcend that something comes out of it you you you grow with the creation of this thing in some way and while it's happening you're about as alive as you can be right me well i'm i'm happy if you know my breath is decent at four in the afternoon i i have very very lit low ambitions with this stuff but it's but it's for the certainly for the guys going through it with people going through it i hope it gives them you know a profound and transformative experience i for me i i i get very um i get kind of a bit low if i'm not actively engaged in something creative so that that that is important for me but you know the painting or whatever these are all things yeah

76:38you were referring to the painting in the exact same way something bigger than yourself yeah yeah that's projects something to occupy your mind and your spirit and your creative juices yeah it's that's i think that's a really it's a it's a vital part of your life making sense at some you know the people sadly that throw themselves off buildings it's not they're unhappy it's that they've normally there's no the meaning has gone that's that's the real that's the real killer is lack of meaning and we find meaning through throwing ourselves into something bigger and recognizing that and you know i think maybe the reason why this sort of work on you know myth and so on is he's sort of feeling like he's coming back into the uh back into the dialogue now is because it's something that's something kind of real brackets fictional to kind of yeah you know to hang on to these these are

77:29important they are i think they are articulate something that's needs to be recognized and somehow honored within within life do you know who tyson fury is no i don't he's a british heavyweight boxer who's the lineal heavyweight champion and he went through severe depression he won the title from vladimir klitschko who had held it for many many years and beat him and then felt like he had accomplished his goals and just went into a real bad funk yeah gained a ton of weight started drinking every night carrying on and got suicidal and was thinking about driving his ferrari into a bridge and then decided that he was going to make another run at the heavyweight championship and so through all this depression and suicidal thoughts and all these different things what turned him around was goal setting the idea that he had something to work towards and something to live for

78:27and then getting in shape and then forcing himself to be on this path to try to achieve that goal um and then what happened the fight takes place in december 1st it hasn't happened yet the rematch hasn't happened yet but he's lost more than 160 pounds uh he's he's slim and he looks fantastic and healthy i mean he was really fat and really large um and very very depressed and now he's really happy and no medication and that's the craziest thing about it is we're always searching for some pill that's going to fix whatever weird funky path the mind is on but for him what he found was that goal setting like having something that you're striving towards and working towards the danger is though what happens afterwards it's exactly the danger because that's what he said i asked him i said well what if you win yeah like what if you win the title what if you fight deontay wilder in december

79:181st and you beat him and you become the champion championship uh maybe i'll bloom back up to 400 pounds again and get depressed i'm like don't say that because i'm worried that he's being honest because he has been down that road before but it's fascinating that he achieved real happiness from attempting to work towards these goals and and building towards these goals and having this vision in his mind i think a real thing happened with christianity that kind of exploded a relatively new idea onto the scene a couple of thousand years ago which so bear in mind so prior to christianity you kind of had the stoics for 500 years they were the you know the hugely popular philosophical school and they're all about bear in mind they're also the first director from the east so there's a kind of ideas around like non-attachment and mindfulness that are sort of differently expressed in a much more

80:12western rational way but they kind of reflect some of those ideas and they were going on in buddhism at the time so the idea of happiness was very much about um your relationship to the current moment and your emotional state in the in the moment um and then also stepping back from my whole life and you know he said you couldn't really judge anyone as happy until they're on the deathbed and then what is what is the story that's emerged um what happened with christianity is for the first time there was this this new message that no no you suffer now and your reward will happen in the future and it's it's like it's an amazing idea particularly if you're suffering and that was you know a time when there was hellenic wars and you know it was a time of great suffering so an amazingly powerful message but like that idea of you can take that sort of spiritual

81:07ladder that idea of sort of climbing towards your sort of this shimmering golden haze of a reward heaven whatever it is off in the distance that's now the corporate ladder right that idea that that mode has has stayed with us we now like in england i'm not familiar enough with the school structure here but in england when you're you're 16 you're choosing your a levels right which is what you finish school with to then decide what you're going to like major in at university in order to then what job you're going to get at the end of that to what promotion you could get and what you're going to work your way up to and like what is that moment what is that point that it's that that ends you know we're so we are so fixated on what's coming and i know this is in a way it's sort of like well this is familiar in terms of you know the importance of mindfulness and so on but

81:55it also ties in with like our fear of death you know death death is it's interesting unpacking why death's frightening because you know we're not going to be there when it happens and all those things but it seems to be that it's frightening because our projects will end you know the whether it's your kids or grandkids that you won't see grow up or there's always something that's going to come to an end and the the antidote to that seems to be just just reappraising that constant fixation on the end so i'm on on the future so that's why i'm you know i i hear that and god how i mean how amazing he's found that now but i can't help but think and as you said and then what you know what i couldn't agree more about this idea of working towards something when you're in school that you're you're you're almost trying to reach an end that never comes i mean you're you're building for

