THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.110 - DERREN BROWN

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

Adam talks with British mentalist, illusionist and author Derren BrownThanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and Matt Lamont for conversation editing. RELATED LINKSREGISTER TO VOTEADAM BUXTON 2020 BOOK TOURDERREN BROWN OFFICIAL WEBSITEDERREN BROWN - HAPPYDERREN BROWN - TRICKS OF THE MINDDERREN BROWN - CONFESSIONS OF A CONJURORADAM BUXTON AND THE HUMAN HORNFALLING TREE MUSIC DOCUMENTARIES Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Come on, dog. some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing podcats? Adam Buxton here. Very nice to be with you again, taking a walk on kind of a grey autumn day in late November 2019, out here in the East Anglian countryside. Let's give you some leaf action. The sound of leaves there. I suppose for balance we should have the sound of remains, although that would be a little macabre. Brexit. Hey look, speaking of that and much else besides, I don't know if you knew, but there is a general election on December the 12th of this year, 2019. And it's going to be great fun. Maybe some of you listening are eligible to vote, but are not yet registered. If so, or if you're not sure, follow the link in the description of this podcast

and register to take part in this very important election. It only takes five minutes to register, really not very long. The deadline for registering to vote in the 12th of December election is the end of the day on Tuesday, the 26th of November. If you're listening to this in the future, and it's all happened, what's it like in the land of hugging and non-stop kindness? Ooh, that sounds sexy. Bet you're glad you voted. OK, let me tell you a little bit about my guest for podcast number 110, the British mentalist, he's a mentalist, illusionist and author,

Derren Brown. Derren facts. Derren, currently aged 48, came to the attention of UK television audiences with his show Mind Control back in 2000. And since then, in various TV series and specials he has, and I quote now from his website, played Russian roulette live, convinced middle managers to commit armed robbery, led the nation in a seance, stuck viewers at home to their sofas, successfully predicted the national lottery, motivated a shy man to land a packed passenger plane at 30,000 feet. Well, he landed it at 30,000 feet. That's not landing, that's hovering.

Hypnotized a man to assassinate Stephen Fry and created a zombie apocalypse for an unsuspecting participant after seemingly ending the world. Just a few of the memorable moments that Darren has created on TV. In addition to the TV work, Darren has toured with eight one-man stage shows up to this point, and he has written five books. If you haven't read Darren's books yet, I would start with Tricks of the Mind. That's a good one.

Amongst other things, it includes fascinating insights into the psychology of magic and hypnosis. We talked a little bit about hypnosis in this podcast. I also really enjoyed the 2017 book, Happy, which Darren, as you will hear, calls an anti-self-help self-help book. And it draws on various works of psychology and philosophy to encourage new ways of thinking about, well, making the most of our lives, I suppose. I quote from the blurb, we are trapped inside our own heads. Our beliefs and understandings about the world are limited by that perspective.

Of course, then, we mistake that story we've constructed of our lives as the truth. As if all that wasn't enough, Darren is also a talented photographer, and if you've never seen the caricatures that he paints, mainly of celebrities, actors and the such, I recommend opening a browser ASAP and typing in Darren Brown caricatures, whereupon your mind will blow. They're amazing. As I speak, Darren is in New York. He's performing his show Secret on Broadway, but he's back in the UK and touring Showman, his first new show for five years from March of next year, 2020. You can find details on Darren's official website, link in the description of this podcast. The conversation that you will hear today was recorded in Darren's East London home

back in February of last year, 2018. Apologies for not having put this one out sooner. It was all set to go out. Then we ran into some scheduling conflicts. And then it just fell victim to me being just a terrible, badly organized person. But Darren was very nice about it yesterday. I emailed him to let him know it was finally going out and he has only put a very mild evil spell on me, which was nice. Back at the end for a bit more Solo Waffle, including news of my 2020 UK book tour. That's

right. And a Radio 4 show that I'm presenting, which is on next week, that I think you will enjoy. But right now, with the always fascinating Darren Brown. Here we go. Ramble Chat, let's have a ramble chat. We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that. Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat. Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I told a friend that I was coming to see you,

they said that a friend of theirs had been at a dinner party and they were all nervous because they thought you were reading their minds. And I wasn't even there. Was I at the dinner party? Oh, right. OK. I do wonder dinner party? You were at the dinner party. All right, OK. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, I do wonder if that's what people think I'm doing most of the time. I guess some people must do.

Yeah. But you're not aware of that. It literally never crosses my mind to be that person when I'm with somebody, because I think it's such an exhausting way of being for everybody. No, I've got a good friend who said that it took him a couple of times of us just meeting and going out for him to let go of that possibility that I was doing. Every gesture, everything I did, every time I lifted up a cup. Apparently I picked up a cup and put it back down without drinking it.

And that kept him up that night as to what that meant. I guess most people regard you as someone who has a superpower, which is mind reading. which is mind reading and being able to deconstruct the way people behave and pick up on signs and understand what they're thinking at a deeper level than most people can so you don't feel like you have a superpower or do you no i don't feel like i have a superpower i try to give the impression of it somebody in my line of business years ago i can't remember who it was said that it's about using your five senses to give the impression of it. Somebody in my line of business years ago, I can't remember who it was, said that it's about using your five senses to give the impression of a sixth,

which I quite like. So yes, there's certainly nothing, A, nothing magical about it from a sort of like, you know, psychic, that sort of point of view. And as for the sort of, you know, hypersensitivity to body cues and all of that, that's largely the effect that I try and create as well.

