Master Illusionist Derren Brown: “ My Job Is To Control The Uncontrollable"
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to

to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Wednesday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. When I was living in New York, so I was just finishing the first draft of The Obstacle is the Way.

10 plus years ago now, which seems insane, I decided I was going to buy myself something nice, like as a treat for finishing the book. And I found this antique dealer that had a small Carrara marble bust of Marcus Aurelius. Like Marcus Aurelius himself is probably not smaller than my fist. It's more like a baby's fist. It's maybe six inches or so tall. And it's from the 1800s.

And, you know, I got it. It's sat on all my different desks where I've lived and written most of my books. And sometimes when I look at it, I think like, who had this made, right? How many people's desks has this sat on?

There's actually something that Matthew Arnold talks about in a famous essay he wrote about Marcus Aurelius, how the bust of Marcus has adorned the houses of sort of admiring people basically since Marcus's own lifetime. I mean, there's even a statue. We did a Daily Stoic email about it, about this statue in like the Cleveland Museum of Art is of Marcus, but probably stolen. And you just think about the generations of people that owned this, that looked at it. Why did, why, why this person that we've never met

who was by no means perfect, who wasn't some towering conqueror like Caesar or Napoleon. Why him? Why his bust? I know what it does for me, but I'm just always fascinated by this question. And so it was interesting when I interviewed today's guest, he was in this sort of dark room filming. And the thing I noticed out of the corner of my eye that we ended up talking about was his bust of

of Marcus Aurelius. He showed it to me and I was really excited to talk to Darren Brown, who actually was one of the first people we ever interviewed as part of Daily Stoic back in 2018 before we even dreamed of doing a podcast because he had this book out called Happy Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine, which is about how stoicism helped him reclaim his happiness and

And I'm fascinated by Darren because, you know, obviously lots of people are interested in stoicism. There were fewer back then, but I'm always interested in high performers who stoicism has helped do what they do, particularly when I don't really understand what it is they do. And Darren Brown is probably the foremost mentalist in the world.

He's done a number of big specials in the UK and all over the world, including some insane ones like when he played Russian Roulette live. He led a seance. You can check out his YouTube channel, which is Official Darren Brown. That's Darren D-E-R-R-E-N Brown to see some of these stunts. He's toured all over the world. He's won all sorts of awards.

As I said, he also happens to be a practicing stoic who just released this cool project with a platform called Rebind, where you can read not just Marx's realist meditations, but Darren's annotations throughout.

I've raved about the Robin Waterfeld annotated edition of Marcus Aurelius, which I'll link to. We carry that at the Painted Porch. This would be a version we would carry if there was a physical version because it's awesome. And in today's episode, Darren and I talk about how he was introduced to Stoicism, how this philosophy has been a guiding force throughout his career, the ways that his perspective on the Stoics and Marcus has changed. Like, you just think about it. By definition, if we interviewed him first in 2018, he would have been a Stoic.

He's at least seven years into it. In fact, it actually goes back many years. So just as my understanding of the philosophy has grown as I have grown and changed, so too has it for Darren. And this was his first US interview to discuss this edition of Meditations. I will link to that in today's show notes. You can follow him on Instagram and platforms at Darren Brown or at official Darren Brown. I will link to all that. Here we go. Here's me and Darren talking.

I've attached this sort of ring light around the bust I have of Marcus. It just looks... I have to see this. Can you take a picture? Quite a bit like Jesus. Take a picture. We'll post it on the behind the scenes when this goes live. I have my Marcus bust right here. Oh, nice. There you go.

Excellent. Well, it's an honor to talk. I've been a fan for a long time. I think you're one of the few people out there whose love of Marcus Aurelius might rival my own. Have we spoken before? I thought we hadn't. We did an email interview one time.

That's what it was. Many years ago. Okay. All right. That makes more sense. Great. Oh, it's very nice to meet you finally. I've seen many of your podcasts. Well, likewise, I've seen your stuff over the years as well. So tell me how you come to the Stoics. Well, I was reading Montaigne many years ago, and he kept referring to these Stoics, kept referring to Seneca more than anyone, I guess.

And I just didn't know who this person was or what this movement was. So, you know, the Montaigne essay. So here's like a French Renaissance essay yesterday. Massive, chunky things. And I kind of paused and picked up the Stoics instead just so I could see who and what he was talking about. And then that just became a much more appealing and richer essay.

source of interest to me. It led into this book on happiness I wrote called Happy years ago, because it just resonated in the way that someone's articulating something that you feel instinctively and you feel is valuable, but you hadn't quite found a way of putting it into words. Then it grew from there. Then over the years, my relationship to it has changed and grown, I guess.

But it's still a kind of a recurring theme in my life. No, I know exactly how that goes. It's funny. I'm writing about Montaigne in the book that I'm doing now. And as far as this is going to be a little nerdier than people want to probably want, but I'm interested. I think it's a conspicuous absence. So Marx really never mentions Seneca, which I suspect is deliberate.

But then Montaigne and Marcus seem so similar. You'd think they would have been sort of philosophical bedfellows. So it's an interesting omission in Montaigne's essays that he quotes Zeno and Epictetus and Chrysippus and Seneca, but he never mentions Marcus really. Yeah, exactly. And the books, you know, it's around. I guess he could have had access to it up in his tower. It sort of feels to me like really, I may be wrong, but it feels like it's the 19th century that really kind of

where Marcus became sort of saturated, I guess, reading culture and where I suppose he gets a reputation of being just a collection of kind of homilies and vaguely Victorian sounding platitudes. So I guess I always sort of see that as the sort of the heyday. Yeah, it never occurred to me. I never went back to...

