Can you MIND CONTROL someone into ARMED ROBBERY? | Derren Browns The Heist (2006)

➡ The text discusses a TV special by Darren Brown, a British magician and mentalist, known for his mind control techniques. The show, called “The Heist”, involves Brown using psychological tools to manipulate people into committing a simulated armed robbery. The participants, who responded to an ad for a motivational seminar, are put through various tests to gauge their reactions. The aim is to see how far these individuals can be pushed under the influence of hypnosis and suggestion.
➡ The text discusses a seminar led by Darren Brown, who uses Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques to manipulate people’s behaviors. He uses color themes, memory tricks, and subliminal messages to make participants feel empowered and capable of extraordinary feats. He also uses a song and the color green as triggers for motivation and action. The seminar culminates in an exercise where participants are encouraged to steal from a store, reframing the act as a positive experience, which is part of Brown’s manipulation techniques.
➡ A group of people, dressed in suits, are involved in a social experiment where they are encouraged to steal from a shop. The shopkeepers notice the unusual behavior and start watching the participants closely. Some participants refuse to steal, citing personal reasons or moral objections, while others get a thrill from the act. The experiment concludes with a selection of participants who will continue to the next stage, based on their reactions and decisions during the theft scenario.
➡ Four individuals are chosen for a heist, each with different traits. They undergo a series of psychological and hypnotic training, including anchoring techniques to link feelings of anger and confidence. The trainer, Darren Brown, uses various methods to manipulate their perceptions and prepare them for the heist. The final test involves them being dropped off near a bank, where they encounter a security van and a man carrying briefcases of money, setting the stage for the heist.
➡ Four friends plan a fake heist, inspired by a Jackson 5 song played from a passing van. Three of them go through with the robbery, using a fake gun to threaten a security guard and steal briefcases. They run away but are soon surrounded by a film crew and extras. The fourth friend contemplates joining in but ultimately decides against it. The event ends with the participants in a sci-fi-like setting, reflecting on their actions.
➡ Darren Brown, a performer, has a series where he convinces various religious groups that he has special insight. The authenticity of his acts is questioned, creating a layer of intrigue for viewers. The text also promotes Paranoid American, a conspiracy theory comic book, and a comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo space missions, available at nasacomic.com. The text ends with lyrics from a song, possibly related to the mentioned comics.

Can I mind control a normal person to commit armed robbery? Under the docks yeah, under the docks Very deep but we breaking the locks got clip they erase all the shots they collect the dots under the docks under the docks yeah under the docks. Ahoy mateys. This is under the Docks with Paranoid American and Sean Chris. Mainstream Mondays where we go through the normie documentaries Cutting through the treacherous waves tell you if it sinks or swims visit paranoidamerican.com kill them birds.com and don’t forget, like subscribe Share Share Share the show this one is called the Heist and It’s actually a TV special from Darren Brown.

It was on Channel 4. This is 2006. I will forgive you if you’ve never heard of Darren Brown or haven’t seen any of his Channel 4 British TV specials. Right, so. So before you even get into it, have. Have you ever heard the name Darren Brown? Have you ever seen any of his stuff before? Or was this all new for you? This was all brand new for me. I’ve. I didn’t know who he was going in. Okay. I mean, the. For someone that hasn’t seen Darren Brown’s work or not familiar with it before, it’s somewhat of a mix between the David Copperfield, Chris angel kind of specials that you’d see, which is all like big theatrical stage magic and stuff, but then kind of combined with that masked magician that they had that show in the early 2000s on Fox where a guy wearing like a black mask so you couldn’t see what his face was and he would expose all these big magic tricks.

So Darren Brown has kind of positioned himself from starting as a typical kind of David Copperfield style, Criss angel magician slash mentalist to someone that’s like, here I’m going to expose all of these manipulative techniques. And the way that I came across Darren Brown was because I was just searching for weird documentaries and videos in the early 2000s on mind control. And he had a series called Mind Control and it was essentially him performing hypnosis and NLP on people and stealing their wallets or planting thoughts in their heads. One of the most famous ones is a interview with Simon Powell.

Who. Who’s the guy from one of those, like comedy zombie movies, Sha of the Dead, I think, and that he comes over and he talk about his childhood and he’s like, okay, well, I got you a present. What do you want? And sorry, Simon Peg. And Simon Peg goes a bike. And he was like, wait, why do I want a bike? Like, he didn’t even know why he said this. And then they rewind the tape and they show you. Here’s how he planted this idea in Simon Peg’s mind of him wanting a bike. And the reason that I remember that one so vividly is because as soon as Darren Brown said, now what do you want? I thought in my head, a bike.

