Modern Wisdom - #172 - Johann Hari - What Are The Real Causes Of Depression?

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

Johann Hari is a writer & a journalist. Rates of depression are at an all time high and yet pharmaceutical drugs have never been more widely used. If depression is simply an imbalance of chemicals in the brain - what's going on? Johann is my favourite writer on depression and this episode has been 2 years in the making. Expect to learn what are the true causes of depression, how reality TV degrades society's values, how you can take back control of your mood, why I lowkey fancy Dame Judy Dench and much more... Sponsor: Check out everything I use from The Protein Works at https://www.theproteinworks.com/modernwisdom/ (35% off everything with the code MODERN35) Extra Stuff: Buy Lost Connections - https://amzn.to/2LrPjo9 Follow Johann on Twitter - https://twitter.com/johannhari101 Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh yes, hello friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom. Before I get on to today's guest, I wanted to give a huge thank you to everyone that supported the show. The last cup of weeks has been insane for plays and we landed in the top 40 on Apple podcasts, which is just ridiculous. Oprah is now officially eating my dust. So yeah, take that. It's all because of the support that the show is getting and obviously the quality of my fantastic guests. So thank you. I really appreciate it. All the messages, all the tags, all the shares,

everything is, it's so good. It really, really does make me so happy. I adore this project. I love getting to speak to these people and The fact that you are along for the ride makes it all the more sweet onto today's guest I am joined by Johan Hari author of lost connections and chasing the scream I have been trying to get Johan on this podcast for more than two years now, but as he kind of tests, I am incredibly persistent, which is why I had to probably make a good serial killer. But yeah, I probably, is that the sort of thing you should say that you'd be a good serial killer?

That's not a legal, is it? I would be a good serial killer. Anyway, we're talking about a topic which is incredibly close to my heart, which is depression, depression, anxiety, loneliness, we're hearing increasingly that we are in a connected world that has never felt more apart. And I wanted to get who I consider to be one of the seminal writers on this topic. Lost Connections is the book to read if you want to understand how depression manifests itself

in yourself and also how you can take back control of the way that you deal with it. Fair warning, this podcast is a beast and clocks in at just under two hours, but there was so much for me in your hand to talk about. You had a lot of questions to do with reality TV in my experience on Love Island, especially to do with the mental health aspect of it. I think he's worked with some past reality TV stars, helping to guide them through their mental health challenges. So that was really interesting, some great conclusions drawn from that. Also, just a lot of sense-making around your experience with regards to your happiness, any sensitive depression, any down periods.

It's just great. It was a fantastic episode and well worth the wait after two years. Oh, we did it. It's time for Johan Hari. Let's go. I am joined by Johann Harry, author of Lost Connections, Johann. Look at the show. It's great to be really Chris. You're also a very rare instance of a person who said my name right first time. I once waited the six hours with a broken arm in casualty because they were calling for Joanna Harry to come through with. So,

I'm always so happy when everyone did it right first time. Yeah, I think I've said your name or heard it on podcasts and interviews sufficiently for me to know what it is. So, for the people who are listening, you should have already heard me say your hands name. As far as I'm concerned, lost connections, your book is the 80-20 way to understand everything you need to know about depression. I think you should be incredibly proud of it. Oh, thank you. I'm really chuffed by that and I'll start paying your commission. The more time's the name drop here, there you go. I swear to God, I must have sent it to 20, 30 people

and most of them are gonna be listening. So first question's first, your book's been out for what, two and a half, three years now, something like that. Like that, let me think, January, two years ago, yeah, so two and a bit years, yeah. Got you. Why is it back in the charts now then? Apart from the fact that it's great,

but why is it back in the charts now? It's a really interesting question. I think about it a little bit. I've been sort of in a slight frenzy finishing another book and I actually almost certainly got coronavirus, I've been a little bit out of it and I've been thinking a lot about the themes of the book and why they're really resonating with people at the moment. So I guess I should just say what the book is about and then just very briefly, which is really the book was, the thing that empowered me to write the book was that there were these two mysteries that I was thinking about a lot of the time. The first mystery is I'm 41 years old and all throughout my life, depression

and anxiety have increased in Britain, in the US, and across the Western world, right? So has anxiety. And I wanted to understand, the Western world, right? So has anxiety. And I wanted to understand, well, why, right? Why is this happening to us? Why is it that with each year that passes more and more of us are feeling depressed and anxious, what's going on? And I wanted to understand that for a more personal reason, which is that when I was a teenager, I went to my doctor, I explained that I was very depressed, I was quite ashamed of it. And my doctor told me a story that I, and now I know, wasn't totally wrong but was really oversimplified. My doctor said, well, we know why people get like this. Some people just have a natural problem in their brain, right? Got an imbalance. You're clearly one of them. All you need

to do is take a load of drugs, you're going to be fine, right? So they gave me an antidepressant called Paxill or Sriroxat, it's got different names. And it did give me some relief, but for most of the 13 years that I took it, I was still depressed. And at the end of it, I was asking what's going on here, right? And for the book Lost Connection, saying that I'm going on a big journey all over the world, I met the leading experts in the world about depression and anxiety, and people who have just very different perspectives on this, as you know, from an armish village, because the armish had very low levels of depression to a city in Brazil that banned advertising

to see if that would make us feel better to allow them Baltimore where they're giving people psychedelics to see if that helped. Ask me afterwards. And I think the heart of what I learned is there's scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are in fact in our biology, right? There are real changes that happen in your brain when you become depressed, that

can make it harder to get out, and your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems. But most of the factors that cause depression and anxiety and make us feel like shit are not in our biology. The factors in the way we live. And once you understand that, I put up a very different set of solutions. The reason I started to set it up, it does think about it, is a lot of the factors that I learned there's strong scientific evidence for that cause depression and anxiety have been supercharged to fucking the last five weeks or whatever it is, and this began for a lot of us, right? So, to give some very obvious examples, financial insecurity causes depression and anxiety. Now that in some ways seems like a no-shit Sherlock insight, right? If you'd said to my

nan or your nan, you know, do you think if you're really financially insecure, you're going to be more or less likely to be depressed. My grandmother would have clicked me around the ear and said, stop fucking wasting my time, right? She was Scottish last time. No, that's a good Scottish accent, ladies. That's an impressive one. It's the closest I can get to it. You know, but I can say a lot about Scottish accents, like, if you want, but all my, not because of my name, but because of my mother, all my negative thoughts in my head.

Because my mother's very positive person in many ways, also very negative, happening in a Scottish accent. That's hilarious. Whenever I feel I'm accent. So I'm like, hilarious. Whenever I feel I'm fucking up, I'm like, what are you doing, you can't. What are you doing? What the fuck is this? I gotta interject there.

I'll land a bot on. One of my favorite philosophers says, every bad inside voice was once an outside voice. Isn't it so interesting that you've got a signature that is like embedded from something that's outside this disciplinary and this past grandfathered in archived in from this old sort of era, perhaps where you were disciplined more. And that's now what's re-recoming back.

That's true, because both my parents have, I've had so far in accents, because my mom does regards Scotland as a foreign country. So whenever she's really pissed off with me, the only time I've ever met my mother truly angry with anything I've ever written was once. It must have been, when was it 2004, I was in New York covering something. And for a play on the sting song,

I called myself an Englishman in New York. My mother phoned me the next day, I like, no fucking son of Mayn as an Englishman. You fucking son. You fucking son. Get to Mel Gibson, fuck you. Get to son. Even now when she's really pissed off and me she'll go, oh, is that my English son? Oh, God.

My mother's can keep grudges like no one else. Very true. But you think about that in relation to financial insecurity, right? Like my grandmother and my mother would have actually regarded that as so obvious and insight, it'd be like, why the fuck are you wasting my time, right?

And so, but if anyone does lead scientific evidence for it, there is plenty, people who have a private income from property are 10 times less likely to develop serious anxiety than people who don't. Doesn't mean there are lots of other causes of anxiety, doesn't mean rich people can't get anxious, obviously. And obviously there's been a big increase in financial insecurity over the last five weeks. For reasons again, so obvious I don't need to tell your viewers, that is causing a lot of depression and anxiety. And one thing I'm finding quite frustrating at the moment is seeing some of them I know they're all good and admirable people

but people who run mental health charities that, you know, brought on the news or celebrities, they brought on the news and they said, what should people do about their anxiety and depression? And almost always they say, well, they should meditate, they should switch off the news. It's all individual solutions, right? And I mean, favour of all those things, I mean, favour of meditation, I'm not watching the news 24 hours a day myself because I would go mental. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not dissing any of those things. But that is so limited a set of solutions as to be insulting. If you are worried how you're going to

pay your rent next week, next month, if you are worried how you're going to feed your kids, how you're going to, and it goes to the heart, I think what I think is the most important insight of what I learned in the research for Lost Connections, which is for a really long time, we've been told implicitly, it's not the goal of anyone to communicate this to us, but implicitly, we've been told that our depression and anxiety are malfunctions, they're signs of being broken on the inside. And mostly, depression and anxiety are not malfunctions, they're signals, the signals that something isn't going right, either in your psyche or in the environment,

and they're signals that we need to change. And what we need to do is stop insulting those signals by saying that they're a sign of weakness or craziness or purely biological malfunctions, and instead listen to them. Because if you listen to the signal, you can find a solution. And it's not like there are solutions to financial insecurity, right?

What the British government has done, they've done some good things on this. They've certainly been better than the US in terms of financial support. But the single best, if you look at, okay, let's go to El Salvador, right? El Salvador is one of the poorest countries in the world. I've been there, it's staggeringly poor.

The government of El Salvador has cancelled everyone's rent and everyone's utility bills till this crisis is over, right? Now, there's no one watching your podcast who's gonna doubt that people are gonna be at shit time less anxious in El Salvador. Now they know they don't have to worry about their rent and their utility bills, right? And a big part of what I'm arguing is we need to expand our idea of what an antidepressant is, right?

Anything that reduces depression and anxiety should be seen as an antidepressant. For some people that will include drugs, but precisely because these problems go deeper than our biology, the solutions need to go deeper than our biology too. So, I mean, I have to be happy to talk about other the other causes of depression and anxiety that have risen in this crisis. But the single best solution to financial insecurity in this crisis, which is the single best solution to depression and anxiety for a lot of people in this crisis, I would argue, it's what's called a universal basic income. They're basically doing it in Spain.

It's much less bureaucratic income. They're basically doing it in Spain. It's much less bureaucratic than what we're doing. It's where everyone in the country is given just a basic income. You're not going to be having any, you know, you're not going to be ordering caviar on a basic income. And there's lots of evidence that that reduces depression and anxiety. When they tried it in Canada in the 1970s, they chose a town. They said to everyone in that, not everyone. So they said to a larges, they chose a town, they said to everyone, not everyone, so they said to a large number of people in that town, for now on we're giving you a basic income, there's nothing you have to do for it and there's nothing you can do that means

we'll take it away, it was a small amount of money, it wasn't, I think it was the equivalent of about 9,000 pounds in today's money, so you're not going to be able to live well on 9,000 pounds, but equally you're not going to be homeless with 9,000 pounds, right? And lots of things happened, almost nobody gave up work, which I think is really interesting. But the single biggest effect is it was a massive fall in depression and anxiety, right? Massive fall. In fact, mental illnesses that were so severe that people had to be shot away in psychiatric hospitals, fell by 9%, very rapidly. That's the way they're the most acute cases, right? Exactly.

