Nov. 9, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:10:40
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 4...3...2... | ||
| Boom! | ||
| What's up, man? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Thanks for being here. | ||
| Well, I'm pleased to get here. | ||
| It's kind of a strange day in this part of LA, isn't it? | ||
| This is as strange as it ever gets. | ||
| The big concern in Los Angeles has always been, according to a firefighter that I talked to once, that the right wind catches a fire and it takes it all the way through Los Angeles down to the coast. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not quite that. | ||
| It didn't go through Hollywood. | ||
| They think one day it's going to happen and with the right wind they're not going to be able to stop it. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, this is pretty bad. | ||
| This is about as bad as I've ever seen it happen all in one day. | ||
| Yeah, it was extraordinary driving down the road to get here just these huge just Just huge, pillowy... | ||
| I thought it was just mountains, and I thought it was a strange cloud formation, but it was just simply smoke. | ||
| Yeah, it looks like a giant grey mountain in the distance. | ||
| It's insane how bad it's gotten. | ||
| I've had it happen... | ||
| 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 wind was just crazy. | ||
| It's humbling. | ||
| I mean, it's super unfortunate for all the people that are losing their homes and losing their property. | ||
| But the reality is, this is... | ||
| It's nature. | ||
| This is just something that you just can't avoid. | ||
| There's nothing you can do about it. | ||
| It gets dry like this. | ||
| I don't know what started it. | ||
| I hope it wasn't a cigarette. | ||
| I see so many morons throwing cigarettes out the window when they dry. | ||
| It's not just a weather thing that just happens. | ||
| It is literally things like cigarettes. | ||
| Unfortunately, a lot of the times, I mean, the weather certainly accentuates it because it's dry and windy. | ||
| Yeah, this is fire season. | ||
| 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 as a 47-year-old man is helpful. | ||
| So I keep bouncing away from the microphone, which I'm sure isn't good. | ||
| But yeah, they're incredible. | ||
| They keep you sitting straight. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| They accentuate your posture. | ||
| They do. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So what's up, man? | ||
| What are you doing in town for? | ||
| Shoulders back, chest out. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| Shoulder would be proud. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I'm here for a week. | ||
| I've got a show on Netflix that's come out, so I'm just kind of generally here to talk about it, I guess, and seen a couple of friends, and it's been a really nice week. | ||
| Yeah, this is a good way to end it too, with a giant fire that's just saying, Darren, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Quickly, these people are crazy living here. | ||
| With no water, it never rains. | ||
| Yeah, it's very different back home. | ||
| It's amazing just at this time of year leaving England and coming to somewhere like... | ||
| I mean, I'm sure you don't take it for granted, but it is amazing just for a... | ||
|
unidentified
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The weather? | |
| Just for a bit. | ||
| Do you like LA as a place and a home? | ||
| I mean, you've got an amazing setup here. | ||
| Is it just a dream place to you? | ||
| It's a love-hate relationship, certainly. | ||
| The real problem is the population is just so insane. | ||
| There's more than 20 million people. | ||
| Plus, who knows people... | ||
| They really don't have no idea how many people have snuck in. | ||
| It's just a chaotic place. | ||
| And no public transport. | ||
| It just hit me the other day. | ||
| There's no trains. | ||
| There's no infrastructure. | ||
| So everyone's driving these huge, huge vehicles. | ||
| Everyone has an Escalade or a Tesla or something. | ||
| Yeah, it's just a strange place. | ||
| The highways are massive. | ||
| You 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... | ||
| 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 can see. | ||
| Miles one way, miles the other way. | ||
| Just a complete parking lot. | ||
| And you just realize, wow. | ||
| What are we doing here? | ||
| Found a spot with great weather and then the entertainment industry draws people in. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| Maybe it's better to be in England. | ||
| To keep the rain, a little bit of dreariness. | ||
| Yeah, see I like a little bit of that. | ||
| I do like a bit of the old... | ||
| I take a lot of pictures and it's very nice when the rain clears and everything glistens and that's a nice... | ||
| Yeah, your Instagram is interesting. | ||
| It's surprising. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mainly put, I paint and I do a lot of street photography. | ||
| So those, I've only gone into Instagram recently and I've just been putting that stuff on there, which I don't know how 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 picture of my mother. | ||
| So I don't really sell them. | ||
| So they just sit around. | ||
| So actually, yeah, putting them on. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| That's not my mother, just for clarity. | ||
| Your stuff is really good. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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The Tom Waits one is excellent. | |
| It's surprisingly good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm literally flicking through my Instagram. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you're a really good artist. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Have you done this your whole life? | ||
| Not yet. | ||
| Yeah, pretty much. | ||
| As a kid I used to draw and paint a lot. | ||
| Always faces, like I'm no good at anything else. | ||
| But faces has always been my thing. | ||
| So I used to write these kind of caricatures and now 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's that thing of something bigger than yourself to throw yourself into and to lose yourself in. | ||
| It's great, you know. | ||
| Days, weeks of, you know, just being in my studio is just lovely. | ||
| It's a great thing. | ||
| Do you find that stuff like that clears your mind for your other work? | ||
| I think it's just the sheer contrast. | ||
| One of my favourite 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 get me in for a meeting or anything. | ||
| I just have the days free, and I can write. | ||
| I had a book on happiness that I wrote, which I wrote while I was on tour, and it was just this amazing routine of just finding a coffee shop, spending the day writing. | ||
| And then if that does get a bit... | ||
| You know, a bit boring or a bit, you know, sad or something if it's not quite coming together. | ||
| You then get to go out and be this amazingly charismatic, well-rehearsed version of yourself on stage, which is, you know, full of adrenaline and lovely. | ||
| So that's an amazing routine. | ||
| I think that's my favourite. | ||
| Favourite thing. | ||
| So yeah, the painting and all that. | ||
| Photography is an interesting one because you find yourself on the one hand kind of slightly, because I do street photography so it's kind of, you know, out taking pictures of candid moments I guess. | ||
| So you're a step out of it but you're also very open and engaged and And that feels like a really prime state. | ||
| That's a very kind of porous, lovely state to be in. | ||
| And having been used to keeping my head down out in public, because I realize I'm not known here at all, but in the UK I am a bit. | ||
| So if I was out in public, I'd generally kind of naturally kind of hunker down. | ||
| Trying to stay low-key. | ||
| Yeah, hunker down a bit. | ||
| And now it's the opposite. | ||
| It's totally changed, that relationship. | ||
| So it's all good. | ||
| Yeah, it's nice. | ||
| Just photography. | ||
| Just being out there taking pictures. | ||
| Yeah, because you're having to be mindful and open and alert. | ||
| But at the same time, because I'm probably a little bit shy, so having that little step back thing as well, because you're taking pictures. | ||
| I find that a really great state. | ||
| And it's a lovely contrast to the shows and the rest of it. | ||
| Were you always shy, or did you become more shy because of becoming really famous? | ||
| I was always... | ||
| Well, not always. | ||
| I think I grew quite... | ||
| I was probably quite insecure as a kid. | ||
| I was very charming and very... | ||
| quite bright and quite, like, socially, you know, that was all good. | ||
| But I think, like, inside, I was very intimidated by the kind of sporty kids. | ||
| You would have terrified me as a child. | ||
| Athletic kids, like kids who played sports. | ||
| Yeah, just that, exactly. | ||
| I really didn't fit in with any of that. | ||
| I started my career as a hypnotist and I saw this guy performing at university and I just thought, I'm going to do that. | ||
| I didn't realize at the time all these boxes that it was ticking, you know, performing, that sort of, you know... | ||
| Need for affirmation and love and center of attention. | ||
| And also the control aspect of it, you know, the kind of... | ||
| Yeah, the control aspect. | ||
| And also the kind of people, particularly the sort of guys that would respond well to hypnosis and come up on stage and, you know... | ||
| And respond well to it, tended to be exactly the kind of guys that would have really intimidated me before. | ||
| So that was, like, at an unconscious level, and I hope I've grown out of that now, mainly, but, yeah, it ticked a lot of boxes. | ||
| So that's how I started, and, yeah, I was definitely driven by insecurity. | ||
| Because any 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 a while. | ||
| So I've tried to, you know, as I've grown up, I've tried to move it into a different area and one that's a little more resonant than just showing off. | ||
| That's fascinating that you started out doing a hypnosis show. | ||
| Was it a comedy show? | ||
| No, it was sort of... | ||
| I would mainly perform at, like, colleges, and I'd do a demonstration and then have questions and answers afterwards, and I wasn't making people look stupid. | ||
| It was an entertainment show, and I guess it was kind of, you know, funny, but it was... | ||
| It was... | ||
| 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 20 years back home. | ||
| And I don't think of myself as a hypnotist. | ||
| That was just kind of where I started. | ||
| But 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 now. | ||
| There's... | ||
| You can never quite climb inside someone's head and know what they're experiencing. | ||
| When I used to do these stage hypnosis shows, the last thing I did was to tell these people on stage that I was invisible, right? | ||
| And 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 and running off stage and so on. | ||
| But afterwards, when I'd have this kind of Q&A... I'd ask them, what was your actual experience? | ||
| Like the show's over now, be honest, what were you experiencing? | ||
| And you'd get some people that would say, well, yeah, you were obviously just floating that, you were just holding it, but I kind of felt like I had to play along. | ||
| And then you'd get this interesting air in the middle of like, well, I kind of, now when I think back, yes, of course it was you, but it was, and I sort of knew it was you, but I emotionally just completely, I could only experience it as a terrifying floating bottle or whatever it was. | ||
| So that's a bit like an actor getting caught up in a role, I guess. | ||
| They know they're on stage and it's a character, but nonetheless emotionally committed. | ||
| And the other extreme people would not accept that it was me floating it. | ||
| That must have been on a wire or something. | ||
| There's no way that I can drop you back in the picture in my memory of that thing. | ||
| So how do you judge what that experience is? | ||
| And are those people that are saying... | ||
| No, you are really invisible. | ||
| Are they just saying that because they want to be like the best subjects in that group? | ||
| I mean, how do you tease it all apart? | ||
| That must be a real issue, right? | ||
| The people that just want to please you and are playing along. | ||
| Can you tell if you were hypnotizing people? | ||
| Yeah, I can tell. | ||
| But the way I use it now is kind of... | ||
| I use it quite sort of subtly in the show. | ||
| I don't like overtly, you know, hypnotize people. | ||
| So, that means... | ||
| It can mean one of two things. | ||
| It either means it just... | ||
| I'm not interested in people playing along because I'm not just trying to create the effect of someone hypnotised. | ||
| They need to genuinely be responding to this thing in order for the next bit to work, in which case I have to filter out anybody playing along. | ||
| But occasionally... | ||
| 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 there's a rapid handshake induction that the guy just falls to the floor. | ||
| And there are times that that matters and that has to be a really honest response. | ||
| Other times I can tell they're sort of half into it and they're just a bit intimidated. | ||
| But for the 2,000 people looking, that might look... | ||
| It kind of might look like the same thing and then it won't matter so much. | ||
| How exactly does that work? | ||
| The handshake induction. | ||
| Well, it's a... | ||
| I take no responsibility for explaining this to your tens of millions of listeners and viewers. | ||
| But you're interrupting an automatic process, right? | ||
| This is the key to it. | ||
| It was made popular by... | ||
| Made popular by, I guess, Richard Bandler, who's the guy behind NLP and so on. | ||
| I don't know if he kind of created this thing, but perhaps Ericsson did before him. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Anyway, you take an automatic process and you interrupt it in the middle. | ||
| So like when you're shaking hands with somebody, It's such a familiar process that when you start, you're not thinking, okay, I'm going to grip this person's hand now, and I'm going to move my hand up and down with them a few times, then I'll take my hand away. | ||
| You just kind of do it automatically. | ||
| And there's something about interrupting that that leaves people really flummoxed and bewildered because they're really caught off guard. | ||
| Like if you imagine somebody comes up to you in the street and says, it's not half past seven. | ||
| Your reaction isn't to go, yeah, yeah, I know, it's twenty past nine. | ||
| Your reaction is a sort of, you think like you've missed something, like you're trying to make sense of it. | ||
| It's a strange, kind of puts you on the back foot. | ||
| And at that point, if you've got somebody who's fairly suggestible, and people coming up on stage, it's such an odd moment for them anyway, they're naturally very suggestible, that a clear instruction to sleep, or whatever you want to give them, tends to be taken very deeply, and very often then you'll see, I'll shake hands and I'll I'll break the pattern of the handshake, so 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? | ||
| Well, it's not sleep, but it's a kind of... | ||
| It looks like... | ||
| I mean, they'll do anything from eyes closed, head drops down, to just drop like a dead weight on the floor. | ||
| You know what I found this most interesting, actually, was... | ||