But that gets into a grey area because some of that is real you know and i started off as a hypnotist so a lot of the suggestion skills and that type of thing is real but then i also became a magician after that so a lot of it's also more kind of like conjuring based so that's a kind of that's a bit of a gray area what i've sort of tried to do in more recent years is to make, at least with the stage shows, the TV shows have sort of become their own thing, these people going on these sort of dark journeys. I've tried to make those about, I don't know, something dramatic,

because it's not very dramatic if you're a magician going, look at me, that's not a... it's a very bad premise for drama. So with the stage shows, I've just tried to make the point of the shows about something else other than me and my inverted commas skill set. Because then I think things are more interesting if they're not about you. And I think particularly with the current show

that I'm doing, Underground, I realise that magic of any sort is a very good metaphor for the kind of stories that we tell ourselves in life all the time. The way we just fall for little narratives, which we we need to form because the world is this infinitely complex data source we need to navigate through that we need to we do need to reduce things to neat stories full of you know neat characters and things that don't really exist in in real life but the danger is of course then it is highly reductionist and it leaves us with a very weak understanding of what's going on and

magic is a great metaphor for that because that's exactly what we're doing we're falling for a story that we're being told we're joining up the dots wrongly so i that's what i've tried to do is just to shift the focus away from the less interesting question of what my skills are to i think the more resonant question of of what you know what value that might have yeah because you're interested in psychology and you you're i i really enjoyed your book happy oh thank you where you weave together some of the philosophy and psychology that you've read over the years yeah with a general i mean you describe it as self-help self-help book yeah so. So it's great.

I mean, I really enjoy it because I like all that sort of stuff as well. You're much better read than I when it comes to the philosophy. But there's a bit of crossover with some of the psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and all those types of people who are so interesting. Yeah. On the patterns and the little lies we tell ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. The patterns of thought we fall into.

lies we tell ourselves yeah yeah the patterns of thought we fall into and obviously you must use a familiarity with those patterns a lot in what you do when you're directing a new show i mean you've got this thing the push which is now they're showing on netflix aren't they now that's right yeah so i've uh signed up with netflix and so it's currently february yeah so nothing's gone out on netflix yet but the first one is The Push so we've given them two specials that I've already done one of which is The Push so they'll go out that was originally called

Push to the Edge never liked that title we always wanted to call it The Push Channel 4 liked Push to the Edge so it's quietly satisfying to just nudge it back to The Push and then a third one which is a brand new

Netflix original what's really exciting is getting the little trailers and things back and just seeing the Netflix logo at the start and all that. It's kind of nice. Are you a Netflix guy? I'm a bit of a Netflix guy, yeah. Yeah, so the brand new one will go out probably, I'm hoping,

sort of in the autumn. I'm editing that at the moment. Maybe by the time this goes out it'll all be done and dusted and everyone will know what it is. But for the moment it's it's uh under wraps but in that kind of show you are you're like a director almost creating an experience yeah did you get any shit for the push because it's like when you describe it to people it sounds like quite an extreme thing like how how would you pitch it for people who haven't seen it the push is a big social experiment

to see whether, through social compliance, somebody can be manipulated to murder somebody else. Brackets, push them off the top of a building. And, yeah, I suppose, like, a lot of the stuff, not all of the stuff, but a lot of the stuff I've done, it's sort of quite, you know, it's a dark journey that someone's going on. Perhaps because I only do, like, one of these a year or so,

there's a lot of room around making these shows to make sure people are very well taken care of and there's a huge duty of care aspect to making something like this not all of which is it really ends up in the show because it's not necessarily when you want to get on with telling the story is that so much of that that you can really show so often i have people sort of you know say well how do you know these people are going to be all right and this is terrible and blah, blah, blah, which I understand that reaction, but at the same time, the reality is everyone that's done these shows has taken so much from them and loved them

and been taken care of. There's never been any, you know, issues like that. So, you know, what we're doing obviously works. And there was a bit of controversy around the push when it first aired on Channel 4, and I don't really read too much response-wise. Because it's very hard to know what's a real response and what's just a sort of, you know, the media finding a story. Just to draw you back to that news source, which is the media.

Which has nothing to do with the real opinion. It's just a little loop effect. It's easy to spin a lot of what you do as well to make it sound irresponsible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People are outraged. And they say, I don't know, are they outraged? Darren Brown, the magic man. He's trying to influence people to kill each other.

What's that? The dark arts. He's going to get used by the CIA. Yeah, and of course the shows are never about that. The shows always have. What I try and do is mix a kind of dramatic hook, a kind of one-line thing that would make you go, oh, I want to watch that, but also a a good reason for for doing it yeah so what kinds of stuff have you read about that area of psychology then that whole way of influencing people or or the extent to which people can be influenced i'm thinking of

the stanford prison experiment and stanley milgram's electric shock stuff and all this which we of, we recreated at a thing called The Heist years ago. And it was really... It was fascinating. And that Milgram experiment... So the Milgram experiment, first of all, is you've got somebody in a room,

apparently wired up to have an electric shock delivered, but they're in on it and they're not really having any electric shocks. But in the other room is the subject of the experiment, who's apparently doing a sort of memory test with the person that's rigged up in the other room. And the person that's rigged up, the actor, is apparently giving wrong or right answers.

