I'd been asked by the FBI, I'd been asked by the police, to help. I'd be the FBI where the police might help with. Nah. Ladies and gentlemen, the head is psychological illusion.
The extraordinary television that have even been to live shows. There is a national treasure. Welcome to the show. The story we tell ourselves is not what's real, like, for example.
I did a show called Miracle. The Lord has his work, I'll tell tonight. And the second half is healing. The woman came up and she'd been paralysed up on the side of her body so she could stalk 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 of life that caught your problems, it's the story that you tell yourself about, but it's the judgments that you make about them.
There's a lot of people that are trying to sell you on this board so you can take your traumas or your insecurities to zero. I've never seen it happen. We've completely obliterated the idea of just fortune and life. Sometimes life's throwing stuff back and being able to control over anxiety still somehow, but never that anxiety, how do you know to change anything?
You know, you can't do that without embracing anxiety to the extent. Your work is probably based on psychology, right? So have you ever done anything and how the fuck did that happen? Don't go home and start doing that.
Do this, don't do mine. I spent the last few days reading all about your childhood. Oh, truly fascinating. I've actually got a picture here of you.
How strange that you have that picture? Yes, that's me with a parrot on my shoulder. This little boy. Yes.
What do I need to understand about him and the world he lived in, and the way he saw the world to understand you? What do you need to understand? Well, I was only a child until I was nine. So I guess that's kind of a pretty formative thing, isn't it?
Quite creative, I've always always drawing and building things, lego. It's always been a bit of a people pleaser and maybe that age kind of, yeah, sort of happy, didn't have a lot of friends. There wasn't like a, didn't have a big gang. And everybody did, I've always gone through life just with sort of a small number of good friends.
But I think that feels like a happy, happy time to think back on. I remember sitting with Jimmy Carr and him telling me that 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 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. I wonder in your, you know, you said that you're a bit of a people pleaser.
You clearly have this huge affinity towards entertaining and getting the reaction back from people, the amazement. Where did that start? Can you pinpoint it by that start in your childhood? Yes, I think I could.
So when I was at school, so my dad was a swimming teacher at school and he, and I wasn't very sporty. So I kind of, it shielded me from being like bullied as a non-sporty kid, but I didn't love school mainly because I found a lot of the kids, the sporty kids quite intimidating and so on. So I kind of like, dad teaching to help. And then when I got to, and I was in with the wrong group, the sort of classical music loving group, all the puff gangs, as we were less charitably known, didn't even like classical music.
So it was a pretty miserable group to be slept with. In sick form, I remember everybody sort of seemed to grow up, suddenly become a lot more friendly. And so I kind of, I sort of exploded in a way into sort of like a tension-seeking, and I went from being very sort of quiet and a bit intimidated by these sort of kids to sort of suddenly, they seemed to sort of, you know, like me, or at least, you know, they were fine. So I started doing impressions of teachers and I would draw caricatures of them and I became a kind of, really, I would imagine quite irritating, certainly some of the teachers, a tension seeker.
So I think it all happened around then. And then it just sort of then progressed into university. Most of my 20s was probably a lot of it was around, you know, based around that. And it was one 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 good thing. Were you picked on the tea store or anything in school before that break? No, I think because my dad taught there, it helped. But I was definitely, you know, always chosen to ask for the teams and things, hated sports and so on.
And there were a couple of kids that were probably, I mean, generally fairly nasty anyway, but I certainly got a bit for never knowing. 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, I said intimidated.
I don't really remember ever getting sort of never got beaten up or balled on. No one was making my life particularly miserable. I think it was just a general feeling of not quite fitting in. And religion, I was incredibly religious.
Well, yeah. And then I just did about 18 became incredibly biggest. Yeah. And I ran a sort of sort of journey in your stress, a six or something you'd ask your parents if you could go to Bible.
That's right. Mrs. Whitaker, one of our teachers at school was, I really liked a lot. And then she ran, it was called Crusader class.
It was basically like a Sunday school thing. And because I was six and she asked me if I wanted to go to it. I just sort of assumed everybody did hardly, hardly different. So I said to ask my parents if I could go and they said, yes, of course.
So I did. And by the time I realized that, oh, no, no, it's actually like a thing. I now believe in it was sort of, I was pretty much inculcated. So it was hard to step out of it.
But I did eventually university. So many years later, I threw doing hypnosis first and magic. And they always give you a quite skeptical outlook on things because you just see how people fall themselves. 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. 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 exercising me and casting out demons whilst I was hypnotizing people on stage. So again, all of that just sort of made me quiet.
It just helped with the general skepticism that took a little while to properly come out of it. In fact, 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 a helpful book, actually, as I'm sure it was for many people, in terms of giving that lack of belief, a kind of a structure. Was for me, one of the pivotal books in my life when I was about 18 years old.
