#776: Derren Brown — A Master Mentalist on Magic, Mind Reading, Ambition, Stoicism, Religion, and More

27:08Would you have them watch certain things? I've seen more and more, I think, in a foreboding, burgeoning nihilism with a lot of worries around climate change and so on, people want something to grab onto. The Judeo-Christian religions in many places have faded away, no longer have the hold that they did, therefore not offering the guidance they once perhaps did. So at least in Austin, my pet theory is that people are looking for some sense of wonder at work and possibility, and then they start grasping onto QAnon. They start grasping onto whatever the latest and greatest kind of magical thinking might be.

27:48How might you train someone in the opposite direction? Well, first of all, I mean, that's a very noble human urge. We all want to find meaning in our lives, and so much of happiness and good stuff comes from that as a byproduct from that. And you find meaning in your life by finding something bigger than you and then just throwing yourself into that thing. So that's sort of okay. The human urge to transcend is important and worth honoring. But yes, of course it can misfire, but it also misfires when we attribute it to money and success and fame. If we think those things are going to make our lives transcendent or us happier, and again, they don't.

28:24There's lots of ways in which and misfires. But yeah, we can also attach it to these sorts of structures provided by conspiracy theories and so on. I have, over my years, read through quite a lot of books on skepticism. So perhaps I've sort of just developed a kind of a way of thinking. But to me, the things that have sort of landed and stayed with me are first that Humean idea of strong claims demand strong evidence. So if somebody is making a positive claim about something that is unusual, You know, this thing exists, whether it's, you know, something supernatural or it's up to them to come up with evidence for it.

29:02It's not up to you to try and disprove it, because that's always going to be a losing battle. So, you know, when people say, oh, this is true, it's what I believe, and you can't disbelieve it, well, no, you can't, and that's fine. You don't have to sort of rise to it. And I think a lot of the problem is once you start rising to it and it gets into a sort of heated thing, you're arguing about stuff you don't need to be arguing about. I've had a million people over the years say to me, as someone that's often doing stuff that appears psychic and saying, look, this isn't psychic, say, well, how do you explain this?

29:34You know, this psychic said this thing to me, you know, a ghost that they saw or, you know, these experiences that people have. and particularly when it's ghosts of loved ones and so on all these experiences they're really meaningful to people and I think there's probably all sorts of other things going on I lived in a house for a few years that was damp damp's a funny thing you know it creates a real feeling of death when it's just not quite enough that you can identify as damp but it's enough that it just does something in the air it took a long time for us to work out it was damp but it felt just like death.

30:08There was just something wrong. You know, that feeling of a room being wrong. There was vents that air would come in and the dogs would do that thing of barking at nothing, barking midair. It turned out it was smells coming up through vents. A friend of mine who works a lot in the sort of parapsychology world, Richard Wiseman, I don't know if you've come across him, but he... He's been on the podcast. I'm sure he has. Yeah, he's a brilliant, hilarious man. But he was talking about windows open at just the right amount of extractor fans and things. So you'll have air passing into a room at a particular frequency where, and we all know about brown noise and white noise and things that can make parts of us vibrate and it makes us feel a bit sick.

30:46Well, there's a particular frequency that'll just make our eyeballs vibrate a bit. And what that means is we'll see shapes and we'll see like dark patches in the periphery of our vision. Now, you'd never know that. That's not somebody being stupid or gullible if they're seeing things like that. There's all sorts of stuff that goes on, But ultimately, whatever is causing these things is a powerful experience for people. And there's something wrong with leaping on them and saying, that's wrong, that's stupid, because they really can mean a lot to people. And particularly, he said, if you've lost somebody and then feel that you're having some connection with them afterwards.

31:19So I think not rising to it and understanding these things as stories and experiences and what meaning that can have for a person. So I guess I'm talking more about the sort of supernatural side of things rather than conspiracies as such. But even, I suppose, with conspiracy theories, these are things that mean something. They're giving this person something. I think there's a bit of space around that that can be sat with rather than immediately leaving on them. Otherwise, it's about the obvious things. Check your sources. Is this government that on the one hand you're saying is totally ineffectual?

31:53Are they all so clever enough to have created this enormously elaborate thing that you're saying that they've done? And, you know, it's always going to be with us. And it points to that feeling of wonder and storytelling and how we latch on to a nice, neat story of cause and effect. And that's exactly what I do for a living. I see value in all that stuff, but it can misfire. It's something I think about a lot. I fund a lot of early stage science. And I'll just give people a couple of recommendations. Actually, this is, I'm pretty sure it's a fellow Brit. Ben Goldacre wrote a book called Bad Science, which I think is worth, should be required reading for every school child on some level, at least parts of it.

32:35Michael Shermer's written a lot in the area. All right, I'll check him out. There's also, I think the best book I've seen on cold reading, and it might be very hard to get now, and it's a book written for magicians. I have a load of sort of old pamphlets and strange old books on these things, but there's one relatively modern, for me at least, written in the last 20 years, called The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading. It's a great title. You may have written other books with The Full Facts Book of dot, dot, dot, but this is The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading by Ian Rowland, R-O-W-L-A-N-D. And I remember that when I was learning all this stuff, that was definitely a kind of, that was a really useful.

33:14It was certainly up to date at the time compared to the very sort of, you know, strange old antique things. Because it's such an old profession. It's, you know, probably the second oldest profession around. You know, it goes right back to the Oracle of Delphi, giving people information that you seemingly couldn't know. So it's a very old literature too.

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35:02I'm enjoying this conversation on a few levels, including a meta level, which is this conversation is going to be published directly before, directly after a musician who is devoutly religious. So we're going to have a contrast of styles, as it were. Is it true that you were Christian until reading The God Delusion? Is that an accurate statement? Not quite. No, I was very much a Christian when I grew up. I didn't really have any Christian friends, apart from one or two, but didn't have a Christian family or a Christian group. So it was relatively easy to sort of grow out of it, really. How did you end up an island of Christianity in the beginning?

35:40Meaning you didn't have Christian friends, you didn't grow up in a Christian family, but you yourself were Christian. How did that happen? There was a teacher at my primary school, elementary school, who invited me to join her Bible class when I was five. I just didn't know any difference. I was inculcated quite young. And by the time I realized, oh, it's not everybody that believes this. It was too late. And then I came out of it partly because I was doing magic and hypnosis and stuff at university and getting such a strong, angry reaction from fellow Christians. I started to say, oh, okay, this is just sort of fear of something that's misunderstood.

36:18Okay. And I had them literally exorcising demons from me during the show, you know, at the back of the room. It was extraordinary. It adds a little bit of extra flourish to the show. It added to the drama. And then soon after that, I had a good friend who was a psychic healer and did tarot readings and so on. And I was just looking at what to me struck me as a pretty circular belief system around it and thinking, I'm sure I'm doing the same. I must be just doing the same with Christianity. It's just a bit more, well, it's less of a fringe thing, so it's a little harder just to laugh at. So I tried to find some sort of intellectual base for it other than just what could just be a circular belief system, and never did.

