Sam Harris speaks with Derren Brown about his work as a "psychological illusionist." They discuss the power of hypnosis, the power of expectations, the usefulness of Stoic philosophy, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
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| Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. | |
| This is Sam Harris. | |
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| Today I'm speaking with Darren Brown. | |
| Darren, as many of you know, is a fantastic magician. | |
| He calls himself a psychological illusionist, which is to say that the effects he achieves really are at the level of manipulating the behavior of his subjects. | |
| He uses hypnosis and other forms of suggestion. | |
| He creates the most elaborate ruses by which to manipulate people's expectations and assumptions. | |
| If you've seen any of his television specials, you'll know that he puts people in situations where Literally everyone around them is an actor who's in on the gag and people just have no way of understanding what is happening to them and so he can drive them to do things that are really astonishing. | |
| In fact, if you haven't seen any of Darren's work, I would strongly encourage you to pause this podcast and go on YouTube and watch some of the many fragments of his specials that you can find there. | |
| Or better yet, go on Netflix and watch his most recent one, Sacrifice, or Miracle Before That, or The Push. | |
| We talk about all of these, and you'll certainly get the gist of our conversation if you haven't seen his work. | |
| You'll enjoy it much more if you have, because it really is hard to exaggerate how ambitious these changes in people's behavior are, and how successful Darren is in producing them. | |
| It really is amazing. | |
| Anyway, we talk about his career as an illusionist, his reliance on hypnosis and other forms of suggestion and manipulation. | |
| We talk a little bit about his book, Happy, where he goes into the value he's drawn from Stoic philosophy and his other thoughts on how to live a good life. | |
| Anyway, Darren is a very thoughtful, interesting, and extraordinarily nice person. | |
| And it was a great pleasure to sit down with him, so I hope you enjoy his company as much as I did. | |
| And now I bring you Darren Brown. | |
| I am here with Darren Brown. | |
| Hi. | |
| Darren, thanks for coming on the podcast. | |
| Thank you. | |
| This is so exciting. | |
| Thank you for having me. | |
| Yeah. | |
| No, really. | |
| It's a treat. | |
| I've known I had to get you on the podcast for a very long time because you're quite literally one of my most requested guests. | |
| Really? | |
| Yeah. | |
| But it's never come together. | |
| And then it always seemed that there was some prospect of you coming to the States. | |
| But, you know, you and I connected in London recently when I had that event with Jordan Peterson. | |
| But we didn't record there. | |
| But now you are in And then we bonded over old fashions afterwards. | |
| That was nice. | |
| That's an appropriate way to bond. | |
| So, there are quite literally too many things to talk about. | |
| There's a ton that we can get into. | |
| Let's start with how you describe yourself as a psychological illusionist. | |
| Yeah. | |
| What are you doing as a magician? | |
| I mean, there's so many, you do many things that I think a lot of people don't know about, but obviously we're going to be talking about your recent specials and your magic, but how do you describe your approach to magic? | |
| Yeah, I don't know. | |
| I mean even that term psychological illusionist I came up with in a panic when I was asked right at the start of my career what it is that I do. | |
| I started off as a hypnotist. | |
| I studied law and German at university in Bristol in England. | |
| Did you actually get a degree as a lawyer? | |
| I did. | |
| I didn't want to be a lawyer or German. | |
| Think of what a good lawyer you could be with your skills now though. | |
| Well, yeah, I don't know. | |
| It's such a big... It was very little interest, really. | |
| But I got the degree. | |
| But in my first year, I saw a hypnotist perform, and so I started off with that. | |
| And I Bought, borrowed, stole books I could find on it. | |
| I was the guy at university who could hypnotize you, so I had lots of people turning up to be hypnotized. | |
| Did you formally study it in a psychology department? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Not at all. | |
| It was just self-taught. | |
| I had a couple of, I remember a couple of seminal moments. | |
| I had a, I would often, people would come over and I'd hypnotize them and I'd say, if you come back, if I click my fingers and tell you, if I click my fingers, you'll go straight back to sleep. | |
| So it would save time, right? | |
| If they came back the next week and wanted to try something else. | |
| And I remember this guy coming around Who I presumed I'd seen before. | |
| And I said, okay, sit down, look at me. | |
| And I clicked my fingers and I said, sleep. | |
| And he went back into this, what I presumed was back into this trance state, whatever that is. | |
| Anyway, and then we did a few things and then afterwards we spoke and he hadn't been, I'd never met him before. | |
| So at this moment of, well, how did you know to respond to me clicking my fingers and saying sleep? | |