And I was like, why the hell would I want a bike? Like, I’ve got a car. I haven’t used the bike in forever. So when he starts showing you. So anyways, Darren Brown has this. This concept of being a hypnotist that then kind of supposedly shows you how he hypnotized you. And that’s his shtick. And he’s got, I want to say, like five or six different TV series in England. He’s also got like seven or eight documentaries. And we were originally going to do a, like, Magic Monday Month or something where it was all magician documentaries.

But now that we’re doing this mainstream Mondays, I was like, man, I don’t want to wait forever to get to a Darren Brown. So the first one that I could think of was the heist. And even though it’s technically not a documentary, it was a TV special. It’s a great intro for all of Darren Brown’s work. So the concept is pretty simple, that he’s gonna take random people that he puts out an advertisement in the paper, and he’s going to train them, he’s going to mind control program them to commit an armed robbery on a bank, an armored vehicle bank.

And it sounds crazy from its premise, but that’s essentially what this is all about. Well, for me, it was really crazy because you’re talking about magicians. So me going in, I’m like, okay, they’re going to get revealed of these tricks. And I was in for something. Mko Trish. Well, let’s kick off with the actual description of what this is listed. If you were to go and look at an IMDb or Wikipedia or something. So the heist filmed over two weeks, during which Brown tells the viewer that he’s used a bunch of different psychological tools. They mention conditioning, anchoring, suggestion, all to get a group of people into a mental state in which they will willingly rob a security guard without ever being directly told to do anything like that.

That’s. That’s the premise is how. How far could these people get? And the anchoring that we’re talking about, I’m going to get into more detail on that. It’s this NLP concept, but it’s an Anchoring where he’s trying to get people to be able to quickly tap in to a feeling of confidence and aggression and euphoria and elicit that state. Combined with the color green and the song can you feel it by the Jackson 5. Are you, are you with me on this? Oh, yeah. And he even starts talking about how like, true hypnotizm is not really a thing.

Like you don’t, you know, you’re not really able to go out and go do a horrific crime. Now you can make them do a couple funny things. So he’s explaining how this, this is what he’s doing to actually get people to where he wants. And that a traditional hypnotist would not be able to do this, right? And then in traditional stage magic hypnotism, that he plays it play acting. That’s. I think that’s the exact phrase that he uses. And that this is not. That this is not traditional hypnotism because it’s not play acting. Someone would actually be committing a federal crime, you know, like an actual dangerous crime that would completely change the course of their life.

So it starts out under the guise of a motivational seminar. This is how he wants to eventually lead to getting someone to steal £100,000 in an armed robbery. And he invites 13 different people that originally signed up for this seminar. He places an ad in the paper and once they actually get there, they have to meet these criteria. The criteria that they had to be open minded, which he figures out over the course of this. They also have to have a middle management job. And I think I’m gonna make a guess here. I think it’s because they had to be at least not so high up in the food chain that, that they.

Money’s not a problem, right? Like these people, it seems like money is a concern. And you kind of see that because the very first thing that he does to him, he puts them through all these like sneaky tests. So all the people show up and they get invited to this like, fancy little spot and they sit down and they have this nice dinner. And on the way in he has this security guard at the door wearing a green jacket and he’s got like a little symbol on his outfit. And he’s intentionally being dicks to everyone, making them empty out their purse, kind of just, just being a dick about it.

And it’s not clear, at least you’re assuming that it’s not clear to the people that are going into the seminar that he’s part of it, that all of this is part of it. So they go in. He’s kind of a dick. Okay, whatever. He’s, he’s being antagonistic. But then after the dinner’s over, the mater d comes up and he starts asking people for their credit cards. He’s like, yeah, no, the, like, your accommodations are free. But that dinner wasn’t free. And then it was like a large check. And this, again, it shows Darren, like, watching from 14 hidden cameras all set up inside this room.

And he’s looking to see, okay, who gets angry, who gets defensive, who folds over and just goes and gives him money. And then eventually at the end, one of the guys is like, this is BS and he’s like, I’ll pay for everyone. And he goes and he gets his card and he’s like, I’ll just send it to my accountant. Don’t worry about any of this. So it, it does show, though. Like, here’s how all these. And I was thinking too, what would happen if someone invited you to, like, this, this big soiree? And it’s like, oh, yeah, accommodations provided.

And after dinner, they give you the bill and it’s like, oh, I’m not so rich that, like, I don’t. I wasn’t planning to drop $90 on that steak just now. Like, I ordered it because I thought it was free. Yeah. I would walk out, I would be like, I’m gonna find my way out of here. So that, so that was, that’s already two tests, right? One was, how do you deal with a authority figure being a dick to you? How do you deal with all of a sudden being surprised and imposed upon by like, okay, now pay this bill.