And the point is the subject has to deliver an electric shock every time they get it wrong, and then the shock gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it was to see when would people stop. There's no reason for them to do it, other than a guy in a white coat is telling them to do it the guy that's leading the experiment and milgram asked the scientific community what what percentage of people do you think would administer a fatal electric shock that was clearly going to be fatal and then there's just silence sort of on the other

end looks like you know it sounds like the other person's die and the scientific community said it be like something like 0.1 percent of people would do it and it was about 50 percent that people would happily do it just because this guy is telling them to do it so it was about obedience really is what the thing was about and milgram's relatives had been in the uh concentration camp so it was a particular point of interest to him as to why good people will do bad things. Interestingly, then, it got a lot of bad press, and it started a move to make sure that these sorts of experiments were ethically done, which is sort of interesting because, as far as I know, everybody that took part in the experiment was fine with it. There's sort of stories flying around that people weren't

or someone killed themselves, but I don't think any of that's true as far as I know. I think the story is one of the scientific community being embarrassed and therefore clamping down on anything like that happening again. But I think the reality of it was it was perfectly fine for the people involved. I may be wrong, somebody may have other information on it, but from what I understand from academic psychologists, that story is the case, that actually, you know, it was fine. But it's certainly a rich source of material

for me because you now can't do that sort of thing in any clinical setting but you of course doing it on tv is a very different world the sort of uh the sort of the the goal posts and the you know it's all a little bit different so um yeah i've i've delved into that kind of thing uh a few times and found more or less the same thing yeah it was i mean we ended it with 10 people um but it was pretty much 50 i think it's even it's over 50 actually will will administer that fatal shock perhaps especially in the context of entertainment where they feel well they didn't know part of this they didn't know they were being filmed because yeah i mean that's another thing that is a helpful thing to use when people do know they're being filmed things change a lot and in

quite a few of the stunts that are done we have to create an environment where they have no idea so that you know you're getting an honest result and not just people playing up to the cameras um so uh they didn't know and i mean even one of the guys was complaining that the thing wasn't going up high enough because he'd reached the end of the and there were still more questions left for the the test that he was apparently giving so he was was saying, oh, you need more buttons. So, yeah, it was kind of extraordinary. And the Stanford Prison Experiment, which is the other one you mentioned, which I think, again, has a lot of mythology around it, but essentially people falling into these roles of aggressors and victims.

Yeah, students who were given the roles of either prison guards or prisoners. And within a few days, they started inhabiting these roles so much that they were just brutalising the guards. Brutalising each other. Brutalising them. Yeah. From what I know though, there were question marks over the sort of protocol around the experiment.

So it might be one of those things that maybe if you did it again, wouldn't quite hold up in the same way. Which is another thing. It's always very important with these things, isn't it? It's that sometimes things happen once, but they don't really then stand up. Which is why people can point to, you know, scientific evidence for pretty much any mad belief. But it's not about one experiment holding up. It's whether that experiment gets peer-reviewed and whether, you know, that really holds up.

That's the key. Yeah. viewed and whether you know that really holds up that's the uh that's the key yeah does that awareness of people's willingness to be influenced or obey authority have you ever found yourself thinking about that in practical terms in your everyday life or have you ever sort of exploited that i really know i i'm not i think i'm just not quite made of the right stuff compared to how it is on TV. It's like there's a part of me. When I go out and do my shows and I'm on tour,

I get to be like this immensely charismatic version of myself, which is lovely. It's a lovely feeling to go out and do that. It's not quite me. I mean, it's me, but in terms of that kind of psychological game-playing, that would just be exhausting. So no, I don't really, I don't think about I think the only time where it's helpful is because essentially all it comes down to

is seeing the world from other people's perspectives rather than just your own and that can sound a bit glib it's easier said than done so I think in times you know a friend or a partner that's depressed or upset and those times when you genuinely want to be of help to somebody,

I think my kind of skill base, whatever that is, is helpful, because we often tend to switch into a pattern where we can't get out of our own perspective, and I think genuinely, you know, seeing things from other people's is helpful there. But no, in terms of manipulating and getting upgrades or whatever, seducing people, all those things that people might imagine.

No, I've never quite, it's never really been me. All right then. Is that disappointing? Well, I just think you're lying. I am coming from. so you started out doing hypnosis right yeah yeah that's yeah university that's how i started how did you learn that then did you teach yourself yes of course yeah it was the days before you know youtube and so on so i um i saw a hypnotist guy called martin taylor at university at bristol in my first year i was studying law uh and german and i went and saw him

perform and i left that like going that's what i'm going to do and it wasn't the kind of show where people sort of embarrassed and made to look stupid, which I think might have put me off. It was just fascinating. So I got every book that I could, borrowed, stole, bought, whatever I could, and just started doing it. Started doing it with fellow students. I remember this, I had this one sort of watershed moment with it.

So lots of people would come and knock on my door because I was, you know, the guy that would do that. This is in the days when you looked like a crazy comic book guy yeah yeah long hair cape just a bit of a dick struggling for attention i think and hypnosis was you know great for that um yeah i'm sorry remember so when people would come over and get hypnotized if they were responsive i'd tell them under hypnosis if you come back and i click my fingers and tell you to sleep you will go straight to sleep and then somebody came who i thought i'd seen before and told that to i said okay sit down and and I click my fingers and tell you to sleep, you will go straight to sleep. And then somebody came who I thought I'd seen before and told that to.

