Derren Brown: UNLOCK The Secret Power Of Your Mind! | E212

The FBI asked me to help with the FBI or the police came out with a psychological illusion making extraordinary television programs and even better live Darren is a National Treasure welcome to the program the story we tell ourselves is not what is real, as per For example I did a program called Miracle, the Lord has a lot of work tonight and the second half was the healing, the woman appeared and she had been paralyzed on one side of her body since she was four years old in the floods. of Tears because he was able to move his left arm for the first time, what you are seeing is that it is the psychological component of suffering, as if nothing had happened, nothing has changed, but what has been changed is the relationship with suffering, not It's the things in life that because

your

problems are the story you tell

your

self about them are the judgments you make about them there are many people who are trying to sell you this thing that they can take your traumas or your insecurities to zero.

I have never seen it. It happens that we have completely erased the idea of ​​​​simply fortune and life, sometimes life gives us things back if we have no control over anxiety is still somehow the devil, but without anxiety, how do you know how to change anything you know what can you? Doing that without embracing anxiety to the extent that it was is predominantly based on Psychology, right? So have you ever done something and thought about how that happened? Don't go home and start doing that. Before this episode begins, two things come to

mind

. I asked you a small favor two months ago. 74 of the people who watch this channel did not subscribe.

Now we're down to 69. My goal is 50, so if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted, if you like that. this channel, can you do me a quick favor and hit the subscribe button? It helps this channel more than you think and the bigger the channel gets, as you've seen, the bigger the guests get. Thank you and enjoy this episode abroad the last few days reading. all about your childhood oh really fascinating, thanks actually I have a photo here. How strange that you have that photo? Yeah, that's me with a um, a parrot on my shoulder after you have this kid.

Yes, what do I need? to understand about him and the world he lived in and the way he saw the world to understand you, what do you need to understand? Well, I was an only child until I was nine, so I guess it's pretty formative. Isn't it pretty creative as always to draw and build things with Lego? I've always been a bit of a people pleaser and maybe at that age kind of yeah, kind of happy, I didn't have a lot of friends, there wasn't a big gang. Actually, I never had it. I have always gone through life with only a small number of good friends.

But I think there is one that feels like a happy, happy moment to remember. I remember sitting. with Jimmy Carr and him telling me that people often think that comedians are depressed and trying to impress other people to get some kind of thrill for their own kind of self-gratification, but Jimmy told me that I said you should actually ask which of my parents were depressed who I was trying to impress to understand how I became a comedian and I'm wondering if you said you're a bit of a people pleaser, clearly you have this great affinity for entertaining and getting people's reaction the amazement where did it start that?

Can you tell where that started in your childhood? Yeah, I think I could do it when I was in school, so my dad was a swimming teacher at school and, uh, he and I were. I'm not very athletic, so he protected me from being bullied when I was a non-athletic kid, but I didn't love school mainly because I said a lot of the kids who were athletic became quite intimidating, etc. so I like it, but dad teaching that helped me and then when I got there and I was, I was in the wrong group, um, the kind of classical music loving group or the puff group, like we were less charitably known, um, I didn't even like classical music, so it was a pretty miserable group to be stuck with in sixth grade.

I remember everyone seemed to suddenly grow up and become a lot friendlier, so I kind of exploded into a sort of attention-seeking thing and went from being very quiet and a little intimidated by these types of kids to suddenly seeming like you know like me or at least you know they were okay, so I started doing impressions of teachers and drawing cartoons with them and I definitely became kind of really, I imagine quite annoying, certainly some of the teachers, an attention seeker, so I think it all happened at that moment um and then just then. I progressed to university for most of my twenties, um, probably a lot of that was because, you know, it was based on that, uh, and it was a pretty useful thing, you know, if you're going to perform it, it takes care of that need to you know.

Just as a sort of impression, I think it was probably a good thing if you got picked on for Ortized or something at school before that point, no, because I think because my dad taught there it helped, but I definitely always got picked last for the teams and things they hated, uh, sports and stuff, there were a couple of kids who were probably, I mean, generally, pretty nasty anyway, but I certainly got a little bit from them, but no, I think I did okay. . I think overall I didn't. I really enjoyed school and I felt like I was um, I said bullied, but no, I don't really remember ever being hit or bullied, or anyone was making my life particularly miserable, I think so. it was just the general feeling of not quite fitting into the religion.

I was incredibly religious, well yeah, and then I introduced it around age 18. I became incredibly atheist, yes, and I read a similar kind of journey in your story at six or something. your parents, if you could go to the Bible. That's right, Mrs. Whitaker, one of our teachers at school, I really liked her and she led, it was called Crusader class, but it's basically like a Sunday school thing, um and uh, because I was six years old and she asked me if I wanted to go and I just assumed everyone did. She didn't know any different, so I said, "I asked my parents if I could go and they said yes, of course, so I did." The moment I realized that, oh no, this is actually something I believe in now, it was like it was instilled in me, so it was hard to get out of it, but I finally did in college, so many years later, I overcame. doing hypnosis first and magic and they always give you a pretty skeptical view of things because you just see how people deceive themselves and then naturally you start to see a lot of belief systems.

I think through those eyes, including yours. I don't know what it was like for you, but I, um, and also the very idea of ​​doing hypnosis, um, I just remember it was because I was a member of the Christian union my freshman year in college. I went to Bristol and they were totally excited. In the arms that I had, I had members of that Christian union in the back of one of my shows exorcising me and casting out demons while I was hypnotizing people on stage, so, again, all of that made me help with that kind of things. of general skepticism and it took me a little while to properly come out of it; in fact, Richard Dawkins' book, The The God Delusion, came out at the time when I had mentally taken that step, but maybe I didn't have the right kind of language for it, so if it was a useful book, actually I'm sure it was for a lot of people in terms of giving that lack of belief some sort of structure, for me it was one of the sort of foundational books in my life when I was about 18, um, I kinda like them too the compulsive behaviors of your childhood, things like putting your knees together and yes, a number of other things, really nervous, yes, a little bit on that kind of Tourette scale.

I think there's a gap that ends up with pretty severe things, but a lot of people have that experience of making funny little noises like tickling in the throat or having to, you know, not step on the cracks and, uh, there's all that kind of obsessive disorder. -compulsive that begins to be accompanied by feelings of dread and so much so that I never had that, but yes, I was shaking. I find that there is a lot of creativity, creative children are, right? I really don't know what. what is it, it seems to be a form of automatic suggestion, um, it's like when you have the idea in your head and then it's very difficult to let it go and sometimes I understand it now, sometimes I put it on stage because there is a certain amount, there is a lot of memory muscle when doing a show, so if anything, if you think a little twitch occurs at one point during the show, it will appear every night, um, so still like uh.

I'm still aware of it, a little bit more in recent years because obviously it's been such a strange few years for everyone's mental health, so I've noticed it more than before, but, yeah, and it was quite, it was a lot, My parents were pretty desperate about it. I think it is a very painful thing to see if the child does and does not know what he was looking at, how to help his knees, hits, sniffs, sniffs terribly, yes, like Rip, but very, very strong. I went to see a um Alfred Brendel The pianist played in Berlin once when I was studying there, I think I did my gap year.

I think he was there, and I just want to say, this guy is playing, I think it was Beethoven's piano sonatas, just him by himself. On stage at the Berlin Philharmonic and there's this incredibly loud sniffing thing that I'm doing and in the second half everyone was gone, I was basically a completely empty area of ​​the audience, but yeah, it's such a strange thing, um, you can just . You can't really stop it with the best in the world, you can't help but do this, there's these things and it's um and you didn't have the language for that either when you were a kid, that's the worst part.

You don't have the language to explain that it's a compulsion, if you feel like you have control of it, you say, you feel like, therefore the only thing you can say is that you want to do it if you don't want to. do it because it's horrible you would really want to stop and it's hard and it's scary because you can't articulate it and um uh and I think there's no answer to that, I think it just happens the way you've done it um, as you've matured, your perspective of your childhood has evolved because I have discovered that mine certainly has a little more wisdom.

I say that I am now 30 years old, but with a little more wisdom. I now have a different perspective on the events of my childhood, at one time I would have narrated them differently, but now I see different types of truths and lines in my early experiences. I think I like them a lot. from my memories of myself as a kid and, um, it felt like there was a pretty clear break once I got into college, it felt like life stopped and started again, so when I think about my kind of um , the It's kind of a story about myself that I guess I'm living quietly in the back of my head.