| And I realized sort of at that point that so much of it depended not on these long sort of scripts that I was learning and that side of technique, but just kind of my confidence in the moment and their own bewilderment perhaps, obviously their own suggestibility. | |
| So things like that were Taught me a lot. | |
| It's a difficult way of earning a living, and I was graduating, and I was just starting to scrape a living together, so I did more magic, like close-up magic, that kind of thing. | |
| But the psychological stuff interested me more, the suggestion-based stuff. | |
| So did you learn it from books, or did you actually have a teacher who was a hypnotist? | |
| No, I didn't. | |
| I continued learning the hypnosis from books. | |
| This was pre, like, the days of YouTube. | |
| There were no YouTube videos? | |
| No, nothing. | |
| This was like 1935. | |
| And I ended up doing a lot more magic, but I found the mind-reading plots more interesting than making someone's card disappear. | |
| Mentalism is the technical name for it. | |
| I wrote a couple of books for magicians. | |
| I was earning a living in Bristol, this city in the west of England, Going around, you know, tables in restaurants and doing people's parties and then I got a phone call from this TV production company that were looking for someone that did mind reading and they were really only, I could only think of like four or five people in the country that did it. | |
| Mentalism? | |
| Was that esoteric? | |
| Yeah, just no one really, no one, it just wasn't very commercial. | |
| To give people a sense, many people will be familiar with your work, but just give an example of the kind of thing a mentalist like yourself does on stage with people. | |
| It's magic with a mind reading plot, essentially. | |
| But I mean, I suppose someone that passes themselves off as psychic could be technically a mentalist. | |
| So there's a wide range because, as I said, not that many people do it. | |
| So there's kind of a wide range of what people do when they do it. | |
| Now there's a lot more of them. | |
| And that's probably partly because I was making it popular in the UK. | |
| So if you were a young magician, I guess, you know, growing up, and I was, you know, a kind of a role model, I suppose, for some. | |
| So there's a lot more mentalists now, but we were very few and far between before. | |
| Do your powers of mentalism extend to dogs? | |
| It does sound like a dog in the background. | |
| I think it's someone moving plates or cutlery. | |
| Okay. | |
| It might be moving, but it does sound like a dog. | |
| Maybe I just, that's a powerful suggestion I just gave you, that it's a dog. | |
| So that was that, and then I, yeah, but now I, um, Essentially, at its heart, a magician is just saying, look at me, aren't I clever? | |
| That's the only subtext. | |
| So as I grew up, I sort of grew out of that initial urge and the desire for the sort of controlling thing, which hypnosis certainly ticks that box if you're insecure and those things are important to you, which I was. | |
| Did you ever go down the path of hypnosis as therapy? | |
| As therapy? | |
| I thought about it. | |
| I think ultimately I didn't really want to sit and... Get in there with people's problems? | |
| Listen to people's problems day after day. | |
| Now, I mean, now I find, not so much hypnotherapy, but psychotherapy I find fascinating. | |
| That world I do find. | |
| I'd sort of love to, part of me would love to do that. | |
| But no, I sort of, the performing came together in such a way that I had to kind of at some point choose and go, you know, I'll concentrate on this. | |
| But now, I mean, I'm not very well known in the States at all, but in the UK I kind of do a variety of things. | |
| I do stage shows every year that are like old-fashioned magic shows, really. | |
| Again, with kind of a mind-reading sort of feel to them. | |
| And I do these TV shows now on Netflix, which are, again, they're very different. | |
| But what I've done is I've tried to take a step back, and I kind of figured that it's dramatically more interesting if you're watching a real person go through a real situation. | |
| So the deception is now all out on the surface. | |
| So as a viewer, you're invited into the deception. | |
| The deception is happening on somebody that's going through something they don't really know. | |
| I want to talk about several of your specials in detail but before we get there. | |
| Let's just talk for a second about hypnosis. | |
| Hypnosis is a topic that isn't often touched. | |
| I don't think it came up once while I got a PhD in neuroscience. | |
| I'm sure there's been some neuroscientific work done on hypnosis. | |
| The only time I Touched it as a topic academically I was freshman year at Stanford where I think Stanford still has the scale of hypnotic susceptibility I think yeah I think it predates my time there but I remember being tested on this scale because they were looking for good and bad subjects to do research I think it was a 10 point scale and I think it was a 9 on the 10. | |
| So I was on that side of the tail and then I remember going through these various exercises and the experience that proved to me that this wasn't just total bullshit, that there was something to this, was we were regressed to... how was it put? | |
| They asked us to imagine that we are Eight years old, I think, or seven years old, and sign our names. | |