And so I think, and that should help us to understand one of the reasons, and I stress it's only one of many, and I'm sure we'll talk about others. Why depression and anxiety have been rising throughout my lifetime and yours, right? There's been a big increase in financial insecurity throughout my lifetime, right? The middle class is factoring and collapsing. You've got a lot of money going to the very rich,

and a lot more people being pushed down into insecurity. That causes depression and anxiety. And for those people to then go to their doctor and be told, Oh, actually, it's just something wrong in your brain. It's an insult to them. It's not that there aren't real biological factors that are, but that's such a grossly simplifying solution explanation that it misses a lot of what's going on. And it means we miss out on the most important solutions. Yeah, it's like diet brain. So diet brain is anyone that's ever done a cut

or has been trying to lose weight knows when you start to really drive your calorie deficit into the floor, all that you think about's food, all that you're thinking about is, oh God, that sweet potato really didn't fill me up or I wonder when I can next have my 10 calorie round trees jelly or whatever it might be. You can tell that I'm dieting at the moment as well.

And it's the same, right? You know, it's the bottom, that bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's food, shelter, da da da da da. And money is just a proxy for all of those things, right? Money is the root cause of food, shelter, safety, blah blah blah. And yeah, without that, it's the thing. Anyone who's ever been skinned, you just think enough.

I, this is a thought. And then at the end, there's an effect of but I'm skinned. This is a thought of but money worry. This is a thought and it's the same with, this is a thought but I'm hungry. This is a thought but I'm hungry. And it's diet brain. I've got, I've tried to summarize

lots of connections in one sentence. I'm gonna see. Oh, gone, let me see. I've tried to summarize last connections in one sentence. I'm gonna see. Oh, gone, let me see. I'm gonna see what you think. Your state of mind and mental health is much more under your control than you or the medical industry might think. I would only change one word in that,

which is I would say our control, not your control. Because I'm gonna need a car. That's one letter. I think that's one letter. That was one letter. You're one letter. Because I do think it's important to explain to people that a lot of these problems can't be solved by us as isolated individuals. Some of them can.

A lot of them can't. But they can be solved by us together as groups, right? And so I would try to explain to people that we can regain control collectively over many of the things that I've been fucking with those that I'm making. Some of us anxious and depressed, and a lot more of us are a lot less happy than we otherwise would be, right? Yeah, so I think that's pretty good summary. I could do that thing where David Bowie used to have a used to have a, when he didn't want to turn up at concerts, he had a person who he would sort of send out.

He would pretend that he's a Bowie. No, unfortunately, we're not exactly Bowie's ever bowing. I think that I could do it. You get me a quiff. You get me a quiff and give me a slightly poshed dance out accent. And I reckon I can make it work. Right, so.

You're playing several stone and it's funny you say that about posh because my mom, going back to my mother at Accents. So both my parents were from very pretty poor backgrounds. And for some reason, even when I was a little boy, I had this weird posh voice, right? It's so funny when you watch our home videos, right? It's like my mom goes, I'm like five and my mom goes, your hand, go and pick up that and I go,

certainly mother of course, I'd be happy to. Where the fuck's this voice come from? So my mom wants to resonate with me. What she does is she goes, yaya, yaya, yaya, yaya, she once said me about a year ago, she sent me an email and it said, I go, hand, you're really good in this clip. And I thought, she's watched something.

I've done this nice. I click the clip. It's the fucking queen speech. I thought it was going to be made in Chelsea or something like that. She said, oh, this is you on made in Chelsea. So I want to go high level for the people who haven't read the Lost Connections.

Can you just run us through the nine in the seven, sorry, the causes and the solutions, just titles of that. And then I want to make a sound of it. We can talk about something that connects a lot of them. I think it would be a better way to connect to people. So this is not true of all of them, but it connects a lot of them. So every one, it goes, relates exactly to what you just said.

So everyone knows they have natural physical needs, obviously, right? You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need cleaner. If I took those things away from you, you'd obviously be in trouble really quickly. But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs, right? You need to feel you belong, you need to feel you're connected to other people, you need to feel your life has meaning, you need to feel you belong, to feel you're connected to other people, you need to feel your life has meaning, you need to feel your work has meaning, you need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And the culture that we've built is good at lots of things, right? I'm glad to be alive today. A lot of things are better than they were in the past. But we've

been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs that people have, a lot of them, not all. And I think this is the key reason why depression and anxiety have been going up. And you know, there are loads of different people who explain this to me in all sorts of different ways. But the moment when it really emotionally fell into place for me, where I went to interview the South African psychiatrist called Dr Derek Summerfield. It's an amazing guy. to place for me, where I went to interview the South African psychiatrist called Dr. Derek Summerfield.

It's an amazing guy. And Derek happened to be in Cambodia in 2001, when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for the people in that country, because they never had them in Cambodia before. And the local doctors, the Cambodians, were like, well, what are these drugs? And he explained to them. And they said to him, oh, we don't need them. We've already got anti-depressants and they and he was like, what do you mean? And he thought they were going to talk about some kind of like herbal remedy, like I don't know, Jinco Balobas and John's Warts, something like that. 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 left over from the war with the Americans and he got his leg blown off. So they gave him physical therapy, they gave him an artificial leg and after a while he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's really painful to work underwater when you got an artificial limb and I'm guessing it's quite traumatic to go back and work in a field where you've got blown up. The guy started to cry all day after a while, he refused to get out of bed, he developed

classic depression. This is when they said to Dr. Summerfield, well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant, and he said, what was it? And they explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense, right? It had caused us in his life to actually when he sat down with him, we're entirely understandable. One of the doctors figured after listening to him, you know, if we bought this guy a cow,

he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was f**king him up so much. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, he stopped crying with a couple of months his depression was gone. They said to Dr. Summerfield, so you see Dr. 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 sounds like a joke, right? I went to my Dr. for an antidepressant, she gave me a cow. But what those can Bodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the whole world, the

World Health Organization has been trying to explain to us for years, right? If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the mesh, the main, a machine with broken parts, right? You're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need and deserve is support to get those deep needs met. And the reason why I say, our rather than your is because that farmer on his own could not have solved that problem, right? He needed people around him to help him figure out what had gone wrong and more importantly to think of a solution and build a solution with him. And I think so many of the problems we face in a way, you know, when you explain

these causes to people, I mean, let's think about another one, a really obvious one that's risen in the last five weeks, loneliness, right? It's not rocket science when you explain to someone, if you're lonely, you're more likely to become depressed, right? But I remember, today's funny, I remember when, I remember the night before my book came out, I was sitting with one of my best mates, and we were talking about it, you know, when a book comes out, you always think about how people could react. And I said, I think most people are going to say, you know, obviously there's interesting stuff that people could learn and lots of stories and facts and people they won't know about in the book. I thought some of the ideas, I thought they're going to go, well, no shit Sherlock, why the fuck do we, what we

need is you to tell us that loneliness of financial insecurity causes depression, right? This is really obvious. And then the book came out and I kept being introduced in radio interviews and things would go, well, we're now going to talk to Johan Hari who's written this incredibly controversial book. I want to interject there, Johan. So two things. First thing being the best books tell you a story that you already know is a universal,

atomic habits by James Clea, one of the best books that I've read over the last few years. I knew everything that was in that book, but no one had synthesized it, put it across with those examples, and put it in a single unit. Right? That makes a big difference. Second thing, reason that I think people see lost connections as controversial is that it puts the locus of control onto the individual. From an individual's perspective, you're hearing stories of snowflake, generation, and helicopter parenting, and all this sort of lack of sovereignty, lack of high agency, no upward mobility. People wanting the state an increase in socialism,

and sort of leftists thought where people want the state to give them as much as they can and do the problems, fix the problems for them. I think it shines a bright light and a very ugly mirror onto some of the things that people are doing that can affect their own mood. Now, again, neither of us, both of us have suffered depressive episodes and depression in our lives. Neither of us are saying that depression is in an easy mistress to bear, right? It is an existential crisis that feels like you're drowning in thought. But being told that we have more control over our mental health than we might have thought, it makes you become the architect or more of the architect of your own suffering.

And that's quite uncomfortable for people. It's interesting, I'm thinking about what you're saying because I think there's... I think I would put it slightly differently. I think it's... If you're given a story about your pain, right? Even if that story doesn't work very well, at least you feel like you know where you are, right? And what's called the biomedical model, which is basically just the idea that depression anxiety are overwhelmingly biological, right? Biological flaws in you, in the individual.

I think because people have been told that story for so long, it becomes, and it, I don't say this separately, for me, it became part of how I saw myself, it became part of how I, how I understood the world. In Bill, right? Yeah, and if someone, and by the way, it's not that those insights are totally wrong, right? There are real biological factors, but if someone comes along and says, that's true, but actually, and it's not just me saying this, it's the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization, actually,

these problems are mostly social problems. And we mostly need to deal with them together, you know, as individuals and as groups. It's very painful to make the transition from one story about your distress to another. It's disorientating. The analogy I thought of, when I was learning this, it was destabilizing for me, was like, if you feel like you understand your pain,

even if you feel like shit, but you understand it, to me it's like there's a dog, a wild dog, but it's on a leash, right? And that moment of switching stories, of seeing that something much more complex, understand it, to me it's like there's a dog, a wild dog, but it's on a leash, right? And that moment of switching stories, of seeing that something much more complex and I think interesting and empowering is going on, is like a moment when the dog is let off the leash, right? And that's a very disorientating moment.

But actually, I wanted to ask you about this, Chris, because I'm really thinking about this. I was thinking about this in relation to love Ireland and reality TV, that I think for me, one of the interesting things, I would think about it a bit in the last few weeks, obviously, it's a big part of the book, is I think one of the things we can get from this crisis is an understanding of what had gone wrong with our values. So, and this for me was one of the most challenging things that I learned about in the research for lost connections. And I could see how much it played out in my own life.

So, everyone knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right? As you can see from my chins, I'm not immune to this temptation. I'm really pissed off that KFC is some KFCs have reopened, but not with it a delivery radius of me. Just like, it's funny, I got a message from someone on Facebook the other day, I hadn't seen in years and years, like literally about 20 years, and she said, I don't know if you remember, but when we were 16, we watched some horror film about the end of the world together, and we talked about what's the point in a collapse of civilization where we would all kill ourselves.