| Like applying this in slightly more useful everyday situations was as a sort of like a self-defense technique. | ||
| I was walking between, so I was like, must have been like 20 or something, and I was at a magic convention. | ||
| And I was walking from one hotel to another, and I'm dressed in like a three-piece velvet suit, as this skinny British, like, I might as well have, you know, punched me in the throat, tattooed across my face. | ||
| And this guy comes up, and he's like, he's drunk, it's about three in the morning, drunk, aggressive, he's with his girlfriend, clearly looking for a fight. | ||
| And he sort of, he comes up to me and he says, what are you fucking looking at, what are you looking at? | ||
| And because I'd spoken about this, how to deal with this sort of thing, but had never found myself in this situation, I'd kind of had it all mentally rehearsed. | ||
| So I said to him, I said, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high. | ||
| And I guess there's an equivalent to this with sort of adrenaline dump, I think it's called, in martial arts. | ||
| But it's just like he's got all this adrenaline, and then a thing like that for me, which is just out of context. | ||
| Like, it makes sense. | ||
| I'm not, like, talking gibberish. | ||
| It makes sense, but it's just out of context. | ||
| So now suddenly he's thinking, 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 there were very high, but if you look at the ones here, they're tiny, they're nothing. | ||
| And then he just sort of broke down. | ||
| He sort of went, wah! | ||
| You started crying? | ||
| No, it wasn't quite crying, but it was like all the adrenaline and everything just flooded out of him. | ||
| And he sat down, and I end up sitting next to him on the roadside, asking him, you know, the plan was I was going to try and stick his feet to the floor. | ||
| I had this whole plan, but he just kind of collapsed and sat down. | ||
| You were going to stick his feet to the floor with hypnosis? | ||
| Yeah, that was Because I knew it'd be like this highly suggestible state. | ||
| And either way, the moment of aggression had passed. | ||
| But I ended up weirdly sitting with him asking him what had happened that evening. | ||
| And his girlfriend, I think she'd bottled somebody or something horrible had happened. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| So he'd got out with all this aggression. | ||
| But it's a good one, isn't it? | ||
| If you just have like a... | ||
| It could be just a song lyric or just some weird kind of... | ||
| It's a thing that you can just go into in those situations. | ||
| I mean, if someone's running at you with a knife, it's a bit difficult, but you're kind of strangely taking control of a situation. | ||
| Otherwise, what are you going to do? | ||
| If they say, what are you looking at? | ||
| There's no way you can answer that without being on the back foot. | ||
| So it just kind of nicely inverts the situation and puts them on the back foot. | ||
| Anyway, it worked. | ||
| It was kind of fun. | ||
| Isn't there like a process required to hypnotize someone? | ||
| You could just do it that way and just talk them through some sort of a program that makes them think their foot is stuck to the floor? | ||
| It all depends on the moment. | ||
| I used to hypnotize people 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 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, it was like, you know, 20 minutes, half an hour of relaxing somebody and maybe suggesting that their hands were getting light and floating or heavy and they couldn't lift them. | ||
| So kind of, you know, kind of basic stuff. | ||
| But I would leave them, if they were very suggestible, with the instruction that when you come back, if I click my fingers, you'll go back into the sleep state. | ||
| And they, you know, they kind of get conditioned to that. | ||
| You know, it'll often work, even like a week later. | ||
| And this guy came and I thought I'd seen him before. | ||
| I thought he'd been on a previous week. | ||
| So he sat down and went, OK, look at me, and sleep, click 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 air, whatever it was. | ||
| And at the end of it, I realised in talking to him that I hadn't met him before. | ||
| So then I'm like, why did you respond to me clicking my fingers? | ||
| Because I don't have magic fingers, there's nothing like anything going on here. | ||
| And I realized it was just that. | ||
| It was just that moment of my kind of confidence with it and the fact, fortuitously, that he was also very suggestible. | ||
| And put those two things together. | ||
| That's what made it work. | ||
| It was just that psychological moment for him. | ||
| That was more important than the nature of the 20-minute script that I'd been learning and using up to that point. | ||
| So that was a seminal moment for me. | ||
| So your confidence in that he had already been under? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't question it because I believed he had. | ||
| So it just sort of happened. | ||
| 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 changed the way that I thought about hypnosis. | ||
| I'd also started this realisation that ultimately my kind of toolkit with what I do is the stories that people are telling themselves. | ||
| That's kind of... | ||
| That's really, you know, all there is. | ||
| Even a magician showing you a card trick is just getting you to tell yourself a story, edit this event in such a way that you go, oh, you know, I picked a card and then it disappeared. | ||
| 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 being sold a story with particular sort of edit points. | ||
| To me that's interesting because that's what life is. | ||
| We have this infinite data source coming at us and we have to kind of reduce it to stories to make sense. | ||
| So I think stripping aside all the kind of vaudeville and tacky associations of hypnotists and magicians and so on, I think there's something interesting at the heart of it. | ||
| I think that our storytelling capacity is endlessly fascinating to me. | ||
| Well, it's fascinating in that regard, but it's also fascinating that there seems to be some cheat code to the human mind. | ||
| There's a way you can lock into an admin panel, and all of a sudden you're doing things, like telling people they 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 it is that. | ||
| I think it looks like that, and that's the problem, because you so often see it when performers are doing it, and they're often going for a kind of theatrical effect. | ||
| If you go and look at it like a clinical environment where hypnosis is being investigated, it isn't like that at all. | ||
| It's much more kind of boring in a way, so it doesn't have any theatre attached to it. | ||
| It's much more, you know, kind of intuitively understandable. | ||
| Have you been hypnotized yourself? | ||
| I'm terrible. | ||
| I'm a really bad, really bad subject. | ||
| I had one experience where I, only one, when I was in like a workshop thing that I was there as a paying person. | ||
| I wasn't giving the workshop. | ||
| I was sat with, the exercise was, it really worked for me, it may work for others. | ||
| So you're split into pairs, and the idea is you start to describe a scene. | ||
| So you sat, I was sat with this woman, you close your eyes, you start to describe a scene, and you go back and forth adding details, right? | ||
| So she says, oh, okay, I'm laying on a beach. | ||
| So I just imagine that, and I go, okay. | ||
| I'm laying on a beach, and I can feel the warmth of the sun on my face. | ||
| So I'm just kind of like imagining it and joining in with the story. | ||
| And then I just remember... | ||
| Somebody going, okay guys, time for lunch. | ||
| And I had been 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 it. | ||
| I think it's just suggestibility. | ||
| It's something about... | ||
| And we get it when a doctor gives us a placebo and we respond to that because this authority figure is giving us that. | ||
| Or the way we absorb... | ||
| 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. | ||
| The trouble is, most of the time it's done through the world of the performing hypnotist, which isn't giving really a very clear and fair view of what's going on. | ||
| Because it's so theatrical. | ||
| Yeah, because often you're relishing in things like, I clicked my fingers and this guy went to sleep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's not really... | ||
| What are they doing? | ||
| Are they just kind of responding because you've just asked them to and they know that when you click their fingers they're supposed to go to sleep? | ||
| There's a real range of possible experiences... | ||
| It might look like a power but it doesn't mean it is. | ||
| They might just be just complying. | ||
| I was going to do some of this stuff on stage without using the hypnosis to show that I don't think there's anything that happens under hypnosis that can't be done without. | ||
| And I was having this discussion with my friend Andy who directs and co-writes my stage shows with me. | ||
| And I was saying, like that thing of, you know, when a hypnotist gets someone to eat an onion and says, you know, this is a classic hypnotic stunt, gives them a raw onion and says, it's a delicious juicy apple, now eat it and enjoy it. | ||
| And 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 you can just do it anyway. | ||
| And he went to my fridge, took out an onion, took a big bite of it, and it was fine. | ||
| So he's proving a point there, right? | ||
| So he's in a different mental state than somebody going, God, I dare you to take a bite of that onion. | ||
| When suddenly you're pre-empting 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 worked. | ||
| So that wasn't hypnosis, but the end result still, if you did that on stage and pretended to hypnotize somebody first, it would look like you've done something amazing. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| To me, it's just that story that someone's telling themselves. | ||
| Well, did it taste like an onion to him, or did it taste like an apple? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| It would have tasted like an onion. | ||
| There was no suggestion of him doing anything else. | ||
| But what about with the people that are hypnotized? | ||
| Does it taste like an apple to them? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| It's like 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 medicine. | ||
| Even when you look at people undergoing surgery through hypnosis, And being wide awake and being cut open. | ||
| So you think, well, that must be evidence that hypnosis is some special thing because that couldn't happen otherwise. | ||
| But of course it can. | ||
| 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 a painful process anyway. | ||
| Plus, very often they tend to use a little bit of like a local anesthetic anyway, just to numb the very top layer of skin. | ||
| So again, what looks amazing, very often... | ||
| It's an endlessly rich and bizarre area to me and I kind of, as I said, I don't really think of myself as a hypnotist but that process, that kind of ability for people to get into this space where they can have that kind of experience is something I'll always find interesting. | ||
| One of the recent stage shows I did It's called Miracle. | ||
| I don't know if you've seen it, but I'm faith-healing in the second half. | ||
| So using exactly the same idea. | ||
| And I've got an audience that are like me. | ||
| You know, they don't believe in that. | ||
| And I'm saying, look, I'm an atheist. | ||
| I don't believe in this either. | ||
| But will you just kind of go with me, at least at the start? | ||
| Because the results are really interesting. | ||
| And I just started doing this faith-healing, not really knowing if it was going to work. | ||
| I thought, well, I can get some adrenaline going. | ||
| And I could see the techniques that the charlatan... | ||
| I thought, well, I'll just, you know, I'll do that. | ||
| And I thought, well, the adrenaline kills pain, so if I can get some adrenaline going, there's bound to be people that said, oh, I had a pain in my back and now it's gone. | ||
| But the actual results, admittedly with, like, small percentages of the audience, right, not everybody, but 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 can move my arm. | ||
| And this is a skeptical audience like me that know that there's kind of playing along with something. | ||
| And nonetheless, again, small percentage, not everybody, but having these kind of experiences. | ||
| So that's the psychological component of suffering, which was really eye-opening doing that show night after night after night. | ||
| Well, faith healing has got to be a form of hypnosis, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's the same world. | ||
| What they're both joined by is the idea of suggestibility, and it doesn't And sometimes those healings are sort of... | ||
| I mean, if you take an x-ray before and afterwards, nothing's changing, but in as much as a lot can depend on this psychological component, it can really make a difference. | ||
| The percentages are getting smaller, so 3,000 people in the audience, 300 people come up, 10 people come up on stage, and I'm 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, which is why you don't tell people to throw their pills away and so on, right? | ||
| But we're in probably like that half a percent now, which is always going to be kind of pretty extraordinary, but... | ||
| It was like a real thing. | ||
| But still, if you had 200 people and one of them actually gets cured from that, that is immensely bizarre. | ||
| It's immensely bizarre. | ||
| But it's bizarre and... | ||
| And, like, I had this bad shoulder for a long time, and I got really used to, when I put a jacket on, kind of putting this in my left arm, putting it in, like, letting my left arm go dead, and then using my right arm to pull the thing up, right? | ||
| Now, I don't know how much I really need to do that anymore, or whether I'm just doing it out of habit, but if somebody got me up on stage and said, your left shoulder is healed, it's happened now, and kind of made me feel a bit, oh, now go on, try it, try it, move your arm, I think in the surprise of it, And the sheer kind of just snapping out of that habit of being like, this is my dead arm. | ||
| I probably would be very surprised that I could actually move it as much as I can. | ||
| You know, it's just, it's like when you break it down, it's like not that amazing. | ||
| But when you see the more kind of extreme and exciting ends of that... | ||
| It is mind-blowing. | ||
| And then you realise how these performers, how you start to go mad yourself and think, well, I've got this special gift and I could pack out Stadia doing like a... | ||
| I did think at one point, why don't I do like a secular healing show? | ||
| I could say, well, this is... | ||
| It's just, you know, it doesn't work on everybody and it may only work for 10 minutes, but... | ||
| Certainly works in some meaning of the word. | ||
| Anyway, I didn't do that. | ||
| But, you know, you can start to go mad. | ||
| Well, the processes of the mind, I mean, the idea of the placebo effect is fascinating. | ||
| The idea that your mind has some ability that you can't tap into consciously. | ||
| But you can, in some sort of a subconscious sense, someone gives you something, and if you're convinced that it's doing something positive, it actually will have some benefit to you, a real, tangible, measurable benefit. | ||
| And it doesn't seem to make sense. | ||
