Begin Again with Davina McCall - Johann Hari: The True Cause of Addiction! This is the Real Reason We're Unhappy. Pain is a Signal, Listen To It!

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

In this episode of Begin Again, Davina welcomes Johann Hari, an acclaimed journalist, TED speaker, and New York Times best-selling author of The Magic Pill, Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections, and Stolen Focus. Renowned for his exploration of mental health, addiction, and the societal factors shaping our well-being, Johann offers profound insights into why tackling the root causes of our challenges is key to true transformation. Find more of Johann’s work here: www.johannhari.com FB: @JohannHari.Page Insta: @johann.hari TikTok: @johannhari Twitter: @johannhari101 Follow me here: www.instagram.com/beginagain https://www.tiktok.com/@beginagainpod  (0:00) Intro (1:26) How to Move Forward in Life After Setbacks (6:18) Healthy Ways to Cope with Trauma (13:44) Why Anti-Depressants Aren't the Only Solution to Depression (15:01) The Importance of Finding Your Support Network (20:54) Why Tough Love Often Backfires (23:45) How Hatred Controls Our Lives and How to Break Free (30:07) Adobe Ad (31:15) Fiverr Ad (32:05) Escaping the Social Media Rabbit Hole (40:00) How to Reframe Negativity into Positivity (50:04) The Healing Power of Feeling Truly Loved (51:17) How to Use Your Inner Power to Create Positive Change (01:59:22) Johann's Book (01:01:50) Davina's Takeaways Sponsored by: Adobe - https://www.adobe.com/uk/express/ Fiverr - https://fvrr.co/davina" SetArtwork provided by Kimi Zoet. Enquiries: [e-mail] https://g2ul0.app.link/oQMAPbdSGNb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amazon presents, Laura versus Fruitflies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen, these little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Everyday with Amazon. The core addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life

because your life is too painful a place to be. Well, I'm going to cry. We're being taught to mistrust the signals we get from our own bodies and our own psyches. My biggest problem was that I had to say that I was an addict and I'd never said that out loud before. And I thought, once I say I'm an addict, I can't go back and use easily again.

The addicted behaviour is a way of in that moment not being present with that pain and distress. Sorry. It was a very hard thing. Everyone knows they have natural physical needs. You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. There's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong.

You need to feel that people see you. You need to feel your life has... We've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep psychological needs. People feel that something's wrong in their lives. They feel there's something they want to change. Those signals, they're painful. Of course, horribly painful. But those signals are absolutely necessary.

They are telling you the most important thing, which is if you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy. You're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is... Yes, yes. Johan, I mean, first of all, I just want to tell people how we met because it was way back in the day on Big Brother, obviously. 17 years ago, I looked at it. Oh my God, was it really? Look how good we still look.

Still got it. So I wanted to really start off with asking you, what do you? think the kind of major factors that prevent us from moving forwards or starting again? Yeah, I was thinking about this because in a way, so many people feel that something's wrong in their lives. They feel there's something they want to change. But I think the way I began to think about it, I was thinking about our conversation is sort of there's all these kind of locks in the way we live that are trapping us. I think, well, okay, what we need to do is help people get to the keys to undo those locks. And so many of the books that I've written in different ways about different

problems are about that, right? I'm, you know, I'm sort of, to some degree, subjects I write about, like depression, addiction, attention problems, weight problems. You know, to some degree, I've got a sort of intellectual interest in them, but to be honest, the main reason I mentioned them, understanding them sort of in a different way is, okay, does that help us get to better solutions?

Does we get to better answers? So I was thinking there's so many sort of locks and keys that we could talk about. There's so many places we could start. I guess I would start, the one that first came to mind, And so sound a bit, I don't know, fancy or abstract at first, is I think one of the things that blocks people right at the start is that we're being taught to mistrust the signals we get

from our own bodies and our own psyches, our own kind of spirits in a way, and to actually insult the signals that we get and to not understand them. So I think about in my own case, right, but think about it in relation to depression, you know, So when I was a teenager, you know, I'd had a, as you know, we've talked about there's so many times. I grew up in a very crazy environment. There was a lot of addiction, a lot of insanity.

And I think about myself when I was 17, I went to the doctor. I was, you know, distressed, right? The way I've sometimes put it is I felt like pain was leaking out with me. And I look back now, I think about the 17th. year olds I know now. And I think, well, of course, it was kind of obvious why I was in that state, right? And my doctor told me something it was very common in the 90s. It's still being told to people out now. I get emails from it all the time. My doctor said, we know what's wrong with you. You've just got something wrong with your brain. You're lacking a chemical in your brain.

All we need to do is give you some drugs. You're going to be fine. So I started taking an antidepressant called Paxil. But these feelings of pain kept coming back and I kept taking higher and higher doses until for 13 years. So by the time we first met, I was on an unbelievably high dose for really, you know, I've been on it for many years.

And I think back now, my issue isn't with the drugs. You know, there's obviously benefits and drawbacks to all drugs, but my issue isn't so much with the drugs. My issue,

antidepressants benefited me for a while. They benefit many people, anyone watching, if you're taking them, they're benefiting, you carry on. But my issue is about thinking about that signal right at the start.

By saying, this is just like a kind of glitch in a computer program, right? it's like a malfunction, a biological malfunction. Inevertently, what my doctor was doing was saying, well, this signal doesn't mean anything, right? It's not a meaningful signal, it's a malfunction.

So all you need to do is sort of, firstly, it locates the problem in you, right? Actually, the problem wasn't in me. I was a great kid, right? Actually, what I needed to be told is, how amazing that you survived all this. Well done you, right? Like, that would have been a really powerful message to be told, not you're broken, there's something wrong with you, even that was very well, I want to stress again, very well intention.

And I think that's happening a huge amount in our culture, right? So sometimes it's easier to see it if you think about it in the recent past. If you think about the 1970s, right? In the 70s, there was, it still is now, but there was even more domestic violence in Britain, right? It was very common. And very often, women who were being violently abused would go to their doctor, they were being beaten up, and the doctor would say, you've got a nervous disorder

and you need Valium to treat your nervous disorder and people were literally told something wrong with your actual physical nerves, right? It wasn't like a metaphor, right? And lots of people believe that. Now when we look back on it we can see, right, that wasn't, what those women need to be told was you need to get the fuck away from this man who's abusing you,

right? You don't need Valium, you need a domestic violence shelter and a society that supports you and sides with you against violent men who think they can abuse you, right? But at the time, people couldn't, some people saw it, obviously, It's why heroic women set up domestic violence shelters. But a lot of people couldn't see it.

