I’m going to teach them some genuine skills that I use, peppered with some spurious pop-psychology and quite a lot of bullshit. - Derren Brown

My techniques are concerned with reading signals from people, tiny unconscious clues that betray their thoughts. I tend to see it like a game...

History is littered with examples of normal people being persuaded to act in deviant, criminal or irrational ways. How do you persuade someone to do something they would not normally be prepared to do? Some people might think of hypnosis. However, hypnosis isn’t really what it appears to be. It’s only a kind of play acting and no one would carry out an instruction to really commit a robbery any more than they’d murder someone if they were told to.

If a piece of 'alternative medicine' can be shown to work reliably, it ceases to become alternative. It just becomes medicine.