I also don't like compulsive behaviours from your childhood, things like knocking your knees together in a series of other things. Really twitchy, yeah, a little on that sort of kind of Tourette's sort of scale. I think there's a wench that ends with quite severe things. A lot of people have that experience of making little funny tiggly noises in a throat or having to, you know, not step on the cracks and there's all the kind of OCD thing that starts to get accompanied by feelings of dread and so much.
I never had that, but yeah, I was twitchy. I find a lot of creative kids are. I don't really know what it is. It seems to be a form of auto suggestion when you get the idea in your head and it's very hard to let it go.
Sometimes I get it now, sometimes I get it on stage because there's a lot of muscle memory doing a stage show. So if something, if a little twitchy thing is crept in at one point during the show, it'll just creep in every night. So I'm still kind of aware of it, a little more over the last few years because obviously it's been such a weird few years for everyone's mental health. So I've noticed it more than I had before.
But yeah, it was quite, it was a lot, my parents are quite despairing with it. I think it's a very painful thing to watch a child do and not know how to help. Knees knocking, sniffing, terrible sniffing. Yeah, really loud.
I went to CA. Alfred Brindle, the pianist, playing in Berlin once when I was studying out there, I think, I did my gap year, I think it was out there. And just, I mean, this guy's playing the Beethoven pianoist and I was just here on his own on the stage with the Berlin Philharmonic. And there's this incredibly loud sniffing that I'm doing.
And by the second half, everybody cleared out. I was just basically a whole empty area of the audience. But yeah, just such a bizarre thing. You just can't really stop it with the best one in the world.
You can't stop yourself from doing these things. And it's, and you also get another language for it as a kid. 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. You say you feel like, therefore, the 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 hard and frightening as you can't articulate it. And I think there's no answer to it. I think just it sort of passes. As you've matured, has your perspective of your childhood evolved?
Because I've found that mine certainly has. It's almost like with a bit more wisdom. I say that 30 years old now, but with a little bit more wisdom. I've kind of had a different perspective now in 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 throughlines in my early experience. I think I'm quite fond of my memories of myself as a child. And I felt like there was quite a clean break.
Once I went off to university, it felt like life stopped and started again. So when I think back to my kind of the sort of story of myself, I guess, I'm sort of quite living out the back of my head, I sort of don't really go much beyond university age. And I'll happily find anything excruciating, like, you know, more than anything I've settled on 10 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. And then by the time I get to childhood, it's all perfectly, all feels fine. I mean, I'm aware, as I said, I was kind of, would sort of just get on with my own things, but nothing. I, I, I think I was sensitive.
I think I still am. I was quite a sensitive child. I stood, I did used to cry a lot. I know that makes me sound unhappy, but I used to, it didn't take much to make me cry.
And I think I've probably retained a sort of sensitive, which is sort of interesting, to write a lot about stoicism and a lot of the things I think people, people do tend to write about the things that, you know, that they either need to learn for themselves or are learning. So, you know, you express those things often better because you're discovering them for yourself. So perhaps like a lot of stuff, you know, secretly quite, quite sensitive to. So I remember that, but not, not, not really unhappy, not, not particularly happy either, but just a kind of fairly content, solitary coming kid.
So that's sensitivity. I've always wondered if, if we're particularly taken by the applause, are we therefore also taken by the criticism? So people then end up committing their lives to being like public entertainers and living for their response and the reaction that they, their work has, are those then also the people that are most susceptible to, you know, the opposite of applause? Yeah, I guess, I guess, you're definitely putting yourself out there, aren't you?
If you perform, you are kind of, you are opening yourself up to both extremes of reaction. But it wasn't really about that for me. I think it was about control was a big part of it. And also as I sort of, I couldn't come out until I was actually quite late in my 30s.
And I think around the time that I was getting into the hypnosis, that was, you know, university time really. And I think, first of all, it was, this all wasn't clear to me at the time, but with hindsight, the control aspect of it was very clear and actually ticked. Well, if you watch a hypnotist hypnotizing people, I mean, it's just that the whole thing is a big exercise in control. And I think I sort of, that was appealing to me.
I didn't know it. It didn't strike me quite in that language at the time. But I think looking back, that was helpful. And also, I think if the old outmoded cliche of the gay man in particular being a hairdresser or an interior designer and all of those horrible old cliches, what they have in common actors as well is the notion of being able to create dazzling surfaces because they deflect people from the more difficult.
If you're feeling shame about what's underneath, and I think magic's very good for that as well. 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.
That's a very appealing thing. A lot of kids get into magic because they're under confident. 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.
I think all of that was helpful to me as somebody that was not out and working all that stuff out. And you were saying that, it reminded me of listening to your audio book where you talk about those two kids beating you up in your sleeping bag. I can't remember the... Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.
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 I mean, very good at holding shame. You're full of shame.