And I think in a way, we're a lot closer to that than we'd like to think, right? Lots of things are going wrong in our culture, in lots of ways people watching your deeper psychological needs will not be being met. You're experiencing signals of that, which can be depression, anxiety, attention problems, addiction, all sorts of things. Overeating, whole battery of things, right? You've got all four in my books there. You go down the list, right? But they all come from the same thing, right? They all come from an unhappiness, a trauma,

and need to fix something. And we're going to look at anything to try and do that. And, you know, with this kind of abuse that you went through or the trouble, the trauma that you went through in your childhood, meant that you felt troubled. And you actually were sensible enough and brilliant enough to go and see a doctor about it. Whereas I've reached for the drugs, you know,

which is chasing the scream. It's always that trauma that leads you to something, but so many people are going. through some kind of dealing with trauma. But it's so true to be, and even people aren't going through trauma in the way that we did, I would say everyone knows they have natural physical needs, right? You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air, obviously. If I took those things away from you, you'd be screwed.

But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value. You want to proud of you. saying I've heard you talk about a lot. You've got a future that makes sense. And the culture that we've built is good at loads of things.

I'm glad to be alive today, right? Many things are much better now than in the past. But there's lots of evidence that talk about us a lot in my book, lost connections that we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs. And when you reframe the problem, there are real biological contributions. Your genes can make you more sensitive to all the problems we're talking about,

although they don't write your destiny. but when you reframe it as mostly about unmet needs, it opens up a different way of thinking about it. I remember there was a moment this really fell into place for me because I was struggling with it, right? I was very much in this story. I was very deeply committed to the story my doctor told me. I'm biologically broken.

Gives a lot of relief to you, seems to release shame. How would you describe it? Well, I just think it's relaxing because then you think, oh, great, I don't have to do any work on this thing that really is hurting a lot. just fix it with a pill. That's much easier than looking at the thing or the place, going to the place I don't want to go.

That's so important. I'm just thinking about the way you put it. I think that's exactly right. I think there's that. I think there's also, we're in this kind of dichotomy where we think it's either brain or blame, right? Either, oh, there's a problem with your brain or you're to blame. You were lazy, weak, whatever, right? And there was a moment I sort of realized it was opening up for me of realizing, oh, right,

there's a third option between beyond brain and brain. Blaine. He's called Dr. Derek Somerfeld and he's a South African psychiatrist. He told me this story. So he was in Cambodia in 2001 when they first introduced chemical antidepressants in that country in Southeast Asia. They'd never had antidepressants before. And the local doctors, the Cambodians, were like, huh, what are antidepressants? He wasn't there to study it or anything. It just happened to be there at the time. And he explained to them what they were. And they said to him, oh, we don't need them, we've got antidepressants. And he was like, what do you mean?

And he thought they were going to talk about some kind of like herbal remedy, like, I don't know, Jinkgobeloba or something. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day he stood on a landmine that had been left over from the war with the Americans, and he got his leg blown off. So they took him to hospital, they gave him an artificial leg. They're good at that in Cambodia because they could have a lot of landmines.

And a few months later, he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's really painful to work under water when you've got an artificial limb. And I'm guessing it's pretty traumatic to go back and work in the fields where you got blown up. The guy started to cry a lot. He developed kind of what we would call classic depression. After a while, he just refused to get out of bed.

And the Cambodian doctors said to Dr. Somerfeld, well, that was when we gave him an antidepressant. And he was like, what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. You only had to talk to the guy for five minutes to realize why he was so traumatized. They said to him, one of the doctors figured,

if we bought this man a cow, he could become a dairy farmer, he wouldn't be in this position that was screaming out so much. So they bought him a cow within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone. It never came back. They said to Dr. Somerfeld,

so you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant, right? Now, if you've been raised to think about depression, the way we have, that sounds like a weird joke. I went to see my doctor for depression. and she gave me a cow. But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the whole world, the World Health Organization has been trying to tell us for years. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the main

kind of machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is love and practical support to get your needs met. So I think, if we think about it in terms of locks and keys, right? One of the locks that locks people in, is there in a situation that doesn't meet their needs, they experience distress, and then absolutely not the fault of the system, but it starts to tell people, oh, no, this distress you're experiencing

because you're unmeted needs is actually just that you're broken. There's something wrong inside you, and all you need to do is drug yourself, and of course the drugs can give some people some relief and do give some people some relief, but it keeps you in that lock. It leads you to actually distrust your most essential

feelings that it's not just that those signals, they're painful, of course, horribly painful, but those signals are absolutely necessary. They are telling you something really important about, in fact, the most important thing, which is your needs are not being met, right? And that's in the situation you were in when you turned to addiction, a situation I was in. The way I think of it is if you don't have an accurate map of your pain, you can't find your way through the territory, right? Oh my God, yeah. And we're giving people inaccurate maps of their pain, and it leaves them locked in this dysfunction. So what first thing we need to do is sort of start with helping people to create accurate maps of their distress. What does this mean? Why do you

feel this way? And there can be many reasons. Obviously, I go through in lost connections, nine different forms of disconnection that have been proven to cause depression. There's lots of other things going on as well, obviously. So it has to start with a very different kind of conversation about our pain. Because if you've got the wrong story about it, you're very unlikely to get to the right solution. Does that ring true to you? Well, I mean, God, there's so much to get up there. But one of the things that I loved is when you said your emotional needs aren't being met. And I remember in recovery early on, I was in a meeting and I just said, I'm just so needy all the time. I just feel so needy. I just kind of look at people. And some wise old timer came up to me

at the end and said, it was in a relationship, he said, you know, have you thought about the fact that you're just needed because your emotional needs aren't being met? And I'd always seem being needy as something horrible. You know, it's like a fault in me. But actually it's like, oh, well, maybe I'm with the wrong person and they can't meet my needs.