I'm on Taylor now. I never finished him, so I wouldn't know if he mentioned him or not, but I'll take your word that he doesn't. One of my favorite books, a book I've been reading and talking quite a bit about since 2016, Stefan Zweig, the novelist. He writes The World of Yesterday, which is this beautiful sort of memory of Europe before World War I. And then he's forced to flee Europe in World War II. And while he's basically on the run from the Nazis...

in his basement in Argentina or Brazil or somewhere,

he comes across a copy of Montaigne, whom he'd never read. And it's sort of one of those moments of the right book at the right time, because Montaigne is living through the Reformation and this sort of period of civil war and religious persecution. And the reason he goes into that tower is because he's disgusted with the world. He's disgusted with his fellow human beings. And he says, I'm going to retire soon.

into inward pursuits. I don't understand what's happening out here, but I can at least try to understand myself. Zweig ends up writing this beautiful biography of Montaigne

as he himself is on the run from a world that's tearing itself to pieces. And it's just one of my absolute favorite books. And it's a very haunting thing to read today as the world seems so crazy. That's fantastic. I have that book and I've never read it. I've often thumbed through it and thought, what is this? And never really delved any deeper. That's great. Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? Just how these things come across at the right time. When I discovered Stoicism, I...

had graduated as a lawyer and had started working as a hypnotist and a magician. And it started on this sort of strange career that I followed. And I remember very clearly thinking, is my life from day to day, like if I take a cross section of it, are things kind of in the right place?

And if so, great. If not, that's quite easy to change stuff. And really, for me, it was stuff like I want to get up when I want to. I don't want to do what other people are telling me to do. And I want to just kind of have control over my time and so on. But that did make me feel after a while, particularly as the TV stuff took off, like I was a bit of a kid in a world of grownups. It all felt a bit kind of childish and silly, especially when everyone else was so concerned with

things like viewing figures and career trajectories and so on. And I knew I didn't have any of that in me. I didn't have any kind of particular ambition. I didn't have any, the things that were important to me felt much more day-to-day. And it was, I can't remember exactly, well,

Well, it was Seneca that I read first, and there was something in that that sort of... It was the first time I'd come across these ideas of just not sort of, I guess, not fixating on those things on the horizon that have a habit of moving forever further away. And it's stayed with me, and I think it's, on the one hand, very helpful. There's another aspect to it, another aspect to Stoicism, which is it does slightly put you...

at odds with the world. I mean, that relationship is quite central to Stoicism in a way that, you know, say it isn't to Epicureanism, for example, in the same way. And that's interesting. And I think particularly with Marcus, you do get a sense, I mean, you don't come out thinking this is a happy guy. This is a living, walking advertisement for the power of Stoicism to make us happier. I mean, so I now have this kind of ambivalent relationship with it

where I've gone from quite a passionate, it's probably the wrong word, but certainly an all-in sense of stoicism to now a kind of, I see it as a toolkit. I see it as a really helpful, valuable toolkit, but I think to throw yourself completely in with something that sets you up with a set of values that you're consistently not meeting in the world and is sort of telling you to

you know, stick to those values and to navigate a world that will never quite live up to this sense of how you feel it should be. I mean, that's kind of, in a way, could be seen as a recipe for unhappiness. So I think, for me, there's a kind of tempering of things. But as a toolkit, as a toolkit for anxiety, for, you know, stress and navigating all these sort of everyday things,

difficulties, I think it's really valuable. And I don't think that seeing it as a toolkit and picking and choosing versus seeing it as an all-in like a religion is a bad thing or a cop-out. I think things should be seen like that. I think if you think one thing has all the answers, you're probably going down the wrong path. Do you agree? I would say that Marcus Aurelius almost certainly agrees with you. One of the things that Gregory Hayes points out, that's my favorite translation of the meditations, and I like the one that you just did, is

But one of the things he points out in his foreword or his introduction is that there's nowhere that Marcus Aurelius explicitly identifies as a Stoic. He never says, I am a Stoic. He never says, I am a student of Stoicism. Hayes says that probably the closest you would get Marcus to admit to was that he was a philosopher, that he was a student of philosophy. Right.

It just happens to be that what he writes about illustrates a lot of Stoic thinking and he quotes from a lot of Stoic philosophers. But I would suspect that he too saw philosophy as the larger umbrella and then he's grabbing from the different schools in the different situations that he's in. There's just something interesting about meditations in the sense that it's what he was writing to himself at these different moments. Yeah.

And so we don't know all the other things that he thought that he cared about that he used. It's just what happens to survive. It'd be like if someone got a hold of my journal, they'd think all I think about are these handful of things. But those are just the things I needed the most help with.

Exactly. Which makes him very easy to criticize for reasons that feel unfair, for exactly that reason. And also means that its weaknesses are its very strength. The fact that it isn't a book written for a readership, it's written as notes to himself, means, of course, that it lacks really any coherent or obvious structure. It repeats itself again and again in a way that

You might find a bit tiresome after a while. I don't think it is, but you might see it like that because we instinctively want to read it as a handbook, and it just isn't. But the strength of that is that slowly, almost subliminally, this really human picture emerges. And the fact that he isn't telling us how to live and he isn't presenting this kind of glorious picture

image of an enlightened sage or anything. He's just a man struggling. And on top of that, of course, part of its perennial appeal is that we're

We're listening to an emperor talking to himself, and yet we're finding we're relating on so many levels. And I love that because I think an issue with Stoicism, well, not really with Stoicism, but the communication of it, is that when you've got somebody telling you, why are you thinking like this? You should think like this instead. That's a difficult line to tread without it seeming preachy. And I think we're much better at sort of taking in ideas when...

when they're not being communicated at us, but particularly when they're, you know, if we're sort of almost over, like almost eavesdropping on a private conversation. I often find myself being interviewed about stoicism. I can hear myself saying things like, oh, you know, it's fine. Pay no attention to those things. These things aren't as important. You know, just let it go. And I realize how glib that will sound, but actually those are

such key, important messages, but you don't want somebody telling you that. We spend half our life wanting our problems to be heard and appreciated and recognized. We don't want somebody telling us they're our own fault, however it comes across. Yeah, I suspect that's why no one else has published a book like Meditations. There's something, as you said, it's bugs are its features and its features are its bugs. Like,

If you sat down to write a meditations or even in the style of meditations, there's already something artificial and performative about it. It's the fact that it's the emperor of Rome writing a book

almost certainly not intending to publish it, and it surviving, perhaps even to his mortification, that's what makes it so special. And that's a bit of magic that you can't recreate. It is a singular piece of literature, certainly of philosophy. And although it's rooted in rhetoric, of course, because that was his background and a big part of his life, it isn't doing what...

