The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Johann Hari - Everything You Think You Know About Meaning & Happiness Is Wrong

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

This podcast is a real treat and a podcast that you cannot miss! Johann has come back and what honour it was to record. He has to be my all-time favourite guest ever! His book ‘Lost Connections’ had such a positive, transformative impact on my life and truly changed my perspective on how I viewed depression & addiction. I am sure that the information shared today will be valuable and important topics that our society needs to hear. Johann is a very successful and inspirational British-Swiss writer and journalist with 2 books hitting The New York Times best sellers list. Born in Glasgow Scotland then relocated to London when he was young, Johann experienced some childhood trauma having suffered from being physically abused as child and his mother suffering from an illness. Starting his career as a journalist he won many awards such as Journalist of the year and was named by the Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people. Johann then went to onto being an author writing the worldwide known “Lost Connections” and “Chasing the Scream”. He also released a TED talk back in 2015 “Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong” which has now over 17 million views. This honest conversation lasted around 2 hours and we even went on into the evening off air. I genuinely think that this might be the most important podcast you choose to ignore. I’m not giving much away, but you will thank me after. Follow Johann: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/johann.hari Twitter - https://twitter.com/johannhari101 Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

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 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. The most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we feel so bad in the first place. We need to stop asking what's wrong with you and start asking what happened to you. If you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're going to feel like shit. It's not like I'm explaining quantum physics, right? And we've all had that experience where you crave a consumer object, you build up to it, you get it, you get home and you just feel flat. It's not the trauma that destroys you. It's the shame about the trauma.

And giving people ways to release that shame is an antidepressant. God, change is really possible. today we have a real treat for you this guest today johan hari is one of my all-time favorite ever podcast guests ever and i'm not saying that to blow smoke up his ass when i had the conversation with him and when i started reading his books many years ago, I can quite honestly say that no book I've ever read in my life has had more of a positive impact, a more transformative impact on the topics that matter most to my fulfillment and happiness than the work that Johan has done. He is a comedian on one hand. He's an incredible storyteller. He spends a decade writing his books. So you know the information he's going to share with you today is both profound, it is evidence-backed, and it is compelling, true, important, and everything

that our society at this point in time needs to hear. This could well be the most important podcast I've ever recorded. If you asked me if there was one podcast that I wish the world got to hear, it's definitely this one, above all of the other podcasts I've ever recorded. This is The Conversation. So without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself Johan it's uh it's a real pleasure to have you back on the podcast you are one of my all-time favorite guests top three I don't know the order but you're definitely up there these are the two I don't actually know but I'm really pleased everyone will know that I have not bribed you

since you don't need the money exactly there you go this is authentic i'm very happy but no i mean that and not just because of the conversation we had but because you changed my fundamental beliefs around depression mental health the importance of human connection and everything in between and that had a really fundamental positive impact on my life it's also you feature heavily in my book i've i talk about you on this podcast all the time so my you know the amount of times i've plugged so really what i brought you here today was to get the royalties from no but no but i do i talk about you on this podcast all the time so um give you an old bag of crisps and that's all you're getting that's why i wanted to get in the podcast, because, you know, you changed my life.

And I'm not saying that to blow smoke up your ass. I genuinely mean that with your book, Lost Connections. So the first question I have is like completely off track, but I've just finished writing my book, published it. It's all great and everything. You're onto your third, fourth book now? Yeah? Yeah. Talk to me about why you like writing books what is it about writing books why are you

doing that oh for me i write books because there's a question i want to answer for myself that i don't know the answer to at the start so we'd lost connections i wanted to there were for me there's always a core mystery that i want to understand right so we'd lost connections the core mystery was two really simple things. When the book came out, I was 40. All throughout my lifetime, depression and anxiety have increased in Britain, the US, across the world. I wanted to understand why, right?

Why is it that with each year that passes, more and more of us are finding it harder to get through the day? I wanted to understand it for a personal reason, which is that I had been really depressed myself. I had done everything I was told to do by my doctors and I remained depressed or chasing the screen but before that um I had a kind of core question which was you know we had a lot of addiction in my family one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to um and I wanted to understand

well what causes addiction and what can we actually do about it I wanted to understand well what causes addiction and what can we actually do about it I want to understand a personal level but also at a social level what we could do about it so for me I always start with a core question so a book I've been working on for the last 10 years that I'm sort of writing at the moment about something I have to be careful what I say about a series of crimes that have been happening in Las Vegas. For me, there's always a core question, a mystery. And then I'm like, okay, I want to take the reader on a journey as I try to unsolve this mystery. I try to solve this mystery for myself. Right. So, um, all of my books are long journeys where I, you know, for both books, I traveled more than 30, 30 000 miles went to a crazy

mixture of people and for me the best journeys are not where you find yourself and one goes oh you're on a journey to find yourself to me the best journey is where you find other people right so i think about the crazy mixture of people that i've got to know for these books who i love who are still you know important people to me from you know uh for the addiction book i think about chino harden who's a trans crack dealer in brooklyn he's one of the smartest people i've ever met uh rosalia retta hitman to the deadliest mexican drug cartel he's unfortunately not one of the smartest people i've ever met but uh you know or the lost connections are you know i think about these

people will probably talk about these people in berlin who transform who starting from a position of terrible depression, transformed their city and their country. I think about this couple, homeless couple I know very well in Vegas. So for me, it's always about finding people and solving mysteries. And I write to figure out, to try to understand the world and to figure out what we can do about the world, you know? So for me, I can't imagine writing a book where i felt i knew in advance of course i've got ideas when i start right i don't start as a blank slate but i can't imagine writing a book where i felt i knew in advance i was standing above the reader and going well reader you know i mean there are books that do that you know if you've been in

it i'm a journalist i'm not an expert right so if you've been an expert for 30 years on uh i just read a fantastic book about octopuses right if you guys spent 30 years studying octopuses he knows a shit ton about octopuses i'm very happy for him to stand above me and say let me tell you a load of crazy shit about octopuses that it is crazy shit right but uh that's great it's called other minds i really recommend that book um but i'm not that i'm not an expert so for me it's about the journey come on the journey with me come to all these different places come with me to a favela in rio come with me to the killing fields in mexico come with me to a gulag in vietnam let's go on the journey let's figure out what the fuck's going on and

of all the books and this is i know i can probably guess the response here they'll hold like i'll choose your favorite kid which one oh chasing scream i have a really easy answer to that because only because um so chasing scream is a book i wrote about the uh addiction and and the war on drugs and it's because it's the book that i've it sounds uh self-aggrandizing and wanky but it's the book that i've seen do the most good in the world it's a place where i've been to so many places where people have used that book and the things that to me the happiest moment in any book and the whole process of writing is when so i track down people i think are really interesting and important uh so to give an example there's a guy in vancouver called professor bruce alexander one of the most amazing human beings alive who did a

really important experiment that's transformed how we think about addiction called rat park i suspect we'll talk about it and bruce you know that experiment was known before my book and before my ted talks and stuff but as bruce says you know it got a huge boost from that and and and that evidence is now used was used in norway where they're just on the brink of decriminalizing all drugs um in all sorts of places in mexico i remember having a surreal conversation with some mexican politicians about it in all sorts of different places and to me the most exciting moment is when the people i've written about get in touch with me and say oh people are contacting me because of you because they've about me. And it's that moment where you feel

that you've been a conduit between someone who's doing something really important and people who needed to know it. And to me, that's like the blissful feeling, you know? So Chasing the Scream just because that's the book I've seen do the most work in the world. You know what I mean? So let's talk about Rat Park.

I read about this study numerous times, but I think it the world you know what i mean so let's talk about rat park i i read about this study numerous times but i think it's you know you probably talked about it before but i think it's so important and foundational for so many reasons and and speaks actually speaks a lot to lost connections as well in many respects um but i would love you to tell the story of rat park and exactly what it what it is you know rat park was for me i found it very challenging when i learned about rat park because i realized that all my life i've been misunderstanding some of the things i was seeing right in front of me so like i said we had addiction in my family we still have addiction in my family it's very difficult and when i started doing the research

for chasing the scream god 10 10 years ago exactly 10 years ago almost i am if you'd asked me let's say heroin addiction because i was close to me if you'd said to me johan what causes heroin addiction i would have looked at you like you were thick and i would have said well steven the clues in the name right yeah obviously heroin causes heroin addiction right we've been told this story for 100 years that's become totally part of our common sense it was definitely part of mine so we think we're sitting here in east london we think if we kidnap the next 20 people to walk past your flat in East London, and like a villain in a Saw movie, we injected them all with heroin every day for a month, at the end of that month, they'd all be heroin addicts for a simple reason. There's chemical

hooks in heroin that as you use it, your body starts to crave, you want more and more of them. And so at the end of that month, people would have this tremendous physical hunger for the chemical hooks right that's why we call it being hooked um and that's that's the story we have in our heads now that story is not completely wrong turns out it's a very small part of a much bigger picture and the first thing that i remember the first thing that alerted me to that was in my research. I was interviewing doctors and experts and it was explained to me, right? Here in Britain, if you and me step out into the street and we get hit,

you get hit by a truck, right? God forbid, terrible loss to the world. You will be taken to hospital. And if you say you broke your hip, you'd be given a lot of a drug called diamorphine, right?

Diamorphine is heroin. It's much better than the shit you'd buy just up the road from here on the street because it's medically pure heroin right and anyone watching this if you're if you're british and your nan's had a hip replacement operation your nan's taken a lot of heroin right now if what we think about addiction is right that it's caused primarily or entirely by exposure to the chemical hooks. What should be happening to all these people in British hospitals who've been given a lot of powerful heroin? Some of them should be leaving and trying to score on the streets. You should be meeting people in NA meetings who say, well, you know, I started, I had a hip placement.

This has been studied very carefully. It never happens, right? And I remember when I learned that, I was just just thinking the first person who told me that was dr gabble marty and i remember thinking saying to him gabble that can't be right how could you have a situation where you've got someone in a hospital bed they're using a shit ton of really powerful heroin they don't become addicted and you've got someone in the alleyway outside who you know is shooting up actually a weaker shittier form of the drug and they and they do become addicted how could that be and i only began to understand it when i went to vancouver and interviewed professor alexander professor

bruce alexander so bruce explained to me the story we've got in our heads that addiction is caused primarily or totally by the chemical hooks comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century they're really simple experiments um your viewers can try them at home if they're feeling a little bit sadistic and bored in covid times right heroin is it no they don't have to try it you take a rat you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles one is just water the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine if you do that the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself quite quickly within a week or two right so there you go that's that's our story that's that's how we think it works but in the 70s professor alexander was working where i met him on the downtown east

side of vancouver which has a lot of he's working with a lot of people with very bad addiction problems and he starts to look at these experiments and he says, well, hang on a minute. You put the rat alone in an empty cage. It's got nothing that makes life worth living for rats. All it's got is the drugs. What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats, right? They've got loads of friends. They've got loads of cheese. They've got loads of coloured balls, they can have loads of sex. Everything that makes life worth living for rats is there in Rat Park. And they've got both the water bottles, the drugged water and the normal water. This is the fascinating thing.