82:44something and also the pressure that they put on children to start that off at age 14 15 16 and to pick what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life and this idea that one day you're going to air quotes make it yeah and then you're going to make it but if you did you'd be like tyson fury in that situation now what yeah like this friend of mine i said built up the company and then sold it and was depressed and had to go into depression that that need the thing that has been driving that's still there and that needs somewhere to go and it's like you're much better off having something unfulfilled that at least is taking care of that need so you need you need something that's going to be perpetually uh you know rewarding perpetually stimulating stimulating i mean the human mind needs to engage in puzzles and and and projects and creative endeavors and

83:32all sorts of different there's requirements that the mind has i believe that mirror requirements that the body has we think of the body having requirements like you need some daily exercise you need good food i think you need some mental exercise and i think you need knowledge you need information you need wisdom you need that to you need inspiration and inspiration like when we're talking about all the the different things you can do to someone as a hypnotist or that you can do to someone when you're putting together these shows and changing their perspective on things through these transformative events that's ins in a lot of ways it's a type of fuel for the mind and inspiration is a type of fuel for the mind a great book is fuel for the mind you know um even sometimes people i mean this fast food culture that we live in we like it in a little tiny meme

84:26a little inspirational meme on someone's instagram page oh i like that that's i like that makes me feel good because it gives you a little bit of a some nutrition for your mind but at the same time is it's squaring that with how that life is it's actually really ambiguous and complex and that's that to me is the that's the big thing to become i think more conscious of which is probably the best we can really aim for is to become more conscious of the things that beset us because the stuff we're unconscious of is the stuff that owns us yes right so yes and the stuff that we're unwilling to acknowledge yeah that's the stuff that comes back and by itself yeah in the background constantly yes absolutely jung's model of um psycho psycho analysis i love it there's he talks about the god so he was very interested in talking about like the the the greek model of the gods because

85:25they didn't necessarily like worship the gods and believe that they were like real divinities in the way that we might talk about god now but they what they were doing was honoring these different sort of like clusters of energy like like you the god of like eros like so that's you you honor eros because it's important to honor the sort of the erotic urge and if you don't if you don't honor that it's going to come back and get you so the homophobic televangelist that gets you know caught in bed with some guy and it's some massive scandal it will come back and bite you if you're just trying to bury something in you it will come back and bite you and i like that but it it it it just means that you know life is um ambivalent and complex and i think the best we can do is is try and um be conscious of that and not be constantly reducing things to uh to easy packages but at the same time

86:17how else do you navigate forward without without reducing things to an easy story that's the only way you can make sense and move forward is to is to have an easy story so it's it's a that's like a whole lifetime's you know preoccupation there is trying to get that right yeah it is all messy yeah we do love to simmer things down to a nice tasty little easily digestible package but the reality is when you open that package there every package is intensely complex like every single situation has all these different interacting factors that led to that situation taking place and if you take them all into consideration and really dwell on it like you just get paralysis by analysis exactly yeah well you can take it to the point that you can move you don't have enough that's name yeah exactly exactly but uh consciousness is uh awareness is probably the most we can we can aim

87:09for at least in our own lives god you can only you can only sort your own life out can't you it probably also plays into hypnotic suggestibility and my own work in terms of suggestibility because we are we're looking for direction which is essentially that the simple message the easy message was so we're just kind of kind of wired to grab hold of that and absorb it yeah which is kind of what a hypnotist it's like a director somebody giving you something you know you can hang on to when you're just kind of confused that's sort of essentially i guess what what suggestibility is you're essentially confused and looking for an answer and at that moment someone is giving you the answer in the in the right way but correct me if i'm wrong there's no clear scientific understanding of what hypnosis is it's not like there's like you can clearly show like this is what's happening and that's

87:56how it works and this is why it works there is i don't think there's an easy answer to that but there is like a i said forget the hypnotists and the performers there is a whole a big body of like a clinical work investigating it because it's clearly a thing yeah suggestibility is part of the human experience but as to what it is well that's kind of that is yeah kind of the question because you can't ever quite climb inside a person's head and know um but i like i in one of the shows i did i did a show where i took you know sehan sahan who assassinated uh bobby kennedy so he said he was you know uh hypnotized by the cia so it was like that that's his story right now as a whole he sets out how uh how that happened so we took that said well let's let's do it let's set up a an assassination and see whether or not is it plausible i mean is it if you take someone that's highly successful

88:47possible do you believe so we did it we did it we got a guy um and the show starts with a big audience of people that are up for taking part i find the most suggestible person in the audience and by the end of it he finds himself in a um a packed theater uh no doesn't know it's being filmed he's got what he thinks is a real gun which he thinks is a thing that he's got to carry with him and for a bit of filming he's going to do later but he has a real gun on him and we set off these little triggers in the same way sahanzahan said happened to him right so there's a girl with a polka dot dress there's a sound that he hears which we had of someone's ringtone next to him the little triggers that they had apparently implanted would you do it would that guy he has no idea this is being filmed doesn't know it's part of the show it's in a pact theater we've got stephen fry on stage right