any other book with a kind of normative force telling us how we should live would do, which is creating a much neater...

polished, ultimately unrealistic at some level version of what it's trying to sell. It's not really trying to sell anything. He's just talking to himself where he needs it, which of course means that sometimes the things you're saying sound exaggerated. Or if you take this bit out of context, why would you want to live like that? Of course. But that's, as you said, if somebody read your own diary and took bits out of context, they sound ridiculous too. But in those

In those moments, these are the things that he needs to hear. But you are also, it's also allowing for all sorts of, there are things that contradict each other. There are things that seem kind of a bit unpleasant or a bit unclear from time to time. And those are, you wouldn't have that in a handbook.

that would be selling you something that you know is not giving you the whole story. You'd be looking for holes in it. I think we just instinctively do that, don't we? We work away from what we're given. And somehow having this very personal dialogue with himself, because you can't argue with that. You might not resonate with his view of the world, but you can't argue with the message because it's just back at himself.

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Yeah. I remember I saw an art project once where the photographer, and I'm forgetting the specifics, but I think you'll get the essence of it. But basically the photographer told people they were going to do this photo and

And as they're preparing for the photo, they gave them some kind of unexpected compliment. And they took the picture precisely as the person was comprehending the compliment. Right. So the person thought this wasn't the photo, but actually this was going to be the photo. And there's something about meditations that is.

Pre publication, like it's it's what he's thinking about without any kind of self-consciousness, even though the the thing is itself inherently self-conscious because he's writing to himself. But but because he's not thinking about you at all when he's talking about when he says you, he means him personally.

but somehow incidentally means you. And there's just something profoundly unique and relatable to that, that makes it this kind of singular work of literature and philosophy. It'd be like a,

a band performing and somehow they capture something in the rehearsal that is the essence of the song that when they went into the studio to record, you could not ever recreate. Yeah. Which happens all the time. If you watch rehearsals of anything, it's always so much more. The Peter Jackson documentary where he catches them writing, get back in the moment.

And you're like, oh, this is the real thing right here. Yeah, it's a wonderful thing. One of the reasons why I think Rebind, this version of the meditations, is interesting to me is precisely because of this. Precisely because for a lot of people, the book might lack the kind of reader-friendly aspect that you might want from a

from a handbook, or if you've heard a lot about meditations and you come to read it, it can be a bit odd. The whole first chunk is him expressing his gratitude towards a bunch of people we don't know, and that seems to go on for a bit. And then you're into this, what might just seem like a big hodgepodge of virtue and platitudes. So I think having a... What we've done with this rebind thing, and for people that don't know it, I should explain it, is it

I think it's really interesting. At its heart, it's an e-book, but it has this AI thing built around it. So I have...

filmed a whole load of the various 12 books of the meditations and about it generally and all sorts of things. And then I did hundreds of hours of, that's an exaggeration, maybe a hundred, but interviews, audio interviews about it, just covering like anything that John, who was interviewing me, could think about. And what the reader then gets is a book that they can interact with. So they can ask me questions and

and sometimes the thing will suggest topics and work the other way and suggest things for the reader to think about so that's kind of coming one way and then and the other way they could they could ask questions or what about this bit or what do you think about this and they could be asking me or they could be asking just a sort of um like a assistant like a research assistant type character and it's

It's just fascinating because suddenly you've taken something that is a wonderful book, but it can take a little while to find your place in it because it's not written for you and makes it this very personal interaction. It's not one of those things that you can go, this is what it's about. Let me tell you the plot in five sentences. Give me the nut of it. Because it's not one book. It's like...

several hundred smaller ideas that overlap and layer, as you said, sometimes contradict each other. But it's not about one thing. Actually, one of the most helpful things I found on this was Pierre Adolphe's idea. So he's a, I know you know him well, but he's a French academic philosopher writing, who writes a lot about the Stoics.

who kind of goes, well, there is a structure. There is a structure to this seemingly structureless book. And he divides it into three big themes, three big disciplines, he calls them. For me, there's do, desire, and discern. The alliteration is mine, right? So the do question of how we should do and how we should live, like ethically with other people and how we should act and what should...

our actions and our interactions with others. And then that very stoic... And by the way, I think the do, the how we act, is one of the strengths of this book. You don't get, in the other stoic sources, I think as much emphasis on the importance and almost a kind of cosmic alignment with ideas of service, gratitude,

and living, acting for the common good. Now, of course, this is an emperor writing. This is a leader writing. So how he balances all these things out in his life is going to be a big part of his life, perhaps more than the other Stoic thinkers. But it's a big and surprising chunk of the meditations is this

sort of selflessness and a kind of a kindness that comes through, which isn't, I don't think, what we instinctively tend to associate with stoicism. And then secondly, desire, right? So that's a big Stoic topic, how we want. And a big part of that is how we manage our expectations because our desires and our expectations are so close to each other, how we try and navigate a life where we want things to fall in line with our plans. And of course they don't. This is a big and for me,

just the heart of the appeal of Stoicism is this, there's an image that permeates through the history of so much thinking. And I think Schopenhauer put it like this first, of an X equals Y diagonal. So like a graph, right? And you've got your aims on one, your X axis, whichever one that one is going up, is your aims, the things you want to achieve in life, and then your Y axis, the other one,

is all the stuff that life just throws back at you, what they used to call fortune, or when life just doesn't work out the way you want. And what we're told again and again in this predominantly Americanized, optimistic culture we live in is that if you set your goals enough, if you do your vision board, if you believe in yourself enough, that you can kind of crank the line of how we live

up in line with our desires. That you'll get success because you deserve it. The essential premise of a meritocratic world, which is not true. It's not true. And it's a hangover from Protestantism, hangover from Calvinism, the idea of working hard for our own salvation. And the religious hangover is interesting because I think where you see it, well, there's a couple of places where you really see it. So that whole world of the secret, putting the Rhonda Byrne

nonsense of the universe is going to provide for you. Normally, in the form of jewelry and cash, it's really horrible. But the universe doesn't really care about you at all. So how do you absorb that into just how you live without that being a sad thing? How can that be a liberating thing? But the other place that's really interesting where you see it with the religious connection is faith healing. So I've spent a lot of time around those evangelical faith healers

that you know get you up on stage and tell you you can walk again i've done it myself as i'm an atheist but i've done this as part of a shows on tv and stage i found it really interesting and a thing that struck me when i was watching them at it is there's this interesting dynamic of so you come up on stage and you feel healed right and you feel healed because there's a lot of adrenaline which is a natural painkiller um there's a large psychological component of suffering so