In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They don't use it very much. None of them use it compulsively. none of them overdose so you go from almost 100% compulsive use and overdose when rats don't have the things that make life worth living to no compulsive use and overdose when they do have the things that make life worth living and obviously we are not rats we're more complicated but the core of this and there's lots of human evidence that i can talk about but what what this taught me and a lot of the other evidence taught me is the core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be and that actually makes you realize why our approach of punishing people with addiction

problems is such a disaster actually makes the problem worse the opposite of addiction is not sobriety although that is valuable for some people the opposite of addiction is connection and we're living through a great example of that right now just just i think two days ago the government announced massive increase in alcohol related deaths massive increase in other drug related deaths in britain and in the united states why would that be right we we i think rightly in order to suppress the virus which we had to do we have had to become more disconnected and that has caused an increase in addiction now that tells us something about what was causing addiction all along and what the paths out of addiction are so i thought it was a

very long answer perfect answer and obviously with the with that in mind you know covid has um accelerated the um adoption of remote working which i you know there's been a lot of debate around that whether it's a good thing or a bad thing my stance is pretty clear i think it's an awful thing and i say this because you know after reading your book i understand that um connection organic connection in our lives is has this like has been on this sort of macro decline and one of the like institutions in our lives that has held that together has been the office so like most of my friends come from working in a big office you know if i think about where 90 of my connection comes it came from the office and to think especially as a young person who hasn't built a family or kids whatever

that that is also now going to move to a screen i think is a fucking terrible idea to be honest um i wanted to get your your thoughts on that because I think people think of the convenience factors, but we thought of the convenience factors when we created social media and dating apps and all these other things, but the unintended consequences of the convenience tends to be stripping us of connection once again. And what do we have left?

Everything else is on a screen now. So if you take away work from me, I'm like i probably wouldn't see anybody like porn you know i can do that online now dating swipe swipe swipe so it feels like you know the last institution of connection is being uh is at war i think that's really interesting i think there's a there's two things i was thinking about as you talked about that steven one is what a lot of us get out the web the relationship between social media and social life is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex and you mentioned porn because i'm not anti

porn porn's going to meet a basic itch right um but no one you know spends an hour looking at porn and feels like satisfied and seen speak speak for yourself not not the way you do after you've had sex right unless you're having a very bad sex i've got a virtual reality headset there's definitely a satisfaction to looking at porn but there's not it's not as satisfying as sex right of course unless something's gone very wrong and we can talk about that when the cameras are off you know i'm very happy to have that conversation but um in a similar sort of way you know it's not that that these a lot of these technologies are attempts our unhealthy relationship with the technology itself is neutral a lot of our relationships with these technologies are attempts to fill holes in the way we're living right fill

holes it sounds a bit unfortunate can we be talking about porn but you know what i mean um the the and even if you just think about when the internet arrived right so internet arrives for most of us the early 2000s or 1999 i got my first email address in 2000 and a lot of the things that we're talking about had already been going rising for a long time big increase in loneliness before that and what happens is the internet arrives and it looks a lot like the things we've lost right you've lost friends here's facebook friends you've lost status in the economy here's some status updates but they're not the things we've lost it's like giving porn to a sex-starved man in prison or something it's not the thing you've lost right i mean it'll meet a certain basic hitch but it's not the thing

you've lost and if interacting through screens met our basic needs as human beings we would all be very happy zooming all the time right sitting on zoom would be as good as sitting in the office right you know and people often say to me why do you travel to so many places to do all these interviews why don't you just talk to them on on skype or zoom and i would say because you get 10 of the experience through a screen people don't open up to you they don't feel they've met you i wouldn't remember all these people i'm describing to you i can picture them so vividly people i've interviewed on zoom i can never remember even what they look like right so these forms of interaction they've got a place

you know look it's better to have zoom in a time of a plague than the nothing which would have been the alternative in in the context of covid but it's not it doesn't we evolved to interact to look into each other's eyes to see each other to interact in three dimensions we did not evolve to interact through screens it doesn't meet our deeper needs that is why i've never done this podcast over zoom despite the temptation yeah so we we started doing it and just we started we upped everything in december and really started going for it you know build the team and all these things and uh that's obviously in the middle of the pandemic there's flight restrictions no one can fly in and we've got the most amazing guests in the world that want to come on via zoom and i just said i do this because i enjoy it right that's like the fundamental reason that's the reason why

i'll keep doing it for the next 10 years and i would not enjoy doing it over zoom it would become like a job to me because i like meeting people and obviously the the conversation we have now you can feel the emotion you can you can hear the you know you can see it my eyes and you can see at certain points you know you can feel what i'm thinking and that unlocks for a podcast that's meant to be a little bit more um deeper it unlocks that depth we've had that's meant to be a little bit more deeper. It unlocks that depth. We've had, you know, tears and we've had all sorts. And I formed real friendships from it.

So many, pretty much all of my guests. I feel like I'm friends with it straight after because of the vulnerability. So I just made a rule that I would not do anything over Zoom. And when people ask me to go on their podcast over Zoom, the answer is the same. I don't want to do it.

And I, with my team, my office is actually downstairs. downstairs so we come in every day there's one thing about work i think everything you said is totally true so there's one thing about work i would say which is a slightly different point uh but relates to remote working which is so uh and we can talk about some more detail if you want but just for the purposes of this part of the conversation there's a lot of evidence that um lacking control over your work makes you depressed right i'm sure we could talk about that more um one thing that people do benefit from i think from zoom not actually funny interestingly not so much in covid times as evidence people are working more hours under covid than they were normally partly because zoom meetings take so damn long um but some people i think as we come

out of this which we will as we come out of covid um the pandemic some people i think would like to have more leeway about when they are in the office oh yeah and would like to and i think it's interesting when you look at the research on this it's not so much the ratio is it 20 at think it's interesting, when you look at the research on this, it's not so much the ratio, is it 20% at home? It's whether you can choose. It's the amount of agency you have. So in that sense, I think that's where, and of course we didn't have any choice about COVID, but that's the bit where I would say we'll probably have some value going forward. A hundred percent agree.

I actually wrote about motivation, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation and one of the big factors is or i'll feel people feeling motivated in work is as you say autonomy feeling like you have control of your work and and that's the that's also the balance that i've always tried to create at my companies which is um one where you can book um as much time off as you need without having to put like tell a computer and ask it for approval and there is no bitchiness there is no one that's going to look at you the next day and be like oh you've had a couple of days off and giving people the same level of freedom that i've always had has been super important um but at the same time like i'm i've been super clear even though it's an unpopular narrative right now i think this this remote working future where, you know, these companies are coming out and doing all their

virtue signaling, you know, whatever, I think it's a load of nonsense. And I think they're actually harming people by supporting the idea that we're going to all, especially younger people, live our lives through screens. And I think that people are going to figure this out. I actually think people have overestimated the stickiness of remote working. Because the narrative is, companies that offer remote working will attract all the staff, all the good talent, so you're going to have to do it. But I actually think companies that are able to offer community, and much more than work, which for me is what a good job is, much more it's the friends you make, the experiences you have, the challenges you're driving towards together, the worthwhile, it's like the you make, the experiences you have, the challenges you're driving towards together,

the worthwhile, it's like the worthwhile striving for a challenge with a group of people you love. For me, that's like become my, the reason for why I live. I managed to get it down to those three things, which is people I love, worthwhile, challenge, right? And I don't know how that links into your work, but that's, I think the most foundational I've managed to get with like my reason to live is like or at least my reason to work

so if i think what you've gone to a really important um one of the most important things that relates to depression anxiety in your own life which is meaning right so there's all this i mean it's funny exactly a year a little bit more than a year ago, a year and a month ago, I was in Moscow. It was the last thing I did before I got COVID. It was grim. I interviewed this fascinating Russian psychologist called Dmitry Leontiev. And his, so his dad had actually been a super famous, so his grandfather had been an incredibly famous psychologist, but he's a very distinguished psychologist as well and um i remember him saying like um british and american people british and american philosophy if you go back it's very often about happiness the belief that you should try to make yourself happy right obviously it's in constitution the pursuit of happiness right and he said when russians hear

that we just laugh right that's a child's game trying to chase happiness that's the child's philosophy so you can't you don't have that much say about whether happiness will come and go he said what life is about is not happiness but meaning right the pursuit of meaning and actually when you've got meaning in your life you can tolerate a lot of unhappiness and you even think about something as simple as uh a dentist or a big example a dentist drill right so if i now took out a drill opened your mouth and you know jabbed it into your teeth and it was agony because that would have no meaning in the

context between us it would be suffering it would literally be torture it would cause you terrible suffering and you'd be traumatized for ages but you've been to the dentist and they've done that right and it didn't traumatize you most likely some people do get traumatized dentist that's a different story it's rare um why because it had a meaning right you could tolerate the pain because there was because it was for a purpose oh right if i don't tolerate this pain my teeth are going to get fucked up right um it's worthwhile and i think there's one of the things that's a big a big driver of depression anxiety it's one of actually it was one of the two hardest causes of depression and anxiety that i wrote about in lost connections for me to it was the one one that was most chat one of the two hardest causes of depression and anxiety that I wrote about in Lost Connections for me to, it was the one that was most, one of the two that was most challenging for me

was this crisis of meaning. So for thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're going to feel like shit, right? It's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that is basically what he said, right? But weirdly, nobody had ever scientifically, I'm looking into, is this true? How do we know? No one had actually scientifically investigated this until an amazing man I got to know named Professor Tim Kasser, who did an incredible amount of, spent 35 years researching these questions. He discovered loads of things, but I think for what we're talking about, there's two in particular. Firstly, he discovered, exactly as the philosophers warned, if you think life is

about money and status and showing off, all the values you get from advertising, Instagram, everything like them, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by a significant amount. And secondly, he discovered, as a society, as a culture, we have become much more driven by these junk values, right right they've been rising all throughout my lifetime your lifetime and and i was talking about well why is that right and there's many reasons that i go through but why does that make us feel so bad um a key reason i think is just it trains us to look for happiness in all the wrong places, right? You know, your technical crew know, everyone knows, everyone watching this knows, you're not going to lie on your deathbed

and think about all the likes you got on Instagram, right? You're going to think about moments of love and meaning and connection. But as Professor Kasser put it to me, we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life, right? We live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life right we live in a machine where we are bombarded more 18 month old children know what the mcdonald's m means than know their own last name right so from the moment you're born you are trained to think if you don't feel good there's a solution for that work harder buy shit display it on instagram to make people go omg so jealous right that is the script in our society and it's it's like kfc for the soul right you're not going to find happiness there but the more meaningful values are lying just beneath the surface right nothing i just said i mean it's almost like a hallmark card at the level of banality everyone knows that at some level

and yet we don't live by it and this is true of a lot of things i learned for lost connections it's not like i'm explaining quantum physics right it's not like i'm not that i could do that it's not like i'm explaining i don't know tom skis linguistics or something these are things at some level we all know but we live in a machine like professor casser put it we live in a machine that has taught us to neglect to mistrust our own instincts about what will give us a good life and to and to pursue um other things instead do you know what i mean does that make sense of course it makes fucking sense to me of course it makes sense do you feel but i really feel the reason it was

challenging is because i could see how much of my own life was driven by these junk bags i was never a materialistic person. I was never, I was once nominated for an award as the worst dressed gay man in Britain. So I was never like a kind of material. No, I was beaten by David Furnish, who I've always thought was very well dressed.