I mean, now I would look at it in terms of love languages probably and my need is touch and theirs wouldn't be. And I'd be kind of going like, hello, and they'd be like, oh, don't want to. And I'd read that as you don't love me. But so I loved what you said there. But I think I'm thinking about depression nowadays and how hard it is for people that have been through a journey of constantly, from a relatively young age, being put on this drug. And then using that and then continuing to live a life where they aren't doing nothing to fix that feeling in themselves of being content or having purpose.

they've gone for the job where they're dissatisfied. I mean, there were horrific percentages, I think you said, something like 80, in the 80% of people who are dissatisfied in their daily job. That's five days a week of doing something that you're not happy. And imagine having that and having a situation that you're trying to deal with, but you're dealing with in the wrong way. It's almost like, how do you untangle yourself from that in life? It's such a, and feeling the way that you do, vulnerable.

scared to come off the drugs because you think I don't want to go back to where I was. I think that's really important. I think there's a lot of things what you just said to Venus. I don't think it's the drug that traps people. There are benefits to drug and drawbacks to the drugs. It's important to weight them and I know you're not conscious to what you're saying. No, no. I mean, I'm agreeing with you. I think you're absolutely right. Exactly. But for me it comes back to that story. So you can see how when you when you shift the story, you can start to get to some things that unlock. It's giving an example, again, just up the road from here.

A really important breakthrough in the history of depression was made. And a really inspiring one, I think. So there's a doctor at the road in the Bromley by Bow surgery. I'm pointing that way, but I have no idea what direction of Bromley is from it. But not far. Called Sam Everington, great, a wonderful person. So Sam, he's a GP, family GP, and he was very uncomfortable. because he had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety.

And like you, like me, he's not against antidepressants. He thinks they have some value. But he could see that very often antidepressants were giving a bit of relief but not really solving the problem. And his patients were often depressed and anxious for really good reasons. Like they were really lonely, they were really financially insecure, there's a whole range of things. And one day Sam had an idea. So a patient came in called Lisa Cunning.

I got to know her later. And he said to Lisa, you know, she'd been shut away in her home with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years. She was in a bad way, Lisa. And he said to her, OK, I'm going to prescribe something else for you. I'll carry and give you the drug. But I'm going to prescribe for you to come here to the doctor's offices twice a week to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people, not to talk about how shit you feel. You can do that if you want, that's not a point of it.

I want you guys to find something meaningful that you can do together. And the first time the group met, Lisa, Lisa, Lillard. literally vomited with anxiety. It was just so overwhelming. Yeah. To be around people, right, if you've been shut away. And the group started chatting. People that rubbed her back. They're very nice to her. Group started chatting. They were like, what could we do? These are inner city, East London people like me. They knew nothing about gardening, right? But there was an area behind the doctor's offices that was called Dog Shit Alley, which gives your sense of what it was like.

It was the scrubland where dogs were going shit. And they were like, we could turn Dog Shit Alley into a garden, right? What do we do that? So they started to watch loads of gardening clips on YouTube They started to go to the library to get out, books about gardening. They started to get their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. There's a lot of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a really important antidepressant. But they started to do something even more important, right?

They started to form a tribe. They started to form a group. If one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking for them and go, hey, are you okay? Do you need any help? And the way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom, right? There's a, this approach is called social prescribing. It's spreading all over Europe.

There's a small amount of research on it, but the small research we have suggests it's twice as effective as chemical antidepressants. I think for a kind of obvious reason, right, it's solving some of the deep underlying problems that are making people so depressed and anxious in the first place. So I would say if we want to get to a lock, one of the first locks, if we think about the, or rather when you get to a key, if one of the first locks is being trapped in an overly simplistic story, misreading your signals, one of the first keys I would talk about would be it is exceptionally hard to solve that on your own. Right. If you are sitting alone and you're trying to disentangle that, it's really hard. You would not got out of your addiction without NA, you know, Lisa would not have got out of depression without this social prescribing. group. So I would say the first thing you want to do is connect to a wider group of people who are also trying to solve that problem. The very fact of being in a group massively increases

your chance of unlocking what's going on. It's through dialogue with other people that you can begin to uncover what's actually happening and crucially build solutions to it. I really hope you're enjoying this episode. And if you can, give us a follow. I mean, I feel like crying every kind of other sentence with you at the moment because it's, it's, It's moving me deeply because of the, well, you've got such a brilliant way of wording things. But one of the things that I couldn't believe at my first N.A. meeting, like, my biggest problem was that I had to say that I was an addict and I'd never said that out loud before. And I thought, once I say I'm an addict, I can't really go back and use easily again. How are we then?

24. So to say it out loud meant that I was admitting to other people. people, but even worse, I was admitting it to myself. And once I've admitted it to myself, then that makes it quite hard. It will ruin my using forever. I can't never enjoy it again. Mark wasn't enjoying it much at that point anyway. That's why I was in a meeting. So all through the meeting, I'm obsessing about, I'm going to have to say it. Oh my God, if I have to talk, I'm going to have to say it. And then they say, now is the time for newcomers to say anything. And sort of everybody just looks at me. I'm thinking, oh, no, I say, my name's Davina.

And I'm like, it's like vomiting out the words. I'm an addict. And then I just cry for kind of two minutes and people rub my back. And a bit like you were saying, you know, somebody was rubbing Lisa's back because she was so anxious. And I really identified with that feeling of being in a group of like-minded people suffering the same kind of problems but supporting each other with the knowledge of exactly what that person's going through. And a bit like maybe Lisa felt I've never felt true depression before. don't think, but I get that feeling from friends of mine that have spoken about it, that you just feel that the entire world, even people that you know love you, would be better off without

you, like you are worthless. And this feeling that when Lisa or somebody didn't turn up in that group of people, how much it would mean when somebody would come to look for you and you'd think, why? Why are you doing this? We talked a bit about tough love. And I remember calling you from a run, having a fucking epiphany, you know. You know, I love that an epiphany. I remember the second. And how I'd always believe that to be true that, well, I'm going to cry as fuck.

Sorry. It was a very hard thing reading that book because it was a philosophy that was so ingrained. It's a bit like you being told that you taking medicine was like, oh great, I can take this. This is the philosophy that I've been told to believe in. I believe in it all this time. but there's something not quite right about it.

It felt a bit mean. And how come when we were nice to somebody that was coming in, we weren't shunning him or telling him to go away or telling him, we gave him love, we gave him somewhere, we gave him a cup of tea and we gave him a biscuit. And five years later, he made it. That realization that actually maybe tough love isn't the correct way to move forward. How did you, what made you think about that?

