The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - E26: Johann Hari - We Have Lost our Connections

Episode Date: February 26, 2019

Books will change your life, and there are so many that have changed mine. In this episode I chat with journalist and author Johann Hari, most well known for writing the New York Times bestselling book ‘Lost Connections; uncovering the real causes of de...

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly, to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. books can change your life and there are so many books that changed mine one of those books is called lost connections uncovering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions i've wondered for years why mental health issues are on the rise, why people are lonelier than ever before, why some people hate their jobs, why anxiety is so prevalent amongst young people, and most importantly, what the cure is for all of this. This book helped me to find those unexpected answers. It helped Elon Musk to find those answers. It helped Hillary Clinton to find those answers. And I think it will help you to find those answers too. As the CEO of a company, as an entrepreneur, understanding our minds is the key to unlocking it.

It's the key to knowing what's important for our minds. It's the key to success, happiness, and fulfillment. I've been obsessed for the last decade with understanding the human mind. I took up psychology classes at age 16 and although my attendance was 30% in school generally, that was the lesson that I never missed. People are the only thing that really exists in our world and psychology is the key to understanding them. This is why on today's podcast I traveled to London to the home of Johan Hari, the author of that book, Lost Connections, and I talked to him about everything I've been wondering.

He has reached hundreds of millions of people. His accolades are too far-reaching for this introduction. Our conversation was inspiring, eye-opening, and life-changing. So without further ado, this is the Diary of a CEO and I'm Stephen Bartlett. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. so i'm a massive fan of your book and your writing generally i first discovered your book after listening to you on the joe rogan podcast and then i quite aggressively plugged the book to all of my team i'll start paying your commission and our happiness teams and i always get um asked across especially instagram especially when

I show my bookcase to recommend a book and your book is the one that I've been plugging a lot lately oh thank you and will continue to do and for good reason um lost connections changed my perspective on mental health and and why so much of my generation so many of our employees and our teams globally are reporting to be suffering from some kind of mental health issue. What I wanted to talk to you about today is a number of things. Everything from the impact social media has, the role of mental health issues in the business community, but also there are some just fundamental questions that I've had about mental health and some misconceptions I think I've had since day one. But first, why did you

write Lost Connections? Yeah, it was a really personal reason for me. When I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor and saying that I had this feeling like pain was kind of leaking out of me and I couldn't control it or regulate it. I felt very ashamed of it. And I didn't understand what was going on. My doctor told me a story that I now realise was really oversimplified. My doctor said, we know why people get into this state. There's a chemical called serotonin in people's brains. Some people are just naturally lacking it or have a chemical imbalance. You're clearly one of them. That's why you feel like this. And all we need to do is give you these drugs and you're going

to feel better. So I started taking a drug called um paxil or soroxap it depends where marketing are different names and i started taking i felt a whole lot better really quickly i have a couple of months i felt great and then this feeling of pain started to kind of bleed back through um so i remember going back to the doctor doctor said clearly i didn't give you a high enough dose he gave me a high dose. Again, I felt better again, faster this time, feeling came back. And I was really in this cycle of taking more and more and getting shorter and shorter periods of relief. And then for 13 years, I was taking the maximum dose you're allowed to take,

at the end of which I was still really depressed. And I thought, well, something's not right here, right? Sure. So I wanted to understand what was going on, because I was doing everything that I was told to do according to the story that I've been given by my doctor. And the story that's told by the wider culture at the moment or at that time, certainly. And I decided I wanted to just go. I ended up going on a big journey. It was over 40,000 miles.

I wanted to sit with the leading experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety and people who were trying treatments, different ways of responding to this problem and and i guess at the core of it was this kind of mystery that i wanted to understand which is i'm 40 years old in a few months every single year that i've been alive depression and anxiety um people reporting depression anxiety have increased across the western world um i was thinking well if it was just a problem in our brains why would it be going up so much and so i wanted to sit people and i learned lots of things but the the core of what i learned is that there's that there's scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety some of them are indeed biological they're not it's not a chemical imbalance in your brain but there are

real things that happen in your brain and their your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems but most of them are factors in the way we're living and once you understand those factors that are causing depression and anxiety to rise it opens up a very different set of solutions ones that i also saw being tried over the world which some of which have remarkable results so is it definitely true then that mental health issues are on the rise and is broadly across the sort of western world so there's a debate about this what we definitely know is more people are reporting these problems right so significantly more people are saying they're depressed and anxious so there's several things going on it's a little bit complicated partly what's happening is there's been a big decline in stigma about people talking about

mental health problems sure that's a great thing and that means more people are like to talk about it so i think for example my grandmother right my grandmother when I look back and I talk to people who, my grandmother sadly died, but if I talk to people who knew her, there are periods in her life when she was very clearly depressed and would never have shown up on any depression statistics because she wouldn't have dreamed of going to the doctor. It was a thing that she would have been very ashamed of, much more so than today.

So partly we'd expect there to be an increase in the figures just because there's been a decline in stigma and more people coming forward that's part of what's going on but i think there's other things that are going on that can show us that there is an actual increase not just a reported increase so let's look at i'll talk about one of the examples one of the nine causes of depression anxiety i wrote about lost connections um so we are the loneliest society there's ever been there's a study that asks americans how many close friends could you turn to in a crisis? And when they started doing this years ago, the most common answer was five. Today, the most common answer, not the average, but the most common answer is none. There are more people who have nobody to turn to than any other option,

right? What is life like when you have no one to turn to? And I learned a lot about this from an amazing man called Professor John Cassiopo, who was the leading expert in the world about loneliness at the University of Chicago. And he showed, he was saying to me, why are we alive, right?

Everyone listening to your show, why do we exist? One of the key reasons is because our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't faster than the animals they took down.

They weren't bigger than the animals they took down in a lot of cases, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating that's our superpower as a species right just like bees evolved to need a hive humans evolved to need a tribe and and we are the first humans ever to try to live without a tribe and professor cassioppo proved two things One is that human beings separated from tribes, lonely humans, become depressed and anxious, or much more likely to become depressed and anxious.