And she said to me, you said, it's when they shut all the branches in McDonald's and KFC and they stopped filming these tenders. And she was like, just like, no. That's two of the horsemen of the apocalypse. That's two of the, that's two of the horsemen of the apocalypse. So bad sign.

But, so I don't know, sorry, I'm done with you, I'm distracted on that, but there, so just like, junk food, you know, we all know junk food is taken over our diets and made us visit the sick. In a similar way, a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. So for thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're gonna feel like shit, right?

But weirdly, nobody had actually scientifically tested this until an amazing man I got to know, named Professor Tim Kasser, who did a load of research I have to talk about, but the core of what he discovered is, kind of two things. Firstly, the more you think life is about money and status and showing off beyond a baseline of financial security where you can provide for yourself.

The more you think life is about money and status and showing off, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious because it trains you to look for happiness in all the wrong places, right? You're not going to lie on your deathbed and think about all the likes you got on Instagram and all the shoes you bought, right? You're going to think about moments of meaning and connection and purpose in your life. The second thing he showed is that as a society,

as a culture, we have become much more driven by these junk values. Just much more, they've become really dominant. And I guess for me, one of the interesting things about this moment is it's a moment when we can really re-appraise those values because it turns out when our backs were against the wall, who did we really need? Who were our key workers? Who's allowed to leave the house? It's not billionaires, right? It's not the people of

the biggest followers on Instagram, right? It's people like my grandmother was a clean-erge, clean toilets. My dad was a bus driver, my sister was a nurse, you know, it's people who are doing the things that have been devalued for so long in this society and culture. And there's someone to ask about that in relation to love Islanders. One thing that surprised me when the book came out was how many people who are reality show stars. I got a funny actually, there were three categories of people who I did not expect to contact me, who I got a shit ton of messages from. WWE people, wrestlers, reality stars and porn stars, right?

Amazing. That's interesting to me. That's the big three. Unfortunately, they were all female porn stars, which doesn't do anything for me, but I know I was like, where's all the gay porn stars? He's me, I'm over here, Johan Hari, here's my dress. Sally, but, and it was interesting because I'd get all these messages from people who, if you look to their Instagram pages, look like they had the most perfect life. Best life.

They'd message me and go, I'm suicidal, I read your book, I'm trying to think about this and this and this and I'd be like, oh, so I'm just initially your perspective on that, those values and how, how did that play out for you in relation to something like Love Island? Real interesting question, man, I've got about 20 different threads open in my mind and I'm going to try and close them all before we finish this podcast. So firstly, I was very good friends with Sophie Grayden who sadly passed away a couple of years ago, Ex love Island contestant, I've known her for 10 years previously to that, we've modeled together for a long time. Mike, I didn't know personally but knew sort of secondarily. And people are associating that, those situations, the fact that TV stars have taken their

own life with some sort of a failing on the part of ITV, with some sort of systemic problem that they weren't given enough support or whatever it might be. I've said this before, but I'll say it again. ITV2 give more than enough psychological support to everybody that goes on there. You're given a full psychometric evaluation before you enter. There's a psychologist on site at all times who you have access to and there is a full post-show aftercare thing. Perhaps they're not super forthcoming with it, but they have a show to run.

You know, it's not their job to check in on you every week and say, hey, how's it going? Also as the show continues and goes on and on, this is not me saying I don't have sympathy for those. Sophie was one of my best mates, but she wouldn't want me to pity that or say that it was somehow the fault of ITV too, right? I know that she wouldn't. People want to blame it on that, right? And I did this tweet.

It was when Caroline Flack passed away. I did this tweet and it went pretty big. And I said, how many people need to die from reality TV before we realize that it's not the fault of the producers or the newspapers. They are not the ones who are retweeting and posting vitriol and daily basis. If you want to find out who is the cause of this problem, look in the mirror.

And the problem is people, the general public believe that somebody with a blue tick, now no longer has feelings or emotions, they're just like this kind of sounding board to throw things on. So that's kind of my thoughts in terms of like the big stuff that's gone unrecently. Also in terms of the values and things, man, like my main problem with reality TV at the moment is it takes these people out of the general public and then puts them on a pedestal. And what does that say to everybody that's listening? It says that you too, your path towards becoming two million follower, blue tick person with a huge clothing deal

with this particular company, all that you need to do is get on reality TV. Like that's now the path to itself. So a lot of people I think that go on reality TV aren't looking for a springboard for their career, they are looking for it to be their career. And that for me is a challenge. I don't think necessarily the kids who are growing up at 14 years old should be looking to love Island as the pinnacle, like the zenith of what their career aspirations should be. And yet I know that that's the case. I was away in Dubai with my dad a couple of years ago, and we were sat down with a young family. We got put in, it's when you go one of those tours together and you get put

in a car and it's like mom and dad and a young kid and 18-year-old daughter. And dad, we're talking about just, oh, what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? And that's how I run club nights and I do this. Just get a brief overview of stuff. And there was a bunch of stuff in there

that I thought was super interesting and virtuous, but not really none of them batting and lying. None of them batting and lying, playing cricket for Durham back in the day, even though one of the kids played cricket for Durham, none of them batting and lying at the podcast or at the other bits and pieces. Halfway through the night my dad dropped, oh, and Chris was on the V Island. That was it, rest of the night, that's all I wanted to talk about. And I thought, that is a misalignment

of values, as far as I'm concerned. That is being something which literally is essentially by chance, thing which literally is essentially by chance, being put on a pedestal significantly higher than things which require genuine work ethic and virtue and value to get to. So that's my thing to do with love Islander. And I've also got something that relates back to what you were saying before, to do with how people like to try and they want to make sense, right? They want to have a story to tell themselves and why they have comfort in a story. And this is the third time I'm going to drop this same psychological effect on the podcast. So, they'll listen, should know by now, but they might not. It's something called compensatory control. Have you heard of this? A little bit. Yeah.

Yeah, cool. So Matthew Sied in the Times talked about this. And what he said was that when there is a period of uncertainty, people much prefer to give something a story than to believe that it could happen by chance. So one of the experiments that was done was people that were given an uncertain medical diagnosis were much more likely to see patterns in a meaningless screen of static than those that weren't. And it was used by Matthew Siet to explain why there's a proliferation of 5G conspiracy theories and stuff like that at the moment because it is significantly easier

to believe that this global pandemic was caused by the plans of some maligned scientists than by the chance mutation of a silly little microbe. And as soon as I saw that, it has got so, that compensatory control has so many wide-ranging implications. I think that's really interesting. I wanna go back to the love island thing in a second if we can, but that's so interesting because I think what there's Michael Marma, who's a professor, brilliant

Australian professor, who studied lots of aspects of health and depression, said to me, at the heart of so much depression is a lack of control. And I think it's interesting. We live in a society and culture where people have very limited control over their lives, right? And people have been actually systematically denied it. So I'll give an obvious example, which is Michael Marmot is an Australian, like a saying Australian scientist, who made a real breakthrough in the 1970s. So I had noticed that loads of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work, right? I was like, well, I'm maybe people I know are unusual, so I looked at the science on this and the polling actually

is really striking. So 13% of people like their work most of the time, 63% of what they called sleep working, you don't like it, you don't hate it, you sort of get through it, and I think it was 23% fucking hate their jobs, right? It's quite striking, right? That means you're almost twice as likely to hate your job as to love your job, and the vast majority of people are not enjoying the thing they're doing most of the time. So I started to think, well, could this bear some relationship to our depression and anxiety crisis, and that's when I learned about and went to interview Professor Marmer. So he had basically discovered in the 1970s the single biggest factor that causes depression at work, not the only one,

but the biggest factor by a long way is if you go to work tomorrow morning, you have low or no control over your work, right? So if you go in and you're like a robot on an assembly line, right? So you can't use your creativity, you can't use your intelligence, you can't, you just got to do what you're told and you're told by your boss and that's why you have to do it. And it's really something, so, and workplaces are now very controlled, you know, people are living under the tyranny of email. And I think, I think it's one reason actually, this lack of control is one reason why slogans like take back control, the Brexit slogan which resonates so deeply, people at a very deep level feel they don't have control over the lows.

Now, I, leaving the European Union hasn't given anyone back any control over anything, I'm probably guessed my views about that, but whatever you think about that, I think it does help us to understand why these things resonate. And it's really interesting because there is a solution to that, right? A very simple solution. It's a big change, but it's in some way simple. To understand it, I went to interview a group of people in Baltimore. One of them is called Meredith Keo.

When I met her, she was in her early late 20s early 30s. Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night just sick with anxiety. She had a kind of administrative job. It wasn't the worst job in the world. She would tell you she wasn't being bullied or anything, but it was really boring and she could bear the thought this was going to be the next 30 years of her life, more than that 50 years, whatever. So one day with her husband Josh and her friends, they did this really quite bold thing.

Josh had worked in bike stores in Baltimore since he was like 15. Especially in the US, low income jobs. You don't have health care, you don't even have guaranteed holiday time. It's just really insecure. Brutal, yeah, yeah. Brutal, you can be fired at any moment, you've got no rights at work. And one day, Josh and his colleagues

he worked with in this bike store, said to themselves, what does our boss actually do? Right, the boss wasn't a asshole or anything, but they were like, we seem to do all the work, and he seems to make all the money, right? So they decided they were gonna do something bold. They set up a bike store of their own,

but this bike store worked on a different principle. So the place they'd worked before was like where most people watching this or work a corporation, right? You've got a boss at the top, and everyone has to pretty much do what he says, or you leave, you can rebel a little bit, but it's pretty limited.

That's actually a very recent human invention, and he goes back a little bit more than 100 years. They decided they were gonna build their bike shop around an older idea. So their bike shop is what's called a democratic cooperative. So they don't have a boss. They make decisions about the business together, have a meeting once every couple of weeks to vote if they don't agree and practice their agree. Most of the time, they share all the proceeds, the money, according to how

much they work, some are doing it a bit more work than others. They share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks, so no one gets stuck with all the shit tasks. And one thing that was so interesting, and this totally fits with Professor Marmot's research, spending time with them was how many of them talked about how they have been depressed and anxious in their previous job and were not depressed and anxious. Now, and it's not like they quit their jobs fixing bikes and went off to become Beyoncé's backing singers, right?

They fixed bikes before they fixed bikes now. What was the difference? Now they had control over their work. Now that's still a capitalist economy. They compete in a capitalist economy. They had to have a good shop or it was shut down, right? But the unit that's competing is a democratic cooperative, and I just think about when I was spending time there and other democratic cooperatives, and there's loads of them. I was thinking about how many people do I know who are to press an anxious, who would feel quite differently if they knew that tomorrow they were going to work in a workplace where the boss was accountable to them as well as the other way around, where they

can control it, where if they can use their intelligence for their task, if something isn't working, they can persuade their colleagues, they can change how it works. It's actually more efficient as well, a study at Cornell University found that more democratic businesses do much better, because you're using the intelligence of all your workers, not just, you know, you're not deadening them all day. So there's a lot of ways we can change the way we live. Partly that's individuals can do that, and partly I just think we should get rid of corporations. I think everything should be a democratic or business, it should be democratic cooperatives. It's more efficient, it's better for the economy and it's much better for people's mental health. But I think it helps us to see again when you re-frame problems in this

way based on the best science. Again you can see how that's saying to people who are depressed and anxious. It's not that there's something wrong with you, right? It's not that you're broken. It's that we fell into these ways of living that didn't work very well for us, that don't meet our needs. And we can change those things together. We don't have to go on in these, it's about giving people, like you were saying before Chris, giving people some power and agency that we can change these things.