So that shows how much I know. But, you know, a big part, not, it was never like, I was never like Trump. It was never a hundred percent,

but a big part of my life was driven by trying to think about how people perceive me managing people's expectations does it still yeah of course it's still a part of my character but it's a radically smaller part of my personality than it was uh 15 years ago because i was thinking as you're saying that i was just thinking i was thinking this is also true but again the question posed my mind was how would i get out of the machine when so much of the things i enjoy keep me within the machine so you know i could i could abscond and go to bali and go and live on a beach and just you surround myself with a couple of friends and you give up my louis vuitton shoes i don't have louis vuitton shoes but you get friends and you give up my Louis Vuitton shoes. I don't have Louis Vuitton shoes,

but you get what I mean. Give up my Lamborghini, which I also don't have. And I could escape. But much of the joy of my life comes from doing things like this, having conversations with people like you, which means that I have to live in London. And then to promote this,

I'm going to have to use Instagram and social media. And then I'm going to get a little pat on the back from the algorithm if it's good or bad. And so in the pursuit of some of my intrinsic joy and goals i i've played with this a lot i i i'm i'm putting myself in the machine and i can't see another way to live the best so i say to myself the best you could probably do steve is live within the machine but just live much more consciously know that you're in the machine and it's the minute that you don't know you're in the machine, that the machine becomes your puppet master. And then I'll start fucking buying Louis Vuitton again.

So it's funny. There's a story of things you're saying Louis Vuitton, because I once a party met Calvin Klein. And until that moment, I thought Calvin Klein was a fictional character. So someone said, Oh, this is Calvin Klein.

I almost said, Oh, like the clothes. And then I was like, Oh, right. Is this like, it was, it was like

suddenly meeting like Ronald McDonald or something but I am gap yeah I think he thought I was an exactly like oh really well I'm Colonel Sanders exactly um I think he thought I was an absolute twat but um but no the the um so I think Tim Kasser discovered two answers to your actually lots of answers but it's two specific things that he discovered that i think really help answer your question so and they operate at different levels so what can we do about the fact we live in the machine there's two things there's one thing that's going to sound very big and is very big which is we can dismantle the machine the machine was created by human beings and it can be dismantled and again i went to places that have started that sao paulo in brazil

uh city was full of advertising it was doing people's heads in they banned outdoor advertising people felt much better do you remember the campaign that happened here when was it it's in the books it must have been at least four years ago five years ago maybe there was a campaign on the tube skinny t no this was the yeah exactly so if you don't remember there were it was a picture of um super ripped guy and a super lean woman and it said are you beach body ready right and it was an advert for some i'm so out of touch with so i don't know but i don't want to plug them okay don't plug these fuckers so what was it a protein shake it was like a protein a powder right right right you see i'm so unhealthy i don't even know what that powder would conceive of what you would do with that

powder except snort it which i assume is not what you did but anyway and siddy khan just banned it just said you know what this makes me feel like shit it's got an insidious vile message which is if you don't look like these people i.e if you're like 99.99% of the population you're not fit to go to the beach just banned it there was a campaign to vandalize that poster which uh people vandalized it just with the slogan advertising shits in your head so that was a great slogan so you can do a political thing we don't have to allow all this stuff right um and we can build up to that in all sorts of ways smaller steps and one is a more personal one and that's something

i now do i have a group of friends we talk you know once every couple of weeks we talk about okay what are the times where we've been tempted by bullshit you know like uh we had the conversation the other day and one of my friends said you know oh she'd got retweeted by some famous person and it lifted her mood for five minutes and then she was like i need more i need more i need more and then we're like okay but did you write that day she's writer she said no no it distracted me i didn't write and we're like okay but and of course you only had to say it to her oh yeah that's the thing that gives my life meaning that's the moments when i feel flow not the sugar high of you know um i've tried to remember who it was it was someone really famous i've tried it was um uh so just having these so

i would say and those things are complimentary by the way when we have those conversations with the among ourselves it makes us feel more powerful to take on the aspects of the machine that are fucking us up as well what you've described is like a counterbalance right because you've got the machine whispering in your ear every day every time you log on social media walk down the street look at the internet look at a newspaper and it's saying bye louis vuitton motherfucker and then what you've described there is just by having someone in your ear once in a while going, don't buy Louis Vuitton, live your life for, you know, intrinsic, your intrinsic values, you know, things that actually matter.

It acts as a bit of a counterbalance. And it's so true because I know this stuff, right? Done a lot of reading about it. Your book really helped me understand it. Lots of other books. I've, you know, you talked about Professor Tim Kasser, read his writings after you wrote about it in your book. I know this stuff yet. Once every quarter, I'll pop up in the WhatsApp group with Dom and Sophie

and I'll go, about a lamborghini and they'll and they'll they'll respond to me i mean dom goes fucking get it because he's a he's a bad egg but um he's like you might as well no but um but my all it takes is one of my good friends to go to me but why do you need that and i go yeah of course you're right but this is what kasa puts it really well i remember him saying it to me we all have a need intrinsic values but intrinsic values are very fragile yeah and they can be very easily hijacked by signaling around us which is why you're right we need to counterbalance it we also need to actually get less of this bullshit pumped out right and and that's a social thing that we can fight for right there's all sorts of there are countries that regulate these things sao paulo banned outdoor advertising there's all

sorts of things we can do we but also um it's not just that we're bombarded with the advertising externally we then police that among ourselves right when i mean when i was a kid and people were obsessed with nike sneakers and i was a kind of fat kid who sat in the corner reading i didn't give a shit about um uh basketball and yet i wanted these things right you know why did i and it wasn't it partly was exposure to advertising but actually it was more um the way we police it among ourselves so once you set and train those values people then police among themselves so that's about how do we undo that and it's partly about saying to people how does this really make you feel right there are very occasionally you will meet an extremely

materialistic person who will tell you donald trump would be a good example right who will tell you this makes me feel good and yet you look at them and you see that they are achingly unhappy, right? I've rarely seen a more unhappy person than Donald Trump. So you can see one of the dangers of these values is, one of the reasons they make us feel so bad, is that those values can then pollute your relationships. When you measure it scientifically people have high levels of junk value what called extrinsic values is the scientific term people have high

levels of extrinsic values junk values have less successful relationships that break up more often because relationships where you value the other person for very superficial external things like you know do other men feel jealous when they see me with this person um those aren't good relationships right i've been in uh so many of them and you were nodding very i thought yeah no it's just so true yeah no it is and um you talked about how you know there's the fear one of the reasons why people are less happy in these relationships is the fear that this person would leave if i lost my money or my looks whatever and then you alluded to the point that i was thinking most about which is um you formed your connection with them based on something basically extrinsic something superficial so you have these like surface level connections

and then your life with that person you don't your psychological needs don't get met because you don't have the you know in my case like an intellectual connection with them you can't talk about the things you want to talk about you haven't formed that basis on a deeper level but then i just wanted to this is if this was a confession box here's what i would say in the same way that as a young 28 year old guy who's been successful um uh you know i guess that word in my ear that just says buy a lamb bikini like a little kermit every three months i also get in the same year from the same little fucking evil kermit says to me there's that hot girl who's completely i don't know i don't want to get cancelled because i've got some stuff coming up in the media but there's that hot girl who has made herself look um beautiful on the outside

i think there's a distinction steven right like there's nothing wrong with sexual attraction in front of people we don't want to counterpose a world of junk values versus puritanism and joyless do you know what i mean it's like sexual attraction is one of the great joys of life yeah i was just trying to i don't want to i don't want to say it in uh in the words though there is that person who offers nothing more than um just they look good they offer nothing more and the same it says go on steve go for it and every time i've gone for it it doesn't take me very long to be miserable in that situation and then on the other hand i've got these other this other person in my life who is the antithesis of that,

who is all substance. And something in my life tries to sway me back to the junk people. I think there's a thing about, in several ways, I think what you just said is really important, because it's not like there's this category of saintly, benign human beings who are immune to all these temptations and you know we need to be more like that every human being is a conflict of intrinsic and extrinsic values and extrinsic values are a certain measure of them is healthy right desire for external success is nothing to be ashamed of uh finding people hot and wanting to have sex with hot people is perfectly is something we all have right at the expense of a meaningful relationship it's like a balanced diet

isn't it you want to have um you want these you want these things to exist in a balance with all your other motivations but what i don't think what definitely doesn't work is because i tried this myself i remember being quite cut off from my own um status seeking behavior and sort of not owning it and i think actually when you just acknowledge oh yeah this is part of me this is a part this will always be a part of me there are some pleasures to be found there it's not it's not barren right um but you always want that to be one part of a much bigger picture then you can have a healthy conversation with yourself and with other people about these aspects of yourself that's very different to and especially if you live in a society and culture

that is all about getting you to be that one thing and you know presenting as images of success i mean you and i have both met lots of rich people and i've got to say they are the most miserable bastards oh you're one of the very few cheerful rich people i know right that if i think about so there's a handful who are happy and they're almost always uh i'm trying to think of i can well one person who inherited it so i don't count that um some artistic people like a few people who pursued their artistic dream like elton john and became really rich he's happy after a fucking rocky journey as everyone knows and the machine that's fucking us all up do you believe that because it's making us all care it's conditioning