I think was the message. Yeah, I can't exactly what I wrote. Creeps up and I find out, it's, I'm prone to it. If I feel I've upset my partner, it's a shame that I'll go to rather than defensiveness or, you know, I don't...
Really? Yeah, I'll easily get back to a feeling of, I've been bad, I've just let this person down. Is that what does shame mean to you? Because I think I've been using the word a little bit without every focus definition.
I've been saying that I felt a lot of shame because I was only like 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 be half a sexy millionaire. But what does shame mean to you in that context? Well, I suppose, if you distinguish it from embarrassment, embarrassment is sort of where you sort of let yourself down in front of, it's a feeling you're going to get from other people. They're important in that.
It's how you've appeared before there. As I suppose, shame is how you've appeared before yourself, that you sort of let something down within yourself, it's that, isn't it? But I think the experience of it is just a sort of... It just becomes an easy resting place.
Whatever it is, what I might have thought of as, 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 just find yourself settling back into that. And I suppose part of getting older is recognizing those kind of things, 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 do things you wouldn't have thought. I mean, not being out, all that energy was going into creating this Mr. Magic kind of persona. And although it's easy to say, always come out and all the rest of it, of course those things are important too.
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. Shame being a familiar resting place, as you kind of described it, and you said that kind of starts in your childhood. Because I want to 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, a bit like a loner. Is that what you're saying? Or is there other dynamics with parents where they...?
No, I think specifically with sort of the gay thing, I think that's what it is. I think if you feel... Hopefully it's different now. It's just going back there, 51 now, so if you feel like those things are just embarrassing and awkward, it's not like you really get to...
Well, you're finding it out in real time about yourself, aren't you? So it becomes an uncomfortable center 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, but there's a bit of a bubble around you because you're sort of having to maintain a kind of a curated exterior and part of that then is then what's happening underneath. This is uncomfortable and difficult and feels shameful.
So I think that's it. I don't remember feeling that as a kid. As I said, but quiet and so on, but I don't remember feeling that as an experience, but it just sort of just kind of crept in and the more I sort of was leaning into the magic persona thing, the more the outside becomes harder and more opaque, this sort of exterior presentation becomes, I think, that it goes hand in hand with a more shameful interior until in the end you just sort of fuck that and just sort of let it all be fine. Was there a point...
And this might be a really annoying question as a straight guy, but was there a point where it became crystal clear to you that your sexual preference was different? Or was it slow sort of realisations? Yeah, it was kind of... Because you can never really climb into anyone else's head and sort of understand what their experience is, it's sort of...
It's often difficult to really know and of course at the time I was also proper Christian, which 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 some of that kind of 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 nonetheless it's basically that.
So he was going through that, and although I didn't, I was kind of skirted it a little bit because I was his friend and you know it was something we were talking about a lot. So all of those things, and obviously by the way it doesn't work, I was wondering, I went in straight to work for me. So yeah, it was sort of... I don't know, I don't know, just a clear moment, it's just...
I think it's got on the public eye, I thought I don't want this to be something weird sort of thing that's like a secret. So then you come out of it, you come out about it, and then actually the joy, the reason why it's liberating. At least it was for me, and probably hopefully most people know it's that people just don't care, like this thing that you've carried around and that experience, that shameful center that's there. Again, shame is a really strong word, but nonetheless it's kind of just this sort of awkward thing, eventually when you sort of are open about it, it's just people don't care why would they care.
So that's why it's liberating. It's not because suddenly you can spin around on the street with your shopping bags, it's just that, oh no one cares about doing difficult private stuff in the best way, so actually, and you've done the big one. So now anything else after this will be fine. I think that's why it's a liberating thing.
I really quite think it was in the telegraph where you'd said that maybe the journalist was commentating that something is simply mislaying your keys can trigger a whole new wave of self hatred. God, that was me saying that, wasn't it? 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? Self-hatred, I mean, it's a strong word.
I think maybe, yeah, maybe it does, yeah, I would probably reflect it back on myself rather than being angry at my partner, anybody else who's probably lost it. That's what he'd do. He'd be angry that I must have put his keys somewhere because he can't find them. He'd just be, yeah, beat myself up for one.
I was losing stuff. Why can't I remember where I put things? Yeah, I definitely would do that. Interesting.
I wouldn't. No, I don't think it would reflect on my self-image if I lost the keys. Or even if it did, it wouldn't negatively affect. I think that's just who I am.
That's who I am. I'm an organist versus like, oh, I'm so an organist. I hate that about myself. Yeah.
Well, 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 I should exaggerate these things for rhetorical effect. Has anything changed? At a very fundamental level, I'm so curious about how can we actually changing some of these things?
Because 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 real fundamental stuff is never healed. It never goes away. 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 insecurities to zero.