Not every single person, but it massively increases. Just like if you ever separate a bee from its hive, if you ever see a bee separated from it, it goes crazy, right? And we also have a huge amount of evidence that there has been a really big increase in loneliness. And I can go through the evidence you want, but there's extremely strong evidence that that's happened. And so I think that tells us,

given that we know loneliness causes depression, and given that we know loneliness has massively increased, it seems reasonable to me to assume, therefore, depression has increased. Now, there are other causes of depression, anxiety, the nine that I could find scientific evidence for. Some have remained the same. One of them has probably slightly fallen, and we can talk about that later, but most of them have risen. And so I think that's a big part of what's going on. And that's why I think it's fair to conclude it is actually increasing. And what is, you know, this podcast centres

around business entrepreneurship and I guess the pursuit of success generally speaking but what is it that's causing us to become lonelier as you know because entrepreneurs are you know known to be incredibly lonely as a as a group i guess a professional group of society but um what's causing us broadly to become lonelier i think there's a lot of things but i'll give you an example of one of the other courses that i think might i think you'd have better insight onto this than me, but I think might play out more in people who are inclined to become, you know, business leaders,

not all of them. So everyone listening to this knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right? I don't say it's with any sense of superiority. For most of my twenties, I basically lived on KFC. I had a low point one day when I went to the,

my local KFC at the end of brick lane and i remember going it was it was the afternoon of christmas eve which makes it even sadder as a story and we were going in and saying my order which was so disgusting i won't even repeat it and the guy behind the counter said oh johan i'm really glad you're here and i was like and he said wait a minute and he went back behind the fryers and came back with every member of staff and a really big christmas card which they'd all written to like to our favorite customer and part one of the reasons why my clogged heart sank is because i suddenly thought this isn't even the fried chicken shop i go to the most right but okay so we know that junk food appeals to the part of us that wants nutrition but actually doesn't give you nutrition makes

you sick right but what's interesting is something very similar has happened with our values and a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. So there's an extraordinary man called Professor Tim Kasser, who I learned a lot about. He's in Illinois. He's done incredible work researching this for 30 years. And he showed lots of things. I'll give you an example of one of the things he's shown in a really, really interesting way. So every human being has two kinds of motivation, right? So let's imagine what would be an example. Imagine you play the piano, right?

I'm completely unmusical, but maybe you aren't. No, I'm definitely not. Imagine you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it gives you joy, right? That would be an intro, or you play it with your kids, or, you know, as part of a band or whatever. That would be an intrinsic reason you play it with your kids or you know in a you know as part of band or whatever that would be an intrinsic reason to play the piano right you're not doing it to get something out of it you're doing it because that experience is the thing you love right okay now imagine you play the piano not because you love it but to pay the rent in a you work in a dive bar

right or i don't know to impress a woman maybe there's some piano fetishist out there or something right or maybe because your parents are massively pressuring you, they want you to be a piano maestro, right? That would be, that's not an intrinsic reason to play. You're not doing it for the thing itself. That's called an extrinsic or junk reason to play it. You're doing it to get something else out of the experience because of how it will look to other people or for something else that you'll get further down the line, right? Obviously, all human beings are a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motives. But what Professor Kasser showed is a couple of things firstly as a culture we have become

much more driven by these junk values we've become much more obsessed with doing things and driven by doing things because of how we'll look to other people in a kind of a cheap way because of money because of status right professor Kasser also showed the more you are driven by money and status and the kind of external appearance of how you look to other people rather than joyful or important experiences with them, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious, right? And I think this is one of the most difficult factors to think about because I could think about how much it played out in my own life. I know you obviously do a lot of work with social media. I think social media drives

us so much to be driven by these junk values, right? I think all the time about, I've got three teenage nephews and a teenage niece. I think all I've got two godchildren who are just on the cusp of starting social media. Social media drives people to think in terms of these junk values, right? How many likes did I get? How good do i look in this picture for instagram right the more you are driven in those directions the more unhappy you will become and there's a kind of um deeper reason for that which connects a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that i write about in in my book lost connections which is everyone listening to your show knows that they have natural physical needs. Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took them away from you, you'd be screwed really

quickly, right? But there's equally strong evidence all human beings have natural psychological needs, right? You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense and where you're going to be valued. And our culture is good at lots of things. I'm glad to be alive today. I like dentistry. I like gay rights, all sorts of things.

But we've been getting less and less good at dealing with these deep underlying psychological needs that people have. And it's not the only thing that's going on, but I think it's a really key factor in why the crisis is going up. And do you think those junk values are making us lonelier? Because if you look at social media, there is very,

there's very few posts on my timeline that talk about doing things for those intrinsic reasons that you described. There's very few people that post today, I went for a walk in the park because I like taking a walk in the park. It'll be, um, today I went and bought myself a Rolex and because I think that'll improve the sort of my extrinsic value amongst, you know, that kind of thing. It's a really good example. If you think about how many people are following the script for happiness that we're given by this society, right? So what they do is they work really hard at a job they don't like to buy things that they then show off and display on social media and they're puzzled that at some level they feel like shit right and so what do they do they work harder they buy more stuff they show that off on social

media they still feel like shit they but you know there's that line that people say in a and na and you can never have enough of something that's not quite enough um you know we're given a script for happiness that doesn't work right so there's a really interesting person i interviewed called dr brett ford who was at berkeley at the time that i interviewed they did this really interesting research so what she wanted well they want to figure out her in this part of this team there were other people who worked on it as well was simple question if you or anyone listening to your show decided you were going to really make an effort to spend more time being happier would you become happier right if you said two hours a day i'm going to work at being happier would you become happier and they did this research in four

countries they did it in the united states japan russia and taiwan and what was first the results were really weird which was in the united states if you tried to make yourself happier, you didn't become happier. But in the other three countries, if you tried to make yourself happier, you did. And yourself you buy something you amuse yourself whatever it is right in the other countries generally of course there are exceptions on both sides but generally if you wanted to make yourself happier in taiwan you did something for someone else right you you you do something for your friends your family your community so we have an individualistic idea what happiness is and they have an instinctively collective idea what happiness is of course this isn't instinctively collective idea of what happiness is. Of course, this isn't conscious on the part of anyone.

And our story about happiness, our individualistic story, just doesn't work, right? A species of individualists would have died out on the savannas of Africa, right? They wouldn't have been able to cooperate. We wouldn't be alive to have this conversation if those had been our instincts. So I think partly about that, and in relation specifically to junk values, I think what junk values do, as Professor Kasser put it to me, is they divert you from the things

that are genuinely meaningful about life and get you to focus on things that won't make you happy. I'll give you, this is a bit of a cheap example, but I think it illustrates it well. In 2009, Melania Trump went to speak at NYU. This is before, obviously, Trump was running or anything. I can't imagine why she was there, but anyway. 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? Which in one way makes me respect Melania Trump. You think,

oh, well, you know the terms of the bargain, right? But think about that. That's a very good expression of junk values, right? about what that means that means they value each other entirely for external qualities right and that means melania trump no is going through life knowing if one day she got fat or she lost her looks for some other reason she's out and donald trump knows if he loses his status his power she's out of there right so you can see how that's a very extreme example very few people are like that but we've all become more like that right if you value things and people and life according to these external junk values you're going to be more insecure because it doesn't meet your needs compare that to for example um and you can discreet many things they did but barack and michelle obama who i'm sure would say

well we'd love each other even if we became homeless and we you know were burned in a fire or whatever you can see how that model of a relationship and that way of being in the world would make you feel more secure, more contented. And we've all become more like the Trumps, right? Trump is an expression of these. He's the extreme expression, don't get me wrong. Very few of us are actually like Donald Trump.

