Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Re-Air: The Truth About Depression, GLP-1s and ADHD & Why Our Biology Is Not To Blame | Johann Hari

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

In honor of World Mental Health Day, we’re revisiting our second episode with New York Times best-selling author Johann Hari (Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, Chasing the Scream, Magic Pill). He gave us a powerful breakdown of the real causes behind depression, anxiety, and the global attention crisis.Is Big Pharma healing us or profiting from keeping us sick? Johann reveals why only two of the nine causes of depression are biological, exposing how Big Pharma, social media addiction, and modern lifestyle traps are fueling mental health issues. He dives into the rise of GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic) and society’s toxic beauty obsession, while uncovering the overlooked role of sleep, community, and social connection in healing. Johann shares his personal experience with antidepressants, and explores how childhood shame and trauma drive addiction, weight gain, and despair.You’ll learn why even pets are being diagnosed with ADHD, what Silicon Valley insiders confessed about attention-hacking technology, and how our loss of focus is sabotaging relationships, careers, and democracy itself. If you’re ready to challenge the myths of mental health, regain your focus, and take back control of your mind, don’t miss this eye-opening conversation with Johann Hari.Go to https://helixsleep.com/breakdown to receive 20% off your Helix mattress.Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit https://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN and for a limited time, get a free Immune Support Bundle, including a bottle of Omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of Vitamin D3K2, with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro.Find the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at Quince. Go to https://www.quince.com/breakdown for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.Upgrade your kitchen with Our Place today. Visit fromourplace.com/BREAK and use code BREAK for 10% off sitewide.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, I'm I'm Bialli. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today, in honor of World Mental Health Day, we're going to revisit the second episode that we did with bestselling author, Johann Hari. He gave us a really, really powerful breakdown of causes of depression, anxiety, and also the global attention crisis. We thought this was perfect for World Mental Health Day. Johann reveals why only two of the nine causes of depression are biological, exposing how big pharma, social media addiction, and the modern lifestyle are traps that are fueling our mental health crisis. We also do a deep dive into the rise of GLP-1s. He was really one of the first people I saw talking about this, and he talks about our toxic beauty obsession, the overlooked role of sleep, community, social connection, and how we heal, how we manage our resources surrounding what our bodies look like and how they

function. Johan's going to talk about his experience with antidepressants, the global journey he went on to learn more about them all over the world. And he also talks about his weight gain, his eating patterns, and how he believe Ozempic saved his life. We also explore why even pets are being diagnosed with ADHD and what Silicon Valley the insiders confess about attention hacking technology that they know is impacting people. This is really the perfect conversation to re-air, we think, in honor of World Mental Health Day.

It's talking about essentially everything about what we can do to change our mental health and to point us in the right direction. If you haven't already, check us out on Substack, Mime, Bialx breakdown on Substack, where you can get exclusive content not available anywhere else as well as lives with Mime and I breaking down our episodes. And now we hope you enjoy this particular episode with Johan Hari. Mind Balx Breakdown is supported by Helix Sleep. We cannot tell you how excited we were to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about almost six years now. I've been sleeping great. Jonathan loves his.

Our kids love their Helix mattresses and all of the things like night sweats, back pain, motion transfer are significantly better. Helix sleep makes premium mattresses and bedding that are customized to fit your personal needs. They're conveniently shipped to your door, and I was so happy with how easy their shipping process was. I actually ordered my son, a mattress that shipped right to his apartment at college. Helix combines innovative tech with high-quality materials to deliver comfort and support. Helix offers soft, medium, and firm mattresses. There's different options for side, stomach, and back sleepers. Helix sleep mattresses have a supportive hybrid design, and you can choose to elevate your mattress with premium cooling options.

The Helix lineup offers 20-plus unique mattresses to choose from, also a variety of mattress topers. Helix has a sleep solution for just about everyone. Go to helixleep.com slash breakdown for up to 20% off sitewide. That's helixleep.com slash breakdown for 20% off site wide. Helixleep.com slash breakdown. Hi, I'm Dr. Mary Claire Haver, board certified OBGYN and menopause specialist. My podcast, Unpaused, is the place for bold, unfiltered conversations about what it really takes for women to thrive in the second half of life.

Every week, I sit down with medical experts and leading voices to talk about the health issues that matter most. Because Unpaused isn't just about the years you live, but how well you live them. Listen and follow Unpaused with me, Dr. Mary Claire Haver, wherever you get your podcasts. Break it down. I'm like ridiculously happy to be here. We're so excited to have you in person. And if you didn't hear our first episode, we recommend that people listen to it. Mainly because it was the peak moment of my life and my existence on the planet Earth.

Tell us what was so special for you about your first time with us. You know why. And I'll begin to cry. You say it because I'll cry. Deep and left field. This one came out. Johan is a huge beaches fan. Deep cut. It was very deep cut.

When I was 12, I played the young Bet Midler in the movie Beaches. You're still playing her. It was not my first role. But it was kind of the thing that led to really the entirety of my life and career. as we know it. It was after that that I did blossom. But yeah, you were a huge beaches. I literally know, I almost literally know it by heart. The script. How many times have you seen beaches? Like, so between the ages of 12 and 15, I think I watched it with my best friend like twice a week, like every single week. Why would you do that to yourself? It's very sad.

And it's, it's tragic. And weirdly, I realized that I profoundly misunderstood the plot of Beach. Just because when I then didn't watch it for many, many years until like maybe... Most people think Barbara Hershey's character had cancer. She did not. No, she has... Oh, I know the name of it. It's... Wait, what's it called?

It's a brain disease. No, she had a heart. It was a heart thing. Cardiomyopathy is the name of what... Yes. Yes, the Barbara Hush character has. But why did you miss the plot of the whole movie? So, I was raised in a family.

It was a lot of addiction and insanity and a lot of narcissism. And I now realize that the arc of beaches is that C.C. Bloom, your character, Beckmiddler's character is very narcissistic at the start. Enough about me. What do you think about? Exactly. And the movie is partly the story of C.C. Bloom, overcoming her narcissism through this friend with friendship with Hillary, right? I just thought she was admirable right from the start because I was raised in a environment with so much narcissism. I was like, wow, she's great.

And then like, I said, I was like, oh, no way. She just sucks up all the energy in the room. I don't have to do anything. I was like, well, she's a terrible person at the start of the movie and I'd completely missed this. So yeah, it was fascinating when I re-watched it as an adult and when actually, weirdly, my best friend was very, very unwell and we thought she might die. Fortunately, she didn't. So it was like, oh my God, my life is like turned into the film Beaches. Like, how has this happened to me? And so that's when I rewatched it. I got very emotional and realized I misunderstood it. And then we reenacted the iconic final moment. Just to clarify, in the first episode, there is an

reenactment where both of you are singing. So if people need to To see that, that's where you find. So what we're going to do in this one, my understanding, is I have brought the script. We're going to do the entire movie from the beginning. No, but I was going to say, you'll be the man we fight over. As a nod to another layer of the movie and what, honestly, what a lot of your work and life is about is like, what's that other layer? In the flashback scenes, which I am a part of, we see a dynamic between her and her mother, who's this very kind of larger than life personality who's really kind of inserting herself into a lot of aspects of

of this child's life. So we also see some of the sort of like, the psychopathology, right. I mean, not to get too deep. No, yeah. Lenore, that's the name of the mother, isn't she? Lenora. Leona.

That's it. Which is? It's my grandmother's name. Yeah. Grandmother's name. Played by Lainey Kazan. That's my mother's name. And Lainy is his mother's name.

I know. Isn't that funny? Earing. We talked with you kind of at the beginning of, I'd say the early beginnings of, you know, an Ozempic kind of revolution. at that time, I think it was still kind of new to talk about.

And we've now shifted. I just want to touch on this briefly because it was what we talked about last time. We've kind of shifted into what many people are saying is just the death of the body positivity movement with sort of, I mean, even when we spoke to you, I was like, oh, I'm hearing so many people. Now it's like in L.A., you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting seven people. And the dead cat will also be on his own pick because it was being a bit fat shamed on his Instagram. And I also just recently read an article about the transparency with which celebrities now feel it's sort of their like, I don't know, like their humanitarian responsibility to list all of the plastic surgeries. They've had all the medications they're on. I think it was a Kat Rosenfeld piece from the free press. And she was like, is this the new feminism? To be like, you can't look like this naturally. Here's the way to do it. Here's the money you need, which is exorbitant. But I wonder, you know, You know, from the time that we first spoke about it and when you wrote, you know, your book, what have you seen shift in not just the GLP one? Is that what they're called?

The GLP1 world, but sort of our perception of thinness, beauty. Are we beautiful at any size? Apparently not. So I think there's a quite big division between two different groups of people. There's people who are overweight or obese for whom I think there's a really strong case for taking these drugs. It's not for everyone. There's risks. I go through them in the book. Because sadly, being overweight or obese does significantly increase health harms. You know, I'm 46. I'm two years older than my grandfather ever got to be because he died of a heart attack when he was 44. Loads of the men in my family get fat, have heart attacks or have other health problems and die young.

So there's that group of people. Then there's a group of people who are already a healthy weight or indeed skinny who are taking it to be super skinny. and for them I have absolutely no criticism of those people because women are, you know, it's much better than me are made to feel like shit about their bodies, whatever they do. So this is not coming from a point of criticism,

but I would urge that category of people not to do it because actually being super skinny is also bad for your health. And making yourself artificially thin is actually quite dangerous. Not so much now, say if you were our age, but if you're super thin, you're much greater,

risk when you get older of breaking your bones, a condition called sarcopenia, it means you can't even get out of a chair because you're so physically weak. So I think it's two very different categories. And in a way that relates to the body positivity movement. Because I thought very deeply about the body positivity movement for the book. And while I was taking it, you know, I think we talked about one of the lowest moments in writing the book. It was when I had lost a load of weight. I was feeling really good.