I've never seen it happen. No, that's all wrong. And even stoicism in a way is sort of a little guilty of that. Even something that's 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 won't experience anxiety. That's a little bit off really. I think the nature of life is that it is difficult, and not all the time, but a lot of the time things really go badly.
They don't go as you planned. And you start to get older, you realize your plans probably have nothing to do with how things 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, the task 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 it, 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? That's a very isolating thing.
Whereas actually, and weirdly, I'm doing this show at the moment, and this is entirely what the show is about, those isolating experiences, like they're exactly the things that join us all up. 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've failed, 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, you know, some sort of forced optimism. And it isn't about reaching a nirvana of a problem free life. I think that's somebody's 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. It would remind me of the faith-eelers 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. It's your fault. And that's no different from the secrets, you know, the gore of attraction.
Oh, fucking hell. This is the thing. It's the same thing. You have to completely commit yourself and it doesn't work out if the universe doesn't provide you with.
It's always jewellery and money and cars and build. 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 actual system completely and puts the the blame entirely on you.
It's a bit of an irony in the fact that people choose those books because they don't want responsibility. But failure puts responsibility back on them. Because I think of the law of attraction, 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 she believed that she could visualise anything into existence. I went to see you believe that you can just think about something and then it will happen so you can think about becoming a billionaire and it will happen to you.
Yes. And I was like, no, I don't agree with that. But how is she put out into the universe? And it comes back.
And what they're doing in there, to me it seems like they're alleviating their incense of responsibility. They're putting it up to the puppet master of the universe. Yeah, it must be awful. It was just a bad idea to begin with.
And more helpfully, how do we live comfortably with a universe that doesn't give a fuck what our plans are? Why would it? It doesn't make any sense. So how do we navigate?
And there is an ancient sort of image. It's appeared in so many different forms of an X equals Y diagonal. So if you imagine a graph and you've got a long one axis, you've got the X axis, 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.
And if you imagine the line that we lead in our lives, it's sort of an X equals Y line. 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 and 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 American optimistic model is that by believing in ourselves, we can, and this is an all hangover from Protestantism, this sort of work ethic that you can, by believing in yourself, you can crank that line up so it's in line with your aims and your goals.
And we've completely obliterated the idea of just fortune and life from that. We used to call people unfortunate. Now we call them losers. There's a lack of respect now for just the fact that life is throwing stuff back at you.
So how do you navigate that? I think actually snow system is a very good toolkit for, and snow system, as I'm sure, pretty much all of your listeners will be familiar with. But the bottom line of it is, is that, you know, the things in life, it's not the things in life that call your problems. It's the story that you tell yourself about.
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 over the last couple of thousand years. And then allied to that, you take all the stuff that you have no control over outcomes, what other people do and what they think and so on. And you can just decide 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 interest in that. There's interesting, there is a middle ground of if you are successful at any sort.
Parts of that, you're in control of the parts that you're not. It's like, best analogy, I've read for it is, going into a game in tennis If you go into a game of tennis,urous players you And Argentina's as well as you can. Activity and Vuitton, even if it's. regarded as a game, especially non-jobs.
then it sort of doesn't matter if your opponents are a bit better than you, or they start to win, you're not failing, you know, and the same goes for, you know, the stomachs with big movers and shakers, 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 think all that's very helpful and very useful. The only thing, if you sit as a toolkit to be lent into when it's helpful, but the, even that, if you take it as a sort of, you know, almost like a spiritual way of life can fall into the 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 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.
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, and you do that, that we have this signal. Sometimes it comes in a form of anxiety, sometimes it comes in a 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 and like a suit or tie because that's what society had an expectation of, but I'm feeling a signal inside which is, I need depression or I'm feeling, you know. I think that seems very important to listen to.
I think we, we do live out stories very easily, we do tend to see things in terms of a narrative and that's, um, it's an interestingly double edged thing because on the one hand 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 sort, the very notion of story has become so important, um, 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, for 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 were taking 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. Um, and, uh, so the, the story side of things, it seems to be part of just our, our makeup, but it's important not to fall in love with it too much and to realize that the nature of the story is that it's, there's stuff you're excluding, there's an image of, isn't there of telling a story of a campfire and a clearing and it's cozy, but then there's all the forest in the darkness with all the stuff that you're, uh, excluding from that story and that's where the monsters live and the nature of monsters that 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, tell ourselves about ourselves, um, 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 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 stuff that comes to onus in our own lives and, and in our, you know, in our societal lives as well as 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 what makes us feel resentful or what we envy or, you know, 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 a chunk older than you, but, um, 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 what we're getting our cues from, people showing us what we need to be successful, we need to look or act in a certain way that denotes moving forward in progress and we do that for the first half of life and it is sustained a little by this optimistic illusion that the, that the castles that we're chasing in the air that will reach if we just, you 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 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.