37:00And magic gives you a very, it really drives a wedge into that thing of belief and skepticism. It always has been. It's always been the magicians that are exposing the psychics and the frauds. Well, it gives you sort of the implicit, how could you explain this otherwise frame, I would have to imagine. Very similar to good scientists in the sense that you're, as a magician, sort of deconstructing phenomena to ask, how did they do it? How could they do it? How might they have done it? How might you explain this? Right? Which I imagine lay people just don't do as often, but you're getting a lot of repetitions.

37:38There's a terrific magician with the great name of Tommy Wonder. I don't think it's his real name. No longer with us. But he had this nice idea that the story of your trick gives you the highlights of the trick. And in between the highlights, there will be the shadows. And the shadows is where you put your method. And what that means is that what you learn as a magician, and it's a very hard thing to decode this if you're not another magician, is you're not hiding your methods in secret moves and so on. A lot of what you're doing, you're doing very openly in plain sight, but you're doing it in those little moments of relaxation that are out of the story that people are going to follow later.

38:17And it's a very hard thing because that's such a human thing to sort of follow those cues. It doesn't matter if you're a scientist or what you are, you're still going to do that. So you need the kind of familiarity with that. You need to instinctively watch and have the kind of emotional distance that allows you not to fall for the same rhythm. It took me a long time to realize this. We were doing a show on Broadway, I think, and it was the first show I'd done that was a compilation of the best bits from previous shows. So it meant that when we wrote it, it didn't have the same heart and through line as the other shows had because they were always written with that first.

38:53It didn't have an arc in the same way. Yeah, exactly. But it needed one. And I was sort of trying to work out what that was in real time doing the show. And it struck me, especially because magic is such a childish thing, really. It's the quickest, most fraudulent route to impressing people, isn't it? So it struck me that... There are a lot of those. What happens with the magic trick is that you are seeing something happen that is showing you that your understanding of reality isn't right, that there's something you've missed, that your story, right, as you put those highlighted moments together and form the narrative of what's happened, cannot be the full picture.

39:31Something else has gone on. and it really stayed with me because in amongst that childish sort of really quite infantile world of magic there was this thing that's like well that's a really useful thing in life that's the nature of storytelling we sit around these it's like the image of sitting over a campfire right so you're not over a campfire the uncomfortable but across from a campfire from somebody and you're in a forest and it's dark and you're lit by this little fire and You're telling a cozy story. That's what stories are. They are cozy. And then outside of that is the darkness and the forest.

40:04And that's where all the monsters are. And all the things that are being excluded. That's what Jung would call the shadow. It's all the stuff you're not including in your narrative. And all the stuff you push out of your personality. They're talking about coming out late. The stuff you want to bury. It works at a societal level as well. The parts of society you don't want to include in the narrative of who you are. These things will always come back and bite you because they gain a certain power in the shadows. You know, the old fairy tale idea of the evil godmother banished from the christening who turns up.

40:35She gate crashes the christening and lays a curse on the infant. These ideas resonate because they mean something to us psychologically. The things we banish, or it'll be the hero that's banished from the city and comes back at the end of the story with an army and defeats the bad king. You know, these things will come back. So the point being that in amongst all of its nonsense, there was something about magic that does show us that the stories we're telling were not including things that are important and gain a certain power if we don't include them. It's meant that over the years, particularly with my first with the TV, but also with the stage shows, I think now in particular, as I do more of those that I like to make it about that or something.

41:21I like to that something that's important because how you do tricks isn't important, particularly, and it's entertaining and it's a lovely vehicle. But there's just something in it that I think tickles at a deeper experience. let's talk about not necessarily shadow but something you seemingly pushed away or excised for compartmentalized at least for a period of time you already mentioned it twice coming out in your 30s could you describe if there was the moment the conversation the day the realization that led you to then come out and because there was not coming out not coming out then you came out, but presumably there was some type of catalyst for that.

42:00What happened? I think the lingering Christian thing didn't help. The one Christian friend that I had had got involved with that sort of gay conversion thing, which doesn't work terribly well. And I, although I didn't get very involved in that, it was in the air because he was experiencing it. So I think it just sort of, it kind of lingered. And although I sort of didn't really, wasn't a believer anymore. It just kind of, I don't know what it's like now for people. I'm sure it's very different, but you can sort of think it's going to pass. There's a lot of that, or you sort of don't really own it.

42:37And it just got to the point where I thought this is just silly. And I've just got into a relationship and I thought, well, I was known in the UK and I thought, I don't want this to feel like it's some secretive thing unnecessarily. So I just sort of did. And of course, what you realize, whatever you come out about, whatever your thing is, how little people care. I mean, I expected the final scene of Dead Poets Society. I thought I walked out of my building the next day thinking I was going to get a round of applause from people on the street. And of course, no one cares, no interest to anybody.

43:09And I think the reason why it can be so liberating is not because you get to swing around with shopping bags in the street and live this flamboyant life. I think you just realize that these things aren't important. And if that isn't important, if the big thing you've carried around for so long that felt so much shame about isn't important, then all the other stuff certainly isn't. So I think that's why it's always good to, when the time is right, to do those things. I told my mum, actually, I came out to my mum, and I think the next day she had a stalker of mine, a woman turn up on her doorstep saying that I was her abusive husband.

43:45It was a very confusing week for my mum. yeah that was that was a lot it's a rough week for mom you mentioned quite a while back finding something bigger than yourself in there's a guardian piece i read this was just before you turned 50 that in the second half of life it's important to find things that are bigger than yourself and finding meaning through losing yourself in those things i'd like to ask about this because i know a number of i won't mention them by name some would be recognizable but let's just call them sort of ultra skeptics and it's hard to say that this is causal but they aren't necessarily the happiest people who seem to be the most fulfilled and there are exceptions of course now you might say that came first and then they found the skepticism who knows so i'm not saying one causes the other in any case without religion without that type of mooring not saying it's necessary, but how have you found meaning?

44:45How have you found things bigger than yourself? What does that journey look like for you? I think I've done the thing of looking for other structures. So I kind of drifted out of Christianity around university time. So I was doing magic and hypnosis, but not really as I didn't feel very full time. I was kind of a little a bit drifting, but I was subverting enough to just sort of tick by. And I remember thinking, I don't have any ambition here. I'm just enjoying this rhythm of life. I remember quite consciously thinking, I just want to, I want to be able to take a cross section of my life at any point.

45:21And is everything in this moment sort of roughly in the right place? Am I doing the things that, you know, am I getting up when I want to and not having to do things I don't want to and the things that felt important to me at, you know, 21. And if they're not, that'd be kind of easy to change. And that became a bit of a guiding principle. I've never had any, genuinely never had any ambition, didn't try and get a TV show or anything like that. I've always just had that feeling of how are things feeling now? And this is long before talk of mindfulness or anything like that. So that's been a sort of a guiding principle.

