The Joe Rogan Experience - #1077 - Johann Hari

Episode Date: February 12, 2018

Johann Hari is a writer and journalist. He has written for a number of publications including The Independent (London) and The Huffington Post and has written books on the topic of the war on drugs, the monarchy, and depression, in an accessible and non-technical style. His new book "Lost Connections" is available now. https://thelostconnections.com/

Johan Hari, I got it right. You said it right, you are literally the first person to ever say my- I was saying to your affair that I once waited for six hours with a broken arm in an emergency room because they were calling for Joanna Harry to come forward. So anyone who gets my name better than that is by my name. Didn't you just assume that was you when you heard Joanna Harry? To be fair, I had a broken arm and I was lying there like a wee pig and being like, fuck, someone help me. So I think in my normal mind I would have done.

What went down with your arm? I just, I fell. And tragically, nothing, no glamorous story to it. I fell down a staircase. I wasn't even drunk. I wasn't even fucked on anything. I just fell down the stairs, right? I wasn't even a victim of domestic violence.

No surrounding narrative that would make that an interesting story, sadly. like no right no uh surrounding narrative that would make that an interesting story sadly so give me your if you had like a one paragraph take on depression sure what is your take on depression so this is why i wrote this book lost connections uncovering the real causes of depression and anxiety and the real solution so i wanted to understand why does depression and anxiety why did depression anxiety seem to be rising so much? It's very personal to me. When I was a teenager, I'd gone to my doctor. I'd explained that I was in this deep sense of pain.

And all my doctor did was tell me a biological story, just said, basically, your brain's broken. And all he did was give me drugs, right? And drugs play a role in treating people. But I was still depressed all that time I was taking these drugs, right? Most of the time and after 13 years of it i thought right i need to understand what's really going on here so i ended up going on this big long journey over 40 000 miles interviewing the leading experts in

the world on what causes depression and anxiety and what solves them and what i discovered is the we've we've told a ridiculously simplistic story to people about what depression is and how to solve it. That, you know, until I was a teenager and I went to my doctor, I thought depression was all in my head, meaning, you know, you're just being weak, you're being a pussy, basically. And then the next 13 years, I thought it was all in my head, meaning, you know, it's a chemical imbalance in your brain. What I discovered is the overwhelming evidence from the World Health Organization, leading medical body in the world and loads of other places is there are real biological factors that can make you more sensitive to this stuff. But the causes of depression, anxiety are overwhelmingly in the way we're living.

There are these nine causes of depression and anxiety for which I could find scientific evidence, seven of which in the way we're living and some of which are rising, which explains this kind of epidemic. And that opens up a whole different way of finding solutions. Now, when you were young and you were experiencing depression how would you categorize it like what how would you describe it if you had to describe it to someone who didn't understand depression yeah i try to keep this amount of fist away oh sure i think i'll move a bit closer to me i think depression um depression is despair spreading everyone has moments of hopelessness in their lives right

right it's that spreading further but i think one of the things i learned is a deeper way of thinking about this which is everyone listening to this everyone watching this knows that they have natural physical needs right you need food you need water you need clean air you need warmth if i took those things away from you you would be in real trouble real fast right right there's equally strong evidence that human beings have natural psychological needs right you've got to feel you belong you've got to feel your life has meaning and purpose you've got to feel that people see you and value you you've got to feel that you've got autonomy you've got to feel that you've got a future that makes sense and our culture is good at lots of things i'm glad to

be alive today but our culture has been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs for lots of people. And that is the key reason. It's not the only one, but it's the key reason why we have this rising depression and anxiety epidemic. That can sound a bit weird in the abstract, so I can give you some specific examples if you want. Okay, sure. So I'll give you one example. I noticed that lots of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work, right? I started to think, what's going on here? So I started to look for evidence about how people feel about their work. Best research on this was done by

Gallup, the opinion poll company. Massive detailed study took a couple of years. They found the figures for how people feel about work in the US and other comparable countries, what they found is 13% of us, 1-3%, basically like our work. Most of the time we get energy from it. 63% of us are what they call sleep working. So don't like their work, don't hate their work. They're just kind of enduring it. And 24% of people fucking hate their work, right?