I said, OK, sit down and sleep. I clicked my fingers, they went straight out. And at the end of the session we spoke and I realised they'd never come and seen me before at all. So I couldn't work out, well, why did they respond to me clicking my fingers? Why did they go to sleep if I hadn't given them that suggestion before? And realised in that moment that it wasn't really about the sort of techniques that i was using it wasn't about the sort of scripts that i was learning and this sort of 20 minute process of hypnosis more than anything it was in the moment my confidence in their belief that made it work so that was a definite moment of sort of real learning and i think you do learn

it just from doing it again and again and again does it say in the books what hypnosis actually is? It's the big question, isn't it? You're altering someone's, the way someone's brain works, like your mental state or somewhere between consciousness and sleep? Well, there used to be two schools of thought, one saying it was a special brain state, the other one saying, oh, it's just kind of behaviour, just sort of encouraging people to kind of kind of maybe not quite play along but sort of role play at a very deep level and and i think nowadays it's often that those two schools of thought have kind of merged but i used to at the end of my hypnosis shows i'd make myself invisible and let's say if i pick up this cup here that it's you know floating through the air so you'd see the cup floating through the air or at least the audience would perceive you reacting to a floating cup but i used to then get everyone back up on stage and i would talk to them about what was your actual experience while that cup was floating around so let's say you got 10 people you'd have

some people at one end going i to be honest by that point i kind of was just sort of playing along it felt a bit too much to go put my hand up and stop the show and say you know i can see you this is silly. So you'd have a couple of those. Then you'd have people going, well, I kind of knew it was you, but I had to react, every, like, emotional part of me had to react like that was just floating. So I was screaming, and I meant it, I felt it,

but, yeah, I kind of knew it was you as well. So they're sort of playing along as well a little bit. Well, but they can't not, you know, they're caught up. I guess like an actor really immersed in a role. They still know they're acting, they know they're on stage, but in terms of... They're in the zone. Yeah, you're in the zone. And then people at the other end that wouldn't accept that it was

me doing it, presumed it was on wires and couldn't see how that could have been me at all. And they were fully experiencing a hallucination of the thing floating. Brackets, you never know whether they're being honest. Are they just saying that because they want to appear like the best subjects to the audience? I mean, you never really know.

You never quite know what someone's experience is. So I see it as a kind of... There's clearly a personality trait that is suggestibility, which is the thing that makes us, you know, respond to a placebo or unquestioningly adopt the opinions of some expert that we admire in a subject all those things where just ideas just fall very comfortably into our heads and then just have have quite a powerful effect on us and some people are more open to that than others some people and that's nothing to do because nothing with gullibility or intelligence no no no not at all

not at all and it'll be different from one situation to another i'm a bad hypnotic subject but i'm sure i'm very prone to some of the other areas of suggestibility so i think it just it taps into that um in terms of what you're doing you're just presenting ideas in the most compelling way and using all sorts of different types of motivation from uh you know flattery and clever little language patterns but you're just motivating people towards that sort of behaviour. And then the ones that are just sort of wired in the right way like that will really pick up on it. There's a classic hypnotic stunt where you make somebody eat an onion and think it's a delicious apple.

Right. And I remember talking to Andy, my kind of co-creator. Andy Nyman. Andy Nyman. Many years ago, we were talking about doing this stuff on stage, but without the hypnosis, just trying to cut straight to the kind of the end effect. So then the

question is, if you took all the hypnosis away, all the kind of mojo, would people just do it anyway if they were told to? What's the deal? And he said, I bet you can just eat an onion, can't you? And he went to my fridge, took out an onion, took a big bite of it, went there, look, it's fine, it's fine. It's absolutely fine to do.

So he's motivated there by something which is kind of proving a point. It'd be very different if I said, I dare you to eat an onion. Go on, I dare you. It's in my fridge. Obviously, then his psychological state would be very different.

Sure, he wouldn't be able to do it. It'd be disgusting. He'd be, oh, maybe not daring Andy. I think Andy probably would. But it's a different, it's just psychologically, it's a different situation. So suddenly there he is eating an onion happily, which on stage looks like proof of some altered state of mind,

because how could anybody do that? So it's this really grey, fascinating area, and I treat it like it's that. I don't treat it like it's a special state of mind. I treat it like it's a kind of thing that just brings out a potential for behaviour. But then I get surprised by things that people do and the ways they behave on hypnosis,

that they... A, it would be very difficult to fake, for example, just by any sort of role-playing, like we did a thing on The Assassin, which involved a guy getting into an ice bath and just laying there very happily. And it was freezing, freezing water water and i mean you can't no amount of sort of well i'll just do that i mean you got that'd be very very hard to do and the clinical hypnotists who are with me we were having a bit of a kind of um behind the scenes bet as to whether or not people would do

because we were testing it to see how far can you push it they didn't think you'd do it and he did which was which was exciting so that was surprising or occasionally and that's a bit like walking over hot coals yeah i guess it is i've never done that i don't i don't know too much about that that's exactly what's going on there but certainly this was um fascinating to to see and then other things like you know people often i'll have people in an audience in a stage show standing hypnotized for want of a better word. And you might get things like shaking. So some people will shake. Now, they wouldn't know to do that.

That isn't a kind of a role playing. I'm just going along with the idea of being hit because why would you why would you shake? And that's one of those things that I see quite a lot with people, which suggests that, you know, there's some kind of shift happening somewhere because why would it elicit that response? You can understand why somebody might dance around on stage with a mop thinking it's a... You can understand why, because people do that stuff when they're drunk, perhaps, so that's easy. But little things, little physiological things

that they wouldn't know to just do suggest it's a bit more interesting than just a sort of role-playing as well. So I'm probably as clueless as you are as to exactly what it is at the end of the day how long does it take to hypnotize a person generally it varies so and it depends at what point you say that the hypnosis has started so with my shows stage shows i want to create often the feeling that i can just click my fingers and make it happen so you i should stop clicking on fingers while I'm talking. It's not a toy, and I'm sorry if anything happens. So what tends to happen in the shows

is that stuff's already happened to pick out the more suggestible people already. People have already responded to something that's happened before, and then it's out of those people that I'll do the next bit. So I know they're kind of already... A lot of the work's already done by that point. I can often do a clicky finger thing or hypnotize someone in a handshake right when they come up on stage because i know that moment is very bewildering for them and it's just odd coming

up and yeah that's kind of part of the shaking thing as well and maybe in a way is that they're just in a state of yes absolutely it's kind of a nervous yeah absolutely kind of a nervous loop that we get into but it makes us very suggestible coming up on stage so again you can create uh it can happen seemingly in an instant other times if i just sat down with somebody cold who wanted to not that i do this kind of thing but you know stop smoking or something i'd probably spend 20 minutes talking them gradually into a into a state where there's no need for any kind of you know theater around it yeah just create an effect so it varies and it varies entirely on the on the on the person And your parents tried that on you at a certain point when you were younger, right?