It was university that's sort of sparked your interest in hypnosis, right? Yeah, yeah, you saw someone on campus doing, Martin Taylor was doing a show, he was in my freshest week and that 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 my, I knew I meant it, I knew that I'd never seen it before, never come across hypnosis, I'd obviously heard of it but it was a good show, like it wasn't embarrassing people making looks deep but it was sort of just jaw-dropping. How did you know that you meant it? Because I've had that feeling in my life before where something just connects.
Yeah, well, I think it was the, again, those boxes were being ticked, something about performing, something about control, 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, it was appealing in ways that just weren't really, so it hadn't really thought about, hadn't thought about performing and yeah, I think that's what's happening, isn't it? There's something, it's resonating unconsciously, it's something that you kind of need and it was absolutely no doubt, so I just bought or sold any books I could find on the subject. You probably just learn on YouTube nowadays, but it's a 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 can't be like funding around trying to Google what to do, you know, you need to have the skills there and the way with all to deal with it. So I definitely learned the long way around, yeah.
And then you became, I think, from what I was really obsessed with magic and hypnosis to the point that you have a conversation with your parents and you tell them that, you can kind of... Yeah, I remember saying to my mum, I think I'm not going to be a lawyer, I was studying law in German, that's not going to be a lawyer, I'm going to be a magician. They're not fine, that sounds great, so it's much more fun. Which actually made me stop and think, okay, hang on, I'm being a bit rash.
What did they say, so they were okay with it? Totally, yeah, yeah. That's what she said, it sounds great, so it's much more fun. It's nice.
I wrote them a letter at the end of my first year saying, 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 that, just for letting me always do what I wanted to do. The only thing they ever put me pressure on me to do is learn how to drive, and I don't drive. I still don't drive, that's still a drive.
It's quite a common story, I have to say that your obsession seemed to come from, or at least be driven by some kind of insecurity, as in the reason why hypnosis initially resonated so much was because it was giving you something, it felt like it might offer you something that you were looking for, or different yourself. That's the story I hear all times. The level of obsession I saw went from that day when you discovered hypnosis, like doing all the books, teaching yourself, and then even beyond university, where you start working in restaurants for many, many years, how long from that first day when you saw hypnosis for the first time, until let's say before the TV stuff began, how long is that sort of tenure? I think the tenure is about ten years.
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 actually, the first TV show went out into September 2000. 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, 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 I wrote a book for magicians, which kind of got me known within that world, which that then led to being picked out for a TV show, that led to me getting a phone call from my name getting passed around in that world. So that's almost ten years of practicing without any real money.
When you say signing on for people that are in America, signing on as in welfare, I guess you'd call it. I was, I was, I lived in my student flat, I stayed, and it was quite a nice flat. I had all my books in it, my parrot, and so that didn't cost me very much. And I just loved his 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 so I developed my own sort of approach to it all. And that, yeah, I just remember thinking, I never had any ambition at all. And I just remember thinking, if I can take a cross-section of my life, is everything in the right place.
I'd like to get up whenever I like to get up. I'd like to feel like I make my own decisions about what I do from day to day. And I just had a fake idea of those sorts of things that were important to me. And, 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, never about where 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. I suppose the difference is that you get, 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 happen to happen somewhere along the line, but it doesn't come from me. I've, you can feel like a kid a little bit, like a child in a world of grown-ups. So I feel that sometimes, except now the grown-ups younger than me, which is strange.
But also I think maybe that's a good way to feel, maybe that's a nice way to be. If you contrast yourself from today to that young man in his restaurants in Bristol doing the magic tricks, is there a difference in your level of happiness? I think about this. 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 20s, well, my 20s 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. I said, that's a comfortable place to me. So part of me, I had more of that then. So slightly misses that, but actually that's, you know, also where it was, that was lonely sometimes.
And, um, you know, I like being in a relationship to, 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.
That's hard to do that as you grow up and you do have responsibilities and, you know, you're contributing to a household and you're a partner and you've got dogs and all of that. That's not, not quite as easy to say. A childish part of me would kind of quite like trying to go back to that, but not really, not really. I wouldn't really press a button to make it happen.
It's just a nice little sort of back at the head dream as we probably all have, maybe don't mean it's like kind of fantasy thing if we never really live it out. But it's just something nice about, about that. Um, it's almost like, um, I feel like you were, my head is like, you know, you're in Bristol, minding your own business, enjoying the simple life. And then they pulled you out of Bristol.
Um, 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 ends up feeling a bit like you're throwing the coal in 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 like the corporate world. They become a good lawyer, then they get promoted, then they're a partner and they're like, am I doing it? Yeah, I think we drift towards the things we're second best at. It's like, you know, the great teacher that becomes a headmaster, but would have been a better teacher than, uh, that's an easy thing to do, isn't it?