Fear it and dread it. So I was quite struck by that when I looked at it. That means 87% of people don't like the thing they're doing most of the time that's incredible it's striking and bear in mind this thing that we don't like has spread over even more of our lives right average person answers their first email at 7 48 a.m and leaves work at 7 15 p.m so this is most of our waking lives we're doing something we don't like i start to think could there be some connection between that and this epidemic of awful sort of forms of despair anxiety depression addiction so I start to look for scientists who'd

studied this I discovered an amazing Australian social scientist called Professor Michael Marmot who I got to know who discovered the key to what causes depression at work right there's several aspects this can tell you the story how he discovered it if you want i think it's an amazing story but the core of it is if you go to work and you are controlled so you feel you have low or no control you are radically more likely to become depressed you're even more likely to have a stress-related heart attack and i think the reason is clearer than a bit further than professor marmot does um human beings need to feel our lives have meaning right and if you're controlled all the

time you don't feel like your life has meaning you don't feel like you it disrupts your ability to create meaning out of your work and it makes you feel like shit right that makes sense and one of the things so one of the things that was really important to me in everything i was learning for in the research for lost connections was Connections was it required this kind of shift in my mind. Because what I was basically told by my doctor is, your pain is a malfunction, right? He said, you know, we know what causes depression. It's just some people naturally have low levels of serotonin in their brains. You know, you're clearly one of them.

That's what's going on here. And one thing that was really striking speaking to the leading experts in the world is that story is just not true. There are real biological factors, there are real things that happen in your brain, obviously, but actually a professor Andrew Scull at Princeton University says it's deeply misleading and unscientific to say depression is just caused by low serotonin, right? This is just not true. But one thing that was so important to me looking at these nine real causes of depression and anxiety was realizing actually our pain makes sense right if you're depressed if you're anxious you've been told basically that you're a bit crazy there's

something not working but actually you're not a machine with broken parts right you're a human being with unmet needs and that requires a very different set of responses. So you think about, I started to think, well, let's think about that problem with work, right? Most people feel they've got no control at work or low control, and it's making them feel terrible. They're not wrong to feel that, right? They've got a need as human beings, and it's not being met. How can we deal with this? And I learned there's a really interesting strategy to deal with this. Now, this is something some people will be able to do as individuals, but it's something we can actually change as a society. So far, more people could do it.

I went to Baltimore and I interviewed a woman called Meredith Keogh, young woman. Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night, just fucking sick with anxiety, right? She had an office job. It wasn't the worst office job in the world, right? She wasn't being bullied. She wasn't being harassed.

But she just felt like she just couldn't bear the thought the next 40 years of her life were going to be this right and one day with her husband josh she did this quite bold thing josh was a working class guy from baltimore since he was a teenager he'd he'd um worked in bike stores and you know working in a bike store your viewers will know it's insecure work it's um controlled you do what your boss tells you you don't even get vacations unless the boss you know working in a bike store your viewers will know it's insecure work it's um controlled you do what your boss tells you you don't even get vacations unless the boss you know is nice to you and and josh and his colleagues in the store they didn't hate their boss he wasn't particularly bad boss as far as bosses go they quite liked him as a person but one day they just asked what does our boss actually do right we fix the bikes, and he seems to make all the money. What's going on here?

They decided to do an experiment. They set up a different bike store, a rival bike store. It's called Baltimore Bicycle Works, and it works on a different principle. So most people listening to this will work in corporations, right? Top down, you do what the boss says. It's modeled like an army. That is a very recent human invention, right? It comes along in the late 19th century. What they did was try a different model. They're called democratic cooperatives.

So at Baltimore Bicycle Works, they take all the big decisions together about their work. They vote. They share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks. So no one just gets stuck with all the shitty tasks. They share the profits, obviously. So they control their environment together. They're like a little tribe that control their environment instead of an army with one guy at the top controlling it. And one thing that was so fascinating spending time with them, which is totally in finding with Professor Michael Marmot's research about what causes depression at work,

is how many of them talked about having been really depressed and anxious when they were working in this controlled way. And their depression and anxiety had largely gone. They still had bad days, of course, but that kind of nagging depression and anxiety had gone away in this different environment. And as Josh said to me, there's no reason why any business