Did you look at drugs and think maybe this is another plaster that society is putting on itself? Can it make me cry as well? Sorry. I know that... Well, as you know, I had a lot of addiction in my family and, you know, I had this experience the other day. A young member of my family who had a very bad addiction problem

and if you've met six years ago, you would have thought there's no hope for this person. And he, last week he got called for jury service and he was chosen as the foreman of the jury and he persuaded them to acquit the guy and he called me and he was so proud and I thought fuck me six years ago they would have looked at you

and I thought the only context in which you were interacting with the jury was as the defendant right? And I thought, and he's worked really fucking hard to make that happen and I'm really, really proud of him but I think the key thing to understand about addiction is that it's an attempt to solve a problem. That sounds weird to a lot of people at first,

but the core addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be. And the addicted behaviour, which can be heroin, it can't be, gambling or porn or whatever it can be, is a way of in that moment not being present with that pain and distress. There's a really challenging thing that Marianne Faithel said once. She said, heroin saved my life, because if it wasn't for heroin, at that point, I would have killed myself. Right.

Now, Marianne is not saying that heroin, I assume, I'm pretty sure, not saying heroin is a good solution to despair, obviously for all the reasons that everyone watching knows. But it's the best solution anyone offered her, and it's on us that no one offered her a better solution. I feel like you and I are similar people. We want to see the good in people, and I get fed good things. So I actually went through my Instagram account, and I deleted it. a lot of accounts where I thought, I don't want to see this content anymore. And now I get fed, a lot of positive action.

I'm on X less than I used to be. But what I see in other people is they get served hatred for people. And they read their social media and they get so angry about things. And it could be angry either way, but I'm in some blissful kind of ignorant, space in between these two sides. And of course I get agitated about things or misjustice or unfairness, things like that.

But I hate hate and I hate anger. It disturbs me deeply. So this is why I'm sad about this situation because I feel like... What we want is social media that gives people the experience you're having of Instagram. We don't want to get rid of social media. We don't want to...

Even if we could, I wouldn't. But what we want is, that. So the question is, why are most people not having that experience and how do we give them your experience? And the people in Silicon Valley who designed it taught me what's going on, right? So if you took out your phone now, please don't, and you opened TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, I don't like calling it X, but in mind. And you start to scroll. Those companies, they begin to make money out of you immediately in two ways. The first way is really obvious. You see advertising, right? We all know what that's about. The second way is much more.

important. Everything you ever do on these apps, including in your so-called private messages, is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and what makes you tick. So let's say you've ever said, I don't know, that you like Nigel Farage, Bet Midler, and you told your mum you just bought some nappies, right? It's going to go, okay, if you like Nigel Farage, you're probably right wing. If you like Bet Midler and you're a man, you're probably gay. No disrespect to any straight men who like Bet Midler. I don't actually believe you, but, and you've just bought nappies, okay, you've got a baby, right? If you've been using these apps for a while, they know tens of thousands of things like this about you.

They've got an incredibly detailed profile of who you are. And they're building that up for lots of reasons, but the most important one is to figure out how to keep you scrolling for as long as possible. Because every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money. The longer you scroll, the more money they make, because the more ads you see. So all this genius of Silicon Valley, all this AI, all these algorithms, is geared towards one thing and one thing only, figuring out how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. That's it, right? That's all that's going on. And remember they kept explaining this to me.

People who'd been there who'd literally been in the rooms where they decide what to show people and say to my, it can't be that simple. There must be saying more going on here. And they said to me, no. And one of them said to me, I think it was Aza Raskin, who played a key role in designing a lot of this. The head of KFC might be a very nice person, but all they care about in their professional capacity is how often did you go to KFC this week and how big was the bucket you bought.

And if you become obese, that's not their problem, right? They want you to eat as much fried chicken as you possibly can. In exactly the same way, these companies, what they want to feed you, what they want from you and your kids, is for you to scroll as long as possible and never see. stop. So why does that lead to negativity in particular? Yes. Right. And again, it's a while to get this, people at the heart of it kept explaining it to me. So the algorithms are set up to scan what you look at and what everyone in the world looks at, billions of people. And they just want to, they just want to find whatever keeps you scrolling. They don't give a shit about what you actually look at. What I'm looking at.

Totally agnostic. They don't care. As long as it's legal, they don't care. All they care about is did it keep you scrolling? So the algorithms are set up to just track everyone, what keeps people scrolling, what doesn't. And the algorithms bumped into an underlying psychological truth that's been known about for 80 years now, which is part of human nature. Fancy term for it is negativity bias. It's very simple. People will stare longer at things that make them angry and upset than they will at things that make them feel good. If you've ever seen a car crash on the motorway, you know what I mean. You stared longer at the car crash than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street, right? This is very deep in human nature. 10-week-old babies

will stare longer at an angry face than a smiling face. That's always been part of who we are. But when it combines with algorithms that learn you intimately, what specifically makes you angry, it has a horrendous effect. So you think about negativity bias, right? I'd like to think, I'm pretty sure you find what I'm saying really interesting. There's a nice camera guy there.

If he started punching someone else in the corner, you would stop listening to me and you would turn and watch him punching someone else. Right? I know you're not going to do that, don't worry. The, because the negativity bias would over, and we've got negativity bias for a good reason, right? Our ancestors who weren't looking out for the fight, for the danger,

they got eaten. They didn't get to be our ancestor. That's a slight crude way to get my point, right? So the algorithms learned, if we show you stuff that makes you angry and upset, you're going to scroll for longer, right? So you picture two teenage girls who go to the same party and leave to go home on the same bus.

Yes. one of them opens the video and opens TikTok and goes, that was such a great party. We danced all night to Taylor Swift. Fucking loved it. The algorithm is scanning the kind of words you use and it'll put that into a few people's feeds. Okay, now imagine another girl opens it and goes,

Beth was an absolute skank at that party. And her boyfriend's, I have no idea of teenagers to use the word skank. I think they probably don't. I don't know, but it's funny to me. Like, I love that. Skank's such a thing. But if Oasis can come back,

the word skank can come back. But you know, she's a skank. her boyfriend's a prick, starts angrily denouncing everyone at the party. It's going to put that video into far more people's feeds. Because if it's enraging, it's engaging. But now imagine that being done to a whole country where the nice people, the kind people are muffled and pushed to the back and the mean, angry people are pushed to the front.