But do you see the point I'm making there? I 100% understand. And, you know, so I want you to give me some advice then based on the journey that I've, I've taken as an entrepreneur and what my, uh, what my values were and how they've changed about what the decisions I should make in the future based on what you've just said. So when I was 18 years old, um, I came from a family that didn't have anything, right? So my, my parents are bankrupt. We didn't have, um, nice things at all. We didn't have Christmas and birthdays. So at 18, I wrote in my diary, which I've shared publicly a number of times, that the things I wanted to achieve before I was 25 were these following

four things. I wanted to be a millionaire before I was 25. I wanted a Range Rover to be my first car. I wanted to work on my body image and I wanted to to get a girlfriend or whatever but um so uh interestingly at 20 before 25 um there were multiple offers for people to buy my company and those figure those those are in you know the tens of millions in terms of figures or whatever so in those moments 18 year old Steve showed up um to almost collect upon the the things that he thought he wanted. But by 24, 25, and I literally went on auto trader and looked at cars. And then I went on right move that night and looked at houses that I would buy. And just by looking at those things, I felt a tremendous sense of almost emptiness and, and, and fear at the thought that if I bought that Lamborghini Aventador or that house,

um, I would actually, I would actually be losing something. I would, I'd feel emptier because, you know, that, the idea of hedonistic adaptation where you just keep chasing pleasure, um, what, what next? Um, and so I've, in many respects, almost been a little bit confused as to why I'm doing what I'm doing because my values and what I thought my motivations were originally, I now almost scare me. So I find that so moving because what you did is you allowed yourself to feel the emptiness of that system. Right. And what's striking to me, I mean, you will have met, you know, like you know like you i came from a you know working class background um and we're both in the unusual position now where we get to meet like really

rich people right and one thing that strikes me so powerfully is i have almost i can think of two exceptions every single extremely rich person i've met has been such a miserable person, like deeply, deeply unhappy. I don't mean, Oh, a bit unhappy considering that they're really rich. I mean like achingly unhappy.

Right. I can think of, yeah, two exceptions. I just got goosebumps then because like, that's literally part of the reason why I felt so empty when I looked at those things was because I really, I,

I almost imagined in my head the person I would become. And I knew that person and they aren't happy. In fact, they've told me they're not happy that the person that has the car that I wanted to buy is miserable. And they've, they've literally said to me, quote,

I will never be happy because I'm always chasing and I'm never satisfied because I'm always chasing the next thing. And therefore I'll never be happy. And so for a second, you know, when I looked at that car, it made me think, fuck, I don't want to be that person. Yeah. I'm always chasing and I'm never satisfied because I'm always chasing the next thing and therefore I'll never be happy. And so for a second, you know, when I looked at that car, it made me think, fuck, I don't want to be that person. Yeah. And it's a really weird thing, isn't it? Because on the one hand, you know, I look at all this science and the science shows

something very clearly, but the thing the science shows us is something that at some level we all know, right? It's almost a banal cliche to say no one listening to this program is going to lie on their deathbed and think about all the things they bought, right? You are not going to sit on your deathbed and think, what a great life I had. I had two Range Rovers, right? You will think about moments of love and connection and meaning in your life. And yet the way Professor Kasser put it to me is, we've designed a machine. We all live in a machine that's designed to get us to neglect the things that are actually important in life and what i find really moving and what you

said is early enough in life you clocked wait this story i've been told which we sing like a kind of karaoke song right um the lines have been laid out for us what do you do uh lord won't you buy me a mercedes-benz and i think the journey from Janis Joplin singing that ironically to that actually being in a Mercedes-Benz advert is so revealing. You saw women at this thing. I'm singing this song and I feel like shit, right? So we've got to think about, firstly, how is that story constructed? And there's lots of research about advertising, and I can talk to you about that if you want,

but I mean, there's a really simple little experiment that I think really shows this beautifully it was done in 1978 they get a bunch of five-year-olds and they split them into two groups and one half of the group is shown an advert for whatever the equivalent to dora the explorer was in 1978 i can't remember what it was now and the other group of kids is shown no adverts at all and then at the end of it they say to all the kids okay kids you got choice now. You can either play with a really nice boy who doesn't have the toy that was in the advert, or you can play with a nasty boy who's got the toy. The kids who've seen just that one advert mostly choose to play with the nasty boy who's got the

toy. And the kids who haven't seen the advert mostly choose the nice boy who doesn't have the toy, right? So think about that. One advert primed those kids to choose an inanimate lump of plastic over the possibility of meaningful connection fun, right? Everyone listening to this has seen more than one advert a day, right? So you start thinking of a way that tells you Melania Trump's journey, right? To use a kind of, I don't mean to be snide about her because I think she's got a rough enough life as it is, but you know what I mean? So that's how we, and it's not, of course, advertising is not the only thing that's going on. Lots of things are going on,

but that's, and we police this ourselves. It's a kind of value system created by an extreme kind of neoliberal capitalism that we then becomes the kind of logic of the society, the logic of all of us, right? I think about it. When I was a kid, I really craved Nike trainers.

You could not have had a child who was further from playing basketball like Michael Jordan than me, right? And yet, why did I want that? It was solely because, how do we get out of this? And there's lots of things about this. I think we should much more tightly regulate advertising, all sorts of things. But, and I went to places like Sao Paulo where they just banned outdoor advertising to see if it would improve people's mental health. And it did. But to me, there's a more interesting part of this or as interesting um so it's a really interesting guy called nathan

dungan who with professor casser did this really interesting experiment so nathan dungan was a financial advisor in minneapolis and um he was contacted by a bunch of kind of middle-class schools so not like poor kids not rich kids um and the schools were like we've got a big problem these kids are really freaking out if if their parents don't buy them like brand sneakers or whatever they get really genuinely distressed if they don't get these designer labels can you come in and talk to them about budgeting right so that's what nathan duncan would do would advise adults on budgeting so he comes in and he starts talking to the kids about budgeting and very quickly clocks. This is going to get me nowhere, right?

This is not a budgeting issue. This is like a values issue. So they did this experiment that was set up and monitored by Professor Kasser. It was really interesting. The kids came in with their parents and I think it was once a fortnight for, I think, four months. I might be getting some of the figures there wrong, uh they come in and they just meet and it started by saying i think the first session was i want you just to write down the things you've got to have right and of course people would some people would name like we grow her house graphic but

quite quickly they talk about things they feel they've got to have you know that we're not those things like designer sneakers would come up quite quickly for the teenagers and um nathan would say to them what can you write down what you would have if you had those sneakers right and quite quickly the kids would say well i would feel i was valued by the group i would feel i had status people would be impressed by me and the minute you say it out loud it doesn't take long people to go oh why do i think i need sneakers to be respected by the group right and they go well well, where does this come from? And they would look at advertising.