| There's no mechanism that we can trace. | ||
| There's no mechanism. | ||
| No, it's... | ||
| What I found works really well is... | ||
| I've done a few shows on placebo. | ||
| For me, I find the key is the person gets to absolve any responsibility for the change themselves. | ||
| I've done a couple of things where... | ||
| This new show I have on Netflix now called Sacrifice. | ||
| A guy thinks he's got a microchip implanted in him, which is doing all the work. | ||
| Another show I've done was placebo injections they were getting. | ||
| So they feel the drug is doing the work. | ||
| But the key is... | ||
| They don't 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... | ||
| The person thinking, I don't have to make this happen myself. | ||
| There is no onus on me. | ||
| I don't have to do anything. | ||
| This magic formula is somehow doing it. | ||
| It is hugely powerful. | ||
| I think that's a big part of it. | ||
| When we did the placebo program, we created this whole fake pharmacological Building. | ||
| We had a building. | ||
| We just, you know, fitted it out with actors and equipment and stuff to just create this environment that was going to be convincing before the injections were even given. | ||
| And these were on people that had various, like, fears or problems or things that we were just going to investigate and see how well the placebo worked. | ||
| And, yeah, it did. | ||
| But that's a helpful thing. | ||
| Feeling there's just something in you making it happen. | ||
| Yeah, almost like a subconscious optimism or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I've wondered... | ||
| If that sort of mindset that allows you to experience a beneficial result of a placebo, if that in some way transfers over to everyday life events, if having this Maybe unfounded sense of optimism or this bizarrely positive outlook or this almost undue confidence actually can have some sort | ||
| of a beneficial, tangible result in the real world in terms of actual events that take place. | ||
| Whether it's because of the way you interact with other human beings, that they are being influenced by your positive attitude and energy and confidence and enthusiasm, and then therefore things go smoother, 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 problem with that kind of, the problem with unwavering self-belief is that it just doesn't quite map into how life works, right? | ||
| I think the Greeks had this down. | ||
| So if you imagine a kind of a graph, so you've got your, is it the y-axis going up here of your aims and things you want to achieve, and then your x-axis It's 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. | ||
| So actually what we lead is an X equals Y line. | ||
| That's a kind of more realistic, I think, appraison of what our life is. | ||
| So actually kind of sort of, I think, making peace with that, which allows for all the optimism you want, but also... | ||
| Makes peace with the fact that at some point, that might let you down. | ||
| You can spend your life climbing a ladder and then realise you had it against the wrong wall, to quote Joseph Campbell. | ||
| You can set goals that... | ||
| They may just be the wrong goals, or you may achieve them, and then, like, now what? | ||
| I've got a friend who... | ||
| He spent a long time building up a company and selling it and he'd been driven to do this all his life because he needed to sort of achieve to feel like, you know, that he was kind of really worth something. | ||
| It was all about achievement and then he, you know, sells the company and achieves that dream and then he didn't know what to do with his life because that urge was still there. | ||
| Now it had nowhere to go and actually ended up in therapy because of it. | ||
| It was such a strangely 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 When Freud created psychoanalysis, he wasn't trying to make people happy. | ||
| He called it restoring natural unhappiness. | ||
| Like, you know, life is basically going to be unhappy sometimes and he was trying to get rid of unnatural unhappiness as he saw it, like a sort of neurotic unhappiness and restore a kind of an easy relationship to life and fortune. | ||
| So to me, that's the case. | ||
| I'm always a bit skeptical of the kind of just unwavering positivity. | ||
| Yeah, no, I agree with you. | ||
| I mean, I think that unwavering positivity is usually delusional, but a certain amount Of positivity. | ||
| Of course, yeah, of course, a certain amount. | ||
| A certain amount of the way your attitude. | ||
| It's like the faith healers, right? | ||
| So the faith healing thing of you go away, you don't take your pills, and if this condition returns, which it's going to, it's your own fault because you didn't have enough faith, right? | ||
| Now that's quite a toxic cycle of self-blame. | ||
| It's exactly the same cycle that you get when you read, like, The Secret, for example. | ||
| It says quite explicitly, if these great things don't come your way... | ||
| It's because your self-belief wavered for a second. | ||
| You only have yourself to blame. | ||
| She's very explicit about that. | ||
| And that's the problem. | ||
| It's great if you can put it in a certain context. | ||
| If not, it sadly can be a recipe, I think, for anxiety and just a feeling of failure that you don't understand where it's come from. | ||
| Well, what I was trying to get at was, I wonder if it's a component in a much larger picture. | ||
| Not that it's the one thing, like the key. | ||
| Like, the real problem with the secret is the idea that you're taking all these people that are already successful, they've achieved a certain result, and then you're asking them, how did you achieve that result? | ||
| Well, I thought positive and I just really put my mind to it and I dreamt on it. | ||
| They all have this in common. | ||
| Well, you know who also thought positive? | ||
| A bunch of losers. | ||
| They tried and they got hit in the head by asteroids or car accidents or the world turned bad on them. | ||
| That actually can happen too. | ||
| So it's just, you're using, you have a biased focus group. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| And the idea of setting a goal... | ||
| Fixating on it and ignoring all the haters and ignoring all the people that will bring you down is a perfect recipe for failure as much as it's a common anecdotal story of success. | ||
| Well, the problem with that is if you just focus on the one – the thing about human beings, I think, is that we really do need other people's input and interaction. | ||
| The idea that you're going to work in a vacuum and create this great masterpiece without any interaction with other human beings, it doesn't really work like that. | ||
| It doesn't because life is active and messy and ambiguous and ambivalent. | ||
| And I think the trouble is we get hung up on nouns like happiness or meaning or even the self, right? | ||
| Because I think actually these things are verbs. | ||
| Maybe we self as a verb. | ||
| Maybe it's something that happens dynamically in the relationships that we're in. | ||
| Maybe our self is something that... | ||
| Kind of extends out into the world and is, you know, kind of fluid in that way. | ||
| And happiness, maybe that's an activity. | ||
| Meaning is maybe an activity. | ||
| But we reduce these things to nouns like they're really neat, easy, isolated things. | ||
| And they're really not. | ||
| So like in a lot of the TV shows that I do, I'm putting people through like a transformative process. | ||
| And 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, just this sort of individual kind of separated from everything else, watching that and thinking how they behave. | ||
| What they're not doing is thinking, and if I were in that situation with those same pressures. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's amazing that that does change us, that we're not these, you know, for two, three hundred years we've had this idea that we are these kind of, it all goes back to like not being influenced by kings and priests, like it was, this is John Locke, it's like the The beginnings of that idea that, no, no, we should have this kind of personal authority. | ||
| And it's drifted into, through Kant, I think, it's drifted into a really unrealistic and unfair sense of how isolated we are and we're not. | ||
| We're clearly social creatures. | ||
| There's a show on Netflix called The Push. | ||
| Which I did, which was to see whether if you create this environment of social compliance, so it's a big party, right? | ||
| There's one guy in there who doesn't know that this is being filmed, that he's part of a TV show. | ||
| Everybody else is an actor. | ||
| And the plot was to see, could you get him to murder somebody, to push someone off the roof to their death, as far as he's concerned. | ||
| Obviously, no one really dies, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And it just starts with, he kind of gets roped into helping out at this event, and it's a big high-stakes event. | ||
| Everyone's in tuxedos, but he didn't get the memo for the dress codes. | ||
| He already comes in feeling a bit like, oh, fuck. | ||
| And then he gets roped into helping out, and the first thing he's asked to do is to label meat-filled sausage roll snacks as vegetarian, right? | ||
| Because 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 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-ducing journey. | ||
| There's a lot of emotions you go through and you watch it, and then faced with this massive pressure to kill this guy. | ||
| And I don't want to spoil the ending, because it's a stonker, but... | ||
| This is like, that's what it's all about. | ||
| You know, how your sense of... | ||
| It's like the story you tell yourself about who you are. | ||
| It just isn't real. | ||
| Can I talk about the new show? | ||
| Can I talk about the sacrifice? | ||
| You talk about anything you want, but can I ask you one question about this? | ||
| 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 similar or maybe even more powerful pressures were in play, and this guy was suggestible and he found himself in very unusual circumstances where it seemed like a good idea to kill this person. | ||
| Like you're introducing this thought and this scenario into a person's mind that perhaps could go cradle to the grave and never have that. | ||
| It's kind of the opposite, but it actually... | ||
| It's hard to talk about not really giving away the ending, but what it does is actually mentally rehearse... | ||
| 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 stand up to. | ||
| Because you need that kind of emotional rehearsal. | ||
| And likewise for viewers hopefully watching it too. | ||
| That's kind of the idea. | ||
| We're all emotionally rehearsing it with him. | ||
| And unless you've been trained in stuff and you know it like that, you need like an emotional experience of it to know when that thing happens to just have the resources to understand that you can be manipulated. | ||
| So these are very, although I realize it doesn't sound like it. | ||
| And that show The Push is, I mean, it's kind of like the darkest of all the shows, but they are there for like a good reason. | ||
| There's like a... | ||
| Reason for doing it. | ||
| Everybody that comes away is always like, you know, that was a great thing to do. | ||
| Best thing I've ever done. | ||
| Even though the journeys themselves 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. | ||
| But there's some people that when confronted with some new situation, like, wow, I really was going to 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 perhaps a lack of faith in themselves and their ability to make decisions. | ||
| That's kind of my job to make sure that they don't... | ||
| Yeah, that's kind of... | ||
| I mean, I get these are ethical questions that are worth asking. | ||
| Ultimately, my concern with these... | ||
| I've done a lot of these shows where people have put through these dark journeys to reach a valuable point, more valuable than perhaps the end of the push, which... | ||
| It's quite dark. | ||
| But my only real concern is their experience. | ||
| So the guy that has just done this new show, for example, I said to him before I came out and started talking about the show, I said, what do you 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 justify that? | ||
| Manipulating somebody, and why did he not just want to kill you at the end of it? | ||
| But the reality is, it's just this one guy's experience that I care about, and that's something that I can manage and create and make sure that he's left in the right way. | ||
| And also, these are people I just will remain friends with for the rest of my life, so it's not like, great, you've done the TV show, thank you, goodbye. | ||
| There's a genuine... | ||
| Intimate bond. | ||
| 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 You're putting them through these are like 10 month projects mmm half it was a little different with them sacrifice because he 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 it that was a It was only like one evening of actual filming. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Because it was just one, like, real-time event. | ||
| But the preparation for it, you know, goes back a bit. | ||
| The biggest one was I did a show called Apocalypse, which isn't on Netflix. | ||
| I mean, if you go down the rabbit hole, it'll be somewhere on YouTube where we ended the world for somebody. | ||
| So we took control of his news feed, his TV. We filmed, like, special editions of TV shows, like, new shows that he'd watched, fed them into his TV. Oh, no! | ||
| Drip by drip created the idea that the world was going to win and there was going to be this meteor strike. | ||
| Even like he'd be out in a cafe and the radio in the cafe because we'd know he'd be in that cafe. | ||
| There's a radio playing with DJs that he knows that are talking about this thing that is supposed to happen. | ||
| And then we stage it. | ||
| We stage this pyrotechnic end of the world thing in this kind of sort of controlled enough environment we could get him into where we could stage that convincingly. | ||
| And then he wakes up. | ||
| In the second sort of episode, a two-episode thing, in this post-apocalyptic, seemingly like weeks later, in a hospital, like everyone's gone, the place is abandoned, some infection has spread, so there is like this 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 he was living with, never had a proper job. | ||
| He was just kind of like needed to value what he had. | ||
| So the Stoics would say, you know, just rehearse taking everything away. | ||
| So when you return to the stuff you have, you value that rather than just always desiring more. | ||
| So that was that idea kind of writ large, take everything away and the world. | ||
| But again, like he was transformed by it really changed. | ||
| You're still in touch with this person? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| 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 lovely. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| 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 perception of the world and they realize that time really is finite and that it could have been taken away from them and they feel like they have a new lease on life. | ||
| I mean, you really can become a totally different person after something like that. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Well, that's also what's happened with this guy, Phil. | ||
| So in this new show, which is also the first, like, brand new thing I've done for Netflix, there's a couple of other shows. | ||