45:55And years later, I wrote this book, Happy, which was largely about Stoicism. I realized as I was reading the Stoics that they were giving language to a big part of that experience. Stoicism isn't, as you know, it's not really just about that, but that feeling that I had really resonated. The way we often find things inspiring because they're articulating something clearly that we half feel they haven't really found language for. So I kind of found myself latching onto that. And I wrote Happy, and I wrote Happy over three years because I was touring and I like to write while I'm touring. So it split up over three years.

46:36And of course, it meant at the end of the three years, I had a different take on it. And then my feelings about stoicism have sort of changed over the years. But I think often, you know, one, we look for another structure, don't we? So I'd left behind the sort of Christian world as a structure. And I think it was appealing in the hypnosis, NLP, all of those things, they give a certain kind of structure to experience as well. And I think that's probably a part of it. And as I've grown up and got older, what I was trying to articulate there was that the first half of life, I think, is very much about having this sort of dialogue with the world in terms of the world is telling you what you need in order to move forward or have a reputation or be liked or whatever.

47:19You're kind of, this axis of dialogue is very much with the world. And I think there's a, a natural shift in the second half that actually is about having that dialogue more internally. I'm 53 now and I think there's, you know, I'm sort of aware of that happening and my feelings of, you know, stoicism has shifted. I suppose that's it. Like we all do. We find a thing because the experience of something bigger than yourself is how we find meaning. What do you or what have you historically struggled with? Is there anything that pops to mind? My mind immediately goes to the horror of dinner parties and high status people, which of course I come across a lot because I'm known a bit here and sometimes I get invited to things and I'm not very good at that.

48:04I guess I'm quite introverted. So unless somebody is really warm, I very quickly get into a thing of really not knowing what to say. I found myself at the Clintons for Thanksgiving one year. That's a wonder. I mean, it was incredibly, incredibly high status. I mean, they were wonderful and everything, but it was kind of that sort of thing I find very difficult. I generally don't hang around other famous people here. I like the experience of people sometimes being on a bit of a pedestal. And it's different if you then meet them and they're not perhaps a bit disappointing. It's hard to go back to their work and appreciate it in the same way.

48:44Yeah, the heroes with clay feet situation. Yeah, yeah, totally. So I think that when you say, where do I struggle? I think it's what immediately comes to mind is sort of awkward, difficult things with people of high status. Maybe this is a dead end, but I'll probe a little bit more. I'm curious also psychologically for yourself, when you are by yourself, does anything come to mind? And maybe this is me misreading, and if so, I'd love to know the origin. That's one piece, right? For yourself, psychologically, is there anything that you struggle with or have struggled with? and then the follow-up to that would be why write these books happy why more or less everything is absolutely fine a book of secrets finding comfort in a complex world or doing the audible original right book camp for emotion these types of things are those reflective of things that you have found challenging in the past or is that not the case i think since writing happy that book i have found the world of what it is to flourish really interesting.

49:51And I've never felt it in the way in that very, forgive me, but that American optimistic goal setting mode at all. I'm very much not about that. So that's meant that it's less simple and it's more interesting to sort of navigate. And it's then, because I enjoy writing so much, probably more than anything. I've And naturally then that's been the sort of stuff that I've taken into my stage shows and very much wanted to write about as I go along. I guess I am a kind of reflective type. Life's difficult. Life has this centripetal quality. It brings us to these difficult central points. And when we're there, and it's interesting that the last show I did, Showman, was about this.

50:32We wrote the show. I don't want to spoil it for anyone that might see it, but certainly it was pre-COVID. And I wanted to write the show with this thing that at the heart of it, that life brings us to these difficult centers. And when we're there, it feels lonely. We feel like we've failed, which is the big problem with the American optimistic goal setting model that, you know, when things don't go well, you're supposed to. I guess you have to blame yourself because you didn't set your goals well enough or believe in yourself well enough or whatever that strange Protestant work ethic applied to life tells us we should feel.

51:03So the reality is that lonely, difficult central point is exactly the human experience. It's because we're all brought to those points. It's what we all share. And the thing that makes us feel most isolated is the one thing that actually connects us the most. and interestingly we'd sort of written this show and then lockdown happened and it just played out. The very thing that was physically isolating us was the one thing we were all sharing. And that I think is eternally valuable to me. And it's the thing that, and I know is also the answer to finding, you know, dinner parties with high status people difficult.

51:42They're the same. They're probably hating as much of it as I am, You know, that we're all having these awkward experiences most of the time, and you shouldn't compare your insides to other people's outsides because, you know, they're very different things. I find that a helpful thought. One of the issues with stoicism for me, I suppose, is that it's another way of life being a bit of a fight. The thing I love most about it, actually reading Marcus Aurelius, he talks so much about retreating, and I love that. I love this. It's very introverted aspect to reading Marcus that you don't get so much from the teachers, you know, from Seneca and Epictetus that are very much telling you what to do.

52:19All of it. I do love it all, but there is a bit of a constant fight at the heart of it. The images, the metaphors, they're either military or they are, you know, you're a rock with waves lashing against you and you've got to be solid in the face of all this, you know, and you are setting yourself up for a world that's not going to live up to your standards. And I don't know. I don't know. Is that the way to live? There's a German sociologist called Hartmut Rosa who's got a terrific book. It's not an easy read. It's a beast of a thing called Resonance. Have you come across this? Have you come across Resonance?

52:49I've heard the title. I haven't read it. It's a very different look at what might make a successful life. And rather than being about virtue and so on, it's about a mode of relating to the world where it's a level, I suppose, a type of engagement. It's not an emotional state. It's not about feeling anything in particular, but it's just about what it isn't and how most of us live as we treat the world as a resource, right? So imagine if two artists and it's an art competition, they're told to go out and paint the best picture they can. And one of them goes home and does the best he can do and provides his picture.

53:24And the other one thinks, OK, all right, well, I want to do the best picture. So I better get a first one, you need a really good studio space. So he finds a great studio space. And now I need the best possible easel and OK, a proper good linen canvas. and he sources that and they're going to get the best paints and the best brushes, the finest brushes and so on and so on. And then, you know, time's up. And this is what we're doing. Generally, we're treating the world as a resource. But what's happened is that the resources that are a means to an end, right? So we're trying to be richer and more attractive and more this and more that.

53:57Those are only means to an end. They got a bit confused with the goals somewhere along the lines. and he's suggesting a sort of rather more he talks about like a tuning fork like you know you put one tuning fork next to another one and the other one starts to vibrate and it's just a different sort of relationship of resonance with the world as opposed to treating it as a resource and a number of other things that we do and i rather like that and i don't think it's incompatible with stoicism at all and the part of stoicism i like the most and i think that initially drew me to it is that life is difficult.