| And without any conscious forethought, the script that came out of my signing was just this bubbly, childlike script that was totally familiar to me as something, the way I would have written my name as a seven-year-old, and it was not at all the way I wrote my name as an 18-year-old. | |
| And then he asked, put the year, and I remember marveling at the fact that without any conscious arithmetic, you know, I was putting down the right year from, you know, that age. | |
| Did you ever compare the handwriting? | |
| You know, if it was actually... I don't remember going back and finding a sample of my handwriting if I could have, but it was just the spitting image of the kind of writing. | |
| And I just remember... | |
| It feeling like an automaticity, that I was not, you know, I wasn't gaming the system, you know, trying to impress myself with hypnosis working. | |
| And I've spent no time studying it since, but it's one of these topics where I think you can talk to scientists who are still in doubt as to whether or not it's actually a bona fide phenomenon. | |
| And then it obviously connects to vaudevillian applications of it, which Where it seems appropriate to wonder whether there's a fraud associated with what you're seeing on stage. | |
| So what is your understanding of the reality of hypnosis as a psychological process that can be invoked on stage? | |
| I used to do a, um, in a, when I performed stage hypnosis, which I don't anymore, but I try and find other ways of employing it. | |
| But I used to finish with saying that I'd make myself invisible so the subjects wouldn't get to see me. | |
| I'd then say I'd float a chair around and they'd all, you know, scream and run around and it was, you know, a fun bit in the show. | |
| But then I often used to have questions and answers afterwards. | |
| And I remember once I got, say there were 10 guys, I got them up and said, well, what was your actual experience? | |
| When I was saying I was invisible and moving a chair around, what were you actually experiencing? | |
| And there were some that were saying, well, you know, I, I, yeah, I was just felt like I should play along, but yeah, you were obviously just moving the chair around yourself. | |
| Then there were people that would say, well, I, I kind of. | |
| I knew you were doing it, but I had just had to emotionally, I could only react as if that thing was floating, even though, yeah. | |
| And of course, when I think back as well, I mean, I, yeah, you're obviously there doing it, but I, I, I kind of was disregarding that. | |
| And a range of reactions right through to, there's no way you were moving that chair because that was floating. | |
| They're more happy to believe it was on wires than it was me. | |
| Now I still don't know whether that whole discussion is colored by the fact that some people want to appear to be better subjects than others, but certainly what is clear is that the range of experience is so varied. | |
| I always think of it as a sort of like an actor getting into a part. | |
| You can get totally emotionally lost in something. | |
| It doesn't mean that anything untoward is happening. | |
| Have you experimented with giving people post-hypnotic suggestions that They seem to be genuinely unaware of, so that they're doing things that originate in a truly unconscious space in their minds, and you've put the seat there. | |
| Yeah, because you can never really climb into anyone's head to really know. | |
| I remember telling a friend of mine that he'd find himself invisible. | |
| And he was really, he was laughing. | |
| He was looking down and saying, it's just like looking at a footage of like the carpet. | |
| And you know, I'm just, it's like, I'm looking out of a camera. | |
| I think one of the most, for me, one of the most interesting experiences of it was I did a show called The Assassin. | |
| So Stephen Fry is going to get shot by this guy. | |
| And we had this sort of first part was just looking at hypnosis. | |
| What is it? | |
| What are the limitations of it? | |
| So this is a, just give people the set up here. | |
| So how is Stephen Fry going to get shot? | |
| I throw these things away. | |
| I'm kind of used to them. | |
| All right. | |
| So the show was actually looking at the claims made by Sahan Sahan over the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. | |
| Him saying that he was hypnotized by the CIA. | |
| So we kind of, well, is it, if we take what his claims are, is that even feasible that that could happen? | |
| Or is it just the stuff of, you know, just fiction? | |
| Right. | |
| So as closely as we could, we kind of replicated his story and did it with a guy that didn't know that that was the plan for him. | |
| So we found a very highly suggestible guy, even more suggestible than you, I'm sure. | |
| There was only one point on the scale if I recall. | |
| There was only one guy. | |
| And the show begins with finding that guy from a sort of a big audience of people who are volunteering and ends with him in a situation which he doesn't know is being filmed with a gun that he thinks is real. | |
| All the triggers going off, the polka dot dress and all these things that Sirhan Sirhan said the CIA had used. | |
| And will he do it? | |
| Will he in that situation fire a gun which he believes is real at somebody and seemingly shoot them? | |
| But there was this really interesting bit at the beginning. | |
