Joe Rogan - Derren Brown on Psychic Mediums

Sadly, what do we have? We have people like me, we have magicians doing tricks and psychic mediums pretending to connect you with the dead. That's like our tawdry answer to providing a sense of mystery. They're just hustlers. It's horrendous. I sat in a studio audience once and watching a psychic, it was one of those TV filmed ones where there's an audience. It was just like, so before filming starts he came out and he said, is there anybody here that's hoping that someone's going to come through and all these hands go up and he just asked people, so who are you hoping will come through? Okay, what do they look like? Is there anything, because I'll let you know if they come through, is there anything I can ask, any bit of information they could give me that nobody could possibly know that will prove to you it's them? Yes, yes, he drowned and he was wearing a red sweater. Okay, well, I'll let you know if he comes through and then they start filming and he just says all those things to them. I think the reason why that stuff is like people do believe it is that the lie is so ugly that it's so much easier to believe something amazing must be going on there than just, is it just that ugly and pathetic a lie? It's such a horrible experience. There's so many of them. I mean, they have a television show where there was a medium television show where this woman was connecting people with their dead relatives and it was so fake. The questions were shitty. It was so poorly thought out. It wasn't just a lie. It was a lie by a moron. That's a shame. That's the, there was, I, in one of my shows I had, I got like 50 people up on stage, had like a, like an audience thing set up on stage and I was doing mediumship with them. I'm providing like, like very accurate information, but at the same time saying, I am, you know, I'm lying to your grandmother's telling me, well, she's not telling me anything. I'm making this up, you understand? And then after the, so it was kind of, it was an interesting kind of like space, right? And then afterwards, I think it was the first night of doing the show. I went out the stage door and I was talking to people there and there was a girl who'd seen the show and she said, will you, um, I wonder if you could put me in touch with my dead grandmother? And I said, oh God, well, I hope you understand from what I've just done that. I don't, I'm not really doing it. That's kind of the point. She said, Oh no, no, I understand. I know you can't really do it, but would you be able to put me in touch with her? That's amazing capacity for just this kind of dissonance. Well, that's how cults work, right? Yeah. I mean, that's the only way they can work. Once you get a hold of the manuscript and you read whatever it was, whether it's Mormonism and Joseph Campbell, the 14 year old boy who found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus that only he could read with his magic seer stone. If you, if you're, you know, if you have any critical thinking left in you at all at that point, you just, you put the book down and go, what the fuck am I doing with my life? But people don't want that. They want, they want the, the, the universe is so open-ended and the possibility of your, your existence expiring at any moment and you just vanishing into nothingness and this consciousness just literally stopping the lights go black and that's it. It's so terrifying to us that we, we would prefer some nonsensical, unrealistic version of something, but rigid. So we know how to follow it and a bunch of other people follow it as well. And we have this community of people that follow it and we gain comfort in that. And some very, very.