Joe Rogan Experience #1198 — Derren Brown Transcript

Transcript

0:00 four three two boom what's up man how are you hello thanks for being here well i'm pleased a giant gray mountain in the distance yeah it's it's insane how bad it's gotten i've had it happen But the reality is this is, it's nature. It's not just a weather thing that just happens. They're amazing because they support your back as well, which as a 47-year-old man, this is helpful.

2:33 So what's up, man? kind of generally here to, uh, talk about it, I guess. And, uh, seeing a couple of friends and a does it i mean you've got an amazing sort of setup here is it just a is it just a dream these huge, huge vehicles. Really, when you realize how preposterous it is when you're flying into LAX, and you interesting you know it's surprising i well yeah i mainly put i paint and i do a lot of street

5:20 At least putting them online. You know, I mean, you think someone is really good at something like magic. like as a as a kid i used to draw and paint a lot and always faces like i'm you know no good It's a great thing. I had a book on happiness that I wrote, which I wrote while I was on tour, So that's an amazing routine. And that feels like a really prime state.

7:52 just photography just being out there taking pictures because of becoming really famous? I was always... I was very intimidated by the kind of sporty kids. You would have terrified me as a child. And also the control aspect of it, you know, the kind of, yeah, the control aspect. was definitely driven by insecurity because any any sort of magic which sort of followed for me

10:15 No, it was sort of, I would mainly perform at like colleges and I'd do a demonstration And I've done this stuff for 20 years back home. And I out of it it's just a really interesting area and i've done this But afterwards, when I'd have this kind of Q&A, I'd i'd um i'd ask them what was your what was your actual experience like like the show's over now

11:58 emotionally committed and at the other extreme people that would not accept that it was me The people that just want to please you and are playing along. the effect of someone hypnotized. They need to genuinely Other times I can tell they're sort of half into it and they're just a bit intimidated. who's the guy behind NLP and so on. you're not thinking,

14:30 Your reaction is a sort of, But a clear instruction to sleep or whatever you want to give them tends to be taken very deeply and very often. was like applying this in slightly more useful everyday situations, And this guy comes up and he's drunk. It's about three in the morning, It makes sense, but it's just out of context. they're tiny. The plan was I was going to try and stick

17:25 But it's a good one, isn't it? Isn't there like a process required to hypnotize someone? You could just do it that way and very suggestible with the instruction that when you come back if i click my fingers you'll go back Maybe perhaps he wanted to stop smoking, and I realized it was just that. I didn't question it because I believed he had. you know all there is even a magician showing you a card trick is just getting you to tell yourself

20:36 Because you're being fascinating to me well it's fascinating in that regard but it's also fascinating that it seems If you go and look at it like a clinical environment where hypnosis is being investigated, it isn't like that at all. I wasn't giving the workshop. you start to describe a scene And then I just remember somebody going, It's something about uh

23:45 Are they just kind of responding because you've just asked them to I don't think there's anything that happens under hypnosis You get somebody munching into an onion and like having no problem eating it. And I was like, meant he did it and it was fine. Yeah, of course. What are they seeing? so you think, well, that must be evidence that hypnosis is some special thing

26:19 So again, what looks amazing very often isn't. some adrenaline going. And I could see the techniques that the charlatan faith healers Of playing along with something and nonetheless again small percentage not not not everybody but having having these kind of experiences And it doesn't, and sometimes those healings are sort of i mean if because I thought it would only last for 10 minutes while they're on stage

29:11 cured from that that is immensely bizarre it's immensely bizarre but it's it's bizarre and but if somebody got me up on stage and said, performers how you start to go mad yourself and think well i've got this special gift and There's no mechanism that we can trace. Another show I've done was placebo injections they were getting. So they feel the drug is doing the work. But the key is they don't

31:58 which is why a lot of the, subconscious optimism or something like that yeah i've wondered if that sort of mindset that allows energy and confidence and enthusiasm and then therefore things go smoother or whether it's really some sort of a factor of the way you interchange with reality itself and that your control at all so we are told a lot nowadays that you just you know set your goals believe in

35:11 been driven to do this all his life because he like needed to sort of achieve to feel like you of unnatural unhappiness as he saw it like a sort of neurotic unhappiness and restore a kind of an But a certain amount of positivity. and if this condition returns, And that's the problem. It's great if you can put it in a certain context. If not, Well, you know who also thought positive?