They would critically look at advertising. But then the next stages I think were really interesting. You start to say, okay, once they kind of deconstructed the junk values, this thing you think you want is actually just a meaningless lump of plastic that doesn't signify anything. How could we actually get you the things you want? What do you actually think is important in your life? And as the weeks went on, they would build,

they would basically figure out what they actually valued and try to figure out ways to do that more. Both the adults and the teenagers. And they'd report back the next time, well, actually I did this, I did that. And what was fascinating was, this is quite a small intervention, right? It's, you know, once a fortnight for four months.

It led to a really significant fall in junk values, right? Which we know leads to a decline in depression and anxiety. And I think I told you something really interesting because people are so hungry to have these conversations, right? This is not like explaining quantum physics to people. When I think about the nine causes of depression anxiety that i write about lost connections and then the solution so nathan's program in this kind of it's almost like a kind of alcoholics anonymous for consumerism right and for junk values that's one of the solutions that i write about these are that it doesn't take long to explain them to people that for them to just intuitively get it right it says there's something wrong in what we've been doing and this is part of the solution um but but as i say we live in a

machine that's designed to get us to divert from that but that machine was created by humans and humans can dismantle it right we don't have to live in a machine that makes us feel like shit you know we can we can dismantle it so a question i get asked a lot is obviously because i work in the industry of social media um should we cancel social media turn it off in order to protect the future generations and to maintain our value system i guess yeah so i was really interested in thinking about this so i i went to i was trying to figure it out um so i went to the first ever one of the places that really helped me think about this i went to the first ever internet rehab center in the world it's that it's in spokane just outside

spokane in washington state i had this i remember arriving it's rehab center in the world. It's in Spokane, just outside Spokane in Washington state. I had this, I remember arriving, it's a clearing in the woods, stepping out the car and absolutely instinctively glancing at my phone and being really pissed off. I couldn't check social media. I was like, Oh wait, you're in the right place. Right. And I think the answer there is one of the things I learned there from

looking at a lot of the evidence on this is that the answer is a bit complicated. It's not like a yay social media or a boo social media answer so they get all kinds of people at this internet rehab center but the woman who runs it dr hillary cash explained to me they disproportionately get young men who become obsessed with multiplayer online role-playing games like world of warcraft and fortnite although fortnite didn't exist then i'm sure it isn't a big issue for them now um and she said to me and i'm speaking to a lot of the young men there she said to me you've got to ask yourself what are these young men getting out of these games because they're

getting something right they're getting the things that young men used to get from the culture but no longer get they get a sense of a tribe right that they're part of a group they get a sense that they're good at something and they're getting better at something and they get a sense they can physically roam around the average british child now spends less time outdoors than the average maximum security prisoner because by law a maximum security prisoner has to have 70 minutes a day at least they get a sense they're fucking moving around right because it's what we're doing in these games. They're getting a sense that people see them

and value them. But of course what they're getting is really like a parody of those things, right? I think the relationship between social media and social life a lot of the time is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex, right? I'm not opposed to porn,

but if your whole sex life consisted of looking at porn, you'd be going around pissed off and irritated the whole time because we didn't evolve to wank over screens we evolved to have sex right um and no one feels deeply satisfied after an hour wanking over porn in the way they do after sex if it goes right at least right um in a similar way we didn't evolve to interact through screens right but you've got to think about the moment when the internet arrives, which tells us to see it's more complicated than just, oh, the internet did this to us, right? Because if you look at for most people, the internet arrives in the late 90s, the early 2000s.

I think I sent my first email in the year 2000. And a lot of the factors that caused depression and anxiety had already massively increased by then. There was already been a huge increase in loneliness. There'd already been a huge fall in people interacting with the natural world, all sorts of things. There'd been a big increase in people feeling humiliated by inequality. And what happens is the internet comes along and it looks a lot like the things we've lost right sure you've lost friends well here's some facebook friends you've lost status here's some status updates um so in a sense like all addictive behavior

it's an attempt to fill a hole that's that's been left right so the simplistic thing to do is to say well just shun the social media get rid of it um but the more complex and i do think social media can make these things worse i think it encourages people towards junk values as we've talked about and so on for many people it makes not everyone but i think if you just it's a bit like with um something i wrote another book about chasing the scream if you think about addiction let's say heroin addiction with someone who's got heroin addiction if you simply take away the heroin and don't do anything to make their lives better they're still gonna they're gonna be just suicidally depressed right because they're anesthetizing themselves with the drug and then the thing

they're anesthetizing themselves against re-emerges it's why good addiction responses to addiction aren't about just taking away the drug they're about although that may be necessary for some people and is necessary for some people it's much more about helping the person to rebuild their life and rebuild their connections and so on but but in a similar way if we want to understand why we're so addicted to social media we've got to understand these deeper factors right the social media addiction is a symptom of the disconnection of the society now it's a symptom that can make the problem worse and is making the problem worse for a lot of people so a good rule of thumb was um professor john cassioppo that amazing expert on loneliness that i was talking about who sadly just died uh said a really useful thing to me

he said after doing loads of research on this he said if social media is a way station to meeting people offline then it's a good thing sure if it's the last stop on the line something's gone wrong and i think that's a good kind of rule of thumb i love that um so as a so here's a thing so because i've publicly criticized social media for all of the reasons you've just described there people often call me a hypocrite because that's ultimately how we make our money, right? As a business like Social Chain, that's not looking to make the world a worse place because we existed.

And I do like your answer there because it kind of offers us hope that we could play a big role in helping to fulfill or to plug the gap in other ways that social media as you've said is just is is filling for people do you think social chains approach then should be to uh invest in offline socializing and connectivity in our society would that be how the way we almost go like social media neutral as a company if you know what i mean i never heard of it that way that's interesting well i would say a couple of things about that

so firstly everyone alive is a hypocrite if the only people who can argue for social change are perfectly pure people then there will be no argument for social change ever right mahatma gandhi one of the most admirable people ever killed his wife nelson mandela one of the most admirable people ever beat his wife everyone is morally flawed and everyone is a hypocrite in some respect and generally i think the charges of hypocrisy well of course there are some you know i don't know you get instances of gross hypocrisy i don't know a evangelical christian preacher who's preaching that gay people are terrible while you know fucking a rebel or something okay you can see even there i think

that's more that the person is actually at war with something in themselves than that they're just being a hypocrite in a kind of cheap way but you know i think charge of hypocrisy are generally not very helpful uh and don't get us anywhere right the question is do we agree this is a bad thing how do we change together right um and do we agree there's a problem here and how do we move forward? And there is a problem here. I think pretty much everyone can see that. So in terms of the changes we can advocate, I'll give you an example of a really interesting one that really moved me. It might be worth you thinking about in some ways. So one of the heroes of Lost Connections is this amazing doctor called Sam Everington. He's a doctor in the East End where I used to live for a long time. And Sam was really

uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety. Unlike me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants. I think they have a real but limited role, but he could just see most of the people he was giving these drugs to remain depressed right i was taking the edge off for some of them for sure but they were still depressed so one day he decided to try this different approach a woman came to see him called lisa cunningham who had been shut away in her home for almost seven years with just crippling depression and anxiety got to know lisa quite and and Sam said to Lisa don't worry I'll carry on giving you these drugs but I'm also going to give you something else I'm going to prescribe something else I'm going to

prescribe for you to take part in a group there was an area behind the doctor's surgery that was known as dog shit alley which gives you a sense of what it was like it was like scrubland basically and Sam said to Lisa what I'd like you to do is come and turn out a couple of times a week i'll come and support you sam himself had had quite a lot of anxiety and he said with a group of other depressed and anxious people we're going to turn dog shit alley into something nice right first time the group met lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety but they decided to do they decided they were going to learn gardening these were in the city east london people didn't know anything about gardening right i said we're gonna learn gardening you teach it to get teachers themselves together and

what's interesting is they started to kind of get their fingers in the soil they started to learn the rhythms of the seasons there's a lot of evidence that disconnection from the natural world is a big cause of depression and actually interacting with the natural world is a really strong antidepressant. But something else happened that I think was as important, which is they started to form a group. They started to form a tribe. They started to care about each other. They started to do what human beings do when we solve a tribe. They started to solve each other's problems right they start to notice if someone wasn't there um and i remember so as the weeks and the months went on i remember lisa saying to me you know um as the garden began to bloom we began to bloom there was a study in

norway of a very similar program that found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants i think for kind of obvious right, is dealing with some of the reasons why they felt so terrible in the first place. And this is something I saw all over the world. The best solutions to depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we're in this distress in the first place. And I kept seeing this in so many places, this capacity for reconnection that is just beneath the surface. I'll tell you a story. Obviously, I learned a huge amount from my book from scientists and doctors. But I actually think the place that taught me the most was a place where there were no scientists and no doctors.

So in the summer of 2011, on a big housing project in in berlin a woman called nuria chengis climbed out of her wheelchair and put a sign in her window she lives on the ground floor she was a woman in her early 60s and the sign said something like i've got a notice i'm going to be evicted next thursday so on wednesday night i'm going to myself. And this is a big housing project in a very poor part of Berlin. It's called Cottey, where basically, because it was such a kind of slum area, you only really have three groups who lived there. There were recent Muslim immigrants, like this woman, Nuria. There were punk squatters, and there were gay men. And as you can imagine, these three groups would look at each other with a lot of mutual incomprehension.

No one really knew anyone on this housing project like a council estate anywhere in Britain. Most people didn't know each other. No one knew, hardly anyone knew Nuria, but they saw this sign in a window and they started to knock on her door. And they said, do you need any help? And Nuria said, fuck you, I don't want any help

and shut the door in their faces. And the people who lived nearby just stood outside and they started just talking to people who'd never spoken before outside and they started just talking people who never spoken before and and they were all pissed off because their rents were going up as well and lots of people were being evicted in koti and so they felt like this was coming for them too and one of them had an idea you might remember this was the summer of the revolution in egypt i've been watching this on the news and one of them had an idea there's a big thoroughfare that

goes into the center of berlin that runs through kottey and one of them had this thought he said you know on Saturday if we just blocked the road for a day and we'll go and protest and we will Nouria out probably the media will come there'll be a bit of a fuss they'll probably let us stay in a flat maybe they'll actually be a bit of pressure to keep our rents down so they decided to do it they blocked the road on Saturday they go to knock on Nouria's door and she's like well I'm going to kill myself anyway I might as well let them wheel myself and wheel them wheel me into the middle of the street they will nuria out the media does come quite a lot the neighbors protest quite a big thing and gets a bit of coverage in berlin that day nuria's interviewed uh a bit bemused to be

interviewed but she's interviewed and then it gets to the end of the day and the police say okay you've had your fun take it down and the people the people who lived there said, well, hang on, you haven't told Nuria she gets to stay. And we want a rent freeze for all of us, for this whole housing project. So when we've got that, we'll take this blocking down, blockading the road down. But of course they knew the minute they left, the police would just tear it down anyway, right? So one of them, one of my favourite people at Cotty Woman called Tanya Gartner, she's one of the punk squatters. She wears tiny mini skirts, even in Berlin winter. She's hardcore.

Tanya had an idea in her flat. She had a clankson, you know, those things that make loud noises at football matches. And she went and got it. And she said, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to drop a timetable to man this

barricade. And, uh, we can man it 24 hours a day. And if the police come at any point to take it down before we got the rent freeze, before Nuri is told she can stay, let off the klaxon and we'll all come and we'll all stop them.

So people start signing up, people who would never have met, right? Completely random mixes of people. So Tanya in her tiny mini skirt was paired. I think she did the Thursday night shift with Nuri, who's a very religious Muslim in a headscarf, right?

And first few night shifts they had were super awkward. They're sitting there like we've got nothing in common. What are we going to talk about? They just look away from each other. Tanya kind of taps away on her laptop. But as the nights went on, they discovered they had something really important in common. Nuria told Tanya something she'd never told anyone. So Nuria had come to Berlin when she was 17 from a village in Turkey with her two young children. They were babies and her job was to raise enough money to send back home for her husband so he could come. And after she'd been in Berlin for a year, she got word from home that her husband had died. And she told Tanya something she'd always

been ashamed of. She'd always told people that her husband had died of a heart attack. Actually, he died of tuberculosis, which was seen as like a disease of poverty. And that's when Tanya told Nuria something she didn't talk about very much. She had come to Cotty when she was 15. She'd been thrown out by a middle-class family. She'd come, she'd lived in a punk squat. She'd actually got pregnant not long after she arrived. They both realised they had been children alone in this place with children of their own. They realised they had something incredibly powerful in common. There were these pairings happening all over Cotty where people were realising this. There was a young lad called Mehmet. He kept being told he had ADHD. They were going to throw him out

of school. He got paired with this grumpy old white German guy who said that he hated direct action because he loved Stalin. But in this rare case, he would make an exception. And he started helping Mehmet with his homework. Mehmet started doing much better at school. Directly opposite this housing project in Cotty, there's a gay club called Zudblock that opened, I think, Mehmet with his homework Mehmet started doing much better at school directly opposite this this housing project in Cotty there's a a gay club called Zudblock that opened I think four years before it's run by a person I love called Rickard Strauss and um you know it's a pretty uncompromising gay club that gives you a sense the previous place Rickard owned was called Cafe Anal right and um and I always thought you wouldn't have a sandwich from cafe anal but anyway um and when