| And what is it called? | ||
| It's called Sacrifice. | ||
| So the plot is, I take this guy, Phil, who is an American guy, his father's British, got a few sort of British links, but he's an American guy living in Florida, Cocoa Beach, Florida. | ||
| Big right-wing guy, strong views against immigration, and I, using these covert psychological techniques, try and get him to the point where he will willingly lay down his life and take a bullet for an illegal Mexican immigrant. | ||
| Or at least someone he believes is. | ||
| It's an actor because the whole thing with actors. | ||
| So he went through this journey, which is not a political story at all. | ||
| I mean, obviously it resonates, but it was ultimately a story about compassion and humanity in this ultimately very human moment that he found himself in. | ||
| And, you know, the guy's made a huge difference to him. | ||
| You know, it's... | ||
| I kind of don't want to give away exactly how it turns out. | ||
| How long did the process take? | ||
| It was about ten months. | ||
| For him, it was like maybe three, four months. | ||
| It was like the beginning block of this year. | ||
| But there's like two levels to making these shows. | ||
| You've got to write the plot of the show and make that happen for him. | ||
| But you've also got to create this whole thing. | ||
| It's like this kind of Truman show. | ||
| You're creating a fiction for somebody that has to be completely convincing. | ||
| That's a whole other level of kind of work. | ||
| Plus, you know, you've got to make sure this guy's robust enough to go through something like that. | ||
| There's a whole vetting procedure that has to happen without him realizing what it's all about. | ||
| That's a great way of putting it, robust enough. | ||
| Robust enough. | ||
| Psychologically, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That is a crazy amount of preparation and production work. | ||
| Yeah, it's huge. | ||
| In the Apocalypse show, there was like one moment when we had to just make this guy's, because there was the idea 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 We had to be there all day because they couldn't come in and out the garden because you might see them. | ||
| Pulling a cable at this moment to make the TV go. | ||
| But then they couldn't leave because you might see them, so they had to spend the night in this garden shed, right? | ||
| And this is like after three months of not having a day off as well. | ||
| So that's like a nothing moment that no one will ever remember from the show. | ||
| But yeah, a huge amount of work. | ||
| I always get people saying, oh, it's all fake, you haven't really done it. | ||
| I think it's just that no one believes you'd actually go to all that trouble. | ||
| For the paranoid, like if you did that to a naturally paranoid person, a person with a touch of schizophrenia, oh my god. | ||
| Which is why they have to be vetted very carefully first. | ||
| And at any point during the process, of course we can like stop it. | ||
| But that would suck, wouldn't it? | ||
| That would suck, yeah. | ||
| 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 he's slipping away. | ||
| Yeah, that's never happened. | ||
| It's always been hugely... | ||
| That is an amazing process, though. | ||
| I mean, that's amazing how much prep work is involved in something like that. | ||
| To set up the radio, where they walk into a place to have different news broadcasts. | ||
| I mean, that's fun. | ||
| The most terrifying bit for him was the kind of end of the world moment. | ||
| Because we had this fake radio broadcast from the BBC, which was so convincing. | ||
| It was just major blood go cold. | ||
| War of Worlds type stuff. | ||
| But in this thing, in Sacrifice, there was like a... | ||
| Amazing, pivotal moment in it when we do this staring test, which was developed by a New York psychology professor. | ||
| And the idea is you might have come across it. | ||
| You just stare silently into someone's eyes for four minutes. | ||
| It's the most amazing thing. | ||
| Because obviously the first thing is you get this sort of awkwardness and this kind of, you know, giggling. | ||
| And then that tends to stop. | ||
| And then you're just facing a human being. | ||
| And like you've sort of somehow broken through all the kind of crap. | ||
| And then you just see like a person that's like living and struggling like you are. | ||
| And someone with a private life. | ||
| Like that's a big thing for me. | ||
| Like, you know, we... | ||
| We go through life seeing people generally at their best. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We miss that Because we know for us, we have this big, clumsy, embarrassing, lumbering giant of a private life that's just following us around. | ||
| And it's particularly now, you know, with Instagram and all that, people are branding themselves so effectively. | ||
| I mean, it's so unfair in terms of the difference between how you perceive yourself and how you perceive everybody else. | ||
| So again, the stories that we're kind of living out. | ||
| So it takes like four minutes of this bizarre staring thing to kind of reach a moment of just suddenly, I think, hitting a point of just seeing another human being and everything that comes with that. | ||
| 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 work out quite well and then this really emotional moment when he just has this big change. | ||
| I think also just being able to do a TV show that really changes somebody quite aside from how popular the show is or how well it works as a show or who watches it, whatever, just to actually feel like You know, at some point in my life, I've done a positive thing just for one person with TV, which is like, you know, generally kind of a pretty moronic kind of medium. | ||
| So to be able to just do something meaningful is, you know, It's good. | ||
| Listen, it sounds amazing. | ||
| It doesn't just sound good. | ||
| It sounds like quite a work of art that you've managed to figure out a way to coordinate all these moving parts and trick someone into accepting a bunch of different versions of reality that you're presenting and get these results. | ||
| Well, I've got a big production crew that's not all me. | ||
| I've got to write the thing and design it and so on. | ||
| We kind of worked on it over the years. | ||
| We had little things that involved those kind of plots. | ||
| The first show I did like that was taking a guy who... | ||
| As with Phil in Sacrifice, actually, just bringing out someone's hero, right? | ||
| That's really what it's about. | ||
| That's kind of the story. | ||
| You're seeing somebody go through a big change, but bringing out their hero. | ||
| And the first show he did like that involved this guy who, at the end of his own journey he'd been through, finds himself on an aeroplane. | ||
| He's terrified of flying. | ||
| But we created this situation where he had to be on a flight, and he didn't know it was anything to do with us. | ||
| Everyone's an actor in the plane. | ||
| We've got hidden cameras throughout the plane. | ||
| Then there is a medical emergency. | ||
| And will somebody land the plane? | ||
| Someone needs to land the plane. | ||
| It's like, would he step up and do it? | ||
| You better land the plane. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's called Hero at 30,000 Feet. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| And just to talk through the ending, because it's kind of a spoiler, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| He does it, right? | ||
| He rises up. | ||
| Has this moment. | ||
| He goes to the cockpit. | ||
| Now he is highly suggestible, right? | ||
| I've used him because he's suggestible. | ||
| So I know that I can put him to sleep, in inverted commas, by clicking my fingers, right? | ||
| He's conditioned to that. | ||
| 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 about to walk into one of those convincing simulators that they use for pilot training. | ||
| And it's kind of a night flight. | ||
| We found out that was the most convincing thing, was to have it when it's dark. | ||
| So he now goes in, believing he's in the real cockpit of a real plane, 30,000 feet up in the air. | ||
| He's got the guy on ground control, who is in on it, obviously, as everybody is, talking him down, getting him to land the plane. | ||
| And he just... | ||
| It's just amazing. | ||
| This guy, in his mind, he's 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. | ||
| You know the game, the Michael Douglas film? | ||
| There's always been a point of reference to me. | ||
| So he comes out, there's a big party of everyone that's been on his journey, all these people, these actors that have been taking him in this direction. | ||
| Yeah, so amazing. | ||
| So I've, over the years, kind of worked with these kind of, these plots, these kind of immersive Truman Show style plots, while at the same time doing stage shows. | ||
| You know, I do a live show every year as well, which is kind of a bit more like an old-fashioned sort of magic mind-reading kind of show. | ||
| But... | ||
| 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 much work. | ||
| 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 to be convincing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And to follow the plot, not deviate at all. | ||
| And the L.A. actors we used for Sacrifice were so good. | ||
| It's just like in your blood over here. | ||
| It was so, so good. | ||
| And they were like big, at the end, they're like big sort of aggressive racist biker characters that we used. | ||
| Just terrifying! | ||
| Which is then that hilarious thing of like, they are, because they were bikers as well, so they are big, like hairy, intimidating people, but at the same time they want to know about their motivation and whether they did a right in this scene. | ||
|
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It's kind of a fun, odd combination. | |
| Wow. | ||
| What a fantastic idea for a show and so uniquely original. | ||
| I mean, it just seems like there's so much work involved in something like this. | ||
| You must obsess over that. | ||
| The process is, I come up with an idea, which is normally, I sit with a couple of guys that I write the shows with, we normally drive ourselves mad, thinking of ideas, and then one of us, normally me, goes, oh can't we just, let's just end the world and it's zombies, or let's... | ||
| We can get someone to push someone off a building. | ||
| Or with this one, because I'd done the push, I wanted to kind of do the opposite of it, something that would be saving a life, a much more redemptive story than the push. | ||
| So that idea is the first thing, and I try and combine a really strong dramatic hook with a really good reason for doing it. | ||
| Otherwise you're just making like a controversial, shocking thing for the same thing, which is of no interest. | ||
| Well, that's a beautiful perspective, too. | ||
| That you actually want to benefit someone through this crazy prank you're playing on them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Otherwise, exactly. | ||
| It would just be a crazy, horrible prank. | ||
| There is, like, part of the enjoyment of the show, I guess, is a little bit of that. | ||
| It's kind of fun. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| You know, the shows, I think, have a lot of heart and a lot of... | ||
| Thought. | ||
| What's your intent? | ||
| Your intent to be beneficial to these people is what transforms it. | ||
| You have empathy for these folks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you truly care. | ||
| That alone makes everything else better. | ||
| It makes the whole... | ||
| If the whole thing is just like, I'm smarter than these dummies and I'm just going to trick them. | ||
| I mean, we've had that show before 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 the hope. | ||
| The way that I do it, the way that I change them is through conditioning. | ||
| So this is a technique I've used a lot over the years. | ||
| You kind of take the emotional state you want the person to have at the end, break it down into components and then attach each one of those to a trigger. | ||
| So this guy, Phil, in Sacrifice, is using an app which he thinks is sort of talking to the microchip he has in him. | ||
| And we really do cut him open. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's a placebo. | ||
| We don't really put it in. | ||
| But you actually do cut him. | ||
| Yeah, we cut him. | ||
| Stitch him back up again? | ||
| Stitch him back up, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I don't think he needs stitches. | ||
| It's kind of a small cut, but it's a scalpel going in horrible. | ||
| So he thinks he's using this app, which is kind of helping motivate him. | ||
| But what it's doing, it's giving him this sound, like this little jingle. | ||
| That gets attached to all those feelings of motivation. | ||
| So that means that when he finds himself in this kind of final scene where he has this choice to step in and save a life, that we can have the same jingle on the radio that plays. | ||
| It's like that thing of you hear a song when you're breaking up with someone and it's a horrible period of your life and then five years later you hear the same song and it just brings it all back. | ||
| It's that process. | ||
| Or obviously advertising is the big example of that. | ||
| Isn't that the premise behind something like The Manchurian Candidate, that there's some way they can snap and then you go back to this state of mind where you follow their bidding? | ||
| 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 he'd be some kind of hypnotized robot, if that wouldn't even work anyway. | ||
| This is about creating a trigger. | ||
| There's feelings of empathy are important. | ||
| A lot of the show is about empathy and a lot of the show is about the desire to act. | ||
| And then he finds himself in this situation which is extreme. | ||
| He has no idea at this point it's anything to do with. | ||
| The filming's finished. | ||
| That all happened in England as far as he's concerned. | ||
| He's gone back home, had time to forget all about it, and then ends up stranded in this situation where it all happens. | ||
| And then I trigger these things off. | ||
| So I'm giving him this kind of psychological nudge, and then it's... | ||
| What will happen? | ||
| Will he rise up and take it? | ||
| Like the guy landing the plane. | ||
| Ultimately, it's that guy's decision. | ||
| And it's also, I think, it's a story about stepping out of the kind of I guess the show resonates politically but it's not a political show. | ||
| There are political narratives we get constrained by and we forget that actually it's the dialogue between the sides where humanity emerges and where we find truth. | ||
| So this is also I guess a story about a guy coming out of his particular 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. | ||
| Because I think people do – we do get caught in ruts, right? | ||
| We do get stuck on momentum. | ||
| We get stuck following the same patterns over and over again. | ||
| It's very difficult to change your life. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| Well, the thing that makes us so great at evolving, our ability to adapt, is the same thing that just – it ties us down. | ||
| So like all through life. | ||
| So from an early age, like we emerge in this world – And we're very quickly given messages about what our relationship to that world is. | ||
| This is what people are like. | ||
| This is what they'll want from you. | ||
| You are not powerful. | ||
| The world is powerful. | ||
| And that is going to be skewed. | ||