Um, and I think that sometimes I think about, or might be quite nice to act. I think I'm doing exactly that thing and sort of going from being, um, someone who's really good at what I do now, and I just sort of, why would I want to do it? I might be fun, but like what a strange thing we naturally start to drift towards things that we're not as good at. Um, I, the only, I would say, when you said that, I was thinking of, um, the early, the early TV shows, when I was sort of, which were very much a response to David Blaine's success in the state, so 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, if people have no idea who I am, listen to this far.
Um, uh, and generally what I've been doing for the last decade or so with the TV shows is putting people through these kind of Truman show style, big social experiments, often quite life or death situations they found themselves in without realizing the part of a show. And what that allowed me to do was not be the center of attention. And the reason, the reason for it is, actually, apart from just my own dissatisfaction with it, but just magically, if you, um, if you can trick your fingers and make anything happen, which is sort of what a magician does, dramatically, that's a very, um, unsound, uh, place to be. And this is, you know, Penn and Tella, the, yeah, it's just something that Tella, who apart from being a beautiful magician is a wonderful thinker, as well.
He spoke a lot about this, that it's actually very bad drama if you can make anything happen. What we want dramatically a hero is people that are struggling with the situation. Maybe they are trying to get to point A, but actually they end up at point B. Um, and his thoughts and my own sort of, 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 watching a real member of the public go through quite intense drama.
And that has to be more appealing when somebody going, Hey, look at me on tech level, which is sort of the bottom line of what most magic is. So I think that was a kind of semi deliberate, uh, shift that came from a moment of pause. 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? 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 of Mercedes in the minute, yeah, and you basically, what was it? You, um, you raised red her not her future. You read into her life.
I think it was that the psychic that I was challenging had mentioned, um, that she drove a little red mini and she'd been really impressed by that. I've seen him pull up his car right parked next to her in the car park. Yeah, but actually I think it's the opposite. I think the, um, 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. Um, 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. Um, so I, the other 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. So I've tried to avoid making when I, when I have sort of, you know, attack those areas rather than just attack them and make it negative.
I've always tried to recreate something and make it more interesting and better while at the same time saying I'm not redoing 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, um, was giving them mediumship readings, right?
So I say, it's come up if you've lost somebody that you would, that you'd want to get in touch with, if you were to see a medium and a skeptical audience kind of like me, right? Because they're my audiences. So they come up and say, and I would start to give them these readings. And I would say, no, I'm getting a message from your auntie Jill.
Is that right? Do you have an auntie Jill that passed away? 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, um, and I'm lying to you, but she said, so I would like pepper these like impossible information I was giving with reminders that I was making it up. Um, and I just found that really, really sort of 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 or whatever. So I've tried to find a more creative approach to that.
Some people think you are, you asked supernatural in your powers. Some, well, I was going to actually after that, I've had a week into that show. I came out as a girl at Sage Door said, um, I wondered if you could put me, I'd actually get on it. She was, you know, in the 20s.
And 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 stuff isn't real.
And she said, no, no, 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 that. I get what's extraordinary.
Um, how we kind of can balance these things in our, in our heads. So yeah, I, I show people believe all sorts of things about me. I think 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.
The other extreme people saying, I'm psychic and I want to 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 me. There's always going to be people at the far edges that will have strange and extreme reactions.
Um, and then, you know, I think there's a certain license on stage, which is different from TV. If you're doing stuff down the barrel of the TV, if you're talking to people at home, there's a level of directness and honesty there. 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 if you don't want to 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 am doing this for reals where I said there's a lot of not tricks. Um, and then once the show's realized, once we realized there's 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. And to, and I've enjoyed that now, I like leaning into the ambiguity of what I'm doing. Because again, 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 something worthwhile to be said, it's much easier to say that if you're not trying to make it about yourself. Has anything ever stumped you in terms of the supernatural? You know, I was, your work is primarily based on psychology, right?
So has there, have you ever done anything and thought, how the fuck did that happen? Do you think something about it? One, I was in a restaurant in Bristol, approaching a table, which is 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 business men.
And one of them says, Oh, no, no, thank you. Sorry. Okay. And I said, walk away.
The other one went, but queen of hearts 13 cards down. And I sort of laughed and walked away, then went into a corner and counted the cards down on the 13th one down was the queen of hearts. No idea how we did that. If you are listening, please get in touch.
That's bugged me for 20 years. And the, um, the other thing was actually doing, I did a show called Miracle, which was, so this is also on Netflix. It was a, uh, previous, uh, stage show, uh, a few stages 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, because again, very skeptical audience, like not, you know, if you've, 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 and inverted commas for people in the audience, but at the same time, I'm kind of undercutting it too. 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 the 40s. She'd been paralyzed on one side of her body since she was four or something in flutter 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, someone, 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 you're seeing is that it's the psychological component of suffering, right? Like if you take an x-ray before and after, there's nothing to happen, nothing's changed. But that, how that person is living out there, um, affliction, how their relationship with their suffering has, that's been made to change. So what you're seeing, it's a mixture of two things that are going on.