If you do an x-ray before and afterwards, nothing's changed. But nonetheless, how you feel, how you identify with whatever your issue is might drastically change. So yes, you might have an experience of healing, even though nothing's actually organically happened. You might have that experience. You might come up on stage and jump around and probably do yourself terrible harm by doing that. But then the healer says to you, throw away your pills and

If the disease returns, it's your fault because you didn't have enough faith. And it's a great way of avoiding any responsibility from their part and putting the blame back on this poor person. So now if the disease returns, not only have they got to deal with that, but they got their own failure, which is somehow worse. They weren't a good enough believer. And it's the same dynamic. And when you read something like The Secret,

that tells you to just commit that the universe will provide and you have to just commit to it. And if it doesn't provide, she says quite explicitly, it's your own fault. You didn't commit enough. You didn't have enough faith. So that's like a really insidious kind of idea that creeps around a lot. And it means that when things go badly, not only are we in a difficult place, but we now have our own sense of failure to add to that.

The reality is that life has this centripetal aspect and it pulls us towards difficult times. And when we're in those difficult times, it can feel like we fail, but actually, and it can feel very lonely, but actually that point is when we connect most with everybody else, because this is the human experience. It's the one thing you can guarantee is that life's going to take us to these places, no matter what you do and how great your life normally is.

So actually, it's the one thing that really connects us. So this question of how we navigate this life. And so he saw it. Schopenhauer talks about, you know, we've got our...

um will pulling us one way and you know fate pulling us the other and uh freud of course spoke about a very similar idea of kind of the things that we want to achieve and then sort of culture and civilization is going no no you can't do those things so again we're torn we're sort of leading this x equals y diagonal we're kind of meandering

like that on that diagonal sometimes we are on top and things are going the way we like and sometimes they're not so how do you navigate that line so that whole question of how we address what we want in line with the universe that isn't going to give us what we want

And then finally, the third D is discernment. So how we, again, a big Stoic topic of how we separate this sort of internal world from the external world, how we make decisions, how we make our judgments, because ultimately the judgments that we make, of course, as we know, if we're familiar with Stoicism, are what create our problems, not the things in the world themselves. So all the Stoics talk a lot about

this, how you separate the things that are in your control from the things that aren't. The stoic fork, you called it. I thought that was an interesting way to do it. Yeah. So it's a kind of a bifurcation. Is this thing under my control or not? And then other thinkers like Bill Irvin, for example, talks a lot about the gray area in between, which is really important to do because most things aren't that clear cut. He has the great analogy of a game of tennis. If you go into a game of tennis thinking I must win,

and then your opponent's better than you, you're probably going to start to feel a bit anxious or you might feel that you're failing and you're not going to play as well. Whereas if you go in thinking, "I'll play as best as I possibly can. I'll play to the best of my abilities."

then you will play better. You won't become as anxious if your opponent's better than you because you're still succeeding in your goals and you'll play a better game. So there's a lot of gray areas in terms of what really is in our control and what isn't. But that's a huge thing. And when you read Marcus, you very much read the thoughts of a leader. So if you read Seneca on these subjects,

There's normally a sense of, here's a well-to-do statesman who's sort of giving us a sense of balance, I guess, between self-interest and the realities of sort of middle-class life, it feels like. If you read Epictetus, it's quite...

urgent and because he's an ex-slave so his his senses avoiding enslavement to the passions or to bit of a night and day urgency to it and when you read Marcus he is somebody navigating how to

how to lead and how do you make these decisions? How do you serve others? - You get a sense of Marcus as being the most, even though being an emperor would have been such a disorienting, strange, surreal life, Marcus feels the most rooted in reality. You can imagine him

suiting on his armor and riding into battle. You can imagine him getting in an argument with a person. You can imagine him having to make hard decisions. You can imagine him as a guy with a job. Obviously being emperor is an absurd and strange job,

But he had a profession, an occupation in a way that, yeah, Seneca is very much, although he was involved in politics, a wealthy man of leisure. And Epictetus is such a low end of the social hierarchy and then is effectively just a teacher of Stoic philosophy. Right.

But there's something fundamentally relatable about Marcus's relation to the world that I think... And of course, he's really drawing from Epictetus. So you've, you know, I sometimes, you know, we might think, well, this is all very well for Marcus, but he was the most powerful man in the world. And is this just a, is Stoicism just a philosophy of privilege? But, you know, it is interesting. He's really drawing from the thoughts...

of an ex-Roman slave who became a teacher. I don't think they ever met, but nonetheless, he ended up with a copy of Epictetus' handbook. And it's a really, again, another humbling, kind of touching...

aspect of this book and this story is that it could be something so different. Even when you read this first chapter, which is just a series of, I'm grateful to this person for this. He's not talking about things, his own great qualities that is attributing to these people. He's talking about their great qualities and

He's not doing all the kind of self-serving stuff that was very popular at this time. It's just, it's a very... What's weird is he's not doing it for them either, right? He's not doing it for them either. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's really just the, it's like a rundown of all these great qualities in these people that you can tell he so earnestly respects.

and is aspiring to integrate into his own life. Especially the extended meditation on Antoninus, his stepfather, I think is just one of the most beautiful things that a child has ever put to paper around not just a parent, but a step-parent. I mean, their relationship is such a unique one historically, but it's such a beautiful celebration of

of what it means to step up and be a parent and be a good example in someone's life. It's a really remarkable bit of text. Yeah. And he resists the urge to criticize, but when he does, it's kind of all about absence. There's some subtle backhanded things, not even insults. They're just as interesting. He's clearly referring to this person or he hasn't mentioned this.