| So I've got these two clinical hypnotist psychologists with me as well, and we did two tests. | |
| One was the acid test, which is where the notion and the phrase comes from, where you have somebody hypnotized. | |
| You've shown them it's acid before they're hypnotized, but actually it's just water. | |
| And you say, when you wake up and you get the signal, you'll throw this acid in someone's face. | |
| Right. | |
| So it's an interesting thing. | |
| If they're playing along at any level, of course, they're not going to do that. | |
| They all did it, but it's a TV studio. | |
| They know no one's really going to give them acid to do that. | |
| So part of the brain you get, part of them is going to know this is safe. | |
| And that's fine. | |
| That's what we imagined they'd do. | |
| But then towards the end, we had this guy in an ice bath And this was the guy that we used in the end. | |
| And we just had no idea if he was going to do it or not. | |
| Either way, it was fine for the show. | |
| If he didn't do it, that was interesting. | |
| If he did do it, that was interesting. | |
| And he did very happily. | |
| He got in this ice bath and lay there and there was no It didn't seem, they had a bet backstage, like a wager as to whether or not he'd do it. | |
| They thought he wouldn't do it, I had no idea. | |
| But that didn't seem to be the sort of thing that you could just play along. | |
| Yeah, pretending not to fight a call. | |
| Yeah, exactly, just kind of pretend not to find that, you know, intensely painful. | |
| And that's one of the very few moments that I've had of just being really surprised by it. | |
| The other thing that surprises me is, again, if it's just sort of a playing along, is behaviors that people wouldn't know to do that get shared across, say, an audience. | |
| So very often I'm doing this with an audience of 2,000 people and then walking out amongst those people that have responded, who, say, are now standing, eyes closed, head dropped down. | |
| In your special before, the most recent one, Miracle, you did this. | |
| Let's dive into some of what you're doing here with the specials. | |
| There's hypnosis, which is this one specific activity of inducting someone into a state and leading them to do various things post-hypnotically. | |
| But you're also just playing with people's suggestibility a lot. | |
| You're pre-screening your audiences in many of these specials in ways that sometimes I guess they know they're being pre-screened, sometimes they have no idea. | |
| They think they're taking a course in self-improvement or whatever it is. | |
| You are continually selecting for the most suggestible people or the most conforming people, whether they're conforming to social pressure or showing themselves to be vulnerable to you just dropping the right words into their heads. | |
| So, you've had so many specials that I would love to talk about, but should we go chronologically? | |
| I want to talk about The Push, and I want to talk about Miracle, and I want to talk about Sacrifice. | |
| Okay, cool. | |
| Those are the three most recent ones. | |
| So, let's talk about The Push. | |
| What did you do there? | |
| So the push was looking at social compliance and it was a big, dark, fun, funny kind of experiment. | |
| We did it over a weekend to see if somebody could be made to commit murder just through social compliance. | |
| So there's a big event that this guy finds himself at. | |
| Everyone's an actor apart from him. | |
| He has no idea it's being filmed. | |
| He's applied to be in the show months ago and then, you know, told he hadn't got it. | |
| So he just finds himself at this event, and bit by bit, starting with, he sort of gets roped into helping at the event, so starting with him being asked to mislabel meat sausage rolls as vegetarian, and him kind of going along with that, it builds and builds and builds to the point that he, Pushes or doesn't push, someone off a roof. | |
| By stages you're selecting for somebody who is willing to, under some pressure of authority, it's like a mini Milgram experiment. | |
| In fact, you actually do the Milgram experiment in that episode, correct? | |
| Yeah, in a different, that was a different, yeah. | |
| Oh, it was a different, okay. | |
| We did a compliance test, which is the bell test you may have seen where people are coming in, you've got a, being made to stand up and sit down when they hear a bell. | |
| Because the The first few people in the row are actors and then you build the line up. | |
| The actors then leave and now you've got a room of people doing it for no reason. | |
| Again, just out of compliance. | |
| So yeah, so we've chosen this guy. | |
| He's then told he's not used and then sometime later he just is at this event that we've constructed this whole way of getting in there without him knowing it's anything to do with us. | |
| So he's at an event where literally everyone in sight is in on the gag. | |
| Yeah. | |
| He's just surrounded by actors and doesn't know it. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Watching it, it's pretty remarkable to realize how unusual a circumstance that is and how we are not prepared to interpret reality with that being one of the possible explanations for what's going on. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Well, the fear that we've had over the years of, you know, what if he spots a camera? | |
| Or what if there's a glitch in this Truman Show-like fiction? | |