they'd open this club you know you can imagine there's a lot of very religious muslims there so the windows have been smashed some people have been really pissed off the gay club set started giving all their furniture to the protest so they could make it a more permanent barricade and after a while they started saying you guys could have all your meetings in our in our club if you want you know we'll give you free drinks we'll give you food and at first even the lefties at cotty were like look we're not going to get these very religious Muslims to come and have a meeting underneath posters for like fisting night, right? It's not going to happen. But it did start happening. I remember one of the Muslim women saying to me, we all

realized we had to take these steps to get to know each other. After the protest had been going for about a year, one day, a guy appeared at koti called tung kai who's at that time he was in his early 50s and tung kai's clearly got some kind of cognitive difficulties you can tell when you meet him and he's he'd been living homeless but he's got an amazing energy about him everyone immediately liked him and um he started helping them out and by this time they had built a permanent structure in the middle of the street and and they started saying well we don't want you to be homeless you should live in this structure right so he started living there and he became like a much-loved staple of the camp and after he'd been there for about nine months one day um the police

came they would come and inspect every now and then and tung kai doesn't like it when people argue and he thought the police were arguing so he he went to hug one of the officers and they thought he was attacking them so they arrested him that was when it was discovered that Tungkay had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital for 20 years often literally in a padded cell he'd escaped one day he lived on the streets for a few months and he found his way to Kotti and so the police took him back to this psychiatric hospital right the other side of Berlin at which point the whole of the kind of cotty protest camp turned into a kind of free tung kai movement right they descend on i remember the psychiatrist has been completely

baffled right that this person they've had shut away for 20 years suddenly they've got these women in head scarves these gay very camp gay men and these punks demanding his release i remember uli one of them one of the protesters uli saying to the people there but you don't love him he doesn't belong with you we love him he belongs with us anyway it took him a long time they got tung kai back he's there now he still lives there um and there were lots of things that happened at koti i guess the headline is they got a rent freeze for their entire housing project they then launched a referendum initiative to keep down rents across the city that got the largest number of signatures in the history of the city of berlin but i remember the last time i saw nuria talking to her and her saying to me

you know i'm really glad i got to stay in my neighborhood that's great i gained so much more than that i was surrounded by these amazing people all along and i never knew i remember one of the other one of the other women one of the German woman called Neriman Manker, her name is, saying to me, you know, when I grew up in Turkey, I grew up in a village and I called my whole village home. And I came to live in the Western world and I learned that what we're supposed to call home is our four walls, right? And then this whole protest began and I started to think of this whole place and all these people as my home. And I remember thinking, as Nariman told me that, that in some sense, in this culture, we are homeless, right? Our sense of belonging isn't big enough to meet our natural human need for a home.

There's a Bosnian writer called Alexander Heyman who said, home is where people notice when you're not there, right? They didn't have people who noticed when they weren't there and then they did right and i could see how um intoxicating that was and i kept thinking about these people and i think they think i'm slightly mad because i would just go back every few months and just like cry because i was so moved by them but i remember one time one of them uh sandy saying to me i think johan maybe you have allergies because my eyes were watered so much while i was there but i remember thinking it was so clear to me there how much those people did not need to be drugged they needed to be together right i think about how serious the problems were you know nuria was suicidal tung kai was shut away in a padded cell

and mehmeh was nearly being thrown out of school the whole time what solved these problems i remember tanya saying to me one time i was sitting with her outside the gay club zib block and she said to me, you know, when you feel like shit and you're all alone, you think there's something wrong with you. But what we did is we came out of our corner crying and we started to fight and we realized how strong we were. And the thing to me that's so important about Cotty is I love these people. I think they're the most incredible people, but in some way they are not exceptional, right? And so these were a random collection of ordinary people like you would find in any street, in any city. What they found was a way to come together. Now, of course, coming together will mean different things for different people and that model won't work everywhere.

But like that gardening program in East London, or like so many other things I write about in Lost Connections, people are so hungry for this coming back together. People can feel how divorced they are. And I guess the key thing I wanted to explain to people after I'd learned so much about this, but the book is, if you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not crazy, you're not a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs, and you are surrounded by other human beings with unmet needs. And the way we get those needs met is by coming together and fighting for something better. Amazing. That's really what I took away from your book. I think I had so many misconceptions that had been fed to me by, I guess, other misinformed people. And so interestingly, I was sat in the

office in New York and I was just doing my work. And sometimes when I'm doing my work, I put YouTube videos on and they just cycle through into the night. And your video actually came relating to our loss, our lack of community, relating to social media and, you know, living behind screens. One of the other things that it really made me think about as an employee is the way that our teams are treated at work. And I remember, and I'll never forget the example you gave about the bicycle store and the employees of that bicycle store. You'll tell this story much better than I will, so I don't want to ruin the story. But in essence, when this particular bicycle store sort of removed the management layer and became sort of self-autonomous and sort of gained freedom and operated in more of a democracy than typical companies operate, I believe the financial performance was better.

They were all happier and less depressed. What I really wanted to ask you, though, is as it relates to work and the working environment that we create as entrepreneurs and CEOs and managers, what are the things that we should do for our teams in order to ensure that they are happy, engaged, and our businesses ultimately succeed? So there's a difficult answer to that, if I'm honest, which is what I would say specifically to CEOs. So just to step back a set there. So one of the reasons I was interested in this is because I noticed that lots of people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work. So let's look at what's the evidence for how people feel about their work it's a really good study this by gallup an incredibly detailed study done in loads of countries and it was just figuring out how do people feel about

their work and the figures were pretty striking so 13 of us one three percent like our work most of the time 63 percent are what we they call sleep working you don't like it you don't hate it you tolerate it and 24% of people fucking hate their jobs and fear them and dread them right it's quite striking that means 87% of people don't like the thing they're doing most of their waking life right you're almost twice as likely to hate your job as like it and I started to think well could this have some relationship to our mental health problems so I started looking at well who's done research on this and I learned about and went to meet an incredible australian social scientist you should interview actually

because he can give you a lot more detail on this he's a really remarkable man called professor michael marmot who made a real breakthrough on this in the 1970s i can tell you how if you want but just to give you the headline um he discovered the single biggest factor that makes people depressed at work if you go to work tomorrow and you have low or no control over your work, you are significantly more likely to become depressed and anxious. There's a very strong correlation between this. If you feel that you're just like a robot on a line, you're just taking orders, or you're like a soldier in an army, you're taking orders from above, you don't have much choice, you can't use your creativity,

you don't have freedom, you are can't use your creativity. You don't have freedom. You are much more likely to become depressed and anxious. And I started thinking, well, what's the antidepressant for that, right? And so, as you mentioned, I learned about this different model, which actually is much closer to how humans have lived for a long time. It's actually the model of the modern corporation that's a really weird aberration in human history. So, I went to interview this person, spent a lot of time with this one called meredith keogh who um meredith used to go to bed every sunday night just sick with anxiety she wasn't um she had an office job and it wasn't as she would tell you it wasn't the worst office job in the world she wasn't being bullied or harassed or anything but she just couldn't bear the thought she was

quite young she was in her 20s she couldn't bear the thought that this was going to be the rest of her life right for 40 years um and one day with her husband josh she did this quite bold thing and for a minute people listening to this gonna think i'm saying you should do this and they'll think i can't do this and it's right most people can't do this this is leads to a different insight so josh had worked in bike stores since he was a kid, a teenager. And, you know, working in bike stores, especially in the US, it's insecure, it's low paid, you get no benefits, you don't even get holiday pay.