89:32he's he's the guy that's going to get assassinated so he's on it he's wearing squibs and everything he knows that he may get assassinated at some point during the show will the guy do it um and he does it right he stands up and does it he fires what he's a real gun uh with a weird thing of expecting pandemonium from the audience and there's that weird normalcy bias that kicks him if i just sat there thinking is this part of the show we had all these crowd control people and like nothing happened but he did it like you know he uh he shoots him but i was gonna i mentioned that because at the beginning of it we're doing these tests with the guy um and you know the people in the room and sort of looking at what is what is going on with hypnosis so we had this we had an ice bath and i uh hypnotized him and told him under hypnosis he'd be able to comfortably get in the ice bath and he

90:17wouldn't feel the the temperature and i had no idea if you would because like that's a real test like if he's just sort of playing along at some level you're not gonna you're not gonna get in a nice path like that even if it's even if there's some kind of physiological state you can tap into to make that possible that some people with training can do as a first time just step in and do it he's gonna he's not gonna be able to do that and i had these two clinical hypnotists with me they they'd actually might made a bet on whether or not he'd do it they thought he wouldn't do it i had no idea and he did do it and it really kind of sort of threw me he was comfortably laying in this ice bath and see the temperature we had him uh kind of linked up to a thermograph thing we had to pull him out if he was at a certain temperature i think if it got to whatever it was 50 whatever

91:04that means we had to we had to take him out um yeah and that was that was extraordinary so although i i think of it in very behavioral terms i don't think of it as any kind of special weird state then it's like well then you know what what was going on with that guy well it's it's a physiological possibility that we can do that because somebody can do it through lots of training so maybe just kind of with this guy cut to the chase and he was able to just do it but i don't know would the next guy do it hypnotized probably not i don't know what about the the ethical complications that are involved in having a guy literally perform murder i mean he doesn't well he's not absolutely dude of course because it's an actor haters yeah but he doesn't know that he's not performing murder he he thinks he's a murderer and then you put it on television yeah you have a murderer

91:57yeah he's a murderer i mean there's a there's a good kid that's a show where he's being like completely conditioned he's being conditioned but that's terrifying that a this is possible and that b to this person that has never experienced anything like that before finds out that it's possible for him and that he actually squeezes the trigger and watches stephen fry fall to the ground the squibs go off and he thinks he's a murderer and look if you follow the logic that the fbi has used because the fbi has used similar logic to talk some pretty mentally challenged people into detonating fake bombs that were purchased from the fbi and those people are in jail for life this is a thing that happened in dallas there was a young man who was very suggestible and uh he had some serious psychological problems probably and he was a radical and he wanted to become

92:52some sort of a terrorist whether it was al-qaeda or isis or whatever and the fbi infiltrated this guy his life and set him up and and got him or whatever organization was with his cia or fbi they or they organized some sort of an artificial bomb they got this bomb to him had him set up the bomb and then gave him this you know ability to detonate it he goes to detonate it and then they arrest him so there was no bomb the bomb didn't exist they talked him into doing it and they genuinely arrested him he was genuinely in jail for life they they talked him into doing it they provided him with the bomb the bomb didn't exist it wasn't a real bomb it wasn't going to kill anybody and they took this person and essentially did a version of what you did but it wasn't funny and it wasn't it wasn't for a television show yeah but through the same intent through this guy's a different intent hopefully

93:56for him the intent was to kill yeah and the intent to kill stephen fry or the intent to kill whatever innocent people he was going to get with his bomb essentially they were both talked into doing there's no real evidence this guy would have ever done it without the fbi or cia or whoever the else it was that did that yeah but if if that had ended with them stepping in and going okay we're going to stop you here this was an experiment yes you've been conditioned to do this we wanted to see if you would you have done it and now here's a very careful and delicate thing to make sure you're okay that would be a different story and somehow the ends would then it would be like a maybe even a fascinating and valuable thing to do if if the guy was fine at the end of it and happy with it and it wasn't in jail jesus yeah so that's kind of more the world that we're in here and you know this is a

94:41no i'm not making a judgment on what you're doing i think what you're doing is awesome but i mean i think it's f i think what they did is kind of up and not just up but crazy that this is this waste of resources i mean maybe i'm incorrect and maybe this person was on that path anyway and they recognized it and they stepped in they said listen this guy's going to do something and we're going to help him and because we need to get this guy off the streets so let's show that he's capable of detonating a bomb and killing a bunch of civilians and we'll provide him with that whatever he needs then we'll get him maybe they did it that way i don't know don't really you know obviously i wasn't there when all this was going down but it seems eerily parallel um yeah well yeah my my concern is i guess what makes hopefully what makes the shows compelling are these sorts of

95:30questions the sort of implications beyond a controlled thing with one guy who's fine also it opens the door to the possibility that this has been done in the past this manchurian candidate possibility like that yeah well yeah who knows well from your perspective you must think it's possible right well i after making that show i sort of felt well that worked it doesn't mean that his story is true of course it doesn't it doesn't really necessarily have to relate to that at all but but you did yeah it was yeah kind of it sort of kind of worked yeah it worked why did you write a book about happiness i wrote a book about happiness because the stoics had really resonated with me i was i like i i studied law i was supposed to be a lawyer and i uh graduated and i kind of was living in bristol this lovely city in england and making my living as a magician because