Oh, yeah, I went to see a hypnotherapist when I was much younger. I was very, very twitchy. I'm still a little bit twitchy, but I'm very, very twitchy when I was young. You knocked your knees so much you bruised them badly. Yeah, I did. I used to have all sorts of... When did you start knocking them? Did you do it one day and think, hey, this is cool? Yeah, it did. I used to have all sorts of... When did you start knocking them?

Did you do it one day and think, hey, this is cool? Yeah, it's like, oh, that feels really satisfying. That feels great. Slash extremely painful. I'm the knee-knocking guy. I'll do that whenever I think about it, and I won't be able to not do it. It's classic suggestion. It's auto-suggestion.

And mystifying when you're young, and frightening, and frustrating for your parents. And I remember I went to see... I went to a concert in Berlin, Alfred Brendel giving the Beethoven piano sonatas. I mean, a beautiful chamber piece, absolute silence. And my thing at the time was intense, loud sniffing. Oh, wow.

But like real kind of snort. I mean, huge. And I basically cleared out my robe by the second half when I came back. It was an onset. Just excruciating. Everyone thought you were like some coke fiend. Yeah, probably some very young coke fiend. So I went to the

therapy suit. I didn't do anything. And I remember opening my eyes at one point to see what was going on while he was talking. And he just had a tape playing. He'd gone out the room. So after that point I used to open my eyes and just, you know, I remember getting up, looking around his room, looking at the certificates on the wall.

So that didn't work at all. But it got me off games, which was the main thing, because Tuesday afternoon was rugby afternoon and I was not interested in that. Were you excited, though, about the idea of being hypnotised? Did you want it to work? I didn't know anything about it. It really all was about getting off sport. That was my only motivation. The only time I've ever responded to it

at all, and this might be a thing for people to try at home it was quite an interesting thing it was at a conference I went to it was a conference for NLP I don't know if you ever come across that oh neurolinguistic programming yeah it was a sort of a fishy and a slippery craft

but some of it is interesting and bits of it here and there I think are worthwhile John Ronson did a good piece about it yeah yeah and yes there are elements that he found useful in yes i think a lot of it's sort of borrowed from here and there anyway so it's sort of difficult to pin down exactly what is nlp as opposed to the various places that it comes from but i did one it's the only time i've ever found myself responding to it and uh everybody's split

into two which sounds odd doesn't it split into pairs and i sounds odd, doesn't it? Split into pairs. And so I was with this lady. You sit down, you close your eyes, and you begin to describe a scene together that you just both sort of imagine as you go along. So sort of a relaxing scene. So she said, I'm laying on a beach. So, of course, I then imagine laying on a beach, and I say, oh, there's sand beneath me.

I'm running my fingers in the sand. And then she adds to that, oh, there's the seagull and here the seagull and you're just sort of my memory of this is I just started off just talking and describing such things and of course you begin to sort of begin to imagine and the next thing I knew an end was called to the experiment but I had been on a beach absolutely been on a beach experiencing all of that and then open my eyes I was you know literally back in the room that's the only time i've had a kind of um experience of being kind of in any way sort of you know taken away by in some kind of altered state yeah yeah other than that i'm just terrible terrible subject hopeless I love you. Norske Norske one thing that's very seductive about what you do and some of those psychological techniques that you use as part of your shows is the practical applications for some

of them for me it was remembering people's names and i got one of your books because i heard that it contained some tips yeah what are the main ways that you do that the trick with any sort of memory technique and these are not mine just go back back to the ancient greeks really they were they were kind of the first is to you just work with what the brain naturally does which is to make pictures that silly pictures that link one thing to another just visual associations we do it all the time very naturally anyway so you just you work with that so if you want to remember people's names you do have to listen to the name when they tell you which is most most of the time where we go wrong we just don't really listen

and people say it and you connect that you connect the name or whatever the name reminds you of to maybe you know what they're wearing or something about so when you see them again later at the party you go ah yes so yes hello i'm angela redmond angela redmond so you'd go angela angel so you make an image first of all from the name so angela will give you an angel and if it was you unusually um you're in a striking blue jacket which i know if i see you later you'll be wearing gets very confusing if people change clothes this technique so you know i just imagine an angel in a blue cycling jacket and as long as that image is bizarre and it has to be bizarre otherwise it doesn't work that just sits there and you forget

about it and then later when you see the blue cycling jacket you go it's the angel angela yes so it's great you can uh if you're if later when you see the blue cycling jacket, you go, oh, it's the angel. Oh, Angela, yes. So it's great. If you're like me, the sort of person that doesn't love parties, it gives you something to do. And you get to be very charming at the end and go around and say goodbye to everybody by name. I use it on stage a lot, because when people come up on stage,

I need to remember their names. And again, it's a nice thing if I send them back at the end and I can remember everyone's names. My problem is that it takes me too long. You have to have the presence of mind to do it in the instant. So you're in a noisy party, you get introduced to three people in quick succession. And you have to, yeah. There isn't the time to go, wait, wait, wait, wait

I'm trying to formulate some kind of... No you don't, but what you do is you zone out a moment later. Just make sure you hear the name and just sort of log it and then a moment later perhaps while they're talking zone out and then do it. It takes five seconds, then you know you've it, and then a moment later, perhaps while they're talking, zone out, and then do it. It takes five seconds, then you know you've got it. On stage, this happens so much.