And I got a call from my niece. We were FaceTiming. And she was going, oh, you look great. You know, I never knew you had a neck before, right? And then she said, will you get me some ozempic? And she was a perfectly healthy weight. And I thought she was kidding. And I laughed.

And she looked down. And I realized, oh, fuck, she means it, right? I'm undoing all these messages. So I think you've got to look at the, we've got to look at the body positivity movement in all its complexity. Because they make a range of arguments, some of which are unbelievably important. So the most important is, however you look, whatever your body's like, you should be protected from bullying.

and cruelty. And, you know, 42% of women who have a BMI higher than 35 get insulted every single fucking day, right? So, absolutely they're right about protected people from bullying. They're also right that shaming people is completely counterproductive for promoting health, right? Lindy West, the brilliant body positivity activist, says, you know, you don't take good care of a thing you hate.

Teaching people to hate their bodies is not a way to help them be healthy. So all of that, I passionately agree with them. There are some parts of the body positivity movement and it's a relatively small part that argue that it is not true that obesity increases the risk to your health that that's a kind of fatphobic move. I was open-minded about that.

I looked at the evidence. I looked at the leading science on this. We just have to be honest. That isn't true. The evidence that obesity increases the risk to your health is one of the most proven facts in the whole of science. Doesn't mean you should bully people.

It doesn't mean anyone should be ashamed. It's actually not their fault that we gain weight. I'm saying this is someone who's obese most of my adult life. That's the result of industries that have fucked us up from, even before birth, because we're exposed to this stuff in utero.

So it doesn't give any weight to the people who want to shame them. So we've got to be honest to the complexity of that. We want a movement that says people should we want people to love their bodies we want people to be healthy we want to be happy we want to help people be healthy not shame them um but but we can't pretend that being overweight or obese doesn't harm your health because unfortunately on average it does mine be alex breakdown is supported by kava haven jonathan i feel like you have been looking for a way to relax and

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This leads us to the idea of happy, healthy, and what we're seeing that these drugs have an impact on addictive tendencies. I'm curious to, you know, how that relates to what we're seeing right now, because often, you know, there's an emotional component of eating. There's an emotional component to addiction. Maybe that's where we tie in here. Yeah, there's a lot in that. I mean, there's kind of two halves of what you said there as well. So one of the fascinating things about these drugs is it's becoming increasingly clear that these drugs actually don't work primarily on your gut.

They work primarily on your brain. I interviewed the leading neuroscientists or working on this. We don't actually know how it changes your brain, which is slightly disturbing, but we know it is primarily a brain effect, although there is a gut effect as well. And that opens up some additional risks. It's like a much more intimate thing to have your brain change than to have your gut changed, or it feels that way to me. But also opens up some potentially positive aspects.

So what we do know is lots of people who have been given these drugs are now saying that in addition to losing weight, it's reducing their addictive behaviours. This started with alcohol. we know that people drink a lot less alcohol. But then they thought, well, there's calories and alcohol. It might be that that's what's going on there. But actually, so there's a lot we don't know, but there's a lot we do know. We do know that when you get rats and you get them to heavily use any class of drugs, cocaine, heroin, alcohol.

I don't know why I find the other rats using cocaine. So, like, hilarious. But it's just like the, you get them to do that. You then give them these GLP1 agonists, these drugs. They massively reduce the amount. of all of the different types of drug they use, which is really eye-catching. They're like, I just not hungry for it. Just like, I don't want this line anymore.

I don't know why we imagined rats would have like these weird cabb, like, sex of the city voices, but that is weirdly how I imagine rats. Like, oh, bitch, no more cocaine from me. We now know anecdotally lots of humans are saying this. There's now a shitload of scientific studies going on to figure out, okay, is this also going to help with treating addiction, compulsive behaviors? We don't know yet. We need the human research.

but that's kind of exciting. And there was a second bit of what you asked, and I don't want to neglect it. It was you said, oh, about emotional eating, which is really important because for me, the first six months,

I was getting everything I wanted. I lost a shitload of weight. My back pain went away. My neighbour's hot gardener kept hitting on me. Like, loads of really good things happened. And I did not feel better. If anything, I felt slightly worse. I don't want to overstate it,

but I felt slightly worse. This is weird. What's going on here? And then for my book, Magic Pill, I did all this research about, why do we eat? And there's scientific evidence for five factors why we eat.

Only one of them is the super obvious one that like, you know, feed your body. Thessonance. Exactly. All the rest are emotional drivers of eating. And for me, so I grew up in a family like we were saying where there was a lot of addiction and craziness. I grew up in this environment and I realized, and I had some awareness of this before the OZempic, but I realized then the way I coped with that was by stuffing myself, by overeating. You don't have a lot of agency in a family like that when you're a kid,

but you can control your eating, right? I could. And when I started taking the OZN pick, you can't stuff yourself and overeat when you're on these drugs. You would throw up. And I had a really epiphany about this. I was in a branch of KFC in Vegas. I was there because I'm writing a book about a series of crimes that are happening there.

And I had this awful, it was seven months into taking the drugs and had an awful day. I was investigating the murder of someone that I knew and really loved. so it was hard. And I went to this branch of KFC that I've been in like a thousand times before. It's the one on West Sahara, if you know, Vegas. And it's a really skeezy branch of KFC. And I went in and I did what I would have done before I was taking the drugs.

I ordered a bucket of KFC, a big bucket of fried chicken. I had one of the pieces of the fried chicken. And I said it, I remember looking at the bucket and thinking, oh, fuck, I can't eat this. Right? Like, I couldn't. And I remember Colonel Sanders was on the wall and it was like he was looking at me going like, what happened to my best customer, right? And I remember in that moment just thinking,

oh, you're just going to have to feel bad then. And obviously, there are better ways for me to deal with emotional distress that I've subsequently learned than, you know, Colonel Sanders. But one of the things that happens with these drugs, which is really connected to emotional eating and the other factors in eating they're right about, is these drugs massively disrupt your ability. to eat the way you did before. That's obviously why they work,

which is a very good thing for your health if you overweight or obese at the start. But that disrupts your emotional relationship with food in ways that can, people really need to know about in advance, and I hope the book kind of helps them prepare for that. Well, so, and that's actually sort of what I wanted to focus on today. Sure, sure.

It's a perfect bridge because, you know, besides like this sort of like hand-wringing that people do, of like, oh, what if you have to be on that medication forever? I'm not interested in that. What I'm interested in is what happens when we are given medications, in many cases, in place of the actual mechanisms of support and transformation that are needed for us to actually feel better. And by feel better, I mean, realize our potential, be in touch with something greater than ourselves, feel like we have purpose, feel like there's a reason for us to be here, feel like we have a reason to get up. every day. And it's a bit of a common thread. I happen to have some of your books right here. I felt it a lot in lost connections and obviously stolen focus. I think it's a different threat,

but it's like the same tapestry. So when I think about our conversation about a ZemPEC about these GLP-1 drugs. I can't help but then think about the number of people I know who are on an SSRI, an SNRI, any number of medications to make them stop feeling bad. And as an extension, this diagnosis, right, of ADHD gets thrown in there. Well, maybe we need a stimulant, right? Maybe we need Adderall. And now we have this other wave, which I don't know what your next book will be, of neurodivergence.

And you have this sort of like Venn diagram of anxiety, ADHD, and neurodivergence. Some people are all of them. Some people are one of them. But we're kind of playing this like pinball of medication with symptoms. And it feels like a very similar conversation in terms of, oh, you're feeling these symptoms. Psychiatry has the answer. they've got the answer we will give you the pill that closes the channel right that releases the hormone that makes you feel that way and act this way and when you take these medications it's very hard to work on the things to actually heal because in many cases you don't have the

motivation because like everything's fine right there seems to be in these all these different diagnoses of i don't i can't focus i'm feeling depressed i'm overeating and i'm undercurrent of emotional distress under all of this. And it seems as though while this diagnosis and the approach to fixing it is changing through a different medication, everyone is just trying to distract themselves or distracted or unable to focus or feeling badly or disconnected in some way, which you cover in all of your books. So maybe we can sort of a little bit of a lay of the land of where society, and I know that's a broad umbrella, finds themselves, but this really is almost like a gut check of where we are right now.

For me, this was a really personal journey because, you know, it's partly what my book Lost Connections was about depression and anxiety is about. When I was a kid, I remember going to my doctor when I was a teenager and saying that I had this feeling like pain was kind of leaking out of me, and I couldn't control it, I didn't understand it. And my doctor who is a super nice person said, oh, we know why you're like this. Some people are just lacking a chemical in their brain called serotonin. You're clearly one of them.

All we need to do is give you this drug. You'll be fine. So I started taking an antidepressant called Paxil. And I felt much better. And then this feeling of pain came back over the next few months. I went back. I was given a higher dose. Again, I felt better.

Again, the feeling of pain came back. And I was taking higher and higher doses until for 13 years I took the maximum possible dose and still felt like shit. And I was like, well, what's going on? here because according to this story that we're told in our culture, I'm doing everything right and yet I still feel like this and I look around me and I'm surrounded by people in the same situation. So I ended up going on this big journey for the book all over the world. I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts. I think I was about to turn 40 when the book was finished.

You know, every single year that I've been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in this country in Britain where I'm from, as you can tell from my weird downtown Abbey accent. And in fact, across the Western world and I was like well human biology doesn't evolve that quickly what something's going on here so there are definitely biological contributions and I'm sure we'll unpack some of them and absolutely the distress that people are experiencing

is real and I want to stress that because a lot of people and certainly me when you hear the story being widened I experienced that at first people saying you're saying what I was told isn't real or what I'm feeling isn't real that is not what the people offering a wider perspective is saying. It took me a while to absorb that.

So there's a lot that underpins the various things that we're going to talk about. And I actually go through in the book, there's scientific evidence for nine factors that cause depression and anxiety. Only two of them are in our biology. And what unites the rest of them broadly is, the way I would put it, is everyone listening, everyone watching knows that you have natural physical needs. Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you. you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble, real fast.

