Interview with Psychological Entertainer Doug Segal

Earlier this week I caught up with Doug Segal, one of the performers at this year’s annual York Takeover Festival, hosted by York Theatre Royal. Doug is multi-award winning mentalist and his show, How to Read Minds and Influence People, is a winning combination of comedy and mind reading. I jumped at the chance to interview him, but went to the interview with much caution; this is a man, after all, who claims he can read my mind.

As soon as I sat down with Doug I could tell that this wasn’t going to be your average interview. He immediately started making jokes and before the interview even began, he was eager to impress me with his psychological trickery. He performed a fantastic trick on me, which I must admit I have no idea how he performed and am still baffled by, in which he guessed which number I would pick from 10-99 by making me imagine numbers spinning around as if in a fruit machine. You may think I am just easily impressed, but after this unnerving display of seemingly genuine mind reading ability I was eager to progress with the interview.

So Doug, an obvious question first, how did you get into mind reading? 

I studied psychology at University up to PHD level. What I realised was that I was being taught stuff that wasn’t really relevant to what I wanted to do. One of the captions for the show, actually, is ‘hard science abused in the name of tawdry entertainment’! I had all this information and knew I could do something with it (beyond getting drinks and impressing women), so I just started coming up with lots of little party tricks.

I know you had a successful career before your life on stage, so what made you go into entertaining?

After University I went into advertisment, by the time I left I was actually a Board Director of a large agency. I found out an awful lot more about effective persuasion techniques and subliminal stuff, and again took this away from its true function and added that to my repertoire of party tricks. I actually had a client who basically bullied me into putting on a show at a sales promotion in Munich. I kept saying to him ‘I don’t think you understand, I run your advertising this is not what I do!’, but he put a lot of pressure on me, I’m sure half in jest, to put on this performance. So I put on a show. It went really well and I just sort of realised it was time to leave the industry, so I took a leap. I realised I was never going to make as much money, but I knew I might kind of get my soul back.
The Evening Standard has described your show as what would happen ‘if Derren Brown were funny’.

Is professional comedy something you have considered or does it come in mostly to assist the mentalist part of your show?

In all honesty when I started out I knew that when people think of mind tricks they immediately think of Derren Brown, and rightly so- he came first and he’s brilliant. I think I added in the comedy to put some clear blue water between my act and his because without it we are trying to achieve very similar things, I didn’t want to be a poor man’s Derren Brown. My shows are very comedy based, in fact the next show I’m working on which comes out in 2014 has 5 comedy sections and is more of a narrative, but I think it’s something that gives me an edge and hopefully makes me stand out.

In your show you plan to predict the National Lottery, have you ever been tempted to use you tricks in everyday life? If it were me I think the temptation would be too much!

All I will say is that with great power comes great responsibility…

I’ll take that as a ‘no comment’ haha. I’ve noticed that previously you have had competitions for your fans offering them the chance to have a one-on-one performance from you, is there anything similar that your fans in York can get involved with?

Unfortunately I’m really not here long enough to do anything like that, with the show only being performed here once, but there is a free Ap that fans can download onto their smartphones which will, once practiced, create the illusion that you have memorised the internet ( tiny.cc/dougtrick ). Of course if you come to the show, I’ll be showing you how to do more tricks than just that!

Having met Doug, I can see why the show has been so successful in the past. How to Read Minds and Influence People promises to be well worth a trip to the theatre on Friday 22nd March, and tickets are on sale now to students and Under 25s for £8 from yorktheatreroyal.co.uk .