should work in this top-down, controlled way that makes people depressed. It's not even more efficient. A study at Cornell University found that democratic businesses grow four times faster than top-down businesses. And I think what this opens up at Cornell University found that democratic businesses grow four times faster than, you know, top-down businesses. And I think what this opens up is a different way of thinking about depression. So what we've done up to now is we've said to depressed and anxious

people, the job of fixing this is basically on you, buddy, right? Maybe if you're lucky, your family, maybe if you're lucky, your doctor. But actually, once you begin to realize that the reasons why people are depressed and anxious make sense this is just one of many reasons why people are depressed and anxious and also one of things that's fueling the addiction crisis which you can talk about if you want and once you realize it makes sense you suddenly realize what you've got to do is deal with the problem in the world as well as the problem just in the individual skull do you see what i mean yeah so you're focusing on work environments right um and there's's many reasons, as you were saying, for people being depressed. When you talk about work environments, have you researched people who are independent,

people who work for themselves, people who make things or make furniture or what have you? Yeah, and that was one of the things as well at Baltimore Bicycle Works, is most people are so removed from their work, their work right from the outcome of their work to give you an example of a guy i interviewed a lot um a guy called joe he works in philly and he worked when i met him in a paint a paint store right and joe's job was to turn up at whatever it was 8 30 in the morning stay there all day until 7 p.m and just take your order for paint and then when you ask for a specific shade, his job was to put it in a machine that shook it, right?

And then just give you the paint. That's it. That was his whole life, week after week, year after year. And Joe was acutely depressed. And Joe was really, felt really guilty about telling me how depressed he was, right? He kept saying, look, I know how lucky I am. I know how lucky I am. But he felt like shit. And he said, I remember him saying to me, look, I know how lucky I am. I know how lucky I am. But he felt like shit.

And I remember him saying to me, look, I know people need paint, right? I know that I have some function here in the economy. I don't think you put it quite like that. But this is not giving me any sense of meaning. But one of the real mysteries to me about Joe, and for that I had to learn about one of the other causes of depression and anxiety and solutions to that, was... So Joe, a lot of of people some of my relatives who

do work like that they're basically the margin for them to change their lives is really narrow right like one of my closest relatives is a struggling single mom um you know she's she works every hour she can she gets home at the end of day collapses right the idea of saying to her your job now is to democratize your workplace is ridiculous right she can't do that that's why most of lost connections is about how we can change the culture to free people up to make the changes they need to make although there are things individuals can do that i go through in the book but the but but the the a lot of people um how do i put it they we live in such an individualistic culture that people think what you're saying is you need to do it yourself. But Joe was in an unusual position in that Joe loved fishing,

right? He'd fished, I think, 20 of the 50 states. And he'd recently been to Florida. And he said, you know, when I was in Florida, I realized I could just quit this job. I could go and live as a fisherman in Florida. I'd make less money, but I'd be much happier, right? And somehow I knew as I was talking to Joe and I followed up with him over the years that followed, I knew he wasn't going to go to Florida, right? How did you know? It's just the way he said it.

It was a wistful longing. A whimsical idea, not something based on a real possibility. That's a really good way of putting it. But I remember the last time I saw him and he walked off and I felt like a complete dick for doing this. But I shouted after him because I felt it so strongly. Joe, go to Florida, right? Right.

And one of the things that really troubled me was why are so... So a lot of people are trapped in the way our culture works, which is why we've got to change the culture. And I talk about specific concrete things that have been tried in other countries that have freed people up and have reduced depressions. I'm we'll get to that but if you think about an individual like joe what's going on there and one of the things i learned from this amazing professor tim casso in illinois at knox college in illinois is i think one of the things this is one of the hardest causes of depression to learn about because i realized how much it played out in my own life as

well so just like we all know junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick right something similar has happened with our minds a kind of junk values have taken over our minds when i started learning about this i kept remembering so i ate nothing but junk food for like 10 years from my 20s basically and i remember one day it makes it even this story even sadder that it was Christmas Eve in 2009. At lunchtime, I went to my local KFC and I ordered, said my order, which I won't even repeat to you because it was so disgusting. And the guy behind the counter said, oh, Johan, we're so glad you're here. I was like, OK. And he said, wait a minute, wait a minute.