I don't actually go much further than college, um, and I'll happily find anything unbearable like you know more than you do. Whatever I said or did 10 minutes ago seems pretty easy to me and I guess that feeling gets weaker and weaker the further back I go in terms of finding myself, you know, embarrassing myself and then when I get to Childhood. Everything is perfect or feels good. I mean, I'm aware, like I said, that I would just get on with my own thing, but nothing. I think he was sensitive. I think I still am. He was a quite sensitive child.

I used to cry a lot, I know that makes me sound unhappy, but I used to, it didn't take much to make me cry and I think I probably retained a kind of sensitivity that's interesting, so I write a lot about stoicism and a lot of things. I think that people you guys tend to write about the things that you know you need to learn for yourself or for our learning, so you know you express those things, often better because you're discovering them for free for yourself, um, maybe like many stoics. You know,

secret

ly, I'm also quite sensitive, so I remember it, but no, no, um, not really unhappy, not totally happily happy either, but just kind of quite. content type of lonely child that sensitivity um I've always wondered if we are particularly captivated by applause, therefore we are also captivated by criticism so that people who don't end up committing their lives to being public artists and living for the response and the reaction who has his job are also the people who are most susceptible to when you know the opposite of applause uh yeah, yeah, I guess, so you're definitely exposing yourself, aren't you if you act? and you thought you were opening yourself up to both extremes of reactions, but that's not really what it was about for me.

I think it was about control being a big part of it and also kind of um. like I didn't come out until I was like 30 or so, um and I think around the time I was getting into hypnosis, you know, sort of Actually, in college, uh, and I think, first of all First of all, this wasn't clear to me at the time, but in retrospect, the control aspect was very clear, uh, and inIt actually worked well if you see a hypnotist hypnotizing people. I mean, it's just that this whole thing is a big exercise in control and I think that was appealing to me, even though I didn't know it, it didn't strike me in that language at the time. time, but I think looking back was useful and I also think that if the old outdated cliché of the gay man in particular being a hairdresser or an interior designer and all those horrible old clichés that they have in The Common Actors is also the notion of being able to create dazzling surfaces because they divert people from the more difficult ones, but if you get embarrassed, you know what's underneath and I think Magic is very good for that too. you're, you're creating this kind of bubble around yourself, this kind of um, you're literally hiding behind a gimmick, and people will see that gimmick and be like, oh god, you're amazing, how do you do that, you're amazing. that's a very attractive thing, a lot of kids get into magic because they don't have confidence, um, and a lot of people, even going through magic into adulthood, have learned to rely on it to impress people and they haven't had to go back and just work through the normal social skills that most people do, so it's a very attractive thing.

I think all of that was helpful for me as someone who wasn't out and, you know, figuring out all that stuff. Use the word shame. That's when it re

mind

ed me of listening to your audiobook where you talk about those two kids who hit you in your sleeping bag. I can't remember them oh yeah, yeah, that's true, yeah, and one of the lines you said in that section of the book is that You were very good I think you said embody shame, but I know that's not the exact word you used, but they were too good to like to harbor shame.

You are full of shame. I think it was the um, the message, yeah, I don't remember. exactly what I wrote, but um, yeah, it scares you, I said, now I find that it's um, yeah, I can relieve myself, I'm prone to it, you know, if I feel like I've upset my partner, I'll do it, it's a shame that I'm going to go instead of getting defensive or you know, yeah, I'll just do it easily. I can easily go back to a feeling of oh, you know I've been bad, I just let this person down is what does shame mean to you because I think I've been using the word a little bit without a very focused definition.

I've been saying that I felt a lot of shame because I was the only hidden black person in everyone. white school and we were the poorest family, so that feeling of shame became a motivation that made me want to become a happy and sexy millionaire, but what does shame mean to you in that context? Well, I guess if you distinguish it from shame, shame is in a way that you've let yourself down or it's a feeling that you're going to get from other people, they're important in the sense that that's how you've presented yourself to them. o I guess it's a shame how you've presented yourself to yourself, that you've let something down inside of you, that's the way it is, isn't it? um uh, but I think the experience of it is kind of um, it just becomes an easy break. place whatever it is, but it could be someone else, it could be anger or fury or whatever, if there's just an emotional line that you have that was a familiar place when you were young, you just find yourself settling back into that and I guess What part of getting older is recognizing those kinds of things, aren't you recognizing that?

Ah, that's an unnecessary pattern and as you said with your own experience, those things can be really useful, they can provide a real boost. and a motivation to um, you know, do things that you wouldn't do, if I mean not be out, all that energy went into creating this kind of Mr Magic Persona and I just you know, and although it's easy to say that you know you should always always comes out and everything else and of course those things are important too, but I don't think I would be. I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you right now.

I don't think if that would have been an easy journey, you know, it's a shame to be a family resting place like you describe and you said that starts in your childhood. I just want to be because I want to make sure I'm clear about the context here that you have. kind of family history in your childhood because of the social dynamics of your childhood because you felt a little different and a little lonely is that what you're saying or are there other dynamics with parents that I know, I think specifically with something like gay, I think I think that's what it is, I think if you feel and I hope it's different now, you just know it's receding a little bit.

I'm 51 now, but if you feel that way. things are just embarrassing and awkward, you're like you know it's not like you're really recovering, you're finding out in real time about yourself, aren't you? So it becomes an uncomfortable center of everything that starts to affect a lot of what happens on the surface and there is a real experience, I think, if you are not outside, which I have also recognized in many friends, but there is a kind of bubble around you because you're kind of You have to maintain a kind of um, kind of curated exterior and part of that is that what happens underneath is uncomfortable and difficult and feels embarrassing so I think that's it, I think that's where I don't remember feeling that as a kid when I was saying hush and stuff, but I don't remember feeling it as an experience, it just kind of crept in and the more I leaned into it, the more magical the outside becomes, the harder and the more opaque becomes this kind of outward presentation, I think it goes hand in hand with a more embarrassing interior until in the end you just oh, that and just letting it all be okay, was there a point?

And this might be a really naïve question for a straight man, but was there a point where it became very clear to you that your sexual preference was different or different? it's kind of a slow understanding and yeah, it got cut off, um, if it's because you can never really get into another person's head, yeah, and understand what their experience is, it's, it's kind of um, it's often hard to tell. really and of course in Back in the Day I was also a real Christian, which spoils things a little bit and gets in the way of everything a little bit.

I had a friend who went through some of that type of Living Waters movement, which is the This type of gay conversion is called gay conversion therapy, it was a little more subtle than that, but basically it is that, so he was going through that and, although I didn't do it, I avoided him a little because I was his friend. and you know it was something we were talking about a lot um so all that stuff and obviously by the way it doesn't work in case you were wondering um I mean I went right in it worked for me um uh so yeah It was kind of um, I don't know, no, there's never a clear moment, it's just that I think when I just came into the public eye I thought I didn't want this to be some kind of weird thing that's like a

secret

, um, so, uh , and then you get out of it and you get out of it and then actually, uh, The Joy, the reason it's liberating, at least it was for me and probably, hopefully, for most people now is that people just don't care. like this thing that you've carried with you and that experience of that shameful Center being there again, shame is a very strong word, but it's still kind of an uncomfortable thing and, eventually, when you're open about it, it's just a people don't care why would they care so that's freedom that's why it's liberating it's not because you can suddenly walk around the street with your shopping bags it's just that oh no one cares how you drive difficult private things of the best way, so actually you've done the biggest one like you've done it, so now anything else after this will be fine, I think that's why it's kind of liberating.

I really think it was on the telegraph, well, you said that, um, maybe the journalist was commenting that, um, something as simple as losing your keys can trigger a whole new wave of self-hatred, oh God, that was it um, yeah, that's just Fury, although it's not. It's when you can't find a circle, you can't find your keys or your pen, self-hatred, I mean, it's a very strong word, uh, I think people maybe yes, maybe yes, yes, probably yes , would reflect it back. at myself instead of getting angry at my partner, at anyone else who probably lost control, that's what I would do, I would be angry that I must have put his keys somewhere because he can't find them, I would just be, yeah, punishing myself. why why Am I always losing things?