38:02 Well, the problem with that is if you just focus on the one, the thing about human beings, Maybe we self as a verb. that but they're viewing themselves as this isolated it's just this sort of individual kind it all goes back to like not being influenced by kings and priests. and unfair sense of how isolated we are. There's one guy who doesn't know that this is being filmed, that he's part of a TV show.

40:32 tuxedos, but he didn't get the memo for the dress and it just builds and it builds and uh it gets to this point when he's on a roof having been It just isn't real. when you're trying to talk someone into potentially, that perhaps could go cradle to the grave and never have that. And likewise for viewers hopefully watching it too. although I realise it doesn't sound like it

43:07 Best thing I've ever done. But there's some people that when confronted with some new situation, be that's kind of that's kind of my job to make sure that they're framing. people watching the show will say how can you know how can you justify that you're manipulating and the production team falling in love with these people should you put in the But the preparation for it, you know, goes back a bit.

45:40 and there was going to be this meteor strike. like everyone's gone the place is abandoned some infection has spread so So when you return to the stuff you have, you value that rather than just always desiring more. a new lease on life i mean you really can become a totally different person after something like that. I think so. So the plot is, I take this guy, Phil,

48:08 or at least someone he believes is. the guys, like, made a huge But there's like two levels to making these shows. So there's a whole vetting procedure that has to happen In the Apocalypse show, there was like one moment so they had to spend the night in this garden shed. point during the process of course we can like stop it i can you know i can but that would suck

50:45 different news broadcasts. But in this thing, And like you've sort of somehow broken through all the kind of crap. lumbering giant of a private life So again, the stories that we're kind of living out. was I think also just being able to do a tv show that really like changes Yeah. I've got to write the thing and, We had small, finds himself on an airplane.

54:44 Would he step up and do it? Someone needs to land the plane. He rises up, has this moment. So we found out that was the most convincing thing was to have it when it's dark. And then there's a, you know the game, while at the same time doing stage shows it seems like not only does it take so much time It was terrifying. Kind of a fun, odd, yeah, odd combination.

57:56 uh see if someone we can get someone to push up off a building or with this one because i'd done Well, that's a beautiful perspective, too, You know, a little bit. It makes the whole, like, if the whole thing is just like, I'm smarter than these dummies and I'm just going to trick them. talking to this, But you actually do cut him? So he thinks he's using this app, which is kind of helping motivate him.

1:00:41 It's that process. are important. A lot of the show is about empathy, and a lot forget all about it, and then ends up stranded in this situation where it all happens. And narrative and just finding something that ultimately is just a human, you know, a human This is it. and we're very quickly given messages that the greatest burden a child has to bear is the unlived life of its parents.

1:03:48 Like we know as adults how difficult it is raising kids. british philosopher and writer and he said you know know, if you go to bed twice a week with your partner thinking, Three times a week. Five nights of hell with two of them. out for when the music plays and the close up is there. is so unhelpful for the person that's in that situation makes everyone else maybe feel better

1:06:42 that final scene makes sense of everything that's happened before. these things that just give us a sense of where our experience fits into a wider sense of meaning The vet puts them down. What they're tapping into is not like it isn't the supernatural. So an example of this is a great book called The Spell of the Sensuous And she was going off and doing something else with those.

1:09:48 And then the rice moved along the ground, and he, oh, it's ants. We're going to put this rice out. Well, doesn't it depend on what they're doing, particularly with shamans? If a shaman I think the term that they use in Peru, they call them plastic shaman. a cigarette or anything i'm it's it's it's a real magician's thing it's kind of like uh pendulets

1:12:59 Yeah. I think what we're missing religions originally a phenomenological embodied experience of the was giving people a phenomenological, And then, you know, I'm an atheist, but I could see that what you left with thousands of years later is quite easy to knock down and kind of poke fun of. And meaning trumps happiness or anything else. We just put it in all the wrong places,

1:15:26 that needs to be some kind of space for that. this recognition of your work as being something that's bigger than yourself. i hope it gives them uh you know a profound and transformative experience. Something bigger than yourself. that that's that's the real that's the real killer is lack of meaning. I think they articulate something that thinking about driving his Ferrari into a bridge and then decided that he was going to make another

1:18:53 craziest thing about it is we're always searching for some pill that's going to fix whatever weird, goals and building towards these goals and having this vision in his mind. that were going on in Buddhism at the time. And it's an amazing idea, particularly if you're suffering. which is what you finish school with, You know, we are so fixated on what's coming.