| But of course, the reality is, if you were in a restaurant and a camera fell out from behind the curtains, you wouldn't think... Everyone here is an actor. | |
| Everyone here is an actor. | |
| This whole thing is some elaborate... You know, you'd just think, oh, a camera's falling out from behind the curtains. | |
| You wouldn't necessarily make that all about, you know, make the whole thing about you. | |
| It's all about me, yeah. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| So there have been moments when... | |
| You know, a camera has been spotted or just something like that has happened and we're all, you know, suddenly all sphincters are tight and it's fine. | |
| You know, nothing bad happens at all. | |
| So we've kind of got used to it. | |
| But it's, yeah, we've kind of got good at being able to create and hold these in lab. | |
| There's a whole other show with each one of these and just how you create that. | |
| How you create the fiction, how you get the guy to the point that... Because also these people have to be, you have to make sure they're robust enough psychologically to go through these quite dark journeys, so they have to be independently vetted. | |
| This is my daughter's, my 10-year-old daughter's question for you is... How do you know they're fine? | |
| How are you not in jail for what you put people through? | |
| That's her literal wording. | |
| Because you're putting, I mean some of these, some more than others, but for instance The Push, there is a real ethical question about what you're doing here, because you're, in some cases, you're making people look very, very good. | |
| As we'll talk about in Sacrifice, you reveal this person's latent heroism. | |
| But in The Push, you are revealing a very dark fact about somebody, or at least it can be interpreted as a very dark fact. | |
| And how do you view that? | |
| I mean, so just to fast forward to the punchline of that show, I mean, and spoiler alert for anyone who wants to go watch these shows, In some cases, yes, you get someone to reveal that they're capable of murder. | |
| Yeah. | |
| He shoves a guy off a rooftop based on all the suggestibility that you have engineered in him. | |
| That doesn't look great on his CV, does it? | |
| Well, the push was, I think, uniquely dark and unredemptive. | |
| Was it two of three people did it? | |
| It was four in the end, yeah. | |
| Four of them, and three out of the four did it. | |
| Three out of the four did it, yeah. | |
| I see these things with all of the shows. | |
| And I always have, with any of the shows, regardless of whether it's sort of a, you know, a happy ending or whatever it brings out in the person, they're always, they're very often going through a kind of a dark period, sort of journey at some point. | |
| So I do get asked about ethically how they can be justified. | |
| My feeling is I'm really only interested in this one person's experience that is going through it. | |
| So, in The Push, for example, it's hard to talk about without giving it away, but the guy that doesn't do it has been through hell to get there, but he feels great about himself, so he's very happy with the experience. | |
| And then the careful situation is framing the whole thing for the others. | |
| So by the point they come to do it, there are so many things that I've layered in during what has essentially been their audition process, that they don't realize it's an audition process. | |
| The number of meetings that they've had, they think they're one of 300 people doing that, but actually by this point it's only that five. | |
| There's things that can be layered in so that very quickly obviously at any point during I can you know step in and if need be and the whole thing but also afterwards the whole thing can be framed very quickly for them again as something positive and that that's probably the most Difficult, not difficult, but the most of all the situations of having to make sure that something is a positive experience for them to take away. | |
| That's probably the most, like, would appear to be the most kind of conflicting. | |
| But actually for them, they all found it very positive because their feeling is, I've now been through this. | |
| And yes, I did that, but most people do. | |
| And that's what we've shown. | |
| That's not like anything unusual about me because that's what most people do. | |
| But I'm now armed with An experiential, you know, well, that experience of having done it. | |
| So if ever I find myself in a situation where I'm going to get manipulated, I've been through that now and I can stand up to it. | |
| And that's the key to me. | |
| And then obviously these are all people that remain friends and we all keep in touch and none of them have had that other Thing we might think of, well, does that mean they're not going to get a job? | |
| Or, you know, people are fascinated by their experience, but none of them have had those troubles. | |
| I think that show is unique in that that question is, I think, probably most obvious with that is, you know, are those people OK? | |
| And the answer is they are. | |
| They always are. | |
| Everyone that's done these things comes out of it saying, you know, it's the best thing they've ever done. | |
| And that ultimately, to me, is what It matters even though, of course, I understand people stepping back from it and going, well, how can you justify it? | |