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. You need to feel you have a future that makes sense. And this culture we built is good at lots of things.

I'm glad to be alive today. But we have been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs for a very long time now. Well, and on Maslow's kind of hierarchy of needs, pyramid, right? Like, you go for the first things first. Do I have enough food? Do I have enough shelter?

In many cases, people see these things as a luxury, right? Romantic love in my family as a luxury, right? You were just arranged, like you were, and for most of human history, right? So there's also, there's been this evolution, right, of an understanding of these needs

in an increasingly complex world that we're trying to fit them into. It was a moment I had a real epiphany about this. I really shifted my perspective and shifted actually my own life. I went to interview this South African psychiatrist called Dr. Derek Summerfield, a great guy. And he told me this story.

He happened to be in Cambodia in 2001 when they first introduced chemical antidepressants in Cambodia. They'd never had them before in that country. And the local doctors hadn't heard of them. So they said to him, he wasn't there to study this. He was there working on something else. But they were like, what are antidepressants? and he explained and they said to him

oh we don't need them we've already got antidepressants and he was like what do you mean he thought they were going to tell him about some kind of like herbal remedy like St John's water 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 and he got his leg blown off so they gave him an artificial limb

and after a while he went back to work in the rice fields but apparently it's super painful to work underwater when you got an artificial limb and I'm guessing it's pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where you got blown up. The guy started to cry a lot. After a while, he refused to get out of bed. He developed what we would call

kind of classic depression. That's when the Cambodians said to Dr. Somerfeld, well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant. And he said, what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense. You only had to listen to this guy for five minutes

to see why he was so distressed. One of them figured, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. he wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up. 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. Somerfield, so you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right? Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that it's entirely or primarily a biological malfunction in your brain, that sounds like a weird joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant.

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 now. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not primarily a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is practical love and help to get those deeper needs met. So the question we need to be asking with every depressed and anxious person is,

what's the cow for the problems that are facing you? What are your unmet needs? How can we together help you to get those needs met? And when I went to places that I've built their response around depression around that, and I can talk about them, they have incredible results. So the nefarious part here, because I completely agree with everything you're saying in terms of unmet need, is that our systems seem to be increasingly designed to not meet and actually keep people in a state of suffering. So if you think about amount of GDP spent on public spaces, it's plummeted to like 0.2% versus what it used to be at over 3% of public spaces.

Incentive structures on building apartments to keep people as separated as possible with no communal spaces to maximize square footage is designed to keep people in little boxes. The way that the economy is set up is the same. Our tech platforms are designed to keep people siloed in algorithms. increasing enragment to drive engagement. There seems to be more and more obstacles to even considering what it means to have emotional needs as at the core, which, you know, I can go into why and we can unpack that, but it feels harder and harder to even start to look at people to say they have needs, let alone thinking of the systems of our economy that thrive on us being broken. Well, and also the healthcare system, which is not designed to actually, you know, provide

more than 15 minutes of care for most, you know, for most people who are being run through a system. There's a person I spoke to with that insight. Some people will hear that and think, struggle with it. There's a woman who really helped me to grasp that core point you're making. You should have her on, by the way, amazing person. She's called Dr. Joanne Cassiottore. So Joanne must be 24 or five years ago now. She gave birth to a daughter called Cheyenne who died during childbirth. And almost immediately, the doctors offered her antidepressants and drugs. And she said, but I'm not depressed.

My baby died. Like, I should feel sad. You should be destroyed. In fact, grief is a form of love, right? If you tell me that your neighbour died yesterday, I'll feel sad. in a sort of vague way, but I won't feel sad the way you tell me my neighbor died because I know my neighbor and I care about them, right? Grief is a form of love.

It's also a form of healing. Exactly. And absolutely necessary and essential psychological process. Indeed, one of the ways we would know someone was a psychopath was if they did not grieve for someone they loved, right? So she said, this is, this is, she found this bizarre. Anyway, she then began to research this, like obviously later, as she discovered, I forget the figure it's in the book, but if I remember rightly, a majority of people,

of people whose children die are drugged almost immediately in this country, right? And she began to think, well, A, this may interfere with the grieving process, but B, is a profound misunderstanding of what being human is, right? So she then began to research this and discovered this really interesting thing that I think leads to an insight about what you're asking. So she looked at the history of this. It's really interesting. Back in the 60s and 50s and 60s, when they were first formulating the DSM,

the diagnostic and statistical manual, up to then there was no agreed definition of depression in this country right doctors would just use the term meaning different things so quite sensibly they came up with a definition and it was a palis psychiatrist and they basically came up with a checklist i think it was from a rightly 10 things and they said if your patient has more than five of these 10 symptoms for more than two weeks they're depressed to do what you can tell them right and it was obvious things like crying all the time or a lot you know feeling hopeless kind of things you would guess So they send this out, and psychiatrists all over the country start using it. But then the doctors come back after a while and go, oh, we've got a bit of a problem here. If we use this definition of depression, we're going to have to diagnose every grieving person in this country is depressed because these are the symptoms of grief, right? And they were like, oh, shit, that's not what we meant. So they created what was called the grief loophole or the grief exception, where it said, if someone they love died, then it's normal, but if it's not, then they're depressed. But that began to beg the question, well, why is someone you know?

love dying in the only situation in life where you're allowed to feel like shit. What if you've lost your job? What if you're homeless? As Dr. Cassiottoria put it to me, the minute you start asking those questions, you have to let context in. And this is not a system designed for context. This is a system based on a very different model. It's based on the model of tropical diseases. If you've got malaria, you go to the doctor, you don't want the doctor to go, what was your mother like? Tell me about your childhood. Don't give you a little test. They figure out if you got malaria. They give you the treatment for malaria, right? And you don't have malaria. Exactly. There's a pathogen that you identify.

Malaria is a, you might think of it as a malfunction in your body that you can get rid of, right? Human pain is not a malfunction. Human pain is a signal. It's telling you something really, really important. Doesn't mean it's a good thing. It's terribly painful to experience it. It's agony. It's the worst thing I've ever experienced to be depressed.

But it's telling you something really important. And if we treat it as a malfunction, I want to stress this is not the intention of any of the doctors who do it at all, who are good people. but what you're saying to people unintentionally is your pain is just a like a bit of malfunctioning code. It doesn't mean anything. It's not, think about when I was a kid. What I needed to be told by my doctor was, tell me about your life. Oh, wow. Your earliest memory is trying to wake up one of your relatives and not being able to because they were so severely addicted.

Oh, you grew up in an environment where you were violently attacked throughout your childhood by adults. Oh, there's nothing wrong with you. there was something wrong with your environment and what you need is help to release the shame around that environment. But because I was told a very different story, again with very good intentions and I'm not saying the drugs didn't help me a little bit for a while

they did, along with side effects. What that did is it gave me, and the way I came to think of it is it gave me an inaccurate map of my pain and if you don't have an accurate map like we're sitting here in Studio City, if I didn't have, I mean I've got Google Maps, actually Uber took me here, but like if that Uber

driver didn't have a map of this city that was accurate. If she'd taken me to Santa Monica, you know, we wouldn't be having this conversation. And in a way, what I feel like is we're being given these maps that don't take us to the destination we need to get to. They may help, right? I don't have anything against chemical antidepressants. There are benefits and side effects, as with all complicated things. But telling people a purely biological story about their distress. Firstly, it isn't true. Every medical textbook will tell you that is not, it is not correct to say that the causes of depression are purely biological, although your biology can contribute to it.

But then, crucially, it leads us to miss the bigger solutions, the cows that are waiting for all of us, right? Mind Balak's breakdown is supported by Tumble. You know, finding the right rug for our studio was surprisingly difficult. An expensive rug makes you constantly afraid that you're going to stain it. We've got dogs around, like just living life.

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Please support our show and let them know our show sent you. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and on the Soul Boom podcast, I sit down with fascinating entertainers, thinkers, and doers to dig into the big, questions, the meaning of life, death, the soul, God, mental health, personal transformation, and to be honest, a little bit of idiocy. Together we explore this strange human experiment and whether ancient spiritual wisdom tools can help with modern problems and how we might become slightly better human beings while we're at it. So come and join the spiritual revolution. Soul Boom with Rain Wilson. Watch or listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcast. 100% agree with you. We just released an episode on the biology of trauma, on how those

experiences that you're talking about cause stress in the body over time when continued and for prolonged periods can cause quote unquote trauma, although that's a definitional phrase. And what we see is that those long extended periods of time actually impact a person on a cellular level, reducing their ability to produce basic energy, reducing their ability for their systems of their body to function properly, which then has an impact on their psychological state because they're not producing the fundamental energy that they need to exist and run the systems of their body. And, you know, medical doctors are telling this story differently, but very, very few because there are no tools to intervene and navigate this. But that's the second bit. So it's

really important. You've told half of a really important story there, right? Untreated trauma can really fuck you, right? And a lot of depression and anxiety and indeed attention problems can be the result of that untreated trauma. So for a long time, I backed away from looking into this. Because I heard the bit that you just said and I thought, oh, so it's just saying, I'm f***ed then, right? You're just broken. And what's really important is we do have tools to deal with the second part. There's a guy who made an incredible breakthrough about this, an absolute hero, one of the most amazing people I've ever met actually. Man called Dr. Vincent Feliti.

It's okay, I'll just tell you the story. You've probably heard of him. He's famous for he discover what called the adverse childhood experiences study. Oh yeah. So the story of how he discovered this for a minute, when I tell it to you, for about two minutes you're going to think, what the fuck is he talking about? This has nothing to do with what he just said. But it led to the breakthrough and I don't think you can understand it as well if you

don't understand the story. So in the early 1980s, Kaiser Permanente, the big not-for-profit medical provider here in California, one of them are. They had a problem. which is that obesity was really rapidly rising. It was actually incredibly low by today's standards, but it was rising. They would give people diet plans.

