Derren Brown: UNLOCK The Secret Power Of Your Mind!

Predicting the lottery, playing Russian roulette on live TV and tricking people into robbing a security van in broad daylight. These are just a few of the stunts that Derren Brown has performed in over 20 years of pushing the boundaries of the believable. But while he may be best known for controlling minds, one he couldn’t control was his own. From battling with issues of self esteem, faith and coming to terms with his sexuality, Derren’s path to success has been one that is both internal and in the limelight. In this intimate conversation with Britain’s alternative national treasure, Derren breaks the magician’s code and reveals his secrets, as well as the psychological tricks we play on ourselves and hold us back from our true potential. Derren: Instagram -http://bit.ly/3vTBsyf Twitter - http://bit.ly/3IP6crw Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I've been asked by the FBI, I've been asked by the police to help.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  What did the FBI or the police want to help with?

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Nah.

• 0:08Steven Bartlett?

  Ladies and gentlemen, the incredible Darren Brown! A psychological illusionist.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  Doing extraordinary television and even better live shows.

• 0:16Steven Bartlett?

  Darren is a national treasure. Welcome to the show.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  The story we tell ourselves is not what's real. Like, for example, I did a show called Miracle. The Lord has his work cut out tonight. And the second half was healing. The woman came up and she'd paralyzed on one side of her body since she was four. In floods of tears because she could move her left arm for the first time. What you're seeing is that it's the psychological component of suffering, right? Like, nothing's happened, nothing's changed. But their relationship to their suffering, that's been made to change. It's not the things in life that cause your problems, it's the story that you tell yourself about them, it's the judgments that you make about them.

• 0:49Steven Bartlett?

  There's a lot of people that are trying to sell you on this bullshit, that they can take your traumas or your insecurities to zero. I've never seen it happen.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  We've completely obliterated the idea of just fortune and life. Sometimes life's throwing stuff back at us we have no control over, and anxiety is still somehow the demon. But, you know, without anxiety, how do you know to change anything? You know, you can't do that without embracing anxiety to an extent.

• 1:11Steven Bartlett?

  Your work is predominantly based in psychology, right? So have you ever done anything and thought, "How the fuck did that happen"?

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Don't go home and start doing that. Two things come to mind.

• 1:31Steven Bartlett?

  I've spent the last few days reading all about your childhood.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:35Steven Bartlett?

  Truly fascinating.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:36Steven Bartlett?

  I've actually got a picture here of you, um...

• 1:41Speaker 00

  How strange that you have that picture. Yes, that's me with a parrot on my shoulder, rather than you have.

• 1:47Steven Bartlett?

  This little boy?

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:49Steven Bartlett?

  What do I need to understand about him? And the world he lived in and the way he saw the world to understand you?

• 1:57Speaker 00

  What do you need to understand? Well, I was an only child till I was nine.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  So I guess that's kind of a, that's a pretty formative thing, isn't it? Um, quite creative, like always, always drawing and building things, Lego. Um, always been a bit of a people pleaser and maybe that, at that age.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Kind of, yeah, sort of happy, didn't, didn't have a lot of friends, it wasn't like a, didn't have a big gang. And everybody did, I've always gone through life just with sort of a, a small number of, of, of good friends. Uh, but I think that's, that feels like a happy, a happy time to think back on.

• 2:35Steven Bartlett?

  I remember sitting with Jimmy Carr and him telling me that, um, people often think of comedians as being like, they're depressed, so they're trying to impress other people to get some kind of thrill for their own sort of self gratification. But Jimmy said to me, he said, you should actually ask which one of my parents was depressed, that I was trying to impress, to understand how I became a comedian. And I wonder, and you, you know, you said that you're a bit of a people pleaser. You clearly had this huge affinity towards entertaining and getting the reaction back from people, the amazement. Where, where did that start? Can you, have you pinpointed where that started in your childhood?

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Yes, I think I could. So when I was at school, so my dad was a swimming teacher at school. And, uh, he, and I wasn't very sporty, so I kind of, um, it shielded me from being like, uh, bullied as a, as a non-sporty kid, but I didn't love school. Mainly because I said, I found a lot of the kids, the sporty kids, quite intimidating and so on. So I kind of like, but dad teaching there helped. And then when I got to, and I was, I was in with the wrong group, the, um, the sort of classical music loving group, or the puff gang, as we were less charitably known, um, didn't even like classical music. So it was a pretty miserable group to be stuck with.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  Um, in sixth form, I remember everybody sort of seemed to grow up suddenly and become a lot more, uh, friendly. And so I kind of, uh, I sort of exploded in a way into sort of like a, a, a attention seeking. And I went from being very sort of quiet and a bit, a bit intimidated by these sort of, uh, kids to sort of, um, suddenly they seemed to sort of, you know, like me, or at least, you know, they were. Fine, so I I I started doing impressions of teachers and I would draw caricatures of them and I was definitely, I became a kind of really, I would imagine, quite irritating, certainly some of the teachers, um

• 4:31Speaker 00

  attention seeker. So I think it all happened around then, um and then it just sort of then progressed into university. Most of my twenties was, um probably a lot of it was around, you know, based around that, uh and it it was quite a handy thing, you know, if you're going to perform, it takes care of that need to just sort of, you know, just kind of impress. I think it was probably a a good thing.

• 4:56Steven Bartlett?

  Were you picked on or teased or anything in school before that point?

• 5:00Speaker 00

  No, I said, I think because my dad taught there, it helped, but I was I was definitely, you know, always chosen last for the teams and and things hated uh sports and so on. And there were a couple of kids that were probably, I mean, generally fairly nasty anyway, but I certainly got, uh

• 5:18Speaker 00

  a a bit from them. But no, I think I think I sort of did all right. I think I generally didn't enjoy school that much. And I felt like I was sort of, um, as I said, intimidated, but I don't I don't really remember ever getting sort of, I never got beaten up or bullied or no one was making my life particularly miserable. I think it was just a general feeling of not quite fitting in.

• 5:38Steven Bartlett?

  And religion. I was incredibly religious when I was

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Were you?

• 5:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and then I listed at about eighteen, became incredibly atheist.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:45Steven Bartlett?

  And you I I read a similar sort of journey in your story. At six or something, you'd asked your parents if you could go to Bible.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  That's right. Mrs. Whittaker, one of our teachers at school was, uh, I really liked a lot and she ran, it was called crusader class, but it's basically like a Sunday school thing, um and because I was six and she asked me if I wanted to go to it. I just sort of presumed every everybody did. I didn't know any difference, so I said to uh, I asked my parents if I could go and they said, yes, of course. So I did. And then by the time I realised that, oh, no, no, this is actually like a a thing that I now believe in. It was sort of, I was pretty much inculcated, so it was uh, hard to step out of it. But I did eventually, yeah, university. So many years later, I, uh, through doing hypnosis first and magic and they

• 6:34Speaker 00

  they always give you quite a skeptical outlook on things because you just see how

• 6:41Speaker 00

  People fool themselves and and so you sort of naturally start to view a lot of belief systems, I think, through those eyes, including your own. I don't know how it was for you, but I and also the very idea of doing hypnosis.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  I just remember that was, so I was a member of the Christian Union in my first year at university. I went to Bristol. And they were just totally up in arms. I had I had members of the Christian Union at the back of one of my shows, exorcising me and casting out demons whilst I was hypnotising people on stage. So again, all of that just sort of made me quite, it just helped with the sort of general scepticism. It took a little while to properly come out of it. In fact, that the Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion, came out around the time that I had sort of mentally made that step, but didn't quite maybe have the sort of proper language for it. So that was, if that was a helpful book, actually, I was sure it was for many people in terms of giving that

• 7:43Speaker 00

  lack of belief a kind of a structure.

• 7:45Steven Bartlett?

  Was for me, one of the very sort of pivotal books in my life when I, when I was about eighteen years old. I also read about like compulsive behaviours from your childhood, things like knocking your knees together and

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:57Steven Bartlett?

  A series of other things.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Really twitchy, yeah, a little on that sort of kind of Tourette's sort of scale. I think there's a, there's a, there's a wedge that ends with quite severe things, but a lot, a lot of people have that experience of

• 8:15Speaker 00

  making little funny tingly noises in the throat or having to, you know, not step on the cracks and then there's all the kind of OCD thing that that starts to get accompanied by feelings of dread and so much. I never had that. But yeah, I was twitchy and I, I, I find a lot of

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Kind of creative, creative kids are, I don't, I don't really know what, what it is. It's a, it's a, seems to be a form of auto-suggestion.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Like when you get, you get the idea in your head and then it's very hard to let it go. Sometimes, I, I get it now, sometimes I get it on stage. Because there's a certain amount, there's a lot of muscle memory with doing a stage show. So if you've, if something, if a little twitchy thing has crept in at one point during the show, it'll just creep in every night.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  So I still kind of, uh, still aware of it.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Little more over the last few years, because obviously it's been such a, you know, weird few years for everyone's mental health. So I've noticed it more than I had before. But, uh, yeah, and it was quite, it was, it was a lot. My parents were quite despairing with it. I think it's a very painful thing to watch your child do and not know.

• 9:24Steven Bartlett?

  What were they watching?

• 9:25Speaker 00

  How to help. Knees knocking, sniffing, terrible sniffing. Yeah, like really, but really, really loud. I went to see a, um, Alfred Brendel, the pianist, playing in Berlin once when I was, studying out there, I think, or did my gap, gap year, I think it was, out there. And just, I mean, this guy's playing the, I think it was the Beethoven pianist, and I was just him on his own, on the stage of the Berlin Philharmonic. And there's this incredibly loud sniffing that I'm doing. And by the second half, everybody had cleared out. I, I was just basically a whole empty area of the audience. But yeah, just, it's such a bizarre thing. You just can't really stop it with the best will in the world. You can't stop yourself from doing this, this, these things.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  And it's, um, and also you don't have the language for it as a kid. That's, that's the worst part of it. You don't have the language to explain that it's a compulsion. You sort of feel like you're in control of it. So you feel like therefore, the only, only thing you can say is that you want to do it. You don't want to do it because it's horrible. You really, really want to stop. And it's, it's hard and frightening because you can't articulate it. And it, um, uh, and I, I think there's no answer to it. I think just it sort of passes.

• 10:37Steven Bartlett?

