Joe Rogan - Derren Brown Explains Hypnosis

And so when I first saw, I started my career as a hypnotist and I saw this guy performing at university and I just thought I'm going to do that. And I didn't realise at the time all these boxes that it was ticking, you know, performing that sort of need for affirmation and love and centre of attention. And also the control aspect of it, you know, the kind of, yeah, the control aspect and also the kind of people, particularly the sort of guys that would respond well to hypnosis and come up on stage and respond well to it, tended to be exactly the kind of guys that would have really intimidated me before. So that was like at an unconscious level and I hope I've grown out of that now mainly, but yeah, it ticked a lot of boxes. So that's how I started and I was definitely driven by insecurity because any sort of magic which sort of followed for me on from the hypnosis, basically it is the quickest, most fraudulent route to impressing people. That's, you know, the subtext is only, you know, look at me, aren't I great, which is not that interesting after a while. So I've tried to, you know, as I've grown up, I've tried to move it into a different area and one that's a little more resonant than just showing off. That's fascinating that you started out doing a hypnosis show. Was it a comedy show? No, it was sort of, I would mainly perform at like colleges and I do a demonstration and then have questions and answers afterwards. And I wasn't making people look stupid. It was an entertainment show and I guess it was kind of funny, but it was, it was, it's just a really interesting thing. And the trouble with doing it on stage is of course it gets mixed up with people just kind of playing along and stuff. So it's, but if you take that out of it, it's just a really interesting area. And I've done this stuff for, you know, 20 years back home and I'm not, I don't think of myself as a hypnotist. That was just kind of where I started. But the suggestion based techniques of that is something I've continued with and brought into different areas. And I still don't fully understand it. You know, now it's, there's, you can have a quiet climb inside someone's head and know what they're experiencing. Like I used to do in the, when I used to do these like stage hypnosis shows, the last thing I did was to, I'd tell these people on stage that I was invisible, right? And I'd float something through the air, right? Like this bottle I've got here. And it was normally something big, I like a chair. And they'd be freaking out and, you know, running off stage and so on. But afterwards when I'd have this kind of Q&A, I'd ask them, what was your, what was your actual experience? Like, like the show's over now, be honest, what were you, what were you experiencing? And you'd get some people that would say, well, yeah, you were obviously just floating that, you were just holding it, but I kind of felt like I had to play along. And then you'd get this interesting air in the middle of, of like, well, I kind of, now when I think back, yes, of course it was you, but it was, and I sort of knew it was you, but I emotionally just completely, I could only experience it as a terrifying floating bottle or whatever it was. So that's a bit like an actor, like getting caught up in a role, I guess, like they know, they know they're on stage and it's a character, but nonetheless, emotionally committed. And the other extreme people that would not accept that it was me floating it, just they, that must have been on a wire or something, there's no, there's no way that I can drop you back in the picture in my memory of that thing. So how do you, you know, how do you, how do you judge what that experience is? And are those people that are saying, no, you were really invisible? Are they just saying that because they want to be like the best subjects in that group? I mean, how do you tease it all apart? That is the, is that, that must be a real issue, right? The people that just want to please you and are playing along. Can you tell if you were hypnotizing people? Yeah, I can tell, but the way I use it now is kind of, I use it quite sort of subtly in the show. I don't like overtly, you know, hypnotize people. So that means, it can mean one of two things. It either means it just, I'm not interested in people playing along because I'm not just trying to create the effect of someone hypnotizing people. The effect of someone hypnotize, they need to genuinely be responding to this thing in order for the next bit to work. In which case I have to filter out anybody playing along, but occasionally, occasionally it doesn't matter. Like a lot of the time, like I'll get people up on stage and I'll shake their hand and there are this rapid handshake induction that the guy did, you know, just falls to the floor. And there are times that that matters and they have to be, that has to be a really honest response. Other times I can tell they're sort of half into it and they're just a bit intimidated. But for the 2000 people looking, that might look, it kind of might look like the same thing and then it won't matter. How exactly does that work? The handshake induction. I don't know. Well, it's a, I take no responsibility for explaining this to you, tens of millions of listeners and viewers. But it's, you're interrupting an automatic process, right? This is the key to it. It was made popular by, made popular by, I guess, Richard Bandler, who's the guy behind NLP and so on. I don't know if he kind of created this thing, but perhaps Erickson did before him. I don't know. Anyway, you take an automatic process and you interrupt it in the middle. So like when you're shaking hands with somebody, it's such a familiar process that when you start, you're not thinking, okay, I'm going to grip this person's hand now and I'm going to move my hand up and down with them a few times. Then I'll take my hand away. You just kind of do it automatically. And there's something about interrupting that that leaves people really flummoxed and bewildered because they're really, really caught off guard. Like if you imagine somebody comes up