I mean, you do wonder whether there was any thought of having an audience for this at all. - Well, talking about these philosophers as sort of men and women of action, I think you're an interesting case because you clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the Stoics. You're not just someone who picked up some self-help book and are vaguely familiar with it or someone who shares this stuff on Instagram or something. You've thought about it philosophically and yet you have a day job. You have a thing that you do, right?

How do you think about the integration of Stoic philosophy into your life? And again, I think people might think, you know, a glimpse of Marx's release or some of the perceptions of Stoicism, that it would somehow destroy ambition or render worthless any, you know, desire to be an elite performer or to succeed, to be the top of one's craft. How have you sort of balanced being like one of the best in the world at what you do and having this

this sort of long-time fascination with Stoic philosophy? Well, thank you, first of all. That's very kind. I've never had any ambition. I genuinely haven't. That thing when I was a student of thinking, well, is my life fun and interesting in the moment? Am I living a sort of a day that I'd like to live? That's always stayed with me. I genuinely, and I don't say it with any false overweening modesty,

had no desire i wasn't trying to get a tv show i wasn't trying to you know i did a broadway show a couple of years ago and in a way that's kind of a big deal for a brit but i was more interested in whether or not it would be fun to live in you know new york for six months um i have other people that are like you know i've got a manager and producers and people that i'm sure think much more in those terms um but ultimately i'm making you know i'm making my own decisions there's no like sort of

division there there's no sort of bifurcation to get into this sort of stoic thing and then oh but then there's my job and then that's different where they are different i think is my job is to control things i cannot that's that's sort of like that's that's a very uh explicitly unstoic

thing that I do. But I'm not really. That's kind of like the illusion or the effect that I create. I do, for those that, many people that don't know me, I do sort of mind reading and magic and hypnosis. I should say I'm on the Simpsons Christmas special next week. Oh, that's amazing. It's so exciting. It's their first feature length episode. It's their 35th anniversary and their Christmas anniversary. And it's all Derren Brown comes to Springfield, which is

baffling to me that they didn't ask. But it was incredible to do. That's unreal. I have some sense of what that feeling is like, where you just get an email or a note, someone proposing a thing, and you're like, this is beyond my wildest fantasy of a thing I could have thought I deserved or could happen to me in my life. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. And they say, please don't tell anybody. So I think I told everybody within a week. So yeah, I only mentioned it because I have no idea whether people would

know me or my work at all in the States. But if you watch The Simpsons, I may ring a bell afterwards. So... Well, I've been thinking recently, I think the most stoic line in The Simpsons is the one where Bart goes, it's the worst day of my life. And Homer says, it's the worst day of your life so far. Yeah.

That's very good, isn't it? I think Marcus Aurelius, when you think about a guy who lives through a plague, he buries half of his children. He loses his father as a young man. There's a war. There's floods. I think that just every day he's like, oh, this is the worst day of my life.

It actually got worse. It was unimaginably bad before. And it was only a failure of imagination that I couldn't have imagined the fresh horrors that life had in store for me. And to me, that's, you know, we were talking earlier about how meditations is a little depressing and Marx really sometimes seems depressing.

It's like, of course he was fucking depressed. Like, look at his life. It was a series of unending disasters. Yeah. That he got out of bed every morning was a statement of profound hope and resilience. Like, you got to grade this guy on a curve. As soon as he becomes emperor, there's this flood. There's a massive plague that killed 10% of Romans at the time.

Even in that, there's a sweet moment. I can't remember exactly the line, but he's basically at war with these Germanic tribes up in the north.

And the way he's writing about people and Romans, you would expect for an emperor that is at war and having to find that within himself, because he's clearly an introverted guy, you would expect there to be a sense of, we're great, we're powerful. And there's none of that. He draws his circles of humanity very large, which I think is...

I mean, that's something we don't do nowadays, right? We've got very good at drawing circles around our own community and going, whatever, we demand this or we're this, and there's another circle around that community and they're the bad guys. And that's a dynamic that it does something to our reptilian brains and really, you know, Jesus up and gets us in this sort of, you know, antagonistic mindset. Whereas actually...

A far more effective way of doing it is to draw your circle very big around the whole of society and then go some of us within society. Some of us brothers and sisters, fellow Americans, whatever it is, are being unfairly treated. That's always shown itself again and again to be much more effective. You have it here in this very unselfconscious way.

where he's still talking about humanity in such a charitable, kind way whilst being at war with one section of it. He had every reason to give up on life, every reason to give up on other people, every reason to be bigoted and close-minded. I think about how, in a way, it's funny. It's offensive, but it's funny. The reasons they were called barbarians...

basically anyone who wasn't a Roman citizen, is because other languages sounded to the Romans like bar, bar, bar. That's like something like my eight-year-old would do. You know, like it's so childishly closed mind. And so that's the world that he's in, a world where you could basically kill or enslave someone if they were not like you.

So again, to get this kind of not just occasional, but this persistent cosmopolitanism and a sense of a common good and a sense of interconnectedness is really a remarkable feat for, again, an isolated, basically imperialized, worshipped as a god human being in Rome. It's almost unbelievable that he could get anywhere close to this kind of empathy or connection to other people.

Yeah, it really is. It's interesting, the character of Lucius Verus, who's his sort of, I guess, adopted brother, who becomes co-emperor with him, who seems...

so much the polar opposite, which is always a little suspicious, I think, isn't it? I think we do this a lot in life. I think a lot of our arguments with our partners over whether or not we should do this or whatever, a lot of the time you're outsourcing projected. You kind of maybe want to get another dog or whatever it is, and they want the dog, and then it becomes, they want this, I want that. And actually, you've just polarized the conflict within yourself into

And it's interesting that these two characters are always portrayed by history as so drastically different. And it does make you wonder whether that's a neat bit of storytelling that's kind of emerged. I love the idea that Lucius Verus was, he was sort of touring around the Roman Empire with an orchestra. He was such a sort of carousal that he had his own private orchestra. I love that. I want to know more about him.

I want to read his meditations. You do get the sense that Marcus at least loves him and appreciates him. So it couldn't have been a caricature. Treat seems to go out of his way to make sure that he isn't the kind of playing second fiddle. Because clearly, I think as Marcus was growing up and Antoninus was sort of preparing his way, it does seem like Lucius was getting the backseat quite a lot. But he is surprisingly fair towards him whilst seemingly unkind.

acknowledging that he can see his weaknesses and keeps him safely out of the way when he needs to. Again, it's part of a very touching portrait. But also, I just wonder whether, you know, you look around for any hint from other writers that maybe Marcus wasn't quite this dignified person.