I've been thinking about the power of community lately, thanks to our favourite creative tool and sponsor Adobe Express. You might know it as the quick and easy create anything app from Adobe, but it's also a really buzzing creative network. So the other day, I couldn't get our Begin Again logo to look how I wanted in a doc. So we jumped into the Adobe Express Facebook group, and within minutes, the gang in there came to my rescue. And there are thousands of business owners and creators in there, all helping each other out. And it's not just design advice, and they're not frightening at all. And loads of resources and stories, honestly, it's amazing. If this podcast has

taught me anything. It's that starting a new chapter, you know, whether you're creating a logo for your new business idea or just doing a personal project. You know, obviously it's always going to have its ups and downs, but having the right people around you can really make all the difference. So if you're ready to take on your next big thing, don't be afraid to reach out. It's not as scary as you think. There are loads of helpful people out there and they want to help you along the way. So search for Adobe Express to find out more and get the app for free. We're taking a quick break to talk about today's sponsor, Fiverr. Have you experienced the immediate panic when you're asked to create something on the computer, but you have absolutely no idea how to do it. For me, it's

social media. But I have realised that I can rely on Fiverr. It's an online marketplace. It's got talented freelancers who specialize in different areas from social media and graphic design to marketing, website building and coding. I don't know what I'm not mean. But with Fiverr, I can leave it to the experts and focus on the stuff I do best. So if you want to give Fiverr a try, and I think you should, search Fiverr.com or click the link in the description and use the code Davina at the checkout for 10% off your first order. That's F-I-V-E-R dot com. And don't forget the second art. You mentioned a solution. Please tell me there's something we can do about this. It's so important to understand this, that social media does not have to work that way. This is what loads of people explain to me.

And weirdly, this only fell into place with me when I thought about it, when someone explained it to me by an analogy with something that happened in our lifetime. So you'll remember, I remember. So when we were kids, the only form of petrol you could get was leaded petrol. Remember it really clear. I remember the smell of it. I can remember my mum putting it into a red minnie. And it was discovered that exposure to lead is really bad for people's brains

and particularly bad for children's ability to pay attention. And if it's in petrol, it's in fumes. everyone was breathing in a shitload of lead when we were kids. So what happened was a group of ordinary moms led in Britain by an amazing woman called Jill Ruinette banded together and they said

well, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing the lead industry to screw up our kids' brains? And it's really important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, let's ban cars, let's go back to horse and cart. Just like you and me are not saying about this. Let's all go back.

You know, it's all drawing the Amish, right? and give up our technology. What they said is let's get rid of the specific form of the petrol that screws up our kids and us and move to a different form of petrol, unleaded petrol, that doesn't, right? And we forget this now, but that was a really big fight. The lead industry fought back hard. And it followed the kind of classic pattern of all successful movements

that was described by Gandhi. First they ignored them, then they laughed at them, then they fought them, then they won. No more leaded petrol. we banned it. Venezuela just became the last country in the world to ban it. As a result, the average British child is five IQ points higher than they would have been. Had we not bad, had those mums not fought like hell for all of us and for their children. Now, to me, that's a really important model because social media, like I say, doesn't have to work that way.

So you can have all the social media we currently have, but not have it worked this way. What you've got to do is break that, what people can explain to me is you've got to break that mechanism. So basically, there are three ways that social media can work. It can be funded. It can be paid for, right? So the model we have now, the fancy term for it from Professor Shoshana Zuboff, is surveillance capitalism, which sounds like a nightmare, but it's actually very simple. You seem to get TikTok and X and Facebook for free, but in return, they track and surveil you,

they learn you, they hack you, they fuck your attention. So you pay with your attention, I would argue with our democracy, with the mental health of our kids, all that other stuff, right? So that's one model. There are some advantages to that model. You get it for free, right? Like that's, don't dismiss that. And it costs a living crisis, that's not nothing, right?

But what a lot of people who have been at heart of the machine said to me is, what we need to do is just ban that business model. It's like lead in petrol. Yes. Don't allow it. And I said to them, all right, let's imagine we do that. And the next day, we do the ban, and the next day I open Facebook and TikTok, would it just say, sorry, guys, we've gone fishing.

They said, of course not. What would happen is they'd have to move to one of the other two business models. And almost everyone listening will. will have had an experience of the other two business models. So one of them is subscription. Yeah. We all know how Netflix works, right? You pay a certain amount, in return you get access.

The key thing is under a subscription model, all the incentives change. But suddenly under a subscription model, you are the customer. What would you like? So that's one option, right? Subscription. All the incentives change. Suddenly they're like, oh, what does Davina want? Davina feels good when she meets up with people offline.

Let's design the app to maximize offline interaction. Yes. DeBina, Bob's up the road. He wants to have a coffee. My friends in Silicon Valley could design that in five minutes. But how do we do? I'm feeling an activist. Yeah. Kind of the activist in me lit up here. Like, what do we do? How do we make that happen? So it will only happen if enough people fight for it and demand it.

Governments can regulate these companies to do this. We need a movement to restore our attention, right? We've got a catastrophic crisis of attention. So catastrophic. Yeah. What I would say to anyone, because you might hear that and think, oh, it's a little bit over the top. No.

I would say to anyone, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar,

whatever it is. That thing that you're proud of required loads of sustained focus and attention. We're talking in the middle of the Paralympics, right? The focus and attention that gets you to be an Olympian

or a Paralympian, right? But even just everyday achievement, being a good dad or a good mom, requires a lot of attention. And the evidence is very clear if your ability to focus and pay attention deteriorates, your ability to solve your problems deteriorates, your ability to achieve your goals deteriorates. And when you regain your attention, it's like regaining your superpower, right? I mean, I felt that with lots of the changes I made based on what I wrote and stall and focus,

that it's such a joyful thing. And I would argue, actually, that's another one of these keys that unlocks this. A lot of us are trapped because when you're seeing the world in 20 second bursts, it's very hard to get any sense of like traction on your life. And also you get lost in these negative signals. And I absolutely feel that that happened with me many years ago. But when I used to be, I'm not standing above this world going,

well, you're judging it, right? I was completely part of this. When I think about times, when I was a heavy user of Twitter as it was at the time, you know, whatever would be 14 years ago. I think you and I were probably in the same, right in the same time. Yeah.

On it all the time. I remember we would talk to each other on it. And we were ahead of the curve in being there and ahead of the curve in backing away from it. But the real disaster that happens to it, I've seen it happen to so, we know lots of people who have high profile position on Twitter, the catastrophe that happens,

there are many catastrophes that can happen on Twitter, but one of them is when you start to mistake the signals from social media for meaningful social signals around you, because if you start to repatter yourself to please or avoid that kind of abuse, you just go crazy. Because if you're trying to feed that machine, it will coarsen you. It will make you... Absolutely.

I saw a really weird example of this with... Do you might be him Milo Yianopoulos is? No, to your credit, that you don't know who he is. So Milo is... He was a, when I met him, many years ago, well more than 10 years ago, he was a kind of little bit right-wing journalist. He's gay, he's quite funny. He's kind of a little bit right-wing, never my taste.