| Jung said that, I love this, that the greatest burden a child has to bear is the unlived life of its parents. | ||
| Such a great thing. | ||
| So your starting point is this skewed story. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then you go through life looking for things that just fit and recreate those patterns because they feel so comfortable. | ||
| What you learn about love from your parents, you start to bring to your adult relationships and project all that stuff on your partner. | ||
| If you think about it... | ||
| If you've had a nice, loving upbringing, you are getting a ridiculously skewed version of what love means. | ||
| Like, we know as adults how difficult it is raising kids. | ||
| We never saw that as kids. | ||
| We never saw our parents going off and screaming at each other in the next room once we'd gone to bed. | ||
| We just have this sort of impossibly, hopefully, you know, if we've had a... | ||
| Had a happy one, we get this impossible template of what love is and should be. | ||
| And then we just dump that on our poor adult partners, which nobody can live up to. | ||
| So our ability to adapt, to internalize stories about who we are and then mistake that for reality is just... | ||
| It's 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 versions of romance and interaction. | ||
| Yes, particularly with that. | ||
| I love the idea that – I don't know if you know Alain de Botton, a British philosopher and writer, and he said, you know, if you go to bed twice a week with your partner thinking, What the fuck am I doing with this person? | ||
| That's normal. | ||
| That's a normal thing. | ||
| To me, that's more useful information than how to make your relationship perfect. | ||
| These things aren't perfect. | ||
| And again, living with the understanding that... | ||
| Life is difficult. | ||
| But what about three times a week? | ||
| Three times a week. | ||
| I think that's probably pretty normal as well. | ||
| He was probably being generous. | ||
| What's the number where you should start to reconsider? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is it five? | ||
| Two good nights. | ||
| We have two good nights, though. | ||
| Five nights of hell with two of them. | ||
| She's the best. | ||
| Yeah, what do you do? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Yeah, I think the narratives that we get from fiction, they're very confusing to people. | ||
| You know, particularly people that are very romantic. | ||
| They have these ideas that their life is going to be like one of their favorite films. | ||
| And that's what they're looking for. | ||
| They're holding out. | ||
| You know, they're holding out for when the music plays and the close-up is there. | ||
| And those stories... | ||
| Going back to this guy, Landon Boton, he read a lovely book on this. | ||
| The trouble with those films and those stories, they stop when the people fall in love and get together. | ||
| That's when it starts. | ||
| That's when the tough stuff starts that we can do with some good, strong, fictional frameworks to absorb. | ||
| That's when the tough stuff... | ||
| It's like death. | ||
| It's the same thing, isn't it? | ||
| 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 that we have absorbed, I guess, is that of the brave battle that someone's fighting, which is so unhelpful for the person that's in that situation. | ||
| It makes everyone else maybe feel better, but just adds like eventual failure and letting everyone else down to this person's Because what we should feel at that time is, you know, that this is when we can bring our, if we have the opportunity to bring our stories to some kind of ending. | ||
| You know, if you watch a film or read a book, that final scene makes sense of everything that's happened before. | ||
| This doesn't happen in life, it just kind of ends. | ||
| So we should be, like, author of our stories more than at any point. | ||
| Before death and if we have the opportunity, what happens is the opposite. | ||
| We become like cameos in this story. | ||
| 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 mythical stories, just these things that just give us a sense of where our experience fits into a wider sense of meaning. | ||
| 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 we've kind of lost touch of something. | ||
| We've lost a little bit of touch with nature and 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 food comes from, actually seeing death. | ||
| Even if your dog is sick, you bring them to the vet, the vet puts them down. | ||
| All these things that people probably experience firsthand for hundreds and hundreds of years, particularly raising animals. | ||
| And that is just completely removed from the equation for most folks. | ||
| Yeah, that sort of embodied dialogue with ecology, with nature. | ||
| was interesting. | ||
| There's like our view of like what, what the kind of indigenous peoples and what's like the idea of the shame. | ||
| And Our view of what the shaman is is so skewed by our kind of Western mode. | ||
| What they're tapping into is not like it isn't the supernatural. | ||
| That's not really the mode. | ||
| What you have, and you still have it in these indigenous peoples that sort of say live like Rural Asia and so on, where these ways of living are still going on. | ||
| What's clear is it's not the supernatural. | ||
| It isn't the spirit. | ||
| It's all about a really easy... | ||
| Relationship with the natural world. | ||
| So an example of this is a great book called The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams, who actually was a magician originally, who went out and lived amongst his people. | ||
| And he talks about this and he said he was staying in this compound, this shaman's compound, and the shaman's wife would bring him some fruit every morning, But she also had these little, like, banana leaves with ricin, and she was going off and doing something else with those, and he asked where they were going, and she said, oh, those are for the spirits of the house, right? | ||
| And then she'd come back without them. | ||
| So 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 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 spirits. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| And 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 big events, and ant infestation would be just disastrous for them. | ||
| So the offering to the spirits of the house is a kind of a dialogue with the ants. | ||
| We're going to put this rice out. | ||
| If you just have the rice, if we do this every day, will you leave us alone? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's quite simple dialogue and this lovely kind of embodied relationship with nature that, of course, we're so far from here. | ||
| So interestingly, we do tend to pack a lot of ideas into the supernatural, even like the unconscious and depth psychology and so on, which I'm a big fan of. | ||
| But we can take all the unknown stuff and shove it into these kind of bottomless pits. | ||
| Whereas actually, interestingly, if you trace it back, it seems like it just wasn't like that. | ||
| It was this very... | ||
| Well, doesn't it depend on what they're doing, particularly with shamans? | ||
| If a shaman is concentrating on psychedelic drugs, if they're an ayahuasca church and they're giving people dimethyltryptamine, they are dealing with the supernatural. | ||
| That's a very bizarre and intense transformative experience they're putting people through. | ||
| And there's different... | ||
| That term shaman, it really... | ||
| It kind of was very rare, very rare to be discussed up until about maybe 20 plus years ago. | ||
| And it seems like there's been some sort of a psychedelic revolution over the last couple of decades. | ||
| And it's almost become a little bit too popular here where a bunch of people are profiting from it or they're opportunists and they're labeling themselves as shaman. | ||
| I think the term that they use in Peru, they call them plastic shaman, and they're setting up shop and putting together this ayahuasca brew and having all these Americans come in, fly in, and Europeans are looking for some, you know, air quote, spiritual experience. | ||
| And these are not necessarily pure shaman in the greatest sense of the word. | ||
| It's a different... | ||
| This is what we think of. | ||
| When we think of shaman today, we think of someone who conducts a psychedelic ritual. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Which I know very little of. | ||
| Have you had any experience? | ||
|
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No. | |
| I'm excited if I put real coffee in with a decaf. | ||
| How come? | ||
| Why haven't you tried something? | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| Psilocybin? | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| No. | ||
| I never even smoked a cigarette or anything. | ||
| It's a real magician's thing. | ||
| It's kind of like... | ||
| Pendulet's like that, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very common. | ||
| It's sort of a... | ||
| I think it's like a neurotic control thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| During that kind of period where if you're going to do it, you're going to be doing it then. | ||
| And then... | ||
| And then that kind of time passes and it just ends up being something that gets missed. | ||
| Like a lot of magicians don't drink, don't smoke. | ||
| Penn had the strangest response when I asked him about that. | ||
| He said, I think we've figured out everything we can from those things already. | ||
| I was like, but you have it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You haven't. | ||
| We've learned everything we can learn from these psychedelic trips, was what his perception was. | ||
| I don't know if he's amended that since then. | ||
| This was over a decade ago we had this conversation. | ||
| But that thought process is fascinating to me. | ||
| Because when you're talking about this transformative experience that you've put people through with these shows, setting them up, they think the world is different and changed, and then they change because of that. | ||
| I think what we're missing is our... | ||
| It's the experience of transcendence that's important. | ||
| You know, religions originally gave people that. | ||
| There was a time in history 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 I'm an atheist but that... | ||
| I could see that what you've left with thousands of years later is quite easy to knock down and kind of poke fun of. | ||
| But actually, at some level, I think it is not doing a very good job of, but pointing back to the original experience, the importance of transcendence. | ||
| Now, you can de-spiritualize that. | ||
| It doesn't have to be about anything overtly spiritual. | ||
| Finding something bigger than yourself in life and throwing yourself into that thing is how we find meaning, right? | ||
| And meaning trumps happiness or anything else. | ||
| And that might be through your kids. | ||
| I guess this is why people generally sort of – we have kids at a certain point. | ||
| Our ego gets to sort of step down. | ||
| What we do instead, I guess, is hence the interest in these dodgy shamans. | ||
| 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 of transcendence. | ||
| We think they will, because we think a rich and glamorous life will lift us up and out of our boring everyday lives, but of course they don't work. | ||
| There's something There's something about that relationship to the mysterious that even me as an atheist and the rest of it, 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 spiritual. | ||
| It just is a kind of a respect for and an understanding that serving something bigger than yourself, whatever that is, is an important part of being human. | ||
| I like that that keeps coming back to you, this recognition of your work as being something that's bigger than yourself. | ||
| You pour yourself into this and through that experience you somehow transcend, that something comes out of it. | ||
| You grow with the creation of this thing in some way and while it's happening you're about as alive as you can be, right? | ||
| Me? | ||
| Well, I'm happy if, you know, my breath is decent at four in the afternoon. | ||
| I have very, very low ambitions with this stuff. | ||
| But it's certainly for the guys going through it or people going through it. | ||
| I hope it gives them, you know, a profound and transformative experience. | ||
| For me, I... I get very... | ||
| I get kind of a bit low if I'm not actively engaged in something creative. | ||
| So that is important for me. | ||
| But, you know, the painting or whatever, these are all things I can... | ||
| You were referring to the painting in the exact same way. | ||
| Something bigger than yourself. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Projects. | ||
| Something to occupy your mind and your spirit and your creative juices. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that's a really... | ||
| It's a vital part of your life making sense. | ||
| 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 is gone. | ||
| That's the real killer, is lack of meaning. | ||
| And we find meaning through... | ||
| Throwing ourselves into something bigger and recognizing that. | ||
| And I think maybe the reason why the sort of work on myth and so on is sort of feeling like it's coming back into the dialogue now is because that's something kind of real, brackets, fictional, to kind of hang on to. | ||
| These are important. | ||
| I think they articulate something that needs to be recognized and somehow honored within life. | ||
| Do you know who Tyson Fury is? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| He's a British heavyweight boxer who's the lineal heavyweight champion, and he went through severe depression. | ||
| He won the title 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. | ||
| Gained a ton of weight, started drinking every night, carrying on, and got suicidal and was thinking about driving his Ferrari into a bridge. | ||
| And then decided that he was going to make another run at the heavyweight championship. | ||
| And so through all this depression and suicidal thoughts and all these different things... | ||
| What turned him around was goal setting. | ||
| The idea that he had something to work towards and something to live for and then getting in shape and then forcing himself to be on this path to try to achieve that goal. | ||
| And then what happened? | ||
| The fight takes place December 1st. | ||
| It hasn't happened yet. | ||
| The rematch hasn't happened yet. | ||
| But he's lost more than 160 pounds. | ||
| He's slim and he looks fantastic and healthy. | ||
| I mean, he was really fat and really large and very, very depressed. | ||
| And now he's really happy and no medication. | ||
| And that's the craziest thing about it is we're always searching for some pill that's going to fix whatever weird, funky path the mind is on. | ||
| But for him, what he found was that goal setting, like having something that you're striving towards and working towards. | ||
| 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? | ||
| What if you win the title? | ||
| What if you fight Deontay Wilder on December 1st and you beat him and you become the champion? | ||
| He goes, oh, maybe I'll... | ||
| Bloom back up to 400 pounds again and get depressed. | ||
| I'm like, don't say that! | ||
| Because I'm worried that he's being honest because he has been down that road before. | ||