They would even give people personal trainers sometimes. It just wasn't solving the problem. So they approached this guy, Dr. Vincent Feliti, and said to him, will you just do Blue Sky's research and figure out what would actually reduce obesity? And he's like, okay, and he's like, what can I do?

So he started to work with 200 severely obese people, people who weighed more than 300 pounds, who tried everything. And he's like, well, can I do? He had an idea that sounds and actually is kind of dumb. He said, what would happen if severely obese people literally stopped eating? And we gave them like, you know, vitamin C shots that didn't get scurvy or whatever. Would they just burn through the fat supplies in their body and lose weight? So obviously with a shit ton of medical supervision, they tried it.

And incredibly, at first, it worked. There's a woman who I'm going to call Susan, not her real name, who went from being, I think it was more than 350 pounds to 138 pounds. It was extraordinary. You know, her family were ringing Dr. Felitti saying, you saved her life. And then one day, something happened that no one expected. Susan Crack, she went to KFC. Actually, I don't know what's KFC? It's me projecting.

Some fast few plays started overeating and quickly went back to her being overweight, not where she was, but a... And Dr. Felitti called her in, and he said, Susan, what happened? And she looked down, she got really ashamed. She said, I don't know. he said well tell me about the day you crack anything in particular happened that day turned out something happened that day that had never happened to her

she was in a bar and a man hit on her not in a nasty way in a nice way and she suddenly felt really freaked out and went and started eating that was when dr feliti said to her question he'd never thought to ask his patients he said susan when did you start to gain your weight in her case it was when she was 11 he said well did anything happen when you were 11 that didn't happen when you were 9 or when you were anything in particular happened that year. As she looked down and she said very softly, well,

that's where my grandfather started to rape me. Dr. Felitti interviewed everyone in the program. He discovered that 60% of the women in the program had made their significant weight gain after being sexually abused or assaulted. And he was like, this is weird. What's going on? And Susan put it to him very well. She said, overweight is overlooked.

And that's what I need to be. And he realized this thing. that appeared so dysfunctional was performing a profoundly protective function for these women, right? Of course, people get sexually assaulted at any size, but you're more likely Well, and also you

convince yourself psychologically that if I can't be, quote, attractive the way, you know, our society deems, that might be protective for me. Exactly. But the reason this led to this breakthrough with depression, addiction, and the other questions was, so Dr. Fulity's had this result

in this small group. He's like, But it's a small group, it seems like such an unusual finding, that he went to the Centers for Disease Control and got funding to do a much bigger study, which led to this incredible breakthrough. So every single person who came to Kaiser Permanente in San Diego for a whole year, don't matter what for, broken legs, schizophrenia, anything, was given a questionnaire. And the first part said, did any of these bad things happen to you when you were a kid? I'd be like, just fix my broken legs. Exactly. God damn it. bring me the fucking morphine

and sexual abuse physical abuse neglect that kind of thing and the second part asked we initially was just going to ask about your weight but luckily for us at the last minute they added you know have you had an addiction problem suicide attempts depression and at first when they added up the figures

they were like this just can't be right do it all again but they were correct for every category of childhood trauma you experienced you were two to four times more likely to be depressed anxious or addicted, but when you got into the multiple categories, the figures just went wild. If you'd had six categories of childhood trauma, you were 3,100 more likely to have attempted suicide, and 4,600 more likely to have an injecting drug problem, which is you very rarely get figures like

that. And Gabor Matte, you know, confirmed this in his, you know, in his extensive studies of addicts and realized most every addicts had been, especially the women, had been sexually abused and grew up in abuse and addiction. Yeah, I spent a lot of time. Gab or on the downtown side of Vancouver. And what they discovered next, I think is really important. After the study was over, they had all these people who had indicated in a medical form that they'd experienced sexual abuse or neglect or whatever it was. So their doctors were told, don't call them in.

But the next time they come in, say to them something like, I see when you were a child, you were sexually abused. I'm really sorry that happened to you. That should never have happened. Would you like to talk about it? And 40% of people said, I don't want to talk about it. but 60% of people did want to talk about it, and they wanted to talk about it on average for five minutes.

And then it was randomly assigned. Some of them were told you can come back and have to see a therapist. What's incredible is, just those five minutes of an authority figure saying, that should never have happened to you. I'm so sorry, you should have been protected. That alone led to a significant decline in depression and anxiety. Somebody cared. Well, what this shows is it's partly about someone caring,

and it's partly about shame. What we know is, as a brilliant scientist here in L.A. who did a lot of research, if you look at the AIDS crisis, closeted gay men died on average two years earlier than openly gay men, even when they got healthcare at the same stage of the disease, because shame f***es you. It's not the trauma that f***es you. It's the shame about the trauma. And giving people a way to release that shame is an antidepressant. It's a cow, right?

The way I think of it is anything that reduces depression should be regarded as an antidepressant. For some people, that will be chemical antidepressants, but there needs to be a much wider menu of options, precisely because the causes are much wider than just in your biology, although there are some in your biology, the solutions need to be much wider. So one of them is releasing people from shame, but there's, I go through more than 20 in the book, ways we can do this. But it's about you've got to honour the complexity of the problem and its causes in order to find the solution. What we've been doing is with often good intentions telling people an insanely,

oversimplified story about their pain and their distress. And that has led us to trap people and prevent us from seeing these wider solutions that are all around us. That really hits it right on the head. People want a simple story. They want one thing to be wrong that involves one medication to fix it. What is it about this nuance that we're not able to capture right now? Yeah, I mean, that's not the thought that when you're in pain, you want, you know, you want to pull a lever and make it stop, right? And they're absolutely right to want that, and that's what I wanted. And some people get relief from the drugs, some people don't. Sadly, over time, the only long-term study of chemical antidepressant shows most people taking them do become depressed again. But that's

not everyone, right? So, when you're in pain, you want it just to stop, right? And any tool that makes it stop is fine by me. And people should seek out the solutions they can. But the problem with this simplistic story, so there's lots of reasons for this simplistic story. Obviously, one is Big Pharma. There are many good things that Big Farmer has done for us. I'm pro-drug across the whole category of many drugs. We live much longer lives because of the breakthroughs in scientific medicine, some of which, many of which come from Big Pharma. You know, it's a more than a billion dollar industry to drug people for depression. And obviously, they're invested in promoting the simplest possible story.

that means that people turn primarily to the drugs. But here's my question. Do they know that they don't work? And they're still making those advertisements so that I watch them and say, I want that life. I want to run through the water. They're always running through the water.

I want to run through the water. I want that drug. I mean, I know it sounds like I'm a five-year-old asking it. But am I supposed to operate in the world with an understanding that there's an enormously, you know, profit-heavy portion of our existence that knows that things don't, work or hides the adverse effects so that we will just buy them like candy.

So with chemical antidepressants, it's not that they don't work. It's that they have a limited effect, right? So they're oversawed, not that there's no effect. So there's lots of studies of this. For example, there's something, there's a way of measuring depression called the Hamilton scale. I've always felt really sorry for whoever the hell Hamilton was that we're going to remember him by measuring how miserable we all are. He's not Alexander Hamilton.

He's definitely not. Alexander Hamilton. We should do a Hamilton scale musical. We're just people on stage just hugging themselves slowly. But they are going to take their shot. Is that too distasteful? Just do. Wait.

Just you. Okay. We're going to improv Hamilton scale musical at the end of this episode. Okay, go ahead. Sorry. But the Hamilton scale, so it goes from 1 to 51. I think one is where you are suicidal and 51 is where you're dancing around in ecstasy. Maybe on ecstasy, whatever it is, right?

So to give you a sense of movement on the Hamilton scale, if you improve your sleep patterns, you generally will move six points up the Hamilton scale. on average, when you take chemical antidepressants, you move up two points on the Hamilton scale. So it's about a third of improving your sleep. Now, it's important to say that as an average. For some people, it's much more. For some people, it's less.

For me, initially it was much more than it was less. So that gives you a sense, though, that saying to people, this is the answer, the solution. Most people, it will help a little bit at first. Some people, it will massively help. But some people will help a little bit, but some people it doesn't help. indeed harms, but the telling people that's the answer, that's all you need to know. This is the end of

the story. Now, do they know this? It's very interesting. That story I was told by my doctor, that depression is just caused by a lack of a chemical called serotonin. That was never a scientific theory. That's a story that was invented by the PR departments of the drug companies, right? There isn't even any evidence that people with depression have lower serotonin than everyone else. Which is like a complete head fuck, right? And one of the things I find up, slightly gaslighty is a lot of the doctors who said that before, a lot of the people who promoted that theory. Now go, oh, we never said that, right?

Even though polling shows, most people still believe that, the depression is caused by lack of serotonin. You don't have enough serotonin, so we'll give you this drug, and then you'll have enough. And again, stressing there's real value in the drugs for some people, anyone who's taking these drugs. There's also real value in placebo. Yeah, sure, sure. And some element of this is placebo, and some of it may be beyond that, and I believe it's more

effective than a pure placebo, although that may be because people figure out that they're not on a placebo. And anyone who's taking these drugs, if they're helping with your depression, my advice is to carry on taking them. If they're not helping, absolutely do not stop abruptly. You can have terrible withdrawal. Go to your doctor, discuss it very carefully with your doctor. You know, do not just stop, right? If you're listening to us, you think, oh, wow, it's not working for us. It can be really quite dangerous to just abruptly stop. So go and have a conversation with your doctor. But what we need to do, a lot of people we're listening and going, okay, I get all of this, but I don't have any better options on the table. So what we need to do is help people to put better options on the table.

To give you an example of an amazing additional option that to me was really transformative. So one of the heroes of my book about this, Lost Connections, is an amazing doctor called Sam Everington. And Sam is a doctor in a poor part of East London where I lived for a long time, though sadly he never got to be my doctor. and Sam had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety and like me he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants but he could see that most of the people he gave the chemical antidepressants to took the edge off but they were still pretty depressed so one day he began to pioneer a different approach now spreading all over Europe

a woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham who I also got to know who'd been shut away with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years and Sam said to Lisa don't worry on don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs. But I'm also going to prescribe something else. I'm going to prescribe for you to come here to the doctor's offices a couple of times a week to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people, not to talk about how shit you feel.