But, you know, and he wrote this really interesting article called something like the internet is making us all psychopaths where he said at the time, but all the incentives in this system is to be the worst version of yourself, to be mean, cruel. Yes. And then he became a very extreme internet troll. He whipped up literal riots in Berkeley.

He became a huge champion of Trump and ended up sort of imploding in various reasons. And when I was writing Stalin on Focus, I went to interview him. I didn't use this material in the book in the end. It was so interesting because he had prophesied his own fate very articulately, right? He'd entirely...

Was he not aware of what he was doing? He said he completely didn't know. that any of it was due to the incentives of social media. And I thought, wow, that's how powerful this is. Yes, you don't even know. It can profoundly repatten your character. Yes. Obviously, it had to activate something in any way.

Most people wouldn't be as extreme as him. But it can profoundly repattern your character and you don't even know that's what happened to you. You know, we talk all the time in our culture about post-traumatic stress disorder, right? I don't like the disorder bit of it because actually I don't like telling people any of these things are disorders

because they're actually human response. and often necessary human responses. But we're talking about post-traotic stress. But weirdly, there's a lot of science that's emerging around, I've not written about it yet, but post-traumatic growth. So you can follow people who go through traumatic events. And some people indeed do develop what would be what we would call PTSD, right, classic PTSD and they obviously have a lot of support and help.

Actually, lots of people who go through traumatic events, grow and learn from it. So you can follow up, like, people who've been in playing crashes, for example. Now, no one thinks of playing crashes is a good thing. Right, obviously. You can feel like being a plane crash and go, do you know, I survived that plane crash. And it was a horrible thing that happened to me. But I realised life is short and I left that husband who was an asshole.

And I got a different job. And you know what? I wouldn't go back and undo it now, right? And I think you're, does that ring true to you? You're a great example to me of post-trawest growth. I was just wondering what makes somebody able to get through something like that. I do a show called Long Lost Family. It is about helping people find people.

In the 60s, young children were sent out to Australia and told they were orphans. And actually their parents were alive. They'd just been taken away from their parents who maybe were deemed not suitable or whatever, taken from their mothers, who were single mothers, and just shipped out to Australia and put in boys' homes. And the abuse that they suffered in boys' homes

would mean that quite a few. few of them would end up taking their own lives. But there was a man who left as soon as he could, went and joined the army, did brilliantly in the army. It made him, went on and got a job, had a family and talked very movingly about the people left behind and about, I don't know why I'm different. I don't know why I didn't do that, but why it actually made me stronger. And when he talked about it, I thought, oh, I've been through something. and I wonder why I'm such a positive person. Like I'm, I'm in, I'm literally aggravatingly positive.

Like I annoy people. But you're not, you're not aggravatingly positive. There's a thing called toxic positivity, which I think is a real thing, which people can sort of respond to people's distress by going, ah, but look at the bright, that's not what you do. No, I hope not. No, okay. You don't.

You obviously do not do that. I wouldn't say you do it. But so I just thought, oh, what, can you, can you, can you, You change the type of person that you are. I mean, I've had friends of mine that I've tried to help, and they've ended up taking their own lives. And you think, what happened there? Why couldn't they get it?

What's your take on that? It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately because, as you know, a close relative of mine killed himself almost exactly two years ago. And obviously, in the aftermath of that, you think a lot about this. I don't have an obvious answer. There's all this research on,

it was done by people I interviewed for Lost Connections called George Brown and Tyrell Harris. Amazing. It should have been game-changing research on depression. But it's one of the things where people didn't actually want to hear the breakthrough. We went off on a very different direction. They were incredible people. But they looked at,

they followed a load of women here in London to look at why do people who go through similar distressing things Why do some of them go down into depression and some of them thrive? So some people had like, they measured all sorts of deficits that you could have, like, you know, insecure housing, a husband who beat you up, whatever it might be. I've got the specifics in the book, I might be misremembering them. And so they measured like sort of deficits.

That's not the term they use, they use a different term. And then they measured what they're called stabilizers. Do you have friends? you know, do you have a supported partner, do you have money, you know, all sorts of stabilisers. And basically, you could actually measure it pretty tightly. I mean, there were obviously outliers, but you could actually, so you wanted the presence of stabilisers and the absence of destabilisers. So I think it's partly that, but I never, it always feels more mysterious to me.

Like when you experience something really painful, it can just finish you off, it can break you. And there's lots of people like that and I've got a lot of love and compassion for them. And I think a lot about I've got a friend. I haven't checked with her if I can tell this story. So I have to be someone know. She'll probably recognize it. I have to be slightly, I'm going to slightly euthanise it. She's a very senior and incredible British journalist. And when she was in her early 40s, she got breast cancer and nearly died. And on a way into the operation, she's a completely inveterate journalist. She was asking the doctor all these questions about the NHS and how it works. And he's a way.

He mentioned that he works with Medicines Sarpontiere, who do, I've seen their work. He's who, people don't know. If there's like an earthquake or war or something, they'll drop these doctors in to do emergency surgery and then they take them out again. And she said to him, you're really interesting. She told him her name. And he said, if you've ever got a new story, call me. And then the all set it kicked in. She passed out.

11 years passed. One day she was in her office. and a secretary came in and said, oh, there's a guy on the phone, says he needs to speak to you urgently. He's the guy who did your cancer operation 11 years ago. Oh, my God. How nuts.

I don't. And he says, hi, you won't remember me. She said, I do remember you. He said, I need your help. This was a day or two after the massive earthquake in Haiti, devastating earthquake in, I think, 2010. And he said, I'm in a building that's collapsed. I've got a two-year-old girl here who's badly burned.

Her whole family's dead. Every hospital on this island has collapsed. If I don't get her out of here, she's going to die, I phoned everyone I could think of to help me and no one could help me. And suddenly, I remembered you. She said, what can I do? He said, please help me. She said, what are your GPS coordinates?

I'm sending a camera crew now. They sent a camera crew. They put her on the news. They raised the money to get around in like three minutes. She was airlifted to, the girl was airlifted to Britain. And one time I went to my friend's house and that girl was there. She's now her godmother and that doctor is now her godfather. And she said to me, to look at this girl, she said to me,

I can't ever regret that I got cancer now. Because if I hadn't got cancer, that girl would have died in the rubble in Haiti. I think a lot about that. Because, you know, the age we are, we know lots of people who face tragedies. We've had various things in our lives. Everyone faces tragedies. It's, you can always take the most terrible and painful things and turn them into something else.