Why can't I remember where I put things? Yeah, it would definitely make that interesting. I wouldn't, no I wouldn't. I don't think it would reflect on my own image if I lost. the keys or even if I did it wouldn't reflect negatively I think that's who I am, that's what I am, yeah, I'm someone organized versus oh, I'm so organized, I hate, I hate that about myself, yeah, well, no No No I know when I said that was probably quite a while ago and uh I don't know if I would necessarily be as hard on myself now and unless you exaggerate these things for rhetorical effect, has anything changed? as in a really fundamental aspect. level, yeah, I'm really curious about how we could change some of these things because we say yes, we talk about it, but as I get older and older and I've done more and more interviews like this.

I tend to find that these are really fundamental things that never heal, never go away, and in fact, I think that's very good news for people because there are a lot of people who are trying to sell you this thing that they can endure your traumas or your insecurities are within reach. zero, yeah, I've never seen that happen, no, that's all wrong and even stoicism in a way is a little guilty of that, even something that is talked about, of rolling with the punches of life, is still kind . to suggest that and if you do it right you won't be bothered you know you won't experience anxiety that's all that's a little off base I really think the nature of life is that it's difficult and uh not all the time, but a lot of the time things really go wrong and they certainly don't go as planned and you know that, in reality, as you start to get older, you realize that your plans probably have nothing to do with how things are turning out, but with the illusion of That they are is what propels you through the first half of life, so I actually think that the project, the task, our task is, to some extent, a kind of personal development and integration with the parts of us that we feel uncomfortable with.

Again, that's the project of relating to what is difficult within ourselves and then how we do that in life and how we relate to the things that are difficult and tricky in life because the thing is, although that experience It can be very difficult, isolating those feelings of you know, when life lets you down or you feel like you've failed, they tend to be quite isolating experiences, like shame, right, that's a very isolating thing, whereas in reality and strangely, I'm doing this show showing right now and this is completely what the show is about those isolating experiences like they're exactly the things that bring us all together, I mean, the human experience, how we deal with the difficulties of life, you know. when things go wrong and we feel like we failed. that's why we all have to find our way, so the things that feel the most isolating are the ones that tend to connect us, um, so I don't think it's about trying to bury them under some kind of forced optimism and I don't know. tries to achieve Nirvana or a life free of problems.

I think it's a really terrible project because you'll end up blaming yourself for failing, you weren't stoic enough or you weren't stoic enough. I'm not a good enough optimist or whatever. It always reminded me of the faith healers that I spent a lot of time observing and when they do that thing where they say throw away your pills and if your illness comes back it's because you didn't have enough faith. like it's your fault and that's no different than you know the secret you know the Law of Attraction this is yes it's the same it's the same you have to commit completely and if it doesn't work if the universe doesn't always provide you it's jewelry and money and kind of strange cars um so you didn't have enough faith um it wasn't that you know it was your own fault um so it's a perfect cycle of uh blame um uh which exonerates the um, the real system blames you completely, so yeah .There's a bit of irony in the fact that people choose those books because they don't want responsibility, but failure brings responsibility back to them because I think about the law of attraction.

I actually had a conversation with a girl. I was dating many years ago in New York and she got out of the taxi and left because I told her that she believed she could visualize anything. I went so you think you can just think about something and then it will happen so you could think about becoming a billionaire and what happened she said yeah I said no I don't agree with that but house because you go out into the universe and then comes back and what they're doing in that to me seems like they're alleviating their own sense of responsibility, they're putting it up to the puppet master of the universe, but as you've described,when that fails the fault is ultimately theirs for not doing it, yes it must be horrible instead it was just a bad idea to begin with and more helpfully how do we live comfortably with the universe that it doesn't give us an idea of ​​what our plans are, why wouldn't it make any sense, so how? we know how we navigate and there's a kind of old image that has appeared in so many different forms of a diagonal x equals y, so if you imagine a graph and you have an axis, you have the The , your goals and your plans, and then the other access to the y axis is just life, what they used to call fortune, is all the things that are thrown at you, um, if you imagine the line that we carry in our lives is kind of line x equals y, right, it's kind of a wavy line, so sometimes our plans are winning and we're doing great and sometimes life throws things back at us that we have no control over. and things got horrible and someone got sick or whatever, then there's some kind of wavy diagonal x equals y where we're being pulled in two different directions, that's what we live, it's just kind of reality and nature The American optimistic model is that by believing in ourselves we weaken ourselves and this is not an old hangover from Protestantism.

It's the kind of work ethic that you can, by believing in yourself, you can put that line in line so that it's in line with your goals and objectives. um and we've just completely erased the idea of ​​fortune and life from that, you know, we used to call people, um, unlucky, now we call them losers, you know, so there's a lack of respect now towards just the fact that Life is throwing things back at you, so how do you navigate? I think Stoicism is actually a very good set of tools that almost all of your listeners will be familiar with, but the bottom line is that you know that it's not the things in life that cause your problems, it's the The story that you tell yourself about them is the judgments that you make about them, which is a very good and sensible idea that has come down to us, um, over the last few thousand years and then, coupled with that, you take all the things on their face. the ones where you have no control over the results, what other people do and what they think, etc., and you can decide that those things are fine the way they are and you can just focus on things, just try to change the things that you can really change , which is the world of your own thoughts and your own actions, and that's where we should put our attention and then it's interesting, there's a middle ground of uh, you know.

For example, if you have success of any kind, you know that there are parts that you have control of and parts that you don't, so the best analogy I've read is like going to a tennis match if you go in determined to win and then your opponent is playing better than you, you'll probably get anxious and feel like you're failing, whereas if you go in determined to play your best again just to control the part you're in charge of, then in some ways it doesn't matter if your opponents they're a little bit better than you or if they start winning, you're not failing, you know? re and the same goes for um, you know, stomachs were big movers and shakers.

If you want to change the world, you can do it, but you will only be emotionally invested in your intention and your actions, not the results that may happen a generation later. You've done it after you've died, you know that's something that's out of your hands. I think all of that is very useful and very useful, the only thing if you look at it as a set of tools to lend when it's useful, but even that, uh, yeah. you take it as a kind of you know, almost like a spiritual way of life can fall into the problem of um and therefore we shouldn't have any anxiety, therefore anxiety is still somehow the devil, but you know , without anxiety, how do you know? change something in your life, how do you know to change jobs, unless the current job makes you feel bad or you know that things have to get anxious and have to go away so we can move forward and grow, and we know you?

I can't do that without accepting anxiety to the point that as I get older I started to realize that the kind of compass of my life is how I feel and that's what you alluded to when we have this. The signal sometimes comes in the form of anxiety, sometimes it comes in the form of fear, but these are all really helpful signals. Do you resonate with what I just said there in terms of similar feelings that our body is giving us? They are the most important signs. so that we navigate versus similar narratives versus what my mother wants or I end up working in the city in a suit and tie because that's what society had expectations, but I feel a sign inside of me that is I know depression or I feel like you know, I think It is very important to listen to those things.

I think we live stories very easily, we tend to see things in terms of a narrative and that's, um, it's an interesting double. Kind of complicated because, on the one hand, whether you know that someone is written in or out of a story, language and damage have become very important, and all of those things have suddenly become very linked and guarded, the notion story itself has become so important, um taking authorship of your story and so on, but the other side of what you know I live by in my work as a magician is that stories are just stories, you know, if a magician tricks you with a trick in a way that works What they are showing you is that your story that you are acting with the world is not entirely correct, like there was something you missed and you always feel like you paid the right attention, you saw everything you were picking up on all the information, but it shows you that you've missed something that your narrative of what reality is is not the same as the world's um and uh, so the story side of things seems to be part of our composition, but it is important not to fall.

I'm too in love with it and realizing that the nature of a story is that there are things that you're excluding, there's an image that doesn't exist of telling a story about a campfire and a clearing and it's cozy, um, but then there's all the things. forest in the dark with all the things that you're excluding from that story and that's where the monsters live and the nature of the monsters that come and bite you and all the things that we don't include in a story, whether it's the story that we tell uh we tell ourselves about ourselves um or if it's a story that we tell ourselves about our nation or our culture, whether it's something social or private, the things that we bury and the things that we don't include within the narrative, because the narrative is really too simple, It's deep, like it's buried, it's buried in our own unconscious or it's buried in the untold story of whatever it is, and that's what comes back and bites us, that's the things that come to possess us in our own ways. lives and in our uh, you know, in our social lives, as well as things that we've buried and I think as you get older, this is where those feeling signals come in.