96:24that was the hobby that i'd started and i was just kind of thinking well i need to at some point would this just grow into a job i don't know but i i know that my priorities are just kind of i want my life my days to feel like this is good everything's in the right place and this is kind of an enjoyable and worthwhile pastime and worthwhile existence and i never really thought beyond that i've never had any kind of ambition genuinely of any any sort which is why you know i don't really i'm not the whole goal setting thing particularly so but the trouble with thinking like that as you grow up and become successful with what you do is you start to feel like a kid like everyone else is a grown up and you're the kid and and you're slightly embarrassed that you don't seem to care enough about the things that everybody else cares about the businessy things and the viewing

97:12figures and this i my interest was genuinely am i enjoying what i'm doing and is it worthwhile and then i read the stoics and although that's not like their central message it's a big part of their what they write about you know not not trying to control things they're out of your control not attaching yourself to things that leave you kind of um and emotionally kind of vulnerable um and you know just your relationship to the present moment and so on and it really resonated so i i uh i read it i read a lot and it took me off into other directions and i started writing and i wrote this book on happiness after it took me three years to write it while i was on tour so three years but blocks of blocks of writing not like three solid years but also that by the end of it i kind of had grown and changed and felt differently and i think for anyone that knows about stoicism and it's an

97:59immensely valuable resource in terms of if what you want is a sense of feeling centered and a kind of emotional robustness in your life and uh you know if you suffer from anxiety and so it's it's it's phenomenal i think they'll wear it where it slightly doesn't deliver is the importance of anxiety it's all about avoiding anxiety that their image of happiness was a sort of tranquility avoiding disturbance but actually of course disturbance is really important anxiety is important in life because how do you change how do you grow other than you know unless some anxiety triggers that you know lets you know that something's wrong yes if we just look for security all the time and i say this because i know i'm like this like this is my my problem is that i'm too i'm very good at avoiding stress very good at avoiding anxiety but the danger is am i gonna grow or you know i'm just gonna just

98:50be too comfortable that's not you know that's not necessarily a good thing um so uh so yeah by the end of the book i was i kind of could feel the edges of stoicism in terms of uh the importance of anxiety and you know and not just living too comfortably but it is a and that's not you know they were movers and shakers like there were people that changed the world marcus aurelius you know greatest philosopher king really was an emperor most powerful man ever was probably ruled the earth and was a um was a one of the great stoics uh so they're not like it's not a recipe for complacency which you can often sound like when you talk about this kind of tranquility and non-attachment but uh it is it's it's uh it's just it's a very robust kind of language they talk about being like a rock where the waves are lashing against you and i i prefer the image of a sort of

99:40i don't if you know martha nussbaum who's a uh american philosopher who writes a lot about these things but she she talks about being more porous like a rock that the the waves the water can move through and i think that's a more helpful image i think that's a that's a good way i think of stepping out into life is if you can have a a sort of a robustness but at the same time they're kind of an easy porous relationship with what's going on that gives you that easier relationship to fate and fortune and all those things that they used to honor and recognize so much more than we do now because we don't read tragedy so we don't think in terms of those things it's all just you know pride and hubris now that they had lessons about back then and you know uh but i think that's a really i think that's a that's a good that's a good starting point for life so i wrote i i wrote this book happy

100:26it is it's actually just become available in the in the us on amazon i don't think you'll find in any bookshops but um because of the like i'm hopefully doing a broadway show next year and these netflix specials and things that are you know so it is now available um and uh and ironically the moment i finished writing it i was out giving talks on happiness feeling oddly sad and i couldn't work out why it was because this amazing three-year writing project had ended and i realized yeah i i the importance of some kind of creative pursuit or something that brings you out of yourself is so important that's fascinating that in the embracing of the anxiety of the difficulty of the task and finding upon its completion that you feel sad oddly uh oddly sad well it's kind of proof of concept there yeah yeah right i mean what what you're saying is like in this

101:16theme that you keep saying over and over again that putting yourself into something bigger than you something something that you're you're attempting to work through and that through this difficulty and all the struggle and trying to put this some you you gain some sort of intangible benefit from this you feel like you seem like you're someone that seeks out those things you seem like you you've always like immersed yourself fully in things that would do that yes i'm a firm believer in the importance of difficult tasks i think uh i think seeking comfort is one of the worst things a person can do in terms of achieving overall happiness i think overall happiness a lot of it comes through this amazing sense of wonder and the unknown and possibilities and working towards things with this embracing of you know having no idea how the what the result is going to be

102:12no idea where this is going to go and being genuinely nervous about it every step of the way and do you find because normally being having the language for something means that it doesn't come naturally because if that came entirely naturally or the things i'm saying if they completely just i'd always been like that you wouldn't have the language because you'd just be entirely unconscious so you've found this is stuff that you've found and then learned to articulate but because it's that's not it's not an easy thing it's not a not an intuitive thing that maybe life is is essentially difficult and these lovely happy moments we have are wonderful but they're not the kind of they're not the central force of life which is that it is it is difficult and if you want a philosophy of life it has to work in those has to work at the different moments isn't it otherwise it's not