us to care more about extrinsic values and these like you know all this nonsense do you think it's making us all care. It's conditioning us to care more about extrinsic values and these like, you know, all this nonsense. Do you think it's hindering our chances of forming meaningful romantic connections? I, just from what I've grown up in this Instagram era where it looks like everybody's getting prettier on the outside and everyone's getting uglier on the inside because Instagram and the machine have told us

that this is what society values. How big is your X? How white is your Y? How perfect is your hair? You know? So it feels like life has gone, okay, the game, everybody get in, get in, everybody get in. Okay. You're going to, this is how you win. You'll get the most points in life. If you have the best hair, the best eyes, the best boobs you know biggest six-pack chest that is the game do you understand everyone's going yeah okay okay and if you see someone that has that as well pat them on the back and we go okay cool and we've had 10 years of this black mirror experiment so all of our values have gone you know extrinsic and junk values and i think

we're struggling to form meaningful connections because the machine told us that didn't matter. You know, it's funny, after the book came out, a group of people I did not expect to... So I was absolutely inundated on... It was particularly after my TED Talk about it came out, inundated on Instagram by massive instagram um started we call it stars yeah influences this word um it's so good you don't know that word like really people with some of the biggest instagram followings in the world

messaging me saying you're so right i feel like and i remember getting a message i won't say who it was but from someone who was a big instagram influencer messaging me saying i'm so depressed i don't want to get out of bed in the morning my life is terrible i didn't know who this person was so i clicked on their instagram page and literally five minutes before sending me that message and five minutes after yeah she had done a kind of glowing my life is you know i can't remember the words but you know a kind of my life is so great um bragging and and and i really yes but the thing i would say that is so important about this it's a funny thing to say i know it might sound odd but the widespread nature of our depression anxiety and addiction crises in one sense although terribly painful and horrible and excruciating and i've been there is a positive thing because

the system is not working for more and more people and it becomes harder to defend this system and these values when it makes everyone feel like shit right at some point you have to go you know what this ain't fucking working for us so think about where we are i lived here as i said for 10 years right just not far from here so tower hamlets you know i mean the tower hamlets are some of the i think if i remember rightly when i lived here it was i think it was the constituency in england that had the highest level of poverty, right? So there's a lot of distress in Tower Hamlets, right? I mean, and by the way, you can be distressed and not be poor. A lot of this distress is happening in middle class and wealthy areas. But think about where we are. Look for signs of distress, connect with the people who are

distressed, fight together with them for something better. And of course, that has to be something people do. I can't tell people what the signs of distress around them are and they'll be different in you know um a coastal village in kent to you know glasgow where my mom's from to the isle of sky different there'll be certain shared factors but look for the signs of distress i mean you're spoiled for signs of distress they're all fucking around us right i mean you think about um the number of people who drank themselves to death in britain last year and how much that went up as we said and then meet them where they are because god change is really possible right and i think about that in my own life you know i'm gay right i didn't hear the concept of gay marriage till i was 20 and my friend andrew sull Sullivan wrote the first book advocating it, right?

Literally, I did never cross my mind. I remember the first person I was ever in love with when I was 16. I never had a sense of a future. Didn't even occur to me that we could get married. It never even entered my head, right? You think about the scale of that transformation. I remember just before COVID, I was on the tube. And there were these two girls

who can't have been more than 16 and they were making out and i was staring at them and i think they thought i was like an elderly person and i had to go oh no no i'm gay i'm just really this is really moved this could never have happened when i was your age like i said they just thought i was like a mental person but the the how did that happen right it happened because ordinary people came out they appealed to other people around them lots of heterosexual people saw that it was pointless to be cruel to gay people and they could be loving and accepting instead and that change happened unbelievable you basically got 2 000 years of gay people being horrifically persecuted and then like 70 years of this from person from less than 70 years 60 years from send them to prison to yay they can get married right so absolutely change on when we talk about things

like oh you know we're trapped in this machine that's making us depressed right that can sound like such a big thing right we had 2 000 years of homophobia right and i'm not saying we've completely overcome it obviously but there's stunning progress right the things we're talking about are much more recent inventions than homophobia right like infinitely more recent and homophobia terrible though it was only ever affected a small part of the population the things we're talking about fuck make they don't make everyone depressed but they make everyone less happy than they could be so these are you know these are absolutely things that can be challenged they can be challenged in individuals lives and we can deal with them at the political level as well it requires a transformation in consciousness, which is happening.

And we can talk about addiction if you want in places that solved, that made extraordinary changes in that and massively reduced their addiction deaths that I went to. But we need to understand this differently and we need to listen to our pain. We need to stop insulting our depression, anxiety and addictions by saying they're a sign of weakness or madness or purely biological although there are some biological contributions and start listening to them listen to the signal as a society and as a culture because it is telling us where we need to go and what we need to do let Let me talk about you. Okay. And your connections.

Yeah. And your romantic connections, your friendships and all of those things. Sometimes I find it fascinating that obviously, since, you know, people can know a lot of stuff, but applying it to oneself is challenging. I've, you know, some of my favourite guests that I've sat here with, I'm thinking about Jamal Kreshi,

who I sat here with, who's like a, you know, one could call him like a motivational coach, you know probably doesn't quite characterize who he is but my last question to him was um are you good at taking your own advice he went absolutely fucking not he was like i'm the least motivated motivational coach in the world so my question to you is how are you doing with your connections in your life in your mental health and all of these questions i think people are often most articulate about the things they most struggle with right so and it's interesting because sometimes that's presented as hypocrite i'll give you an example there's a left-wing i won't say who but there's a left-wing politician i know who is incredibly articulate about greed and how

terrible it is and is incredibly greedy right now you could look at that and go that's hypocrisy and of course at one level a kind of boring the obvious level it is but to me what's much more interesting is that is a person who's internally struggling against his own flaw right that is a person who has this force within him and is genuinely trying it's so articulate because he's wrestling with it all the time. And so I think in a sense, taking your own advice, it's sort of like the fact that you needed to articulate the advice suggests that internal struggle.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I think about, um, EM Forster, one of my favorite writers who famously said only connect, who was someone who really struggled with connection. Um, partly because he was a gay man of a much earlier generation who uh well his connections his loving romantic

connections were a crime right so he was really there were other ways in which he struggled with with connection as well so in terms of myself um i was always very lucky with friendships um all my life i've had amazing friendships for me um you know i said before there were two causes of two cause out the nine causes of depression anxiety right back in the book there were two that i struggled with a lot and this so one was junk values the other this was a hard journey for me in the book i learned about this through a story of a scientist discovered it who i met and to explain i think people understand it better if they know the story even though for like a minute you're going to think what the fuck has this got to do with what he just said but just bear with me so in the mid

1980s there was a doctor called vincent felitti who um was approached he was in san diego in california and he was approached by kaiser permanente who are one of the big not-for-profit medical providers in california and they came to him and were like we've got a problem and we need your help and the problem was um obesity obesity was massive rising hugely exploded since then but it was rising and rising and they were like look nothing we're doing is working we give people diet advice we talk to them about nutrition we even give some of the personal trainers nothing is working and so they just gave him a quite big budget and said just do blue skies research work with really obese people just figure out what the hell we can do so dr felitti starts working with uh 250 severely

obese people people who weighed more than 400 pounds so people who were really you know in terrible danger and he's working on this thing he's interviewing them he's thinking what can i do and one day he's talking to one of them and he has an idea which sounds like it actually is a quite stupid idea he said what would happen if really obese people literally stopped eating and we gave them like i know vitamin c shots so they didn't get scurvy we gave them like vitamin shots would they just burn through the fat supplies in their body and get down to a normal weight so with a shit ton of medical supervision they try it and incredibly at first it worked there's a woman i'll call her susan that's not a real name um who went down from being more than 400 pounds to 138 pounds it's amazing right and people are like how can this be what's going on

uh and her family are like you've saved her life and then one day something happened they didn't expect susan cracked she went to kfc actually wasn't kfc that's me projecting wherever it was uh some fast food place she starts obsessively eating and pretty soon she's back at a dangerous weight not where she'd been but a dangerous weight and dr felicity called her in he's like susan Susan, what happened? She said, I don't know. I don't know. And he's kind of dumbfounded. And he says, well, tell me about the day that you cracked. Did anything happen that day? It turned out something had happened that day that had never happened to Susan. She was in a bar and a man came up to her and hit on her, not in a nastyatory way in a nice way and she felt really freaked out and she goes and she starts eating and he's like huh well what's

the significance could this be significant and then he said to her so he'd never asked his patients before he said susan when did you start to put on your weight in her case it was when she was 11 and he said to her well did anything happen that year that didn't happen any other year? Anything when you were 11? She said, she looked down, she said, yeah, that's when my grandfather started to rape me. Dr. Folletti interviewed everyone in the program, and he discovered that more than 60% of them are put on their extreme weight in the aftermath of being sexually abused or assaulted. And he's thinking, what's that about what

and Susan explained it to him really well she said overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be this thing that seems so destructive and of course it's bad for you to be severely obese was performing a positive function for all these people it was protecting them from sexual attention right and And just like oh, this is this kind of interesting So he but this is a small group people. It's 250 people. It's not much cotton to draw big scientific conclusions based on this So dr. Felitti goes to the CDC Center for Disease Control who fund a lot medical research and he got funding to do a massive study everyone who came to kaiser permanente in san diego so more than 17 000 people for a whole year no matter what for headaches schizophrenia broken leg anything got given two questionnaires first part

says did you have any of these bad experiences when you were a kid things like sexual abuse severe neglect that kind of thing second part said um have you had any of these problems as an adult it was initially only going to say obesity but and this is where it comes to our story at the last minute they had loads of other things like depression addiction suicide attempts and at first when they added up the figures people they were like no there's been a mistake add it up again because the figures were so extreme for every category of childhood trauma that you experienced you were two to four times more likely to be depressed obese and addicted but when you got into the multiple categories the figures just went crazy if you had had six categories of childhood trauma you were 3100 percent more likely to have attempted suicide and 4600 more likely to have an injecting

drug problem i mean these are just insane figures you very rarely get that in science right and i remember dr felitti saying to me like that that he realized it was like there had been a house fire and we had been focusing on dealing with the smoke not on dealing with the fire right dr robert ander who's one of the other scientists who worked on it said to me he realized when you see things like obesity depression addiction we need to stop asking what's wrong with you and start asking what happened to you but it's kind of difficult to talk about this but so dr felicity's a super nice guy right if you met him you'd really like him when i interviewed him he was like 81 so this is ages ago um lovely good decent admirable man

and when i interviewed him in san diego the first time I was sitting with him and I was getting angrier and angrier and I actually ended the interview early because I was getting so angry and I remember walking to the beach in San Diego walking around thinking what the fuck is this about why am I so angry with this lovely old man who's done this amazing research that's helped so many people and I remember thinking so when I was a child i'd experienced some very extreme things from an adult in my life and i had i didn't want to think about that i didn't want to uh i didn't want to think about that in relation to the depression i had experienced i didn't i didn't want to give this individual power over me now um but one of the reasons i'm glad

that i went back and carried on talking to him is because of what dr felicity discovered next which i think is really relevant to what you're asking so obviously they'd asked all these people who came for health care about their childhood trauma so suddenly they've got all this data so they said to people's g, don't call them back in. But next time they come in, look at the childhood trauma thing. And if they've experienced childhood trauma, say to them something like this. I see that when you were a child, you were sexually abused or whatever it was. I'm really sorry that happened. That should never have happened to you. You should have been protected. That was a failing. Would you like to talk about it?