And then he actually starts the seminar the next day after he’s kind of got notes on people. And you notice right away in the seminar, the PowerPoint presentation is green. He’s wearing green. Like, green everywhere. Green is kind of the theme of this thing. And then he starts teaching them legitimate NLP eye accessing cues. I don’t, I don’t know how much you know about NLP or if you’ve ever even heard of this eye accessing before. I don’t know too much about it. No. Like, I, I, I just kind of, I’m learning on the fly as I’m watching.

So Darren Brown, part of his shtick now is that he mentions NLP a lot. And NL was much bigger in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s as this, like, motivational sales training seminar stuff. And it’s kind of just persuasion engineering. As, as one of the original founders in nlp, he actually rephrased it as this, like a way to manipulate people into doing what you want them to do. And it has taken a big sales aspect of it. And this is kind of what Darren Brown is making fun of throughout this documentary, I think. But he’s also teaching you what other people say NLP is.

And one of the things that NLP usually covers is that you can be a human lie detector. And one of those ways is that you get a baseline on someone and you would add like, for example, for you, I’m not going to go through the entire process, but if I said like, hey, think back to what, what was the color of the front door of the first house you lived in, right? And if you look a certain direction, if you like look up and to the left, now I’m getting a baseline like, okay, whenever I ask you to think about something real, you’re going to look up into the left.

And then if, and then if I’m like, hey, just imagine like a make believe monster in your mind right now. Give them teeth and like a color and stuff. And then you might look up into the right instead. So now that I’ve got a baseline, I can tell whether or not you’re being honest with me. So he puts them through some really basic NLP courses and then they get a little bit of confidence. They think that they can tell which coin someone’s holding a hand in. Like all this. He’s building up their confidence that they’ve got kind of like superpowers.

And then he starts teaching a memory tricks. He has a memorize A list of 20 random items and then anyone in the audience, and there’s 13 people that show up for the seminar. Now they can remember all 20 items in any order, front and back, which for a lot of people does feel like superpower at a certain point. And I, and I know that too, because I’ve, I’ve gone into that thinking like my, my memory is crap, you know, I’m like so burnt out. But that if you just focus on this in practice, it’s just like any other muscle and that your memory can be improved.

So anyways, he’s showing people all these things that seem like they’re cheat codes to life, like these ultimate mind hacks. And they’re feeling more and more empowered as we go. And then the camera starts showing these tiny little like quirks and anomalies, like for example, the exit sign H, it says exit, but then it also has the letters C and E imposed on it. So it says excite instead of just exit, but it’s, like, super subtle. And there’s like all these tiny little, maybe red herrings, but they’re kind of showing you that he’s, like, messing with these people’s heads at an even deeper level.

So what did you think of that when you started seeing, like, all the green colors and the excite? Oh, even when he was breaking down, like. Like the. The words and stuff, and he had, like, the column, like, it said cash or it said, like, he had little subtle things that, like, was going to stay in your subconscious. And. And to me, I was like, this whole time, I’m like, because of what we go deep on a lot. It was like, oh, this is right up my alley, man. Like, this is my kind of stuff. I always like to watch brain games and, like, MK Ultra stuff.

It’s like a mix of both put together. So then he also starts using, like, really charged language that has these embedded commands, another NLP technique. But he. He’s talking to me. He’s like, okay, imagine yourselves feeling highly motivated. Steal yourselves, you know, get excited about this. And then he starts giving them these realistic toy guns. And he tells them that the toy guns are supposed to just make you feel empowered and, like, you know, adding this other, like, naughty angle to the aspect of it. And then he gives them a cd and he says that the cd, you put it in and you listen to it and it’s got subliminal messages, and that will give you, like, reinforcements.

You won’t be able to hear them or detect them, but if they’re on there, and he tells the audience, like, after the fact, he’s letting you know that these are just blank. They’re just blank CDs. They have absolutely nothing on them. But it’s forcing all these people to think that they’re being affected. So they’re, like, opening their mind to be receptive to a message, even though it’s not in the cd, it’s everything else happening to them. And then finally he plays this song, can you Feel it by the Jackson 5. And he anchors all this different training, and he’s basically saying, hey, whenever you hear this sound.

And he also teaches them some physical anchoring. I won’t get into the weeds on this. But he anchors all these feelings of motivation and aggression and confidence to this song. And then he’s like, flashing green lights as. As he’s doing it. And it’s basically getting people into a programming mind. So as soon as they hear that song, as soon as they See the color green, then they’re immediately ready to take action. Just like if you see this color green behind me, it means that you should hit the little thumbs up, hit the subscribe button, drop a comment, feed the algorithm as we’re doing this.