54:29Here's your x-axis and your y-axis. On the one axis, you've got all the things you want to achieve, your aims and your plans. Then the other axis is stuff that life is throwing back at you, what they used to call fortune. We don't really talk about that anymore, which is a shame. We're told, if you set your goals and believe in yourself correctly, that you can crank this line of life up so it's in line with this x-axis, in line with your goals and your aims. But the reality is we live an X equals Y diagonal, a sort of a meandering line. And sometimes we're on top and sometimes we're not. We'll have a great day and then life will throw something horrible our way.

55:06And it's that. So how do you make your peace with this? And that image of that X equals Y line is something that resonates throughout history. Schopenhauer spoke about it. Freud, he wasn't trying to make that first talking therapy. It was never about making people happy. His goal was to restore a natural unhappiness. The life is basically going to be unhappy a lot of the time, and you don't want to be overly unhappy, but it's just how you make your peace with the fact that life's always going to be a bit dissatisfying. You're always going to get caught between these poles. Michael Csikszentmihalyi, I'm sure you know who wrote flow.

55:40Again, you're caught between anxiety and boredom and the flow state between whether your skills or your challenges are going to win out. The same idea is so helpful. And that's the stuff I love because I think that's, A, it's a real antidote to the fetishizing of optimism and so on. I worked a lot with, I've been around faith healers a lot. And the thing that really struck me, by faith healers, I mean the kind of the Christian evangelical type that it getting people up out of wheelchairs and so on. I recommend everybody watch Miracle, by the way. My stage show. Thank you. Yes, that was a fascinating show.

56:19I really enjoyed that. Thank you. Thank you. It was amazing to do every night. I was doing it, but for a room of non-believers, it was quite, didn't know if it was going to work at all. But watching the people out there doing it, a recurring idea is that you throw your pills away. You know, you don't need your medicine. And if the disease comes back, it's because you didn't have enough faith, which is this perfect formula for absolving yourself of any responsibility as the healer and putting all the blame on the person going through it. And there's any number of horror stories, of course, of people that get caught up in that.

56:55And it's exactly the same. You know, you read something like The Secret, I suppose, but she's, is it Rhonda Byrne, Rhonda Byrne, is telling us quite specifically, you know, you send your wishes out to the universe. and if it doesn't provide, it's because you didn't commit to it enough. You didn't commit enough to that belief. It's not the fault of the system. It's your fault for not committing to it. And I think it trickles down into goal setting and all the rest of it. So I like this idea of life's difficult and we all share that experience no matter where we are and what we're doing in our own way.

57:29And actually, how do you sit comfortably and hopefully resonantly with a life that isn't always going to give you what you want. All right. So I would like to come back to this word ambition. If somebody looks at your website, if I look at your Wikipedia page, I may describe you or be inclined to say, this is an ambitious man, given the corpus of work, right? You have six or seven books, you have the Broadway shows, the theater, the one man shows, the television, the collaborations, it goes on and on and on. So what I would love to know is how you define ambition, because maybe we're, I don't want to end up arguing about God where we have different definitions of God, for instance, right?

58:13So maybe it's just in the way that you define or think about ambition, but it strikes me that you are very active and you mentioned painting a moment ago. People should go to your website just to see your painting as well. We may come back to that if we have time. How do you explain your productivity? Because if you were just sitting in your room trying to be receptive to the universe, delivering you signals, you may just end up sitting in your room, right? So there is some proactivity involved, it would seem, in what you're doing. How do you explain the level of productivity? What contributes to that, if not ambition?

58:52It certainly isn't ambition. And by ambition, I mean I've never sought out i something ahead in the timeline that I think would be good for me or productive or expand my reach or those things really send shivers through me but i have a manager and i have co-producers and grown-ups essentially who do think about those things and as time's gone on what i choose to do is become up to me which is nice and i won't be blind to the if something you know like yes it's a good thing to do a show in new york of course but really i'm thinking it would be very lovely to live out there for a bit and what an amazing experience that would be.

59:35But I wasn't seeing it as a step to anything else. It just felt like, well, that would be an enjoyable thing to do. And the projects all take a long time and there is a lot that's come out of it, but I'm not running around frantically from one thing to another. They're things that just take a chunk of time. And then normally I'm just sort of obliged one way or another to get onto the next one because a year before I said I'd do it. And somewhere people have been making arrangements and teams have been assembled. And I can't at the last minute go, I just want to sit at home. But I have had a time of sitting at home the last year or so, because I got a bit burnt out with it.

1:00:12And I'm very aware that I am really not my best if I'm not creatively engaged with something. So painting is very helpful for me because I can just do that. That's like a week or two of just in a studio painting. And that's lovely. Is that how long it takes you to do one of your pieces a week or two? Well, sometimes a bit longer because I don't get to give it the time I want. It strikes me as very fast. People should need to go to your website. Everybody go to the website. We'll put some links in the show notes as well. But darrenbrown.co.uk, when you look at the artwork, you would, I mean, this could be another career for you.

1:00:46I mean, it is that. Thank you. Developed. Very, very, very impressed. And I grew up in a family of artists and wanted to be a comic book penciler for 15 years myself. So I paid for some of my college expenses being an illustrator. And I cannot even come close to doing 10 % of what you do with the portraits that you do. There's no way. Oh, very kind. Well, I really, really very much enjoy it. And it's a nice way of shutting yourself away and just throwing yourself into something for a big chunk of time, which I find helpful. So I think that's probably part of it. But I really feel it's mainly due to the other people I have around me who are more savvy with it.

1:01:25So what it sounds like, which is I've never discussed with someone, is that it's not that you live in a life devoid of ambition, but you have freed yourself from the need to be ambitious yourself, which is part and parcel of maybe side effects that come with it by having team members who are ambitious on your behalf in the sense of thinking about how certain options will create or open other doors and so on. Is that a fair description? I think that is a fair description. I think that if there's a recipe for success, it's talent plus energy. So you develop your talent because if you've got no talent, your energy is how you get it out into the world.

1:02:07And if you've got all the energy of self-promotion but no talent to back it up, it's not going to be very helpful. And if you've got all the talent in the world but no energy of getting it out there for people to see, that's also not great. I've certainly never had any energy with it at all. So having a manager and people like that to do that side of it. And very early on, I realized I needed that. So I genuinely, not saying with any overweening false modesty or anything, I just, my principle, and even more so now that I'm older, is what would be enjoyable in and of itself. I forget his name, but there's a philosopher who talks about the importance of this in midlife, of these atelic activities, things that just bring pleasure in and of themselves and aren't constantly about the pay off at some point in the future.

1:02:51I think as we get older, those things are more important. But I've always had that. And maybe I've never really had a proper job and it's sort of easier to... It seems to be working out for you, right? I'm touring next year in 2025 with a new show. And like all these things, we've got a title. It's called Only Human. Tickets are on sale. People are buying it. And I have no idea what the show is yet. We haven't written a word of it. And I've kind of got used to this over the years. So, you know, we're starting to kind of think about that now. Okay, let me ask you this. If you don't know what the content is, how did you choose the name?