to you in the street and says, it's not half past seven. You know, your reaction isn't to go, yeah, yeah, I know it's 20 past nine. Your reaction is a sort of, you think like you've missed something, like you're trying to make sense of it. It's a strange kind of puts you on the back foot. And at that point, if you, if you've got somebody who's fairly suggestible and people coming up on stage, it's such an odd moment for them anyway. They're naturally very suggestible that a clear instruction to sleep or whatever you want to give them tends to be taken very deeply. And very often then you'll see I'll shake hands and I'll break the pattern of the handshakes. I'll often take their hand and lift it up to their face and say sleep and show them their hand like that. And they just sleep. And well, it's not sleep, but it's a kind of, it looks like, I mean, they, they'll do anything from eyes closed, head drops down to just drop like a, like a dead weight on the floor. You know, I found this most interesting actually was like applying this in slightly more useful everyday situations was as a sort of like a self defense technique. I was walking between. So I was like, must've been like 20 or something. I was at a magic convention and I was walking from one hotel to another. I'm dressed like a three piece velvet suit as this skinny British. I might as well have, you know, punch me in the throat tattooed across my face. And this guy comes up and it's like, he's drunk. It's about three in the morning, drunk, aggressive is with his girlfriend, clearly looking for a fight. And he sort of, he comes up to me and he says, what are you, what are you fucking looking at? What are you looking at? And because I'd spoken about this, how to deal with this sort of thing, but I'd never found myself in this situation. I kind of had it all mentally rehearsed. So I said to him, I said, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high. And I guess there's an equivalent to this with sort of adrenaline dump. I think it's called in a, in martial arts, but there's a, it, it just like he's got all this adrenaline and then a thing like that from me, which is just out of context. Like it makes sense. I'm not like talking gibberish. It makes sense, but it's just out of context. So now suddenly he's thinking, I've what I've missed something. So now he, he was sort of, you went, what? And I said, and his girlfriend walked off and I said, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high. I spent some time in Spain. The walls that were very high. But if you look at the ones here, they're tiny, they're nothing. And then he just sort of broke down. He sort of went, wow. And, uh, he wasn't quite crying, but it was just, it was like all the adrenaline and everything just, just flooded out of him. And he sat down and I ended up sitting next to him on the, uh, like, you know, on the roadside, um, asking him, you know, so what I was, the plan was I was going to try and stick his feet to the floor and I had his whole plan. He just kind of collapsed and sat down. Yeah, that was the, cause I knew it'd be like this highly suggestible state. And like either way, the moment of aggression and past, but I ended up, ended up weirdly sitting with him, asking him what had happened that evening. And his girlfriend, I think she bottled somebody or something horrible. It happened. So we'd got out with all this aggression, but it's a, it's a good one. Isn't it? If you just have like, um, it could be just a song lyric or just some, some weird kind of thing that you can just go into in those situations. I mean, if someone's running you with a knife, it's a bit difficult, but you don't have to do that. You're kind of strangely taken control of a situation. Otherwise what are you going to do if they say, what are you looking at? You can't, there's no way you can answer that without being on the back foot. So it just kind of nicely kind of inverts the situation and puts them on the back foot, which anyway, it worked. It was, uh, it was kind of fun. Isn't there like a process required to hypnotize someone? You could just do it that way and saying, just talk them through some sort of a program that makes them think their foot is stuck to the floor. It all depends on the moment. I had, I used to hypnotize people in my, um, in my room when I was a student, right? So I was the guy that did hypnosis. I'd have people coming, you know, regularly coming to try it out. And, um, I had this, this one time, I used to leave people with, like, if they were responsive to it. And this was like, I was really early days, just like, you know, 20 minutes, half an hour of relaxing somebody and maybe suggesting that the hands were getting light and floating or heavy and they couldn't lift them. So kind of, you know, kind of basic stuff. But I would leave them if they were very suggestible with the instruction that when you come back, if I click my fingers, you'll go back into the sleep state and they, you know, they kind of get conditioned to that. And it, you know, it'll often work even like a week later. And this guy came and, uh, I thought I'd seen him before. I thought he'd been on a previous week. So he sat down and went, okay, look at me and sleep, click my fingers. And he went out, whatever that means. Right. And then we did whatever it was. Maybe, you know, perhaps he wanted to stop smoking or his hands floating in the air, whatever it was. And at the end of it, I realized in talking to him that I hadn't met him before. So then I'm like, well, how did, how did, why did you respond to me clicking my fingers? And cause I don't have magic fingers. There's nothing like anything going on here other than, and I realized it was just that, it was just that moment of my kind of confidence with it. And the fact fortuitously that he was also very suggestible and put those two things together. That's what made it work. It was just that, that psychological moment for him. That was more important than the nature of the 20 minute script that I'd been learning and using up to that point. So that was kind of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the that