If you're lucky, the boss might hand it down to you. And one day Josh, with his colleagues in the bike store, just asked themselves, what does our boss actually do? They were like, we seem to fix all the bikes. He seems to make all the money. They liked their boss. He wasn't like a monster or anything, but they were like, I kind of feel like we could do this. So they decided to set up a bike store of their own. It's called Baltimore Bicycle Works. Works on a different principle, right? So most people work in corporations, right? Which is very recent human invention, late 19th century.

It's the idea, it's like a corporation is like an army. The boss at the top is the dictator. And sometimes he might be nice to you and give you choices. And sometimes he won't, but we have to do, follow his, and it is mostly his, not her, whims, right? They decide to set up their bike store on a different principle. It's a democratic cooperative. So they don't have a boss.

They take decisions about the company together by voting like a couple of once every few weeks and most of the time they agree sometimes they don't and they vote they share the profits obviously they share out the shitty tasks and the good tasks so no one gets stuck with the shitty tasks and one thing that was fascinating and it's totally in line with press and marmot's work is how many of them talked about how they've been depressed and anxious before and were not depressed and anxious now. And it's important to say, it's not like they quit their jobs fixing bikes and went off to, you know, become Beyonce's backing singers, right?

They fixed bikes before, they fixed bikes now. The difference is now they've got control over their work, right? So if you want your workers to be happy, give them back control over their work. That's one key factor right so in a sense my advice to ceos is you shouldn't really exist but actually of course there's a place for management and there's a place for uh elected leaders within a within a an organization that are chosen by the workforce because they do something particularly brilliant and there are such individuals and i applaud them and they're an important part of the economy but in a way to me asking what would you ask corporate ceos to do

it's a bit like and this is probably not popular answer with your listenership i apologize then but it's a bit like saying if we were in the middle ages uh you know there's all these terrible problems what would you what would you beg the king to do well i would say we shouldn't have a king we should get rid of the king and we should have a democracy right and then we can sort out the problems ourselves so i i wouldn't beg the king for anything i mean of course look you see the point i'm making right i'm not i'm not comparing all ceos to medieval tyrants but you see the point i make right i deeply understand i deeply agree as well i think that um i think the modern ceo should really kind of get out the way and let people solve their own problems and arrive at their own decisions. We've tried really, really hard to do that. I mean, even this

week, as our teams will tell you, we launched a committee within the company where the members of the team decide what happens to the company. So they decide the working hours, they decide, and a lot of this is actually inspired by some of the things I read in your book. So I sent your book to our, it's not really even a HR team, we call them the happiness team, right? So it's, we've got a head of happiness and she has a team below her. And so she's created what she calls like the happiness club, where members of the team, there's 10 a week, decide what the company does and, you know, what the working hours are, what food is in the fridge and, you know, what our company trips are etc etc

we're really trying to democratize that i think because of what i read in your book um oh that's really nice and yeah i think at some level we all know this when we apply it to other things right about if you ask most people why is north korea a horrific basket case where people are starving to death and south korea one of the most successful economies in the world when actually you go back to 1953 the division of korea they were in the same place right they were more or less the same well south korea is a democracy and north korea is a dictatorship right and in a democracy soccer is not a perfect democracy by any means but in a democracy you have everyone's brain on the job right in a dictatorship you've got one person's brain on the job and you think about you've got one person's brain on the

job and you think about what happened in baltimore bicycle works of course people are much more motivated if they are able to use their creativity you've got everyone's brain on it you've got the knowledge of everyone everyone's trying to think out how to solve the problems rather than one person thinking out how to solve the problems and everyone else trying trying to tap dance to his tune or her tune do you know what i mean 100 so i think this is of all the solutions to depression anxiety that i write about in lost connections the shift in work i think is both the most important and in some ways the hardest but i'm aware that when i talk about, and of course in the book,

I talk about things that individuals can do as well. But when I talk about these big structural changes, I'm aware that it can seem daunting, especially to people who are currently depressed and anxious, where you think, I think about, for example, one of my closest relatives is a struggling single mom,

you know, who works every hour she can. She gets home, collapses, can barely watch Coronation Street because she's so tired. Right. And the other is saying to her, your job now who works every hour she can. She gets home, collapses, can barely watch Coronation Street because she's so tired, right? And the idea is saying to her, your job now is to democratise your workplace,

to go to a, do a gardening programme, do a, you know, I mean, it would just be an insult to her, right? So I'm aware that we've got, these are structural problems, but one of the reasons why I'm optimistic about the past capacities to change things, even in these dark times, I think especially because of these dark times, because the system is falling apart and we can see it can't hold, is I'm 39 and I'm gay. Right. And I have just seen the most incredible changes happen in my lifetime. One of my nephews is is just turned 18 and last year i showed him the things that were on the front pages of british newspapers when i was the age he is now and he literally said

did people call the police right he just couldn't believe it right because there's been such a huge show now if the craziest ukip local councillor tweeted the things that used to be on the front page of the sun every day i mean he'd have to resign sure right i think a lot about um one of the people i write about in the book is a close friend of mine i've just spent the summer with actually um this this this this he did this was part of this extraordinary thing right so 1994 andrew sullivan and some of your listeners will know he's an amazing writer and journalist andrew sullivan was diagnosed hiv positive right height of the aids crisis people are dying all around us before we got any decent treatment. And he goes to a little place in Cape Cod called Provincetown to die. And he decides the last thing he's ever going

to do is to write a book about a crazy utopian idea no one's ever written a book about. And he's like, okay, I'm never going to see this happen. No one alive is going to see this happen, but maybe someone somewhere down the line is going to pick up this idea. The book he wrote, the idea he wrote the first book about was gay marriage. Right. And when I get depressed, I think, oh, fuck, we're up against these big things. I tried to imagine going back in time.