People come up on stage. Of course I remember their names. I do exactly that. I meet them at stage door, by which point they put their coat on, and I've no idea who they are. Can't remember their names at all. Then I'm embarrassed, because they go, Oh, you remember my name? I was on stage. We did the thing. They're purely a stripy shirt to me at that point yeah so that that happens as long as you have to do it

with facial features or something that you know won't change because then you might if you see them again 10 years from you know then if you can remember the name that's that's lovely but they won't be wearing the same clothes right i think that's the element that i hadn't got i'd been doing it purely on the sound of the name i was constructing images based on the actual words that's only one half of it you then need to link it to something about them something physical yeah and the other great thing for remembering stuff in general is the memory palace memory palace yes so we are back to the greeks here the um what i do a lot at night if i um need to remember stuff to do the next day but i'm too sleepy to,

you know, get up and write it down or put it in my phone or whatever. I have a root. This is the Loki system, which is a Greek, an old Greek technique. So you, it's just brilliant. So if you pick a root that you're very familiar with, so the root to your house, along the street to your house or wherever, as long as there's a few features along there, like a postbox, or a tree, or a zebra crossing, or a shop, or whatever. Things that you wouldn't have to think about. You'd know were there. And then you do the same thing.

There's something you have to remember, like I've got to take my suit to the dry cleaners. You make an image of that that's bold and strange, like a gleaming bright white suit that's so bright you can't even look at it. And you would place that at the first location on this very familiar route. So if that's a postbox, you imagine dressing the postbox in this gleaming white suit, and then you are done. You forget it, and then it's another thing you put at the next location. The next thing goes at the next location.

And you always use the same locations. You always use the same route. You don't have to think about that, because that's all very familiar. And then when you need to remember what was that list of things, you just walk the route. So the first thing, you're going to go to the postbox, why is there a gleaming white suit around it? Oh yeah, I've got to take the suit to the dry cleaners. And then the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

And it works beautifully. And the point is, it's effortless. When you describe it, it sounds like, oh, that's quite a lot of work, but it isn't. And you suddenly realise you can uh remember a hundred things and then recite them backwards you just do the route backwards you can these there's the things that look like again like a superpower but they're not they're actually quite straightforward but yeah it's that's that's the idea of a memory palace and i first came across it reading uh silence of the lambs because lector hannibal le, does it. He needs Clarice's phone number.

So he goes into his memory palace and walks around to the room of, you know, addresses and phone numbers that he has and there's some bizarre statue configuration which he then pulls apart and decodes because the statue is very easy to remember. It's a bizarre mix of, you know, strange things

coupled together yeah so yeah i that stuff i do use because it really is genuinely it's sort of fun and it is effortless and it works and in the book there was a list of 20 words that i said look it's just a demonstration here's 20 words first of all try and learn them and see how far you can get and of course it's very difficult and now don't try but i'll just talk you through how you can link the first picture to the second picture and the second picture to the third and that book came out i don't know 10 years ago or something and every couple of months somebody comes up to me and recites that list of words so i can almost still do it myself because i get reminded of it every now and then oh that's great i love stuff like that and um did you read the undoing project no i don't know that

oh that's michael lewis um the guy that wrote Moneyball and The Big Short. Right. And that's him writing about Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's partnership. Right. And there's some good quotes from Tversky there who had this very pragmatic approach to all sorts of things that was quite clinical and cutting through all the bullshit. He had this thing about avoiding the whole business of the round of goodbyes at parties and all that stuff. He would say, you just get up and you start to leave.

And if someone says, where are you going? You'll find something to say. It will come to you. But if you want to go, just go. Yeah. And then you lie and tell people, I tried to find you and say yeah it will come to you but if you want to go just go yeah and then you lie and tell people i try to find you say goodbye and i couldn't but thanks ever so much for yeah i know it doesn't always work that's the thing it's like someone like me i think i have tried that in the past and and you leave the party just slightly traumatized going oh that was bad they would have seen through that as if you yourself are that bothered when someone's left

your own events without having said goodbye. I know, it's crazy, isn't it? I was at a friend's party once and someone was trying out a polygraph on me, like a lie detector. Oh, yeah. So just on a laptop thing.

So I was just rigged up, had a clippy thing on my finger. And he'd been asking me these questions and we were all watching, a group of us there watching. It's a good party. Yeah, it was fun, watching my lies and truth come up on the... And obviously when you have a lie, the line on this graph goes, woo, right up.

And we'd done this for a while, and while we were talking, a guy popped his head round the door, who I'd been talking to earlier, and said, oh, sorry, just heading off to Edinburgh, nice to meet you. And I said, oh, lovely to meet you, and as I said that, this line went, woo, right up. And everybody laughed. And apparently he never oh, lovely to meet you. And as I said that, this line went, woo! And everybody laughed. And apparently he never spoke to the host of the party again. He was so humiliated by the experience. That was awful.

Polygraph busted. Oh, mate. Don't do polygraph tests at parties. Never. one of the things i enjoyed about happy, your book, was the section on death. And I didn't expect to enjoy it because I don't like death. No, me neither. It's one of my least favourite things.