  As you've, um, as you've matured.

• 10:41Steven Bartlett?

  Has your perspective of your childhood evolved? Because I've found that mine certainly has. It's almost like with with a bit more wisdom. I say that I'm thirty years old now, but with a little bit more wisdom, I've I've kind of have a different perspective now on the events of my childhood. At one point, I would have kind of narrated them differently, but now I see different sort of truths and through lines in my early experience.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  I think I'm quite fond of my memories of myself as a child. And I um.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  It felt like there was quite a clean break. Once I sort of went off to university, it felt like life sort of stopped and started again. So I, when I think back to my kind of um, the sort of story of myself, I guess I'm sort of quietly living out the back of my head, I sort of don't really go much beyond university age. And I'm I'll happily find anything excruciating, like, you know, more than, you know, anything I've said or done ten minutes ago. I find that quite easy. And that feeling, I suppose, kind of gets weaker and weaker the further I go back in terms of finding myself, you know, embarrassing. I and then by the time I get to childhood, it's all perfectly, all feels fine.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm aware, as I said, that I was kind of would sort of just get on with my own things, but nothing I I uh.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  I think I was sensitive. I think I still am. I was quite a sensitive child. I used to I did used to cry a lot. I know that makes me sound unhappy, but I I used to. It didn't take much to make me cry. And I think I probably retained a sort of sensitivity, which is sort of interesting because I write a lot about Stoicism and a lot of the things I think people you people do tend to write about the things that, you know, that they either need to learn for themselves or are learning, because, you know, you you express those things often better because you're discovering them for you for for yourself.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  So perhaps like a lot of Stoics, I'm secretly quite quite sensitive too. So I remember that, but not not not really unhappy, not not particularly blissfully happy either, but just a kind of fairly content, solitary kind of kid.

• 13:02Steven Bartlett?

  That's sensitivity.

• 13:05Steven Bartlett?

  I've always wondered if if we're particularly taken by the applause, are we therefore also taken by the criticism? So people that end up committing their lives to being like public entertainers and living for the response and the reaction that their work has. Are those then also the people that are most susceptible to when, you know, the opposite of applause?

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, yes, I guess so. You're definitely putting yourself out there, aren't you? If you you perform, you know, you saw what you are kind of, you are opening yourself up to both extremes of reactions, but it wasn't really about that for me. I I think it was about control was a big part of it. And also, as a sort of, like, I didn't come out till I was actually sort of quite late in my thirties. And I think around the time that I was getting into the hypnosis, that was, you know, sort of university time, really.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  And I think, first of all, it was, this was all wasn't clear to me at the time, but with hindsight, that the control aspect of it was very clear. And that clearly ticked. Well, if you watch a hypnotist hypnotizing people, I mean, it's just the whole thing is a big exercise in in control. And I think I sort of, that was appealing to me, although I didn't know it in that, I didn't, it didn't strike me quite in that language at the time. But I think, looking back,

• 14:35Speaker 00

  that was helpful. And also, I think if the old outmoded cliche of the the gay man in particular being, you know, a hairdresser or a interior designer, and all of those sort of horrible old cliches. What they have in common, actors as well, is the the notion of

• 15:00Speaker 00

  Being able to create dazzling surfaces. Because they deflect people from the more difficult. If you're feeling shame about, you know, what's underneath. And I think magic's very good for that as well. You know, you're sort of creating this bubble around yourself. This sort of, you're literally hiding behind a trick. And people will look at that trick and go, oh, gosh, you're amazing. How do you do that? You're amazing. And that's a very appealing thing. A lot of kids get into magic just because they're underconfident. And a lot of people, even going through magic into adults. They've learned to rely on that to impress people and haven't had to go back and just work through normal social skills that most people do. So it's a very appealing thing.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  I think all of that was helpful to me as somebody that was not out and, you know, kind of working all that stuff out.

• 15:52Steven Bartlett?

  You used the word shame there. It reminded me of listening to your audiobook where you talk about those two kids beating you up in your sleeping bag. I can't remember the outfit.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, that's right, yeah.

• 16:02Steven Bartlett?

  And one of the lines you said in that section of the book is that you were very good at, I think you said embodying shame, but I know that's not the exact word you used, but that you were very good at like holding shame. You were full of shame, I think, was the message.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can't remember exactly what I wrote, but yeah, it kind of creeps up on you. I find now it's, yeah, I can ease, I'm prone to it. You know, if I feel I've upset my partner, it's shame that I'll go to rather than defensiveness or, you know.

• 16:41Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll easily, I can easily get back to a feeling of, ugh, you know, I've been bad. I've just sort of let this person down.

• 16:51Steven Bartlett?

  Is that, 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 like black kid in an all white school and we were the poorest family. And so that feeling of shame turned into like a motivation, which made me want to become a happy, sexy millionaire. But what does shame mean to you in that context?

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Well, I suppose if you distinguish it from embarrassment, embarrassment is sort of where you've sort of, you've let yourself down in front of, or you've.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  It's a feeling you're gonna get from other people, they're important in that. It's how you've appeared before them, whereas I suppose shame is how you've appeared before yourself, that you've sort of let something down within yourself, it's that, isn't it?

• 17:36Speaker 00

  But I think the experience of it is just a sort of,

• 17:42Speaker 00

  it just becomes an easy resting place, whatever it is, it might be for someone else, it could be anger or fury or whatever, if there's just an emotional through line that was a familiar place when you were young, it's just, you just find yourself settling back into that. And I suppose part of getting older is recognizing those kind of things, aren't they? Recognizing, ah, that is a needless pattern. And as you said with your own experience with that, those things can be really helpful. They can provide a real impetus and a motivation to, you know, to do things you wouldn't have. I mean, like not being out, all that energy was going into creating this Mr. Magic kind of persona.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  And although it's easy to say, you know, you should always come out and all the rest of it. Of course, those things are important too, but I don't think I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you now, I don't think if that had been an easy ride, you know.

• 18:39Steven Bartlett?

  Shame being a familiar resting place, as you kind of describe it, and you said that kind of starts in your childhood. I just wanna be, because I wanna make sure that I'm clear on the context here. That has a familiar sort of history in your childhood because of the social dynamics of your childhood, because you felt like a bit different and a bit like a loner, is that what you're saying? Or is there other dynamics with parents where they?

• 19:00Speaker 00

  No, I think it's specifically with sort of the gay thing, I think that's what it is. I think if you feel, and hopefully it's different now, it's just going back a bit, I'm 51 now. But if you feel like those things are just embarrassing and awkward, you're kind of...

• 19:20Speaker 00

  You know, it's not like you really get to, well, you're finding it out in real time about yourself, aren't you? So there's just, uh, it becomes an uncomfortable centre of everything that starts to affect so much of what happens on the surface. And there's a real experience, I think, if you're not out, which I've recognised in many friends as well. Well, there's a bit of, just a bit of a bubble around you because you're sort of, you're having to maintain a kind of a, um, a sort of curated exterior. And, and part of that then is then what's happening underneath is, is uncomfortable and difficult and feels shameful. Um, so I think that's it. I think that's where, I don't remember feeling that as a kid. As I said, quiet and so on, but I don't remember feeling that as an experience. But it just sort of, just kind of crept in.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  And the more, the more I sort of, um, uh, kind of was leaning into the magic persona thing, the more, the more the outside becomes sort of, you know, the, the harder and more sort of, um, uh, opaque this sort of exterior presentation becomes. I think the, it goes hand in hand with a more shameful interior. Until in the end, you just sort of go, fuck that and just sort of let it all be fine.

• 20:38Steven Bartlett?

  Was, was there a point, and this might be a really naive question as a straight guy, but was there a point where it became crystal clear to you that your, your sexual preference was different? Or was it s- slow sort of realisations and?

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was kind, um, it's sort of, because you can never really climb into anyone else's head and sort of understand what their experience is. It's, it's, it's sort of, um, it's often difficult to really know. And of course, at the time I was also a proper Christian, um, which, uh, slightly kind of messes the thing up and just slightly gets in the way of the whole thing. I had a friend who went through the, um, some of that kind of, uh, Living Waters movement, which is the kind of gay conversion, it's got called gay conversion therapy. It was a bit more subtle than that, but it nonetheless is basically that.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  So he was going through that and although I didn't, I was kind of, um, skirted it a little bit because I was his friend and, you know, it was something we were talking about a lot. Um, so all of those things.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  And obviously, by the way, it doesn't work, just in case, in case I was wondering. Um, I mean, I went in straight, it worked for me. Um, uh, so, yeah, it was sort of, um, I don't know, I don't, there's never just a clear moment, it's just, uh, I think as I just got in the public eye, I thought, I don't want this to be some weird sort of thing that's like a secret. Um, so, uh, in the end you come out of it, you come out about it, and then actually, the, uh, the the joy, the reason why it's liberating, at least it was for me, and probably, hopefully, most people now, is that people just don't care, like this thing that you've carried around and that experience, that shameful centre that's there. Again, shame is a really strong word, but nonetheless, it is kind of

• 22:29Speaker 00

  just this sort of awkward thing, uh, eventually, when it, when you sort of are open about it, it's just people don't care, why, why would they care? So that's, that's the, that's why it's liberating, it's not because suddenly you can, you know, spin around in the street with your shopping bags, it's, um, it is just that, oh, no one cares about your own difficult private stuff, in the best way, so actually, and you've done the big one, like you've, so now, anything else after this will be, will be fine, that, I think that's why it's a liberating thing.

• 23:00Steven Bartlett?

  I read a quote, I think it was in The Telegraph, where you'd said that, um, maybe the journalist was commentating that, um, something as simple as mislaying your keys can trigger a whole new wave of self-hatred.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  God, that was me saying that, was it? Uh, yeah, that's just fury though, isn't it, when you can't find a sock, or you can't find your keys, or your pen, um.

• 23:23Steven Bartlett?

  Self-hatred, I mean, is a strong, strong word.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Uh.

• 23:27Steven Bartlett?

  I think the piece went-

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Maybe, yeah, maybe it does, yeah, I probably would, yes, I would reflect it back on myself, rather than being angry at my partner or anybody else who's probably lost it, that's what he'd do, he'd be angry that I, I must have put his keys somewhere because he can't find them. I would just be, yeah, beating myself up for why am I always losing stuff, why can't I remember where I've put things, yeah, I definitely would do that.