1:03:24How did you choose a title? Yeah. And a poster and everything. I know, we've sort of got used to it now because this is the 11th show that I've done. And as soon as we say, okay, let's do a show next year, my manager's saying, right, well, the brochures will need, you know, the theater brochures programs will need an image and a title. Descriptions. Yeah, exactly. Or not even a description. They need an image and a name at the very least. But it's a great example of, you know, how you give yourself a structure and then think within that. So all the show titles have kind of been a bit generic. And then we found ways of making them work.

1:03:58A show of mystery and suspense, right? I mean, you have a lot of room, wiggle room within. Totally. It is a little bit like that. And is it typically this way that you book it and then with the positive constraints, you figure it out? But how did you choose, in this particular case, only human? This was going to be related to my next question, is how do you pick the next project? But let's get specific on The Only Human. How did you pick this? It sounds like you've done this more than once, knowing that you will have to figure it out later. It's absolute necessity. In the same way that you've booked the theaters, you have to come up with a show.

1:04:30And likewise, if you need a title for the brochures, we have to come up with the title. So Andrew and I just had an email exchange back and forth going, okay, and we send a bunch of things. And well, it's going to be something about being human. And because I just know that'll be the heart of it somewhere. And within a few emails, back and forth, no one found that one. No one found only human offensive or to this or to that. You don't seem to mind offensive. Are you steering away from controversial and offensive? Oh, true. No. Well, yeah. But it's also about not being too specific. You know, that's the trouble with an offensive bold title.

1:05:06It's then you're then going to be... Gets too specific. That's the issue, right? That's the issue. And then, yeah, in terms of choosing the project, But, well, I mean, really it's what I would like to do. Yeah, I want to know how you know that, though, right? Because I, for instance, I'll buy a little time. So my friend Kevin Kelly, he's founding editor of Wired Magazine. He tries to give away all of his ideas. And if one idea keeps coming back to him and no one will do it, and he can't seem to get rid of it and it's floating around his head, then that's how he chooses a lot of his projects, at least the new exploratory projects.

1:05:41In my case, nonfiction books, let's just say, it's a book I can't find myself. I want to learn about it. I immerse myself. So it's sort of a graduate degree for myself. And there's a bit more that goes into it. I test it with my audience using blog posts and podcasts and things. But you were saying you want to do, and this might sound like such a silly question, but how do you know that? Because there's some people who describe a feeling, or maybe they're kept up at night, but it's an excitement. It's not an anxiety. The tenor, the emotional tenor is different. How do you feel your way into it?

1:06:12How do you know that you want to do it. Because my experience with people who have a lot of options, as you would, you also have a lot of inbound, you have, sure, a wide menu, is that it's not sorting good from bad ideas. You're going to have lots of good ideas. And then you have to choose the better idea or the great idea or the good for you idea amongst many good ideas that you would actually like to do. So how do you pick? I think it really depends on what sort of project it is. Like for TV and stage, I'm always writing with other people. And I don't give it any thought until the three of us are on Zoom or in a room talking.

1:06:50And then we've got a whole backlog of experience. There's templates that are in place that we can dispose of or use again, or we've kind of got a shorthand. For the format, you mean? The template? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. There's a lot of pre-existing ways we found that work, which as if we can often very consciously dispose with, but there's something in place so you don't feel completely at sea. I suppose it's most difficult. So book writing, like the moment I'm trying to get my head around writing another book and that's just me. And that is, that is more difficult. And that simple question of how do you know what you want?

1:07:26What do I really want? It is difficult. So the last book I wrote was a slightly off-grid book for magicians called Notes from a Fellow Traveller. And I wrote it on the road while I was touring because two reasons. Firstly, I felt that a book about touring and how to put a show together and the experience nightly of doing a show for large audiences and dealing with all the stuff that goes wrong and blah, blah, blah, would be of use to magicians that are just maybe starting out with putting a show together and all the really important stuff about performing, which just isn't really written about too much in the magic world.

1:08:00So that was one reason. But also it would be really fun. I need to write during the days on tour. or otherwise you're just kicking around in somewhere that there may be nothing to do, and what are you going to do for a week? So writing's really important. And that was a big part of it. And sometimes it's that sort of thing, isn't it? Sometimes I've always been, if I'm driven by anything, it's thinking I should be doing better than whatever I'm doing. I always think if I can do something and I find it sort of easy, I just presume it's a bit stupid, and I'm always sort of trying to do the next thing.

1:08:36I particularly feel that with writing and I make it more difficult for myself, probably than I need to. So the magic book was actually a really enjoyable, easy... I didn't need to do loads of research and bring a suitcase of books around with me. It was actually a kind of, it's a really enjoyable, lovely thing. So now I'm trying to listen to that and I'm trying to let something settle into, something that when you've got it just feels obvious. Oh, well, of course. Because those tend to be the best things. But there is no easy route. And with the TV shows, as I said, often the idea of, oh, can you make someone push someone off a building?

1:09:09Everyone at the party is an actor apart from one person. Those come sometimes from just a frustration of just trying too hard and going down rabbit holes and running circles, trying to find something that is clever. Or then just you go, blah, can't we just do this? And it feels obvious and a bit silly. And oh, that's it. That's it. That's exactly what it should be. so I think maybe recognizing that you know when you've got it because then it tingles you know it's right because it resonates to use that word and it has this little buzz of it buzz of excitement to it it's really hard to force it directly but if it was you wouldn't be doing such good stuff if it was easy to find I suppose I will ask you because I have a prompt in front of me using forms of suggestion as self-defense.

1:10:00So I do want to hear a story about that. But before we get to it, since you mentioned the push, and I promised at the very beginning, I would touch on the ethics piece. So for people who have watched some of these, or do a little homework, one might think as a viewer, knowing that you're putting people through this process where unbeknownst to them, ultimately they're being groomed and conditioned and set up to do something very extreme that people would end up with all sorts of complex PTSD and that the show itself could produce all sorts of capital T trauma for people involved. How do you respond to people?

1:10:45And? How do you respond to people with this concern? Well, so if you take, for example, take Sacrifice then, which was the last one. that show somebody's going through a really like roller coaster series of things to get to a life and death situation where they think they're going to be shot at the end of it and so on so the first thing is when we write the show and i'm writing these shows with a we are right the show but a lot of experience of making similar things i've got very used to making sure this person is going to be just held in a place that is they're okay and they're going to be sort of safe in themselves That's like the first layer in the actual writing of the show.