Do that if you want, but that's not the point of it. I want you guys to meet and find something meaningful to do together. The first time the group met, Lisa literally started vomiting with anxiety because she was so overwhelmed being around people. But the group started, people rubbed her back. The group started talking. They were like, what could we do? There was an area behind the doctor's offices that was known as dog shit alley.

It was where dogs were going to shit. They were like, hey, we could turn dog sally into a garden, right? But these are inner city, East London people like me. They knew nothing about gardening. So they start to watch clips on YouTube. They started to go and get books out the library. They started to get their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons.

You know, there's a lot of evidence that exposure to nature is a really powerful antidepressant. but they started to do something even more important. They started to form a tribe. They started to form a group. They started to care about each other. If one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking for them, be like, hey, are you okay? Do you need some help?

The way Lisa put it to me was, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom. There was a small study in Norway of a very similar program, found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants in reducing depression and anxiety. To me, this approach is called social prescribing, right? it's where we are the loneliest society in human history. 42% of Americans agree with the statement. No one knows me well.

And that was before the pandemic, right? One of the first things that should happen when you come and you explain that you're depressed is, oh, are you lonely? You're lonely? Great. We got a, we got a prescription for that. We got a lonely hearts club. Exactly. We've got a prescription for that, right?

Then we should go down the list of the other nine factors that have been proven scientifically to contribute to depression and anxiety the other eight, sorry, that's one of the nine. We go down that list. We have to have a broad menu of options, right? But this should be the first step. It costs nothing to prescribe people to a gardening program. It's free. It costs nothing. The incentive structure doesn't provide options for that because it's not profitable.

So the people who are supposedly in charge of the forefront of the most advanced medical system in the world are failing. Because it doesn't pay them to send people to a community group, to a walking group, to going out in nature. You know, as much whatever you say about Canadians, they prescribe. Yeah, I'll give them that. They'll give a prescription to go out in nature. Now, it would be much better if they went out in nature in a group, on a hiking group. As you say, because these studies exist, yet they have failed to be implemented into the larger health care system. So what is the incentive to keep people sick or to find the best possible treatment, whether that be in a pharma option or in a combination of both where you're getting a social connection?

And this is where it begins to be hard to not see that there is a incentive in keeping people sick. So it's a failure at two levels. You're right that there's a failure in the medical system, but that failure is happening because of a failure at a higher level, which is a failure of the political system, right? The political system is bought and owned by the health insurance companies. Literally, you know, you look at the first day of the Obamacare negotiations as both parties. They're literally funding the Republican and Democratic side the same sides because they want the politicians to work for them, right? So this is a system built entirely around profit

and entirely around these dysfunctional incentives. Where, yeah, a better solution that doesn't cost anything will not be considered compared to a worse solution that makes profit, right? So I say that's the overarching system. And you know, the answer to that is a political solution. Don't fucking tolerate it, right? I completely agree with Bernie Sanders and that part. I don't agree with him on everything.

But absolutely, this is 100% right. I'm constantly amazed that Americans don't burn down the system of health care in this country. It is an outrage. So obviously, I live half the year in Britain, half the year in this country. Even think about we were mentioning OZMPIC. When I buy the Ozenpic in London, it's like 150 pounds a month. So it's about, what, about $200? Here it's $800, right?

You are constantly being ripped off so unbelievably rich people can be even richer. It's why you get this. I was very disturbed by the rage around Luigi Mangione because the support of him, I found very frightening. In a democracy, we do not murder our political opponents and we do not celebrate murder. And it's awful and appalling. and that was still a human being. But it's a symptom of the crisis of democracy that everyone is being fucked over

and in a functional democracy, the democracy offers the solution, right? The democracy goes, you are being fucked over. And this is happening with depression. It's happening with attention problems. It's happening with fucking giving insulin to diabetics. It's happening across the board, right?

You have to go, okay, the answer to that is a democratic solution where politicians compete to offer better solutions. But if they're all bought and owned by the pharmacists, companies and by the healthcare companies, that they have a lock on the political system. And the way you break that is you elect politicians who will challenge that break on the lock, right? Because how many times are we going to have a study that proves that five minutes with a doctor can change the course

of someone's life? How many studies do we need to prove again, oh, it's in Norway, oh, it's in Sweden, oh, they're showing here and here, but it just stays in these little pockets and people hear about them on podcasts and they then don't really go anywhere. It's maddening. with all of those there are very powerful vested interests who benefit from the system being as it is and all of us getting sicker. It's not that they want us to be sick, that that's going too far,

it's just that they profit from our sickness and therefore the system is built around it. And it can feel overwhelming. You can hear that. I can sense people hearing what you just said and going, we're never going to challenge that. And when I hear that, I think about two things. I think about a friend of mine

who I just spent a load of time with called Andrew Sullivan, A lot of your listeners and viewers will know his work. He's an amazing writer. So in 1993, Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive at the height of the AIDS crisis. He'd just watch his best friend Patrick Die.

As far as he was concerned, there was no hope in sight. He thought, well, I've got a few years to live. What am I going to do? So he quit his job. He was the editor of the New Republic. And he went to Provincetown in Cape Cod to do one last thing before he died. he decided to write a book about a crazy, wild, utopian idea that nobody had ever written a book

about before. And he's like, well, I'll never live to see this idea put into place. No one alive today I'll ever live to see it, but maybe somewhere down the line, someone's going to find my book and find this idea. The idea that he wrote the first ever book about was gay marriage. And when I get depressed, I try to imagine going back in time to that year when Andrew's writing virtually normal that book. Saying to him, okay, you're not going to believe me, but 23 years, I think it is from now. A, you'll be alive. That would have fucking blown his mind. B, you'll be married to a really hot man because that will be legal. And I'll be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States quotes this book when it makes it mandatory for every state in this country to introduce gay marriage

rights. And the next day, you'll be invited to our White House lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you and so many other people have achieved, to have dinner with the president. Oh, and by the way, that president, he's going to be black, right? That would have sounded like the most fucking absurd science fiction, right? It happened. Why did it happen? It happened because gay people went and blew anything up. It didn't happen because we raged at people or canceled them. It happened because we appealed to people in a spirit of love and lots of very brave gay people spoke out and lots of very brave straight people open their hearts and sided with us. And And, you know, you think about how unlikely that is.

You've got 2,000 years of gay people being imprisoned, burned, murdered. And in the space of a very short period of time, I don't want underestimate we still got challenges, but that comes crashing down, right? To the point where even current, really right-wing Republicans are not trying to reverse give the gay marriage ruling, right? I think a lot about my grandmothers. I really love my grandmother.

I was raised by one of my grandmothers because the addiction in my family. And I'm 46. When I was 46 years old, I think about my grandmother's life. So one of them was a Swiss peasant woman living in a wooden hut on the side of a mountain. And the other one was a working class Scottish woman living in really tough circumstances. A husband had just died, which was the age I am now. I think about what their lives were like. Legally, they were not allowed to have bank accounts in their own names, right?

it was it was legal for them to be raped by their husbands as it was legal in every country in the world for a man to rape his wife my Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote right my grandmother's lives were

permanently disfigured by that misogyny right my grandmother my Swiss grandmother she loved to paint and draw and she was taught to shut the fuck up and get into the kitchen right and by the time I knew her she broke her heart to draw because it made her think about the life she could have had, right? Now, even the most crazy way out misogynist is not saying,

women shouldn't be allowed to have bank accounts and it should be legal to rape them. I mean, maybe there's someone out there. We're probably getting there, but like no one in, you know, if any Republican congressman said such a thing, they would have to resign, right? How did that happen?

You've got, again, thousands of years where men controlled essentially every institution of power. And then groups of women, just said, we're not fucking taking it anymore. No, you can't do that to us, right? And it took an enormous fight. And obviously, this fight continues and I'm very conscious that I'm a man looking at you man explaining this, which is extremely irritating. So, however powerful the healthcare companies are, and they are really powerful, they are not a tenth as powerful as men were in the year my grandmothers were my age. They're not a tenth as powerful as homophobia was

for the whole of human civilization pretty much, right? hugely powerful concentrated interests can be taken down when enough people challenge them. And we've got to level with people about how big the challenge is. The factors causing depression and anxiety and our attention problems are really fucking big. Let's be honest with people. It's not a matter of do five minutes on a meditation app or just swallow one pill, although pills can help, meditation apps can help. There are really big things.

But we need to listen to the signal and honor the signal that we're being told and act on it, if that requires us to do big things. The more people I know with young children in schools, the more I'm hearing about conversations about ADD and ADHD. My kids were homeschooled, and I would say if you took all the homeschoolers in our community, I'm sure all of them would meet a diagnosis by standardized school measures. In many cases, in many cities, schools are essentially maximizing the number of young people who are on medication for ADD.

And it makes for a more efficient school day. It makes for class management. In many cases, you know, the statistics of boys and female teachers is not one to be ignored, meaning the distribution of men versus women who are in boys' lives has really shifted in the last, I don't know, half century or so. People medicating their kids for days when it's important, but they can be themselves on the weekend and all summer,

but that fundamentally to fit into this society, young people in particular are being encouraged, and parents are being encouraged to medicate children. And in many cases, adults are saying, oh, I have it too. I can be much more productive if I'm on Adderall. What is going on? So the reason I wrote my book, Stolen Focus about this

is that I could feel my own attention was getting worse, right? with every year that passed, things that require deep focus that are so important to me, reading books, watching movies, having long conversations, were just getting harder. It was like trying to run up a down escalator. You know what I mean? I could still do it, but like it was getting harder. And I could see that happening to pretty much everyone around me. And I was particularly worried about the young people in my life.