And he went back and he came out and the whole staff had bought a fucking massive Christmas card for me. And they'd written in it to our best customer and my heart was like sang because i was looking at this and i suddenly realized this wasn't even the fried chicken shop i went to the most right so so i was at an extreme end of the junk food spectrum right i'm not anymore though i've relapsed a bit lately but um but so we all know how that works right junk food appeals to the part of us that evolved to want nutrients. But it tricks that it's not actually a part of you that wants nutrients. It actually makes you sick. Right. And what Professor Kasser found is that there's similar things happen in our minds. So weirdly, so for thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about, you know, money and status and showing off you're gonna feel like shit right

but it's not an exact quote from confucius but that's the gist of what he said right but weirdly no one had actually scientifically investigated this until uh until professor kasser 25 years ago so he knew that basically to put it crudely there's two kinds of motives that human beings have right you've got them i've got them, I've got them, Jamie's got them, everyone's got them, right? The first set of motives, imagine if you play the piano, right? I'm totally unmusical, but imagine if you play the piano. If you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it gives you joy, that's called an intrinsic motive to play the piano, right? You're not doing it to get anything out of it. You're just doing it because you love it, right experience is the point now imagine you play the piano in a dive bar you know to pay the rent and you don't like it

right or you play the piano because your parents really want you to be a piano maestro i don't know there's a woman who's really into pianists so you learn the piano to impress her that would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano right you're not doing it for the thing itself you're not you're not you're doing it to get something out of it right and what professor casser discovered loads of really important things about this but there's a few we're all a mixture of these things but we move throughout our lives and what he discovered is the more you are driven by extrinsic values the more your life is guided by how you look to the outside by you know what you're trying to get out of life rather than enjoying it the more you

will become depressed and anxious by quite a large margin there's loads of studies that show this and and also he found that we have become much more obsessed with we're much more driven by these values over the last 30 years for all sorts of reasons partly because we from the minute we're born we're immersed in a machine that tells us life is about consumption, right? About externally consuming things. More 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own last name, right? So there's this machine constantly geared towards getting us to think extrinsically. Imagine an advert that said to you, you know, Joe, you look great today.

You smell great. You're doing fine, right? You don't need to buy anything today. That would, from the perspective of the advertising industry be the worst worst advert ever right it wouldn't make you want to buy anything so this movement towards these kind of junk values and he shows lots of reasons why these junk values make us feel like shit one is it just corrodes the quality of your relationships right if your, if you think your wife loves you, not because you're you, but because you're rich, because you look good or for some other reason, then think about the insecurity that enters into that relationship. You know, all right, if you suddenly got fat or if you suddenly lost all your money, it's over. It creates that sand of insecurity enters all your relationships.

The more you're extrinsically motivated the more insecure your relationships will be and the worse you'll feel or another example would be something that really makes human beings feel good what are called flow states right they're moments when you're doing something you love for me it's writing for you i'm sure it's partly broadcasting partly working out as you can see it's not working out for me uh Where you just get into the zone and time seems to collapse and you're in that moment, right? But thinking extrinsically, what being dominated by these junk values does is it jolts you out of the intrinsic value. So imagine, go back to the piano example. If you're playing the piano just because you love it and then suddenly you think, am I the best piano player in Los Angeles today?

How are these people in this room thinking about my piano playing? How much am I going to be paid for this piano playing? You can see how that would jolt you out of the flow state, right? People who, the more we're driven by extrinsic values, the less we get into flow states and the worse we feel. And there's lots of other reasons as well I can talk about. Well, that completely makes sense, that relying constantly on other people's approval and recognition and love in order

for you to be satisfied and happy is not a good recipe for getting by in this life smoothly. When you were young and you were experiencing depression, as you called it, what was the root cause of it? So in my case, it was, I mean, there were a few things going on and this is quite difficult for me to talk about, but one of the people I got to know for Lost Connections is this amazing guy called Dr. Vincent Felitti in San Diego and if you don't mind I'll tell you his story first I'll tell you why I sure what it made me realize about myself and actually why I was very resistant to this so it's very resistant very resistant to this insight that he had okay and really did not want