There's adrenaline, which is an actual painkiller, so you make the whole experience full of adrenaline, um, you know, in the same way as a lion walked into this room and you 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, such as adrenaline, that's fine. And then, but this other thing that, which is maybe kickstarted by the experience of the adrenaline, that you, you, the 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, and all the stuff that you build up around pain, you know, the way people respond to you. So there's a whole network of, um, social aspects to it, over protecting 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 you couldn't explain. Um, when really nothing had happened beyond she was just, I've 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, maybe I could do this, maybe I could offer this as a show of like secular healing. It'll only work on some people and you're only dealing with relatively small percentages. Um, and I did start to think that because 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 like when you go to these events, the big name healers, I've seen Benny Hinn and others, um, what you don't 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, I keep it down syndrome that I spoke to the mum and she, she'd taken her son to so many shows falling around the country. Um, and things that they're not going to get, they're not going to get healed by those kind of dynamics. Um, so that's an ugly 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 don't know how to sustain that or what you're supposed to do other than being told to give more money. You know, you know, when people discovered through your TV work that you had this skill and talent, I imagine you've got lots of approaches to use it for less ethical reasons, because I, I mean, help me get the girlfriend back, help me close the deal, help me rob a bank.
A little, not, um, I suppose people would have to ask that, wouldn't they? The only, I've been asked by the FBI, been asked by the police to help. I mean, it's never gone beyond that discussion, because I just, I mean, you know, there's plenty of businesses as well, but it's just, it's not my world. I feel like, uh, I'm an entertainer.
I'm also quite, um, 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 be, I don't have the, whatever that thing is that I feel like I just apply this to anyone. I don't know, because it never went beyond them saying, would you come and talk to us about something and getting back and saying, no, it's not appropriate. So I don't know, no, I won't know.
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 slight finder, 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 and years and years and years. I see it in Lewis Capaldi, the musician who went and played and pubs in Scotland for years and years and years and years and just absolutely loved it when to say that.
I see the 10 year that which love young kids don't appreciate because we all want it now and we want it for the wrong reasons. But what else was it about you, the way your delivery, your style that you think and hindsight made you compelling? Oh, is that really difficult? It's difficult.
Even if any of the answers be hard to say it. Um, I think, 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 because you really enjoyed them in and of themselves.
You probably weren't thinking, I don't do this, I get ahead, I can secure this to myself 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 good at it. If that feels like all you need in the moment anyway, then why wouldn't you love it and put all your passion into it and get very good at it?
So that helped. 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 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 was helpful. I think as I've had a good team around me, it's not like a one, not really a one man thing. There's always, although I had had my own experience for those 10 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. And then I think what does help is letting it grow up with me as I've got older.
I've just let the thing develop with me. I don't really know what job to, you know, you asked me before we started, I would refer to myself. I never really know. I mean, mentalist, I think technically it's what I am, but I don't know a couple of years ago, I had the book on happiness coming out, which is essentially book of Greek philosophy, come out the same month as a ghost track, I've been at the whole park.
And I do remember thinking, I don't know what that is, I don't know what job that is that allows for those two things, it's certainly even mentalism. So, yeah, just allowing the thing to grow up with me. And in terms of like, you know, occasionally people talk about the brand and so on, it's a very helpful thing. I think it's let the thing just be you and not particularly driven by the limitations of what, when I first started, I remember reading I used to go on and magic discussion forums and so on to see what musicians were saying about me.
And there's 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, and they would see that as a real sort of negative. And I was like, that's interesting 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. So, and that's another thing about playing on your own, isn't it?
And you, or if you feel like an outsider's a kid, I think as you get older, you value that, that becomes like a bit of a superpower. You hang on to that feeling of being an outsider and you kind of use that. So, that's always helped me. I just followed my nose for what feels fun and interesting and worthwhile.
And as I got older, I've let those things grow with me. And I find a lot of life much more interesting than magic. Magic is quite a childish thing, 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 both feet in your craft or your art form or whatever, as if the thing is feels to you so huge and expansive and all that you know, you can't, you're sort of overwhelmed by it. You can't move it anywhere. If you've got one foot in that thing and you're 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.
I see that in your shows. I see how your other passions are riddled throughout the show. I remember watching a show in New York, which was just astounding. It's funny because I think of myself as a smart person.
I think I'll figure this out. He won't be able to make me look the other way or he won't be able to control my narrative. He won't be able to get me. And every single time I've been to shows in London, New York, they're all just, I leave in silence.
Because you're right, I like misdirection where you've got me thinking this thing. And then I go, what the hell? It's as constant like disappointment with myself that I'm not as smart as I think of. It's always like, what can I do?