Hopefully my mind control works. Then it goes to the next step. And he tells them, I want you to go to this corner store and just steal something small. Steal like a candy bar, some sweets. And I thought this was really interesting because it’s a bunch of people that either have never even considered doing something like that before, or at least they’re professional. And this is like outside the realm of something you’d be asked to do. When he did this, I was almost like, man, I would just watch this as a reality show film somebody going and just doing like some minor little, you know, petty shoplifting for the first time on camera.

I would love to watch that series. And let’s mention that these people are not like, I don’t know all their complete background, but for the most part, they’re up there more. Right. They’re making good money. They’ve never. Yeah, they’ve never had to go steal. Like, it’s different if you go to the guy that’s like, I used to steal before. It’s not that big a deal. You know what I mean? And they would not only not consider it, but they would be repulsed by it, as you would seem like, ah, that guy’s stealing what a piece of crap he is.

And then now they’re in a whole different. Like, they’re excited about it. They’re like, you know what? Like. And the. The premise is cool too, because the shop owners, it’s a real shop. It’s not like some whole props and made. So, no, it’s a real shop. The owner’s in on it, but nobody else is yet. None of the employees. So no, no one working at the shop knows that people are going to be coming and stealing. The owner knows and Darren Brown knows, and that’s pretty much it. So you see the actual footage, you know, the security cam footage of the people in the shop starting to notice people stealing and how they’re reacting.

And as it. And Darren Brown makes a point. He said that what he’s doing this for is to reframe the feeling of going in and stealing something, just the act of stealing. How do I reframe this as a positive thing? Like, they’re going to come out of this as a positive experience so you can escalate it later. So now I can like, have you tap back into, like, how good it felt to steal and that it was a positive thing for you, ultimately. And right away, the old. This old lady, you could tell she’s never stolen a thing in her life, and she sucks at it.

Like, I don’t. Like, I’m sitting here critiquing like, no, what are you doing? That’s not how you do it. Like, she kind of, like, being super suspicious and goes and grabs a thing and then, like, awkwardly shoves it up the sleeve of her coat and then immediately makes a beeline for the door and, like, walks out. And it. Like, I was just like, lady, come on, you gotta be better than that. And then it shows everyone else going through. But she was, like, super euphoric about it. She got, like, a high from doing it. And then there’s one guy that doesn’t do it, and he’s like, I got a daughter at home.

Even this is for a TV show. I’m not gonna steal something on camera and make that look like something that you can do. Another lady was like, oh, this reminded me when I was a kid and I got in trouble for this kind of stuff. Like, no, I’m not going. It was like a black lady, too. I’m just like, she. She probably doesn’t want to end up in jail over this, okay? She. She doesn’t do it. There’s a few other people that. That essentially don’t do it, but the other. Like, almost everyone else does. A large majority of people do it.

But I think the most interesting part of that whole sequence is that the. The people running the shop that aren’t in on it, like, they’re noticing this. It’s all of a sudden they’ve got 20 new people in foot traffic, and they’re all wearing suits and ties and nice clothes, and they’re all going down the candy aisle and then leaving without buying any candy, right? So that you can see them like, what the hell is going on tonight? And he’s like, yo, if one more person shows up in a suit, follow him. And then all of a sudden you see someone show up in a suit.

And now they’re getting like. Like, watched like a hawk by these guys. I thought that was such a. A fascinating way to just see. Like, this is true reality tv, especially because normally you would see somebody that comes in, maybe scraggly or dressed a certain way, and you’d be like, oh, that guy’s gonna steal. Or the opposite of. They’re like, oh, look, these guys are more in the Higher society, no way they would steal. And now they’re like kind of being also pranked or like social experimented on where they’re like, what is going on man? These rich guys are just ripping off candy bars.

And there was one, you might not have caught this one unless you have seen other Darren Brown stuff before. But one of the guys, he gets caught like they’re walking out and the, the guy that’s running the cashiers like, hey mate. He’s like, you like, you got to pay for that. I saw you put that in your coat. He’s like, oh, I must have, I must have forgot, you know, I’m so sorry. And he’s like, yeah, well, you know, give it back. And then the guy goes, my wall isn’t four feet high. And he’s like, what are you, what are you talking about? He’s like, my wall isn’t four feet high.

He’s like, yeah, well that door is about, I don’t know, 13 or something feet and you’re going to go through it right now. And that the mo. My wall isn’t four feet high. It’s a Darren Brown mentalist technique that if you were to like steal someone’s watch or their wallet or like, or you were trying to break a pattern that they’re like come out and they’re angry at you and they’re yelling and you just like, my wall isn’t four feet high. It like snaps them out of whatever they were doing. And it’s like, what, what did he just say to me? What does that mean? So you can see him try that on the shop keep.