1:11:28And at any point, bear in mind, if it's a big hidden camera thing, I can just step in. If anything bad happened, I could simply step in. And also everything gets passed by, this is important, an independent psychological team. So we'll have a psychologist on board who knows the show, knows exactly what's going to happen, all the things that might potentially be triggering. You know, because if someone's lost someone dear to them in a car crash, we're not going to want them witnessing a car crash, for example. You know, so that might not be obvious, might not know that. So everybody that applies or gets shortlisted will have this session with a psychologist that they'll think everybody gets, but it may only be, you know, three or four people that get it by this point.

1:12:09But if we don't want them to know they've been shortlisted, then they don't. We're also preserving this fiction for them as to what's going on. But we'll have that too. And then during the show itself, again, we've got that psychologist. We have other independent people that are with us in the truck, watching it play out. Any number of measures where if anything is going a bit off track or they see genuinely some line is being crossed, we can step in. And if I get the chance, it depends on what the show is, but if I've been able to interact with the people before, then I can layer in language and triggers, which I can give to the actors, particularly if I'm talking to them through earpieces, to use, which I know will have an effect on the person that's going through it, to calm them or give them some resources.

1:12:55So I'm kind of using the hypnosis in a way that's for that benefit to come back at a later point rather than me making them do stuff. Things like that are in place. Next, they go through the experience and they've always, and I've done this so much, and I've always loved it and taken a bad time will come out of it. However it looks or feels like to the crew making the show, the other actors actually have often a far worse time because they're feeling terrible putting somebody through something. Whereas the guy or the girl that's been through it's always loved it. So going back to Sacrifice, Phil does this whole thing, comes out the other end of the show.

1:13:35But there's actually the trickier part then is, well, how do you now deal with this person who's been through a hopefully life-changing or at least pivotal big thing in their lives, it's now going to be a TV show that's out there. That's weird and that's a sensitive thing. So I flew Phil over and he came and he watched the show in my house. We watched it three times. Once he needs to see it first as a show with music, underscoring, close-ups, bits that were taken out that didn't make it to the final cut that might have meant a huge amount to him. And Now he's got to get his head around. Okay, that's not part of the story because they didn't really serve a purpose at the end of the day.

1:14:12There's a bit in the show where he doesn't do something and it's a bit like, ah, he's not doing it. Is this going to work? And he had to then get his head around. He'd let us down or that he'd failed. And that's a difficult thing. That's a real thing for him. I watched it a second time with the other people that had done similar shows that I'd made. So the guy from the apocalypse one with the zombies and the guy from the Persian. They came. So now he felt like he had a little group of people that had been through a similar thing and shows because he was a fan of the show. So these are people that he knew.

1:14:42So that was a really helpful thing for him. And finally, bizarrely, we watched it. Do you know Martin Freeman, the actor? You come across him? The name rings a bell, but I can't conjure a face. Okay. Famously, Watson to Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock, and all sorts of things. Certainly a big name here. And Phil was a big fan of him. Also a big star in the Fargo series. Oh, yeah, of course. Of course. I just pulled up his photo. I know who Martin Freeman is. You got it. So we watched the show with Martin. That was the third time. So Phil could sort of, you know, hopefully feel proud of it. And by this time, after three viewings, I got used to it as a TV show.

1:15:14But then you've got, what about when the show airs? And it's a controversial subject. So he might have a lot of backlash from people. And I remember the first show he did that was a tool like this. And this was a bit of a learning curve for us. This guy that's been through this extraordinary journey that meant so much to him is so excited the show's going out. and this is back in the day when it's just broadcast and everyone's going to watch it at the same time. So he's got Twitter open on his phone and he's just reading the nastiest things about himself. His girlfriend's too pretty for him. He should get his eyebrows sorted out.

1:15:46It's just awful, awful stuff. And it was really miserable for him. So we got somebody out there to be with Phil in the States so they could be around during that time, which would be sensitive and weird that it suddenly goes out in the public domain. So it's a long answer, but basically, there's a huge amount that we do that doesn't really form part of the drama of the show you're watching because it's a whole different story, that has to preserve the fiction. What you're seeing is absolutely the guy's experience, but all this other stuff has to happen to make sure that it's safe and does the job it's supposed to do.

1:16:20It's there for one reason, which is to give him a real, proper, hopefully important, pivotal moment. You have a hell of a job, sir. As promised, suggestion is self-defense. Oh, that's right. What does this mean? Do you have a story? You must have a story. Well, it was just, it was an experience of, it's worth knowing this actually. I think we should all have this ready in our head. So I had spoken after doing hypnosis shows, I would sometimes do a Q &A afterwards and people would ask about whether you can hypnotize people without them knowing it and so on. It had always occurred to me that, you know, if you want to keep the seat next to you free on a train, you know, you don't put your bag there because that's what everybody does and it's just annoying.

1:17:02and then you want to ask the person to move their bag. Instead, pat the seat and nod and smile at people. No one's going to sit next to you, right? So I'd sort of spoken about this kind of stuff, and then I found myself in a sort of a real-life situation, and I was walking from one magic convention to another. And I was, this was before the TV or anything, I was sort of mid-20s. I was in a velvet three-piece purple suit with a fob watch chain and long hair. And I mean, if anyone was going to get brutally murdered that night, it was me. And this very drunk, angry guy and his girlfriend are walking towards me.

1:17:40Just look, this guy's just looking for a fight. And because I'd sort of spoken about how to use slightly off-kilter ways of dealing with these sorts of situations, the trick is to act in a way that it makes complete sense, but it's utterly out of context. So the other person thinks they've missed something. You know, because if somebody comes up to you in the street and says, it's not 20 minutes past five, your reaction wouldn't be to go, yeah, I know, it's whatever. You're going to, what, I'm sorry? You know, like you've missed something. So he comes up to me, what the fuck are you looking at?

1:18:13Do you want to fight? Or whatever it was he was saying. And I said to him, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high. And what you get, and I guess it's a similar thing in martial arts of that adrenaline dump. He asked me to repeat, first of all, what I'd said. so I said the what it's not four foot high I lived in Spain for a bit the walls were much higher but if you look at them here they're tiny they're nothing he sort of did this he just essentially not exactly collapsed but he just sat he went and he sat down on the pavement his girlfriend walked off I had planned in my mind what I was going to do your girlfriend made the right choice she's like I don't want to deal with either of these people my plan was which I didn't get to my plan was to then give, you give the person relief from the confusion.

1:18:58And this is where the sort of the hypnotic element comes in. I was going to say to him, it's okay. It doesn't matter whether your left or your right foot is released first, but you'll find within a couple of minutes, you can walk and you can move and everything. And it's fine. It doesn't matter if it takes a couple of minutes. So that was the plan, right? To leave him stuck to the pavement. But I didn't get to go that far. He'd collapsed. And I ended up weirdly sitting down with him and saying, so what happened? What happened tonight? And his girlfriend, she'd got in a fight and she bottled somebody, I think.