It's always lovely feeling to start with. And the section on when you have the painting. I only give anything away. The painting.
Is this in the show that you saw in New York? I believe it was New York. I've been to London in New York. One with my family in London, which was many years ago, probably I'd say four or five, maybe five years ago.
And then the one in New York, I think it was a pre-pandemic. It was just before the pandemic. So I'm painting a picture that someone comes up and thinks of a famous person and then I start to do a painting and then it's upside down and I flip it round at the end. Is that what you're thinking of?
Yes. And the thing that I think stands to be the most is how unbelievable you are as a painter. And the fact you could do that upside down. You can paint such an incredible image upside down.
It's also stunning. But that clearly is describing what you described there, what you've pulled in a love of painting. 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 on top level. 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, yeah, I bring what I can to it. And I just make sure the shows are about something else. And a 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 to show about how the things in life that isolate are actually the things that we all tend to have in common, which then gets played out literally for two years during lockdown. 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's a childish way of impressive people.
So it's what you, what can you bring to it that will give it value. And then I think then you're into a much more interesting, worthwhile area. In your books about happiness, 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 I haven't spoken to you now. I can kind of understand because you have a much more today, this week, do my best approach to life. But what's wrong with goal setting in your point of view? I don't think I'm wrong with goal setting for short term goals.
It's obviously, you know, can be very useful. 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 has always been a workaholic.
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 my colleagues will say. So he decided he was going to build up a company and sell it and become a multi-millionaire. And that was sort of the goal. And then did spend all the time that I knew him.
He was building up a company and sold it, relatively young and had a huge amount of money. And then she didn't know what to do with his life. It was miserable. And actually found himself going to a support group with a bunch of similar millionaires that had all made the same mistake.
And it sort of missed the fact that actually it was the building up of the company that was, is what gave him meaning in his life. That was what was important. And it's the old thing, isn't it, you know, the, you know, the arrival at the end of the journey is just, it might just be taking a coat off and putting your bag down. That might be all it is.
It's not necessarily the destination, you know, it's the old thing, isn't it, of the journey being what was important. But it was suddenly, he realized that, and that really changed his life, actually, realizing that what he thought was going to be important wasn't important. Plus, how do we know it's going to make us happy that so many years before, you know, it's so terrible occasioning that we lose flexibility, depending how we set those goals, but we become too rigid. And it's like playing, it's like playing a game of chess, shopping how it talks about this.
It's a really good analogy that it's like starting a game of chess, deciding how you're going to play in 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? Why do we want goals?
Do you think it gives us a sense of certainty? Well, we need, it's about, it's about moving forward, isn't it? It's important because we need to navigate through life. I mean, the first half of life, I think it's, 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 surely 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. I see even the goals that I had as a story that gave my life meaning when I was 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 shame would be alleviated. But as I, as that failed me, I realized that I was going to have to sit set about pursuing something else.
Well, there's the two problems. You either get the goal, 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 building up the company or whatever it is, you're doing yourself out of.
You're purposely and intentionally moving to the point where you're going to move that meaning from your life. Have you developed any coping mechanisms for adversity? Chapter three in your book, Book of Secrets, is about the role friction has, the relationship it has with happiness. And we've talked a few times about adversity, but is there 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?
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 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 be okay that this thing is like that? And not just to go, oh, 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. My partner's has a much more sort of anxious personality than I have, and that stuff doesn't help in the tool, but it certainly helps me. Another thing, there's a great book by David Dostino 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 whatever, and 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 that if you get them into place, they naturally create a more motivational state. And he's a psychologist. And 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 going to study for your exam or are you going to go out and party? Well, the person that is going to not party and study for the exam is valuing the needs of that future self that's done within the exam, more than the current self that sat there would like to go out, right? So he's taking that as the sort of the world of motivation we're talking. So he sets up various experiments to see what can you do to maximize people's into the value of their place on that future self.
And the three emotions 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 into the experiment that makes them feel grateful about something, and then they come in and they have to do a task that's impossible. How long do they spend trying to do it? They'll spend 40% 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 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.
And one of the questions was how many, it's always dollars, but how many dollars, like if you could have $100 a year from now, or X amount now, what would that X amount be that would balance it out? And it's normally $17 like it really makes no fiscal sense at all. But most people would say, okay, I'll take 17 now, rather than 100 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 in a state of gratitude for something again, totally unrelated, it goes up to $31.
That was great. Sort of by the by finding when they did the experiment, it averaged out to 31. In other words, people were valuing the future needs more than the needs now, if that makes sense of that. Because actually, it's shown with something as simple as that.
Well, I read a bit chapter 12 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 instant graphic because when I said make sense, it makes absolutely no sense. I can't understand how gratitude, how making someone feel grateful with a completely unrelated incident would make them choose to have more money.