1:22:02 But it seems to be that it's frightening because our projects will end you know the whether And also the pressure that they put on children Like this friend of mine, I said, food. when you're putting together these shows and changing their perspective on things through these transformative events, That makes me feel good. Yeah. and believe that they were real divinities

1:25:59 And I like that, but it just means that, you know, life is ambivalent and complex. easily digestible package but the reality is when you open that package there every package is intensely complex God, you can only sort which is essentially in the right way but correct me if i'm wrong there's no clear scientific understanding of So it was like – that's his story, right?

1:28:48 So we did it. and for a bit of filming he's going to do later, got stephen fry on stage right he's he's the guy that's going to get assassinated so he's on and But he did it. you're not going to get in an ice bath like that. had to pull him out if he was at a certain temperature i think if it got to whatever it But I don't know. a murderer and then you put it on television yeah you have a murderer yeah he's a murderer i mean

1:32:18 the squibs go off and he thinks he's a murderer. and then gave him this ability to detonate it. They provided him with the bomb. essentially they were both talked into doing there's no real evidence this guy would have Stephen Fry or the intent to kill whatever innocent people he was going to get with this bomb. We wanted to see if you would. So that's kind of more the world that we're

1:35:03 because we need to get this guy off the streets so let's show that he's capable of detonating a bomb and you must think it's possible, right? Yeah. I want my life, my days to feel like this is good, about the things that everybody else cares about, And, you know, just your relationship to the present moment and so on. emotional robustness in your life and uh you know if you suffer from anxiety and so it's it's it's

1:38:46 the danger is i don't know am i going to grow or you know i'm just going to just be too comfortable king, really, was the emperor, most powerful man who's an American philosopher who writes a lot about these things. so we don't think in terms of those things. and these Netflix specials and things Oddly sad. you, I'm a firm believer in the importance of difficult tasks.

1:42:28 language because they'd just be entirely unconscious so you found this is stuff that you've found and I think it's also the attitude in which you embrace And then when you get through it on the other end, you get a different level of happiness. So if you're going to grow, there has to be anxiety and disturbance Once you're going, it's not nearly as hard.

1:45:08 of pacing up and down by the window um instinctively how so in that i'm a little shy and i kind of i'm when you're rejected you know the the meeting someone who's doesn't enjoy the way you've is why that the difficulty is so worth embracing because if you can if you can if you can embrace But there is a real value to that. there's a lot of there was a lot of people felt so guilty and terrible after Freud was damaging

1:48:33 So likewise, you know, in life, like living with disillusionment is like, that's fine. And the fact that she sort of says, I don't know if that's a thing. And that's a big one. Yeah, not the whole story. The secret thing's an element. An element. Yeah, not the whole story. And also where you're born. He didn't make a wishboard and put his pictures of his house, his Ferrari in front of it or whatever the fuck he's trying to.

1:51:20 I mean, the universe in and of itself is a perspective enhancer. There's that, and it was his, with water, Flying around right these little little aspects of light and they had no sense of like what was up and there was no light, just nothing. so magnificent. We have magicians doing tricks and psychic mediums pretending to connect you with the dead.

1:54:37 So before filming starts, he and he just says all those things to them. The questions were shitty. and providing like very accurate information, And then afterwards, with my dead grandmother. If you have any critical thinking left in you at all at that point you just you put the book down you go what that's sort of an for me an unexpected um comfort that comes with this sort of

1:58:22 But they'll be the people that were there and it's it's hard to articulate but it's a i find that like a it's a lot easier to It's like, yeah, these are just, these are my, it sounds, you know, but these are my fellow people. actually they're just going through their own shit as well and i'm just a character in their lives Anytime you can just sort of just Aikido that and just sort of like relax and let it roll off you and just keep moving and go,

2:00:55 that's such a like to really let that idea drop into the soul that oh it's become anxious you don't play as well you're trying to control something you can't whereas thing that is just the way they're manifesting that is annoying me but it's it's fine it is fine Yeah, you know grabbing some guy. You don't even know listen man. You got to straighten your fucking life out

2:03:12 And there's a certain amount of pride in just being able to like, huh, whatever. Even enjoy it. For all I know. by being more aware But it is the founder of, well, one of the founders of CBT was explicitly taking it from the Stoics. rediscovering things yeah and i think um i think that happens with uh i think it happens with yoga And then, yeah, it's this weird thing

2:05:58 But we hung up on the knocking down the things that are actually just signposts back to something that is important, with that numinous, unknowable thing, universe with no scientific knowledge at all. It was only at that point that medicine But that's only a couple of hundred years ago. because they don't come naturally do they I don't know. Yeah, Marshall's here.

2:10:11 And Sacrifice is available right now on Netflix. I don't know if you can even access it in this country.