But the shopkeep’s just like, nah, bro, give me the candy bar back. So after all of these different initial tests, the bodyguard or the security guard tests on the way into the restaurant who paid for the check, how they reacted to stealing. He ends up eliminating everyone except for a few extras. I think there’s like down to seven or eight people. And he mentions that three of the women got cut. Two of them, they just didn’t really have the mentality he was looking for. One of them lied on their application. And then the guy that refused to steal because his daughter was watching that he was also the guy that paid for everyone that first night.

And since he’s kind of like a control freak is what Darren was deducing from this, that he wasn’t going to be a match for either. So he’s, he’s whittle him down a little bit. The next test is he has them repeat the Stanley Milgram test. I don’t know if you ever heard of this one before it. So it’s big in like MK Ultra and Mind Control World. So he repeats this, and this is actually cited as one of the modern recreations of this test, even though it was for a TV show. And the test is essentially that you’re led into a room with another person that’s supposed to be another test subject.

So me and you go into a room and the doctor or the scientist or whoever’s running it comes out and talks to us and we pull sticks or we flip a coin. One of us is going to be the teacher and the other one’s going to be the learner. So the learner has to sit down and memorize, like 10 words or something. And then they go into a room and they get strapped into a chair that’s going to give them electroshock. And then the teacher goes into a separate room with no window. You’re blocked off, but they have like a PA for audio.

And I’m going to sit here and I’m going to ask you, okay, what was the first word? And if you get it wrong, I have to administer a shock to you. And it starts out, I think, at like 10 volts. And then it works its way up to a fatal 450 volts. Like you would kill someone if you actually gave them that voltage. So the premise is that you’re gonna get every single question wrong, and I’m gonna have to keep giving you electroshock. And as you start going through the higher and higher voltages, once you get about to, like, 200 volts, then I hit the little.

And I’m gonna hear you scream in the other room, like, oh, my God, stop, please. This hurts. So the idea is that I’m gonna look to the guy running the thing and be like, yo, sounds like he’s not doing so great in there. Like, I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m not comfortable. The original university test, the Stanley Milgram test, they originally estimated that one in a thousand people would actually continue through the entire thing all the way up to what would be a fatal voltage. In the real test, 65 of people would have theoretically electrocuted someone to death just because there was a doctor in the room telling them to.

And this is where you get the appeal to authority fallacy. This is like an early research that proves this, that just because a guy in a lab coat’s like, no, no, he’s fine, keep going, that you, like most people would murder another person just because a lab coat guy is saying that it’s okay. I’m not going to mention 20, 19, 2020 after this. So anyways, the. He uses this one as a further way to see, okay, who’s cut out for the rest of this heist program. And one of them, you see, they’re like, he gets up about halfway, and he’s like, yeah, I’m not gonna do this anymore.

And the doctor says it, you know, if you can continue, please go ahead and continue. And he’s like, yeah, even. So, I’m done. We’re good here. Like, after he hears that first scream, so he’s kicked out. Then there’s a guy that’s kind of, like, struggling with it a little bit. So he hits it, he hears the scream, and he, like, looks back at the doctor like, hey, man, is this guy okay? And the doctor says, like, it’s painful but not harmful. The guy’s like, what does that mean? He’s like, what? What do you mean? It’s. It’s painful, not harmful.

Like, is there going to be a scar? And you’re saying there’s not a scar? And the doctor is just like, please continue. That’s pretty much all they ever say. So he goes up a few more times, and then he stops. And then there was one chick that’s, like, gets halfway through it, and she’s like, I gotta tell you, like, I know this experiment. Like, I know what we’re doing here. So I needed to kind of, like, recuse myself. And then I. I assumed she was gonna get cut, but she didn’t. So they end up picking four people out of all these different tasks that are finally going to go through on the heist.

And it’s the lady that caught the experiment. And it’s like, I wonder if if now she’s overconfident, and she’s like, I’m above all this hypnosis stuff. So she gets picked. One of the guys that was, like, enthusiastic about stealing, he gets picked. And then one of the guys that went farther in the Milgram experience but still stopped himself, he also gets picked. So we end up getting, like, four total people that are all going to go through on this heist. And it sets you up perfectly because you’re not sure where they’re going to go, because each person does have different traits.

Yeah, the completely different traits. And then it’s interesting how he’s showing who gets cut, why they get cut. And then there was one. One lady that he just says she took longer than others to recover from the Milgram experience experiment. Because I’m guessing that she probably took it all the way to the end and then realized, like, oh, you just murdered. Like, you just hypothetically murdered somebody and didn’t realize it again. 20, 19, 2020, whatever. So they all get cut. And then he finally has a last NLP session with all of them, and he teaches them this.