And I had this real epiphany about this. I've got a godson and when he was a little boy when he was nine he developed this brief and unbelievably cute obsession with Elvis Presley and the reason it was so adorable

is that he seemed to genuinely not know that impersonating Elvis was a kind of cheesy cliche so I think he was the last person ever to do a totally sincere version of Joe House Rock it was super fucking cute and every night when I would tuck him into bed

I would tell him the story of Elvis's life over and over again obviously I skipped the bit where he gets himself to death on the toilet and one day I mentioned Graceland where he lived that people go and visit Graceland and his whole face lit up and he said Joham will you take me to Graceland one day

and I was like yeah definitely the way you do with nine year olds because next week you'll want to go to like the North Pole or something he's like no do you really swear one day you'll take me to Grace Land and I said I absolutely promise I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years until just so many things had gone wrong So when he was 15 he dropped out of school And by the time he was 19

This will sound like an exaggeration I promise you it's not He spent literally almost all his waking hours Alternating between his iPad His iPhone and his laptop And his life was just this Blur of WhatsApp Snapchat, porn

And it was like he was kind of spinning At the speed of Snapchat Do you know what I mean? Like And I remember one day I was sitting on my sofa With him in London And all day I was trying to get conversation going with. He was really clever. He's trying to get a conversation going with him.

And I just couldn't. He was just, and to be totally honest with you, I wasn't much better, right? I was staring at my own devices. And I suddenly remembered this moment all these years before. And I said, hey, let's go to Graceland. And he looked at me completely blankly. It's like what you're talking about. He didn't remember this Elvis obsession, so I reminded him. And I said, we can't live like this. This is no way to live. Let's go on a road trip all over the south. but I thought ahead you've got to leave your phone in the hotel during the day if we're going to go

because there's no point in us going if you're going to look at your phone the whole time and he wasn't happy living like this he's like let's do it and I think it was literally two weeks maybe three weeks later we took off we went to New Orleans first and a couple of weeks later we got to the gates of Graceland have you been there

so it's really worth going but when you get there this is even this was before COVID now there's no human being to show you around Graceland what happens you arrive they hand you an iPad you put in earbuds and the iPad shows you round. It says, you know, go left, go right. Every room you go in, there's an image of that room on the iPad

in front of you and it tells you a story about it. So we're walking around Graceland and everyone is just staring at the iPad and I'm getting a little bit tense. Like, come on everyone. You know, you travelled a long way to be here. Look at it. And we got to the jungle room that was Elvis's favourite room.

It's got loads of fake plants in it. They've kept it just how it was. And I'll never forget them. There was this middle-aged Canadian couple or next to us. And the guy turned to his wife and said, honey, this is amazing. Look, if you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right. And I laughed because I thought they were kidding. And I watched them and they were just swiping back and forward. You just turn your head. Well, this is what I leaned forward and said,

but sir, there's an old-fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning your neck, because you realize we're in the jungle room. You don't have to look at it on the internet. It's literally around us in three dimensions. And they looked at me like I was. inside and backed out of the room and I turned to my godson to laugh about it and he was standing in the corner staring at Snapchat because from the moment

we landed he just could not stop he couldn't stop and I went up to him I tried to grab the phone out of his hands never a good idea with teenagers and I said to him look I know you're afraid of missing out but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out you're not present at your own life you're not showing up in your own existence

and understandably he stormed off and I walked around Memphis on my own that day. And I found him that night by the big, we were staying at the heartbreak hotel. And he was by this huge guitar-shaped swimming pool looking at his phone. And I went up to him and I apologized for getting so angry. And he didn't look up. But he said, I know something's really wrong and I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, we came away to get away from this problem of distraction. But there's nowhere to escape to. It's everywhere, right? It's the air we all breathe. And that's why I went on this big journey for stolen focus, where I interviewed, you know, hundreds of the leading experts all over the world on attention. What I learned is

the scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse, and loads of the factors that can harm your attention have been hugely rising in recent years. Your attention did not collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by really big and powerful forces. And again, we're being told this oversimplified story, which is, oh, it's just a biological malfunction. And there is a biological contribution for some people that we can unpack. But what an amazing coincidence that this biological malfunction happens to have blown up at the same time that we're all exposed to technologies that are designed by geniuses to hack and frack our attention. At the same time, we're all exposed to chemicals in our food that have been proven to harm attention. At the same

time, go down the list, these 12 factors. We've got to understand this in this wider context, rather than just sort of seeing it again as a sort of technical malfunction. You know, even just, I think, about one that you said about dads, right? I interviewed a wonderful man called Dr. Sammy Tamimi. He's a doctor in Britain, and he took over a doctor's practice. He noticed about, if I remember rightly, the figures are in the book, about 60 of the kids were being given stimulants for attention problems. And he thought, well, this is a very serious drug.

We don't actually know the long-term effects of giving children stimulants. There's no long-term research on. giving these kids giving these kids his drugs in the long term which is a staggering fact he's like I should I should do due diligence

I should bring these kids in see what's going on with them and he noticed for example lots of them again he asked that question Dr. Flutti asked lots of them he would say when did your attention problems begin

lots of them it's when their dad's left the home but this is interesting what's going on there so he decided to phone their dads and say hi I'm your son's doctor your son really misses you he's been having a lot of attention, can't really focus when you're not around.

Would you be able to come and see him once a week? The dad started getting involved, not all of them, but a lot of them started getting involved again. As the dad's got involved again, he found he could take the kids gradually off this medication. Their attention problems did not recur. Now, that's not happening with every kid. There's lots of things that can cause these problems.

Again, it helps you to see. When you expand your understanding of what causes the problem, you can expand your sense of what the solutions are, in a way that actually serves particularly, we're talking about children here, right? Particularly serves children better, so we've got to understand what's really happening to us. It is not a coincidence that we're all struggling to focus at the same time.

That is not a coincidence. It's about a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing the people who designed the stuff that does this to us, but a lot of time speaking to food scientists. You can go down the list. Look at how our schools work. I went to an Amish community called Alcart LaGrange. Amazingly, Amish kids don't get ADHD.

The phenomenon does not exist. Fascinating. Right? Go and talk to them. Why is that? They would say, well, we have some kids who don't like to sit still. They're the ones who help us hunt and fish and run around. We love those kids, right? We are the first human society ever to try to get children to sit still for eight hours a day. No one's ever tried to do that before because it's such a fucking dumb idea, right?

Amazingly, when you, and it's even you said, you know, we're giving these kids these drugs to improve how they're doing. You know, I know, I know you were sort of paraphrasing how people speak. Amazingly, and there's a little bit of them. lots of research on this, it doesn't even improve their test scores to give them these stimulant drugs. Oh, I don't even think. Yeah. To me, it's about class management. It's about behavior management. I mean, look, I taught sixth grade Hebrew school when I was in college, and most of my job was behavior management. And I enjoyed it very much. I mean, I enjoyed being a teacher. I enjoyed the

material, and it was at a very lovely synagogue. But I could tell what was going on in the homes of the kids who had the most trouble focusing. Many came from very, very wealthy families. They weren't getting a lot of attention. This will sound ridiculous and crazy. You won't believe me, but if you look this up, it is really happy. Maybe you will believe me, because you live in L.A., so you will see it. There's been an explosion in pets being diagnosed with ADHD.

Oh, yeah. So I went to interview the guy who pioneered this, a guy called Professor Nicholas Dodman. Actually, a perfectly nice man. And it was so interesting. Do you like how easily I was like, oh yeah, I've heard of this. I live in LA and know people. You're literally feeding Ritzel into your dog right now. Are pets supposed to focus?

Well, this is a good. Well, it's kind of like saying, you know, pets can experience depression. They can experience anxiety. You know, very, I mean, birds are very smart. I had one for 12 years. They will pluck their feathers out. They will self-mutilate if they're upset. When an animal's depressed, I mean, my cat, I came home.

I was away for the weekend seeing you. every single meal was vomited up. Every meal all over the house. Anxious stomach. My cat has an anxious stomach. And he's very jittery and he's very, like, that's an anxious animal. So that's different than focusing on his math home. No, but we're on a spectrum.

We're on a spectrum of conversation about chemicals and chemistry. And yeah, you would be able to tell a difference between a dog who cannot, let's say, sit still to focus on eating, to focus on cuddling, like that has anxious energy that's always moving like me. Exactly. But what was so fascinating, right? So exactly as you say, before I went to interview him, I thought he would say, he would give an explanation for sort of animal ADHD that was like the kind of

explanation you would get from a doctor about your child. There's something biologically wrong here. And the drugs is a biological solution to a biological problem, which is what most parents are basically told, right? To use you to his credit, he didn't say that. He described, for example, dogs are meant to run for about six hours a day. Dogs are pack animals. They're not meant to be on their own.

but most pet dogs get a tiny fraction of that walking every day and they're left alone for a lot of the bed. And usually while they're being walked, this is one of my pet peeves, their owner's on the phone. They're not even giving them attention while they're walking their dogs. Exactly.

So the dogs act up, right? Because they have unmet needs and they're acting up. And I said, so when you give them Ritalin, does that solve the problem? He said, no, of course not. It just makes them more manageable, right? It's the same thing with humans.

You've just described the problem with humans. Exactly. The analogy... I mean, it's so... Believe your own book. You've just described the problem with humans. Well, I was so struck with that. And I remember he would describe times when there were dogs with ADHD who would chase their own tails, obsessively running around.

And then they were, because they lived in tiny apartments. And then they were sent to live on a farm. And amazingly enough, their ADHD disappeared, right? Now, it's important to stress again. There is some biological spectrum with attention. There are some people who biologically are less inclined to pay attention. By the way, those people are hugely fucking valuable. We want them in the human tribe.

we need them, but the environment we're living in is driving all of us to struggle much more with attention and focus. Think about the obvious one which everyone will be thinking about, which is technology, right? One of the things that most struck me, so I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and when I spoke to the people who invented this world we live in, the thing that most struck me is how sick with guilt they feel about what they've done. They know what they've done, right? Give you an example, an amazing guy called James William. So James worked at the the heart of Google was very uncomfortable with a lot of what was going on. And one day he was speaking to an audience of tech designers who literally are the people who design the stuff your kids are using

today. And he said to them, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, please put up your hand and nobody put up their hand. And he's like, I can't do this anymore. And he quit and became this really important philosopher of attention at Oxford University. but the people who designed this machinery kept explaining to me why it's having this effect on us and how we can fix it, right? So they explained.