I was just with Andrew in Provincetown, going to Andrew in Provincetown in 1994 and saying, hey, you're not going to believe me. 26 years from now, first point, you're going to be alive. Good news. He wouldn't have 26 years from now first point you're going to be alive good news he wouldn't believe that second point you're going to be married to a man that will be legal thirdly the supreme court of the united states when it rules that it's mandatory for every part of the u.s to introduce gay marriage will quote this book that you're writing now and i'll be with you the next day when you get an invitation from the president of the United States to go to a white house that will be lit up in

the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you've achieved. Oh, and by the way, that president, he's going to be black, right? That would have sounded like the most ridiculous science fiction you could imagine.

Andrew lived to see that happen, right? Now he also lived to see Donald Trump be the president. So things can go both ways, right? Don't, I'm not being mindlessly optimistic about this but when one of the great lessons i think of the incredible transformation and how gay people are seen and treated is if you organize and this wasn't just

gay people by any means this was lots of heterosexual people who opened their hearts and loved gay people um if you appeal to the people around you in a spirit of love and compassion and you work really hard and you don't give up and there were a lot of bumps on the road to the gay marriage decision for sure um you can prevail and you can make incredible changes right the changes don't happen by themselves you have to fight for them you have to fight really hard you have to have a long fight you have to keep at it. And you have to do it in a spirit of love and compassion, not a spirit of contempt and rage and appealing to people's goodness, not their rage and hatred. But those changes can happen. And in a way, the fight about

the things that are causing depression is in some ways easier. Look, gay people are like 5% of the population, right? We're a very small number of people relatively. Depression and anxiety, one in three middle-aged women in the United States is on antidepressants at any given time, right? And the factors that are, if you look at the nine factors that are causing depression and anxiety

that I write about in Lost Connections, they're making some people depressed, but they're making most people less happy and more diminished than they could be. Right. And obviously there's lots of the factors that we didn't get to talk about today,

but the, the, so if we fight to deal with the things that are making some people really depressed and anxious, that will enrich the lives of almost everyone in this society. Right. Whereas the fight for gay rights made the lives of gay people better. And, and you know will have made other people feel good that they were no longer being horrible but you know actually this is a fight that can mobilize far more people because it

affects more far more people's lives now admittedly it's a bigger ask right it's taking on more powerful forces as well so i don't want to be naive about it but i do think these factors that are causing depression and anxiety can be dealt with because, you know, as part of the journey for the book, I went to places that dealt with them, right? I've seen it happen. There's very little that's abstract in my book. It's about people and it's about places that tried things. So I think people should be profoundly optimistic that we can fight and we can prevail. And that we don't have to live in a society where more and more people are becoming depressed and anxious.

And we're experiencing all these symptoms of that distress, whether it's, I think, Brexit and Trump, which I think are disasters, as I'm sure you can guess. But I think they are partly symptoms of this and other things going on, obviously. But these are partly symptoms of that. I mean, think about what's happening in the US at the you know i've been spending a lot of time in the places that are most affected by the opiate crisis for stuff that i've been doing as a follow-up to my book

about addiction which is called chasing the screen but you know male life expectancy has fallen for the first time since the civil war like overwhelmingly because people are killing themselves are committing suicide with guns and committing suicide with opiates or anesthetizing them so much that they accidentally kill themselves because they're in such deep pain, right? The symptoms of this distress are all around us. And we can just kind of carry on with the same bullshit script, the one that you very smartly saw when you were, you know, before your 25th birthday, you're like, wait a minute, this is not a path to a good and happy life right but we can and the fact that the most powerful person in the world is donald trump tells us something really profound right and it's not that his

voters are stupid or they're bad people because i don't believe they are um that this man who is so obviously unwell so obviously sick and deeply unhappy i don't know i've ever seen a more unhappy person than donald trump this person who can't take satisfaction in anything who lives in an actual golden tower married to a really hot woman and is the most powerful person in the world and is achingly unhappy the fact that the people at the top of the game feel like shit tells you something about the game right yeah anyway i could go on about this no but you're doing your book so that's kind of a great segue and will we get our lost connections too at some point i guess some people write the same book over and over again and i can't really do that i get bored but um but i'm all right i'm writing on related themes uh which i'm not meant

to talk about at the moment but uh i should say can my publishers always tell me off if i don't say this that um the most uh if you want any more information about my book um if you want to know where you can get the book or the audio book if you go to www.thelostconnections.com and on the website as well you can go you can take a quiz to see how much you know about the causes of depression anxiety you can listen to audio of loads of the people we've been talking about loads of the experts there's amazing people in berlin loads of people and um i got i got asked you can find out my social media following but i got asked in an interview recently actually um you know what's your twitter what's your facebook what's your instagram and at

the end they were like what's your snapchat and i was like i'm a 39 year old man right only 39 year old men on snapchat are definitely pedophiles right that should be just how they detect pedophiles if you go to street go go to men over the age of 35 what is your what is your snapchat and if they got one arrest them immediately so you cannot follow me on snapchat but you can uh follow me on the other things where i don't look very often because it makes me sad yeah so on the point like to conclude i follow you um i follow you everywhere and it sounds's slightly sinister, but yeah, I know you're out right. I follow you everywhere. But I, but I read the book and then I told everyone else to read the book around me

that I thought was important to my life. And then I downloaded the audio book as well. And then I watched all of your YouTube videos. So I've, I've the story of the wonderful South African man that you described. Oh, I love him. I've,

I've seen that one as well. And on the point of junk values, I follow you and you're somewhat one of i've i've seen that one as well um and on the point of junk values i follow you and you're somewhat one of the people in my timeline that helps make me sort of junk values neutral because i think your your tweets are very good for my soul in my mind so i'd encourage everybody to go and follow you at least on twitter and and definitely buy the book because um everybody that i've recommended it to has seen some kind of shift in their perspective for the better including me and you know I don't shout books out much I don't um I don't I actually don't have a lot of time to read a lot of books so I end up just blink it's called blinkist right

it summarizes a book in 20 minutes but yours was the first book this year that I've probably almost read twice just to you know um because I'm I'm on that journey of seeking answers that your book has so um i want to thank you for taking the time to write it thank you and i mean that from the bottom of my heart because it definitely has has and will make the world a better place and there's not a lot of things that do that and thank you so much for your time today as well because thank you very much i know how busy you must be um so um yeah thank you so much i appreciate you oh thank you so much i appreciate you no worries and um as you said the, thank you so much. I appreciate you as well. No worries. And as you said, the book is everywhere, so go and buy it.

Hooray. Oh, I think I meant to, um, what's this? A little spiel that my publishers told me to say. You can also find out, I always feel like I'm doing like one of those shitty 1950s, um, you know, when they had to read out the sponsors. You can also find out what a range of people thought about the book from Russell Brand to Hillary Clinton to Elton John at the website. Yeah. That's the bit I meant to say amazing thanks johan