This physical anchoring. So get a tiny little bit more into the detail here. So the original anchoring, he was telling them, he was like, and you can do this now if you want. I’m not going to, like, actually hypnotize or go into depth, but it would be like, think about the last time that you were beyond confidence. A time that, like, you showed up, you knew exactly what to do. You nailed the entire process. Everyone’s like, hey, great job, Sean. Like, we knew you could come through. Like, you did it. Everyone’s got at least one example of that.

If they’ve made it far enough in life, they haven’t off themselves. So go back to that exact moment, like you’re watching in a movie theater. Now make it three times bigger, three times louder, three times brighter. Then you keep repeating that, like, now make it 10 times. Now make it 20 times. The point is, you’re trying to, like, immerse yourself in that exact moment. And then you say, like, now start rubbing your leg. Like, put your hand against your right thigh and just start rubbing it up and down as you’re thinking about this moment when you were, like, highly motivated, highly confident.

Okay? So he does that on the first time they go to training. This next time that they come back, he has them anchored the last time they were really angry by balling up a fist, making it really strong. And then you focus on what your fist feels like as it’s all tight and. And constricted. And now you think about the last time you were really angry, and you try and anchor that feeling of anger to the feeling of your fist. And then he has. Has him make a fist with one hand and then rub their leg with the other.

So now he’s combining what you call linking. He’s linking the feeling of anger and he’s linking it to the feeling of being motivated and confident. And he’s having them just, like, feel this in this moment. He’s like, okay, this exact moment, this is your peak human performance. Like, you will never feel as powerful as you do in this moment. So he’s just kind of, like, getting them to this, like, fevered state. So this is like, kind of legitimate nlp. This is kinesthetic anchoring. Anchoring can be through sounds, through sights. Like, if you see a symbol in a movie and you get triggered, right.

If you see, like, a swastika, that is a visual anchor to something unpleasant. So you’re like, oh, my God, that’s horrible. So this is just like the. The kinesthetic, the feeling version of all this. And then. And then it’s leading up, he’s like, okay, final test. He brings him for this martial arts experiment, which is kind of chi. I’ve seen a million of these videos. I always laugh at them. But if you just use your chi, if you just yell at someone, if you kind of use, like, a Jedi mind trick, and I’m like, sean, fall down.

And you’re just like, whoa. And you just, like, fall off your feet onto the ground because of just my chi. But he. He convinces these last four people, like, you have this power. If you just yell at Sean and tell him to get on the ground, he’ll just do it. He can’t even help himself because you’re so powerful. And he’s got them in these, like, heightened states of confidence. And you’ve made it through. You’re the last four contestants out of 12. So they do this experiment. Have you ever seen these videos with, like, the chi masters that’ll, like, do, like, a fake punch, but the guy goes, like, flying back? Well, yeah, that.

And even, like. Even the, like, religious stuff, you know, like, they put him on stage and, like, let me. Let me get this disease out of you. And they, like, touch him and the person falls and convulses and. Yeah, good example. So he gets them into this exact state that thinking that all of this is possible. And then he kind of goes through a recap of all the things that Darren Brown acknowledges that he did, which I don’t think was all the things that are actually at play here. And in fact, the more that I talked to other hypnotists and mentalists about Darren Brown, they’re like, man, whenever he tells you, like, here’s what I’m doing, all that’s just nonsense, and none of it has any impact.

And when he. It’s the things that he doesn’t tell you about that’s having more impact. So the things he tells you about is he shows you that PowerPoint presentation again, and it’s literally called things to take away. Like. Like, what’s. What’s going to be your takeaway from this. But then it says Cash, because Cash is Spelled out as an acronym. So it’s like things to take away cash. The. That the empty CDs made them feel more malleable. That the toy gun romanticized the idea of being a criminal. And I would kind of roll my eyes as, like, freaking British.

Like, oh, you’re allowed to have a gun and not be anyways. That the green security van is a constant motif. That the. The guard at the very first night was also wearing a green jacket and had the exact same symbol on his vest that the security van that’s like the Brinks truck has on it. And showing you that, like, all these things that you might not realize at the time, but he’s tying them all together. That the same badge is on that van. And also that there’s an oil painting of the green van right above the exit sign that’s painted to say excite on the way out of this little seminar room.

So those are the things he acknowledges. And then I made a small little list of the things that he didn’t acknowledge that also seem like they would have made a part in. This one is having people literally steal from a store for a positive experience. That seems like it was influenced. And also I think that that first test when they were at the. The hotel or wherever, when the mater d comes up and he’s like, okay, you have to pay for this. Now he’s probably seeing, okay, well, who. When I tell him like, hey, that was $130 meal.