If you open now, if you open TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, which I refuse to call X, Instagram, whatever, right? And you begin to scroll. They make money out of you immediately in these two ways. The first way is really obvious. You see advertising, okay, we all know how that works. The second way is much more important.

Everything you ever do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and what makes you tick. What makes you happy? What makes you angry? What makes you horny? What makes you sad? And it knows, if you've been using them for a while, it knows. For me, they're all the same thing. And it's his beard. It knows far more about you than your neighbours, because your neighbours aren't reading your so-called private messages at 3am, right? It knows a huge amount. So let's say you've ever indicated on any of these apps that you like, I don't know,

Bet Midler, Donald Trump, and you've told that you just bought some nappies, right? Diapers. Okay, so it's going to figure out if you like Bet Midler and you're a man, you're probably gay. No disrespect to any straight men who like that middleer. I don't actually believe you, but okay. You like Donald Trump. You're probably conservative or right wing, and you just bought some diapers. You've got a baby, right?

It knows all this stuff about you, right? And it's learning that for lots of reasons, but the most important is to figure out what to show you next to keep you scrolling. Because every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money because you see ads. The longer you scroll, the more money they make. Every time your kid opens the app and begins to scroll, they begin to make money. The longer your kid scrolls, the more money they make. Every time you or your kid close the app, their revenue stream disappears, that's a disaster for them. So all this genius in AI, or this Silicon Valley, genius with the algorithms and the AI,

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. That's all they care about. Head of KFC, I'm sure, is a very nice person. But all he or she cares about is how often did you go to KFC this week and how big was the bucket you bought. And if you become obese and get diabetes, that's not their problem. In exactly the same way, all these companies, care about is how much of your attention are we monopolizing. The more, the better. It is a machinery,

as my friend Tristan Harris puts it, designed to frack and hack your attention. Not because they're evil bond villains. They're not. Purely and simply, because of this incentive structure, the longer you scroll, the more money they make, right? So then when you talk about content, you get to layer on this other level of our favorite word, shame. If you layer content with body positivity challenges, right? If you layer that algorithm, right, especially for young people, for young women, with all of these other components,

you then get a shame generator. And the reason that's so important, I'm so glad you said that, because there's an even deeper dynamic to this, which is catastrophic at both an individual and a societal level, which is actually the biggest reason why we need to act on this.

So the way I put it is, picture two teenage girls go to the same party and go home on the same bus and they both open TikTok and one of them does a video going we had such a great night we danced to Taylor Swift, loved it their algorithm is constantly scanning

for the kind of words you use it's going to put that video into a few people's feeds okay now imagine the other girl opens it and goes Karen was a fucking skank at that party I don't know if teenagers still stay skank if they don't they absolutely should have other words that are. We need to rehabilitate the word skank

but Karen was a fucking skank at that party her boyfriend's a prick, just angrily denounces everyone, right? It'll put that video into far more people's feeds for a very simple reason. There's a quirk of human psychology, which you know about called negativity bias, right? Human beings evolved to stare longer at things that make us angry and upset than we did at things that make us feel good. If you ever saw a car crash on the highway, you know what I mean, you stared longer at the mangled car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. This is very deep in human nature, 10-week-old babies stare longer at an hour. angry faces than smiling faces.

And you know, you can see why we would have evolved like that. Our ancestors who didn't look out for the angry face got eaten, right? I mean, it's a slightly crude way putting it, but you know what I mean, right? So that's always been part of our psychology. But when it combines with technologies that intimately learn your wants and likes and angers and hatreds, it has a catastrophic effect, right? It's one of the things that's supercharging anti-Semitism in the moment because rage-based content, but it's supercharging anti-democratic forces across the world, right?

Imagine a culture. Think about that TikTok. The nice girl is muffled. The nasty girl is supercharged, right? Now imagine that happening to a whole country where the nice people, the decent people, people who don't hate each other, want to find ways forward, want to find empathy. They're muffled. And the meanest, angriest, most hateful people are pushed to the front and dominate the conversation,

except you don't have to imagine that, because we see in countries as different as the United States, Britain, Burma, Brazil. Attention is being fucked across the board by these forces, but democracy is how we pay attention together. You cannot have democracy in an environment where people are constantly being primed for hours every day to nihilistically hate their fellow citizens. So we need to deal with these underlying forces and I can talk about how absolutely urgently for our kids because they're really struggling, for us. because we're struggling for our work, because our work is struggling, and for our democracy. This is where it does feel like there is ill intent, because there is research, and it's been revealed that there were studies at these large platforms that knew that they were causing increase in suicidality, increase in bodily harm, especially amongst young

women, increase in depression. And yet they chose to continue. to make them as sticky and as intense to drive attention as possible. So yes, do they have a requirement to their bottom line? Okay, but at what cost? And is there are no safeguards? I don't think you can regulate safeguards into these organizations. They should be held responsible in the court of public opinion as well. Picture a factory that's pumping pollution into a river and downstream, it's giving people

cancer, right? Does the factory want to give people cancer? Obviously not. They're not psychopaths. But once they know they're doing it, do they bear moral responsibility? Or even before they do it, if there was a risk that happened, do they bear moral responsibility? Absolutely. So absolutely people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have moral responsibility for this. Did they want to create a machinery that supercharges anti-democratic forces and anti-Semitism? Of course, Mark Zuckerberg's own family fled genocidal anti-Semitism. And he is the individual in the world now who is most responsible for supercharging genocidal anti-semitism. Is that his intention?

Of course not. But is he knowingly doing it now? Yes. And you look at a guy called like Guillaume Shaslow. So Guillaume Shasloo is, he worked at YouTube for a long time. And he was the person who blew the whistle that basically because the YouTube recommendation videos, you watch a video about a documentary about the Holocaust that is a factual and accurate documentary about the Holocaust.

It wants to recommend other videos, but it wants to keep you engaged. So it will recommend escalatingly angry videos. So he showed from the inside that it created a chain where if you watched a factual documentary about the Holocaust within a chain of six videos, it would always lead you to Holocaust denial, right? Now, to be fair to YouTube, they have, they have changed that. I think, to be fair to Holocaust deniers. To be fair to the Holocaust, you know, wow. But the, so you see that once.

they know that's happening, it's not why they set up that mechanism, of course not. But once they know it's happening, absolutely there's a moral responsibility. But the primary responsibility, look, these companies are never going to regulate themselves, right? That's not how capitalism works, right? Companies don't voluntarily restrain themselves from making more money. What absolutely can be done within capitalism is democratic regulation. And there's an example from our lifetimes where every single person watching and listening has a better attention span because of something that happened in our lives, right? So when we were kids, the only kind of gasoline you could get in this country was leaded gasoline, right? And it was discovered that exposure to lead fuchs your brain and

particularly harms children's ability to focus and pay attention. So what happened was a group of ordinary moms, what at the time were called housewives, banded together and said, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing the lead industry to fuck up our kids' brains? It's important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, so let's get rid of cars. Let's skis. Let's skis. you know, go back and let's burn down the gas station. Exactly. Let's all go back and join the, let's all convert to the Amish. No disrespect to any Amish who are watching. You are kind of cheating if you are. But they didn't say that. They said, let's replace this thing that is harming our kids with something

that does the same job, but isn't going to harm our kids. And these mothers, this is forgotten now. They fought like hell for their children and all of us. And it followed the classic pattern of all successful political movements that was described by Mahatma Gandhi. First, they ignored them. then they laughed at them, then they fought them, then they won, as we all know, no more loaded gasoline in the world. As a result, the CDC is calculated. The average American child is five IQ points higher than they would have been. Now to me, that's a really important model. In my book, Stolen Focus, I go through loads of things we can do at an individual level to improve your own attention and our kids' attention. And I'm passionally in favor of those

individual changes. But we also need to deal with it at a collective level. This attention crisis didn't happen because you had bad habits or your kids have bad habits. It happened because extremely large and powerful forces are benefiting from making our attention worse and we need to take on those forces like we took on the lead industry. We need to regulate them. Well, I thought also, you know, when we were kids, they literally used a cartoon camel to sell cigarettes. Like that seemed like a normal way to advertise cancer sticks. And when it came out that Philip Morris, and the cigarette industry, they knew. They were adding things to make cigarettes burn faster,

so you smoke more. They were adding addictive components so that it was even more addictive than tobacco naturally would be because of its nicotine content. There's a lot of conversation now, in particular regarding things that many in the holistic community,

like, you know, wacky homeschool people, homebirth people like me, have been talking about for a long time. And I wonder if you can touch on it because it's entered conversations about politics because RFK Jr., who in many cases, I think, does a lot of lunatic things. In other cases, he talks about certain aspects, for example, of food dyes, of additives and preservatives that most of the Western world does not use in food because they are known to be bad for the brain. these things have become so politicized. How do we have conversations around things like food dyes, additives, preservatives, without

it becoming, oh, well, that's a political issue, and that's the conservatives trying to take our red M&Ms away or whatever? Because many people do report significant behavioral changes when dietary changes are made, and many of them revolve things that are now being kind of politicized. Where does that fit into the conversation? To me, that's such low-hanging fruit. Yeah, you're totally right. You have to start, what's the thing my monody said?

Speak the truth, whoever listens. You know, like, you just have to start from, we cannot give in to this insane tribalism that is consuming the country and the world, partly because of these factors that we're talking about. We just have to start from, okay, what's actually true here? And the evidence is overwhelming that the kind of foods that American kids have fed

is disastrous across the board, but is having a really negative effect on their attention. For example, in Britain, in 2009, there was a study called the Southampton study. Pretty simple study, I write about it in Stolen Focus. They got 191 kids, and they split them into two groups. The first group was just given water to drink, and the second group was given water laced with the kind of additives that kids are being exposed to the whole time.