| And so on. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So then there's the flip side of your experience and the necessity to deceive people to just get this show up and running. | |
| How do you navigate that ethically? | |
| Because they know what they're getting into. | |
| They're applying for my shows and they know the sort of things that I do. | |
| Right. | |
| And I think it's an end justifying the means thing. | |
| I think if somebody's going to go through something that takes, there's a lot of manipulation involved, but the end result is a hugely positive one for them. | |
| I think that's okay. | |
| To compare this to normal magic or normal illusion. | |
| So your normal stage magic is a situation where there's a trick you, as a professional magician, don't want to reveal how the trick is done. | |
| It's not done the way it seems to be done. | |
| It seems to be done by magic and there's some terrestrial answer compatible with the laws of physics that explains how the trick is done and that's the part you don't reveal. | |
| With these manipulations of people, They're absolutely what they are, if that's what you're asking. | |
| Yeah, my question is, is there any distance between the audience's final appreciation of what has happened and what has in fact happened? | |
| No, not at all. | |
| Not at all. | |
| There are sometimes scenes that don't make it. | |
| Scenes that have to get, you know, squashed down a bit, as you would with editing anything. | |
| So, I mean, Phil in Sacrifice, for example, had A couple of experiences that didn't make the final show, and there was a whole lot of other stuff we did with all the applicants that took part in the show that didn't make it. | |
| So there's always things like that that's just part of putting a show together. | |
| But no, in terms of, you know, is he playing along or does he know more about what's going on than I'm letting on or anything like that, then no, it would be pointless. | |
| And just sort of repugnant as well, I think it would be unartistically repugnant and just pointless to do that. | |
| Well yeah, but it would be a kind of fraud, but it's interesting to consider that they're just gradations of fraud which account for magic. | |
| It's hard to know where the line is. | |
| Yeah, I suppose so, but I think you then it's... It's a different category of... | |
| Yeah. | |
| For me, as I said, the fiction is something that we're sharing in. | |
| The deception is something we're sharing in. | |
| And I save the kind of theatrical deception that everybody knows that it's part of the game for the stage shows now. | |
| I think that kind of makes sense. | |
| And even then, I I try and push it to a place that it's... I guess, you know, I'm 47 and doing magic is quite a childish thing, so I try and find more interesting things to do with the sort of technologies of magic, I guess. | |
| Which ultimately, for me, is just about the stories that people tell themselves. | |
| That's kind of my Toolkit. | |
| So one direction that can go in is creating these specials where somebody's put through something and it is ultimately about the stories they tell themselves and maybe challenging those stories or the limitations of those narratives that they're living out. | |
| And then I save the more kind of, yeah, the more just kind of look at me, aren't I clever? | |
| But I'm still trying to try and do something more interesting with it for the stage. | |
| So yeah, it seems to me that your topic through all of these shows is a question about what are the actual origins of human behavior and what role belief and framing and expectation and suggestion and environment play in all of that. | |
| You really are doing a real-time psychological study of people in odd situations and It's fascinating to watch, but there are these moments where the effect you're achieving seems impossible. | |
| I actually can't remember which show this was. | |
| This could be... They're smithereens for me because my daughter and I binge-watched so many of them in pieces, but you had one where, based on the mere association of a few things like the sound of music playing from a passing car... | |
| You've got people to basically perform an armed robbery of the Pinkertons or the Brinks people who are bringing money in or out of a bank, and the idea that that suggestion could be that powerful that someone would have, you know, Yeah, but it's not just music from the car. | |
| I mean, there's a whole process that you follow of basically conditioning, which is essentially the same in Sacrifice, and I've used this process a lot. | |
| I tend to sort of think, well, I need to get somebody to this point, so how does that break down in terms of the things they need to feel at that point, and then eliciting those feelings, attaching them to some sort of trigger so that You know, it's the same as if you... I always think of the example of breaking up with somebody and having a horrible time doing that. | |
| But there's a song that's just playing a lot on the radio at the time, and then you don't hear it for five years, and then you hear it again, and it just immediately just brings you back into that state. | |
| But here we have a complex behavior that is not only starkly antisocial, but can send someone to prison, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And it's like, this is a major decision to rob a bank. | |
| Yes, it was holding up a security guard. | |