And some small changes, some of them are big changes, but the changes that are possible are incredible. And one of the reasons I think I'm actually very optimistic about change is partly because I'm gay, right? And I'm 41 years old. I've seen the world. If you had, I didn't hear the phrase gay marriage till I was 21 years old. I've seen the world. If you had, I didn't hear the phrase game marriage till I was 21 years old, right? And when I heard it, I thought, well, that's fucking never going to happen. Right. In the book, I tell a story of them, a really close friend of mine, who, I think about all the time, when I get into a mode where I think, oh, we can't change anything. And I've been thinking about him a lot in the last few weeks for reasons that'll be obvious when

I say it. So in 1994, my friend Andrew Sullivan was diagnosed with HIV positive at the height of the AIDS crisis, the last big plague if you like. It's not totally the same, a lot of differences obviously, but some parallels. And this was before they were protease inhibitors or anything, so this was a death sentence, right? His best friend Patrick had already died of AIDS. Gay people, intravenous drug use, all sorts of people were just dying all over the place. And Andrew decided he would do one last thing before he died. He went to a little place called Provincetown and he wrote a book about a crazy utopian idea that no one had ever written a book had

became, right? And he thought, well, I'm never going to live to see this obviously. No one alive today will live to see it, but maybe someone further down the line will pick up this idea. The idea he wrote the first book ever to advocate was gay marriage, right? And when I try to get, when I think, oh, fuck, things are never going to change, I try to imagine going back in time to 1994 and saying to Andrew, okay, Andrew, you're not going to believe me. 26 years from now, you'll be alive. Step one, great news.

Like Elton Johns married. Elton Johns married. You'll be fucking married. The two of man, because that will be legal. I'll be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States quotes this book you're writing now when it makes it mandatory for the entire United States to introduce gay marriage. And I'll be with you when you get an invitation from the president of the United States to go and have dinner with him the next night in a white house that will be lit up in the colors of the brain by the way to celebrate what you and everyone else have achieved. And by the way, that

president is going to be black, right? Yeah. Every aspect of that would have to be like, okay, Chris, 25 years from now, a transgender prime minister is going to fight us to smoke crack in Downey Street with her. You know, I mean, it would have seemed like we're not the way to talk about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the, the, the, so we'll be fun. The, the, the, you know, incredible changes are possible. And I think, you know, particularly in a moment like this one, we're all feeling pessimistic for totally understandable reasons. We're in a terrible crisis. It's so important to stress to people

that incredibly powerful, positive changes are possible and we are all the beneficiaries of them. The idea of the weekend was a crazy radical idea when it was first proposed by ordinary working class people in the 19th century. Now, if anyone tried to take away the weekend, they'd be lynched, right? You know, my grandmothers were not allowed to have bank accounts in their own fucking names when they got married, right? That's not that long ago. Yeah, there are, and of course things can get worse as well as some people wouldn't notice from the news, but you know that we It's really important. Depression is

There's a doctor called Tyrell Harris who gave me the best definition of depression that I got for the whole book She said everyone experiences hopelessness sometimes Tyrell Harris, who gave me the best definition of depression that I got for the whole book. She said, everyone experiences hopelessness sometimes. But depression is when hopelessness spreads over your whole horizon like an oil slick. And I think one of the ways you break that, of course it's extremely irritating to depressed people to say, hey, cheer up. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, together, rather like those Cambodian doctors with the guy who needed a cow, together, we can figure out what is causing this depression and anxiety crisis.

And we can deal with it, right? And the fact that depression and anxiety have gone up so much in the past five weeks should at least help us with one thing, right? No one thinks in the last five weeks human biology suddenly mutated to make us all depressed, right? The environment change. And I have a sentence here on my notes which says, searches for the term depression are 50% higher now than they were in December. Does this prove your hypothesis that depression is highly dependent on environmental factors? Yes, thank you. Look at that, we did it. What I want to say is that it's not my hypothesis, it's the hypothesis of the leading medical

body in the world, the World Health Organization. And by the way, we're all turning, and me. Yeah, but I got it from them, so let's give them credit and lots of other people as well as doctors and psychiatrists and scientists but the Who I learned it from But yeah, no, I think you're totally right That you know these were always primarily there are real biological components important to keep stressing that I'm happy to talk about them if you want but these were always primarily biological and psychological problems

and are always primarily biological and psychological problems. And sorry, I'll say it again, these were always to a large degree social and psychological problems, and a large part of the solutions need to be built around dealing with those problems. And the last third of my book loss connections is really very practical ways. People I met all over the world from East London to Sydney,

who were to Sao Paulo, who were dealing in a both practical way with these problems. I want to talk about those in a second. One thing that I've been thinking a lot about recently is to do with the self-development world, which I'm heading feet into. You know, a big advocate of morning routines, I have a very routine, I's day, I do my journaling, I make sure that I have a morning walk in sunlight, I do, you know, I have a significant number of structures that ensure that my self-care is looked after. In fact, self-care is one of the five key core habits that I have in my life. It's one of the key values that I have in my own life because if I don't do my self-care, then everything else crumbles as well. But I wonder how much of these

resurgence or the surgeons in the world of self-development is due to people trying to take control, trying to bring some order to the chaos of their life. It's like a very macro version of OCD, you know? There's certain things that you can control, there's certain things that you can't control. But if, and I know this for a fact, I know that if I do morning walk, journaling, meditation, reading, back rehab, cook my food, train, go to sleep on time, don't spend too much time on my phone, don't use my phone until 4pm, all the structures, all these things. And that sounds incredibly autistic, you know, to have this like structure, structure of the day, but that brings order to chaos, right? That allows me, that wraps that around and I think that it's twofold. Firstly, I think that we still, as a modern society,

haven't got over our fear of death. And I think that we are trying to transcend our fear of death through the longevity movement, which is going on at the moment, I had Dr. David Sinclair, one of the world's leading, and I gave him doctors on, huge, huge name. And the comments to that video,

I've never had more passionate comments to it. Why would people be getting so emboldened, the comments to that video, I've never had more passionate comments to it. Why? Why would people be getting so emboldened, so, so emotional about something which is nicotine, amide, anamide, dinucleotides, supplementation and resveratrol at three in the morning and stuff like that? Why people getting so emotional about intermittent fasting when I can have Douglas Murray on talking about transgender pronouns, and people just sort of, it's a thing,

and then some people get emotional about it. The reason that I think it is is because people are desperately searching. They've lost faith in religion, I think, that secularism is increasing, and that after life and stuff doesn't give people that sense. Same sense of comfort about where their life's going to finish. So they're desperately trying to hope that they can extend it. And I think that the self development world is perhaps a similar way, a similar way that people are trying to bring control into their life, trying to create these structures, the morning routine, the evening routine, the way that they

think meditation practice are and just let go return to the breath, let go return to whatever is present, the power of now all of this sort of stuff. I think that there's some unifying principles in that. That's very interesting. I just see about what you're saying. I think, and there's lots of things in what you're saying.

One thing, and I don't think it's the biggest thing, but I think one thing that relates to that, and you have to see that in the context of this explosion in loneliness, right? So, there's incredible studies on this, a study that are some Americans, how many close friends do you have and you could turn to in a crisis? And when they started doing it years ago, the most common answer was five. Today, the most common answer, not the average, but the most common answer is none. Right? At 40% of Americans agree with the statement, nobody knows me well. And on those international league tables in Britain, we're just behind them. And I think it's a thing about, in a profoundly lonely society, all an individual has is the

self, right? Or at least they begin to believe all they have is the self. And what that can do is begin to promote, so it can promote, and I'm not saying this is, I want to be clear, the kind of things you're describing, like having a routine and so on, are extremely healthy ways of structuring anyone's life, whether you're a lonely society or a profoundly social connected society. So I'm not talking about that, but I think it can produce a kind of self-centeredness because the self is all you have. And I remember speaking,

I spent a lot of time interviewing this incredible man named Professor John Cassiopo, who was the leading expert in the world on loneliness. And sadly died recently, but he, I remember him saying to me, you know, why do we exist? Why are we here, right? One key reason is that our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't bigger than the animals they took down a lot of the time. They weren't faster than the animals they took down not the time, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating. So just like bees evolved to live in a hive, humans evolved to live in a tribe.

And we are the first humans ever to disband our tribes. And if you think about the circumstances where we evolved, if an individual was separated from the tribe, ever to disband our tribes. And if you think about the circumstances where we evolved, if the human, if an individual was separated from the tribe, they'd be depressed and anxious for a really fucking good reason. You're about to die, right? You're in terrible danger. If you get injured, no one will be there to heal you. If you can't hunt. I want to interject there, you know, Hank, because I've heard you tell this story a number of times, and I've always wanted to jump out into the conversation

and do exactly what I'm going to do right now. How is depression adaptive or fitness enhancing? So it's a technical way of putting it, but Professor Cassie, you know what I said to me? Depression and anxiety are necessary, aversive signals to get back to the tribe. Right? So if you think about it.

I get that. I get that you have this year. You have this year. You have this yearning to be around other people, which is what people feel as loneliness. It's like a hunger for company. That's how I describe it. What I don't understand is why does depression

make you bed bound? Why does depression make you bedbound? Why does depression make you not want to get up and do things and move? That's what I don't understand. So I think there's a few possible explanations for that. There's a guy interviewed called Professor Robert Sapolsky who's at Stanford University and a guy called Paul Gilbert, who's also got interesting theories about this. So Professor Sapolsky did this interesting work a long time ago with primates, with baboons.

And it turns out, so he was living with them on the savannas of Africa. And baboons, it turns out, male baboons live in a really strict hierarchy. So if there's 40 of them, number three knows this above number four, number seven knows this above number eight. And so, you know, there's a, you know, very strict hierarchy. And where you are in the hierarchy determines things like what you get to eat, what women you get to fuck, how, whether you get to sit in the shade, it's a really big deal, right? And what he noticed, Professor Sapolsky, other people have written about this as well, is it's only the baboons. So the baboons at the very bottom of the hierarchy, and it moves around, you're not born into the hierarchy, you can shift. The baboons at the bottom of the hierarchy often will behave in a particular way. They will, because basically everyone can beat the

shit out of them, right? Very rarely does everyone gang up and beat up number one. It happens sometimes during the drive them out, but mostly if number four is having a bad day, he'll go and beat up the person at the bottom of the troop. Number seven is having a bad day. He'll go and beat up the same person. So the person at the bottom, the boon at the bottom is absorbing a load of shit all the time. And one of the things that I'll do is they will cover their heads, they'll put their butt in the air and they'll just stop moving and they'll stop eating and they'll just stay there. And this is called a submission response, right?