102:57really it's not really going to support you i think it's also the attitude in which you embrace those difficult moments and how you approach them you know if you if you relish them and and understand that there's going to be some genuine benefit from getting through these and whether it's a physical thing or a mental thing whether it's a creative thing whatever it is is difficult like just embrace this massive struggle and and enjoy this like the just the puzzle of it all the the the the majesty of the unknown and then when you get through it on the other end you get a different level of happiness yeah you get this powerful earned happiness because you've grown yeah you've grown and you've moved forward and you don't you know yes you don't you don't cross the road on your own without having to let go of your mother's hand at some point yeah something well this is this is the death

103:46and resurrection isn't it that's why these myths do have some uh resonance yes something has to die before something new before something new can grow you have to something has to be let go of in order to step forward so if you're going to grow you have to there has to be anxiety and disturbance and some kind of some sort of death in the metaphorical sense yes that's tough it doesn't come easily no it doesn't come easily but that's also what's beautiful about it if it just came easily i don't think it would be appreciated exactly you wouldn't be doing it and there's all this resistance to even engage in in the first place it was hard to write the first word of a book right the first word sometimes you're sitting there or anything you're trying to do get it the first step of a 10 mile run all those things are the most difficult thing once you once you're going it's not nearly as hard

104:31it's getting going there's something about overcoming all this anticipation and all the the weirdness of it all you know and then once you do it and you realize you can do it it enriches you in all your future attempts so something like you deciding to run a marathon would help you decide to write a book like all these different things are interconnected the poet uh rilke reiner maria rilke talks about um i always love this image of like some people live in a big room some people live in a small room and some people just like just pace up and down by the window i kind of read that thought although i i do a lot with my life but i think instinctively i'm the guy that's just sort of pacing up and down by the window um instinctively how so in that i'm a little shy and i kind of i'm very good at avoiding i just think you're smart to avoid no shy is a lot of it is like look the interaction

105:24between human beings is so who knows what the gonna happen you know i mean you you don't know how people are going to perceive you there's potential bad feelings that could come with that there's there's all sorts of weird social anxiety and social cues that you have to read and the complications of those make sure you get it right don't want to get it wrong don't want to be too rude don't want to be too forward don't want to be too british it's i think it's the case with everybody i mean the the the reason for shyness is there's a terrible feeling when you're rejected you know the the meeting someone who's doesn't enjoy the way you've presented yourself is an awful feeling that will haunt you for hours if not days three in the morning yeah i mean if i've had interactions with people and then i'll two weeks later i'll be putting gas in my car i just go oh

106:12yeah what did i say why did i say it like that like who knows like that's all of that is uh there's a reason why people have some sort of a weird anxiety about interactions and it's also the stuff that which is why the the difficulty is so worth embracing because if you can if you can if you can embrace it that's where there is a kind of oddly sublime space because that you know that's the real stuff of life and then that's the stuff that actually binds everyone together and that the the the happy moments well they might just be happy because you you know which is great and they're wonderful but you might just you just haven't got all got all the information at that point right that's kind of what's going on so those when we when we when we're embroiled in the difficulty i think that's when we're most human and it doesn't necessarily make it any easier by its nature but

107:04there is a real value to that there is a level of growth and a kind of a sort of just a voice somewhere in the background that that is or is just a note of this this is this is what binds everyone together and i think the as you said yeah it's it's a better type of happiness but it doesn't it doesn't come easy but look i think life is about growing up is about tolerating ambiguity isn't it more than more than anything when we're infants we scream and someone comes and gives us the thing that makes us feel yes good and uh there was a british um child uh psychologist called uh donald winnicott who sort of kind of appeared after freud and that there's a lot of there was a lot of people felt so guilty and terrible after freud was damaging their kids and he had this great message of like you've actually what the mother or the principal caregiver needs to be is good enough what she

107:59actually needs to do is to gently let down her infant right because if you uh if you if you just grow up thinking that every time you scream someone's going to give you what you want if you make enough fuss you'll just get what you want that's not a very healthy way of growing up into adult life or becoming a leader um so instead what the what your what your mother caregiver needs to do is to is to let you down it needs to disillusion you you need to learn sometimes i scream and i won't get those things and that that's okay and that you know um so likewise you know in life like living with disillusionment is like that's that's that's fine that's how it is if we don't have that if we live out this sort of fantasy that we're owed that we're owed something we should wire loathe like the secret that idea that the universe is arranging itself around our banal wishes or and it's always like

108:58necklaces and obviously yeah yeah and the god shoot the fact that she sort of says oh this all goes back to plato i mean they couldn't have been any any further from the idea of uh you know wanting all these kind of material gains it's fascinating how this subject repeats itself in some sort of a strange intermittent cycle where people start talking about manifesting things with your mind yeah and i've heard it a lot in l.a i don't know if that's a thing well it's recently it seems to be working its way back around again where it was it was outside of the conversation for quite a long time but now it seems to be coming back again where people are always looking for reasons why certain people are successful and that's a big one the big one is this this idea that people can manifest things with their mind yeah and you know and it comes from again discussing this with people who have