| But it's fascinating that he achieved real happiness from attempting to work towards these goals and building towards these goals and having this vision in his mind. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So bear in mind, prior to Christianity, you kind of had the Stoics. | ||
| For 500 years, they were the hugely popular philosophical school. | ||
| And... | ||
| They're all about, bear in mind, they're also the first OX 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 Western rational way, but they kind of reflect some of those ideas that were going on in Buddhism at the time. | ||
| The idea of happiness was very much about your relationship to the current moment and your emotional state in the moment. | ||
| And then also stepping back from a whole life and, you know, they said you couldn't really judge anyone as happy until they're on the deathbed and then what is the story that's emerged? | ||
| What happened with Christianity is for the first time there was this This new message that, no, no, you suffer now and your reward will happen in the future. | ||
| And it's an amazing idea, particularly if you're suffering. | ||
| And that was, 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 ladder, that idea of sort of climbing towards your sort of This shimmering golden haze of a reward, heaven, whatever it is, off in the distance. | ||
| That's now the corporate ladder, right? | ||
| That idea, that mode 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 16, you're choosing your... | ||
| A-levels, right, which is what you finish school with, to then decide what you're going to major in at university in order to then what job you're going to get at the end of that, to what promotion you could get and what you're going to work your way up to. | ||
| And what is that moment? | ||
| What is that point that ends? | ||
| You know, we are so fixated... | ||
| On what's coming. | ||
| And I know this is, in a way, it's sort of like, well, this is familiar in terms of, you know, the importance of mindfulness and so on. | ||
| But it also ties in with, like, our fear of death. | ||
| You know, death is interesting unpacking why death's frightening, because, you know, we're not going to be there when it happens and all those things. | ||
| But it seems to be that it's frightening because our projects will end, you know, whether it's your... | ||
| Kids or grandkids that you won't see grow up. | ||
| There's always something that's going to come to an end. | ||
| And the antidote to that seems to be just reappraising that constant fixation on the future. | ||
| So that's why I hear that and how amazing he's found that now. | ||
| But I can't help but think, as you said, and then what? | ||
| I couldn't agree more about this idea of working towards something when you're in school that you're You're almost trying to reach an end that never comes. | ||
| I mean, you're building for something. | ||
| And also the pressure that they put on children to start that off at age 14, 15, 16, and to pick what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life. | ||
| And this idea that one day you're going to, air quotes, make it. | ||
| And then you're going to make it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if you did, you'd be like Tyson Fury in that situation. | ||
| Now what? | ||
| Like this friend of mine, I said, who built up the company and then sold it and was depressed and had to go into depression. | ||
| That need, the thing that has been driving you, that's still there and that needs somewhere to go. | ||
| And it's like you're much better off having something unfulfilled that at least is taking care of that need. | ||
| So you need something that's going to be perpetually, you know, rewarding, perpetually. | ||
| Stimulating. | ||
| Stimulating. | ||
| I mean, the human mind needs to engage in puzzles and projects and creative endeavors and all 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 inspiration. | ||
| When we're talking about all 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, in a lot of ways, it's a type of fuel for the mind. | ||
| And inspiration is a type of fuel for the mind. | ||
| A great book is fuel for the mind. | ||
| Even sometimes people, I mean, this fast food culture that we live in, we like it in a little tiny meme, a little inspirational meme on someone's Instagram page. | ||
| Oh, I like that. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| It makes me feel good. | ||
| It gives you a little bit of some nutrition for your mind. | ||
| But at the same time, it's squaring that with how... | ||
| That life is, it's actually really ambiguous and complex. | ||
| And 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, yes. | ||
| And the stuff that we're unwilling to acknowledge. | ||
| Yeah, that's the stuff that comes back and bites us again and again. | ||
| Chews at you in the background constantly. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Jung's model of psychoanalysis, I love it. | ||
| He talks about the gods. | ||
| He was very interested in talking about the Greek model of the gods, because they didn't necessarily worship the gods and believe that they were real divinities in the way that we might talk about God now. | ||
| But what they were doing was honouring these different sort of... | ||
| Clusters of energy, like Eros. | ||
| You honour Eros because it's important to honour the erotic urge. | ||
| And if you don't, if you don't honour that, it's going to come back and get you. | ||
| So the homophobic televangelist that gets caught in bed with some guy and it's some massive scandal, it will come back and bite you. | ||
| If you're just trying to bury something in you, it will come back and bite you. | ||
| And I like that. | ||
| But it just means that life is ambivalent and complex. | ||
| And I think the best we can do is try and... | ||
| And Be conscious of that and not be constantly reducing things to easy packages. | ||
| But at the same time, how else do you navigate forward without reducing things to an easy story? | ||
| That's the only way you can make sense and move forward is to have an easy story. | ||
| So that's like a whole lifetime's preoccupation. | ||
| It is all messy. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| There's almost nowhere to go. | ||
| You can take it to the point that you can't move. | ||
| You don't have enough time. | ||
| Yeah, exactly, exactly. | ||
| But consciousness is, awareness is probably the most we can aim for, at least in our own lives. | ||
| God, you can only sort your own life out, can't you? | ||
| It probably also plays into hypnotic suggestibility and my own work in terms of suggestibility, because we are, we're looking for direction, which is essentially that, the simple message, the easy message, we're so, we're just kind of wired to grab hold of that and absorb it, 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 suggestibility is. | ||
| You're essentially confused and looking for an answer, and at that moment someone is giving you the answer 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 you can clearly show, like, this is what's happening, and that's how it works, and this is why it works. | ||
| There is. | ||
| I don't think there's an easy answer to that. | ||
| But there is, like I said, forget the hypnotists and the performers. | ||
| There is a whole, a big body of 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 is kind of the question. | ||
| Because you can't ever quite climb inside a person's head and know. | ||
| But I... In one of the shows I did, I did a show where I took, you know Sihan Sihan who assassinated Bobby Kennedy? | ||
| So he said he was hypnotized by the CIA. So that's his story. | ||
| He sets out how that happened. | ||
| So we took that. | ||
| We said, well, let's do it. | ||
| Let's set up an assassination and see whether or not... | ||
| Is it plausible? | ||
| I mean, if you take someone that's highly suggestible... | ||
|
unidentified
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Is it plausible? | |
| Do you believe it is? | ||
| So we did it. | ||
|
unidentified
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We did it. | |
| We got a guy, and the show starts with a big audience of people that are up for taking part. | ||
| I find the most suggestible person in the audience. | ||
| And by the end of it, he finds himself in a packed theatre, doesn't know it's being filmed. | ||
| He's got what he thinks is a real gun, which he thinks is a thing that he's got to carry with him and for a bit of filming he's going to do later, but he has a real gun on him. | ||
| And we set off these little triggers in the same way Sir Hansenhan said happened to him, right? | ||
| So there's a girl with a polka dot dress. | ||
| There's a sound that he hears, which we had as someone's ringtone next to him. | ||
| The little triggers that they had apparently implanted were Would you do it? | ||
| Would that guy? | ||
| He has no idea this is being filmed, doesn't know it's part of the show, is in a packed theatre. | ||
| We've got Stephen Fry on stage, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| And he does it, right? | ||
| He stands up and does it. | ||
| He fires what he believes is a real gun. | ||
| It was a weird thing of expecting pandemonium from the audience. | ||
| And there's that weird normalcy bias that kicks in where everyone just sat there thinking, is this part of the show? | ||
| We had all these crowd control people and nothing happened. | ||
| But he did it. | ||
| He shoots him. | ||
| But I mentioned that because at the beginning of it... | ||
| We're doing these tests with the guy and, you know, the people in the room and sort of looking at what is going on with hypnosis. | ||
| So we had an ice bath and I hypnotized him and told him under hypnosis he'd be able to comfortably get in the ice bath and he wouldn't feel the temperature. | ||
| And I had no idea if he would because that's a real test. | ||
| Like if he's just sort of playing along at some level... | ||
| You're not going to get in an ice bath like that. | ||
| Even if there's some kind of physiological state you can tap into to make that possible that some people with training can do, as a first time just step in and do it, he's not going to be able to do that. | ||
| And I had these two clinical hypnotists with me. | ||
| They'd actually made a bet on whether or not he'd do it. | ||
| They thought he wouldn't do it. | ||
| I 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 kind of linked up to a thermograph thing. | ||
| We had to pull him out if he was at a certain temperature. | ||
| I think if it got to whatever it was, 50, whatever that means, we had to take him out. | ||
| And that was extraordinary. | ||
| So although I think of it in very behavioral terms, I don't think of it as any kind of special, weird state. | ||
| Then it's like, well, then, you know, what was going on with that guy? | ||
| Well, it's a physiological possibility that we can do that because somebody can do it through lots of training. | ||
| So maybe it just kind of with this guy cut to the chase and he was able to just do it. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| Would the next guy do it hypnotized? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Now, what about the ethical complications that are involved in having a guy literally perform murder? | ||
| I mean, he doesn't know. | ||
| Well, he's not actually doing it, of course, because it's an actor. | ||
| Yes, but he doesn't know that he's not performing murder. | ||
| He thinks he's a murderer. | ||
| And then you put it on television. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have a murderer. | ||
| He's a murderer. | ||
| I mean, there's a good case. | ||
| But that's a show where he's being, like, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And this is a thing that happened in Dallas. | ||
| There was a young man who was very suggestible, and he had some serious psychological problems, probably, and he was a radical. | ||
| And he wanted to Become some sort of a terrorist, whether it was Al-Qaeda or ISIS or whatever. | ||
| And the FBI infiltrated this guy, his life, and set him up and got him, or whatever organization it was, whether it was CIA or FBI. They organized some sort of an artificial bomb. | ||
| They got this bomb to him, had him set up the bomb, and then gave him this 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. | ||
| Yes, he was genuinely in jail for life. | ||
| They talked him into doing it. | ||
| They provided him with the bomb. | ||
| The bomb didn't exist. | ||
| It wasn't a real bomb. | ||
| It wasn't going to kill anybody. | ||
| And they took this person and essentially did a version of what you did, but it wasn't funny. | ||
| It wasn't for a television show, but through the same intent, through this guy's... | ||
| Or different intent, hopefully. | ||
| Well, for him, the intent was to kill. | ||
| And the intent to kill Stephen Fry, or the intent to kill whatever innocent people he was going to get with this bomb, essentially... | ||
| They were both talked into doing it. | ||
| There's no real evidence this guy would have ever done it without the FBI or CIA or whoever the fuck else it was that did that. | ||
| Yeah, but if that had ended with them stepping in and going, 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 debriefing to make sure you're okay. | ||
| That would be a different story. | ||
| And somehow the ends would... | ||
| Then it would be like a... | ||
| maybe even a fascinating and valuable Thing to do if if the guy was fine at the end of it and happy with it and it wasn't in jail Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, well that's kind of more the world that we're in here and you know, this is a no I'm not making a judgment on what you're doing I think what you're doing is awesome. | ||
| But I mean, I think what they did is kind of fucked up. | ||
| And not just fucked up, but... | ||
| It's crazy that this is this waste of resources. | ||
| I mean, maybe I'm incorrect and maybe this person was on that path anyway and they recognized it and they stepped in. | ||
| They said, listen, this guy's gonna do something and we're gonna help him 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 whatever he needs, then we'll get him. | ||
| Maybe they did it that way. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't really, you know, obviously I wasn't there when all this was going down. | ||
| But it seems eerily parallel. | ||
| Yeah, well, yeah. | ||
| My concern is, I guess what makes, hopefully what makes this show compelling are these sorts of questions. | ||
| The sort of implications beyond a controlled thing with one guy who's fine. | ||
| Also, it opens the door to the possibility that this has been done in the past with this Manchurian candidate possibility. | ||
| Yeah, well, yeah. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Well, from your perspective, you must think it's possible, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, after making that show, I sort of felt, well, that worked. | ||
| It doesn't mean that his story is true, of course. | ||
| It doesn't really necessarily have to relate to that at all. | ||
| But you did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It sort of kind of worked. | ||
| It worked. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Why did you write a book about happiness? | ||
| I wrote a book about happiness because the Stoics had really resonated with me. | ||
| I studied law, I was supposed to be a lawyer, and I graduated and I kind of was living in Bristol, this lovely city in England, and making my living as a magician because that was the hobby that I'd started. | ||
| And I was just kind of thinking, well, I need to, at some point, will this just grow into a job? | ||