was a seminal. So your, your confidence in that he had already been under. Yeah. I didn't question it because I really, I believed he had. And it just kind of, it just sort of happened. And then he just, if he hadn't been a suggestible type, then it probably wouldn't have worked. Yeah. But luckily he was. And that kind of really, really changed the way that I, uh, that I, you know, thought about it noticed. And also started this, you know, this realization that ultimately my, my kind of toolkit with what I do is, is the stories that people are telling themselves. That's, that's kind of, that's really, you know, all there is even a magician showing you a card trick is just getting you to tell yourself a story, edit, edit this event in such a way that you go, Oh, you know, I picked a card and then it disappeared. And it was, and it was in my pocket. He never went near me. And you edit out all the bits that don't seem important. Like when he complimented you on your jacket earlier on in the day, it may have stuck a card in there or the bit where he took the card back for a moment, whatever. Cause you don't, you know, you're, you're, you're being sold a story with particular sort of edit points. And, you know, to me, that's interesting cause that's what, that's what life is. You know, we have this infinite data source coming at us and we can, we just, we have to kind of reduce it to stories to make, to make sense. So I think stripping aside all the kind of vaudeville and tacky associations of hypnotists and magicians and so on, I think there's something, there's something interesting at the heart of it. I think that that our storytelling capacity is kind of endlessly fascinating to me. Well, it's fascinating in that regard, but it's also fascinating that there seems to be like some cheat code to the human mind. Like there's a, there's a way you can like lock into like an admin panel and all of a sudden you're, you're doing things like telling people they don't really don't want to be smoking or putting them into this hypnotic mindset by just snapping your fingers and saying sleep. Like it's odd. I don't think, I don't think it is that I think it looks like that. And that's the problem because it looks, it, it's, you so often see it when performers are doing it, when they're often going for a kind of theatrical effect. If you go and look at it like a clinical environment where hypnosis is being investigated, it isn't like that at all. It's much more kind of boring in a way. So it doesn't have any theater attached to it. It's much more on, you know, kind of intuitively understandable. Have you been hypnotized yourself? I'm terrible. I'm a really bad, really bad subject. I had one experience where I only won when I was in like a workshop thing that I was there as a, like a, you know, paying person. I wasn't giving the workshop and I was sat with the, the exercise was it really worked for me. It may work for others. So you're split into pairs and the idea is you start to describe a scene. So you sat, I was sat with this woman, you close your eyes, you start to describe a scene and you go back and forth adding details. Right? So she says, oh, okay. I'm laying on a beach. So I just imagine that. I go, okay. I'm laying on a beach and I can, I can feel the warmth of the sun on my face. So I'm just kind of like imagining it and joining in with the story. And then I just remember somebody going, okay, guys, time up time for lunch. And I, I had been on a, I had been on a beach and I had completely just, I'd been there like a dream. It was completely real. At some point it had tipped into that. That's the only experience I've had of it. Other than that, I don't respond to it. I'm just not, I think it's just, it's just suggestibility. It's something about, and we get it when, you know, we, we get it when a doctor gives us a placebo and we respond to that because this authority figure is giving us that or, or the way we absorb opinions of people that we admire and experts that we admire, how we just more easily take those on board unquestioningly. This is all the same thing. It's just suggestion. The trouble is it, is it, most of the time it's done through the, the world of the performing hypnotist, which isn't, isn't giving really a very clear and fair view of what's, of what's going on. Because it's so theatrical. And so, yeah, because often you, you know, you're, you're relishing in things like I click my fingers and this guy went to sleep. Yeah. But that's not really, you know, what are they doing? They're kind of, are they just, are they just kind of responding? Cause you've just asked them to, and you, they know that when you click their fingers, they're supposed to go to sleep is there's a real range of possible experiences that you might look like a power, but it doesn't mean it is. They might just be just complying. Yeah. I don't, I was going to do some of this stuff on stage without using the hypnosis to show that this, I don't think there's anything that happens under hypnosis that can't be done without. And I was having this discussion with my friend, Andy, who directs and co-writes my stage shows with me. And I was saying like that thing of, you know, when you, when a hypnotist gets someone to eat an onion and says, you know, this is a classic hypnotic stun, gives them a raw onion and says, it's a delicious juicy apple. Now eat it and enjoy it. And you get somebody munching into an onion and like having no problem eating it. And I was like, well, I'm sure that feels like if you're just going to pull it off without hypnosis, would that just happen anyway? And Andy said, I bet, I bet you can just do it anyway. And he went to my fridge, took out an onion, took a big bite of it and it was fine because he's right. So he's proving a point there, right? So he's in a different mental state than somebody going, God, I dare you to take a bite of that onion. When suddenly you're like, you're preempting the, you know, the disgust and all the reasons not to do it. But the fact that he was just going, I bet you can do it and trying to prove a point, man, you did it and it was fine. So that, that was a