109:50become successful and they're looking for reason as to why they're successful and it's very hard to accredit luck or chance it's in there a success yeah well it's an element analogy yeah it's not the whole story but you don't secret thing is an element the power of positive thinking is an element all these things are elements but they're all combined with circumstance luck genetics cultural interactions the way human beings they're just with the time of the year you're born you know i mean there's so many different factors there's so many things that can lead to i mean and also where you're born i mean you do where where are you living i mean all these things have a huge factor in your success try being a entrepreneur in ethiopia i mean it's a different experience than being you know a a tech startup guy in san francisco clearly one of them has an advantage and there's

110:49there's a lot of those things that play into each other and to say well you know the guy in ethiopia he just wasn't thinking about it the right way he didn't he didn't he didn't make a wish board and put his pictures of his uh his house or his ferrari in front of it or whatever the he's trying to it's it's an in it is it it's the infant's urge it's screaming into the and the universe will provide well it's i there's something it's okay that the universe doesn't give a that should be our starting point of like living maturely the universe doesn't care what's a prospective enhancer i mean the universe in in and of itself is a prospective enhancer i mean it's yeah if you can go somewhere in the country where there's no light pollution and see the milky way you just you get this okay okay this is uh a lot bigger than i'm thinking it's i think it's one of the real problems that

111:36we have with our society with with electrical lights that sort of blind out the stars stop saying we don't get humbled there's the book i mentioned spell of the centuries this guy david abrams who was out living in rural east asia he uh described at the very beginning this amazing image he was living in this hut and it was his uh he wakes up in the middle of the night he's only just kind of i guess been there for a night or two and he's in this paddy field which has become drenched with water right with rain he steps out and you have this incredible star-filled clear sky which is reflected pitch black apart from that right so a star-filled sky it's reflected perfectly like a like a mirror in this drenched enormous paddy field that is in there's fireflies everywhere in between flying around right these little little specks of light and they had no sense of

112:32like what was up what was down which had totally disoriented this feeling of just falling through space it's a great opening to the book wow yeah we don't get a lot of that we don't get a lot of the galactic part we really do it's so unfortunate whenever i'm out in the country and i look up i see it i go oh i was in utah a couple of months ago and it was we're way in the mountains and it was there was no light just nothing and you look up it's just filled with stars every inch of the sky had stars on it it's just it's it's so humbling and i think it's such a powerful image for human beings and it's inspired so much so much pondering throughout human history and so so much philosophy and so much so much of the way people interpret our position in the universe is based on this image this undeniable image of the cosmos that it's so magnificent and yet in our amazing

113:40technological society that we've created we have a side effect and that side effect is light pollution that light pollution has shut off one of the most magnificent inspirations that's available in the natural world it's available to us every night instead we block it out with 7-eleven lights and and the more we lose touch with that not just not just that but the wider sense of the the mystery that you know that is represented by oh yeah i don't know everything i don't know everything you know then sadly what do we have we have people like me we have magicians doing tricks and psychic mediums pretending to connect you with the dead that's like our our tordry answer to sort of providing a sense of mystery they're just hustlers it's horrendous i sat in a um studio audience once and uh watching a psychic it was one of those tv filmed ones where there's where there's an audience

114:37it was just like so before filming starts he came out and he said is there anybody here that's hoping you know hoping that um someone's gonna come through and all these hands go up and he just asked people so what you know what are you who are you hoping will come through okay what do they look like is there anything because i'll let you know if they come through is there anything i can ask any bit of information they could give me that nobody could possibly know that will prove to you it's them yes yes he he drowned and he was wearing a red sweater okay well i'll let you know if he comes through and then they start filming and he just says all those things to them and i think but the reason why that stuff is is like people do believe it is that the lie is so ugly that it's so much easier to believe something amazing must be going on there than just is he is it just that ugly and

115:19pathetic a lie it's such a such a such a horrible experience there's so many of them yeah i mean they have a television show so were they there was a medium television show where this woman was connecting people with their dead relatives and it was so fake they just the questions were shitty it was so poorly thought out it wasn't just a lie it was a a live yeah that's a shame that's that there was i in one of my shows i had um i got like 50 people up on stage had like a like an audience thing set up on stage and i was doing mediumship with them um and providing like like very accurate information but at the same time saying i am you know i'm lying right right your grandmother's telling me well she's not telling me anything i'm making this up you understand and then after the so it's kind of it was an interesting kind of like space right and then afterwards i think it was the first