I don't mean you can undo the harm. No. I don't mean you can, you know, put right the thing. No. You can always make something good out of your pain. and we're trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places. We've got a kind of kind of KFC for the soul. part of a team of scientists, it's really basic and mind-blowing research. So they wanted to figure out,

if you tried consciously to make yourself happier, would you actually become happier? Right? Let's say you spent two hours a day going, okay. We're going to make me happy. Does it work? Yes. And they did this research in four countries. It was, let me see, the US, Taiwan, Russia and Japan. What they found was really weird. In the US, if you tried to make yourself deliberately happier, in the main, it does not work. You do not become happier. But in the other, countries, if you try to make yourself happier, you do become happy. I don't ask weird. What's going on? So they did more research. What they discovered was in the US, I'm sure it's true of us as well, on the main. If you try to make yourself happier, you do something for you.

Right. You go shopping, you work harder to earn more money, you display what stuff you bought on social media, so, oh, gee, so jealous. So we have an individualist conception of happiness, right? The way you get to be happy is you boost yourself as an individual. In the other countries, in the main, that we're sections on both sides, obviously, but in the main, when you tried to make yourself happier, you did something for someone else, your friends, your family, your group, your community. So they had an instinctively collective idea of what it means to be happy.

And it turns out this individualistic idea of happiness that we're all being taught all the time just doesn't work, right? Even if you think about the advice we give people, be you, right? If someone's not being down, just be you, be yourself. But I was going, I remember thinking this at Cotty, actually, and it's with all those people. Don't be you. Be us.

Be part of the group. Be something bigger than you, right? But we're so stuck in these individualistic metaphors. And that question you were asking about, why do some people overcome it and some people don't? I think there's lots of things going on. I don't believe anyone is doomed to be in the category that doesn't go right. I think it's, do you find your way to a story about what happened to you

and a story about how to find your way out? And then do you get help to find your way out? When I think about the cow story, right, we talked about a while back. Yes. One of the most important things about the cow story is they didn't go, okay, so we've figured out that it's working in this field that's making you really depressed and you're in this pain. All right, go sort it out, mate, right? They went to. They went and got in the cow, right?

They helped him, right? They lifted him up, right? And I'm sure that's feeling loved, isn't it? That's feeling kind of cared for. And I was trying to think like maybe Narcotics Anonymous helped me find and positivity. But when you said about deficits and strikes, I think I was loved. You know, I had my dad and my granny. And my mum loved me in a very dysfunctional way.

But, you know, now I'm older. I can see that. And I can feel gratitude. I did feel love. And I think that's a very basic thing. You know, you've spoken about love, not war. you know, love not hate. Like love is going to do everything in the world.

Hate does nothing. Hate just destroys love builds. You know, it's... I think that's so true. And there's... So many people taught me this. And I always think about someone you would have loved who taught me this so deep, please.

I wrote about him in my book about addiction chasing the screen. His name is Bud Osborne. And so... Bud was a homeless guy with a quite bad heroin addiction, and he was living in a kind of notorious area called the downtown east side of Vancouver. Oh, yes, I know it.

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of... It's famous, isn't it, for being dodgy? Chaotic street years. You know, like it's... It was a rough neighbourhood. And Bud was watching his friends just die one by one of overdoses. And one day he was walking down,

he was at the corner of Maine and Hastings, and he bumped into... someone who told him that a really good friend of his had just died. And he thought, I can't just sit here and watch all my friends die, but he also thought the words he would have used at the time, I'm just a homeless junkie, what the fuck can I do? And he had an idea. So at that time, the police were really cracking down on the downtown side. They were arresting anyone who was visibly addicted.

So it meant that people would go and hide to shoot up. They would hide in like dumpsters or abandoning. buildings or whatever. But obviously that meant if you were hiding when you shot up. Yeah, chance so you'd OD or like... Yeah. And you start to OD no one fine to you, you just die. So he gathered together a load of the addicts and he said when we're not using, which is most of the time, even for quite hardcore users, why don't we just drop a timetable and we'll just go and look in the places where we shoot up and if someone's overdosing, we'll call an ambulance, right? And loads of people that come to the downtowning side with these big plans, but this is like,

bud, they knew him, they liked him. They were like, all right, let's see him. I'm like, all right, try it. So they started to do it. And in the next three months, the death toll on the down tiny side massively fell. And obviously that was good because people who would have died lived. But it also meant the people there were like, maybe we're not the pieces of shit everyone thinks we are, right? Maybe. Oh my God, that's so powerful. It was so like the change in self-concept would be the fancy way of putting it. And so they started thinking, well, what else could we do? So Bud went to the library and he learned that in Frankfurt, in Germany, they had opened what we would now call overdose prevention sites.

So there are places where if you've got an addiction problem, you can go, they'll give you clean needles, you shoot up there, and they monitor you, nurses monitor you. They obviously revive you of your overdose. And also there's loads of help, so when you're ready, you can go to rehab or treatment or whatever you need. He was like, okay, we should do that in Vancouver. But there had been nothing like that in the whole of North America for 70 years, right?

But he's like, okay, we'll persuade our mayor. The mayor at the time was a right-wing politician called Philip Owen. He was from a really rich family. never known anyone with addiction problems, super privilege. And he ran when he ran for mayor saying all the drug users should be taken and locked away at the local military base in Chilawak, never let out, right? But I was like, it's okay, we'll persuade him. They built a coffin.

And they wrote on it something like, who will die next, Philip Hoam before you open a safe injection site? Everywhere he went, they followed him with a coffin. Every time he spoke in public, one of them, this group was called Van Gogh. And do, the Vancouver area network of drug users. Every time he spoke in public, one of them would stand up and go, who will die next, Philip O'N before you open an overdose prevention site? One time, Dean Wilson, one of the people there, he stood up and asked that.

And he said, do you remember Julia, who asked that question last time? It turned out to be her because you haven't done it yet. And this went on for years and there was no change. And people were starting to lose hope. And one day, 100% to his credit, Philip Owen said, Who the fuck are these people? What is it?

Who's still following by the coffin? What's going on? And he went and just spent loads of time on the downtown east side and got to know loads of people. And it blew his mind. He thought that addicted people were like, people who partied too hard,

were indulging themselves. And he's meeting people who were like, horrifically sexually abused. It's been through hell. And he held the press conference, Philip. And he held, who was there, Chief of Police, Coroner and Bud. And all the people from Van D.