I think it's increasingly important to pay attention to the things we're banishing from our stories, you know what we do if we think about what makes us resentful or what we envy or you know what those things are because those are the things we're enduring. in some ways and I think there is a change in the second half of life and a membership. I'm a little older than you, but where we can disconnect a little from the story we've been telling. of how to move forward in life, it is a dialogue with the external world, that is where we receive signals from people that show us what we need to be successful, what we need to look or act in a certain way that denotes moving forward in progress Many of you know that focusing on the future and then something happens around midlife where the project actually changes to take cues from within rather than from the outside world and I think that's then a good time for priorities to shift from what will give me success in from the future to what actually is what could bring pleasure, satisfaction and meaning now in the present I think it's a useful thing to lean into the second half of life it was college that kind of sparked your interest in Hypnosis, right, yes, yes.

Yes, you saw someone on campus doing it. Martin Taylor was putting on a show. Yeah, it was my freshman week and wow, that was amazing. I left and came back that night to a friend and said, "I'm going to learn how to do this." my friend Nick said, "Oh yeah, me too, but I knew he meant it. I knew I'd never seen it before. I'd never come across hypnosis. Obviously I'd heard of it, but um, and it was a good show." , right? You know, embarrassing." people make them look stupid, it was amazing, how did you know you were serious?

Because I've had that feeling in my life before where something just clicks, yeah, well I guess it was the new time those boxes were being ticked something about performing something about control uh, I didn't really know, I just felt like I wanted to. , I have to do that, it's the most amazing thing I've ever seen and it was, uh, it was attractive in ways that just weren't really attractive. um, I guess I hadn't really thought about acting, no, uh, but yeah, I think that's what's going on, isn't it? There is something that is subconsciously resonating, it is something that you need and it was absolutely No, there was no question, so I bought, borrowed and stole every book I could find on the subject.

You probably only learn on YouTube nowadays, but it's probably kind of dodgy because you need to learn it from the beginning so that if you stumble upon it. problems or if someone is having a strange time when you are hypnotizing them, you can't be fumbling around trying to Google what to do. You know you need to have the skills there and the means to deal with it, so I definitely learned the long way, uh, yeah, and then you became, I think, from what I was reading, quite obsessed with magic and hypnosis, and yeah, to the point where you have a conversation with your parents and you say, yeah, I remember saying to my mom, I don't think I'm going to be a lawyer.

I was studying law in German. I said I'm not going to be a lawyer. I'm going to be a magician. Said. Oh, okay, that sounds great, it sounds a lot more. funny, which actually made me stop and think, okay, wait, that's probably a little reckless, um, what did they say to get them to agree? Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what she said, she said, oh, that sounds great, it sounds so much more. funny, it's cute, right? I wrote them a letter at the end of my first year saying that because I saw all these other law students really worried about their exams because of what their parents were going to think if they didn't pass and that had never occurred to me as something that your parents they would make you feel, so I wrote them a letter thanking them for that, just for always letting me do what I wanted to do, the only thing they ever pressured me to do.

What you have to do is learn to drive and I don't drive yet I don't drive that's still that driving is a fairly common story. I have to say your obsession seemed to come from or at least be driven by some sort of insecurity like the reason hypnosis initially resonated so much was because it was giving you something, it seemed like it could offer you something you were looking for or didn't have, yeah , that's a story I heard, there are also obsessions, although it's not. It's not that the nature of them is not your eyes, it's just the level of obsession that I saw from that day you discovered hypnosis, like learning all the books by yourself, yeah, and then even Beyond University, where You start working in restaurants for many, many. years how long from that first day when you first saw hypnosis until, say, before you started the TV stuff?

How long does that type of stay last? I think the tenure is about 10 years 10 years I think so, let me think, so I graduated in '94 and then at that time I was doing the odd hypnosis program for students. Actually, the first TV show came out in December 2000. I was involved in everything, it was about 10 years, but it also included my college career, but there was a six-year period after college, by which time I was already involved. doing mostly for students when I was just enrolling or about to make a living doing it. Hypnosis shows but much more magic.

I was doing magic in restaurants in Bristol and then people hired me for their parties and I wrote a book for magicians which got me known in that world, which then led to me being cast. I went out for a TV show which led to me getting a phone call and my name being spread in that world, so that's almost 10 years of practice, yeah, um, no real money when you say sign up for people who are in America, log out as in welfare I guess you would call it yeah, I was, I was, I lived in this, my student apartment, which I stayed in, it was aQuite a nice apartment, I had all my books and my parrot, and that didn't cost me much.

He just loved her life. I would go out and dream about magic tricks during the day and then I would go out and do them at night, so I developed my own approach to everything and, uh, yeah, I remember thinking I've never had any ambitions at all and I just remember thinking that if I can take us as a cross section of my life, everything is in the right place. I would like to get up whenever I want. get up, I would like to feel like I can make my own decisions about what I do day to day and I only had a vague idea of ​​those kinds of things that were important to me and, um, and if something didn't feel right to me, it would be easy to change. and that was it, that's how it was always like I never thought about looking into the future, it was never about where I want to be, it's just this day of this week the life I have.

I would like to live and that has never changed. I guess the difference is that when you're successful, you start to have people around you who do these other jobs for you, the adult jobs, and you know I have a manager and I have myself. I've worked with producers and all that kind of stuff, so it's not like that doesn't have to happen at some point, but it's not coming from me. I can feel you like a child a little bit. as a child in an adult world, so I feel like sometimes, except now, the adults are younger than me, which is strange, but I also think that maybe it's a good way to feel, maybe it's a good way to be yes You can trust yourself from today on, yes, that young man in those restaurants in Bristol doing magic tricks.

Is there a difference in your level of happiness? I think about this, I think it's pretty much the same, but it's different, I mean, um, a little bit. like being a kid and playing alone, most of my twenties were well cut, my twenties were pretty lonely too and that's another pattern that suits me so again it's an easy place to go back to. I love my own company. my interests, the things I love to do outside of my job, painting, writing and reading, and they are all solitary things. I said it's a comfortable place for me, so forgive me, I slide past that so it gets a little lost, but really that's what you know.

I was also aware that I felt lonely sometimes and, you know, I like being in a relationship too, so it's different, I had a different feeling about it. I think the freedom to do what I wanted to do and somehow create this kind of world. For me that was lovely and it's harder to do it as you get older and you have responsibilities and you know that you're contributing to a household and you have a partner and you have dogs and all of that is not that easy, so to a childish part of me you'd like to go back to that, but not really, I wouldn't actually press a button to make this happen, it's just kind of a nice little dream in the back of your head while we probably all have maybe we don't have a slight kind of fantasy that we never really realize. we would live but it's kind of nice about that um it's almost like um I feel like you're my head it's like you know you're in Bristol Mining your own business enjoying the simple life and then you got kicked out, you got kicked out of Bristol.

You were really successful so they put you on TV, that was really successful and sometimes when people are successful sometimes they forget about it and I think I've done that. I have done this in my life several times and we forget to take the moment to pause and consider how intentional this journey is and the direction of travel is like we are being pulled and dragged and then it ends up feeling a little like you are throwing Coal in the steam engine train just to keep it moving Has there ever been a moment of pause in your life where you've gone?

Do you know what I need to take some time and think about where I am? I'm doing it and why I'm doing it because I've been successful and then I've moved up the ladder. People do that a lot in the corporate world, they become a good lawyer, then they promote them, then they make partner and leave. What am I doing here? Yeah, I think we lean toward the things we're second best at. It's like you know the great teacher who becomes a director but would have been a better teacher than uh, that's an easy thing to do, right?

I guess sometimes I think it could be really nice to act. I think I'm doing exactly that, going from someone who is really good at what I do now and just wondering why, why would I do it? I mean it could be fun, but what a strange thing, we naturally start drifting towards things we're not that good at. um uh. The only thing I would say when you said that. I was thinking about the early years of Early TV. The shows when he was on were largely a response to David Blaine's success in the United States.

I'm doing, you know, mind-reading tricks and stuff like that, and I felt like I was over that, but that's how it was. the way he was trapped and I definitely felt like he wasn't really enjoying this and that led to a change in the type of shows I was doing, I mean the last show I did is on Netflix called sacrifice. if people have no idea who I am and you've heard me this far, um uh, and in general, what I've been doing for the last decade with television shows is subjecting people to these kinds of big social experiments by Truman Show style, often quite life or death situations that they found themselves in without realizing that they are part of a show and what that allowed me to do was not be the center of attention and the reason for that is actually apart from my own dissatisfaction with it, but just magically if you can snap your fingers and make anything happen, which is kind of what a magician does dramatically, that's a very wrong place to be and this is, you know, pet and Teller, yes, yes, something that the teller, apart from being a beautiful magician is a wonderful thinker and he has also talked a lot about this that it is actually a very bad drama if you can make something happen, what we want dramatically are heroes, people who are struggling with the situation, maybe they are trying to get to a point. but they actually end up at point B um and the thoughts of him and my own kind of dissatisfaction.