But nothing really emerges to burst the bubble. I don't know if you've come across anything that undercuts it. I mean, the only thing is, of course, Commodus. I'd like to read Commodus' meditation. Commodus, what is his read on his father and how...

how does one follow from the other? To me, like people sometimes ask me if I could meet Marcus Aurelius, what would I ask him? I feel like that's the first place I want to know so much about that because it's so vexing and dark and confusing. And it's something we don't know that much about. The interplay between famous fathers and at this point, famous mothers, I mean, Queen Elizabeth is a great example. The difference between

between great men and women and their children or the unhappiness and the dysfunctions of their children, I find to be fascinating. Yeah, because the public role, there's no reason why that should map across to private life at all. You know, someone that's

does the public role very well. I mean, it's that famous thing of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts having terrible, terrible home lives. Yeah. It's interesting when you see the... I went to Rome to kind of just be amongst it when I was preparing this Rebind project and looking at the statue of Commodus. He's got all this sort of stuff in his hair and you can just sort of imagine him in sort of full makeup and there was something very...

Very performative about him. And there's quite a lot of that. I think Lucius shaved his head because Marcus kept his curly. There was these funny ways that people were wanting to show their relatives of his, wanting to sort of show distance or that they somehow, they weren't living that life. They weren't that guy. It's kind of interesting. You wonder, he might've been really quite insufferable. I mean, it's the image of him at the games, pretending, finding a way of...

First of all, he was getting criticized a lot because he clearly wasn't interested in the games. He was just reluctantly there, but not interested. So to make it seem like he was interested, he would hold his meetings while the games were going on because it would look to anybody that looked across the Coliseum that he was talking about the games. And he wasn't. He was just holding meetings. But that is kind of interesting, who that man is and what that person's like in real life. ♪

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But your point about stoicism somewhat removing you from the world, I think that that's true. And if you're already introverted, you're already an introspective person, you're a literary person.

And then you have this strange job and then stoic philosophy. I suspect he was a distant, somewhat removed person. Right. And that can be traumatic and hard for a child to wrap their head around. I mean, it's something I have to work on. It's like, oh, wait, I have these kids.

I have to live in their world. I can't live in my world. And that's a relatively modern parenting insight. When you read Marcus, you don't get the sense that this is a super connected, at ease with himself kind of a person. There's a distance there. The only time when he emerges as someone at ease is when he retreats, when he talks about stepping back, finding a quiet place,

and returning to kind of first principles, which also for me is one of the most touching aspects of the book. Because I mean, that really, that resonates for me. We do, I think, tend to feel that if we want to get away and sit on our own for a bit, that's like a slightly embarrassing trait that we have. You know, that's a sort of failure. And actually, again, here it is, the most powerful man in the world telling us, go away, find a quiet spot, retreat into yourself, and then know what to do with that. So it doesn't just become, you know, stewing.

And the idea of having a few simple principles that you return to in those times. I thought that was just sort of wonderful because, again, it's that thing of life pulling you towards the difficult center where it feels really isolating. You know, we've all lived through COVID lockdown. So that's a really great play out of that. You know, a literal play out of this idea that things that isolate us are actually the things that we're all connected with.

So, you know, there across 2000 years across, you know, from me to someone who's the most powerful man in the world is somebody just needs to get away and sit down and gather himself. He would have known like, Hey, I can't go outside. There's a plague going on. He would have experienced that sort of forced isolation also, you know, at some level. It's so it's interesting. There is no talk of self-esteem, you know, or anything. I mean, obviously it's before the days of that even being a thing, but,

Again, that's really nice. I like this. I like the idea that I think we should forget about self-esteem. I think if we can find a way of

gathering ourselves afresh and then stepping out into the world and taking some responsibility amidst our mess. That's what we should be aiming for. That's enough. And that's huge. And again, it's really refreshing only because I guess, because it's of its time that there's, there's none of that. There's none of the, there's no, no talk of things like self-esteem. I am thinking though, that there is kind of a theme of loneliness in, in,

meditations. I mean, at one point he says, you know, life is warfare and a journey far from home. You know, I imagine being an emperor would have been a, it's a job no one can relate to. There's no one else alive that has the same, has had the same experiences as you. You know, everyone wants something from you. You're also, you know, busy and you have to make hard decisions. There's something about, I think, the life of a performer that's a little bit like that. You know, those

Those few quiet moments before you go on stage, when you're trying to come up with your next thing. There's something... I wonder if perhaps why meditation struck you and why you like it might be similar to me, which is that there is...

There is a kind of loneliness and isolation. First off, you're already introverted or drawn to that kind of stuff. In the first place, that's what drove you to say, figure out magic and spend hundreds and hundreds of hours, thousands of hours trying to master certain things. But then the actual day-to-dayness of it as a profession, there's kind of a distance and a loneliness that it creates. Even if you're performing for thousands of people or on a television show for millions of people.

Yeah. I mean, and those are, those are, those sort of artificial social situations like, like performing on stage. That's like clearly has no bearing on how lonely you, it doesn't stop you from feeling lonely if you do. I very much enjoy it. And for me, it's like a, a part of, a part of myself that, um, cause you get to be a very well rehearsed and charismatic version of yourself on stage. That's a, that's a nice thing to do, you know, night after night. Yeah.

So I usually, I really enjoy that. I also enjoy the, I think, you know, you find meaning in life by finding something bigger than yourself and throwing yourself into that. And whether that's a religious belief or doing a tour, you know, it's something to absorb you. And when I stop doing it, I, like a lot of performers, get quite sort of irritable and miserable. When I wrote this book, Happy, many years ago, which was the book about stoicism, I

I finished it and then went on a bit of a tour of talking about these ideas to people. I was really unhappy and it was odd. I felt like I was such a hypocrite. I couldn't work out why and then I just realized, "Oh, it's because I'm not writing the book anymore." That engagement in something is so vital.