116:12night of doing the show i went out the stage door and i was talking to people there and there was a girl who'd seen the show and she said will you um i wonder if you could put me in touch with my dead grandmother and i said oh god well i hope you understand from what i've just done that i don't i'm not really doing it that's kind of the point she said oh no i understand i know you can't really do it but would you be able to put me into jesus that's amazing capacity for just this kind of dissonance um well that's how cults work right yeah i mean that's the only way they can work once you get a hold of the manuscript and you you read whatever it was whether it's mormonism and joseph campbell the 14 year old boy who found golden tablets that contained the lost work of jesus that only he could read with his magic seer stone if you're you know if you have any

117:00critical thinking left in you at all at that point you just you put the book down you go what the am i doing with my life but people don't want that they want they want the the universe is so open-ended and the possibility of your your existence expiring at any moment and you just vanishing into nothingness in this consciousness just literally stopping the lights go black and that's it it's so terrifying to us that we we would prefer some nonsensical unrealistic version of something but rigid so we know how to follow it and a bunch of other people follow it as well and we have this community of people that follow it and we gain comfort in that in some very very strange way there's a um sort of for me an unexpected um comfort that comes with the sort of the meaninglessness of it which i've only kind of recently kind of found that that all of the people in your life and the people that

118:01like people that you work with and see a lot of but that like annoy you and end up being like a like a constant source of you know niggling irritation like we i'm you know we have people like that or people that we kind of admire or maybe are a bit intimidated by or um or like they're just gonna be the p they were gonna they're gonna be the people that just kind of populated your life at one point and it will amount to no more than that but they'll be they'll be the people that were there and it's it's hard to articulate but it's a i find that like a it's a lot easier to kind of love it's a lot easier to love when you realize that it isn't at the end of the day it's all you know none of that's gonna none of that's gonna matter the the the the guy that's annoying you every day is he's that's gonna be that was that guy that was with you all your life kind of annoying you but that was like

118:48one of the one of these people that populated your life i find it a very um a very powerful uh kind of just just reset in terms of sort of attitudes towards people that engender any kind of nervousness irritation intimidation any of those things it's like uh yeah these are just these are my it sounds you know but these these are these are my fellow people these will be the people that these would be the characters the people that populated my life and then that's it's kind of a nice thing so does that make sense yes it does it does so in embracing that it there is no great grand meaning to it all this sort of like the annoyance or the intimidation doesn't it just doesn't matter it doesn't matter they're actually they're just going through their own as well i'm just a character in their lives but um that's kind of nice that like god this guy was this person was with me every

119:41day or even that famous person that maybe i never even met but like how weird that that was just like a force within my life that that person represented something you know these are these are um i said it's just a lot easier to sort of go out in the world with love which you know is ultimately what we need to try and do um with that thought i think don't listen that's a great attitude because at any time you can have less annoyance you know by a person who's just whether they're ignorant or confused or agitated or whatever's causing them to behave in a way that's uncomfortable for you any time you can just sort of just aikido that and just sort of like relax and let it roll off you and just keep moving and go ah what are you gonna do you know i mean that's one less thing you have to wrestle with in your psyche i mean that's just that's just a recipe for emotional success period

120:42yeah well this this stoic idea if you could only control your thoughts and your actions so powerful isn't it everything else what other people do what they think everything else outcomes are not under your uh not under your control so you can decide that those things are fine and that's such a uh like to really let that idea drop into the soul that oh it's fine what if it's fine if um my partner handles stress badly and drives me what if that's what if that's that's fine then and also that allows me then to be a better partner and maybe be more helpful right if i'm not internalizing it making it all about me and you know making it making it worse and again it sounds like a recipe for complacency but i like the tennis analogy like like so with success or with matters of social injustice where you think well i need to i need to go out and change that in the

121:27world because then it's like a game of tennis if you go into a game of tennis thinking i must win then well then what happens when you start to lose you become anxious you don't play as well you're trying to control something you can't whereas if you go into that same game thinking i will play to the very best of my abilities that's that's on the line of your thoughts and your actions that's something under your control and you'll play better you'll get better results um that's that's a that's a become a big thing for me and when i get stressed about things i find that something is really niggling away and bothering me that thought of like hang on it's it's always fine it's always something outside of the thoughts and actions it's always something else and it is fine it's normally just someone else's thing that it's just the way they're manifesting that is annoying me but it's

122:13it's fine it is fine it feels like when i was a kid and i used to you know wake up on a saturday morning and think i had to go to school and then realize i didn't that kind of relief yeah i feel that as an adult so much with just that kind of fact ah no no it's it's fine well i don't think it's a complacency thing i mean the idea is that you're you're you fear that this attitude would lead to complacency i think it just leads to you picking your battles picking your battles exactly yeah which is important you're you're wisely allocating resources right you're not you're not concentrating on some that you're not going to control anyway yeah you know grabbing some guy you don't even know listen man you got to straighten your life out you're annoying and this is why and like that guy's not going to listen to you it's it's just an ineffective way to interact with people you're way better