I guess with that early stage of my career it led to this shift where I could be in the background pulling the strings, but you're actually watching real audience members go through some pretty intense drama and that has to be more engaging than someone to say, "hey, look at me, aren't I smart?", which is the essence of what most magic is, so I think it was some kind of semi-deliberate change that came from a moment of pause. , was it quite intentional for you to take it? You know, I've seen several documentaries that you've done where you're proving that magic or the supernatural isn't real and, again, that's super compelling because we would expect you to lean into that and persuade us of the supernatural, whereas some of the more convincing things I've seen you do, whether you come across as a psychic pretending to talk to the dead or I remember that reading you did. where the woman had stopped outside the Mercedes and the minute she was in a mini, yes, yes, and basically, what was it that you read, not her future, did you read in her life?

I think it was the psychic that I was. Challenge had mentioned for many years that he drove a little red mini and that had impressed her a lot, but I actually saw him stop his car, parked right next to her in the parking lot, yes, but I actually think it's On the contrary, I think there's a long tradition of magicians separating psychics and charlatans and I think it's because we end up with an understanding of how those things work and it goes back to Houdini and seances and exposing fraudulent mediums in the dark, you know, it's very, very long and probably before that, but there's a long history of this, um, so the only thing is if you just say, no, this is false, you're not being very entertaining. and by the nature of what those people do, it's more entertaining, so they kind of won the game, so I tried to avoid attacking those areas instead of just attacking them and making them negative.

I've always tried to recreate something and make it more interesting and better, while also saying that I'm not really doing this, so, for example, in one of the shows I did I had an audience on stage. at Infamous, which was a previous show and I was giving them mediumship readings, so I say come if you've lost someone, if there's someone you'd like to get in touch with if you saw them. A medium and a skeptical audience liked me, because they're my audience, but then they'd come over and sit down and I'd start giving them these readings and I'd say, "I'm getting a message from your aunt." Jill is right, do you have an aunt, Jill, who passed away?

Yes, and she says she doesn't say anything. I'm just making this up, but she says that you have, oh, you have a dog named Bella, that she really LOVES, that's true, yeah, and um, I'm lying to you, but she said that. I would like to pepper this impossible information that I was giving with reminders that I was making it up, um and I found it really very interesting and and Well, theatrically it was really interesting and much more interesting than saying that these people are fake and prove it and if you can prove it I will give you a million dollars, so I tried to find a more creative approach to that.

Do some people think you are supernatural in your

power

s? Well, I was going to say that actually after that, about a week into the show, I walked out and there was a girl at the stage door who said, um, I was wondering if you could put me on, I mean girl, which one? You know she's 20 years old, but if you could get me in touch with my grandmother who passed away and I said, oh God, I'm so sorry. I was hoping it would be clear in the show that I really can't do those things? It's not real and she doesn't know it, I know it, I know you can't really do it and it's not real, but I was wondering if you could get me in touch with her like it's extraordinary, how can we balance each other? these things in our heads, so yeah, I'm sure people believe all kinds of things about me.

I think the way I look at it is a bell curve, so on one end of the bell curve are the thinking people. it's all fake it's all Stooges it's all set up um and I never wear Stooges and that's not what it is and on The Other Extreme people say I'm psychic and I won't admit it which isn't true either um and then there's This Swell main in the Middle where people understand it, um and that's all you can, I think, take responsibility for what really there will always be people on the extremes who will have strange and extreme reactions, um, and then you know, I think There is a certain license on stage, which is different from television.

If you're doing things on TV, if you're talking to people at home, there's a level of openness and honesty, whereas on stage it seems like there's a kind of theatrical quotes around everything, so I feel like I'm doing things on the scenario that I wouldn't do on TV, um, so that changes too, it's a pretty interesting line, kind of like step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step , step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, The first television shows were very much like "I'm doing this really," that's what I said, this and these are not gimmicks, um and then once the show was made, once we realized that there was going to be some longevity and that there was going to be In more shows, it was important to me to just bring it back to a place that was honest and kind of ambiguous as well and I've enjoyed that, now I like to lean into the ambiguity of what I'm doing because again it's like that. it means you can do more interesting things with it and you know if there's a lesson in it about how we see the world how the story we tell ourselves isn't what's real how we confuse that story with reality you know we confuse the boundaries of Our own field of vision to the horizons of the world, you know if there is something.

There is something to be said in something as childish as magic, if there is something worth saying, it is much easier to say than if you are not trying to do it about For yourself, has anything ever stumped you in terms of the supernatural? Is your work predominantly based on Psychology? Have you ever done something and thought about how that happened? Two things come to mind: one, I was in a restaurant in Bristol approaching a table which is always unbearable, um, uh, if people aren't interested and I walk up with a deck of cards and introduce myself and it's two businessmen and one of them says oh no, no, thank you very much and I said okay and as I walked away the other one said, but Queen of Hearts 13 cards down and I laughed and walked away, then I went to a corner and I counted the guards at 13.

One down was the Queen of Hearts, I have no idea how she did it. If you're listening, please get in touch. That has microphones. me for 20 years and um the other thing I was actually doing, I did a show called Miracle, which is also on Netflix, it was a uh uh previous, uh, theater show a few state shows ago and the second half was healing, it was How evangelicals, uh, heal people who are beingmurdered in the spirit and I had no idea if it was going to work because again, a very skeptical audience like no, you know if I've been to these events with these renowned healers and of course people are coming. waiting for it to work and they have a certain amount of you know, uh, preparation for it, which obviously helps and I didn't know if it was going to work at all, but it did and again I'm undermining it like I'm doing it and I'm creating these healings and quotes for the people in the audience, but at the same time I'm also undermining it, but it was extraordinary.

I mean, I remember in the first week a woman. appeared and had been in parallel, she was probably about 40 years old, she had been paralyzed on one side of her body since she was four or something in a flood of tears because she could move her left arm for the first time um and the next night Things like that at night, sometimes, like I imagine, you know someone with back problems who felt better, but sometimes also quite dramatic things and although I could explain it because I knew what I was doing, it was um, what are you doing?

Seeing is the psychological component of suffering, like if you take an x-ray before and after nothing has happened, nothing has changed, but the way that person lives their affliction, the way they live their relationship with their suffering, becomes has changed, so what? You're seeing that it's just a mix of two things that are happening, there's sure to be adrenaline, which is a natural pain reliever, so you make the whole experience full of adrenaline, you know, the same way that a lion came in. In this room and you had previously stubbed your toe, you would have run away and you wouldn't feel the pain in your toe well because there is a greater threat, um, that's just adrenaline, okay and then, but this other thing like that maybe it's a kick.

It started from the adrenaline experience of you have this thing that you've lived like presumably this woman her arm had been fine for many years but no, she just continued living as if it wasn't, you know and everything that you build around the pain, you know the way people respond to you, so there is a whole web of social aspects about protecting something that no longer needs protection, you know it is much more complicated than just the The organic cause of your pain there are many other things that cause it. They sustain and can keep it going beyond what is actually useful, so here she was having this extraordinary experience that she couldn't explain when nothing had actually happened beyond the fact that they had just had it.

I've been pulled out of something that was something amazing and wonderful that I started to, you know, do the thing of going, maybe I could do this, maybe I could offer this as a token of secular healing, it will only work on some people and you're just dealing with relatively small percentages um and I started thinking that and of course that's where you start to go crazy, that's when you start to think that you're playing God and then of course the people because when you go to these events the renowned healers that I've seen, Benny Hinn and others, what you don't really see when you see that stuff on television is that in some of these big places there are hospital beds that have been brought in.

There are people who know a child with Down syndrome that I spoke to with her mother and she had taken her son to so many programs that followed him around the country and things that they just won't understand. We're not going to be healed by that kind of Dynamic, um, so that's the uglier side of that, because people have become very dependent on it, they're not going to get any help and then there's the lack of any kind of follow up, you know? There is a lot of infrastructure available if you want to donate, but there is no infrastructure if you have been negatively affected in some way and want help or if you have had a healing and now don't know how to do it. sustain that or what you're supposed to do other than being told to give more money, you know, you know when people found out through your work in television that you had this skill and talent.