| I don't know, but I know that my priorities are just kind of, I want... | ||
| My life, my days, to feel like this is good, everything's in the right place, and this is kind of an enjoyable and worthwhile pastime, or worthwhile existence, and I never really thought beyond that, so I've never had any kind of ambition, genuinely, of any sort, which is why, you know, I don't really, I'm not a whole goal-setting thing, particularly. | ||
| 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 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 figures and this. | ||
| My interest was genuinely, am I enjoying what I'm doing and is it worthwhile? | ||
| And then I read the Stoics and although that's not like their central message, it's a big part of what they write about, you know, not... | ||
| Not trying to control things that are out of your control. | ||
| Not attaching yourself to things that leave you kind of emotionally kind of vulnerable. | ||
| And, you know, just your relationship to the present moment and so on. | ||
| And it really resonated. | ||
| So I read a lot and it took me off into other directions and I started writing and I wrote this book on happiness. | ||
| It took me three years to write it while I was on tour. | ||
| So three years but blocks of writing, not like three solid years. | ||
| And also that meant by the end of it, I kind of had grown and changed and felt differently. | ||
| And I think for anyone that knows about stoicism, and it's an immensely valuable resource in terms of if what you want is a sense of feeling centered and a kind of emotional robustness in your life and, you know, if you suffer from anxiety and so on, it's phenomenal. | ||
| I think that where it Where it slightly doesn't deliver is the importance of anxiety. | ||
| It's all about avoiding anxiety. | ||
| 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 problem is that I'm too, I'm very good at avoiding stress, very good at avoiding anxiety, but the danger is, I don't know, am I going to grow or, you know, I'm just going to just be too comfortable. | ||
| That's not, you know, that's not necessarily a good thing. | ||
| So by the end of the book, I kind of could feel the edges of stoicism in terms of the importance of anxiety and not just living too comfortably. | ||
| They were movers and shakers. | ||
| There were people that changed the world. | ||
| Marcus Aurelius, the greatest Philosopher king, really. | ||
| He was the emperor, most powerful man, who probably ruled the earth and was one of the great Stoics. | ||
| So it's not a recipe for complacency, which it can often sound like when you talk about this kind of tranquility and non-attachment. | ||
| But it's a very robust kind of language. | ||
| They talk about being like a rock where the waves are lashing against you. | ||
| And I prefer the image of a sort of I don't know if you know Martha Nussbaum, who's an American philosopher who writes a lot about these things, but she talks about being more porous, like a rock that the water can move through. | ||
| And I think that's a more helpful image. | ||
| I think that's a good way, I think, of stepping out into life. | ||
| If you can have a... | ||
| A sort of a robustness, but at the same time, a 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 I think that's a good starting point for life. | ||
| So I wrote this book, Happy. | ||
| It's actually just become available in the US on Amazon. | ||
| I don't think you'll find it in any bookshops, but because of the... | ||
| I'm hopefully doing a Broadway show next year and these Netflix specials and things that are... | ||
| So it is now available. | ||
| And... | ||
| 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, and it was because this amazing three-year writing project had ended, and I realized, yeah, the importance of some kind of creative pursuit or something that brings you out of yourself is so important. | ||
| That's fascinating that in the embracing of the anxiety of the difficulty of the task and finding upon its completion that you feel sad. | ||
| Oddly sad. | ||
| Well, it's kind of proof of concept then, right? | ||
| I mean, what you're saying is like in this theme that you keep saying over and over again. | ||
| Putting yourself into something bigger than you, something that you're attempting to work through and that through this difficulty and all the struggle and trying to put this, you gain some sort of intangible benefit from this. | ||
| You seem like you're someone that seeks out those things. | ||
| You seem like you've always immersed yourself fully in things that would do that. | ||
| Yes, I'm a firm believer in the importance of difficult tasks. | ||
| I think seeking comfort is one of the worst things a person can do in terms of achieving overall happiness. | ||
| I think overall happiness, a lot of it comes through this amazing sense of wonder and the unknown and possibilities and working towards things with this embracing of having no idea what the result is going to be. | ||
| No idea where this is going to go. | ||
| And being genuinely nervous about it every step of the way. | ||
| And do you find, 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 they'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 not an easy thing, it's not an intuitive thing, that maybe life is essentially difficult, and these lovely happy moments we have are wonderful, but they're not the central force of life, which is that it is difficult. | ||
| And if you want a philosophy of life, it has to work at the difficult moments, doesn't it? | ||
| Otherwise it's not really going to support you. | ||
| I think it's also the attitude in which you embrace those difficult moments and how you approach them. | ||
| You know, if you relish them and understand that there's going to be some genuine benefit from getting through these. | ||
| And whether it's a physical thing or a mental thing, whether it's a creative thing, whatever it is that's difficult, like just embrace this massive struggle And enjoy this. | ||
| Just the puzzle of it all. | ||
| The majesty of the unknown. | ||
| And then when you get through it on the other end, you get a different level of happiness. | ||
| You get this powerful earned happiness. | ||
| Because you've grown and you've moved forward and you don't. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You don't cross the road on your own without having to let go of your mother's hand at some point. | ||
| This is the death and resurrection, isn't it? | ||
| That's why these myths do have some resonance. | ||
| Something has to die before something new can grow. | ||
| Something has to be let go of in order to step forward. | ||
| So if you're going to grow, there has to be anxiety and disturbance and some sort of death in the metaphorical sense. | ||
| But that's tough. | ||
| It doesn't come easily. | ||
| No, it doesn't come easily. | ||
| But that's also what's beautiful about it. | ||
| If it just came easily, I don't think it would be appreciated. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And you wouldn't be doing it. | ||
| And there's all this resistance to even engage in it in the first place. | ||
| It's hard to write the first word of a book, right? | ||
| The first word. | ||
| Sometimes you're just sitting there or anything you're trying to do. | ||
| The first step of a 10-mile run. | ||
| All those things are the most difficult thing. | ||
| Once you're going, it's not nearly as hard. | ||
| It's getting going. | ||
| There's something about overcoming all this anticipation and all the weirdness of it all. | ||
| And then once you do it and you realize you can do it, it enriches you in all your future attempts. | ||
| So something like you deciding to run a marathon would help you decide to write a book. | ||
| All these different things are interconnected. | ||
| The poet Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke, talks about... | ||
| I always love this image of, like, some people live in a big room, and some people live in a small room, and some people just pace up and down by the window. | ||
| I kind of read that, although I do a lot with my life, but I think instinctively I'm the guy that's just sort of pacing up and down by the window. | ||
| Instinctively? | ||
| How so? | ||
| In that I'm a little shy, and I'm very good at avoiding... | ||
| I just think you're smart. | ||
| To avoid these things? | ||
| No, I mean, shy is... | ||
| A lot of it is like, look, the interaction between human beings is so... | ||
| Who knows what the fuck's going to happen? | ||
| I mean, you don't know how people are going to perceive you. | ||
| There's potential bad feelings that could come with that. | ||
| 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 shy. | ||
| And I'm British, so all of that is sort of like tripled. | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| Ramped up. | ||
| Time 10. Yeah, ramped up. | ||
| I think it's the case with everybody. | ||
| I mean, the reason for shyness is there's a terrible feeling when you're rejected. | ||
| You know, meeting someone who doesn't enjoy the way you've presented yourself is an awful feeling that will haunt you for hours, if not days. | ||
| Three in the morning. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if I've had interactions with people, and then two weeks later, I'll be putting gas in my car. | ||
| I just go... | ||
| What did I say? | ||
| Why did I say it like that? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| All of that is – there's a reason why people have some sort of a weird anxiety about interactions with people. | ||
| And it's also the stuff that – which is why the difficulty is so worth embracing because if you can – If you can embrace it, that's where there is a kind of oddly sublime space, because you know that's the real stuff of life, and therefore that's the stuff that actually binds everyone together. | ||
| And that the happy moments... | ||
| Well, they might just be happy, which is great, and they're wonderful, but... | ||
| You just haven't got all the information at that point, right? | ||
| That's kind of what's going on. | ||
| So when we're embroiled in the difficulty, I think that's when we're most human, and it doesn't necessarily make it any easier by its nature, but there is a real value to that. | ||
| There is a level of growth and a kind of a sort of... | ||
| Just a voice somewhere in the background that is... | ||
| Or is just a note of... | ||
| This is what binds everyone together. | ||
| And I think, as you said, it's a better type of happiness, but it doesn't come easy. | ||
| But I think life is about... | ||
| Growing up is about tolerating ambiguity, isn't it? | ||
| More than anything. | ||
| when we're infants we scream and someone comes and gives us the thing that makes us 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 because they thought they're damaging their kids and he had this great message of like you've actually what the mother or the the principal caregiver needs to be is good enough | ||
| what she actually needs to do is to gently let down her infant right because if you uh if you 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. | ||
| So instead, what your mother caregiver needs to do is to let you down. | ||
| It needs to disillusion you. | ||
| You need to learn, sometimes I'll scream and I won't get those things and that that's okay. | ||
| So likewise, you know, in life, like, living with disillusionment is, like, that's fine. | ||
| That's how it is. | ||
| And if we don't have that, if we live out this sort of fantasy that we're owed, that we're owed something, which is why I loathe, like, the secret, that idea that the universe is arranging itself around our banal fucking wishes or And it's always like necklaces and objects. | ||
| And the fact that she sort of says, oh, this all goes back to Plato. | ||
| I mean, they couldn't have been any further from the idea of, you know, wanting all these kind of material gains. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| I've heard it a lot in LA. 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 idea that people can manifest things with their mind. | ||
| And it comes from, again, discussing this with people who have become successful, and they're looking for a reason as to why they're successful. | ||
| And it's very hard to accredit luck or chance with your success. | ||
| Well, it's an element. | ||
| An element. | ||
| Yeah, not the whole story, but you don't... | ||
| The secret thing is an element. | ||
| The power of positive thinking is an element. | ||
| All these things are elements. | ||
| But they're all combined with circumstance, luck, genetics... | ||
| Cultural interactions, the way human beings, just the time of the year you're born, 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, where are you living? | ||
| I mean, all these things have a huge factor in your success. | ||
| Try being an entrepreneur in Ethiopia. | ||
| I mean, it's a different experience than being, you know, an entrepreneur. | ||
| A tech startup guy in San Francisco. | ||
| Clearly, one of them has an advantage. | ||
| And there's a lot of those things that play into each other. | ||
| And to say, well, you know, the guy in Ethiopia, he just wasn't thinking about it the right way. | ||
| He didn't make a wishboard and put his pictures of his house, his Ferrari in front of it, or whatever the fuck he's trying to... | ||
| It's the infant's urge. | ||
| It's the screaming and the universe will provide. | ||
| It's okay that the universe doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| That should be our starting point of living maturely. | ||
| The universe doesn't care. | ||
| Well, it's a perspective enhancer. | ||
| The universe in and of itself is a perspective enhancer. | ||
| If you can go somewhere in the country where there's no light pollution and see the Milky Way, You get this, okay, okay, this is a lot bigger than I'm thinking. | ||
| I think it's one of the real problems that we have with our society, with electrical lights that sort of blind out the stars. | ||
| We don't get humbled. | ||
| There's the book I mentioned, Speller the Sensuous, this guy David Abrams, who was out living in rural East Asia. | ||
| Described at the very beginning, this amazing image. | ||
| He was living in this hut, and 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, with rain. | ||
| He steps out, and you have this incredible star-filled clear sky. | ||
| It's pitch black apart from that, right? | ||
| So a star-filled sky. | ||
| It's reflected perfectly like a mirror in this drenched, enormous paddy field that it's in. | ||
| There's fireflies everywhere in between flying around, right? | ||
| These little specks of light. | ||
| And he had no sense of what was up, what was down, which he had totally disoriented. | ||
| This feeling of just falling through space. | ||
| It's a great opening to the book. | ||
| We don't get a lot of that. | ||
| We don't get a lot of that nowadays. | ||
| No, we miss that part, the galactic part. | ||
| We really do. | ||
| It's so unfortunate. | ||
| Whenever I'm out in the country and I look up, I see it, I go, oh. | ||
| I was in Utah a couple of months ago, and we were way in the mountains, and there was no light, just nothing. | ||
| And you look up it's just filled with stars every inch of the sky had stars on it It's just it's it's so humbling and And I think it's such a powerful image for human beings and it's inspired so much pondering throughout human history and so much philosophy and so much of the way people interpret our position in the universe is based on this image, | ||
| this undeniable image of the cosmos. | ||
