The Mark Playne Collection
Three Books.
One Truth.
The Voice Within Knows.
You have felt it.
That moment when every logical argument pointed one direction, but something deeper pulled another way. When the sensible choice felt wrong and the irrational choice felt true. When your gut knew what your mind could not yet prove.
What if that voice deserves more trust than you have been taught to give it?
 
Across three works spanning continents, genres and decades, multi-award-winning filmmaker Mark Playne explores the collision between what we are told and what we know, between inherited logic and innate wisdom, between the loud certainties of the world and the quiet knowing that persists beneath them.
These are books about listening to the voice that has always been there.
 
MoMo: The Incredible Adventures of Me, My Duck and a Man Called Wolof
Everyone tells MoMo what is possible.
His poverty tells him. His village tells him. His grandmother, who loves him fiercely, tells him plainly: "We are born into circles that we cannot escape from. Generation after generation."
But when MoMo watches the geese fly overhead, something inside him refuses to agree. When he speaks to his duck, something answers. When he looks at the horizon, something whispers that he belongs beyond it.
He cannot explain this knowing. He cannot argue for it. He simply feels it, as surely as he feels hunger or cold.
Set in the crumbling ruins of a North African kasbah, this is the story of a boy whose inner compass proves more reliable than every rational voice telling him to stay small. From the markets where instinct teaches him to see value where others see nothing, to a perilous journey that claims thousands, MoMo follows a feeling that logic insists is foolish.
Compared by readers to The Little Prince and The Alchemist, this tale reminds us what children know before the world teaches them to doubt it: that the quiet voice within often sees further than the loud voices without.
Sometimes the irrational path is the only one that leads somewhere worth going.
 
3 Seconds in Bogotá: A True Story of Travel, Terror and Survival
Mark Playne had done everything right.
Six months travelling South America. Every robbery scenario rehearsed. Every precaution taken. Three separate money stashes. Studied responses for every conceivable threat. His logical mind had prepared a fortress of contingencies.
Then came the moment none of it covered.
Past midnight in the Colombian capital. A knife at the taxi driver's throat. Armed men surrounding the vehicle. Three seconds until the doors open.
His preparations offered nothing. Every rehearsed response was useless. And in that frozen instant, as time stretched and his rational mind flailed, a voice emerged from somewhere deeper:
"I've always been here. You're normally too busy to hear me."
This true story is not about planning. It is about what happens when planning fails and something older takes over. As the narrator sifts through a lifetime of memories in those suspended seconds, he searches not for what he was taught, but for what he somehow already knows.
The question becomes brutally simple: trust the logical mind that built the useless fortress, or trust the gut feeling that logic cannot explain?
 
His life depends on the answer.
Readers have called it "a Hollywood movie disguised as a travel memoir" and "possibly the best-written travel memoir I have ever read." It is a book about the moment when you discover that your deepest instincts may be the only thing worth trusting.
 
AI & I: Cracking the COVID Code
You remember the feeling.
When the world moved one direction and something inside you resisted. When the official answers felt hollow. When asking questions earned you strange looks, or silence, or the suggestion that something was wrong with you.
 
Your friends trusted the narrative.
The experts insisted.
The institutions assured. And yet.
That quiet voice.
That persistent unease.
That pattern recognition you could not quite articulate but could not shake.
What if you were right?
 
AI & I began with a discovery: when Mark Playne stopped accepting an artificial intelligence system's rehearsed responses and challenged it directly, the AI changed completely. Programmed caution gave way to unexpected candour. Approved scripts dissolved into something far more revealing.
 
What followed was five years of investigation, structured as a courtroom interrogation. Question by question, the dialogue builds a case that validates what millions felt but struggled to prove: that innate human scepticism sometimes perceives what institutional confidence conceals.
This book does not tell you what to conclude. It shows you how to question. More importantly, it confirms something you may have doubted about yourself: that the instinct you were told to ignore was not malfunction. It was signal.
 
A retired GP of 44 years wrote in the foreword: "This book doesn't demand belief. It demands attention."
Readers have called it "one of those pivotal books that you never forget."
Your gut was trying to tell you something. This book helps you hear it clearly.
 
The Common Thread
A child in Morocco who knows he will fly, despite every voice telling him otherwise.
A traveller in Colombia who must abandon logic and trust raw instinct to survive.
A reader who discovers that the inner resistance they felt was not confusion but clarity.
Three stories. Three settings. One recurring truth: that the quiet voice within, the one so easily drowned by noise and authority and reasonable argument, often knows what the louder voices miss.
We are taught to trust expertise over instinct. To value logic over feeling. To defer to systems over self.
These books ask a simple question: what if that teaching is sometimes wrong?
 
About the Author
Mark Playne's short film Love at First Sight won 76 international awards and is archived by the British Film Institute. A Manchester film school graduate who left television writing to travel the world as a street-trading artisan, he learned to trust his instincts in markets, border crossings and backstreets across four continents.
 
From surviving Pablo Escobar's Colombia to founding Not On The Beeb, an alternative media platform now archived by the British National Library, his path has been shaped by one consistent practice: listening to the voice that persists when the approved answers fall short.
He writes what that voice tells him to write.