• 23:48Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. I wouldn't.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  You wouldn't?

• 23:51Steven Bartlett?

  No, no, it wouldn't. I don't think it would reflect on my, my own self-image if I'd lost the keys. Or even if it did, it wouldn't negatively reflect. I think that's just who I am.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  That's who I am, yeah.

• 24:02Steven Bartlett?

  I'm unorganised versus like, oh, I'm so unorganised. I hate, I hate that about myself.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I, I don't know. When I said that, that was probably quite a while ago. And I don't know if I'd necessarily be that hard on myself now. Plus, sometimes you exaggerate these things for rhetorical effect.

• 24:20Steven Bartlett?

  Has anything changed? Like, on a really fundamental level? I'm so curious about how, how, how good we are at actually changing some of these things. Because we say it, we talk about it, but as I've gotten older and older, and as I've done more and more of these interviews, I tend to find that the like, real fundamental stuff is never healed. It never goes away. And I actually think that's really good news for people because there's a lot of people that are trying to sell you on this bullshit, that they can take your traumas or your, your insecurities to zero.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:50Steven Bartlett?

  I've never seen it happen.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  No, that's all wrong. And even, even Stoicism in a way is sort of a little guilty of that. Even something that's talk about, talking about rolling with the punches of life is still kind of suggesting that, and if you get this right, you won't be disturbed, you know, you won't experience anxiety. That is all, that's a little bit off, really. I think the na- the nature of life is that it is, it is difficult. And not all the time, but a lot of the time, things really go badly and they certainly don't go as you planned. And you know that you actually, as you start to get older, you realise your plans probably have nothing to do with how things are, are turning out. But the illusion that they are is what propels you through the first half of life. So, actually, I think the project, the task, our task is.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  A certain amount of, is a sort of personal development and integrating ourselves with the parts of us that we are uncomfortable with. So again, that's the project of relating to what's difficult within ourselves and then how we do that in life as well, how we relate to things that are difficult and tricky in life. Because the thing about, although that experience can be very isolating, those feelings of, you know, when life lets you down or you feel you've failed, they tend to be quite isolating experiences. Like shame, right? It's a very isolating thing. Whereas actually, and weirdly, I'm doing this show, Showman, at the moment, and this is entirely what the show's about, those isolating experiences, like, they're exactly

• 26:25Speaker 00

  the things that join us all up. That is the, that is the human experience. How do we deal with the difficulties of life? You know, when things are going badly and we feel like we failed, that's, that's what we all have to find our way through. So the things that feel most isolating are the things that tend to connect us. So I don't think it's about trying to bury them under sort of, you know, some sort of forced optimism. And it isn't about reaching a nirvana of, of a problem-free life. I think that's, it's a really sort of terrible project because you're going to end up blaming yourself for failing. You weren't a good enough stoic or you weren't a good enough optimist or whatever.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Always reminded me of the faith healers that I spend a lot of time watching and when they do that thing of saying, throw away your pills and if your illness returns, it's because you didn't have enough faith, like it's your fault. And that's no different from, you know, the secret, you know, the law of attraction.

• 27:26Steven Bartlett?

  Oh my god, fucking hell.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  But it's the same thing, it's the same thing. You have to completely commit yourself and if it doesn't work out, if the universe doesn't provide you with, it's always jewellery and money and cars, it's a bit odd, then you didn't have enough faith. It wasn't, you know, it was your own fault. So it's a perfect cycle of blame, which exonerates the...

• 27:48Speaker 00

  The actual system completely and puts the blame entirely on you. So I'm, yeah, I.

• 27:55Steven Bartlett?

  There's a bit of an irony in the fact that people choose those books because they they don't want responsibility. But failure puts responsibility back on them. Because I think of like the the law of attract, I actually had a conversation with a girl I was dating many years ago in New York. And she actually got out of the cab and walked off because I said to her that I she believed that she could visualize anything into existence. I went, so you believe that you can just think about something and then it will happen. So you could think about becoming a billionaire and it happened. She went, yes. And I was like, no, I don't agree with that. And I go, but how? She goes, you put it out into the universe and then it comes back. And what they're doing in that, to me, it seems like they're alleviating their own sense of responsibility. They're putting it up to the puppet master in the universe. But as you've described then, when that fails, the blame is ultimately on them for not doing it right.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it must be your fault, as opposed to it was just a bad idea to to begin with. And more helpfully, how do we live comfortably with the universe that doesn't give a fuck what we what our plans are? Well, why would it? It doesn't make any sense. So how do we? How do we navigate? And that there's a, there is an ancient sort of image. It's it's appeared in so many different forms of an X equals Y diagonal. So if you imagine a graph and you've got along one axis, you've got the X axis is the stuff you want to achieve in life, your aims and your plans. And then the other axis, the Y axis, is just life, what they used to call fortune. It's all the stuff that just gets thrown at you.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  And if you imagine the line that we lead in our in our lives, it's a sort of an X equals Y line, right? It's sort of an undulating line. So sometimes our plans are winning and we're doing great. And sometimes life's throwing stuff back at us that we have no control over and things have gone horrible and someone's got ill or whatever it is. So there's this sort of undulating X equals Y diagonal where we're being pulled in these two different directions. That's what we live. That's just sort of reality. And the nature of the kind of the American optimistic model is that by believing in ourselves, we can. And this is not, it's an old hangover from Protestantism, this sort of work ethic, that you can, by believing in yourself, you can crank that line up.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  So it's in line with your aims and your goals.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  And we just, it's it's a, we've completely obliterated the idea of just fortune and life from that. You know, we used to, we used to call people.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Unfortunate, now we call them losers, you know, so there's a, there's a, a, a, a lack of respect now for just the fact that life is throwing stuff back at you. So how do you, how do you navigate that? And I think actually Stoicism is a very good toolkit for, and Stoicism, as I'm sure pretty much all of your listeners will be familiar with, but the, the bottom line of it is, is that, you know, the, the, the, the things in life, it's not the things in life that cause your problems, it's the, the story that you tell yourself about them, it's the judgments that you make about them, which is a very good and sensible idea that's made its way down to us, um, over the last couple of thousand years. And then allied to that, that you take all the stuff that you have no control

• 30:59Speaker 00

  over, outcomes, what other people do and what they think and so on. And you can just decide that that stuff is fine as it is, and you can just focus on the stuff, only try and change the stuff you can actually change, which is the world of your own thoughts and your own actions. And that's where we should put our attention. And then there's interesting, there is a middle ground of, uh, you know, like if you're, well, success of any sort, you know, there's parts of that you're in control of and parts that you're not. So it's like, uh, best analogy I've read for it is like going into a game of tennis. If you go in determined to win, and then your, uh, your opponent is playing better than you, you're probably going to get anxious and you're going to feel that you're failing. Whereas if you go in determined to play as well as you can, again, just to control

• 31:42Speaker 00

  the part you're in, you're in charge of, then, uh, it sort of doesn't matter if your opponents are a bit better than you, or they start to win, you're not, you're not failing, you know, you're, and the same goes for, um, you know, the, the Stoics were big movers and shakers. You, if you want to change the world, you can, but you're only going to emotionally commit yourself to your intention and your actions, not the outcomes, which may happen a generation after you've, after you've died, you know, that's something out of your hands. I, I think all that's very helpful and very useful. The only thing, uh, if you see it as a toolkit, um, to be lent into when it's helpful, but the, uh, even that, uh, if you take it as a sort of a, you know, almost like a spiritual way of

• 32:23Speaker 00

  life, can fall into the, um, problem of, and therefore we shouldn't have any anxiety, therefore anxiety is still somehow the demon. But, you know, without anxiety, how do you know to change anything in your life? How do you know to change your job unless the current job is making you feel bad? Or, you know, things have to...

• 32:41Speaker 00

  Become anxious and things have to fall away in order for us to move forward and grow. And we, you know, you can't do that without embracing anxiety to, to an extent.

• 32:51Steven Bartlett?

  As I've aged, I've started to realise that the kind of compass of my life is how I feel. And that's kind of what you've alluded to there, that we have this signal. Sometimes it comes in the form of anxiety, sometimes it comes in the form of fear. But these are all like really useful signals. Do you resonate with what I just said there in terms of like feelings that our body is giving us are the greatest signals for our, for us to navigate versus like narratives? Versus like what my mum wants, or I end up in a, working in the city in like a suit and a tie because that's what society had an expectation of. But I'm feeling a signal inside, which is, I don't know, depression or I'm feeling, you know.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  I think those things are very important to, to listen to. I think we, we do live out stories very easily. We do tend to uh see things in terms of a narrative. And that's, it's an interestingly double edged thing because on the one hand,

• 33:47Speaker 00

  whether, you know, someone's written in or out of a story has become very important. Language and harm and all of those things have all got suddenly very tied up. And the very notion of story has become so important. Taking authorship of your story and so on. But the other, the other side to that, which, you know, I live out in my, in my job as a magician, is that stories are just stories. You know, if a magician fools you with a trick in a way that works, you, what you're being shown is that your story that you were forming of the world isn't quite right. Like there's something you missed and you always feel like you've properly paid attention. You saw everything, you, you were taking in all the information. But it shows you that you've missed something, that your narrative of what reality is, isn't the same as the world.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  And so the,

• 34:38Speaker 00

  The story side of things is, seems to be part of just our, our makeup, but it's important not to fall in love with it too much and to realise that the nature of a story is that it's, there's stuff you're excluding. There's an image, isn't there, of telling a story over a campfire in a clearing, and it's cosy, but then there's all the forest in the darkness with all the stuff that you're excluding from that story, and that's where the monsters live, and the nature of monsters are they come and bite you, and all the stuff that we don't include in a story, whether it's the story we tell about, uh, tell ourselves about ourselves, or whether it's a story we tell ourselves about our nation or our culture, whether it's a social thing or whether it's a private thing, the stuff that we bury

• 35:23Speaker 00

  and the stuff that we don't include within the narrative, because the narrative is really too simple, is, goes deep, like it's, it sort of gets buried, it gets buried in our own unconscious, or it gets buried in the untold story of whatever the thing is, and that's what comes back and bites us, that's the, the stuff that comes to own us in our own lives and, and in our, you know, in our societal lives as well, is the stuff that we've buried. And I think as you, as you get older, and this is where that, those feeling signals come in, I think it becomes more and more important to pay attention to the things that we are banishing from our stories, you know, what, what do we, if we think about

• 36:08Speaker 00

  what makes us feel resentful, or what we envy, or, you know, what are, what are those things? Because those are the things that we're bearing somehow, and I think there's a shift in the second half of life, and I'm obviously, I'm a chunk older than you, but, where we can disengage a bit with the, the story that we've been telling of how to move forward in life, that's all about a dialogue with the external world, that's where we're getting our cues from, people showing us what we need to be successful, what we need to look or act in a certain way that denotes moving forward and progress. And we do that for the first half of life, and it is sustained a little by this optimistic illusion that the child, that the castles that we're chasing in the air that we'll reach if we just, you

• 36:50Speaker 00

  know, a lot of happiness deferring going on and a lot of, you know, focusing on the future, and then something happens around midlife where actually the project shifts to... Taking the cues from within rather than from the outside world. And I think then that's a good time for priorities to shift from what will

• 37:11Speaker 00

  give me success in the future to what is actually what might bring pleasure and satisfaction and meaning. Now in the in the present, I think that's a useful thing to lean into towards the second half of life.