I give it a thumbs down. I don't like to think about it. And I like to avoid thinking about it whenever I can. And I think most people are the same, aren't they? Some people really hate thinking about it. Yes. And the mere mention of it in this podcast will have made some people reach for the off button. And I totally sympathize.

But you talk about it really entertainingly and interestingly. And you talk about coming to terms with some of your own fears. But did you ever have a sort of obsession about it? Was it ever out of control as something no no i've never had what i think of as a fear of death which i think some people do however uh but it does happen isn't it as you sort of you know we're we are middle-aged handsome men and you do start to just particularly because you know your parents start to kind of get very old or frail and friends parents die if your own aren't.

And you become aware of it, you become of your own mortality, you start to feel yourself falling apart, little bits here and there, and aches and pains don't go away, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, it's become of interest. What I find really interesting about it and what that bit of the book was ultimately about, I think, is that what we've been left with over the last two, three hundred years is, since the Enlightenment,

is a stripping away of, you know, superstition, religious thinking, etc., etc., all of which is wonderful in many ways. But the flip side of that, a downside, is that we have lost touch with a lot of cultural myths and narratives that actually support us and hold us in important ways. So death, particularly because I think morbid superstitions have particularly sniffed at. So death becomes one of those things that now there's no meaning, there's no narrative attached to it. So it just becomes scary and lonely and confusing

for people when they're caught up in it or know someone that's caught up in it or know someone that's caught up in it the only narrative we sort of have around it is this idea of a brave battle that somebody is fighting that's the kind of story that gets applied somebody was you know brave brave battle and all that does nothing to make the person who's dying feel any better much more likely just to make them feel worse makes everybody else feel a little more comfortable and you know they're just obviously doing the best they can and if I'm battling so bravely, why is this thing not going away? Yeah, so now I've just got to add failure to my list of burdens. What we don't do is,

you know, we don't live with it. And the result is then that people often become like a sort of cameo part, somebody said, in their own deaths. You know, the main parts are going to the doctors and the loved ones and everyone else that's sort of making the decisions and you might feel quite peripheral in your own death and given that the life we lead is about the stories that we tell ourselves and getting those stories right sometimes recognizing them as just stories and living rather more in the present rather than in the middle of a narrative that's always going to be tied to things that have happened or things that are yet to come but being a little you know more in the present rather than in the middle of a narrative that's always going to be tied to things that have happened or things that are yet to come that being a little you know more in the present is one helpful thing uh but another thing that can be helpful is taking ownership of those

kind of narratives particularly when we come to that sort of final chapter understanding the importance of closure to those stories is important if you watch a film or read a book the last scene normally makes sense of what's come before there There's a climax, there's a sense of closure, normally. This doesn't happen in life, it's just, you know, it could just be absurd, it just ends. So you often, if you have the chance to forgive who needs forgiving, or to end the story in a way that needs ending, you know, if you have that chance, that's something that should be encouraged and is you know good for us and also for the people around the person that's dying those things are important too but the

stories uh those we've sort of lost touch with those things that put meaning back into something like death do you feel as if you can plan for it do you ever find yourself imagining what you will do when that time comes for you yeah i do i do, I do. I've sort of found myself drawn... There was a lady who came to see my show in Canterbury called Deborah years ago, who was... She'd been a nurse and a psychotherapist and she had really bad cancer and... Not fun cancer.

Not fun cancer. That wasn't the good one, it was the bad one. And I was sort of on a bit like a bucket list for her, really. She wanted to come and say hello. And then we kept in touch and we became and i uh visited her and we had a correspondence and it led into the section of the book in fact this is the if you've read the book she's kind of the main character in that last bit because it clearly is what she said and others have said is that it can be the most vibrant and extraordinary bit of your life because suddenly

like nothing has meaning unless it's finite, right? If we live forever, we might like the idea for a second, but actually everything would very quickly become utterly meaningless and boring beyond measure. How many Star Wars films do you need to see? Exactly, yeah.

Kafka said the meaning of life is that it ends. Yeah. So when things are ending very soon, you know, everything explodes in terms of meaning and importance and even Deborah said she wouldn't have swapped that her and her son it was really just kind of the two of them really and the son's girlfriend

was involved in this relationship sort of as well the three of them were very close but they both said son and mother said that they wouldn't have swapped that time for anything and she was able to appreciate it despite being gradually debilitated. Yeah, absolutely. And in almost constant pain and, you know, and the rest of it.

So it was a really extraordinary lessons. And not that we need to live each day like it's our last. That doesn't make sense. But I think what it teaches us is because I think ultimately why death is something that is scares us. And this is deprivation. It's not that being dead is going to be horrible because we won't be there to experience that. It's not that the idea of eternal blackness

and infinity should be that scary because we've already been there before we were born. That's happened, right? And it was fine then and it'll be fine in the future. Yeah, that's not the scary part. That's not the scary part. And even the bit of dying, well, the pain,

but the dying bit's only scary if it leads to death. Otherwise it it isn't dying so when you actually untangle what is it that we don't like i think the answer is deprivation that the projects we're involved in now that people would like to see grow up that are just going to end the project just being ourselves and our opinions and our uh that thing that is unique to us the view of the world would just go it would mean nothing it'll mean nothing it'll just be gone that's the bit i think that is unique to us, the view of the world, it'll just mean nothing. It'll mean nothing. It'll just be gone. That's the bit, I think, that is at the heart of why it's scary. So that does teach us to be a little less attached to our projects,

a little less attached to what is yet to come, and root ourselves perhaps more in the present. But people fetishise the present moment at the same time. So I think it's being in the present, but with a a contingent future we are creatures that are going to move forward and and often don't realize the value of the present until we look back on it and see it in hindsight so again that is part of the storytelling that's part of uh being in a timeline um but uh as i get older these things become yeah more interesting Do you find yourself thinking about it? Yeah, all the time. I mean, my dad died a couple of years ago, so that really set it going. To the extent that I was worried it was going to become a preoccupation that was going to get in the way of things,