Then they monitored the kids. The kids that were given the additives were significantly more likely to be hyperactive and struggle with focus, right? And that's just a very low exposure. So this is why the EU subsequently banned a lot of these dyes, but obviously we haven't here. If everyone wants to do an interesting experiment, next time you go to Europe,

before you leave at the airport, buy some M&Ms, and then when you land in the airport, buy some M&Ms and open them next to each other. You'll notice the American and European M&Ms don't look like each other. The American ones fucking glow, right? Whereas the European ones look kind of dull and, you know, because they don't have these.

crazy dyes in them. So I don't care if, you know, who wants to articulate that truth. Obviously, I disagree, I'm sure you can guess, very strongly with RFK Jr on many things. But if he wants to take on the food dyeing those companies, all credit to him and we should all entirely support that aspect of his agenda while opposing others. I don't, to be quite frank, I don't actually believe he will take on those forces, but I want to be proven wrong on that. I don't see much willingness on the part of the Trump administration to challenge vested power interests, right? And they are a very powerful, versed power interest. But I think we should go further and say he deserves

credit for saying that, by the way. I think one of the difficult things is, you know, I think Ronald Reagan, again, not someone I, not my part of the political spectrums. But don't we miss that kind of Republican. But he said, you know, my 80% friend is not my 20% enemy. And I think one of the things we have to get better at is engaging with people who we may not agree with on 10 things, but we agree on the 11th thing, right? And this. idea that almost like a pollution-based model where, no, you're contaminated. I'm really proud,

actually, Lost Connections is the only book that was ever praised by both Hillary Clinton and Tucker Carson. And I'm really, really proud of that, actually. And by Noem Chomsky, you know, people from completely different parts of the political spectrum. And some people were like, how could you put on your website a quote from Hillary Clinton? Or how could you put a quote on your website from Tucker Carson? I'm like, no, this is exactly what we need. We need to find the areas where we agree. Look, we could just nihilistically say, okay, we're dividing into two tribes and let's just... No, but to me, that's about truth with a capital T. I'm not a person who believes in, let's say, the truth of one religious, you know, denomination over another. That's not the kind of truth

I'm talking about. What you write about is true, and that shouldn't fall on partisan lines. And the kind of hijacking of our humanity to make us make decisions based on who your mom and dad told you to vote for is actually not the way that we have progress, you know? It's obviously not the case. I have my own politics. We will have our own politics. But it's obviously not the case that all of human wisdom is concentrated in one place on the political spectrum. It's not a credible thing to claim, right? Of course, we all have our commitments. We all, but this kind of edit. So I would go further. Actually, I was holding back and I'll be, I'll say, while I would vehemently contest some of the things RFK Jr. says, I would

Also, Tim, absolute congratulations to you that you are fighting on this cause. And on this cause, people like ours will back you 100% of the way. I really admire the level of optimism you bring. And I do believe that there is reason to be optimistic. When I talk about the forces of negative influence and the systems that are incentivized to keep people sick, I think it is important to do so because we need to be realistic about what we're up against in order to have that. One of the three things that we talked about a little earlier was the way tech is designed, the way food is designed, and then the way the school systems are designed. And you know,

you hear Eric Weinstein, for example, talk about how we are removing creativity from the school system. We're removing the ability for those people who are going to think differently, who aren't able to sit still, to be successful. sort of driving towards this middle of the bell curve whereby the people who are going to be the most creative and think most outside of the box and potentially provide the largest number of solutions to some of our greatest problems are being excluded from the system. I'm wondering how you see that and if you see any solution for it. This is one of the things I feel most strongly about. It sounds fancy but it's actually very straightforward. Attention evolved to attach to meaning. It's much easier to pay attention to something that is meaningful to you, right?

A frog will pay attention to a fly, not to a stone, because the fly means something to the frog, right? We all know that about ourselves. If you gave me a book about 1970s American politics, I'm reading a biography of Gerald Ford right now, I'm ripping through it, I find that really interesting. If you gave me a book about, I don't know, Formula One, I would really struggle to read it. I don't give a shit about Formula One, it bores me, right? We all know that. The more meaningful something is to you, the easier it is to pay attention.

and yet we have designed our school system to strip out meaning. We've designed a school system which is built around getting kids to memorize meaningless, contextless facts for tests that measure nothing of any value, that we've stripped out pretty much everything except that. Memorise this garbage for this test that measures nothing. Doesn't measure intelligence, doesn't measure creativity, doesn't measure anything we value, right? That's been happening for a long time now. So there's that.

We've stripped meaning from education. We make kids sit still the whole time. Finland has one of the lowest levels of ADHD in the whole world. They never require children to sit still for more than 45 minutes without giving them 15 minutes to run around. Amazingly enough, their kids pay attention much better than ours. But do they have ADHD dogs? We've done so many dumb things to our school system. We've obviously massively underfunded them.

we've massively stressed out the kids. It's just stress is bad for beyond a low dose. Stress is very bad for attention. And it was so interesting. So I went to a lot of progressive schools for the book. One thing is so interesting. I went to a place in Massachusetts that has a model that goes much further than I would, but it's essentially a model where the kids are taught absolutely nothing at all.

They just play all day, right? Play all day and they can ask the adults to teach them things if they want to learn them. It essentially takes everything that we think, is education out of the education system. And I want to be called I'm not advocating that model, but what's fascinating, you go there, every kid there can read, every kid they can write, they go on to have good jobs, think, wow, we could take pretty much everything that stresses and upsets our kids out of the school system and the kids still can function.

Now, I believe in teaching, of course, but just not the way we do it. So I wouldn't go as far as that school. But you begin to see, like, what we are doing is deadening kids. the part of our kids that can't pay attention to this boring, shi mechanical repetition is the best part of our kids. The kids who refuse to do it are the ones that we should be most proud of, right? This is not a good system. Now, of course, this is not in any way criticism of teachers who are heroic people and do amazing work, but they're being forced to work in this rigid testing-based system that is screwing them over and screwing over the kids

and make it impossible for them to pay attention. So we need to really just completely redesign the school system from the ground up. We need to build it around what kind of kids do we want? You know, if you want kids who can mechanically memorize stuff, I've got news for you, we've got AI who can do it a hundred times better than your kids. What we want is what we will need is the kids who can do the things that the AI can't do. And that's creativity, that's empathy, that's listening, that's paying attention to each other. And we've got a school system that is literally destroying those capacities

in favor of the thing the AI does much better. So we've got to just profoundly redesign the school system around places that actually do have good school systems like Finland where they have the smartest kids in the world and they're not doing any of this shit. In fact, kids in Finland, they don't get homework. They don't get any exams until they're 16. Just all the things that we're doing wrong

that are pointless and deadening, they don't do them. Yes, absolutely. I mean, the amount of psychological stress that kids are under in order to hit a mark that is actually absolutely pointless and doesn't provide any of the skills that are going to help them navigate the real world. It's mind-blowing.

I remember when I was 11, when I first went to Britain, that's when you go to like the bigger school. It's different to the system here. I remember being given a timetable, looking at it and it's saying, you know, 10 a.m. you're going to do history, 11-endam drug group. I'm going,

who the fuck are these people to tell me what I'll be doing at 10 a.m.? I haven't committed a crime. Like, what the fuck? Like, what is this? Like, just being absolutely enrage. And I'm really glad that that part of me was not successfully deadened by the school system, although my God, they tried, right?

I would not be sitting here with you now about to reenact the entire script of beaches if I had if I had allowed myself to be deadened into that system, right? So it's a system that's, it really is a terrible system. Like it's really, really bad. And if we're summarizing when you talk about the deadening, what I'm hearing and what I believe to be true is attention and lack of attention is a signal. Depression and feeling anxious, feeling a lack of meaning, a lack of purpose, a lack of drive is a signal. And if we're not looking at the context around that signal, then we're missing the mark entirely. And actually, that signal can be an indicator that things are on the right track. You may be depressed because there's something very wrong in your

life that needs help and attention. You may be unable to focus because there are factors, either algorithmic factors or a lack of meaning in your life that you're not connected to and that when we see them as a signal, then we can begin to make the changes that are required to reconnect us to the vital parts of ourselves that actually want to be alive and thrive and are reflective of our core capability and natural gifts that we have to contribute. What can you tell us about what you're working on now? What can you reveal? What can we look forward to next? So I'm just finishing a book that I've been working on insanely since 2011 about a series of crimes that have been happening in Las Vegas.

So I'm literally just came here from Vegas because of a legal proceeding that I had to be present at. So that is my next book. Awesome. Yeah, but I'm not meant to say any more than that. When is it supposed to come out? It'll either be late next year or early the year after. Oh, very exciting.

It takes ages for... The legal process for this is going to be intense because I'm like describing lots of murderers and lots of criminals. And so it turns out quite a high legal bar for accusing someone of being a serial killer. Who knew? Anyone who wants to know where to get any more information about the books, you can get my books as audiobooks or physical books. If you go to www.j-a-n-n-h-h-a-R-I-com, you can see where to follow me on social

media, but I won't see you back because I'll have a look at it. But you can follow my stuff if someone else does it for me. And, yeah, you can see where to get the audio books and e-books, and you can watch the documentary. It was actually one of my books and I learned about the stuff as well. Thank you for being here in person. Thank you for continuing to be a friend of our podcast. And we just so appreciate your perspective and all the things we get to talk to you about.

So thank you. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's my and be all X breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break down.

It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down. Hey guys, I'm Hoda Kotbe. Look, I know how busy life can get. And sometimes we all just need a moment to pause and connect. Well, that's what my podcast making space is all about. Real conversations with people who've learned how to live with purpose and heart. Think authors, thought leaders, actors, performers. And every time I walk away with something that changes how I see the world. And I think you will too. Join me for Making Space every week, wherever you get your podcasts.