• 37:24Steven Bartlett?

  It was university that's sort of sparked your interest in hypnosis, right?

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:30Steven Bartlett?

  You saw someone on campus doing?

• 37:32Speaker 00

  Martin Taylor was doing a show, yes, it was in my freshest week and

• 37:36Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  I thought it was amazing and I I left and walked back that night with a friend and said, I'm going to learn how to do this. And my friend Nick said, oh, yeah, so am I. But I knew I meant it. I knew that. I'd never seen it before. Never come across hypnosis. I'd obviously had heard of it, but and it was a good show. Like, it wasn't, you know, embarrassing people are making them look stupid. It was sort of just jaw dropping.

• 37:58Steven Bartlett?

  How did you know that you meant it? Because I've had that feeling in my life before where something just connects.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think it was the, again, those boxes were being ticked, something about performing, something about control. Uh. I didn't really know it. It just felt like I want, I have to do that. It's the most amazing thing I've seen. And it was, uh. It was appealing in ways that just weren't really, um, it's ways I hadn't really thought about. I hadn't thought about performing, hadn't, uh.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I think that's what's happening, isn't it? There's something is it's resonating unconsciously. It's something that you kind of need. And yet it was absolutely no, there was no doubt. So I I did bought, borrowed, stole any books I could find on the subject. You probably just learn on YouTube nowadays, but it's probably a dodgy thing because you need to you need to learn it the long way around so that if you run into problems or if someone's having a weird time when you're hypnotizing them, you you can't be like fumbling around trying to Google what to do, you know, you need to have the skills there and the wherewithal to to deal with it. So I definitely learnt the long way around. Uh. Yeah.

• 39:08Steven Bartlett?

  And then. You became, I think, from what I was reading, pretty obsessed with magic and hypnosis. And to the point that you have a conversation with your parents and you tell them that you're gonna.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember saying to my mum, I think I'm not going to be a lawyer. I was studying law and German. I said, I'm not going to be a lawyer. I'm going to be a magician. I said, oh, fine. That sounds great. Sounds much more fun. Which actually made me stop and think, okay, hang on, I'm probably being a bit, probably being a bit rash.

• 39:34Steven Bartlett?

  What did they say? So they were okay with.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what she said. She said, oh, that sounds great. Sounds much more fun.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  It's nice, isn't it? Actually, I wrote them a letter at the end of my first year saying, because I saw all these other law students really fretting 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 a thing that your parents would make you feel. So I wrote them a letter thanking them for for that, just for letting me always do what I

• 40:10Speaker 00

  wanted to do. The only thing they ever put any pressure on me to do is learn how to drive, and I don't drive.

• 40:15Steven Bartlett?

  You still don't drive?

• 40:16Speaker 00

  I still don't drive.

• 40:19Steven Bartlett?

  It's quite a common story, I have to say, that

• 40:23Steven Bartlett?

  your obsession seemed to come from, or at least be driven by some kind of insecurity. As in, like, the reason why hypnosis initially resonated so much was because it was giving you some, it felt like it might offer you something that you were looking for or didn't have yourself. That's the story I hear all the time.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  That's what obsessions are, though, isn't it? Isn't that the nature of them? Aren't your own?

• 40:46Steven Bartlett?

  It's just that the level of obsession I saw from that day when you discovered hypnosis, like getting all the books, teaching yourself. And then even beyond university, where you start working in restaurants for many, many years. How long, how long from that first day when you saw hypnosis for the first time until, let's say, before you, the TV stuff began? How long is that sort of tenure?

• 41:08Speaker 00

  I think the tenure is about, is about 10 years.

• 41:11Steven Bartlett?

  10 years?

• 41:12Speaker 00

  I think so. Let me think. So I graduated 94 and then by that point I was doing the odd hypnosis show for students. I.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Oh, actually, the first TV show went out in December two thousand. So I was into all, it was about ten years, but also included my university career. But there was a six-year period after university, by which point I was already doing it mainly for students. When I was just then signing on or just about scraping a living. Doing hypnosis shows, but a lot more magic. I was doing magic in restaurants in Bristol and then people would book me for their parties and.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  And I wrote a book for magicians, which kind of got me known within that world, which that then led to. Um, being picked out for a TV show that led to me getting a phone call. My name getting passed around in that world.

• 42:08Steven Bartlett?

  So that's almost ten years of practicing.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:12Steven Bartlett?

  Um, without any real money. When you say signing on for people that are in America.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Signing on as in welfare, I guess you'd call it. Yeah, I was, I was. I lived in this, my student flat I stayed in. It was quite a nice. Flat. I had all my books in it, my parrot, and that didn't cost me very much. And I just loved this life. I would go out dreaming up magic tricks during the day and then I would go out and do them in the evening and. Um, so I developed my own sort of approach to it all. And, uh. That. Yeah, that, I, I, I just remember thinking, I've never had any ambition at all and, and. I just remember thinking if I, if I can take a, like a, a cross section of my life, is everything in the right place? Like, am I? I'd like to get up whenever I like to get up. I'd like to feel like I make my own decisions.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  About what I do from day to day. And I just had a vague idea of those sorts of things that were important to me and.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  And if anything didn't feel right, it'd be easy to sort of change. And that was all. That was always how, I was never about looking forward into the future. It was never about where do I want to be. It was just, is this? Day, this week, sort of the life that I'd like to be living. And that's never changed. Um, I suppose the difference is, is you get.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Successfully, you start to have people around you that are doing those other jobs for you, the grown up jobs, and you know, I've got a manager and I've worked with producers and all that kind of thing. So it's not like that doesn't have to happen somewhere along the line, but it doesn't come from me. I've, um, I, you can feel like a kid a little bit, a bit like a child in a world of grown ups. So I feel that sometimes, except now the grown ups are younger than me, which is strange. Um, but also I think maybe that's a good way to feel, maybe that's a nice way to be.

• 43:53Steven Bartlett?

  If you contrast yourself from today

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:56Steven Bartlett?

  to the, to that young man in those restaurants in Bristol doing the magic tricks. Is there a difference in your level of happiness?

• 44:04Speaker 00

  I think about this, I, I, I think it's about the same, but it's different. I mean, the, the, um, a bit like being a kid and playing on my own. Most of my twenties were, well, my twenties were sort of fairly, fairly solitary as well. And that's another template that settles in. So, um, that's again, an easy place to go back to. I love my own company, all my interests, the things I love doing out of my job, painting, writing and reading. And they're all like solitary things. That's a, that's a comfortable place for me. So part of me, I had more of that then, so slightly misses that. But actually that's, you know, I'm also aware that was lonely sometimes.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  And, um, you know, I like being in a relationship too. So it's different, I had a different feel about it. Um, I think the, the freedom to just do what I wanted to do and kind of, um, create this sort of world for myself, that was kind of lovely. And it's harder to do that as you grow up and you do have responsibilities and, you know, you're contributing to a household and you've got a partner, you've got dogs and all of that. It's not, not quite as easy. So a childish part of me would kind of quite like the idea of going back to that, but not really, not really. I wouldn't really press a button and make it happen. It's just a, a nice little sort of back of the head dream, which we probably all have maybe, don't we? It's like kind of fantasy thing, we'd never really live it out, but it's just something nice about.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  About that.

• 45:35Steven Bartlett?

  It's almost like, I feel like you were, in my head, it's like, you know, you were in Bristol, mining your own business, enjoying the, the simple life. And then they pulled you, they ripped you out of Bristol.

• 45:47Steven Bartlett?

  You were really successful, so they put you on TV, that was really successful. And sometimes when people are successful, they sometimes forget, and I think I've done this in my life a few times, kind of, we forget to take the moment of pause and consider how intentional this journey and direction and direction of travel is, kind of get pulled and dragged. And then it ends up feeling a bit like you're throwing the coal in the, the steam engine of the train just to keep it moving. Has there ever been a moment of pause in your life where you've, you've gone, do you know what, I need to take some time and just think about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, because I've been successful and then I've climbed the ladder. People do that a lot in the corporate world, they become a good lawyer, then they get promoted, then they're a partner, and they go, what am I doing here?