He said, I'm never talking about addiction again without having these guys here with me. we're going to open the first overdose prevention site in North America. We're going to have the most compassionate drug policies in North America. Things are going to change around here just to wait and see. And Philip Owen's right-wing party was so horrified. They deselected him as their candidate and his political career ended. But he'd started it in motion and then it opened under the next guy who won from a more kind of liberal party.

And over the next 10 years, the life expectancy on the downtown east side rose by 10 years. Wow. Which is like you don't get that. except when a war ends, right? And I remember when, so they had a kind of conservative government who tried to shut it down, it went all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled that addicted people have a right to live

and therefore they have a right to this. That will never be taken away now. And I remember after I got to know all these people when Bud died, Bud died in his early 60s after I got to know him, he'd been homeless in a drug war. It's difficult. They shut down the streets of the downtown east side and they had this incredible memorial service

and it's now a huge sign in downtown his side that says if you don't care who will care which is a quote from Bud and I remember thinking that day that loads of people in that crowd they knew that they were alive because of what Bud had started

and because so many other people joined them, joined what he had begun I remember thinking you know lots of people will be listening to what we've said thinking yeah yeah I get it things can change but that's hard to do and someone else

have to do it. And it's hard to think of a more powerless person in our culture than a homeless drug addict. Well, I was just thinking Andrew Sullivan, Bud, you know, same thing. You know, I'm a powerless person. There was Andrew thinking that he was dying from HIV. Nobody would want to touch him or go near him at gay man. And then there's Bud. Look what they did. I actually think the most admirable person in that whole story is Philip Owen, the former mayor. Yes. Because he stuck his neck out, right? And the last time I saw him, we were sitting on the downturny side and he said, I would sacrifice my entire political career all over again to do this.

How many times do you get to be part of saving thousands of people's lives, right? And I think it comes back to that line from the Philadelphia story. The time to make your mind up about someone is never. Philip Irwin was the most unlikely person. I would have frankly said if Bud and all those people had asked me at the start, we're going to win over Philip I mean. I would have said, don't waste your breath, right? Try to defeat him and move on to wait for the next guy, right?

But they didn't. I always think one of the most amazing things about life, especially the age we are now, you genuinely don't know what's going to happen. You don't know who's going to change. Some people change for the worst, but lots of people change for the better. You genuinely don't know. The unpredictability of life is an incredible and joyful thing, right? And you can try to be part of that by being part of the rage and the hatred and the negativity.

And there's a lot of temptations to that. And there's some pleasures in that as well. We should be honest about it. I remember it from years ago. There's pleasures of being part of angry, hateful, or you can try to be part of the love and compassion. And that goes through all of us, right? You know, and the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn said,

the battle between good and evil runs through every human heart. We've all got both in us, right? It's not like we're the good people and the bad people are over there. We've all got these temptations. But I guess what I'd really want people to understand who are struggling to change is you are much more powerful than you think. Andrew was really powerful, didn't seem it, Bud was really powerful,

those mums who fought to ban leaded paint. They were really powerful. Every single person watching this is a beneficiary of what those mums did for all of us, right? Know where your power lies. There's a lot of people who want you to believe you're powerless, who want you to believe there's nothing that can change, who want you to be like those women

who were being beaten up in the 70s and were just candid Valium to tranquilize themselves to get through the violence, rather than the people who said, get the fuck away from those men and come to our domestic violence refuge and let's get the police to arrest that man, right? And help him to change.

The change is possible. It is necessary. You can do it by connecting with other people who are determined to fight for change. So I think after everything that we've talked about, Lost Connections is probably going to be the book that people would really enjoy getting their teeth into. So you can get that everywhere.

and this is the one and the audio book. Yeah. Audio book's amazing. I had a really weird experience with the audio book of this. I was in, when it came out, I flew to Australia and I couldn't sleep the night before. And I couldn't sleep on the flight because I never sleep on flights. And I landed in Melbourne and I was fucked. I was delirious.

And I was standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus into the city centre. And suddenly I heard my own voice talking about depression. And it's the literally only time in my life I've genuinely thought, oh my God, have actually gone mad. Like I'm actually having like a psychotic breakdown. What's happening? And suddenly I realised someone in front of me was listening in their car to the audio book of the book.

And if I've been more on the bowl... Oh my God, that is so good. I would have leaned forward and been like, well, hello, because you imagine how weird that would be. You're in Australia listening to British audio book. And so the person goes, hello, just appears in your car door. And then they just drove off.

It's actually weird. Like, bizarrely, my book sold insane amount in Australia. I don't quite understand why. God bless Australia. But yeah, so the audio book, I'm slightly haunted by the thought of the loss. Because for literally about 20 seconds, I thought, this is it. I've lost my mind.

I have finally gone mad. I've literally gone man. But anyone who wants to know where to get the book or other staff or where to follow me. I will not follow you back because I don't look at it. You can go to J-O-H-A-N-H-N-H-A-R-I-I-com, and you can see about all the books and my TED Talks and the documentary that was made out, one of my books, and the Oscar-Lominated film. I just like to advise everybody to go forensic.

Hoero? Yeah, because I think every topic you cover is, is, you know, sorry, because I keep making this podcast longer and longer, but I was just thinking that, that everything you talk about, in particular, I love this stolen focus thing about the phone, that my best ideas, my most creative moments,

come from when I'm bored. And we never let ourselves get bored anymore. Get bored, get bored, get bored. Go on to Johanharri.com, really read a lot of stuff, and then sit down and do fuck all. And your brain will go mad. It'll be great.

You'll have amazing ideas. Amazing. And whereas I can phone you and talk about those ideas, they can't. But anyway. Hooray. What a joy. Thank you so much to Vina. It's always a joy.

Hooray. I mean, Johann always blows my mind when I talk to him. It gives me so much to think about. And I guess with beginner, I always want to try and gift you with something. And I feel like it's been Christmas today, people, for you and for me. So I think a lot of the things we discussed are problems where society is trying to fix us with outside things. And that there are ways that we can look at all the significant issues that people are facing in modern times. and we can turn the solution on its head

and look at it from a completely different way. This is what I love about him. He's always coming at problems that we all suffer with and saying, look, here's another way of looking at it. I think one of the things I love that he said was that people can change. And you might really not like someone, but everyone is capable of redemption.

And I really like that idea. It also makes me believe that I can change, that we aren't stuck in our ways, and that society can change. He gave me hope for society. And he also made me realise that it doesn't matter who you are, what you do, where you are, or where you perceive you are in society's pecking order. You can change the world. That's amazing, isn't it?

What a great thought. I loved him. Don't worry, I'll get him back.