And 40% of people did not want to talk about it but 60 of people did and they wanted to talk about it on average for five minutes and then it was randomly assigned some of them were told we can go to a therapist to talk about it more what they found was just five minutes of an authority figure saying i'm so sorry this should never have happened to you that alone led to a significant fall in depression and anxiety and people who refer to a therapist had an even bigger fall and what this shows it fits with a whole load of other evidence from people like professor steve coles at ucla professor james pennebaker at florida state university is it's not the trauma that destroys you it's the shame about the trauma and giving people ways to release that shame is an antidepressant so for me

learning that and it's one of the reasons i made myself put it in the book and talk about it is so very often people who survive abuse as children internalize the voice of the abuser right almost invariably the abuser says you made me do this you're a bad person you made me do this right and so although of course there was never any point in my adult life where i thought that was a rational you know there's never a point where i would have if you you know if someone had told me they had been abused and told me negative things they've been told, I would never have thought, yeah, the abuser was right, obviously. I didn't reckon with that internalization in my own life. And I think it meant that a lot of the time, although I always had great friendships with romantic relationships, I would often cauterize

them at a certain point because I didn't feel at that time that I deserved to be loved. I didn't feel that I deserved to be treated well. So it would mean that sometimes I would get into relationships with people who didn't treat me well because i'd internalized so many of these negative uh and destructive and untrue ideas and and the process of thinking that through obviously i had a therapist as well the process of thinking that through and releasing that shame made me much more open to you know love you know, because I didn't, it was possible to overcome that. Does that make sense, Stephen? Are you still on that journey? Oh yeah.

And I think anyone who, you know, how would I put it? Yeah, of course, of course. And through all of your work and your writing, you've, you know, you've highlighted to the world, but but also clearly to yourself the importance of that um of romantic connections well it comes right back to where we started isn't it why do i write to to understand to understand things i didn't understand at the start to go on a journey there are things i want to understand um and and sometimes they're big things right um and sometimes they're very personal things and sometimes they're both uh and and then to track down okay who who knows a load about this

who's found interesting things out about this and go and sit with them and kind of pester them and keep going back year after year until i feel i understand it and i feel now i understand it and it and i gotta say it's it's quite frustrating watching some of the covid debate at the moment because um you know there's been this big increase in addiction depression and a lot of the way it's taught even by super well-meaning admirable people as almost everyone in this debate is so many of the ways in which people are encouraged to think they are helping people with the best will in the world and with a good heart often strip these things of meaning so there's a thing for example that very well meaning people say

which is so depression is just like a you know depression is a disease like diabetes you know you wouldn't shame someone for having a broken leg they're absolutely right that depressed anxious people should never be stigmatized but actually that that is not the way you remove stigma you don't remove i mean no one ever doubted that leprosy and aids were biological phenomena and you might notice there was a damn lot of stigma about them right saying something is biological and it's true there are some biological components we can talk about if you want some biological contributions your genes can make you more vulnerable to these things so they do not write your destiny um but but saying something is

biological does not actually the some good scientific evidence it increases stigma because it makes people think god those people are really different to me they're like a different species what actually undoes stigma is to say although there are some biological contributions any of us would feel like this in this situation actually that your pain makes sense you know there's a moment that really all this really fell into place for me as well as one of the two totally revelatory moments for me in the research for lost connections i went to interview this south african psychiatrist called derrick summerfield and he told me this story about something that happened to him so derrick was in cambodia in 2001 when they first introduced

chemical antidepressants for people in cambodia they'd never had them in the country before and the local doctors the the cambodians were like, what are they? They didn't know what they were, what are antidepressants? And Derek explained and they said to him, oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants. And he was like, well, what do you mean? He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy, like ginkgo biloba or something.

Instead, they told him a story. They had 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 an artificial limb they're good at that in cambodia because they've got a lot of landmines and after a while several months the guy goes back to work right so he goes back to work in the rice fields and but apparently it's super painful to work underwater when you've got an artificial limb and i'm guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up the guy started to cry all day after a while he just wouldn't get out of bed he developed what we would call classic depression

right this is when the cambodian doctor said well you know that's when we gave him an antidepressant and derek said what was it they explained that they went and sat with him they listened to him they realized that his pain made sense you only had to talk to him for five minutes to realize why he felt so shit one of the doctors said well we realized if we bought this guy a cow he could become a dairy farmer he wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone. It never came back. They said to Derek, so you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right? Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that it's primarily or entirely a malfunction in your brain, that sounds a bad joke i went to my doctor for an antidepressant

she gave me a cow but what those cambodian doctors knew intuitively from this individual unscientific anecdote is what the leading medical body in the whole world the world health organization has been trying to tell us for years right your pain makes sense if you're depressed if you're anxious you're not weak you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the main a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is practical help and support to get those needs met. So one of the things we have to be asking as a society and culture is, what's the cow for the things that are screwing us up, right? What's the cow for the things that are screwing us up right what's the cow for the things that are making us depressed instead of seeing depression as a malfunction we've got to see it as a signal

that's telling us the person is distressed and and has unmet needs and and together help them get those because what the doctors didn't say is all right mate this is your problem you're on your own right together they help to solve the problem we've got to solve the underlying problems for which depression is a signal and you said you tweeted um about this you said um there is good evidence that after covid we can reverse our spiraling depression and anxiety crisis but to do that we need to radically expand the menu of responses to it yeah think about what we were talking about i could give one example just from up the road social prescribing right every single doctor's surgery should have a social prescribing wing it should be the first thing that is suggested certainly for mild and moderate depression is figure out if the person's lonely and disconnected from the natural world if they are

suggest them prescribe and there's a real power in doctors prescribe not just saying oh you might want to think about this because people feel so disempowered to find each other in such a lonely and atomized society. That's one example. Obviously, the last third of lost connections is loads of very practical examples. And we have to do that in our own lives, right? Like we can socially prescribe ourselves.

Yeah, I think there's an authority in doctors doing it. Absolutely, we should be doing it for ourselves and we should be urging other people to do it. But in a culture that's become so disconnected from understanding our needs and actually where we've been told a rival story that has some truth in it you know there are as i stress a lot in the book i have a chapter about this there are real biological contributions to depression and anxiety that can make you more sensitive to these problems and can make it harder to get out but what's happened is an overly simplified biological story has become the main

thing we say about depression when i went to my doctor and i was a teenager and i was i felt like pain was leaking out of me my doctor who was a very well-meaning decent person just said i say wrong with your brain and all you need to do is drug yourself right and chemical antidepressants gave me a little bit of relief for a while also gave me really severe side effects in my case although not everyone um and ultimately i remain depressed right so what that story did that oversimplified story which has some truth in it for some people well that oversimplified story did is cut me off for many years for 13 years from exploring the deeper causes if right early on there's no criticism my doctor they're just part of a system you know that's not of their own creation and a lot of doctors want to do better and want to have better options

to give people that they haven't been offered them themselves um it cut me off from a deeper more nuanced story that helps me to find a way out of my depression so i think one of the things we've got to do is help people to find stories that make sense of their pain because that's the way once you understand why you feel something you can begin to find your way out of it but just being lost in a haze of you're just biologically broken no one is there are some biological contributions but no one is broken by their biology no one is no one is there are some biological contributions but no one is broken by their biology no one is no one is with uh there's nobody who with the right support can't find their way out but with the right support is a crucial clause there that we have to build as a

society that we have not built right we just haven't built got me thinking about psychedelics for a number of reasons because psychedelics you know it's been it's been of a i think there's a bit of a revolution going on in the the perception of psychedelics you know we had the war on nixon's like war on drugs in the like 50s or 60s or whatever it was i wasn't alive then so excuse my inaccuracy we were lucky you dodged the bullet of nixon not a good thing i wasn't there either i've not read a ton about him but i just i know that he was pivotal in like you know slamming the uh the gauntlet down on the you know the chance of even researching some of these compounds psychedelic compounds but what

i've come to learn over the last six months working in uh you know one of the world's leading um sort of psychedelic and non-psychedelic mental health companies which is a tie and spending some time there is how remarkable the the stats evidence and findings are um for things like psilocybin which is the compound derived from magic mushrooms um at helping those with treatment resistant depression to overcome um their you know their their feelings of. And it matches up perfectly to the philosophy and really the perspective that your book gave me on mental health, because it approaches the, the, what's the correct word to use? The indication of treatment resistant depression

from the stance that something has happened to you. And that thing might live in your subconscious, you know, and it's an unlocker of that thing in the same way that therapy might be for some for some people but what's your you know having written this book and studied depression for so long and anxiety what do you think of psychedelics so as you know for the book as a chapter about psychedelics because i went and interviewed the leading experts in the world on this people have been doing the cutting edge research i interviewed them in um johns hopkins in baltimore at ucla here in london at ucl at nyu and somewhere else oh in brazil and um so i'm strongly in favor of psychedelics for some people

it's a slightly complicated picture in a way that i think helps us to understand what's going on so think about treatment you mentioned treatment resistant depression some really good research was done on this here in london by david professor david nutt and dr robin carhart harris they get people who've been depressed for a long time and nothing's helped them and they've tried lots of things and nothing's helped them and they gave them if i remember rightly three doses of psilocybin the active component magic mushrooms might be wrong on the number but something like that and exactly as you say huge numbers of them have a uh it's amazing they feel a strong feeling of connection to the natural world to their own traumas to everyone around them as anyone has used psychedelics or most people who use psychedelics, experience a really profound spiritual experience. And that deeply lifts their depression and anxiety. So a taste of connection, this wasn't true for