| But what I'm doing, but you're sort of, I'm presenting those triggers. | |
| So there were like three or four, I can't even quite remember what they all were, but three or four different triggers. | |
| And then this sort of tantalizingly available scenario, which is again, quite unrealistic. | |
| So it's just all so kind of impossibly fortuitous that it all happens. | |
| So to me, it isn't a surprise. | |
| Well, the surprises I think over the years that people do just sort of follow these tracks, that if you pick somebody that's suggestible, you pick the right sort of person and they've been through this transformative thing that's lasted for however long we've been filming for. | |
| Built up these associations. | |
| It's going to happen. | |
| I mean, if you imagine it was a room of people, some of those people in the room you get would do it. | |
| But then what would be the difference between those people and the others? | |
| Well, they'd probably be more suggestible. | |
| Those ideas would be dropping in at a much more impactful level than most of the room. | |
| But then those are the people I'm using. | |
| I mean, they're kind of experiments in one sense. | |
| In another sense, I mean, they're clinically not really That interesting because it's not like I'm doing it with a large number of people or I haven't got a control group in the, you know, in the next room doing it without the various triggers. | |
| Well, you keep losing your control group. | |
| You keep just not selecting those people. | |
| Exactly. | |
| So it's, it's more of a kind of, here's an emotional journey to go through and maybe that might make you think about things, you know, in your own life. | |
| It's more of that kind of, well, let's see it more as a sort of kind of a drama ultimately, but the, the mode, the feeling of an experiment is, is the way that that's expressed. | |
| What's your take on free will, given the fact that you manipulate people wherever you go to do things that they can't explain? | |
| I like that there's both. | |
| If you look at it in one way, of course there's no free will. | |
| You can look at it another way and you can go, yes, but ultimately we can exercise our choice and make a difference to a situation. | |
| I'm quite happy to sit with both. | |
| I feel silly saying this to you. | |
| Well, no, there's definitely one level at which it makes conventional sense to talk about choices. | |
| I mean, choices are the proximate cause of the thing you then decide to do. | |
| But when you try to figure out where your choices come from and just how much control you as the witness of your experience had over those variables, you know, from genes on up, Of course, yeah. | |
| But I still think there was that experiment at the Max Planck Institute where this idea came that we make our decisions on anything up to seven seconds unconsciously before we make them conscious. | |
| You must know this with the subjects pressing A or B and they're like, Benjamin LeBay experiments, yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I mean those tantalizingly, they tell the story of the readiness potential in the premotor cortex being available, in this case like 500 milliseconds before the motor behavior, or actually 500 milliseconds before the person's subjective report of when they decided to move. | |
| So they're watching a clock that is made so as to make it as easy as possible To discriminate these increments of time and is that they're given the simplest possible motor task, you know, hit the button or not, you know, hit the left button or hit the right button and their mind is genuinely open and not committed for whatever period of time and then | |
| When they subjectively are aware of having committed, they note where the hand was on this special clock, and lo and behold, it was a full half second before that where you could predict with, I forget what the actual details were, but like 90% accuracy. | |
| Didn't it extend to something like 7 seconds or something ridiculous at one point? | |
| Well then there was an fMRI study that pushed that all the way back to like 7 seconds, where you could get a better than chance prediction. | |
| So I've always found it a strange experiment because it feels to me contaminated by the idea of don't think about it before you do it. | |
| So of course you start to think about is it A or B and then you do the opposite. | |
| You could suddenly do the opposite. | |
| But the truth is, all of that research is really a red herring. | |
| You don't actually need the neurophysiological story to know that there must be some chain of events of which you are not conscious that actually underwrite what you are conscious of, and any conscious deliberation would fall into that category. | |
| Yeah, well, I have no argument, but I enjoy both sides. | |
| But I don't think that, you know, with obviously what I'm doing, I'm creating the illusion of that sort of control most of the time, so I don't see my work as a sort of... But you're still putting people in positions where they are strangers to themselves, in that they're doing things that they can't account for, but you can account for. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, to a remarkable degree. | |
| I mean, everyone's doing this to everyone all the time, less systematically. | |
| I mean, you know, advertisers are trying to get us to click their links or, and you know, that's probably the most systematic version that we all encounter. | |