1:19:26It was something like that. Birds of a feather, yeah. Yeah, so he went off. I then walked off to this other magic convention, told everybody. I was so excited. No one believed me because they thought it was just me making stuff up. But if there's a takeaway there, it's, you know, have a song lyric or just something. It came out of a conversation with a friend who used to walk home from his art studio late at night and there was always gang, just like intimidating gangs standing around. He'd always cross over and sometimes they'd shout things and it was just horrible. I said, why don't you cross over to their side and say, good evening as you walk past.

1:19:59And he did, and he never had any trouble because they just thought he was strange. So I think have something like that. If someone's running at you with a knife, it's not going to help. But if you're in that situation where people are being intimidating, it's a very um i think a powerful route it has to make sense but just be out of context and just commit to it could you elaborate on the making sense right because you could be like a boogity boo dinosaurs times two they need to feel they've missed something so i had that phrase in my head that the wall outside my house isn't four for high because i'd spoken about this sort of thing with audiences after the show so i i had sort of without meaning to kind of rehearsed it so it just kind of came out so i think having something like that for some reason that the the negative in it really helps because it's like it's like they've said something that you're responding to but it happens you know it just it adds it adds something it adds something to it you know i'm just imagining dating you and wondering like what is he up to are you doing that thing are you doing exhausting wouldn't it what are some benevolent applications of the techniques that you have acquired?

1:21:11What are some offstage applications? This would be an example, right? This would be a problem solving example. Where else can you apply these things? I really weirdly don't use it in real life. Now that stoic lesson of not trying to control things that are out of your control, that it's so the opposite of what my, of what this strange job is that I have. So I actually very much don't. I mean, the thing I'm most aware of, which is not a new thing for anybody to hear, but in my mind ties in with the same sort of world, is just the importance of being heard. So your partner, spouse, girlfriend, boy, comes home and has had a frustrating day and just wants to offload.

1:21:56And particularly, for some reason, if you're a guy, let alone if you're stoically drawn. But our natural thing is, of course, to offer solutions and so on. And it's, you're just doing the thing again of not letting the person be heard. And it's so obvious. And I think I really don't walk around in that Derren Brown mode, but I catch myself consciously just trying to be present and hear and listen and know that it's, because you know, the moment you start offering solutions, they're dismissed. There's a million reasons why that isn't appropriate. So you very quickly get told if you do get it wrong.

1:22:33And it goes back to this thing of people's stories of ghosts and psychics that told them amazing things. Just to be present with those things and not feel that it's your job to step in and kind of morally correct them or in some way put them on a different path or even offer a solution to a puzzle. Sometimes we just need to sit in these things and be heard because what we're actually saying is something deeper than the specific problem or the thing that's niggling us. I don't really carry a lot of it around. When I'm in work mode, I'm full of that stuff. The power of presupposition is, I use it all the time in card tricks.

1:23:14You say you've got a deck of cards at the beginning, they're in a special order. So you can't have the person shuffle them, but maybe there's a point halfway through the trick where they can shuffle the cards. So at that point, I'd give them the cards to shuffle and I'd say, I'll shuffle them again, but this time do it under the table. So now they're taking the cards under the table and somehow in doing that, they've accepted the word again and they're shuffling it. And later when they describe the trick and they want the trick to sound as amazing as possible because they've been fooled by it and don't want to look stupid, the amount of times they would say, well, I shuffled the deck at the beginning and they didn't.

1:23:45And then the trick really is impossible because they couldn't have shuffled it at the start. So the power of presupposition is really, you know, it's very, you can apply that to yourself, I guess, and your inner language as much as trying to influence others. But I just somehow don't sit in that world in real life. I think it's enough in life to try and find a way of gathering yourself afresh and then going out in the world and taking some responsibility amidst your mess. I think that's enough. I don't think self-esteem is that important. And I certainly don't think influencing others is that important.

1:24:21I think we've got enough to be getting on with. When I first started, I loved all that stuff. And now it leaves me a little bit cold. I don't think it's about that. I think just how you make peace with life that's not always going to go your way, that's the project. That's a successful life. You read a lot. You've written a lot. Are there any books in particular, and you can name at least two, so one could be of your own, but are there any books that you have gifted or recommended frequently to other people that come to mind? Big fan of Jonathan Haidt, who if you haven't had on this podcast, you should do.

1:24:58So he's a... I have. He's outstanding. Yeah, wonderful, brilliant, brilliant guy. So I've just finished his book, The Anxious Generation, which is his last one. I often find myself giving those to people. I like James Hollis as well a lot. I don't know if you've had one. He's a Jungian psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, I suppose, who writes a lot in that mode. Irvin Yalom, who is a wonderful writer and does that thing that Oliver Sacks, I think, started of writing little accounts of interesting cases. He's a beautiful writer. Do you read fiction? No. No, I don't. I don't. And it's missing. I think I should.

1:25:38And there's probably a lot more truth to be found in reading fiction than in the nonfiction that I do. I'm always drawn to it. And I always feel, because there's always a book project somewhere in my mind, I always feel like I should be. As I become more aware of that thought, I sort of feel like I can now and read more fiction. if you were to read fiction what type of fiction might you start with are there any kind of parameters or characteristics driven by that thing of i should always be doing the thing that isn't easy i think it would be the only fiction i read more of that so dostoevsky and so on it'd be that it would be the the big heavy classics because that's where i feel that's where you should start i've occasionally been given a novel by a friend and i always find them very sort of forgetful.

1:26:23So I think probably the big European works, because then I didn't feel I was... You want to learn how to ski, so get dropped out of a helicopter at the top of K2, that type of approach. I love the Thomas Harris, the Hannibal Lecter series of books. I remember absolutely devouring those. And I was a big fan of Stephen King when I don't know what any of this says about me when I was younger. So I've definitely had that. And if you brought out another one in the Hannibal series, I would certainly read that. All right. You know, since you like difficult, I'll just make one recommendation for a book that for 9 out of 10 people, it's a miss because it's hard.

1:26:56It's dense. It's called Little Big. The alternate title is The Fairy's Parliament by John Crowley, who is also a poet. And this book, Little Big, when it works, at least for me and for the one out of 10 that it might work for, has the most profound effect on time perception and time dilation. It feels like you go on a one to two week psychedelic experience on the lower end of the mystical scale. But it is such a mind altering book in the way that it is written as almost a fever dream with multiple intertwining timelines and magical surrealism. If you're looking for something hard that is also incredibly beautiful and it's this book i've never had an experience like this you have to charge through the first 150 pages if you put it down after 20 and pick it up a week later won't make any sense but if you get through it you'll be like that was an incredible book hopefully i want to recommend it to friends and then two weeks later if someone asks you what it was you will not be able to describe what the book was about it's bizarre so that would be just my recommendation.