I imagine you have many approaches to using it. Less ethical reasons because I mean help me get my girlfriend back, help me close the deal or help me rob a bank a little bit, no um I guess people would have to ask, that wouldn't be the only thing I remember being asked. . the FBI, the police actually asked me to help, I mean, it's never gone beyond that discussion because I mean, even you know there's a lot of business too, but it's not my world, I feel like an I'm an Entertainer I'm also quite introverted. I don't have that thing of, you know, yeah, let me go out and change the world or B, I don't have to do whatever, that thing is that I feel like I could apply.

This would be someone all or the police came out, I don't know because it never went beyond them saying would you come and talk to us about something and we came back and said no, it's not appropriate, so I don't know now. I want to know that you had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast, as the seasons have started to change, and so has my diet, and right now I'm going to be completely honest with you. I'm starting to think. It's a lot about losing a little weight because in the last four or five months my diet has probably been pretty bad and it started to show a little in the last two months I go to the gym about 80 of the time, so I follow it with 10 of my friends in a WhatsApp group and this online tracker and I'm currently at 81 um so 81 of the days I've done a workout in the last 150 days so I'm going to I'm going to the gym about six times a week so One of the things I'm doing now to reduce my calorie intake and try to get back to being nutritionally complete and everything I eat is drinking the fuel protein shake.

Thanks to Heal for making a product that I really like Salted caramel is my favorite, I have the banana one here which is the one my girlfriend likes but for me salted caramel is the one we are lucky to have Intel sponsoring this podcast and in the previous episode AIDS I introduced the Intel Evo platform, the badge of approval for high-spec laptops that will allow you to be more productive on the go. All of their designs are tested to ensure they are extremely thin making them super portable, and they also have a high quality screen and camera features, for example this Samsung device I'm using for those of you who watch YouTube or Spotify is super Lightweight, making it the perfect device for travel, whether you're working on a plane.

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I understand that 10 years of The Graft And I see that in many people sitting here I see it in Jimmy Carr leaves university and does all this like gigs for 20 quid for years and years and years. I see it as Lewis Capaldi, the musician who went and played. I've been to pubs in Scotland for years and years and years and years and I loved it. I wanted to stay there. I see the permanence part that a lot of little kids don't appreciate because we all want it now and we want it for the wrong reasons. but what else was there about you, the way you expressed it, your style, that you think in retrospect made you convincing?

Oh, it's really hard, it's hard, it's hard even if I knew, the answer would be hard to say, um, I don't think so. I think it's just that I think it's not that intentional. I think you've probably grafted and done those things. I can't speak for Jimmy and the others, but probably just because you really enjoyed them in and of themselves, you probably weren't. thinking I don't do this, if I get ahead I can probably secure this and if that's the case, if you're just doing it because you love it and that feels like in itself what you're doing and there's no particular need for a plan anymore. beyond that then you'll keep doing it you'll get really good at it if that's if that seems like all you need right now anyway so why don't you know?

I love it and you put all your passion into it and you're really good at it, so that helped, um uh, and then when things took off a little bit, my manager also had a similar spirit of a kind of Slow Burn. I never had the feeling that I was thrown into the public or some kind of overnight success or anything like that, it was a very deliberate thing, I just let it come out slowly and that was helpful, um, I think I've had a good team around me um, it's not a one-man thing, it's not really a one-man thing, there always is, although I had my own experience during those 10 years of doing it on my own, once I got into television , it was like a small group of us, which I'm sure is pretty common and then I think what does help is letting it grow with me as I grew up.

I just let it develop with me as me. I don't really know what job you know, you asked me before I started how I would refer to myself. I never know, I mean Mentalist. I think technically that's what I am, but I remember a couple of years ago I had the book on Happy Happiness come out, which is essentially a Greek philosophy book, it came out the same month as Ghost Trainer for Thought Park and I remember thinking I don't know what I don't know what that is I don't know what work that is that allows those two things, it's certainly not mentalism, um, um, uh, so yeah, just allowing the thing to grow with me and in terms of, you know, Every once in a while, you know, people talk about it. the brand, etc., is a very useful thing.

I think just let it be you and not get carried away by the limitations of what it was when I started. I remember reading. I used to participate in those magical discussions. forums and stuff to see what magicians were saying about me and there were a lot of things like, oh this isn't even mentalism, like there was a certain type of magic called mentalism and I wasn't doing that, I was doing things that weren't t 10 and they would see it as something really negative and I always thought that's why it's interesting, that that would bother anyone, who knows what the word means, who cares, and it would be that somehow it wasn't sticking with me. within that, um, so, and that's another thing about playing alone, isn't it? and um, you, you or being, if you felt like an outsider as a child, I think as you get older you start to value that, that becomes a bit of a super

power

, you hold on to that feeling of being an outsider and you you use, so that's always helped me and I've just followed my nose to find what feels fun, interesting and worthwhile as I grow.

I've let those things grow with me and I find a lot of life much more interesting than magic. Magic is quite a childish thing actually, so it means that the things I find most interesting about life I can incorporate into magic. You know, I think if you have if you have both feet in your craft or your art form or whatever if the thing seems so big and expansive to you and everything you know you can't, you're like a little When you're overwhelmed by it you can't. move it nowhere, so if you have one foot in that and the other foot in the rest of life, at least you have some leverage to take this thing you do somewhere interesting, so maybe that helped too.

I see in your shows I see how your other passions are littered throughout the show. I remember watching a show in New York that was just amazing, it's funny because I consider myself a smart person, you know, I think I'll figure it out and he won't be able to. make me look the other way. or he won't be able to control my narrative, he won't be able to catch me and every time I've been to shows in London, New York, everyone I just leave in silence, yeah, because you're true, it's like a bad direction you've got me thinking. this, yeah, and then I'm like, what the hell is this constant disappointment in myself for not being as smart as I think I am?

Oh, that's so nice, it's always like what can There are 2,000 people trapped in a room with me, what can I do with them? It's always a lovely feeling to start with and the section about when you get the painting I don't want to give anything away. The painting is this one in the exhibition you saw in New York. I think it was New York. I've seen that I was in two Londons and in New York with my family in London, which was many years ago, like four, probably say four or five maybe five years ago, yes, and then the one in New York, I don't think It was pre-pandemic, it couldn't have been, yeah, it was right before the pandemic, so I'm painting a picture that someone is coming.

I get up and I think about a famous person and I start making a painting and then it's upside down and I turn it around at the end. What you're thinking is yes, yes, yes, and what I think surprises me the most is how amazing of a painter you are, thank you very much, and the fact that you can do that backwards,You can paint such an incredible picture upside down, it is also impressive, but that clearly describes what you have described where you stopped. a love of painting, yeah, I think so, I think that's all really, uh, otherwise what's left is you know, it's just hey, look at me, aren't I smart?

And that is not like that. You know, that might be interesting to the public for a while, um maybe. once and then that's it, so, yeah, I contribute what I can and just make sure the shows are about something else, you know, showman is about how the things in life that are difficult are actually the same things we shared which, strangely, was written just before everything came out before lockdown started and was going to come out the first week of lockdown and they assured me how things in life were isolating us, so they're actually the things we all tend towards. have in common, which then literally unfolds over two years during lockdown, um, so I've always tried to make them about something else, something of value, um and I don't think I like magic, obviously, but I don't think about and In and of itself it has tremendous value as a childish way of impressing people, so it's what you can bring to it that will give it value and then I think you're in a much more interesting and valuable area in your books on happiness. happy and a little happier one of the things that surprises a lot of people is that you are not a fan of setting goals and after having talked to you I can now understand that because today you have a lot more in this week to do my best focus. to life but, from your point of view, what is wrong with setting goals?

Oh no, there's nothing wrong with setting goals for short term goals, obviously you know it can be very helpful, it's the long term stuff, I think we just get a little obsessed. it's like a way of life, you know a friend of mine, it's like always being a workaholic, and he certainly bought an account when he was younger and he was made to feel that kind of need to achieve things in order to feel valued, you know , which is obviously what most workaholics will say, so he decided he was going to start a company, sell it and become a multi-millionaire, and that was kind of the goal, and then he spent the entire time I knew him, She was building a company and she sold it relatively young and had a lot of money and then she didn't know what to do with her life, she was miserable and she found herself going to a support group with a group of similar millionaires who had made the same mistake. and he had sort of overlooked the fact that it was actually building the company that gave meaning to his life, that was what was important and it's that old thing, isn't that what you know? that arriving at the end of the trip is simply taking off a coat and leaving your bag on the ground?