And it's basically the baboon going, all right, you can't see, beat me, right? Just leave me alone. You've beaten me, I'm defeated. I just want to be left alone now, right? Just leave me alone. You've beaten me. I'm defeated. I just want to be left alone now, right? And Paul Gilbert and some other scientists have argued that one of the things depression is, and again, it's, we're moving around because there are lots of things depression is and it's, we don't want to give a simplistic story. There are many causes. But one of the things depression could be seen as is a submission response, right? It's going, I'm fucking, I've taken enough of the humiliation I've taken enough of the stress,

please leave me alone, I cannot go on anymore. And I think that's quite a plausible explanation when you speak. So if I think about people I've known who are depressed, is there a real one? Is there an element do you think perhaps of being away from the tribe would mean, caloric intake is likely to be down, that you're probably going to have less food, less resources, is that a reason perhaps to be more sedate, to be more still, so that you don't expend that. That's something I've been thinking about. That's interesting. I would want to ask people who are much more, who are scientists on that, but I think

my instinct is because it kicks in so quickly, even release very small doses of loneliness. Before you would have had a deprivation of calories, make people feel absolutely terrible. But then, there's an actually fact about loneliness, I think you're actually something Professor Cassiopotomy that I didn't clock that much at the time and I've been thinking about a lot in relation to this period of quarantine. So remember, when Professor Cassiopo started studying loneliness, obviously to study something you have to define what it is, right? And at first you think that would be really easy, everyone knows what loneliness is, if

you say to someone, are you lonely, No one struggles to understand the concept, right? But it turned out to be quite hard to define because most people instinctively think, well, loneliness is being alone, right? But it turned out people describing themselves as lonely didn't bear that much relationship to how many people they saw every day. And I thought I was weird at first, but then Professor Casuipo said, well, okay, imagine the first time you go to a new city, let's say you've never been to New York and you go to Times Square for the first time. You're not alone, right? You're surrounded by people, but you feel lonely, right? So he's trying to figure out what is it that makes people lonely. If it's not interacting with other people, what is it? And he discovered loneliness isn't about the number of people you interact with.

Loneliness is about how much meaning you share with other people. And one of the ways he helped me to understand this was to say, you know, we all had the experience when a relationship breaks down, when the other person is still around, but you feel really lonely, right? So you're not alone. They're there, but you feel like shit and you feel lonely. Why is that? It's because the sense of meaning between you is gone, right? So loneliness is not about purely about how many people you're interact with.

Loneliness is about how many people you share something meaningful with, right? I've got an interesting point there to do with Solitude as well, and this comes from Cal Newport's book, Deep Work. Oh, I love him, yeah. Cal's great although he's absolutely impossible. He's harder than you to get on a podcast. I love him. And that is a talent. What you say is he's talking about solitude and he says that people require solitude

in order to be able to have time to think, to be able to process thoughts. And he said that solitude is not time on your own. Solitude is time away from the input of other minds. And in a, always on technology, technology world where people so I spent, I spent all of my trip to a drove to Manchester and back, at five hours. Yeah, mate, you had the radio on and you made five phone calls in that time. You weren't in solitude, you weren't free from the input over the minds. And I think that that's a very interesting definition, a very useful definition one that I've been thinking as well. And again, to the people that are listening, I'm going to keep drilling it into you. If you can, during your quarantine, first thing that you do upon waking, go for a morning

walk. The weather in the UK at the moment is fantastic. Leave your phone in your house. Get up, go for a walk. There is some really robust evidence that shows that getting sunlight exposure early in the morning is good for your circadian rhythm. It helps to get, activate your adrenal system. It helps to down-regulate your adenosine receptors, which is what's going to make you tidal later in the day, all this sort of stuff you don't need your morning coffee. And on top of that, it is a period of time where you can allow all of the thoughts that have come up during your sleep. You're just verbal and pop and you can focus on where you're walking and you can just think the things, right? You don't need to obsess. There's nothing to do yet. You should totally, you should, Chris, you

should totally have on the podcast, my friend. It's about Ben K, who's an incredible Chilean primatologist. And the most glamorous person I know every time I email her and I'm like, it's about where I use, she's like, I'm in the Congolese rainforest. Oh my gosh. Is that glamorous? That's cool. I don't know the right, it's glamorous. She's so gorgeous, even I almost sing.

She's single, she's single, young. I'll put you in touch there. She might well be. This is the only reason I'm here. This is just a glorified groundwork session. Thank you. It's like a very high brow blind date, right? I love it.

Exactly. I'll take on the silver-blight role in this. But that is because, is about what it's a lot about. She did this really interesting work. She worked with female bonobos, well bonobos. She worked bonobos initially. She's studying bonobos initially in Whipsnade zoo. And she's very interested in this, because I didn't know this. One of the ways that Benobos live is they engage in massive amounts of lesbian group sex.

It's a constant, ongoing, sexual creature. Exactly. And she was the first person to document that Benobos will work really hard to make dildos. And she was in, obviously, in a British zoo. So if you give them like a bucket, they will break off the handle and just start going at it at, like it's a dildo.

Yep. And she thought it was hilarious, because she's from Chile, which is much more free of open place when it comes to such things. And she thought it was just hilarious watching all these British people with their kids try to explain to them.

No darling, darling, look away. That's a little Johnny asking mummy what's that? You know, it's this really fascinating thing, which is, so she worked with Benobos in Whipsnays Zoo and then she worked with Benobos in their natural habitat in the Congo. It was just at the end of the war in the Congo, which I actually covered as well. And it's about, was out there, she was living with this, this Benobot root for you. And she noticed something, which haven't been documented until her, which is in captivity,

Bonobos will often develop symptoms that look a lot like human depression. A bit like the submissive response, you know, they just sit, they rock back and forward, they won't join the group, they look like, they, you know, they stop grieving themselves, they go to shit. And she noticed this never happens in the wild. And she argued, and there's a huge amount of evidence that animals in captivity start behaving in ways that look like obsessive

compulsive disorder or mental illness, right? Parads will rip out their feathers, elephants will grind their tusks down, which are a source of great pride in the wild, down to like bloody stumps, horses will start obsessively swaying, there's all sorts of things, and Isabella argues, a big part of this is just physical movement, right? We've become a society that does not move. If you think about the actual amount movement we do, we are the humans who move least who have ever lived, right? And she argues, I think the way she put it to me, it's in the book, is sort of an animal that is not moving through its natural habitat cannot

be a healthy animal physically or mentally. I think that's totally right, but I just want to go back to something you were saying before, because I forgot to pick up on this, I think there's one thing about love Island, I'm really shinin. I actually love reality TV But I was away from Britain when love Island came out so I Good for you. It's fine. If you did me if gave me a If you did gave me a what you call it? Trivial pursuit quote the series of questions about about big brother in the in the early 2000s. I do a lot there but and

but why I'm interested in about love Island is love Island the people who from love Island who've contacted me and people other reality shows. Let me to think this this thing about I think it reveals something about the game I mean the game of our society and culture, not narrowly the game of love island. The people who are winning the game feel like shit, right? That tells you something about the game. It's a bit like when you meet billionaires, right? I've now in my life met quite a lot of billionaires, and I've almost never met a billionaire

who wasn't unbelievably unhappy, right? Like achingly unhappy. And I've met two that I would say were not unhappy and all the rest were, right? And I think there's something about because it's a game that's a quest to be valued for things that are, I would become, because I don't want to disrespect. Throw it out there, Johan, no one in Lov island has so few followers that they can't take on the chin what you're going to say. I was actually not really coming to Lov island, because as a cassette, it's bad, but it's

a great thing to look amazing, right? And that's an effort to look amazing, right? Obviously some people start off with slightly better genetic inherited than others, but it's an effort. And that is an achievement. I know I'm not dissing that. For a minute, something that I appreciate and enjoy in other people, certainly not in myself.

But I think because you're being honored, that I would accept that bit I would exempt that bit, because that's an effort and an achievement. But because you're being honored for things that are like following, you know, how would I put it? I already know what it is, right? It's right.

Yeah, I know precisely what it is. I think I've got a couple of different bits here. So first and foremost, it's the dichotomy difference. I do a lot of fitness, I talk a lot about fitness on this channel. It's a dichotomy difference between training for aesthetics or training for performance. Training for aesthetics is purely subjective. There is no objective measure. There's some objective measures. What is your actual objective body fat percentage? What is your actual objective lean muscle mass percentage, stuff like that. But very much so when you're talking about aesthetics or a physique competitor, it's inherently a subject, it's an opinion. You go up on stage, you

are judged by someone, you don't actually know if your physique is better than the person next to you because there's no objective measures. Let's go to the complete opposite end of the scale, which is powerlifting. Powerlifting, you pick a weight, that weight is the same for you, as it is for me, as it is for the next person. You either pick it up or you don't pick it up to the movement standards that are prescribed. That is objective versus subjective, right? What that means is that one of those has a very, very easy sense of progression. You know where you are, and all of the progress can be judged internally

without anyone else to help you along the way. So that's the first thing. Second thing is, when you get into reality TV, there is an expected modus operandi, right? There is a way that reality TV stars are supposed to do and I take great fucking pleasure in trying to break that stereotype as hard as I can. When P.S. Morgan said that love island stars are the most stupid people on the planet, I issued him an open letter to come onto the podcast to have a little discussion about it

to see who was the stupid one. And what is happening there is like the particular love island star is putty. And there is a shaped glove, an iron-shaped glove, and that's the life that they have to live. And you get this piece of putty, which could be a U shape, it could be a T shape, it could be an eye shape, it could be a star,

and every single one of them gets forced in from the back and they have to fill all of these spaces. Because you've got to do the thing. You've got to do the after-sun podcast. you've got to do the thing. You've got to do the After Sun podcast. You've got to do the photo shoot for the new clothing brand. You've got to do the Instagram, Hey guys, it's Chris here from Love Island talking about this.

Like you have to live a pre-prescribed life which in no way aligns with the values that you brought into it. So you're not being seen, and this is what, this is one of the big realizations that I had after coming off, and it was that I wasn't indulging myself intellectually, I'm painfully curious, like, like, agonizingly curious about everything,

about absolutely everything, and I wasn't allowing myself to indulge in that. The other thing to consider as well is that that uniqueness in everyone, in the love-hailing contestants that may or may not be listening or anybody that's listening, that uniqueness, your life experiences, your genetics, the scars that you have, the victories that you have, the failures that you have, all of those are your unique offering to the world. It is your competitive advantage. It is what you can offer everybody else. And that's

why I think learning to be able to tell the truth, learning what you think, how you feel, what you enjoy doing self inquiry, doing introspective work, removing your biases. That's why I think that's so important because the closer that you can get to your truth, the closer you can offer to the world, what only you can offer, there is no where the Johan Harry. There is nobody else who has had all of the life experiences with the Scottish mother and the this and the this. There is no one else on the planet who has that. And what that means is that no one else can do the work that you can. Now, someone could have tried to create a proxy of it and analogy, an allegous piece of work or something close, but no one quite could have framed it the way that you did when you wrote Lost Connections.