• 46:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we, we drift towards the things we're second best at. It's like, you know, the, the great teacher that becomes a headmaster, but would have been a better teacher than, that's an easy thing to do, isn't it? And I think that sometimes, I think about, oh, it might be quite nice to act. I think I'm doing exactly that thing of sort of going from being someone who's really good at what I do now, and I just sort of, why, why would I want to do, it might be fun, but like, what a strange thing, we naturally start to drift towards things that we're not as good at.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  I, the only, I would say, when you said that, I was thinking of the early, the early TV shows, when I was sort of, which were very much a response to David Blaine's success in the States, I'm out doing, you know, mind reading tricks and things. And I, I kind of felt like I'd grown out of it, but I was, that was sort of the mode that I was caught in, and I definitely felt like I'm not really enjoying this. And that led to a shift in the type of shows I was doing. So the, I mean, the last show I've done is on Netflix called Sacrifice. People have no idea who I am and they've listened this far. And generally, what I've been doing for the last decade or so with the TV shows is putting

• 47:38Speaker 00

  people through these kind of Truman Show style, big social experiments, often quite life or death situations they found themselves in without realising they're part of a show. And what that allowed me to do was not be the centre of attention. And the reason, the reason for it is actually, apart from just my own dissatisfaction with it, but just magically, if you, if you can click your fingers and make anything happen, which is sort of what a magician does, dramatically, that's a very unsound place to be. And this is, you know, Penn and Teller, the

• 48:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It's just something that Teller, who apart from being a beautiful magician, is a wonderful thinker as well, he's spoken a lot about this, that it's actually very bad drama if you can make anything happen. What we want dramatically are heroes, people that are struggling with a situation. And maybe they are trying to get to point A, but actually they end up at point B. And his thoughts and my own sort of dissatisfaction, I guess, with that first stage of my career led to this shift where I could be in the background pulling the strings, but actually you're watching a real member of the public go through quite intense drama. And that has to be more appealing than somebody going, hey, look at me, aren't I clever? Which is sort of the bottom line of what most magic is. So I think that was a kind of semi deliberate

• 48:57Speaker 00

  shift that came from a moment of pause.

• 48:59Steven Bartlett?

  Was it quite intentional for you to take, you know, I've seen multiple documentaries you've done where you're proving that magic or the supernatural isn't real.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 49:09Steven Bartlett?

  And again, that's super compelling because we would expect you to be leaning into that and persuading us of the supernatural. Whereas some of the most compelling stuff I've watched you do, whether you're confronting like a psychic that's pretending to speak to the dead, or I remember that reading you did where the woman had pulled up outside in the Mercedes, in the Mini.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Oh, in a Mini, yeah.

• 49:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And you had, you basically, what was it? You, you, you read her, not her future, you read into her life.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  I think it was that the psychic that I was challenging had mentioned

• 49:39Steven Bartlett?

  The Mini, yeah.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  That she drove a little red Mini and she'd been really impressed by that. But actually, I'd seen him pull up his car, right parked next to her in the car park. Yeah. Well, actually, I think it's the opposite. I think the, there's a long tradition of magicians. Pulling apart psychics and charlatans and I think it's because we end up with a knowledge of how those things work. And it goes right back to Houdini and the seances and exposing the fraudulent mediums in the dark, you know, it's a long, a long, and probably before that, but there's a long history of it. So I, the only thing about it is that you're, if you're just going, no, this is fake, you're not being very entertaining and by the nature of what those people do, it's more entertaining. So they've kind of won the game.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  So I've tried to avoid making, when I, when I have sort of, you know, attacked those areas, rather than just attack them and make it negative, I've always tried to recreate something and make it more interesting and, and better while at the same time saying, I'm not really doing this. So for example, there was a, in one of the shows I did, I had an audience on stage, this was in Infamous, which was a previous stage show, and I was giving them mediumship readings, right? So I say, just come up if you've lost somebody, if there's somebody that you would, that you'd want to get in touch with if you went to see a medium. And it's skeptical audience, kind of like me, right? Because they're my audiences, but. So they'd come up and sit down and I would start to give them these readings and I would

• 51:09Speaker 00

  say, no, I'm getting a message from your auntie Jill, is that right? Do you have an Auntie Jill that passed away? That, yes. And she's saying, she's not saying anything, I'm just making this up, but she's saying that you've got, oh, you've got a little dog called Bella that she really loves, is that right? Yes. And, and I'm lying to you, but she's saying, and so I would like pepper these like impossible information I was giving with reminders that I was making it up.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  And I just found that really, really sort of in, interesting and theatrically it was really interesting and much more interesting than saying, these people are fake and prove it and if you can prove it, I'll give you a million dollars, whatever. So I've, I've tried to find a more creative approach to that.

• 51:49Steven Bartlett?

  Do some people think you are, you are supernatural in your powers?

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Some, well, I was gonna say, actually after that, about a week into that show, I came out, there was a girl at stage door said, I wondered if you could put me, I say girl, she was, you know, you know, in her twenties, but I wondered if you could put me in touch with my grandmother who's passed on. And I said, oh God, I'm so sorry. I hoped it was clear from the show that I can't really do it, that that stuff isn't real. And she, no, no, no, I know, I know you can't really do it and it's not real, but I just wondered if you could just put me in touch with her. Like it was extraordinary.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  How we kind of can balance these things in our, in our heads. So, yeah, I, I, I'm sure people believe all sorts of things about me. I think the, the way of, the way I look at it is a bell curve. So at one end of the bell curve, it's people that think it's all fake, it's all stooges, it's all set up. Um, and I never use stooges and that's not what it is. And at the other extreme, people saying I'm psychic and I won't admit to it, which is also not true. Um, and then there's this main swell in the middle where people sort of get it. Um, and that's really all you can, I think, take responsibility for, really. There's always going to be people at the far edges that will have strange and extreme reactions.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Um, and then, you know, my, I think there's a certain licence on stage, which is different from TV. If you're doing stuff down the barrel of a TV, if you're talking to people at home, there's a level of directness and honesty there. Whereas it feels like on stage, there's a kind of theatrical quotation marks around the whole thing. So I feel like I can do things on stage, which I wouldn't do on TV. Um, so that changes it too. It's quite an interesting line, sort of treading, treading that. I kind of, in the very early shows, very early TV shows, it was very much like I'm, I am doing this for real. That's what I said, this is not tricks. Um, and then once the shows realised, once we realised there was going to be some longevity and there were going to be more shows. It was important to me just to bring it back to a place that was honest and kind of ambiguous as well.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  And to, and I've enjoyed that now. I like leaning into the ambiguity of what I'm doing. Because again, it, it, it means that you can do more interesting stuff with it. The, you know, if there's a lesson in it about how we see the world, how the story we tell ourselves is not what's real. How we mistake that story for reality, you know, we mistake the limits of our own, um, field of vision for the, for the horizons of the world. You know, if we, if there's something in there to be said in something as childish as magic, if there's some, something worthwhile to be said. It's much easier to say that if you're not trying to make it about yourself.

• 54:25Steven Bartlett?

  Has anything ever stumped you in terms of the supernatural? Uh, you know, I was, your work is predominantly based in psychology, right? So has there, have you ever done anything and thought, how the fuck did that happen?

• 54:38Speaker 00

  Uh, two things come to mind. One, I was in a restaurant in Bristol, approaching a table, which is always excruciating. Um. If people aren't interested. And I'm walking up with a deck of cards and I sort of introduce myself and it's two businessmen. And one of them says, oh, no, no, thank you, sorry. And I said, okay. And as I walked away, the other one went, but Queen of Hearts, thirteen cards down. And I sort of laughed and walked away and then went into a corner and counted the cards down. And the thirteenth one down was the Queen of Hearts. No idea how he did that. If you are listening, please get in touch. That's bugged me for twenty years. And the, um, the other thing was actually doing, I did a show called Miracle, which was, this is also on Netflix.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  It was a, uh, previous, uh, stage show, uh, a few stage shows ago. And the second half was healing. It was like evangelical, uh, healing, people being slain in the spirit and, um, had no idea if it was going to work. Cause again, very skeptical audience, like not, you know, if you, I've been to these events with these big, big name healers. And of course people are arriving expecting it to work and they've got a certain amount of, you know, uh, readiness 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 sort of undercutting it like I'm, I'm doing it and I'm creating these healings in inverted commas for people in the audience, but at the same time, I'm kind of undercutting it too.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  But, um, it was extraordinary. I mean, I remember in the first week, a woman came up and she'd been paralyzed. She was probably in her forties. She'd been paralyzed on one side of her body since she was four or something. In floods of tears because she could move her left arm for the first time. Um, and night after night, things like that, sometimes as I imagine, just, you know, some people with a bad back that felt better, but sometimes really quite dramatic things too. And it was, although I could explain it because I knew what I was doing. It was, um, what, what you're seeing is the, is the psychological component of suffering, right? Like if you take an X-ray before and afters, nothing's happened, nothing's changed. But that, how that person is living out their, um,

• 56:50Speaker 00

  Affliction, how they live, their relationship to their suffering has, that's been made to change. So what you're seeing, it's just a mixture of two things that are going on. There's adrenaline, which is a natural painkiller, so you make the, you make the whole experience full of adrenaline. Um, you know, in the same way of a, you know, lion walked into this room and you'd previously stubbed your toe, you'd run away and you wouldn't feel the pain of your toe, right? Because there's a bigger threat. Um, so that's just adrenaline, that's fine. And then, but this other thing that, which is maybe kickstarted by the experience of the adrenaline, that you, you've, this thing that you've lived out, like presumably this woman, her arm had been fine for many years, but she hadn't, she just continued to live as if it wasn't.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  And all, and all the stuff that you build up around pain, you know, the, the way people respond to you. So you, there's a whole network of, um, social aspects to it. Overprotecting something that doesn't need protecting anymore, you know, it's much more complicated than simply the organic cause of, of, um, of your pain. There's lots of other things that sustain it and can keep it going beyond really where it's useful. So there she was, having this extraordinary experience she couldn't explain. Um, when really nothing had happened beyond, she was just, had been snapped out of something. That was, that was sort of amazing and kind of wonderful. Then I started to, you know, do the thing of going, well, maybe I could do this. Maybe I could offer this as a show of like secular healing.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  It'll only work on some people and you're only dealing with relatively small percentages. Um, and I did start to think that, and of course, that's where you start to go mad. That's where you start to think you're playing God and, and then of course people, because I, when you go to these events, the big name healers I've seen, Benny Hinn and others, um, what you, what you don't really see when you watch those things on TV is that there are, in some of these big venues, hospital beds that have been brought in. There are people with, you know, a kid with Down's syndrome that I spoke to the mum and she'd, uh, she'd taken us on to so many shows following them around the country. Um, and things that just, they're not going to get, they're not going to get healed by those kind of dynamics.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Um, so that's an uglier sort of side of that because people have become very dependent on it. I'm not going to get any help. And then there's the lack of any sort of follow-up. You know, there's plenty of infrastructure in place if you want to donate, but no infrastructure if you've. Been in any way adversely affected by it and you want help or if you've had a healing and now you you you don't know how to sustain that or what you're supposed to do other than being told to give more money.

• 59:24Steven Bartlett?