| But for you to be putting people in situations where you're hoping that at that moment, they're going to push a guy off a roof and... Some of them did and some of them didn't. | |
| I mean, I'm laying down these tracks for them. | |
| Right, right. | |
| 75% did, and the ones who did, did it 100%. | |
| That's true, that's true. | |
| Let's talk about Sacrifice, because this is a genuine happy ending, and it's appearing in the context of a political environment where it seems all too of the moment. | |
| Give us the setup. | |
| What is the show, Sacrifice? | |
| Actually, it was because The Push was the first show on Netflix. | |
| I'd already done it, it'd already been out in the UK before, but it was the first thing on Netflix. | |
| And then Miracle, which was my stage show, but Push was like the last sort of Special that I'd done, and I felt like I had to do something that was sort of the opposite of it, and was more redemptive. | |
| So rather than reveal the propensity to commit murder on the spot, yeah, this is the opposite. | |
| So what is the sacrifice? | |
| So the premise is, using these kind of covert psychological techniques, trying to get a right-wing, Trump-supporting American guy With pretty strong views against illegal immigration, if not immigrants generally, to take a bullet to lay down his life for a Mexican illegal immigrant, or at least someone he believes is. | |
| So that was the premise of the show. | |
| It's a crazy premise. | |
| It's a crazy premise. | |
| I mean, you could have walked that back a little bit and still it would have been an ambitious undertaking. | |
| Yeah, well it's sort of, the way it, When we initially kind of put the show together, I intended it to have more of an overtly kind of political feel to it. | |
| So in what you see at the start of the show, which is a hundred people coming together and I'm choosing the guy I'm going to use, We had a whole day of really interesting experiments going on. | |
| We were doing Jonathan Hyatt's work on changing the environment to, he writes about it in The Righteous Mind, I think perhaps it is naturally his, but one of his colleagues, but making the room disgusting, leaving fake vomit and a nasty smell, and the idea is by having those feelings of threat and contamination that you could make | |
| Otherwise, liberal-minded people give more conservative, socio-political answers to questions they'd already answered in more liberal ways earlier on. | |
| And vice versa, making conservatives more liberal, which is another well-known experiment of inducing a feeling of invincibility first. | |
| So you're undoing that feeling of threat, which seems to be allied to more right-wing views. | |
| So we had a whole lot of stuff that was really fascinating. | |
| All of this ended up coming out because it felt in the end the show was more elegant to make it about a human quality of compassion and kindness and stepping outside of these kind of political Narratives. | |
| So in the end, you know, Trump was never mentioned. | |
| And also, I'm not American, it's always a bit ugly and uncomfortable when somebody from somewhere else comes in and seems to be passing comment on your own system. | |
| So I think the show's better for it. | |
| There's just a lot more that we could have Put into it, but in the end it's a story about, I think, somebody stepping outside of the constraints of those kind of narratives. | |
| Do you have a hard time limit for these Netflix specials? | |
| Do they have to come in right at an hour? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Not at all. | |
| Not at all. | |
| I think originally we were imagining it would be like an hour and a half, but as we stripped more and more out and it got down to, I think it's about 47 minutes or something now, which is what the show, what an hour of TV certainly used to be with ads in it, at least in the UK. | |
| So you've selected this right-wing, somewhat conspiratorial character who is opposed to immigration and wasn't floridly racist. | |
| No, he's not a monster racist, which would have been a different show. | |
| I think then it would have been about, you know, look how clever I am to be able to transform this monster racist guy into a nice guy, which I didn't want the show to be about. | |
| So I wanted somebody you'd kind of relate to. | |
| Although at the beginning... What was the worst view he expressed? | |
| I can't quite... I'm so inundated with this kind of material now, studying white supremacy and all the rest of it. | |
| He was saying, you know, yeah, kick them all out and they're going to turn our country to shit. | |
| And so he was quite kind of, uh, yeah, quite clear in that. | |
| He actually wanted people kicked out, right? | |
| It wasn't just... Yeah, build a wall, build a bigger wall. | |
| But it's not just a matter of not letting more in. | |
| No, no. | |
| But you know, like a lot of people, he's dealing with difficulties in his own life, financially and particularly, and he's seeing these, you know, these, what to him, people coming in and getting free handouts. | |
| And it's that, it's that sort of narrative that he's settled into very comfortably. | |
| Right. | |
| Okay. | |
| So you have the perfect subject. | |
| What does he think he's doing in this? | |
| He thinks he's taking part in a documentary about cutting-edge biotechnology. | |
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