I'm just thinking about it, I love that way you put it that you're not being seen. I think that's so interesting. And if there is a say, it's not just that you're, I had this, for a couple of series of Big Brother, I used to do their show Big Brother on the couch. And I got to know some of the contestants after they got out.

And it was really interesting seeing them when they came out and I think about that you're not being seen. With them, sometimes I felt like it was a sense, I wonder if you feel this, or if to tell me if this is just completely of being, it's not just that you're not being seen at some level you're being valued for something that you're not or something that you can't sustain.

Do you not? I mean, absolutely. So this is a brilliant exercise. I'm going to do it on you now. I don't know whether you've heard Brett Weinstein and Heather Hane on Joe Rogan. Have you heard this one? I think so. Good. Right. I want you to picture a man who is beautiful but not hot.

Okay. Now I want you to picture a man who is hot but not beautiful. Okay. Right. Cool. The difference between those two individuals, and you can do it for the people that are listening can do it for whatever their gender, sexual preference of choice or both, is the difference between those two that you've come up with there. The difference between hotness, yeah, and beauty is that hotness wanes with age. Beauty's timeless.

So you can imagine someone like the perfect example, which sounds so fucking perverse, is a Dame Judy Dench. You know? Beautiful. Have you got a crush on going to do? Dame Judy's, look, she's beautiful, not hot, right? So I'd marry her, but I probably wouldn't fuck it.

Like, you know, that's kind of the way it would work. But some, So Judy, if you're watching. Judy, look, I apologize, please come on the podcast, I'd love to talk to you about how it's like to be beautiful. I think if you married her, you would give in, you'd fuck her eventually. You'd have to wear you down, right? But she'd get that. You'd get that. This is a subject area we never thought that we'd get to the monomers.

It would be like for horrific remake. Have you remember, you must remember this, that as time goes by, that's the problem from the... The night, it's like a dark pornographic version of that. So, yeah, you've got this difference between the two, right? And the problem is... I know the way you're just changing the subject for fucking duty. I'm getting back to beauty and hotness, you're handless. Julie Dench is too much in my head now. Um, beauty scales, beauty compounds, right, with time. Hotness doesn't compound, hotness wanes. Even men, I've, by all of the red pill logic on the planet, I am at my SMV peak, my sexual market value peak right now this year.

This is by definition, the, you know, these fucking quasi-scientific stuff that they come up with. But everybody is funny. You should say that because I got a call from a friend who's exactly the same age as me on 41. And he was crying and I said, Josh was wrong. And he said, I was just looking at a porn site. And there was a category that said, Older Men brackets 35 plus plus and he's like, we're now fucking old. I'm like, 19 roads. What the fuck has happened?

Oh no. There is a point at which you become chronically aware of your own mortality. And it is, it's also, there's a time when people start saying to you in the street to their little kids, look out for that man as opposed to look out for that boy. And I was like, fuck, I hate that. But yeah, so beauty, right? It's grace, it's wisdom, it's timeless stuff, it's the things that aren't in your face.

So, hotness, that's what FHM, I don't even know if these still exist, FHM and Fastcar magazine and stuff like that, loads of references from the 90s. That's what the girls on the front of that, my friend. Not the idea that to younger viewers, we have to explain not what FHMOs, but what a magazine was. Yeah, it's kind of like, it's like an ebook, it's like Instagram, but on paper.

So yeah, and what I think a lot of the time people do is they signal for hotness, not only with other partners, but also in themselves, so they try and develop hotness, not beauty. And I will happily say that I have some girl friends who are getting more and more beautiful as time goes on regardless of their age, let they're becoming more and more wise, they're becoming, they've got more poise, they've got more grace, the way they hold themselves, the way that they're able to be commanding, but also soft and compassionate. You know, all of those different things, they're the untangibles. But the hotness, that's what a lot of people signal for in a partner.

And like, let me tell you, if you are signaling for hotness, you are buying into a depreciating asset. You are getting an asset which, by by definition is only heading in one direction. You're putting a trade on where you're going to exit the position at a lower position, lower than where you entered it. Yeah, essentially, Chris, because it goes back to, and maybe think about something related to what we're saying before about junk values, right? Because there's this moment, it's this big debate about why do junk values make people more depressed? Right? Why does thinking life is about money and status and how you look make you more depressed? Right? And one of the arguments is that if you value people for their external appearance, it actually fucks up the quality of your relationships. And there's a moment

that really helped me to understand this. So in 2009, Melania Trump went to Speaker NYU. I'm feeling like I'm listening. Melania Trump felly hot. I'd put her in hot, slightly beautiful credit category. Interesting. Well, that very once relates to what I'm about to say, which is that she went to Speaker New York University. I don't know why, what I must be some reason.

And one of the students asked her, would you have married Donald Trump if he wasn't rich? And she said, do you think he would have married me if I wasn't beautiful? And that tells you something, it's a funny line and credits to Melania Trump who I feel very sorry for actually, but think about what that reveals about the nature of their relationship, right? So that is a very strong expression of these external kind of junk about. Transaction, right? Yeah, so Melania Trump knows if she ceases to be hot, let's say Melania Trump just fucking pigs out one day, right? And she wants to eat a KFC or and Donald Trump,

she knows she's finished, she's out, right? In fact, as an interview Donald Trump did with Howard Stern, where he was asked, if Melania was badly burned in a fire, would you still love her? And Trump said, do her tits get burned? Right? So now compare that. So she knows the charming lovely man. So she knows, if she abiluses her looks, she's finished, right? And he does have that narrow conception of hotness, not beauty, I think. And he knows if you ever lost his money, she's at the door as well, right? Compare that to whatever you think about the political differences between them, Barack and Michelle Obama.

Well, I'm sure Barack and Michelle Obama happens to be the stunning and beautiful woman, but I'm sure they would say, well, they would love each other even if they became homeless and they got fat or whatever, right? So you can see how being driven by an extreme focus on extra, of course, we all like, you know, we all like people to look good. But if you're, you can see how that extreme focus on it

creates a form of anxiety and depression, right? In a way that being valued for more enduring qualities doesn't cause so much anxiety. And I wonder that sometimes about, because I see that with some of my friends, I think about some of my friends who were really like beautiful 20-year-olds and still look great, you think, if so much of your self-esteem is pegged to your particular kind of looks, you can hear that craft anxiety about aging and a way that your self-esteem is about some other things. It doesn't, which is not to say, look, I mean, favourite people, I'm very good at keeping people on them, favourite people working hard to look good, but I think there must be something about,

to me, it feels like Love Island, from the little I know of it, and other reality shows which I know about much more, are an example of a wider social trend, which is that it's training people to think happiness lies in places where you actually will not find happiness. In fact, you will find anxiety in those places, right? A life where you are constantly being judged by external, simplifying factors isn't going to be a life where you feel good, even if you win, even if you get to be. The problem is that you don't ever get to actually find out who you are. You don't ever

actually get to fulfill what your genuine interests in life are. I've been asking people this a lot recently. I've been saying people are talking about a lack of purpose and meaning while they're at home because evidently a lot of people used to derive their sense of meaning from their job. They used to derive their sense of structure and routine and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, tell me, by your own definition, what would have happened by the end of lockdown for you to look back on lockdown and say that it was a success? That's interesting.

Tell me, and if you're listening, think to yourself, what would have happened by the end of this, by your own definition, you have everything except for travel and unlimited money. You have everything all the time in the world to do it. What would it be? And so few people can answer it. People that, well, I don't know. I'm like, you will miss every target that you don't aim at. By definition.

By definition. And that's one of the things. so few people know what they want. And then what happens? You take someone who, so Amber Gill, girl that won Love Island Year last year, a good friend known of her seven, eight years, her sister trains at my gym in Blaba. You take someone like Amber, who is super bubbly girl, who I think fits what they need from a contestant really well, very robust mentally, got a great support structure around her. She perfect, dream islander, right?

But then you say, okay, you're now going to do all of this stuff and this is the things that you're going to do. And if that doesn't align with your values, then you have two choices. You can either continue to force feed yourself this work and stay famous, but potentially feel misaligned or you can stop doing the stuff which is keeping you relevant, pursue your own things, but have to face the pain of now being a nobody because you don't want to do TV interviews, you don't want to do the photoshoot, you don't want to be judged for your looks and blah, blah, blah. And it's that again, it's that forcing putty into a pre-made mold, right? It doesn't matter what shape you are because you've got to play this game.

There's a very very particular type of person who can break the mold and still win the game. And that's why, sometimes I get accused of thirst trapping on my Instagram. So I'll use what few residual looks in my sexual market value, whatever it is, repository that I've got left, to try and draw people in, to then link them to a podcast. So I'll be talking about like really hot in the garden today. I had a podcast with a meteorologist who is talking about how the world's getting hotter or something like that, you know, and it's like trying to break that you still got to play the game a little bit is what I'm saying. It takes a very, very, and even me, I can't do it. I can got to play the game a little bit is what I'm saying it takes a very very

But it's an even me I can't do it. I can't not play the game at least in part the Twitter game the Instagram game the Facebook game or whatever it might be You know, it's not about It's not I think it's important to explain to people You know, it's not that those things are inherently bad in themselves It's about are they part of a broad menu of things that you have in your life, right? I remember I went to for the lost connections. I went to the first of it internet rehab center in the world. Yeah, such an interesting place. It's since Spokane in Washington, just as I spoke to him in Washington state. And it was really interesting because, and I think it helps,

it helps locate some of what you're saying as well because you think about, I know plenty of people have healthy relationships with social media, and I know some people who have horrendous relationships with social media. And I really helped clarify it to me when I went to this place because, I remember speaking to, they there were they get all kinds of people there but they disproportionately get young men and they disproportionately get young men who become obsessed with a multiplayer online roleplay games like it would be Fortnite now I guess but it didn't exist when I went so it's things like World of Warcraft and I remember speaking slow to these young men and then talking to Dr. Hillary Cashy runs the clinic and her saying to me, you know, you've got to ask yourself, what are these young

men getting out of these games, right? I don't mean healthy people who just do it for, you know, every now and then, when people become obsessed. She said to me, part of it is, a lot of it is these young men are getting things out of the game that they used to get from the culture, but they no longer get, right? They get a sense they're part of a group, a sense they're part, you know, a sense they're bigger than themselves, a sense they're physically roaming around a lot of American and British children almost never leave their house, the figures on this are incredible. They get a sense that people see them and value them, they get a sense they're good at something, a lot of boys in our school system

don't get a sense they're good at anything, right? But what they're getting is like a simulation of those things. And as she was saying that to me, I started to think in a way, sometimes I think the way a lot of us use social media is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex, right? I'm not anti-porn, at all, but if your whole sex life consisted of wanking over porn, you'd be going around pissed off an irritable the whole time. I think that is the sex life of almost everybody that's listening right now with the coronavirus. That's all you got. Let me interject, sex toys sales in Italy went up by 70%. Wow, that's a start for you. I've already had a lot of sex toys sales in Italy went up by 70%. Wow.