  You know, you know, when people discovered through your TV work that you had this

• 59:30Steven Bartlett?

  skill and talent. I imagine you've got lots of approaches to use it for less ethical reasons. Cause I, I mean, help me get the girlfriend back, help me close the deal, help me rob a bank.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  A little, not, um, I suppose people would have to ask that, wouldn't they? But the only, I remember I'd been asked by the FBI, I'd been asked by the police.

• 59:52Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 59:53Speaker 00

  To help, I mean, it's never gone beyond that discussion because I just, I mean, even, you know, there's plenty of businesses as well, but it's just, it's not my world. I feel like I'm an entertainer, I'm also quite introverted. I don't quite have that thing of like, you know, yeah, let me get out there and, and A, change the world or B, I don't have to, whatever that thing is that I feel like I could just apply this to.

• 1:00:20Steven Bartlett?

  What did the FBI or the police want to help with?

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  I don't know, because it never went beyond them saying, would you come and talk to us about something and us getting back and saying, no, it's not appropriate. So I don't know, now I want to know.

• 1:00:35Steven Bartlett?

  Your skill stack, when I think about the, you know, because there's lots of people that might have studied hypnosis or they might have studied magic or sleight of hand or whatever, but they didn't end up on the level you're on, at the table you're at, on the shows you're on. When you think about why you got there, I understand the 10 years of the graft and I see that in a lot of people that sit here, I see it in Jimmy Carr, leaves university, goes and does all of these like shit gigs for 20 quid for years on years and years and years. I see it in Lewis Capaldi, the musician who went and played in pubs in Scotland for years and years and years and years and just absolutely loved it, wanted to stay there. I see the tenure bit, which a lot of young kids don't appreciate because we all want it now and we want it for the wrong reasons.

• 1:01:17Steven Bartlett?

  But what else was it about you, the way your delivery, your style that you think in hindsight made you compelling?

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  Oh, it's a really difficult one to answer. It's difficult, even if I knew the answer, it'd be hard to say it. I, I think.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  I don't think it's that, I think it's sort of, it's not quite that intentional. I think you've probably grafted and done those things. I can't speak for Jimmy and others, but probably just because you really enjoyed them in and of themselves. You probably weren't thinking, I'm gonna do this, if I get ahead, I can secure this for myself, prob- probably. And if that is the case, if you are just doing it because you love it, and that feels like in and of itself what you're doing, and there's no particular need for a plan beyond that, then you'll keep at it, you'll get very, you'll get very good at it, if, if that's, if that feels like all you need in the moment anyway, why, then why, why wouldn't you, you know, love it and put your, all your passion into it and get very good at it. So that helped, um.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  And then when things did sort of take off a bit, my manager also had a similar ethos of just sort of slow burn, slow burn. There was never any sense of me, you know, being thrown at a public or any sort of overnight success or anything like that. It was a very deliberate thing of just slowly kind of letting it get out there. And that, so that was helpful. Um. I think as I've, I had a, a good team around me. Um. It's not like a one, not really a one man thing. There's always, although I had had my own experience for those ten years of doing it on my own. Once I got into the TV, there was like a little group of us, which I'm sure is fairly common. Um.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  And then, I think, I think what does help is letting it grow up with me as I've, as I've got older, I've just let the thing develop with me. Like, I don't really know what job to, you know, you asked me before we started, like, how I'd refer to myself. I never really know. I mean, mentalist, I think technically is what I am, but I mean, I remember a couple of years ago, I had the book on happy, happiness come out, which is essentially a book of Greek philosophy. Come out the same month, the same month as a ghost train over at Thorpe Park. And I do remember thinking, I don't know what, I don't know what that is, I don't know what job that is that allows for those two things. It certainly isn't mentalism. Um. So, um, uh, so yeah, just allowing, allowing the thing to grow up with me. And in terms of like, you know, I.

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  Occasionally, you know, people talk about the brand and so on. It's it's um. It's a very helpful thing, I think. Just let it let the thing just be you.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  And not particularly be driven by the limitations of what.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, when I first started, I remember reading, I used to go on um magic discussion forums and so on to see what magicians were saying. About me and there was a lot of like, oh, this isn't even mentalism. Like, there's a certain type of magic called mentalism and. I wasn't quite doing that. I was doing stuff that wasn't ten and they would they would see that as a real sort of negative. And I always thought, well, that's. Why, that's interesting that that that would bother anybody. A, who knows what the word even means, who cares? And B, that that would. That I wasn't somehow sticking within that. Um. So and that's another thing about playing on your own, isn't it? And um you you. Or being if you if you feel like an outsider as a kid, I think as you get older, you start you value that. That becomes like a bit of a superpower. You you. Hang on to that feeling of of um.

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  Being an outsider and you kind of use that. So that's always helped me and I've just followed my. Nose for what feels fun and interesting and worthwhile. And as I've got older, I've let those things grow with me and. Um, I find a lot of life much more interesting than magic. And magic's quite a childish thing, really. So. It means that the stuff I find more. Interesting about life, I can bring into magic, you know. I think if you've got if you've got both feet in your. Craft or your art form or whatever, if as in if the thing is feels to you so huge and expansive and all that you know. You can't you're just sort of a bit overwhelmed by it. You can't move it anywhere. If you've got one foot.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  In that thing and your other foot in the rest of life, at least you've got some leverage then to take this thing that you do somewhere. Interesting. So maybe that's helped as well.

• 1:05:30Steven Bartlett?

  I see that in your shows. I see how your other passions are riddled throughout the show. I remember watching your show in New York, which was just astounding. It's funny because I think of myself as a smart person. You know, I think I'll figure this out. I'll oh, he won't be able to. Um, make me look the other way, or he won't be able to control my narrative. He won't be able to get me. And every single time, I've been to your shows in London, New York, they're all just, I leave in silence. I think, how the fuck.

• 1:05:54Steven Bartlett?

  Because you're right, that like misdirection where you've got me thinking this thing.

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Steven Bartlett?

  And then I go, what the hell? Like, it's this constant disappointment with myself that I'm not as smart as I think I am.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  Oh, that's so nice. It's always like, what can I, there's, you know, 2000 people trapped in a room with me. What can I, what can I do with them? It's always, it's a lovely feeling to start with.

• 1:06:11Steven Bartlett?

  And that, the section on when you have the painting, I don't want to give anything away.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  The painting, is this in the show that you saw in New York?

• 1:06:18Steven Bartlett?

  I believe it was New York. I've seen, I've been to two, London and New York. One with my family in London, which was many years ago, about four, probably I'd say four or five, maybe five years ago.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Steven Bartlett?

  And then the one in New York, I think was, was it, it wasn't pre pandemic, it couldn't have been.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was just before the pandemic.

• 1:06:34Steven Bartlett?

  Must have been, yeah.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  So I'm painting a picture that someone comes up and thinks of a famous person and I start to do a painting and then it's upside down and I flip it around at the end. Is that what you're thinking of?

• 1:06:43Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:44Steven Bartlett?

  And the thing that I think stuns me the most is how unbelievable you are as a painter.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  Thank you very much. Something to fall back on.

• 1:06:51Steven Bartlett?

  And the fact you could do that upside down, you can paint such an incredible image upside down is also stunning. But that clearly is describing what you've described there, where you've pulled in a love of painting.

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's, yeah, I think all that's really, otherwise what's left, you know, just, it's just, hey, look at me, aren't I clever? And that's just not, you know, that might be interesting for audiences for a little bit, maybe once, and then that's, that's kind of it. So I, I, yeah, I bring what I can to it and I just make, I make sure the shows are about something else. You know, Showman is about how the things in life that are difficult are actually the very things that we share, which weirdly was written just before, it was all due to go out before lockdown started and it was going to go out the first week of lockdown and was a show about how the things in life that isolate us are actually the things that we all tend to have in common, which then gets played out literally for two years during lockdown.

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  So I've always tried to make them about something else, something of value. And I don't think, I love magic, I don't think in and of itself it has. Tremendous value, it was a childish way of impressing people. So it's what you, what can you bring to it? That will give it value. Then I think, then you're into a much more interesting worthwhile area.

• 1:08:12Steven Bartlett?

  In your books about happiness, um, happy and a little happier. One of the things that surprises a lot of people is that you're not a fan of goal setting. And having spoken to you now, I can kind of underst- understand because you have a much more today, this week, do my best approach to life. But what, what's wrong with goal setting in your point of view?

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  I don't know, there's anything wrong with goal setting for short term goals. So that's obviously, you know, can be very useful. It's, it's the long term stuff. I think we just get a bit hung up on it as a way of, as a way of life, you know, a friend of mine, um, has been of a, always been a workaholic. Um, and he certainly by his own account, when he was younger, was made to feel that kind of needed to achieve stuff in order to feel valued, you know, which obviously is what most workaholics will say. So he decided he was going to build up a company and, and sell it and become a multimillionaire. And that was sort of the goal. And then did spend, and all the time that I knew him, he was building up a company and, um, sold it relatively young and had a huge amount of money. And then

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  he didn't know what to do with his life. It was miserable. Um, and as he found himself going to a support group with a bunch of similar millionaires that had all made the same mistake. And he'd sort of missed the fact that actually it was the, it was the building up of the company that was, is what gave him meaning in his life. That was, that was what was important. And it's that old thing, isn't it? Of, you know, the, you know, the arrival at the end of the journey is just, it might just be taking your coat off and putting your bag down. That might be all it is. It's not necessarily the destination, you know, it's the, you know, it's the old thing, isn't it? Of the journey being what was important. But that was suddenly, he realized that, um, and that really changed his life, actually, realizing what he thought was going to be important, wasn't important. Um, plus, how do we know what's going to make us happy?

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  That so many years before, you know, we're so terrible at gauging that. Um, we lose.

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  Flexibility, depending how we set those goals, but we become too rigid in them. And it's like playing, it's like playing a game of chess. Schopenhauer talks about this. That was a really good analogy, that it's like starting a game of chess, deciding how you're going to play and the strategy you're going to use and how you're going to maneuver from the start. There is this other thing playing, which is, you know, life, fortune, stuff that's going to throw, get thrown back at you. So how can, how can you decide those things?

• 1:10:34Steven Bartlett?

  Why do we want goals? Do you think it gives us a sense of certainty?