That could be it, it's not necessarily the The destination, you know, it's the, you know, it's the old thing, isn't it the journey that was important, but that was certainly? She realized that, um, and that really changed her life, realizing that what she thought was going to be important, wasn't. Importantly, how do we know what will make us happy? So many years before, you know, it was so terrible to measure that we lose flexibility depending on how we set those goals, but we become too rigid in them and it's like playing games. playing a game of chess Schopenhauer talks about this.

It was a very good analogy that is like starting a game of chess by deciding how you are going to play and the strategy you are going to use and how you are going to do it. maneuver from the beginning there is something else at stake, which is, you know, life. The fortune things that are going to be thrown at you are thrown back at you, so how can you decide those things? Why do we want goals? Do you think it gives us a sense of certainty? We need it, it's about moving forward, isn't it? It's important because we need to navigate through life and in the first half of life I think it's really important if you didn't have that optimistic feeling that you can chase the pie in the sky and somehow achieve it just by setting those goals.

I think life would be very difficult. I think it's actually important. I think it has evolutionary value. I think it's part of our drive, so it's not a bad thing. Really, but like all those things, we just have to check it out and see its limitations. I think it's a story. I see the goals I had as a story that gave meaning to my life when I was younger. The meaning was a bit misunderstood. I thought that if I bought the Lamborghini I would be happy, important, worthy and the shame would be alleviated, but since that failed me, yes, I realized that I was going to have to dedicate myself to looking for something else, well, those are the two problems.

Either you achieve the goal, yes, you achieve it and then what, or you don't achieve it and you have failed. I mean, you are something like what gives you pleasure, the same thing that gives meaning to your life and what you move towards. you know how to build the company or whatever you're doing yourself from your deliberate, intentional movement to the point where you can remove that meaning from your life. Have you developed any coping mechanisms for adversity? Chapter three of his book A book. One of the secrets is about the role that friction plays, the relationship it has with happiness, and we've talked a few times about adversity, but is there any kind of tool that you've learned that you can impart that has helped you overcome it? deal with when life throws you, well, the big stoic thing of how can this be okay and it's not that they don't put it exactly in that language, but that's the language that I found, how could this be okay, so first of all nothing is what happened which side of the line is under my control is my thoughts and actions or is it out of my control is something out of the world of course it is always the latter is always something out of the world in which case how?

I could be fine? How could that? How could it be okay for this to be like this? um and not just to leave. Oh, okay, okay. It's not just about saying it, but about letting that thought, you know, drip into the soul I find it very useful, that's also partly just my personality, my partner has a much more anxious personality than me and those things I don't They help at all, but they certainly help me, another thing, there is a great book. by David Destino called emotional success and I thought it was cool that he was talking about motivation and how a lot of our tools for motivation are top-down in the sense that you know whether you do this for ten thousand hours or you put in one hour a day for whatever, like a lot of work to change a habit and he's talking about a bottom-up approach where there are certain emotions that, if you put them in their place, naturally create a more motivating state and he he's a psychologist and when he talks about motivation, the way he tested it is by talking about where you value your future self and what your future self needs more than what you need right now, so if you take the example of are you going to go?

To study for your exam, are you going to go out and have a good time? The person who is not going to party and study for the exam is valuing the needs of that future self who did well on the exam more than the current self who sat there and would like to do well, so he takes that as the kind of motivation world we're talking about, so he sets up several experiments to see what can be done to maximize the value that people place on that future self and the three emotions, over and over again, that help compassion , gratitude and having the right kind of pride in what you do, a good kind of pride in the things you do well, not the bad kind of pride in what you do well.

I'm good at this, so I'm great at everything except having a kind of comfortable pride in the things you do well, so he knows that experiments are something that happens outside the room before the person comes in to do it. do the experiment and make them feel grateful. something and then they come and have to do a task that is impossible, but how much time do they spend trying to do it? It will take 40 more than someone who was not prepared to feel grateful before arriving and Gratitude has nothing to do with the experiment. Something seemingly completely independent something happens that makes you feel compassion and then you go in and you have to do some task and you do it better or longer or whatever these kinds of skills are.

The motivated person has more than um one of the questions was uh uh, how many dollars, but how many dollars? If you could have a hundred dollars a year from now on or x amount now, what would that x amount be that would break even? normally it's 17 like it doesn't really make any fiscal sense, but most people will say "okay, I'll take 17 now" instead of a hundred in a year, that seems to be the number people choose, but if you're prepared to feel grateful if they ask you the same question when you're in a state of gratitude for something again completely unrelated um, it goes up to 31, that was a great kind of uh finding out when they did it the experiment averaged 31, in other words, the people valued future needs more than current needs, if that makes sense, it could actually be demonstrated with something as simple as that, well, I read a little bit of chapter 12 of your book, um it was "About exactly that and I actually said before I sent it to my friends.

I sent that paragraph from your book about that instant gratification delay chart because when I say it makes sense, it doesn't make any sense. I don't understand how gratitude, how making someone feel grateful for a completely unrelated incident would make them choose to have more money, well, we'll make them delay their gratification in life, that's exactly what it does and I think the reason why there's no kind of rational link it's because it's kind of an emotional base, it's talking about an emotional heart that then spirals upward because if you find yourself acting more compassionately, which sometimes happens anyway, you might If you are feeling compassion, you may be feeling.

I'm very grateful to someone, that then affects that person's behavior and then that feeds back and affects yours and there's a certain kind of upward spiral that happens that definitely puts us in a state that I think is fairer and better than, for example, when we are. feeling the opposite of those things feeling hateful and resentful um so I get it. Sorry, does that mean that people who are reducing gratitude are more short-term in their decision making? They probably binge on foods that they probably shouldn't eat, they probably make other kinds of reckless decisions that they probably shouldn't make because of their own state of emotions and gratitude and compassion, maybe I mean it sounds like you have to ask him.

Don't know. I don't think he says that in his book, but I can certainly imagine it again, so if you're going through your life feeling generally resentful, I can't imagine that person is very motivated, it's so interesting that it actually answers a lot of questions that I have had with friends of mine. where I've wondered why they make short-term losing decisions, but I think there's an emotional question that I should really ask myself, which is how do you feel and we don't, we don't stop often to ask, what kind of assuming that your character is that they are lazy or just stupid, bad at decisions, whereas they really like to go to work. on emotions and you can change that, which is, it's a, I thought it was a very, yeah, very compelling way of seeing it instead of the normal top down approach we come across with love, aha, you described yourself as a bit of an introvert and someone who likes his own company, yeah, that sounds a bit like me, does it?

What has your journey been like to understand love and then, at 35, you came out? How has that trip been? Well I've had two long relationships and then um some little bits in between um and I think there's definitely a lot of learning in the first one that I think I've now brought into the second of course that's what we do the next thing is you have another relationship. , you bring all those lessons that you can't, you can't change them and you're in one, but you can start again next time. um we're quite different and it's not like we're not similar people in All I have, I have that kind of emotional detachment that I can easily get to, he's very committed and as people, the ones that are a little bit anxious tend to be very Be careful with things, so you know, pack your bags.

Coming to London to do this shows two very different worlds always leads to an argument. I travel light and here's another one, but we might even do this, we might need this, we might need these bags and bags, bags, so we see each other. others, sometimes, you know, like caricatures of ourselves because we're quite different in those ways, my kind of stoic, uh, whatever, sometimes it will seem like just laziness or not really, um, not getting involved with something, no. with that thing, not to be, no. taking it seriously and to me what I see is anxiety or impatience for him, it's a strong sense of justice, he has a strong sense of justice, something's not right, he's going to want to go fix it and fix it, um. and I think love for me is allowing that other person to be another person.

We would probably start our relationships by simply projecting everything we needinto a person and we barely do them the service of allowing them to exist as an independent creature. We pretty much just want them to be what we want them to be and I think if relationships are going to have any longevity at any point, that has to change to, actually, this person is a mystery and I could spend the rest of my life. life trying to get to know this person that I think is fine and I think it's also the same thing within ourselves in the parts of ourselves that we are, we are alienated again from the things that we just put out of the story um That sense of what the other is is the great mystery that you know is there in Magic, it is there within ourselves, in the sides of us that you know we need to live more comfortably with and in our relationships too.