that I would become a bit anhedonic, you know, not really be able to... Enjoy anything. No, yeah, because it was just like, what's the point? It's downhill now. Yeah, I think it's normal to go through a bit of that i think i think there's a huge amount to process people forget often that the um those stages of grief that elizabeth kubler-ross was famous for you know denial and angle those they weren't actually about um they weren't about what the grieving person goes through they're about what the person who's dying has to go through to make peace with their own. It's all been turned into what you're expected to go through when you grieve. And it wasn't about that. It was the person who's dying, their process. But aside from that, it is a huge thing to go through. in the nicest way how you should be feeling or that it's sort of okay or that time will heal and so on. And I don't know if that's true. I think grief is something that has to sit and just find its own place.

And of course time changes things and it will sting a little less, but it's not like you want to forget it and move on. Why would you want that? And those memories of the person that just sting, particularly in their last days, you don't want to move on from those. Those are things that... Wait, Sting is dead? Sting...

Jesus Christ. This is not the way I wanted to find out. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website I see success. Yes, success. This is an advert for Squarespace. your videos and pics and I don't want to stop. And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash Buxton for a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. Hey, welcome back, podcats. That was Darren Brown. Very grateful indeed to Darren for making the time to talk to me.

And as I said, various links to his stuff and tour dates, etc. in the description of this podcast. Now look, speaking of tours, I'm on tour next year in 2020. With my book. I can tell you that the book is going to be called Ramble Book. I think we've settled on that now. And that was actually Joe Cornish's suggestion.

He said, well you've got to call it Ramble Book. And I said, yeah, I don't know. I was thinking of something a little more up itself and highfalutin, because that's what I'm aiming for. He said, no, you should call it Ramble Book. So that's what I've done. You know, the thing is that I haven't actually finished Ramble Book as I'm speaking so it feels a little bit odd for me to be plugging a book tour but there it is that's the way these things work you have to do these things in advance basically I will be going around to various places in the UK in May and June of next year and there is a link in the description of this podcast to all the current dates and links to buy tickets, etc. The shows themselves will be a combination of me

reading out bits from the book and then just talking with the audience. Might answer the odd question. No AV though. No videos, no YouTube comments. Well, actually, that's not entirely true, but no video support. So it's just me on a stage talking for between 90 minutes and two hours sometimes. With a break, I've seen a few tweets from people complaining that shows in their cities have already sold out and wondering why I'm playing smaller venues well I just thought it would be preferable to play smaller venues it's always more intimate especially for that kind of thing and also I didn't know how many people were going to want to come along so So if shows do sell out in certain places, I'm sure I'll come back there at some point. You know, the other thing you could do is go to Aberdeen, which isn't selling very well.

Somehow, I agreed to play in what seems like a vast theatre in Aberdeen. And at the moment, there's still quite a few seats left. So there you go. That's an option for you. But it's early days. Look, it's not until May, this thing. I'm looking forward to it a lot. I've done a few work in progress shows while I've been writing the book, and they've all been very enjoyable and intimate affairs. And I hope the tour will be a similar kind of thing. But yeah, I've just got to, you know, finish it first. Right.

Next item on the agenda. I did a radio documentary for Radio 4. It goes out this Monday, the 25th of November, 2019. And it's called Adam Buxton and the Human Horn. It is a 30-minute programme, presented by me, about the strange tale of the world's weirdest scat singer, William Shuby Taylor, a.k.a. The Human Horn, whose voice could be heard

at the very beginning of The Adam and Joe Show on Channel 4 back in the 90s, if you used to watch that. You remember! Yeah, there you go. That was Shuby Taylor at the beginning of each episode of The Adam and Joe Show. Anyway, as I said, the Radio 4 show goes out at 4pm on Monday.

It should be available online thereafter. I've put a link in the description of the podcast where I think it will appear. But it's a great introduction, I think, to Shuby and his unique talents. And it features contributions from Joe Cornish and Louis Theroux, who was responsible for getting me into Shoeby in the first place. But the bulk of the work on the programme was done by Sarah Cudden. I'm very grateful to her for getting me to front the programme, but yeah, she was the one that did all the work.

And she is from Falling Tree Productions, a name probably familiar to you if you listen to a lot of Radio 4. They do a lot of interesting radio shows, including Shortcuts with comedian Josie Long and loads of other great music documentaries. I didn't realise they'd done quite so many. I looked at a SoundCloud page where they're all collected. I put a link in the description,

but if you follow it, you'll find shows on Leonard Cohen, Robert Wyatt, Baghdad Headbangers, Riot Girls, Jeff Buckley, Judy Sill. I mean, there's loads there, mainly half-hour documentaries, all beautifully produced. They're very good. Falling tree. All right, look, that's enough. That's enough. Rosie! She's loping. Come on.

Come on, Rosie. Yeah, she's galloping. Come on, let's have a flypast. Here she comes. Slow flypast. Thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production assistance on this episode thanks to Matt Lamont for his editing on the conversation thank you very much for listening hope you enjoyed it back next week with more interesting person waffle.

All right. Until next we meet, please take extremely good care and bear in mind at all times that for what it's worth, I love you. Bye! Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Give me a little smile and a thumbs up.

Nice, take a bite, put your thumbs up. Give me a little smile and a thumbs up. Nice, take a bite, put your thumbs up. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Give me a little smile and a thumbs up. Bye. Thank you.