Wow. That's a start for you. That's a start for you. That's a start for you. That's a start for you. That's impressive. That's a stockpile. But you see the point I make him, right?

It's like, we have needs. And interestingly, what happens, if you think about the moment when the internet arrives, right, kind of the most of us around the year 2000. The internet arrives and it looks a lot like the things that had already been disappearing, right? So, number of friends people had had been declining before Facebook. Then Facebook appears and it's like, here's Facebook friends, people have been losing

status in the economy prior to the arrival of Facebook. Then it's like, oh, here are status updates to compensate for your lost status, but it's not the thing we've lost, right? In the same way that a sex starved person given porn will get a certain amount of relief, but they don't feel the pleasure they feel after they've actually had sex, right? And I think, I think actually we're really feeling this, even to something as simple as Zoom, right? I'm sure you've spent

lots of time on Zoom in the last few weeks, like everyone else in the world, and it's really striking, right? Being on zoom, we're all in isolation. Being on zoom is better than nothing. But being on zoom doesn't feel, you don't, I don't feel, you get even 50% of what you get just sitting with your mates, right? Because we didn't evolve to interact through screens. We evolved to interact face to face. That's the But those are the creatures we are. We have certain basic needs that we can, that we can't just deny or supersede

in simplistic ways. It's a misalignment right between us and who we are and what our desires are and the environment. And unfortunately, the environment's gonna continue changing super, super quick. I said to a guy called Rob Henderson talking about evolution in the dating market, and I was talking about the fact that evolution at the moment is fucking pointless because by the time that whatever genetic mutation you have gets passed on to your children, the environment

within which it might have become competitively advantageous to have to adapt to has changed. So it's like, I got his fucking pointless. Evolution only works with a stable environment which moves as slowly as evolution does. When you have an environment that moves more quickly, it's absolutely pointless. Right, so I, Johan, I've got a list of a couple of things I've always wanted to ask you. I'm sure. I'm going to ask you them. How would you describe what depression feels like?

I would use that definition we talked about before from Tiro Harris. We all know what hopelessness feels like sometimes. Depression is like a kind of hopelessness spreading across your whole. Horizon, another example I would give is something that I think a lot of people would identify with is there's this really interesting debate that happened in the 1970s. So in the 1970s the American Psychiatric Association decided they were going to give a technical definition of depression because up till then doctors have been using whatever definition they wanted to use, right? So we're going to define depression to standardize it across the whole country. So they did a really simple definition.

It's that easy. A lot of people would basically guess it's something like this. They dropped 10, a checklist to 10 criteria, things like crying a lot, feeling life is hopeless, that kind of thing. They send them out to all the psychiatrists and they say, if any of your patients experience more than six of these symptoms for more than two weeks, diagnose them as depressed, give them what help they can, right? So they start doing that, but quite quickly a lot of these psychiatrists come back and go,

look, we've got a bit of a problem here. If we use this definition, we're going to have to define every grieving person as depressed because these are the symptoms of grief, right? And the American Psychiatric Association were like, oh shit, that's not what we meant. So they invented something that was called, later got called the grief loophole, which said, okay, if any of your patients had any of these six of these ten symptoms for more than two weeks, define them as depressed, unless someone they love has died in the last year, in which case they're not crazy, it's fine, then you shouldn't describe them as mentally ill.

And so they start using that, but that beg to really obvious question, which was, well, how on a minute, why is losing someone you love in the last year, the only circumstance in life where you're allowed to feel like share and not be labeled as mental ill? What if you've lost your job? What if you've been made homeless? What if you're stuck in a job you hate for the next 40 years? We can all... What if there's a global pandemic? Exactly, right? So what happened is the over the years, the American Psychiatric Association reduced the amount of time you're allowed to greet, even not be regarded as mentally ill. From a year to six months to two months now they just got rid of it. So now you can be diagnosed as mentally ill

almost immediately after the day of your day. Exactly. So, so I mean it's meant to be you're meant to monitor the person for two weeks but in practice they just say have you felt like this for the last two weeks? So actually, a credible Joanne Passiotore who's at the University of Arizona has shown 12% of grieving parents get diagnosed as mentally ill and drugged in the first 24 hours after their child dies, right? And the reason I say that in relation to question about what depression feels like is, in a way, I don't think it's coincidence that depression and grief have the same symptoms. I think what depression is, as in part, a grief for your own life, not turning out how it should, and a grief

for your own deeper needs not being met. And most people will have experienced grief in their lives, and tragically a lot of people are experiencing it now. And I think depression feels a lot like grief. Yeah, I tweeted yesterday saying true hell is when the person you are meets the person you could have been. And that's life not turning out. I think for me, I like the oil slick analogy, but one of my old housemates described it as drowning in thoughts. It can be and this is interesting. It's one of the reasons why. It can be, and this is in states, one of the reasons why. This is one of the reasons why I interviewed a lot of the scientists and people who have taken part in the studies about psychedelics, which seems to be a very promising treatment

for depression. I think that's partly because some of the people scientists have asked say, it's also why being in the natural world can really help. Because both psychedelics and being in the natural world when it's particularly beautiful and striking give you a sense of awe, right? Give you a sense of awe. The feeling of awe is the feeling, I'm small and the world is big and that's good, right?

It's the opposite of the kind of junk values we were talking about. It's a moment if depression can feel like you're rattling around in your ego and you're trapped in your own thoughts, moments of awe, I like moments when you think, oh, actually my little ego with its rattly thoughts, ain't that important, right? Whether I succeed in this thing or fail in this thing, it doesn't matter that much. The world is big. It's we feel this way, we sit in the ocean, right? That the ocean is big and we are small. We got three things left, that one was. Okay.

First thing is how can people get out of a cute depressive stage? So someone has had, it happens, it happens to everybody where you just wake up one day and you've just not got it in the tank, right? What are some of the tacit strategies? Or how do you, you know, you wake up on morning and you think, ah, the black dogs are a little bit fucking close today. Have you got some structures?

Have you got some routines that you rely on that help you to keep moving forward? I do, but I think, I think one thing I would say about that, and obviously the book isn't really kind of big attempt to answer that in much more detail, but one thing I would say is, you know, I would say, using an analogy, right? I think part of the problem of what we do is we put the job of solving depression solely onto people who are already depressed and anxious. And we don't do that with a lot of other problems. I think about car accidents. Car accidents is one of the biggest causes of death, obviously, in the Western world. And we don't put the job of solving car accidents.

We don't say to someone it's just been mangled in a car wreck. Okay, how are you going to solve traffic accidents? Right? What we do is actually because it's a social problem, we have a big structure to deal with it and prevent it from happening, right? So we have driving tests, we have speed limits, we have airbags, we have a restaurant drivers,

we do a huge array of things. And then if all that fails in a person is mulled in a car crash, of course, we take them to casualty and we do a huge array of things, and then if all that fails in a person is molding a car crash, of course we take them to casualty and we do our best and the doctors and nurses and heroes. But most of what we do is try and prevent that problem happening, and that's not just the individual, that's the society that drives to prevent it. In a similar way, because depression has such deep social causes. The most important thing we need to do is to deal downstream with way more of those social causes, right? But so I would just say that as a preface saying,

of course that doesn't mean there are, of course, there are still things individuals can do. I'll give you an example of one of very simple change that I made, which in a way is almost embarrassing to talk about because it feels so simple, but it was so revelatory to me. I went to interview this amazing academic called Brett Ford, who is a psychologist at Berkeley, a Shachin Toronto Navigation Berkeley at the time. She did this really interesting research,

it's really simple research in some ways, her and a big team. They wanted to figure out, let's say that you decided you were going to spend two hours a day trying to make yourself happier. Would you actually become happier, right? And they did this research in four countries, in the US, in Japan, in Russia, and in Taiwan. And what they found was, in the US, if you try to make yourself happier, And what they found was in the US, if you try to make yourself happier, you do not become happier in the main. In the other countries, if you try to make yourself happier, you do become happier. And they were like, how could that be? So they did more research.

What they discovered was in the US, if you try to make yourself happier, in the main, you do something for yourself. You work harder to get a promotion. You buy something for yourself. You show off on Instagram, whatever it is. So we have an instinctively individualistic idea of what it means to be happy, right? In the other countries, in the main,

there were exceptions on both sides, of course, but in the other countries. If you wanted to make yourself happier, you did something for someone else, right? You did something for your friends, your family, your community, even people you didn't even know, right? So they had an instinctively collective idea of what it means to be happy. And it turns out an individualistic idea of happiness just doesn't work very well, right? Like we say, that a lot of the reality stars and wrestlers and porn stars who message me,

who built their lives around individualistic I do success feel like absolute shit right I have never seen a more unhappy person than Donald Trump who was one the individualistic game as much as you possibly can he's the president of the United States he has an actual golden tower to live in as a hot wife he's he's won the game and yet he you can see he feels like shit right. So the way I took this on board was it used to be a lot of the time when I felt like shit, I would do something for myself, right? And for me, it was, I was never particularly materialistic person, but some external,

professional achievement, right? Now a lot of the time, I can't say I do it's all the time because I don't, but a lot of the time, when I feel bad, I try to do something for someone else and I'm, you know, I'm not Oprah, I can't turn up and give them a car, but I can leave my phone at home and go and fucking sit with them and listen to them. And in a society where people are not heard, just the gift of giving someone your attention and your time is so profound for their happiness. So it really stands out as well. Yeah, I think that's a nice way to do it. I certainly think that connecting with others is a big one. The challenge is that when you are in the midst of a depressive episode, that's the last

thing that you want to do, right? Like, you know, it takes a superhuman amount of effort to get out of bed. And that, I think, is where the next action, a next physical action, which is a concept from David Hulland's Getting Things Don, which is a productivity tool, actually worked really well for me. But you know Chris, I think that even when you are

really depressed, you can text someone and remind them of a kind thing they did once. You can text someone and tell them about a good thing they did, right? There are very small steps that you can take. People are very rarely so immobilized that they can't make another person feel good in some tiny way. Maybe it's tiny, but tiny gestures make it actually make a big difference. One of the things I made a big change to do last year and I've continued to embed it is to just text people

when I'm thinking about them. Do you think about people all the time? Remember, I went on a road trip with one of my buddies last year across America and I think about that. Or I think about that training session. I had five years ago where such and such slipped over or whatever it might be, missing my mate. And the friction now does not exist between me

having that thought and me telling the friend that I'm thinking of them. That's great, I may. And the friction now does not exist between me having that thought and me telling the friend that I'm thinking of them. That's great, I love that. All the time. And I implore everybody that's listening, it will make your life and the life of your friendship so much better. And this is coming from like, Mr. fucking solitude only child bullshit over here, right?