| That it's so magnificent and yet in our Amazing technological Society that we've created we 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 fucking 7-eleven lights and The more we lose touch with that not just not just that but the wider sense of the that The mystery that is represented by, oh yeah, I don't know everything. | ||
| I don't know everything. | ||
| Then, sadly, what do we have? | ||
| We have people like me. | ||
| We have magicians doing tricks and psychic mediums pretending to connect you with the dead. | ||
| That's like our tawdry answer to providing a sense of mystery. | ||
| They're just hustlers. | ||
| It's horrendous. | ||
| I sat in a studio audience once and watching a psychic, it was one of those TV filmed ones where there's an audience. | ||
| It was just like, so before filming starts he came out and he said, so is there anybody here that's hoping, you know, hoping that someone's going to come through and all these hands go up and he just asked people, so 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 drowned and he was wearing a red sweater. | ||
| Okay, well, I'll let you know if he comes through. | ||
| And then they start filming and he just says all those things to them. | ||
| I think the reason why that stuff is like, people do believe it, is that the lie is so ugly that it's so much easier to believe something amazing must be going on there than just, is it just that ugly and pathetic a lie? | ||
| It was such a horrible experience. | ||
| There's so many of them. | ||
| I mean, they have a television show. | ||
| There was a medium television show where this woman was connecting people with their dead relatives and it was so fake. | ||
| The questions were shitty. | ||
| It was so poorly thought out. | ||
| It wasn't just a lie. | ||
| It was a lie by a moron. | ||
| That's a shame. | ||
| In one of my shows, I got like 50 people up on stage, had like an audience thing set up on stage, and I was doing mediumship with them, and providing like very accurate information, but at the same time saying, you know, I'm lying to you. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Your grandmother's telling me, well, she's not telling me anything, I'm making this up, you understand. | ||
| So it was interesting. | ||
| Interesting kind of like space, right? | ||
| And then afterwards, I think it was the first night of doing the show, I went out the stage door and I was talking to people there and there was a girl who'd seen the show and she said, 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'm not really doing it. | ||
| That's kind of the point. | ||
| She said, oh no, no, I understand. | ||
| I know you can't really do it, but would you be able to put me in touch with her? | ||
| It's amazing capacity for just this kind of dissonance. | ||
| 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 read whatever it was, whether it's Mormonism and Joseph Campbell, the 14-year-old boy who found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus that only he could read with his magic seer stone. | ||
| If you have any critical thinking left in you at all at that point, you put the book down and go, what the fuck am I doing with my life? | ||
| But people don't want that. | ||
| The universe is so open-ended and the possibility of... | ||
| Your existence expiring at any moment and you just vanishing into nothingness and this consciousness just literally stopping. | ||
| The lights go black and that's it. | ||
| It's so terrifying to us that we 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 sort of, for me, an unexpected comfort that comes with this sort of... | ||
| The meaninglessness of it, which I've only recently found that all of the people in your life and the people that you work with and see a lot of that annoy you and end up being a constant source of niggling, irritation. | ||
| We have people like that. | ||
| Or people that we admire and maybe are a bit intimidated by. | ||
| They're going to be the people that just populated your life at one point. | ||
| And it will amount to no more than that, but they'll be There'll be the people that were there, and it's hard to articulate, but 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 at the end of the day, it's all... | ||
| None of that's going to matter. | ||
| The guy that's annoying you every day, that's going to be... | ||
| That was that guy that was with you all your life kind of annoying you, but that was like one of these people that populated your life. | ||
| I find it a very... | ||
| A very powerful kind of just reset in terms of sort of attitudes towards people that engender any kind of nervousness, irritation, intimidation, any of those things. | ||
| It's like, yeah, these are just, these are my, it sounds, you know, but these are my fellow people. | ||
| These will be the people that, these will be the characters, the people that populated my life. | ||
| And then that's, It's kind of a nice thing. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| It does. | ||
| So in embracing that there is no great grand meaning to it all, this sort of lets you relax. | ||
| Like the annoyance or the intimidation doesn't matter. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| They're just going through their own shit as well. | ||
| I'm just a character in their lives. | ||
| But that's kind of nice that, like, oh, this guy was – this person was with me every day. | ||
| Or even that famous person that – Maybe I never even met, but how weird that that was just a force within my life, that that person represented something. | ||
| I said it's just a lot easier to go out in the world with love, which is ultimately what we need to try and do with that thought, I think. | ||
| Listen, that's a great attitude because anytime you can have less annoyance by a person who's just, whether they're ignorant or confused or agitated or whatever's causing them to behave in a way that's uncomfortable for you, anytime you can just sort of just... | ||
| Aikido that and just sort of like relax and let it roll off you and just keep moving and go, what are you gonna do? | ||
| And I mean, that's one less thing you have to wrestle with in your psyche. | ||
| I mean, that's just a recipe for emotional success, period. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, this stoic idea, if you could only control your thoughts and your actions, so powerful, isn't it? | ||
| Everything else, what other people do, what they think, everything else, outcomes. | ||
| I'm not under your control. | ||
| So you can decide that those things are fine. | ||
| And that's such a... | ||
| Like to really let that idea drop into the soul that, oh, it's fine. | ||
| What if it's fine if my partner handles stress badly and drives me? | ||
| What if that's fine? | ||
| And also that allows me then to be a better partner and maybe be more helpful if I'm not internalizing it and making it all about me and making it worse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And again, it sounds like a recipe for complacency, but I like the tennis analogy, like so with success or with matters of social injustice where you think, well, I need to go out and change that in the world. | ||
| It's like a game of tennis. | ||
| If you go into a game of tennis thinking, I must win, 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 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. | ||
| That's become a big thing for me. | ||
| And when I get stressed about things and I find that something is really niggling away and bothering me, that thought of like, hang on, it's fine. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The way they're manifesting that is annoying me. | ||
| But it's fine. | ||
| It is fine. | ||
| It feels like when I was a kid and I used to wake up on a Saturday morning and think I had to go to school and then realize I didn't. | ||
| That kind of relief. | ||
| I feel that as an adult so much with just that kind of, ah, no, no, it's fine. | ||
| Well, I don't think it's a complacency thing. | ||
| I mean, the idea is that 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 wisely allocating resources. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You're not concentrating on some shit that you're not going to control anyway. | ||
| You know, grabbing some guy you don't even know. | ||
| Listen, man, you've got to straighten your fucking life out. | ||
| You're annoying, and this is why. | ||
| And, like, that guy's not going to listen to you. | ||
| It's just an ineffective way to interact with people. | ||
| You're way better off going, huh, look at this fucking guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just keep moving. | ||
| Sort myself out first. | ||
| Yeah, sort myself out. | ||
| And your reaction to him is the only thing that you could really control. | ||
| You certainly can't control him. | ||
| But you can control your reaction to him. | ||
| And there's a certain amount of pride in just being able to like, huh. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| And just to a person or a thing or a person's behavior that you might have been furious about just a few years ago, or, 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 seemed to be the way that stoicism... | ||
| CBT? CBT, not cock and ball torture. | ||
| The other one, cognitive behavioral therapy. | ||
| It may, for all I know, it may span both disciplines. | ||
| But yeah, cognitive behavioral therapy is the kind of short-form... | ||
| Therapy that is essentially getting into the process of how an anxiety pattern might happen and kind of throw a spanner in that works and make people, by being more aware of other possibilities of behavior, kind of undoing it like that, as opposed to the longer form of therapy, of getting into a deeper dialogue with the self and tracing those things back to where they come from and so on. | ||
| But one of the founders of CBT was explicitly taking it from the Stoics. | ||
| It's interesting how that... | ||
| How that is coming back and I wonder what it is in our culture that's now made us... | ||
| Stoicism seems very, very popular now and there's that sort of awareness. | ||
| Presumably it's a reaction against psychoanalysis, I suppose. | ||
| It's a yearning for shorter, quicker answers which maybe taps into this Difficult in tolerating ambivalence and complexity, maybe. | ||
| I think it's a perfectly effective therapy for many things, but it's just interesting how it's coming. | ||
| This stoic idea is coming back. | ||
| I think there's cultural cycles of sort of rediscovering things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that happens with yoga. | ||
| I think it happens with meditation. | ||
| They become in vogue and then they sort of die out for a while when a new generation sort of forgets it or doesn't learn. | ||
| And then someone catches on to it 10, 15 years later and then it becomes very popular again. | ||
| Then it's in articles and magazines and then people start talking about it. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird thing that we do with knowledge. | ||
| I mean this is our version of oral history. | ||
| We just pass things on in this sort of a weird way where we forget that these are tools. | ||
| And then people start discussing their benefits and discussing the positive results they've had with it. | ||
| And then it sort of builds up. | ||
| It's a bit like the atheist argument thing I was saying, as an atheist, but we hung up on the knocking down the things that are actually just signposts back to something that is important, is vital, but just very difficult to articulate. | ||
| When Nietzsche said that God is dead, he meant that The unknowable God is now dead because we've established this thing that we call God, which is just like the big guy. | ||
| We've put like a box around it and gone, it's that. | ||
| And in doing so, we've kind of lost that touch with that numinous, unknowable thing, which irrespective of what you believe, like a religious belief, it represents something, that unknowable The force that even as a hard-headed rationalist is sort of like... | ||
| You want to honor that thing because we need to know what it is to step outside of ourselves. | ||
| Yeah, honor that thing is a great way to put it. | ||
| I think we have a really strong desire for some sort of a practice of humility and true awe. | ||
| And I would love to be 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 it would probably be absolutely fascinating to watch how these people live their lives with this undying faith in these deities that were in control of all the matters of the universe It must be amazing. | ||
| And when you think about the fact that that was – I mean, how many thousands of years of human history people engaged with the universe like that? | ||
| I think it's only two, three hundred years ago. | ||
| It was only with the Enlightenment that we dispensed with the humor, the humoral theory of medicine. | ||
| You know, we believed it was, you know, the fire and phlegm and all those kind of ethereal... | ||
| That's then. | ||
| It was only at that point that medicine became something that could actually start to fight against death, ward off death, which means death became the enemy and that's where we start to lose that kind of respect for death as some sort of companion rather than just some sort of stranger. | ||
| But that's only a... | ||
| That's only a couple of hundred years ago. | ||
| I'm a huge fan of the Enlightenment, of course, and as a magician, of course, you very quickly develop a love of... | ||
| Well, certainly you develop that sceptical attitude that magicians have had forever and debunking and so on. | ||
| That goes hand in hand, debunking the charlatans and the whole world of spiritual nonsense. | ||
| But... | ||
| But that's sort of a separate thing. | ||
| That's a different thing. | ||
| And again, I can only articulate it at all because it doesn't come naturally. | ||
| We find things that are sort of compelling because they don't come naturally, do they? | ||
| So I don't quite know what that means to me, but I think if I... If I knew too easily what it meant to me, it might have lost something in the mix. | ||
| But I think the relationship to allowing your life to grow and to transform and to whatever that means has to be, surely, our drive at some level. | ||
| Otherwise, we're just pacing up and down by that window. | ||
| Yeah, otherwise, what are we doing? | ||
| What are we doing, Darren? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know either. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I need lunch. | ||
| Well, I have to go see if my house is burnt to the ground. | ||
| Yes, I do hope it hasn't burnt to the ground. | ||
| I hope so too. | ||
| And please Marshall's here. | ||
| Yeah, Marshall's here. | ||
| We're all good. | ||
| My family's in a hotel. | ||
| But thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This is a really fun discussion. | ||
| I really, really enjoyed it. | ||
| Thank you so, so much for having me on. | ||
| Sacrifice is available right now on Netflix. | ||
| It's right now on Netflix. | ||
| So there's three things on Netflix. | ||
| There's Sacrifice, which is this brand new one. | ||
| There's The Push, which is the one we were talking about with the compliance experiment. | ||
| And there's also the stage show Miracle, which was the faith healing thing I was talking about as well. | ||
| And then there's a whole 20 years of stuff on YouTube. | ||
| I don't know if you can even access it in this country. | ||
| I bet we can. | ||
| I bet you can. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Darren Brown, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| That was great, man. |
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