different mental state and it worked. So that wasn't hypnosis, but the end result still, if you did that on stage and pretended to hypnotize somebody first, it would look like you've done something amazing. So I don't know. Is it, it's, it's, to me, it's just, it's just that story that someone's telling themselves. Well, didn't it, did it taste like an onion to him or did it taste like an apple? It's just, it would have, no, no, no, no, it would have tasted like an onion. There was no suggestion. What about with the people that are hypnotized? Does it taste like an apple to them? Well, I don't know. It's like in, when I'm invisible, what are they seeing? I think for some of them it will, you know, taste and pain and things like that and discomfort. It's all very subjective. But the end result of doing this thing that looks like it couldn't happen without some magical process. That's the key. And none of these things really demand that. Even when, even when you look at people being undergoing surgery through hypnosis and being wide awake and being cut open, so you think, well, that must be evidence. The hypnosis is some special thing because that couldn't happen otherwise. But of course it can. You know, the layer of skin that feels pain is actually sort of quite thin. So once you get through that, when you're moving organs around, that's not, that's not a painful process anyway. Plus very often they tend to use a bit, a little bit of like a local anesthetic anyway, just to numb the very top layer of skin. So again, what looks amazing very often isn't, it's a, it's an endlessly rich and bizarre area to me. And I kind of, as I said, I don't really think of myself as a hypnotist, but the, the, that process, that kind of ability for people to get into this space where they can have that kind of experience is, is something I, you know, I'll always find interesting. The, the, one of the recent stage shows I did, it's called Miracle. I don't know if you've seen it, but I'm faith healing in the second half. So using exactly the same idea. And I've, I've got an audience that are like me, you know, they don't believe in that. And I'm saying, look, I'm, you know, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in this either. But will you just kind of go with me, at least at the start, because the results are really interesting. And I, I just started doing this, this faith healing, not really knowing if it was going to work. I thought, well, I can get some adrenaline going. And I know, could see the techniques that the, the charlatan faith healers were using. And I thought, well, I just, you know, I'll do that. And I thought, well, the adrenaline kills pain. So if I get some adrenaline going, there's bound to be people that said, oh, I had a pain in my back and now it's gone. But the actual results, admittedly with like small percentages of the audience, right? Not everybody, but the people that were coming up and saying, I had this problem and now it's gone. And there was a woman that had a, she'd been paralyzed down one side of her body since a kid. And she's like in her 40s now, she's in floods of tears going, I could move my arm. And this was, this is a skeptical audience like me that know that there's kind of playing along with something. And nonetheless, again, small percentage, not, not, not everybody, but having, having these kinds of experiences. It is, so that's, that's the psychological component of suffering, which is, which is, which was really eye opening, doing that show night after night after night. Well, faith healing is going to be a form of hypnosis, right? Yeah, it's all this. Exactly. It's the same world is playing that they both, what they're both joined by is, is the idea of suggestibility. And it doesn't, and sometimes those healings are sort of, I mean, if you take an x-ray before and afterwards, nothing's changing. But in as much as a lot can depend on this psychological component, it can, can really make a difference. The percentages are getting smaller. So 3000 people in the audience, 300 people come up, 10 people come up on stage and I'm, you know, involving them in the show. But getting even smaller, there are people that like a year later were getting in touch and say, just so you know, that thing did actually clear, like it hasn't come back. Because I thought it would only last for 10 minutes while they're on stage. And then, which is why you don't tell people to throw their pills away and so on. Right. But we're in probably like that half a percent now, which is always going to be kind of pretty extraordinary. But it was like a real, a real thing. So it's still if you had 200 people and one of them actually cured from that. That is immensely bizarre. It's immensely bizarre. But it's bizarre. And and like I had this bad shoulder for a long time and I got really used to when I put a jacket on, kind of putting this in my left arm, putting it in, like letting my left arm go dead and then using my right arm to pull the thing up. Right. Now, I don't know how much I really need to do that anymore or whether I'm just doing it out of habit. But if somebody got me up on stage and said, your left shoulder is healed, it's happened now and kind of made me feel a bit, oh, now go on. Try it. Try and move your move your arm. I think in the surprise of it and the sheer kind of just snapping out of that habit of being like, this is my dead arm, I probably would be very surprised that I could actually move it as much as I can. You know, it's just it's like when you break it down, it's like not that amazing. But when you when you when you see the the the more kind of extreme and exciting ends of that, it's it is mind blowing. And then you realize how these performers, how you start to go mad yourself and think, well, I've got this special gift and I could pack out Stadia doing like I did think at one point, why don't I do like a secular healing show? I can say, well, this is it's just, you know, it doesn't work on everybody and it may only work for 10 minutes, but it certainly works in some meaning of the word. Anyway, I didn't do that, but, you know, you can start to go mad.