122:59off going huh look at this guy yeah and just keep moving sort myself out yeah sort myself out and your reaction to him is the only thing that you could really control you certainly can't control him yeah but you can control your reaction to him and there's some there's a certain amount of pride in just being able to like huh whatever and just to a person or a thing or a person's behavior that you might have been furious about just a few years ago or you know or deeply irritated by where it would cling with you for days you'd be in your car thinking about it like but the ability to just let that go or to even enjoy it even enjoy it even enjoy it it's good stoic advice which has come back now it's such a i think through cbt you seem to be the way that starts cbt cbt not uh and bull torture the uh the other one cognitive behavioral therapy for all i know my placement both disciplines

123:56um but yeah the cognitive behavioral therapy is the kind of short form therapy that is essentially getting into the process of how a like an anxiety pattern might happen and kind of throw a spanner in that works and make people by being more more aware of other possibilities of behavior kind of undoing it like that as opposed to the longer form of therapy of getting into a deeper dialogue with the self and and you know tracing those things back to where they come from and so on um but it is uh the uh the founder of um uh one of the founders of cbt was was um was explicitly taking it from the stoic so it's a very it's interesting how that how that is coming back and i want to wonder what it is what it is in our culture that's now made us crystalism seems very very popular now and there's that that that sort of awareness presumably it's a reaction against

124:49against psychoanalysis i suppose it's a yearning for shorter quicker answers which maybe taps into this difficulty and tolerating ambivalence and complexity maybe uh i think it's effective i think it's a perfectly effective therapy for many things but it's just interesting how it's coming this stoic idea is i think this is cultural cycles of sort of rediscovering things yeah and i think i think that happens with uh i think it happens with yoga i think it happens with meditation they become in vogue and then they sort of die out for a while when a new generation sort of forgets it or doesn't learn and then someone catches on to it 10 15 years later and then it becomes very popular again then it's in articles and magazines then people start talking about it and then yeah it's it's a weird thing that we do with knowledge yeah you know i mean this is our version of

125:39oral history we just pass things on in in this sort of a weird way where you know we we forget that these are tools and then people start discussing their benefits and discussing the the positive results they've had with it and then it sort of builds up it's a bit like the atheist argument thing i was saying as an atheist but we hung up on the um knocking down the things that are actually just signposts back to something that is important is vital but just very difficult to articulate yeah when nietzsche said that god is dead he meant that the the sort of the young the un the unknowable god is now dead because we we're now we've established this thing that we call god which is just like the big guy and that you know we've we've put like a box around it and gone it's that and in doing so we've kind of lost that touch with that numinous unknowable thing which

126:35irrespective of what you believe as like a religious belief which it represents something that unknowable force that um that even as a you know a hard-headed rationalist is sort of like there's a yeah you want to make you want to honor that thing because we knew we need we need to know what it is to step outside of ourselves yeah honor that thing it's a great way to put it i think i think we have a really strong desire for some sort of a practice of humility and and and true awe and i would love to be i would if you could go back in time and interact with people where everyone believed in thor and zeus and odin it would probably be absolutely fascinating to watch how these people live their lives with this undying faith in these deities that were in control of all the matters of the unit with no scientific knowledge at all must be amazing and when you think about the fact that that was

127:43i mean what how many thousands of years of human history people engaged with the universe like that i think i think it's only two or three hundred years ago it was only with the enlightenment that we dispensed with the humor the humeral theory of of um of of medicine you know we believed it was you know the the fire and phlegm and all those those kind of ethereal substances in the body that's like that's then it was only at that point that medicine became something that was could actually um start to fight against death ward off death which means death you know became the enemy and that's where we start to lose that kind of respect for you know death as some sort of companion rather than just some sort of stranger but that that's that's only a that's only a couple of hundred years ago um so yeah you know i'm a huge you know fan of the enlightenment of course and

128:36uh as a magician of course you very quickly develop a you know a love of uh well certainly you develop that skeptical attitude that yeah magicians have had forever and kind of debunking and so on that always that goes hand in hand debunking the you know the charlatans and the whole world of sort of spiritual nonsense but but that's uh that's sort of a separate thing that's a different that's a different thing um and uh again i only can only articulate it at all because it doesn't doesn't come naturally you know i i um it's we we find things that are sort of compelling because they don't come naturally do they so i you know i i um i don't quite know what that means to me but i think if i if i knew too easily what it meant to me it might have lost something in the in the mix you know i think but i think the relationship to allowing your life to to to grow and to transform into

129:34whatever that means has to be surely our drive at some level otherwise we're just pacing up and down by that window yeah otherwise what are we doing what are we doing darren i don't know i don't know i don't know i need lunch well uh i have to go see if my house is burnt to the ground yes i do hope it hasn't burned to the ground i hope so too and please marshall's here yeah marshall's here we're we're all good my family's in a hotel um but thank you thank you this is a really fun discussion i really really really enjoyed it thank you so so much for having me on sacrifice is available right now on netflix right now on netflix and so there's three things on netflix there's sacrifice which is this brand new one there's the push which is the one we were talking about with the um the compliance experiment and there's also the stage show miracle which was the um the faith healing thing

130:26i was talking about as well and then there's a whole 20 years of stuff on youtube i don't know if you can even access it in this country but i bet we can i bet you can thank you darren brown ladies and gentlemen