Here's a great mystery that we sit down every day and have breakfast and talk and misunderstand each other and disappoint each other and occasionally delight in each other and it's, you know, it's a wonderful thing and sometimes it's hard work and and uh, but I think That seeing your partner is someone you could spend a lifetime knowing, and as a source of wonder and mystery, I think is a very useful thing. One of the messages I took is about expectations and being really aware that you have to keep your expectations in check because when you don't get frustrated or unhappy, it might prevail and I think about this a lot with my partner, who is the complete opposite.

I consider myself very logical. I need to understand everything. I am very, perhaps, scientific in my point of view. be the opposite of that, she is and then you may find yourself in conversations where the basis of reality that you are conversing from is completely different, yes, she will believe that a rock has energy and yes, and obviously I won't believe it, but we are complete opposites but that's also why it works because there is no expectation that we become the other person, she will tell me something that she knows I don't believe and at the end of saying it she won't wait for me to nod. and she agrees, yeah, because she knows she doesn't believe and that's okay, yeah, and vice versa, and that's what happens when you sing, except we're two different people, yeah, we can actually do that and she doesn't try becoming a spiritual whatever I don't try to turn her into a scientist does allow for the positive side of that difference which is like I can marvel at the world she lives in and say oh that's interesting.

I'm going to try to let you know what I mean and also I think a great ally for that is to think about not what is something that men can do, right, yeah, no, um, most of our frustrations come from the fact that we haven't really been heard, seen or understood during the day we were banging our heads against a wall we came home and she, yeah, exactly, so they come home and then they just unload this stuff and when because I know I do it when my partner does this to me but he kind of vents out all this frustration and I'm sure you do too, it seems like what you do is you go into this mode where you say well, okay, it's probably just this and Why don't we think about it this way differently. and we're just doing the exact same thing they've been doing all day, we just don't listen, um, uh, but it's not intuitive, it's just such an easy way in, um.

Darren, are you happy that was the name of your book? I think so, I think I think, since I have all the happiness, it was easy to say. I remember being asked that when I was single for a while, um, by Hugh Grant from All the people we were sitting across from each other at dinner and talking about happiness, maybe I was writing the book at the time, I don't know and um, he said: are you happy? And it was he said it in kind of a mood like no one really no one's really happy it's them um and maybe just the way he asked it, but I said yes and I said it with a lot of confidence and I felt it with a lot of confidence. and he didn't think that he didn't know what to do. that uh or maybe he just didn't believe it and now when you ask me I still feel like yes, but I think I think things are more complicated, I think there's a more complicated relationship in relationships.

I've gotten older, um 51 and I think I think. that's a good kind of um, you know, I said things, things just change the currents of life change a little bit, so I'm, but I think it's, I don't think it's about happiness in the first place, I think It's about meaning and it's about you knowing things in life that are bigger than you and how you throw yourself into those things, which is what gives religion meaning. You know that that need for Transcendence or to find something that is bigger than you, we all need it somewhere because If you don't have meaning in your life, that's when you have problems, not really happiness is something very difficult to pin down, but We can be unhappy, but it's when we feel meaningless that that's it. get bad um, it's a question isn't it?

Are you happy in many ways? yeah, you know what it is, you know things that used to mean the story of a life, it was something you couldn't say about anyone until they were. dying and looking back on your whole life, you know, that meant our relationship with God, we weren't even supposed to be happy on this Earth because, you know, because it was something we could only have through union with God, that It means a lot of things over the years, but now it just means a kind of state of mind, um, uh, which makes it hard to answer, but I think life is life is good, it's just interesting and sometimes difficult , but you already know.

Ultimately, in a good way, I think life is full of questions and in some ways it's like a form of disorientation. The fact that, yeah, we were never supposed to ask thoughtful questions, they're actually valid because if I had said what number is Fork, hmm, that means you would. Let's say that's not a valid question, but why are you happy or questions like have you found your passion? There is supposed to be one of them, there is a passion, you have to look for it, yes, everything is loaded in the question and no one, no one.

When you ask those questions, you pause to think about whether the question is valid and then the frustration we encounter when we can't adequately fit an invalid question. I see that it is causing so much pain to so many young people because the culture brings up these I like the questions you have: is it love? Well, is it love? I mean, it alludes to a yes or no answer and then I have to know what your definition of love is, what you mean by that because, like I was saying, I love peanut butter. My dog ​​I love my mom and everything is very useless like that's why I love going back to what you said the star like how would you feel good? open question that allows for a little more maneuver yes, I think people are tormented by these um questions yes, yes, your show there is nothing like it in the event space, really on television.

I mean, I prefer to see it in person because obviously cameras can create certain dimensions, but seeing it in person just bends the mind because it makes almost anything seem possible in life, I'm talking about sales, ambition, creativity and imagination, if that's what possible, then anything can become possible and I think it's a cause of great inspiration, so I would hire anyone who is listening to this if you are looking for a once in a lifetime, unique experience that you can't get anywhere else, They have to go and see the show they attended. I really mean it.

It's not just that you didn't tell me to say this. I need you there, you know, yeah, you'll never know, yeah, but thank you, but I really mean there's nothing like it. It's a great idea for the day, a great idea for the family, so I'll definitely go. What can I expect to be different from the other shows I've been on, well, it's got real heart, this one gives you all the feels, like some people say, um, it's, uh, it's me, it's got too, I mean , has the best, if it's okay to say so. the best reviews of anything I've done in over 20 years, which is good to know because it's such a personal show, so it's a lovely thing that it's been so well received.

I swear to the audience to secrecy. Um, so it's hard to get into the details, other than yeah, it's about the things that connect us as people and then how the hard things in life are what bring us together. It's also shown based on audience participation, like everyone is and I have to say, I'd hate the idea of ​​being dragged onto the stage, so I throw Frisbees to pick people out, which means it's the easiest to deliver. to the person next year if you know if it lands in your lap and you don't. I want to get involved, so there's no pressure to get involved at all, but it's a great audience participation show and it's more than people expect.

I hope that we always try and make the program delivered properly, give you more. than you thought I'm really excited Really really excited Thank you so much for your time We have a closing tradition on this podcast We're the last guest Asking a question for the next guest and they don't know who they're leaving the question for oh fantastic I can see it when I open the books sorry if it took me a while to read the lyrics um oh this is for me right yeah cool oh god it's okay up or down, I can imagine I wonder if that was the question, if only you could talk to Call C Touch four people Over the next four years, who would they be?

I feel like this is a pretty boring answer, but it's honest, so my mom, uh, partner, probably number two, very good friends, Sharky. and Stephen, I'd have to include Jenny in there somewhere, so maybe they could alternate weekends or something, um, yeah, friendships really mean a lot to me now, as I get older, I'm not old, but you know, as you get older I have a I really think something happens like on your 50th birthday or something, all of a sudden your friendships really mean a lot to you um and they didn't do it before they always did, but not in such a conscious way because what what changes why I don't know it's just something really sentimental like valuing them Nostalgia and I really um find myself alone that was kind of a sentimental yeah kind of uh inclinations um and my friends suddenly obviously they've always meant a lot to me because I've been. my friends, but suddenly even more, I love meeting people I haven't seen in years.

Now I love doing that much more than before. So yeah, that's it. Mom, bringing together a couple of very good friends. uh that doesn't include my dog, I forgot, I didn't forget, I had two dogs, but I have a clear favorite, which is unfortunate for the other one. I was just thinking about doodles and forgot about the bullshit, okay, I said people. so yeah, sorry, not a very clear answer, but lovely question, thank you so much for your time, thank you for the inspiration, thank you for coming and doing this, you're someone I've honestly been quite obsessed with for 10 years now. years watching TV watching on Channel 4 watching your shows and stuff so it feels like a real honor to be able to talk to you and like I said I read your book in the jungle it was very very much the base in the jungle you didn't say that , yeah, so I took, took a brief, I took a suitcase into the jungle and I wanted books about happiness and yours was on the shelf, so I took it. one was happy it was the yellow one yeah happy um and I'll be honest this sounds because I bought it not knowing it was you funnily enough yeah yeah and then when I saw I got to the jungle and I saw the name on No I could, I had to Google to check it out with you because I couldn't believe you wrote a book about happiness and you understand this a lot, right?

Yeah, I do and a while ago I got a um, the one time I mentioned my own name trying to get a table at a restaurant in SoHo and I did it and got the table, all of a sudden we felt like I made it, I walked in and then, At the end of the meal, the waiter said, Would you mind signing one of your books, so yes, of course, and he returned with angels and demons. Oh, it's fantastic.