literally everyone, but it was a very high percentage. An intense feeling of meaning and connection helps to lift them out of their depression. There's a coda to that, which Robin talks about. So I'll give you an example, one of the people who told me about. So a woman in the program who worked in, she worked in an office in like a coastal town in Britain that was quite kind of run down and grim. She'd been very depressed. She goes, she takes the psilocybin, her depression lifts,

she feels deeply connected, and then she goes back to work in the office. And she comes back and is like i can't go around my office acting like we're all connected we're all equal nature is beautiful i have to live in this disconnected way to exist in my office right so over time her depression comes back because she's had a taste of connection but then she goes back to live in a disconnected landscape, right? A disconnected emotional landscape. And I think, so what the evidence shows is the way I think of psychedelics is administered in the right way, of course, and that's an important clause. What they can do is give you a taste of how it feels to be connected to have meaning but i think of that as

like um a compass that can point you in the direction you need to travel doesn't do the it gives i mean it gives you a flash of what it's like to be at the end of the journey but then you're back at the start of the journey and you know the come you know the direction in which you need to travel what it doesn't do is do the journey for you right or not for more than the six or seven hours you know you're you're under the effects of the the psychedelic so and this is true of a lot of the i mean there's some i'll come to some complexity the evidence in a minute but so most people are not going to want to take psychedelics a huge amount of the time right i mean there's some exceptions amanda fielding i don't know if you've met her so amanda who people don't know amanda is um kind of amazing uh british heiress who's a great champion of psychedelics who um

seemed to me i don't want to get it wrong because i didn't write about her so i didn't uh i don't remember the exact number but i seem to recall her saying she took psychedelics for the whole of 1986 so just every day right so some people will have the means and want to take psychedelics all the time but that's a very small part of the population right so what what what we know works is giving people psychedelics to give them a sense of what it can be like to be connected and then helping them to integrate into their lives ways they can bring take that connection forward so there was a guy i interviewed who was part of the johns hopkins study who had had this very profound experience where he took psychedelics his dad had died when he was very young no one had talked to him about his dad's death when he died it was just kind of silence and when he died he had this vision where his he saw his dad he found his dad

in a wood and his dad said to him you know you built up these walls to protect yourself but we can take these walls down now you're safe go and seek right because he'd been cutting himself off for so long from from things like romantic connections and then when he when the psychedelics the effect of the psychedelics the immediate effect of the psychedelics went away he then started becoming like a very deep meditator doing all sorts of things that kind of built in that that that sense of connection into his life so i think that that to me is the great value of now there are some people who say they have more enduring effects beyond just that immediate taste of connection and the my kind of compass metaphor so the good evidence for that would be the johns hopkins study so the guys at

johns hopkins did who are amazing scientists did it i always think about this in relation to my mother because um they took really long-term smokers so my uh my mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day and uh there's an amazing there's a photo of me and her two at a time she's like a crud there's a photo of me and her when i'm uh about six months old that i found a few years ago where she's um she's breastfeeding me smoking and resting the ashtray on my stomach and uh when i showed it to her she said my mother's scottish uh when i showed it to her she said you were a difficult baby i needed that cigarette you're a fucker she's a bit unrepentant but um so they took people like my mother who are super super long-term smokers she's been smoking

since she was 14. And they gave them, I think it was three doses of psilocybin over a few months. And 80% of them stopped smoking. And a year later, 60% of them were still non-smokers. So there's some evidence of very positive long-term outcomes. It's quite a small study. So yeah, I think this is a really important... I think some people oversell it and say it's the answer which is not right but i think it can be a very useful tool when i talk about

with depression what we've done up to now for basically since the since the 90s is with depression when people present with depression almost all the time there is one option on the menu which is chemical antidepressants which do give some people some relief um we need to eradicate that needs to stay on the menu but we need to radically expand the menu of options and psychedelics are another great example of something that should totally be be on the menu should be available to people in a medical context and i would argue outside medical context as well i mean it's part of the argument of um my book chasing the scream about how we need to end the war on drugs and move towards regulated models of access to drugs for all sorts of drugs

so yeah i think i think it's really important i think we're getting there as well it's uh you know the public markets and the commercial model and the amount of investment that's going into psychedelics is just staggering a tie have raised i think 400 million in the last 24 months it's another thing where you know we're thinking about change when it feels like we're up against the when we are indeed up against these very powerful forces we're thinking about cannabis right yeah when the day george w bush becomes president in 2000 15 of american citizens support legalizing cannabis today it's 70 and because new york just legalized uh that hasn't started yet they've just voted the legislature voted legalized now half of all american citizens live in a state where cannabis is legal, right? So you think about how quickly that happened,

cannabis being unbelievably demonized from the 1930s to your lifetime. And then this huge shift in opinion really quickly because people saw it in practice, right? People saw cannabis legalization in practice. Colorado went first. Mason Tevert, who led led that campaign i interviewed a lot for chasing the screen just all it takes is one place to breach the dam two places washington state did at the same time and people are like oh is this the thing we were so fucking afraid of oh actually

you know it's you know pretty straightforward does i feel like social media has played a played a role in this because we now have this like connected consciousness of like a whole country or the whole planet where we can pick up on an idea, share it and like virtue signal it rapidly into existence into where we all go, yep, that's right. Yep.

Like a whole country can do it. And you think about, if you go back hundreds of years before the advent of the internet, if the king of the land or whatever, the politician had said something we couldn't um sort of get together in the same way and um form our own opinion as this like because i see like i think about twitter as this one brain and one day it'll say you know same-sex marriage is great and that idea can very quickly become adopted because you can get that idea to like a billion people

and basically vote it into existence using likes and retweets and a couple of influencers. And so I, you know. So I would have said that a few, I would have said that 10 years ago, what you just said, I would have had the optimistic view. I think the evidence since then has gotten,

you're definitely right. One of the good things about social media is where geographical distance feels much more collapsed and we feel much closer to the whole world ideas are spreading yeah and i just but if you look at the mechanisms by which those ideas spread this is not inherent to social media this is inherent to the current business model of social media so if you look at my friend tristan harris uh has done he should totally interview has done a really important work on this he was a google engineer who uh saw what was happening inside google and and spoke out um so if you look at how these ideas spread so we tend to think of it as a neutral playing field right so here's a good idea gay marriage psychedelics help depression whatever it might be enters this level playing field right so here's a good idea gay marriage psychedelics help depression whatever

it might be enters this level playing field some people like it it spreads it grows right now sometimes that happens of course if you look at um so these business models are premise the business model of youtube twitter facebook is all premised on you pick up your phone now you scroll through twitter you scroll through facebook the longer you are scrolling the more money facebook makes obviously because of both exposure to adverts and because they're learning more about you every time you do anything so their business model is premised every time you put down your phone it's a disaster for them and every time you carry on scrolling it's great for them so they've designed very complex algorithms to figure out what keeps you scrolling, what keeps everyone who walks past this building scrolling. And it turns

out, because of the quirky human beings that we could talk about why if you want, things that make you angry will keep you scrolling longer than things that outrage and anger you will keep you scrolling longer than things that make you feel good. If you see something that makes you feel good, it makes you want to go and be out in the real world good if you see something that makes you feel good it makes you want to go and be out in the real world if you see something that makes you angry you want to keep scrolling you want to express your rage right if it's enraging it's engaging so although that's not the goal of youtube and facebook they want you to be angry their algorithms have figured out angering and enraging content keeps people scrolling longer therefore although it's not the intention of the designers the the practical effect of these apps is they are designed to make the algorithms function in

such a way they will feed you things that make you angry and upset so this thing that you thought was a level playing field right oh good ideas will prevail bad ideas or die out is not right actually on in the main it will select for things that make people angry so you look at the nyu study if you look at the um the figures for the 2016 u.s presidential election i think the figure was 19 out of 19 out of the 20 most uh shared stories on facebook were lies like actual lies like the trumpet um donald trump was endorsed by the pope right which was not true in fact the pope criticized donald trump um so you see we're in a i mean if you think about info wars the disgusting filth uh this guy alex jones who uh is a a cynic cynic not even a not even a lunatic a cynic

who says things like the sandy hook massacre didn't happen their parents were are liars they're crisis actors so you think about you know how many children it was 26 i think were murdered at school and he unleashes a mob against these parents whose children have been murdered where those parents have had to move loads of times because they are hounded by his supporters threatening to kill their surviving children it's hard for me to imagine a more evil thing info wars in the 2016 election more info war stories were shared on facebook in the world than the entire new york times washington post guardian and bbc combined so you think about this landscape that is enraging people um so it's not now you don't have to have a business model like that social media doesn't

have to work that way right you can have all the good things about social media the collapsing of social distance the connection of the world without that if you have a different business model we can talk about another time and tristan talks about that brilliantly but so i i i get what you're saying and i understand there's a truth in what you're saying which is we can hear ideas more readily but there's a cost well it's not just a cost there'll be a cost in any model but actually we're communicating through a poisoned mechanism that doesn't promote the spread of good ideas that actually promotes the spread of false and uh hateful ideas um and we've got to fix that as well as um yeah so then we can have all the

joys of connection without this you know info wars bullshit or other forms of i completely agree um and you you know i saw you'd written when you went off to write your new book which we're we're probably not allowed to talk about on this uh my publishers will tase me that's fine they've told me very specifically i'm super excited to read it it's january next year january next year yeah how exciting yeah can you talk you can say the title that's on amazon uh it's called stolen focus nice okay i'm not i'm not saying what's the subtitle now literally why you can't focus and how to think deeply again okay but my publishers literally were like does it i can't do an american accent does that fucking word they don't actually swear like that

i've done them like they're the sopranos they're actually like very nice new york we won't talk about that but um what i would like to talk about is focus and what are you doing in that process where you're writing you're writing a new book now what are you doing are you out researching you on the internet you're reading other books you're speaking to people what are you doing so i spend a lot i spend a long time researching my book so the book that i'm gonna the book that i'm writing now which is about i'm really not meant to talk about because it's about a specific set of crimes that uh other people haven't written about i don't want to i don't want to set up the journal i'm going to write about it but um so i've been going there for 10

years and i've been getting to know the people for 10 years and i've been deeply researching it for 10 years and there's a thing about um when you're trying to understand a subject whether it's depression or las vegas or i'm writing a biography of noam chomsky that i've also been working on for a really long time uh and i probably won't write for another 10 years at least there's a thing about such an important part of my books is people opening up to me and people generally don't open up to you the first time they meet you you know they think who is this person why does he want why do you want to ask me these very personal questions what's going on here generally people open up to you at the end of