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  Well, we need, it's about, it's about moving forward, isn't it? We need to, it's important because we need to navigate through life. And in the first half of life, I think it is, it's, it's really important. If you didn't have that optimistic sense that you can chase the castle in the air and somehow get it just by setting those goals, I think life would be very difficult. I think actually it's, I think it's important. I think it, I'm sure it has evolutionary value. I think like it's part of our impetus. So it's not a bad thing, really, but like all those things, we just need to check it and just see its limitations, I think.

• 1:11:16Steven Bartlett?

  A story, I, I see the goals that I had as a story that gave my life meaning. When I was

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Steven Bartlett?

  Younger, the meaning was kind of misunderstood. It was, I thought if I got the Lamborghini, then I'd be happy and important and worthy and my shame would be alleviated. But as I, as that failed me,

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Steven Bartlett?

  I realized that I was going to have to set about pursuing something else.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  Well, those are the two problems. You either get the goal,

• 1:11:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  You succeed in it and then what? Or you don't and you've failed. I mean, you're sort of, and the very thing that's giving you pleasure, the very thing that's giving your life meaning, which is moving towards, you know, building up the company or whatever it is, you're doing yourself out of. You're, you're, you're purposely and intentionally moving to the point where you can remove that meaning from your life.

• 1:12:05Steven Bartlett?

  Have you developed any coping mechanisms for adversity? Chapter three in your book, A Book of Secrets, is about the role friction has, the relationship it has with, with happiness. And you've, we've talked a few times about adversity, but is there any, any sort of tools that you've learned that you might be able to impart that have helped you to deal with when life throws shit at you?

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  Well, the big Stoic thing of how can this thing be fine? And it's not, I don't exactly put it in that language, but that's the language I found. How could this thing be fine? So first of all, is what's happened, which side of the line is it? Is it within my control? Is it my thoughts and actions? Or is it out of my control? Is it something out in the world? Of course, it's always, the latter, it's always something out in the world. In which case, how could it be fine? How could it, how could that, how could it be okay that this thing is like that? And not just to go, oh, it's fine, it's fine. It's not just about saying it, but to actually let that thought sort of, you know, drip into the soul. I find that very helpful. That's also partly just my personality.

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  My partner has a much more sort of anxious personality than I have. And that stuff doesn't help him at all. But it certainly helps me. Another thing, there's a great book by David Distino called Emotional Success. And I thought it was great. He was talking about motivation and how a lot of our tools for motivation are very sort of top-down in the sense that, you know, well, if you do this for 10,000 hours or you put in an hour a day for a whatever, like a lot of kind of work to change one habit. And he's talking about a bottom-up approach of there are certain emotions

• 1:13:51Speaker 00

  that if you get them into place, they naturally create a more motivational state. And he, he's a psychologist and he's, when he talks about motivation, the way he's tested this, he's talking about where you value your future self and what your future self needs more than what you need in the moment, right? So if you take the example of, are you gonna study for your exam or are you gonna go out and party? Well, the person that is gonna not party and study for the exam is valuing the needs of that future self that's done well in the exam more than the current self that sat there and would like to go out, right? So he's taking that as the sort of, the world of motivation we're talking.

• 1:14:29Speaker 00

  So he sets up various experiments to see what can you do to maximize people's, you know, the value that they place on that future self. And the three emotions.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  Again and again, which help compassion, gratitude and having the right sort of pride about what you do, a good pride for the stuff that you do well, not the bad sort of pride where you go, well, I'm good at this, therefore I'm great at everything, but just having a good sort of comfortable pride in the stuff that you do well. So he would, you know, experiments would be something happens outside the room before the person comes in to do the experiment that makes them feel grateful about something and then they come in and they have to do a task that's impossible, but how long do they spend trying to do it and they'll spend forty percent longer than somebody that wasn't primed to feel grateful before they came in and the gratitude has nothing to do with the experiment, so seemingly completely independent thing, something happens that makes you feel

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  compassion and then you come in and you have to do some task and you do it better or for longer or whatever these sort of skills are that the motivated person has more of. One of the questions was, how many, it's always dollars, but how many dollars, if you could have a hundred dollars a year from now or X amount now, what would that X amount be that would balance it out and it's normally seventeen dollars, like it really makes no fiscal sense at all, but most people will say, okay, I'll take seventeen now rather than a hundred, right, a year from now, that seems to be the number that people go for. But if you're primed to feel grateful, if you're asked the same question when you're

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  in a state of gratitude for something, again, totally unrelated, it goes up to thirty one dollars. That was his, that was a great sort of by the by finding, when they did the experiment, it averaged out of thirty one, in other words, people were valuing the future needs more than the needs now, if that makes sense. It could actually be shown with something as simple as that gone.

• 1:16:25Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I read a bit, chapter twelve of your book was on exactly that and I actually said before you arrived, I sent it to my friends, I sent that one paragraph in your book about that, that instant gratification, delayed gratification, because when I say it makes sense, it makes absolutely no sense, in a sense of like, I can't understand how gratitude, how making someone feel grateful with a completely unrelated incident would make them choose to have more money, well, will make them delay their gratification in life as relates to money.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  Exactly, and I think the reason why there's no kind of rational link, because it's sort of, it's like an emotional basis, he's talking about an emotional heart that then kind of spirals upwards, because if you, if you.

• 1:17:10Speaker 00

  If you find yourself acting more compassionately, which say just sometimes happens anyway, right? You might just be feeling compassion, you might be feeling very grateful to somebody. That then affects that person's behaviour and then that feeds back and affects yours. And there's a certain kind of upward spiral thing that happens that definitely puts us in, I think, a more, just a better kind of state than say when we're feeling the opposite of those things, feeling hateful and resentful. So I do get it. I, I, sorry, go on.

• 1:17:39Steven Bartlett?

  Does it, does that mean that people that are lower in gratitude are more short-termist in their decision-making? They probably binge foods that they probably shouldn't have. They probably make other kind of reckless decisions they probably shouldn't make because of their own state of emotions and gratefulness and compassion?

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  Perhaps. I mean, it sounds like. You'd have to ask him. I don't, I don't know. I don't think he says that in his book. But I can certainly imagine that, again, so if you're going through your life feeling generally resentful, I can't imagine that person being very motivated.

• 1:18:07Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting. It answers actually a lot of questions that I've had with like friends of mine where I've wondered why they make such short-termist decisions. But I think there's an emotional question that I should really be asking, which is like, how do you feel? And we don't, we don't often pause to ask that. We kind of assume that their character is they are lazy or just stupid at like bad at decisions. Whereas really like go to work on the emotions and you can change that, which is.

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a, I thought it was a very, yeah, very compelling way around of looking at it, rather than the normal top-down approach we come across.

• 1:18:40Steven Bartlett?

  Love.

• 1:18:41Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 1:18:43Steven Bartlett?

  You described yourself as a bit of an introvert and someone that likes their own company.

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Steven Bartlett?

  Um, sounds a little bit like me. What's your journey been like with understanding love? And then at thirty-five you came out. Um, what's that journey been like?

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  Well, I've had two long relationships and then a few little bits in between. And I think there's definitely a lot of learning in the first one that I think I've now brought to the second one. Of course, it's what we do, isn't it? It's next you have another relationship. You bring all those lessons that you can't, you can't change them when you're in one, but you can, you get to start afresh the next time. Um, we're quite different as well. It's not like we're, we're not similar people at all. I'm, I have that sort of a bit of emotional detachment that I can easily go to. He is very, um.

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  Engage and as, as, uh, people that are a little on the anxious side tend to be very sort of hypervigilant about stuff. So, you know, packing to come to London to do this show is two very, very different worlds, always leads to argument. I'm kind of travel light and he's, no, but we might, we might need this, we might need this, we might need this, bags, bags, bags. So, uh, we see each other sometimes, you know, as caricatures of ourselves because, because we're quite different in those, in those ways. My kind of stoic, uh, whatever will seem to him just sometimes just to be laziness or not really, um, not engaging with something, not that thing not being, not taking it seriously.

• 1:20:21Speaker 00

  And for me, his, his, what I see as, uh, anxiety or impatience to him is a strong sense of justice. He has a real strong sense of justice. If something's not right, he'll wanna go and sort that thing out and fix it. Um, uh, and I think love for me is allowing that other person to be another person. We probably start off our relationships just projecting everything we need onto a person and we barely do them the service of, you know, allowing them to exist as, as an independent creature. We sort of, we just want them to be the thing that we want them to be. Um, and I think if relationships are gonna have

• 1:21:04Speaker 00

  any longevity, at some point that has to shift into actually, this person is a mystery and I might spend the rest of my life trying to get to know this person. That's, I think that's okay. And I think that's also the same within ourselves, in the parts of ourselves that we're, we're, um, alienated from. Again, the things that we just put outside of the story, um, that, that sense of what the other is, of the great mystery, you know, it's there in magic, it's there in, within ourselves, the sides of us that, you know, we need to live more comfortably with and in our relationships as well. Here is a, a great mystery that we sit down with every day and have breakfast with and talk to and

• 1:21:44Speaker 00

  misunderstand and disappoint and occasionally delight at each other. And, and it's, it's, uh, you know, it's kind of wonderful and sometimes it's hard work and, and, uh, I think.

• 1:22:00Speaker 00

  Seeing your partner as somebody you could spend a lifetime getting to know.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  And as a source of wonder and mystery, I think is a, is a very helpful thing.

• 1:22:11Steven Bartlett?

  One of the messages that I took from that is about expectations and being really conscious that you keep your expectations in check, because when you don't, frustration and unhappiness might prevail. And I think about this a lot with my partner, who's the complete opposite. I consider myself to be like, very logical. I need to, I need to understand everything. I'm very maybe scientific in my viewpoint. Whatever the opposite of that is, she is. And so you can find yourself in conversations where the basis of reality you're conversating from is completely different.

• 1:22:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Steven Bartlett?

  She, she will believe that a, that a rock has energy and that.

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:45Steven Bartlett?

  And I will obviously not believe that, but we're completely opposites, but that's also why it works, because there's not an expectation that we become the other person. She will tell me something she knows I don't believe. And at the end of her saying it, she will not wait for me to nod and agree.

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:01Steven Bartlett?

  Because she knows I don't believe, and that's fine.

• 1:23:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:03Steven Bartlett?

  And vice versa. And it's, that's what when you're saying, except that we're two different people.

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:08Steven Bartlett?