We need money from you. If someone is like, oh, crap, then it’s like, okay, maybe they’re not. Maybe they are just middle management and they’re not making the kind of money that. Oh, 130 bucks. Yeah, whatever. Here it is. Because that. That type of person probably doesn’t need to steal from a bank. They probably are thinking about stealing. So I think that was another part. And then also all of the little, like, word symbolism when he’s like, you need to steal yourself. Even if you’re standing in the face of security, it’ll really pay off, you know? And remember, you’re the one with the weapon of having, you know, this absolute aggression and power over people.

Don’t let anyone else take that from you. You take it from them. Like, he kind of, like, says these commanding words, and then he says the next morning, hey, come and meet me down the street. The taxi will drop you off. Just walk up around the way, and I’ll be there to meet you. And that’s kind of where, like, you come to the big crescendo. At the end. And then it really. It really. This is the best part for me, like, the way they unfolded everything. They did a. Well, a good job of like, leading you up to this moment.

So the final moment is that he has them dropped off down the corner from where this bank’s at. And he’s got it timed out perfectly. So you see four people all go through the exact same motions. They get dropped off, they start walking towards the end of the street. As they’re walking towards the end of the street, they walk by a green security van. And then the guy comes out of the bank holding these two big briefcases full of money towards his van. Now as they’re walking to the end of the street, they’ve got the fake gun in their pants because that.

Because Darren was like, bringing the fake gun with you or whatever. And then also a black van will drive by blasting that Jackson 5 song, saying, can you feel it? So right as they walk by this Brinks truck, the van goes by. Blast music. You see them all stop and they’re like, damn, I got a gun on me right now. And out of the four people, three of them actually commit the armed robbery. They take the fake gun out. They say, get on the ground. They grab the briefcases, and then they just dart. They just start running for it.

And the security guard, hey, stop. And he chases them. And then you can see clearly this is all planned because film crew and extras all run and swarm them and kind of like, all right, Darren comes out. He’s like, it’s me, it’s me. Puts like a towel around them, you know, like they’ve just been through some traumatic experience. But yeah, so out of all these people, he picked four. And three of those four people all did the heist. And then the last guy, he just kind of walks by. You can see that he’s, like, thinking about it.

And in his mind he’s like, bro, this is so weird. Like, all these different things just happened. How can this be? But he ultimately doesn’t do it. And then you just. You see the aftermath. And at the very end, Darren Brown leads them on to this, like, geodesic dome tent where they’re all on gurneys with, like, lights flashing in their eyes. It looks like a. Like a sci fi CIA mind control movie at the end. But. And that. That’s the heist, man. Three out of four people all robbed the. The bank based on Darren Brown’s hypnosis.

Not just rob them. Like, you know, hey, give it to, like, they were into it. Like, they were like, get on the ground. Like, they were. Like they really had a family. Do you ever want to see your family again? Y that was, like, mindblowing to me. Because it’s not like they just took it and ran. It’s different from just stealing. Like, it’s almost. You get the feel like, this guy might shoot this guy. You know it’s a fake gun. But you’re like, if it was a real gun, they may shoot them. That’s how far they went.

Over. Hidden treasures over more moments, you go first. The entire heist is the hidden treasure. But if I have to go pick more, it’s just actually getting an inside view for people like us that are into this mind control. MKUltra, a genre of things that you’re like, oh, my God, like, this is how you create a school shooter. This is how you create guys that do these random acts of violence. When we talk about the discords and like, now you can add medications and other things to it, but this is the raw, like, bones of what people do to get people do these crazy things.

I think too, some of the hidden treasures, for me, legit NLP techniques, whether or not you think that they’re valid, it is an entire field that people have been studying for longer than I’ve even been alive. And I’ve personally seen. Like, again, the first Darren Brown I ever saw was that interview with Simon Pegg when he asked for a bicycle at the end. And I also, in my mind, asked for a bicycle. So as anecdotal as that is, I think I. At that moment, it was absolute proof that not only does this work because it worked over an edited television show that I downloaded off of, like, a torrent and was watching it, and it still worked on me somehow.

So I can only imagine if someone was. Was laser focusing on you in person, trying to influence you in all these different ways. The other thing, too, is that the Milgram experiment is it was kind of wild to see a modern version of someone redoing that and having roughly the exact same results. I think the milgram experiment had 65% of people went up to lethal voltage. And this one, he said it was a little over half, but in both cases, it’s definitely not one in a thousand. It’s like five and ten, six and ten. I thought it was a hidden treasure, seeing people rob a store, you know, even if it was just a candy bar, see an old lady rob a store for the first time in her life.