the second year so for me it's so important it's incredible privilege and luxury that i get to do this um for me what's so important is this very long span so i'll spend 10 years writing in in this moment since that's what i'm doing at the moment so i'm writing about vegas so there's a couple tommy and shay who i knew over many years uh when he was murdered um and what i'm doing at the moment is i've got all the audio i've ever recorded i've got hundreds of hours of audio with them i paid to have it all transcribed and i'm just reading through just mounds and mounds of transcripts thinking all right that's a scene that's a moment ah I forgot he said that you know this is that's the time this happened to us that's the time we were you know in Caesar's Palace and then oh yeah and the guy so it's just going through so at the moment I'm in the stage of what I think of as

finding out what jigsaw pieces I've got I'm not even assembling the jigsaw at the moment I'm just oh right okay and you know there'll be I'll read through 100 pages of transcripts and think oh we got nothing that time you know and then another time there are days when you're like oh they were so articulate that day or this crazy thing happened so at the moment i'm assembling the jigsaw pieces and then probably in two months i start to put the jigsaw pieces together so i'll i'll have some i'll like index it and i'll be like all right okay so he talked about his childhood in hawaii this time that time that's okay then you put all that together and then you go okay this is this is where he described gamble it all right okay so you're trying to piece it all together slowly over time

but to do that you've got to initially immerse yourself in the actual place and go back a lot and build up a huge reservoir of just stuff and the other thing and this was hard for me because i was a newspaper journalist for a long time where you know everything had to be you know you've got 24 hours to write it you don't have time for dead ends you have to have a high tolerance for dead ends so for every expert i've quoted to you i interviewed 10 experts who were decent people and told me nothing i used in the book right there's a great uh i know absolutely nothing about nature so this could be bullshit but there's a metaphor that thoreau the american 19th century american writer used where he said um apparently if you want to find a beehive and

you don't know where the beehive is if you stay in a place and wait for a bee to come along and catch it in a jar just keep it there for a couple of minutes it will fly off in the direction of the hive so you let it go and you run and the bee is faster than you it'll then you stand you follow it as far as you can and then you wait there you catch another bee let that one go follow that and if you do that like 30 times you'll find the beehive right i don't know if that's true but that's what thoreau says um and i think of writing as a bit like that it's like you you start with the subject it's really big why are so many people depressed you look for people who've talked about an interesting way you go and talk to all of them and then at the end of every interview you say who else should i talk to and you go and talk to all of them. And then at the end of every interview, you say, who else should I talk to?

And you go and talk to all of them. And you say, who else should I talk to? And you get this kind of growing concentric circle until sooner or later you find the person who, like Vincent Felitti, I can't tell you how many people I interviewed about childhood trauma and depression. Many of whom, you know, were nice people who told me nothing of interest. And I forget who it was. It was a chain.

It was a chain through about five people. He said said you should talk to vincent felitti and i thought who's he went to san diego and you're like ah this is this is the thing right and and some of that can be sometimes you're lucky i knew in chasing the scream i want to tell the story of a drug dealer and i remember chino was the second drug dealer i interviewed interviewed a guy in baltimore and i remember chino uh first thing he said to me almost the very first thing was i was conceived from my mother who was a crack addict was raped by my dad who was an nypd officer and i was like tell me more and i never looked for another drug dealer i was like chino's my person right and chino's an unusually incredible human

being in all sorts of ways he's no longer a drug dealer he's um he he arrested no i mean was arrested he was in rikers but he uh he now campaigns to end the war on drugs and actually had to shut down the horrific sparford the horrific youth detention center that he was detained in he's a completely incredible person but um yeah so sometimes you're lucky and you don't have to do the long chain you just find the right person very early and sometimes you spend five years finding the right person but for me it's a the the fun is the the journey right the part of the fun sometimes it's the fun of getting an answer then simply you're like oh i now understand childhood trauma and addiction and depression but yes it's a long a long journey but i i i'm really lucky i just love you sometimes

you meet writers who go it's agony it's agony and i always want to go go fucking work in a call center for a week and come back and tell me how difficult i'm not saying there aren't challenges in writing there are but anyone who is a writer a professional writer whose attitude is not every day thank god i'm an atheist but metaphorically thank god i get to do this job i'm so lucky that's got to be your default position it's a it's an incredible privilege to get to do it i know it sounds hashtag blessed and wanky but like it really is like a great um to get to kind of investigate complicated things and try to find answers and explain them to people who need to know and there's a lot of people who need to know the answers to these questions it's a great thing but that's clearly why you've written

so many great books because you have a intrinsic joy for your work because the lengths you've described there 10 years five years three years the air miles you must have done to write these books there's a whole part of greenland that has melted because of there you go like yeah i i i'm not going to bullshit i finished i wrote my book um over the space of a year and a half but i wouldn't have done what you did i i and and that speaks to where my intrinsic motivations and joy comes from i enjoyed the process of writing the book but the thoroughness that you put into your books is just staggering to me because i don't share that intrinsic joy for the process which you clearly do um but you have a lot of intrinsic joy for the other things

that yeah exactly important it's a shame it's a shame to some degree i think part of my conditioning which you clearly do. But you have a lot of intrinsic joy for the other things that you do, which are really important. It's a shame. It's a shame to some degree. I think part of my conditioning growing up in the social media era where we get instant gratification made the thought of, you know, when I've got an instant Instagram story I can do

or this five-year book project. But that's why I really restrict... I'll give you an example. I won't say his name, but there's someone, a contemporary of mine, a British writer who's now based in the US who is one of the cleverest people I know, a totally brilliant, I mean, just politically, intellectually, just an outstanding person. if he'd been exactly the same person 10 years before he would have written three brilliant books that changed how people think about the subjects and i've watched and it's been really depressing as he just atrophies his energy tweeting all the time and he's got a huge twitter

following and i'm not saying that doesn't do any good it does some good but and every and whenever i see him i whenever i'm in uh in the cities you know i say he he you know we I see him, whenever I'm in the city he's in, I would say he, you know, I see him and he's just addled. And you know, there's a line, Ann Ginsberg, the poet said, I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by madness. I feel like I saw the best minds

of my generation consumed by Twitter. Just fucking, I'm not saying there's no value in it, but atrophying the energy and i've been there right um years ago but and so for me you're right a huge part of writing a book is deferred gratification i've got to interview people for this biography for example i'm writing a noam chomsky he's an incredible person i interviewed someone two days ago knowing I'm not going to look at that transcript for seven years right and knowing somewhere down the line I'm going to be glad I did that interview because that person's quite old and they'll be dead if I wait seven

years and you know and so you've got to but it's very hard to defer gratification if you can get an immediate hit of but it's a very shallow hit right when i meet people and i always have a difference right sometimes people come up to me in the street and they go uh i follow you on instagram or whatever and there's and it's a very shallow connection and sometimes people come up to me and they'll say i read your book and they will even their physical demeanor is different it's like being approached by someone who is a friend, right? And they will always have some, not always, but most of the time have some much more detailed story.

I always feel like, I feel like if someone follows you on Twitter, it's the equivalent of shouting to you across a crowded bar. Whistling. Exactly. Whereas, if you're lucky, whistling, most likely throwing the pint at you and glassing you. But whereas if someone's read my book, I feel throwing the pint at you and glassing you but the um whereas if someone's read my book i feel like i've gone on holiday with them right the level of

kind of intimate because it takes a long time to read a book right deeply personal it's very and they've been in your head right they've been in your childhood yeah they've been and and they've and they've been on this if they're in my books a really big journey right so there's an intimacy to that so i think it's it's worth it comes back to what we say about porn right you could spend your whole life sitting at home wanking over porn right i'm not against porn right i look at it myself but sometimes but we all know the hard work of having a relationship is ultimately going to be more satisfying than your whole life wanking over porn right speak for yourself exactly um i'll tell you again it's a very sad story i'll tell you again speak for yourself exactly i did notice all the screens around us with the constantly

streaming porn hub but the we won't talk about that but the um but but and i feel like a lot of life is on that principle right like of course you can to me the people i know i mean i know who look at who are tweeting all the time and i know a lot of people with really big twitter followings it's not just that they're partly is that atrophying their lives on bullshit also makes them really fucking unhappy i know someone i won't say who but someone who's got a very big twitter following who's got an extra it's a bit like our instagram influence so we're talking about before huge instagram for a sort of huge twitter following bumped into in the street a good few years ago now again like miserable as shit right and made more miserable by i mean i was thinking about someone i know this is not a famous person

someone i know who uses a uses a lot of meth uh and is on twitter all the time and genuinely if you said to me should this individual quit twitter or meth first i would say quit twitter it's worse for him right i don't mean that as a glib joke not that meth is so great but it it it just has such a negative effect on people the thing i dislike most about it is for me um almost everything about being an effective person in the world is about being sincere and open-hearted you know with humor and comedy and all that stuff but you want to be sincere and open-hearted and what i don't like about twitter and i again it's one things i feel happening to me as i look at it is the voice of twitter the kind of generic voice is you are sarcastic you're cold you're one-upmanship one-upmanship all of

these things that are antithetical to just a good life right if you want to succeed on if you want to win twitter and i've seen this happen to so many people i know um how do you do it be sassy be nasty be maximally judgmental there's no tweets in going oh this person's screwed up but we all screw up sometimes let's move you know let's forgive the person to move on there's no tweets in that all the tweets are in kill the person destroy them escalating outrage because of the algorithms and because the way they work um binary exactly just it's not a forum it's a forum that promotes unkindness and aggressive certainty when almost everything in life that's meaningful comes from kindness doubt listening to people also encourages people to respond to different

to me the worst possible way to go through life is to and again this is a big lesson for me i think about chasing the screams person is good example i can say worst way to go through life is to meet people who are different to you and say that they're terrible and condemn them right to me that almost all the pleasure in life is encountering people encountering people who are different and listening to them I think oh this person's different to me that's really interesting I think about someone people I most admire in the world is a woman called christina dent who read chasing screams which is why she got in touch with me so christina is an evangelical christian in mississippi who's

a republican right pretty different to me i'm a gay atheist who hates the republicans right and christina um so christina is very opposed to abortion and she put her money where her mouth is. She believes that if you're going to say that women shouldn't have abortions, you've got to help them look after the children that are then produced. So she fosters a lot of children in Mississippi. And if you foster children in Mississippi, you know, most of the kids who get taken away from their parents, their parents have addiction problems.