1:28:14A Little Big by John Crowley. Thank you. I've made a note. I recently read a book I really enjoyed called Picnic, Lightning. Three words, Picnic, Lightning by Lawrence Scott. And I loved it. And I could not tell you what it was about at all. It's nonfiction, but I just adore it. Maybe that's the sign of a good book on some level, being lost in it to the extent that you can't piece it back together in retrospect. If you had to give, and I know you've given a great TED talk. I recommend people check it out. Great bow tie also. But I recommend people check that out. If you had to give another TED talk, but it had to be on something you are not known for.

1:28:53So it can't be the magic, anything tangential to magic. Also, I'm going to take art off the table. Sadly, I'm going to take art off the table. What might you give a TED talk on? I think this idea that we're all joined up by how lonely it feels when things go wrong. this thing I said of life pulling us towards difficult places. I don't say that because I've had a particularly difficult life, but I just think it's just part of life. And it's part of someone's life that's going well. It's still a common thread. And I think that is not the mode that we're encouraged to live in. It was very strange when I did that TED Talk and I really enjoyed it.

1:29:27But it was, I don't say this with any disrespect to the TED people at all. They were wonderful, but it was in Vancouver and you step out of that Ted building into some of the worst homelessness in the world. And it's like Disney have staged the apocalypse. There was a bride covered in blood pushing a trolley through fire. There were just things on fire. I mean, it was extraordinary. Not quite on its doorstep, but like 10, 15 minutes walk. And it was very odd going out and finding a coffee in the middle of all that and then going back to the sort of TED Talk topics, it was a strange thing. So maybe partly for that reason.

1:30:06But I think the difficulty of life and how we sit well with that, I think that's the perennial subject for me. Maybe we should make that happen. Yeah, Vancouver, I presented at TED any number of years ago, I can't remember. And some of the worst opiate and opioid addiction in North America, for sure, in terms of density. Galbra Mante has done a lot of work there. all right shifting topics a little bit in the last handful of years five years i mean somewhat of an arbitrary time frame but what new belief or behavior or habit would you say it doesn't have to be the most has improved your life the most but are there any new beliefs behaviors habits that have meaningfully improved your life ways of looking at the world could be anything being confident to go with my instincts on particularly work-related things historically so these are big projects i have these other people around me that are putting things together behind the scenes in terms of productions and meetings and pitching ideas and so on and i get caught up with that as i said that productivity that you see isn't driven by any sort of workaholic tennis is on my part it's just what i find myself swept up in so of late and it's an odd thing to be saying no i don't want to do this or being offered some private gig out somewhere and guys die i'm not going to enjoy that unless it's the clentons then you can't say no unless it's the clentons that's sort of good i've been in a my current relationship for 10 years and probably the last five years of that is it's settled better with me in terms of because we're very different so I think I'm naturally disposed to a kind of a quite a stoic placid thing he's very um very fiery and I've sort of quite enjoying the um sort of learning from that it makes me a bit less of a people pleaser I suppose we've had lots of work done in the house for a long time and he's very happy to start arguments with people that are doing that and I'm just trying to keep everybody happy and making them coffee and trying to iron over any tension.

1:32:10And I actually, you know, sometimes a bit of conflict is important because it isn't really about conflict. It's about being able to have some faith in what you actually are and want to say and stand for. It's not about conflict. You think it's about conflict, so you don't do it, but it's not. It's just about having some faith in yourself. What caused that settling? Was it relating to it differently, Like that dynamic that you just described. So you have 10 years, like in the last five, you've settled into it in a different way. What has contributed to that? I think just time. I think it's just slowly, slow process.

1:32:47Breaking down. Giving up. Slow surrender. My natural predisposition is kind of mental space. I've always sort of saw myself as probably being on my own with a dog. and even getting a second dog as a couple, having now a second dog, it felt, oh, no, no, it's wrong. It should be. I remember saying, oh, let's not get a second one. I like that it's just me and my dog and my partner. So what do you mean you? It's us and our dog. What do you mean? What are you talking about? And I realized that was my image of myself was still kind of a bit single. That's definitely a new mode for me. I am trying to work a little less, but I've also become very aware.

1:33:27When I wrote the happy book afterwards, I was going out and giving talks on happiness to promote the book a little bit. And because I had all this knowledge that I found really interesting and I wanted to do something with it and not just end it because I'd finished writing the book. And I was really unhappy. I was going out thinking, I'm actually feeling a bit miserable and I don't know why. And I feel a bit of a hypocrite. And I realized it was because I'd finished writing the book and I didn't have that engagement in a creative project. So those are important to me. And I think realizing that as well.

1:33:57I think the best we can hope for is become more conscious of the things that we do find meaning, the things that we do need, and having more of those. If you could put a message, quote, image, anything non-commercial, on a billboard, meaning make it present for millions or billions of people. There's a line or a verse of Rilke, the German Romantic poet, which is something like, experience everything the beauty and the terror no feeling is final just keep going always thought that was great love a drop of real so yeah maybe that or just gather if you want something snappy I think gather yourself afresh first of all just to find ways of being able to do that what we need in our life just to kind of get ourselves back together and step back out of the world I think that's having that and knowing what you need that's a big tick isn't it well Darren I could keep going but I want to be respectful of your time.

1:34:56And this has been a great wide ranging conversation. My AirPods are starting to run out. They're starting to. Oh yeah. You keep dipping out. Blop, blop, blop, blop, blop, blop, blop, blop. Yeah. So people can find you on social at Darren Brown. We'll link to everything on Instagram and on X, Darren Brown, D-R-R-E-N brown.co.uk. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we wind to a close? Requests of my audience, things you'd like to point them to, anything at all? Just to recommend our hairdresser. that we both share. Give them a shout out. Yes, we do share the same stylist and beard trimmer.

1:35:33It's a good look. It looks good on you. Thank you. You too. It was very good to finally make contact. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. My pleasure. And for everybody listening, we'll link to everything in the show notes, tim.blog slash podcast. And until next time, be just a little kinder than is necessary to others and also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

1:36:13Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off.

1:36:51for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas, and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says not available in your current location, something like that, or creepier still, if you're at home, and this has happened to me. I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly and then a screen for AT &T pops up and it says, you might be searching for this.

1:37:29How about that? And it suggests an alternative. And I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser. Yeah, I don't love it. And a lot of, you know, I take privacy and security very seriously. That is why I've been using today's episode sponsor, ExpressVPN, for several years now, and I recommend you check it out. When you connect to a secure VPN server, your internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel that nobody can see into, including hackers, governments, people in Starbucks, your internet service provider, etc.

1:38:03And no, you are not safe simply using incognito mode in your browser. This was something that I got wrong for a long time. Your activity might still be visible, as in the example I gave to your internet service provider. Incognito mode also does not hide your IP address. Also with the example that I gave of you can't access this kind or that content wherever you happen to be, then you just set your server to a country where you can see it. And all of a sudden, voila, you can say log into your normal Amazon account as opposed to being routed to.uk or whatever. And everything works. So ExpressVPN protects you and enables you because it encrypts and reroutes your network traffic through secure servers.

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