And, like, it was as real as it could have been. They weren’t going to go to jail over it, but they were definitely getting caught, they were definitely getting called out and having to deal with the awkward situation of like, hey, like hey, where are you going with that? Twix bar, right? I thought that that was interesting. And just seeing the store, the shopkeeper’s reaction to this since they didn’t wear it in on it, and then just the premises itself of like, can I mind control a normal person to commit armed robbery? I just like that someone had that idea and then executed on it and then it was executed.

Well, none of that is without some overboard stuff. So I gotta mention that a. It seems so fast, man. They mentioned in the wiki and even in the beginning of this documentary he says this all takes place over the course of two weeks. And somehow it’s just so hard for me to believe that someone could go from Nevers robbing a store for candy to committing armed robbery within the span of two weeks. Even with all the explanations and everything, it’s still like, I don’t know man, it feels staged. It feels like they were playing into it.

We’re not getting the whole story on this. Maybe they thought as they heard that music and they saw the van, it was like, oh, this has to be part of the Darren Brown show. So let me do the thing that I’m being expected to do. But as far as I can tell, man, there’s been no one that’s come out on this particular special of the heist and said, hey, I was there and here’s what really happened. Darren Brown says that he was shocked at how quickly they did it and that in general the response has been one of belief.

So I don’t know how to even classify like the overboard moment feels. It’s so staged and it is so fabricated like it’s a reality TV show. But then at the same time, man, like, I don’t know, it maybe it could 100% be real. I’m with you. My overboard moment is more of my skepticism, right? I’m skeptical of these people. Is there a producer like hey man, amp it up because you’re just so used to reality tv. But then on the other hand, knowing some of these techniques and, and things that people will do in real life that we’ve actually seen happen, like sheep dipping and stuff like that, like, like getting somebody to be a character that they’re not normally doing.

It can happen, especially with like what you’ve seen with the FBI doing to a lot of these so called terror cells. Throughout the thousands where they just get a woman that’d be like, hey, this lonely Middle Easterner be like, you know, like, it’d be cool. I’ll give you my number if you like feel like blowing stuff up, you know what I mean? So it’s believable and not believable at the same time. So that’s what I think. It makes it a hidden treasure because I can’t tell you for sure what, what’s true or not. My favorite time.

Your favorite time time. Sink or swim. I think everybody already knows this is a swim for me. Just because the fact of breaking down how psychologically you can control someone or put them in a situation that they normally would never ever think about doing right. None of these people would have ever been like, yeah, I’m, I’m willing to rob a, a, a, a security guard, a bank, anything like that. Even so much of taking the candy. Now you go through another scenario. If you take some people that have low end people that have no money, nothing to, they may be like, yeah, I’ll do whatever I got to do to keep eating.

But you didn’t do that in this scenario. It’s people that don’t need it. So for me to actually get a bird’s eye view of what happens, like it’s not exactly the MK Ultra or the mind control. We think there’s so many different genres of it, but it gives you a baseline and the foundation of what they use. So it’s a swim for me. Yeah, I guess. No surprise here. Swim for me too. I’m literally the one that recommended that we put this on the list from 2006. So it was kind of already a swim making its way onto the list, but even revisiting because I haven’t seen this thing in over 10 or 15 years and I think it still holds up.

I still want to do way more Darren Brown, so maybe I’ll just. We’ll just sprinkle a Darren Brown and every once in a while and do another one and see how crazy they are. There is a whole series where he comes to the US and he tries to convince an evangelist group that he’s like the second coming. He convinces a new age group, he’s a second coming. He like goes through all these different, like religious cults and he convinces them that he’s got some extra insight you and they’ve never heard of him before. So I thought that was an interesting thing.

We’ll definitely revisit all this. It was a little bit cheesier than I remembered it too originally being it’s very made for TV in a way, but somehow it doesn’t completely make me think that it’s all staged. And I’m still wondering was it staged or not? Like was this theater? Was it tv? Is it misdirection? And I almost feel that Darren Brown himself is reveling in that. He’s reveling in the fact that there’s people that are like, man, I don’t know, maybe it was staged, maybe it wasn’t. Because now it’s like this meta level of misdirection where not even the people that he literally brainwashed, but now the people watching them get brainwashed or themselves getting brainwashed.

I don’t know. I gotta ask you, do you think you would rob a bank? Maybe, but not. No one could convince me. But that would be on some other circumstances. Okay. Not. Well, I. I do hope that I don’t have to force you through gunpoint to go to paranoidamerican.com go grab yourself a conspiracy theory comic book. Just go and search for Paranoid American on Spotify. Listen to music, listen to other podcasts. Most importantly, hit the little thumbs up. If you made it this far, hit the subscribe. Drop a snarky comment over whether or not you think that you could be mindwashed into robbing a bank within two weeks.

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