So Christina gets to know lots of women with addiction problems. The mothers of the kids she's fostering. because christina is a fundamentally kind and good person she's just like she starts thinking why did no one help these mothers years ago why are they criminalized why are they put in prison and denied access to public housing and all of these things someone should have helped them so she starts learning a lot about drug policy one of the ways was through reading my book chasing the screen and she set up a group called end it for good that is evangelical christians in mississippi who are campaigning to end the drug war right and i got to know christina well she's an amazing person

and i think if i had ever interacted with christina on twitter if i got to know her through twitter we would hate each other right we would look like diametrically opposed people uh in fact she's a friend of mine i love her she's a fundamental i mean really a deeply admirable person right often that that kind of connection can't happen through anger-fueled algorithms it can only happen in fact anger-fueled algorithms will destroy those connections right and so i used to remember what was it that happened something happened with theresa may who i'm sure you can guess i was not politically sympathetic to and i was about to tweet something nasty about her and i knew it would do well on twitter i'm trying to remember

what the specific it wasn't when she resigned it was before that i was about to tweet it and i just thought i don't want to be part of this fucking machine don't part of this machine even someone who deserves to be criticized as i believe you know powerful people powerful people deserve to have criticism and i think theresa may deserved a lot of criticism because i disagree with a lot of things she did but i just thought what is this adding to the world other than more spite and more anger and more cruelty there are ways to oppose harmful things that are not cruel and angry and and i just see so many people that i've known for years you know senior media people who i just feel have been poisoned by these ways of interaction it's made them

cruel and i don't suppose any superiority i was cruel when i was heavily using these sites it's made them cruel and mean and petty and and and worst of all unpersuasive yeah you know when i see people because i could think i won't name the person but i could think of someone who's one of the most followed uh political people on twitter in britain forrest johnson no no no uh kate stone i'm not gonna go through it but not a politician but someone who's a publicly political person who i knew god 15 years ago who was a thoughtful interesting person when i met them and

is now just curdled with uh anger and when i met this person you could have sat them down with any ordinary british person and they would talk about politics and they would have thought about what he said you know they wouldn't always have agreed but it would have been thoughtful now he could talk to maybe five percent of the british population who would fire up to share the anger he has and 95 just be like what is this this is just so aggressive and hyperbolic and over the top and i don't blame this individual it's not his fault you've got a step away from these things what i don't think you can do is be in the middle of it be looking at it all the time and not be made cruder and meaner by it.

I just don't think you can. I do think we can change the algorithms in ways that would mean that we wouldn't have to be like that. But we're a long way off that, right? So for me... If someone's listening to this now, and I had to ask you the very binary question, should they delete their Twitter, Instagram, or not in the...

So we're always encouraged to think in these deep and it is perfectly good question but we're always encouraged to think in these deeply individualistic ways right it's a bit like think about global warming biggest crisis in the world terrible disaster right um and we're always encouraged to think oh global warming so bad should i personally recycle more should i personally buy this and not that? And the truth is, your individual consumer choices make no fucking difference to global warming. You have virtually no power as a consumer. What you have is a huge amount of power as a citizen, right? If we band together as citizens, enough of us, and demand that

everyone has to do certain things that are necessary to stop to to deal with the climate crisis then you have power and agency you personally tweaking your individual behavior i mean don't do grossly harmful things and i feel we mentioned my own flying that's obviously a harmful thing i i never fly just to go on holiday but i do fly a lot to go uh to research my books and that is a a big burden but it's much more meaningful to focus on collective activity so if people want to think about the harm that twitter does the harm that facebook does i would say go to the website of the center for humane technology run by my friend tristan harris which is about putting pressure on the because the truth is my friend james williams who's a

former google engineer brilliant guy lives in moscow he always says talking about you know should i individually delete these things it's like thinking the solution to air pollution is should i put on a gas mask well all right if the air pollution is really bad in beijing you might want to put on a gas mask but a much better thing to do is to you know as citizens demand we deal with the sources of air pollution right which can be dealt with in a similar way deleting your twitter may well be a good thing to do i don't use i don't ever look at twitter almost never i used to go through buffer app but that's the equivalent of me putting on a gas mask gives me a very short-term personal uh protection but if i then go out into a society where people are being made angrier

more politically extreme having their attention destroyed because they're all on this stuff me putting on my own fucking gas mask it's worth doing i'm glad to protect myself but that's not where we should start thinking about it right but if i'm a selfish bastard and i want to be happier should i delete my instagram and my facebook and my Twitter? I don't give a fuck about everybody else. This is me being, you know, just pretending. I just want to make sure that my life is more peaceful, less chance of depression, less chance of anxiety. Should I delete Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?

I mean, I personally would say, you know, I mean, I have it because I'm a, crudely, because I want to reach people with my messages. You know, and there's a mixture of that. some of that is the kind of benevolent thing i think these things are important people need to know about and some of that is a more junk values uh i want to sell my books right but um i don't feel i could tell an individual they have to make their own assessment what do they what do they get out of it maybe they're you know promoting their charity or whatever i don't feel i could tell an individual they have to make their own assessment what do they what do they get out of it maybe they're you know promoting their charity or whatever i don't know that there's all sorts of following kim kardashian i mean what i would say is know that it comes with

a huge cost okay now you only you can weigh is the benefit worth this huge cost yeah and there's some people who for whom it will be right and there's many people for whom it will be, right? And there's many people for whom it won't be. But I would say the constant focus on individualism, even if you're purely selfish, to me, it's a bit like, okay, imagine we were having this conversation in 1937 and we're really worried about the rise of the Nazis. And people who are worried about the rise of the Nazis, let's imagine they were saying,

well, I'm signing a pledge saying I personally will not invade poland right that's very nice i'm glad you're not going to invade poland but someone's going to go and have to stop the people who are going to invade poland yeah and a similar way fine say i'm not going to participate in these hateful anger filled algorithms good good for you just like you shouldn't invade poland but someone's going to have to stop the people who are polluting the society and fucking us all up which doesn't mean shutting down facebook and twitter it means uh changing their business model um which absolutely can be done i mean as james williams always says the google engineer i was talking about um the axe

existed for more gonna get this wrong the axe existed for more than a hundred thousand years before anyone thought to put a handle on it um the internet has existed for less than 10 000 days but we can change these things if we want to it comes back to so many things we're talking about people need to know that they have power you are so much more powerful than you think as a citizen incredible changes can happen when enough people persuade the people around them right and and do it in a spirit of love and compassion. I think that's the perfect way to end this conversation. Hooray. Optimism.

Exactly. And it's not even like a kind of airy-fairy, oh, let's be optimistic. No, it's true. It's very practical. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said, never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world.

It's the only thing that ever has. It reminds me of watching watching martin luther king's last speech where he said to this huge black congregation on this stage he said um he was telling he said to them you know you guys get there you guys get to the mountaintop he goes i don't get there with you but you guys get there and at that time you never would have imagined that america could make the progress it's made as you said to the point where it's got a black president now and when he said those words it sounded like you know wishful thinking or whatever but obviously the world um to some degree you know last couple years haven't been the best you know example of

that but we got there well progress is possible there's obviously still a long way to go on as you know much better than i do on racism and all sorts of other things but huge amount of progress is possible and we must never we've got to never discount the progress that's been made because that's very disempowering actually you know I remember uh yeah even just things as simple as and of course we've got a huge way to go on gender but I think about my grandmothers right that's not some distant past I know my grandmothers I loved my grandmothers I knew them well obviously um when they were the age I am now my grandmothers. I loved my grandmothers. I knew them well, obviously. When they were the age I am now, my grandmothers were not allowed to have bank accounts in their own names. My Swiss grandmother wasn't allowed to have a job outside the home without her husband's

written permission. He could legally beat her. He could legally rape her. He didn't, but he could. In fact, it was legal for men to rape their wives everywhere in the world when my grandmothers were the age i am now there were no women leaders there were no women leaders of companies there were no women leaders of countries um there were almost no women elected representatives right this is not some distant past right i know we've got a lot and it's very aggravating for women to hear a man like me mansplain this i get that um but and because especially because we've still got so much further to go but you've got to always bear in mind the incredible progress that happened and how did that happen right women didn't blow anything up they didn't you know uh tear the

society down they they they banded together and they fought for something better i mean my my swiss grandmother didn't even have the vote when she was 42 years old right and my scottish grandmother had a fucking hard life right incredible transformations and changes are are possible we need to seize the power that we have because we were talking before we live in a machine that's designed to get us neglect to neglect what's important about life we also live in a machine that is designed to make us think we are not powerful a machine that's designed to make us think we we can't change things or the only mechanism to change things is to change the way you shop right and there's some value in changing the way you shop but um pick up the power you have right as citizens you have we have incredible power we are all better off because of

the power that previous generations have seized you know think about you know i'm gay you're black think about what the lives just two generations back again black people were in this country they were a lot grimmer than our lives right um so incredible changes are possible we we just need to fight for them thank you i always say thank you to my guest at the end of the podcast for various reasons but obviously and i know it probably makes you feel uncomfortable because i just repeatedly blow smoke up your ass but um the uh you know you can literally blow no i will not with the cameras but the effort you go to to put this work together is just like outstanding

right and there's so much as we've discussed there's so much like there's such a lack of patience and a superficial nature to the society we live in and people want instant gratification but the delaying of the gratification and doing the hard work i i just you know it's just a tremendous service that you're doing to our society at a time that needs it the most and especially the topics in which you're sticking your finger into and poking to understand our topics that are at the very heart of much of our sort of social problems and um i'd also present much of the opportunities if we find the right answers so thank you you've taught me a ton i can't wait for your new book when people ask me at any point in my life they ask me to recommend a book i always say lost connections because it was that transformative and um yeah um and what's your twitter handle what's my snapchat

my publishers give me this fucking horrendous please knock it out but i meant to say if anyone wants to know where to get the audio book or the book they can go to um for the depression book www.thelostconnections.com because it turned out there was a fucking band called Lost Connections I only found that out really late in the day a Canadian band who knew and the they should have

dropped a book I know damn them and the addiction book is chasing the scream as in ah dot com

and they on those websites you can find out where to follow me everywhere except Snapchat because I'm strongly opposed to affiliate

and your new book's coming soon and soon yeah I can't wait fuck me that's gonna be amazing and people can also where to follow me everywhere except snapchat because i'm strongly opposed to philia so and your new book's coming soon and soon yeah i can't wait fuck me that's going to be amazing and people can uh also watch the film adaptation of chasing the screen which i meant to plug the oscar nominated film adaptation uh which is called the united states versus billy holiday and is where do we get it in britain on sky cinema in the us on hulu and you should interview Andra who played Billie Holiday who is beyond a goddess and a fucking incredible person we shall email her

lure her I'll give you an intro she was nominated for the Oscar did not get it I am the true victim of Covid because I would have been

in the Oscar ceremony as one of the producers and I was gutted that didn't happen anyway plenty of time plenty of time for that to happen

exactly no one suffered in Covid more than me. Thank you so much, Jan. Cheers, Stephen. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Bye.