So if I can do it, you can do it as well. But yeah, you know, you're thinking of a friend, hey man, thinking of you, hope you're good. Like it just is, it is what it is. I'm totally agree with you. Next thing is, is the black dog going to follow us for the rest of our lives? If you've got it, is it going to be there?

Or is there a way that you can conquer it? Is there, you know, do you know what I mean? Yeah, totally. Absolutely. I think one of the worst things we do is we tell depressed people, very often people are told, you know, or you've just got some biologically broken thing and this is going to be your life. Now there are some stress again, there are some real biological components to this, contributions.

But actually, there's very strong evidence that if we make, then I say, I'll just give a very simple example. One of the heroes of my book is a doctor called Sam Everrington, you know, he's a doctor in East London raised to live. He was very uncomfortable with the fact that all his patients were being given drugs. And he's not against the drugs like me, he's not opposed to them, but you could just see that a lot of his patients were being given was drugs. He's not against the drugs like me, he's not opposed to them, but you could just see that a lot of his patients remain depressed. He sat up a program, really simple, just a gardening program where they met and they built a beautiful garden. There's a study of a very similar program in Norway that found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants in reducing depression and anxiety. Partly because

they reconnected with the natural world, partly because they formed a tribe, they formed a group, right? So, no, absolutely nobody is condemned to be depressed for their whole life. There will be some people who need a lot of love and health and support to deal with those underlying causes in their life, but if they get enough love

and health and support they can, and that job is not just on them, that job is on all of us, right? I mean, the most important message I want to give to depressed and anxious people is, help is on the way, right? Because the things that are making some people depressed and anxious are making most people's lives less than they could be, right? So it's not like there's this group of broken people over here, this lump of broken people over here, and then there's the rest of us, we need to pitifully take charity on them. If we deal with the things that are making them depressed and anxious, we'll actually

enhance the lives of pretty much all of us. I think is one of the key challenges that depressed people face, which is that the way that depression manifests, it's so existential and symbolic and bigger than you, and it feels like a personal curse created just for you, right? This is my problem. Incredibly, you know what you've got. And that's partly the nature of depression, but that's also partly because of the way we've encouraged people to think about the problem, right? If you, of course, if you grew up in a culture where you're told, you know, I mean, so many of the ways we talk about mental health are so flawed. I know several people who were terribly sexually abused,

who have a lot of distress about that, they act out over it, they go to their psychiatrist or doctor and they're told they've got a personality disorder. That's a wicked thing to tell people, right? That's a truly terrible thing to tell someone. Your personality is disordered. When in fact, you're just acting out any of us would if we've been fucking horrendously sexually abused, right? So we've got to stop acting like these are primarily internal disorders within people. They're actually, as Victor Fankel Holocaustocaust survivor said you know these are very often

normal reactions to abnormal situations and there are some ways in which we're all living in abnormal situations not just in this period of coronavirus but actually in the last you know a few years So no, I think you've got that question is really important. No one is inherently broken and Nobody is incapable of overcoming these problems. Certainly the case that some people will need a lot of help to overcome these problems and we need a lot of individual change and social change, but those things are possible, right? Think about gay people in the 1940s were described as inherently dishonest, inherently miserable, had tragic lives, even gay people said that about themselves, because that was the reality you had to lie, otherwise you'd

go to prison. Of course you were miserable, you're constantly having to hide your life of criminal. The fear of chemical castration, you know. Exactly. And then what happened? We had a liberation movement for gay people in an equality movement, and now know what you'd be regarded as a pretty out there bigger. If you said gay people were in inherently miserable and inherently dishonest now, right? Even quite homophobic people wouldn't say that about all of us, right? So actually, you can see how things that seem fixed and permanent qualities of people change when the social circumstances change. What we've got to do is change the social circumstances and that's the work of all of us.

I get it. Whether we're depressed or not. What I think is interesting having had this discussion with you today and obviously having been discussing with getting you on for the last two years, so thinking about how this was going to manifest. One of the things that struck me is my particular viewpoint on dealing with depression, dealing with low mood is coming out from a very individualistic perspective. You know, a lot of the time I talk about the actions that you can take, the outcomes in your life are more under your control than you know. So for me, again, how do you have asked me the question, Chris, how do you get over, how do you get yourself out of an acute period of depression? My first thought wouldn't have turned to somebody else, and it definitely wouldn't have had a preface, which was to do with systemic changes,

society wide changes, perhaps policy changes, and stuff like that structural changes, which you need to be made. Mine would have been, do the next action, you need to pull the pillows off, you need to pull the cushions off, you need to get out, you need to have a cold shower, you need to go outside, you need to do this, this and this. I think that there's a lot of value of coming out in from both ways, and I genuinely think

that the intersection of where we maximize what we understand now from self-development, from introspective work, from mindfulness practice, from stuff like that. Both in a more long-term thinking way, to try and make you robust and resilient to low-mood over time and to build structures in your life, which mean that even when that low-mood happens, you just bounce off it,

rather than you being fully swallowed by it. But also in an acute situation, which is where you kind of break the glass to do the this thing, which is, like I say, the cold shower, the sunlight outside, the glass of do this thing, which is like I say, the cold shower, the sunlight outside, the glass of water, and the phone call for a friend. That's my kind of like four-step thing.

I think that the crossover of those two, the ability for someone to have right back to the start, that agency, that control, that upward mobility that they have to be able to do the things that they can do. Because to anyone that's listening, someone might have seen this, know what you do and think, I'm going to go listen to that. I'm going to see if these two British people can make me feel a little bit better about my depression. Like, the outcomes in your life are far more under your control than you know. There are things that you can do today, which

are going to make you tomorrow better. And there are also things that we can do as a society which will make next year and the years after that better as well. I think you're totally right. I think there's a few things I'd say about that. One is, so if you look at the scientific evidence for this, there's three kinds of cause of any mental health problem. And they play out to some degree in everyone

who has mental health problem. There's biological causes like brain changes, your genes, there's psychological causes, how you think about yourself and there's social causes, right? And I think you're very much attracted to thinking about the psychological causes, which is hugely important and I'm strongly and a big part of the book is obviously about some of the things we can do about their psychological causes. Obviously, my temperament is more to be drawn to the social causes, but they're all real. I'd also say, I think you're right.

I think it's important to stress to people, individual change and social change are not separate things. Social change only happens when enough individuals demand it, right? So it's not like there's this thing, it's not like either you do something yourself or you sit here and wait for the government to hand down some good thing, right? Positive changes never happen because the government just will almost never happen because the government just decides one day to do it. Positive changes happen because enough people band together and demand it, right? And fight for it and model it in all sorts of different ways in their own lives.

So whether that's the workers rights, women's rights, gay rights, all sorts of things that have changed the lives of everyone, listen to this thing about the minimum wage, right? Which we now rightly take for granted is someone to get rid of it. We regard them as barbaric, someone to pay pay your pound an hour, which used to happen. Not so long ago, until 1997, that happened because lots of ordinary workers banded together, had organizations, trade unions demanded it, fought and give up. You know, so individuals banding with other individuals create social change. So there's definitely individual change that people can do in their own lives on their own, um, in favour of all sorts of aspects of that that talk about in lost connections. And then there's individual

action banding together to create social change, which is very closely related to it, I think. And I think you're right, if you don't do the individual change, if you're so depressed that you're immobilized, obviously there has to be an element of individual change or you'll never get to the social change. I mean, the thing as well is, nobody is coming to save you right now. You know, you can call the Samaritans if it's a really, really acute situation.

There is a number for the Samaritans, which I absolutely love that the auto reply on your Gmail has an urgent distress footer in it. I thought that was a really, really nice touch. And I remember that from two years ago when I messaged you, and it has like if you're in severe need, here's the number for our cameraman what it was like the Samaritans or something to that. But social change takes time, systemic change takes time. And like I say, there are things that you can do right now that will make tomorrow better. So I said there's three questions. And this is this is the final one. And it might be the one that you're going to have to dip around the most. You've just finished a new book. What can you tell us?

What can you tell us about the new book? Almost nothing, but I can tell you how long it's taken. Can you tell us? Yeah, I can tell you well because the expense of it in my books is the travel, so I tend to research quite a lot of subjects. Just as well that you got that done before now. I know, thank god. So I can tell you the range that I'm writing a book about, why so many people having troubles focusing and paying attention. I'm writing a book about why so many people are having troubles focusing and paying attention. I'm writing a book about Las Vegas, but I can't tell you anything more. That is a very specific story about something insane that's happening in Las Vegas.

I'm really pissed off that I'm not there at the moment because there are developments on it. I'm writing a biography of the great American thinker, known Chomsky. The attention book is done, but I'm not quite sure what order or the other stuff will happen in. But yeah, that's mine. That's the stuff I'm working on now. That's awesome. That's so cool, man. Look, Johan, today's been everything that wanted. It's definitely been worth waiting two years to finally get on. Thanks very much, Chris. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for engaging so deeply with the book. And I was going to say to anyone listening,

if you want to, because people got a lot of time stuck is listening, if you want to, because people have got a lot of time stuck at home, if you want to listen to the audio of interviews with lots of the people that I've referred to, it's all on the website, so you can either go to thelostconnections.com, you can find out where to buy the book, the audio book, and take a quiz to see how much, you know about causes of depression and anxiety, but you can more importantly listen to for free loads of interviews with the people we've been talking about and loads more people about causes of depression and anxiety, but you can more importantly listen to for free loads of interviews with the people we've been talking about and loads more people that we haven't mentioned. That's like the DVD extras. That's exactly what it is. That's cool as fucking. Also, what's my favorite one? So I think your episode on Joe Rogan when you did chasing

the screen when you talked about drug and alcohol problems, I think that was really super interesting. So that will be linked in the show notes below. Thelossconnections.com, your hands fantastic Instagram and his Twitter will be linked there as well so you can go on and ask some questions. So just so you know Chris, I know someone who knows Judy Dench, so when this is live, I am gonna send this. I'm gonna say forward this to Judy.

Time stamp, that point where Chris said that he would fuck Judy Dench. That is what a way to finish this podcast. Any idea how happy she's gonna be? She's gonna be like those snowballs in your head. No, please make it stop. Thanks so much for coming on man. I really, really appreciate it and I am not gonna wait two years after your next book publishes to get you back so I hope that you enjoyed it because you're coming back on soon. Cheers Chris, thank you so much! Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode please share it with a friend, it would make me very happy indeed. Don't forget if you've got any questions or comments

or feedback, feel free to message me at Chris Willek on all social media. But for now, goodbye friends. you