And, you know, for a lot of us that do that kind of thing, I think without it, suddenly you're a bit lost. There are moments in this book, I think, where it stops you in your tracks. I didn't have this rebind thing didn't exist. So I couldn't then ask about it and actually sort of... What do you mean? Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah, exactly. What is this? Or sort of, you know, there are ways you can sort of annotate and acknowledge your thoughts as you go along. It's really fascinating. I didn't have that, but I would just stop in my tracks and...

He talks about, just going back to this loneliness thing, that this might be your last day. The thing of living each day as if it's your last. He has a slightly different way of putting it. I guess it depends on what translation you live. But in any other world, somebody saying that, live each day as if it's your last, it's an encouragement to go out and go bungee jumping or do this or do that or do all those things that you haven't done. And in Marcus, that...

line. I mean, it almost made me cry because what he's talking about without, he doesn't even really exactly spell this out, but you just totally get it is if this was the end of your life, if this really were that final stage or final day or whatever, how would that affect your relationships? How would you live differently with other people? What would that do in terms of the love and compassion that you could

you could find. I remember years ago, I had this sort of thought process I went through. I had somebody that kind of worked, was part of my production team, and he just annoyed me, drove me a bit mad. And I was kind of like, he'd said or done something that just had riled me. And then I kind of thought, you know what, this is the guy that does that job in my sort of strange world I live in. And I'm grateful for that. And one day I look back and I go, oh,

oh god oh that was that guy did that throughout his life he did that for my life that's nice and then that thought sort of expanded to i mean any number of people i guess that i might come across from day to day that i might jar with or find a you know people you meet that are a bit just a bit disappointing or people that maybe work around you that are a bit irritating and uh

The same thought, it sort of expanded as to, oh, hang on, these are the people who are populating my life. And that really means something. Like one day I'm going to look back and it's almost like a cast of people, an ex-partner that's, you know, a source of maybe difficulty. Maybe it's all a bit fresh and all a bit, you know, but that's this person who- That's their job.

Well, yeah, it is a little like a cast. And then it expanded into the people you see every day in the shops, the familiar faces in a store. And also there's people that loom too large, the big figures. It might be some celebrity that you're a bit obsessed by or someone that you've met. And then I do this all the time. I meet famous people. I embarrass myself and I can think of nothing. Like that 3 a.m. thing of, God, why did I say that? I get that a lot. So people that loom too large.

Also, at one point, we probably had this feeling of like, oh, those are just these kind of people that populated my life. It really made a difference to me in terms of affection and compassion and just enjoying people that otherwise might be a little bit like this. It was kind of a wider perspective. I mention it because that line from him about living each day as if it were your last,

normally, as I said, it means something else. And that something else is normally about a fear of death, I think. If it's about, well, I better go out and bungee jump and I better go out and do all these travels. And that's sort of about, ah, death is this frightening thing and I better do all this stuff before it happens. Kafka has this lovely idea of that the meaning of life is that it ends. In other words, that

that the fact that it is finite is what gives it any meaning at all. If we just live forever, nothing would have any meaning. Everything would just blur into this endless blur. So really like living with that and letting it bleed into how do you start to see people if you take that on board? How does that affect their not coming from a fear of death, but a real acknowledgement and a sitting more comfortably alongside of it?

So that's not a, it's not a lonely thought. It's not an asocial or antisocial thought at all. But I think it is maybe like a lot of, you know, people, if you, if you, if you feel like you do lack something or you lack a trait and then you learn it, you become very good often at communicating it and teaching it because it doesn't necessarily come naturally. So you, so maybe there's a bit of that. Maybe this is these pro-social thoughts he has come from somebody who is, you know, is introvert and is having to find ways of,

finding those feelings. But maybe a lonely man, but these are not lonely thoughts. These are really, I think, quite movingly pro-social, beautiful thoughts. I totally agree. You get the sense that he might have this sort of

introverted tendency, but he, there's a line that I think a lot about in meditations that I think is the essence of Marcus Aurelius, the man, Marcus Aurelius, the philosophy, and what Stoicism is supposed to be. Now it's a quote, he says, you know, fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you. And so, so maybe the way to understand Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics is that it's this set of ideas, this set of ideals, this sort of

what we know is the best of us, what we know we're capable of. And then most of the time, we're way down here below that, that we're aspiring to be that. We probably consistently can't be. But through work, through practice, through journaling, through study, through great effort, we can get there in moments.

And so, yeah, you have this introverted guy who's working to not be cynical, to not be isolated, to not write other people off. You see this guy who's experienced tragedy and loss and heartbreak and pain, and he's trying not to despair. He's trying not to give up on people.

You know, you have this guy who has immense power and influence who can get away with and do anything. And he's really working to be ethical, to be good, to be decent, to not be corrupted by power. And so I really feel there's this kind of earnest striving in meditations where Marcus Aurelius is really trying to be

better than he is. And I think, you know, in the 20 odd centuries since he wrote it, that's what's so striking and relatable to us today is, is like, we all know that we could be better. We all know that we should be better. We know, we know that by looking at history and looking at the people we admire that we're

There's something greater that we can be and it takes a lot of work to get there. Absolutely. The interesting balance point there for me is, goes back to this idea of none of this is a recipe for happiness.

There's another really interesting thought that is very un-Stoic, although in some ways it chimes with it. I don't know if you've come across this. There's a German sociologist called Hartmut Rosa, R-O-S-A, and he's written a book recently called Resonance. His point is, and he's writing from a sociological perspective, so he's interested in, I guess, our relationship with the world as opposed to our intimate psychological journeys.

And his thing is, surely a successful life, like living well, is relating to the world in this resonant way. So it's a mode of relating to the world where there's a kind of dynamic and mutual and kind of transformative relationship.

relationship with what a connection with with the world which is about being i guess open and being uh receptive to it and engaged and feeling the world responds to us in the same way and much less about dominating or mastering it much less about this fight and one of the interesting things he gives an example of um like ways that we tend not to live um and it's not not a way you can be all the time like you know if you're a researcher you're a scientist you want to create stuff

You have to think in terms of mastering and dominating. But nonetheless, this is something we should lean into more in our lives. And it's not very stoic, but it's really interesting. And he gives the example of one way that we really don't do it, one way that we live more of an alienated connection with or lack of connection with life, is through constantly gathering resources rather than actually...

what the point of the resources is supposed to be. So he suggests, like, imagine two artists and they're given the task of paint a beautiful, you've got three weeks to paint a beautiful painting. Go and paint your best one. Like, it's a competition. And one of them goes home and does the best he can and just with whatever he's got and does this thing and hopes it'll be good.