  Actually being able to do that and her not trying to change me into like a spiritual, whatever, me not trying to turn her into a scientist.

• 1:23:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:23:15Steven Bartlett?

  Allows for the upside of that difference, which is like, I can marvel at the world she lives in and go, oh, that's interesting. I might try that. You know what I mean?

• 1:23:21Speaker 00

  And also, I think a big ally to that is the thing of not, which is such a guy thing to do, isn't it, is not fixing.

• 1:23:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  Not, um, most of our frustrations come from the fact we just haven't really been heard or seen or understood during the day. So we've been bashing our heads against some wall. We come home.

• 1:23:40Steven Bartlett?

  And hers.

• 1:23:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we, they come home and then just offload this stuff. And when, because I, I know I do it when my partner does this to me, but he sort of offloads all this frustration. And I'm sure you do it too. It sounds like you do, uh, is to go into this mode where we're saying, oh, it's okay. It's probably just this. And why don't we think about it in this different way? And we're just doing exactly the same thing they've had all day. We're just not hearing, um, uh. But it's just not, it's not an intuitive thing, is that you sort of, that is such a, it's such an easy mode to go into. Um.

• 1:24:16Steven Bartlett?

  Darren, are you happy? That was the name of your book.

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  I think so, yeah. I think, I think as I've got older, happiness is, it was easy to say. I remember being asked that when I was single for a while.

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  By Hugh Grant of all people. We were sat opposite each other at dinner and talking about happiness. Maybe I was writing the book at the time, I don't know. And he said, are you, are you happy though? And it was, he was said it in a sort of a mood of like, no one's really, no one's really happy, are they? And maybe just the way he asked it, but I said, yes, and said it very confidently and felt it very confidently. And he didn't, I think he didn't know what to make of that. Uh, or maybe he just didn't believe it. And now, when you ask, I still feel it's yes, but I think, I think things are more complicated. I think there's a more complicated in relationships. I've got older.

• 1:25:11Speaker 00

  I'm fifty one. I think, I think that's a good sort of, um.

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  You know, I said, things, things just change. The currents of life shift a little bit. So I am, but I, uh, I think it's

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  it's a

• 1:25:30Speaker 00

  I don't think it's about happiness, first of all. I think it's about meaning and it's about, you know, things in life that are bigger than you and what you, how you throw yourselves into those things, which is what gives religion its meaning, you know, that, that need for transcendence or finding the thing that's bigger than you. We all need it somewhere. Cause if you don't have meaning in your life, that's, that's when you have problems. Not really, happiness is sort of, um, a very difficult thing to pin down, but, uh, and we can be unhappy, but it's when we, when we feel meaningless that it's, that it, things get bad.

• 1:25:59Steven Bartlett?

  It's a bit of a shit question, isn't it? Are you happy? In many respects.

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it sort of is. It's also hard to, you know, what does it, you know, they used, that used to mean the story of a life. It was something you couldn't say about anybody until they were dying, look back over their whole life. You know, it's meant our relationship with God, we weren't even supposed to be happy on this earth because of, uh, you know, because it was something that we could only have through union with, with God. It's meant so many things over the ages, but now it does just sort of mean a mood.

• 1:26:28Speaker 00

  Uh, which is uh, is it makes it sort of a difficult one to answer, but I, I think uh, I think life is, life is good. It's just interesting and sometimes difficult, but in a ultimately good way.

• 1:26:42Steven Bartlett?

  I think life is full of shit questions and in some respects, it's like a form of misdirection. The fact that I.

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Steven Bartlett?

  We never pause to reflect if questions are actually valid, because if I'd said, what number is fork?

• 1:26:53Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:26:53Steven Bartlett?

  You, I mean, you would say that's not a valid question, but, but because are you happy or the questions like, have you found your passion? There's an assumption in there that there's one of them.

• 1:27:02Speaker 00

  There's one passion.

• 1:27:02Steven Bartlett?

  You have to go searching for it.

• 1:27:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:04Steven Bartlett?

  All in loaded into the question and nobody, nobody, when you ask those questions pauses to think of whether the question's valid. And then the, the frustration we encounter when we can't properly fit into a invalid question. I see, I see that causing so many young people so much pain because culture pops up these like questions you've got to, is it love?

• 1:27:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I love peanut butter.

• 1:27:24Speaker 00

  Is this person right for me is another, is another really unhelpful.

• 1:27:27Steven Bartlett?

  Well, is it love? I mean, it alludes to a yes or no answer. And then I have to know that your definition of love. What you mean by that? Cause I was just saying like, I love peanut butter. I love my dog. I love my mum. And it's all very unhelpful. Like this is why I love going back to what we said at the start. Like, how'd you feel? Nice, open question, which allows for a bit more maneuvering. And I think people are tormented by these um, invalid questions. Yeah.

• 1:27:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:49Steven Bartlett?

  Your show. There's nothing like it that exists in, in the event space, really on TV. I mean, I prefer doing, seeing it in person because obviously cameras can create certain, certain dimensions.

• 1:28:01Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:28:01Steven Bartlett?

  But seeing it in person just bends the, the mind because it makes almost anything seem possible in life. I'm talking about sales and ambition and creativity and imagination. If that's possible, then anything can become possible. And I think that's a cause of great inspiration.

• 1:28:17Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:28:18Steven Bartlett?

  Um, so I would just implore anyone that's listening to this. If you're looking for a once in a lifetime, very unique experience that you can't get anywhere else, they've got to go and see the show. They've got, and I really mean that. I'm not just, you didn't tell me to say this. I really mean that. You know, yeah.

• 1:28:33Speaker 00

  You'll never know. But thank you.

• 1:28:35Steven Bartlett?

  But I really, really mean that. It's, there's nothing like it. So great day idea, great family idea. So I'm definitely going to come. What can I expect that's different from the other shows that I've been to?

• 1:28:44Speaker 00

  Well, it is.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  It's got a real heart to it, this one. You get all the feels, as some people say. It's also got, I mean, it's got the best, if this is all right to say, the best reviews of anything I've ever done in twenty odd years, which is nice to know because it is such a personal show. So that's a lovely thing that has been received so well. I do swear the audience to secrecy. So it's hard to go into details, other than, yeah, it is about the things that connect us as people and how the difficult things in life are the things that join us up. It's also a show based on audience participation, like they all are. And I should say, I would hate the idea of being dragged up on stage. So I throw out

• 1:29:29Speaker 00

  frisbees to choose people, which means it's the easiest thing to hand to the person next to you if you, you know, if it lands on your lap and you don't want to get involved. So there's no pressure to get involved at all, but it is a, it's a big show of audience participation. And it's, it's more than, more than people expect, I hope. We always try and make the show properly over deliver, give you, give you more than you thought it would.

• 1:29:50Steven Bartlett?

  I'm so excited. I genuinely am. I'm really, really excited. Thank you so much for your time. We, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest, and they don't know who they're leaving it the question for.

• 1:30:00Speaker 00

  Oh, fantastic.

• 1:30:01Steven Bartlett?

  I get to see it when I open the book, so excuse me if I take a while to read the handwriting.

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  Oh, this is for me? Right, yes, great. Oh, God.

• 1:30:07Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:30:08Speaker 00

  Top or bottom?

• 1:30:11Steven Bartlett?

  Imagine, imagine if that was the question. If you could only speak with, call, see, touch, four people for the next four years, who would they be?

• 1:30:28Speaker 00

  I feel this is quite a boring answer, but it's honest. My mum, my partner, probably my two really good friends, Sharky and Stephen. I'd have to include Jenny in there somewhere, so maybe they could alternate weekends or something. Yeah, friendship's really meaning a lot to me now as I get, as I get older, not old, but, you know, getting older. I really, I think it happens, something like on your fiftieth birthday or something, suddenly your friendships really mean a huge amount to you.

• 1:30:59Steven Bartlett?

  And they didn't before?

• 1:31:01Speaker 00

  They always did, but just not in such a conscious.

• 1:31:03Steven Bartlett?

  Why? What changed?

• 1:31:04Speaker 00

  Why? I don't know. It's just a real...

• 1:31:08Speaker 00

  Real sentimental like valuing of them nostalgia as well like really um I just find myself just those kind of yeah sentimental sort of leanings um and my friends just suddenly they've obviously always meant a lot to me because they've been my friends but suddenly even more so I love meeting up with people I haven't seen for years now I love doing that much more than I used to um so yeah I'm that's it mum partner and a couple of really good friends um uh that doesn't include my dog I forgot I had I didn't forget I had two dogs but I have a clear favourite which is unfortunate for the other one so I was only thinking of doodle and I forgot about Humbug

• 1:31:53Steven Bartlett?

  It's okay it said people

• 1:31:54Speaker 00

  Yeah so sorry that's not a very clear answer but lovely question

• 1:31:57Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much for your time thank you for the inspiration thank you for coming and doing this you're someone that I've been honestly quite obsessed with since for the last ten years watching on TV watching on Channel Four coming to your shows and stuff so it feels like a real honour to get to speak with you and as I said I read your book in the jungle it was very much the basis

• 1:32:11Speaker 00

  In the jungle you didn't say that

• 1:32:13Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah so I took it took a brief I took a suitcase out to the jungle and I was I wanted books on happiness and yours was on the shelf so I took it

• 1:32:19Speaker 00

  Was it that one or was it happy

• 1:32:21Steven Bartlett?

  It was the yellow one

• 1:32:22Speaker 00

  Yeah

• 1:32:23Steven Bartlett?

  Happy um and I'll be honest I this is sounds like a really because I bought it not knowing it was you interestingly

• 1:32:28Speaker 00

  Yeah yeah

• 1:32:29Steven Bartlett?

  And then when I saw I got to the jungle and I saw the name on it I couldn't I had to Google to check it was you because I couldn't believe you'd written a book on happiness and you get this a lot don't you

• 1:32:36Speaker 00

  Yeah I do and I uh a while back I got a um the only time I've ever dropped my own name trying to get a restaurant table um in Soho and I did and I got the table suddenly it felt I pulled that off went in and then at the end of the meal the waiter said would you mind signing one of your books so yeah of course and he came back with Angels and Demons

• 1:32:56Steven Bartlett?

  Oh fuck

• 1:32:57Speaker 00

  It's fantastic

• 1:32:58Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much Dan

• 1:33:01Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me what a joy thank you