The other guy goes, right, okay, I'm going to do the best painting, so I need a really good studio space. My one isn't good enough. I need a north-facing light, and he finds a perfect space for it. I need a really good – I want to get a good easel, the one that you can crank up and down, so he goes out and gets one of those. And the best paints, the finest quality paints and pigments and the sable hair brushes, and I want proper –

proper linen canvas, and he's just gathering all these resources. And then time's up and he runs out of time or he just has to quickly put something together at the end. And this is sort of how we tend to live.

We're gathering resources, whether it's make more money, become more attractive, become more intelligent, make better social connections. These things that we all do all the time. We've sort of lost track of the fact that they're all means to an end, right? They're kind of resources. But actually what we're trying to do ultimately is paint the best picture we can.

But we've kind of got a bit confused because those resources, they've sort of become tangled up with what the end results are supposed to be like. They become the things that we think are the be all and end all and they're not. I rather like it because part of that, as you said, being the best person you can and being on this stoic path

Sometimes it feels a little bit like that. Like, are you going to get to the end of your life? And they go, oh, fuck's sake. Like, it's just this thing. I really like the image of Martha Nussbaum talks about it. She talks about an alternative of the stoic notion of being like a rock, like a cliff and the waves are lashing against you is to think of yourself as a porous. So the waves are, you know, it's kind of on the shore and the waves are sort of moving in.

in and out. That's a really, I like that very much. I think that's a helpful starting point rather than always being a fight because I don't know that if you're just pitched against the world all the time, if that's the starting point, whether really that's the life project we should be living. This idea of present is very different from that. I could see the word fight there taking it a bunch of ways. What I've always taken that word to mean is he's just saying to really try to be this thing that you know

Right.

work for decades to make enough money to retire and then start your life. Seneca talks about how the one thing fools have in common is that they're always getting ready to start. And there's something about, like Marcus says this in meditations, he says, look, you could be good today, instead you choose tomorrow. So I think there's a tension between the sort of

immediacy and then also the aspiration. But ultimately what I've always loved about Marcus Aurelius is you get the sense that this guy didn't have to make himself into what he was and it wasn't always natural, but he did it. He was as good as he was capable of being. You don't get the sense that he left anything

on the table, which to me is part of happiness. Like if your definition of happiness is I do whatever feels pleasurable to me right now, there's something about that that I think inevitably you wake up one day and you go, what have I spent my life on? What was I actually capable of? Right. And I think there's something beautiful in Marcus's example in that way that

It's not happiness as we maybe often define it in Western culture, but there is maybe something closer to Aristotle's definition of human flourishing that I think he did embody in

and maybe we could say that he had a kind of happiness. And again, it does come down to this thing of we're reading the points of conflict and difficulty for himself because that's why he's taken the time to write them. We're not reading all the other stuff where he may be perfectly happy and where everything's working out really well for him. We're reading the stuff that's a conflict. So therefore we can read it and go, God, this stoicism is a lot of hard work. It doesn't mean that it is hard work in a bad way.

No, totally right. And I actually try to, in my own journaling, because it would have been nice if we had a couple examples where Marcus really said,

Today was a great day. It really came together. Like golden hour was great. I spent some time with my kids. The weather was awesome. You know, I helped someone. I'm lucky that I get to do this, right? I'm lucky that I'm not dead, you know? So when I try to do in my journaling and not for anyone's benefit, but by, but my own is I really do try to recognize on those days where it feels like it came together and it worked.

I try to go, this is it, man. Like you get to do it. You know, you had a nice drive in the car. You got to sit and write for a while. You got to talk to someone who's work you admire. Like I try to take the time and go, Hey, this is, this is it. This is wonderful. There's something in, in meditations actually, where maybe Marcus is doing this where he says, you know, convince yourself that everything is a gift from the gods. Yes. And I think,

That to me is where happiness comes from. When you're not wishing for things to be anything other than they are in this moment, you're not resigned to them. It's not this negative thing. You're saying, this is fucking amazing. We're in a rock hurtling through space and I get to do X, Y, or Z. I'm not hungry. I just laughed at something that was funny.

Life is pretty fucking good. And we don't see that in meditations, but I think your point is worth reiterating again, which is just because you don't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there. It's just that he didn't take the time to write it down. Yeah, he's not writing a portrait of the stoic life

He's slapping himself around the face where he needs it. Yes. And if he didn't have the other stuff that balanced it out, he's either the toughest motherfucker who ever lived because his life was filled with so much awfulness, or he would have killed himself. And the fact that he didn't means there must have been other wonderful things that balanced out the catalogue of tragedies and misfortunes that...

you know, marked his reign. Yeah.

Well, this is amazing. I thought this edition you did was really interesting. I thought the foreword you wrote to it was great. And I think anyone that's taking the time to make this fascinating book accessible to different people or more people is doing an important thing. So I'm so glad we finally got to chat. Thank you. I really think this is... I was asked to do it and I barely even listen to audiobooks. I like reading. Me too. So I went into it thinking I have no idea what this...

technology is going to look like or feel like for people using it. I don't know if it's something that I want to do it myself. And I just, I'm really captivated by it. It's such an interesting way to be able to read and

ask questions and converse and at this two-way thing as well where it's prompting thoughts in you and it's very good at suggesting pathways to think down or things to ask about as well because I think you know sometimes these things can miss the fact that it's quite hard sometimes to think of it go on ask a question ask me it's very sometimes it's hard to know what to do um so it's it's it's just a very user-friendly experience

It is. No, it's really cool. It's so worth knowing because it isn't written for people to read as such. It's not always that user-friendly in itself. It was awesome. I hope we can do it again sometime. And if it could ever be a service, just let me know. I'd love to talk to you. It was really nice to talk to you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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