to absorb it um so he actually made this discovery and it's gonna sound like i'm talking about a whole other subject but trust me it gets to depression it led to an incredible breakthrough in depression so in the mid-1980s dr felidi is doing all this research into obesity basically kaiser permanente a not-for-profit medical provider down in san diego um just had a massive fucking problem with obesity right that it's just hugely growing problem with obesity and uh they were trying everything and nothing was like giving people nutritional advice that's it just wasn't working right so they basically said to him they gave him quite a big budget and they're like just figure out what the hell is

going on here so he went away and he started he started to work with i think it was about 350 extremely obese people right people who weighed more than 400 pounds and um he starts doing all sorts of different research with them and one day he just had this this kind of almost stupidly simple thought he thought what if they just literally stopped eating and we gave them the nutrients they need would they just lose loads of weight and then come down to a healthy weight so they obviously with like massive medical supervision they did this right people they just monitor them and they stop eating and they give them loads of vitamins and everything and it worked right they did in fact lose loads of weight but then something happened

that no one expected there's a woman i'm going to call susan to protect her medical confidentiality she'd been over 400 pounds. She got down to 138 pounds and everyone's celebrating. They think Vincent's like a miracle worker. And then one day she freaks the fuck out, starts massively obsessively eating. And very quickly she's back to not quite where she was, but close, right? And Vincent sits with Susan and he's like, what happened? And she's like, I don't know.

And he said, well, tell me about the day you cracked, right? Turned out something had happened to her that hadn't happened to her in, I think, ever or certainly in a very long time. A man hit on her, right? When she'd been, you know, hugely overweight, no man had hit on her. A man hit on her and that was the trigger, right? And he's like, okay. So they talk a lot more. He's like, when was it you started to put on weight?

For her, it was when she was 11. And so he's like, like well what happened when you were 11 that didn't happen when you were 10 that didn't happen when you were 12 or 15 and she said oh well that's when my grandfather started raping me and he this really stuck with him and so he starts talking to the group and he discovered 55 of the extremely overweight people in the group 50 50% people in the group, had put on their weight after being sexually abused, right? Which was extraordinary, far more than the wider population. It's like, wait, what's going on here? This is really, Susan said to him, overweight is overlooked and that's what I wanted to be, right? So this thing that had looked like a pathology, right? And it is a pathology in one sense, being extremely overweight will kill you, suddenly didn't look

like a sign of madness. It was actually performing a function that we couldn't see, right? And it is a pathology in one sense. Being extremely overweight will kill you. Suddenly didn't look like a sign of madness. It was actually performing a function that we couldn't see, right? It was protecting them from sexual attention. But, you know, this is a small group. It's a small study. So Vincent wanted to get a lot more research on this. And this is where it led to the breakthrough in depression. So he set it up with funding from the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, kind of gold-plated organization in this, in the US for this kind of research, everyone who came to Kaiser Permanente in the next, I think it was a year, for anything, whether you broke your leg,

you had migraines, you had schizophrenia, anything, got given a questionnaire. And it asked about, it had two parts. Firstly, it said, did any of these 10 bad things happen to you when you were a kid, right? Could be sexual abuse, neglect, that kind of thing. And then it says, have you had any of these problems as an adult? Obesity, injecting drug use.

And at the last minute, they added depression, right? By luck. So when they got the results back, the CDC were just like, what the fuck is this? For every category of childhood trauma you went through you were radically more likely to become depressed if you had six of those categories you were 3 100 more likely to have attempted suicide as an adult if you were um if you'd had six of them you were 4 600 more likely to become an adult injecting drug user right and there's a debate about why this is and i'm going beyond

what vincent says now but beyond what the science says and this comes it brings it back to to my experience so i had when i was a kid i'd experienced some very extreme acts of violence from an adult in my family you know my mother had been very ill when i was a kid my dad was mostly in another country and I'd experienced these really really extreme um and frightening acts of violence and I this sounds stupid but until I went to see Vincent if you had asked me do you think that played a role in your depression I would have said no right and it makes me realize one of the reasons why I clung to this very simplistic chemical imbalance theory of depression for so long because I did not want to give the individual who behaved so appallingly towards me

that sense of power over me I didn't want to I didn't want to think about that stuff I wanted to cauterize it I wanted to cut it out of my life I would say well okay that's bad thing that happens to you but you know but but the reason why i stayed with this and the reason why i kept you know spent this time with vincent in san diego and the reason why i kept going with all these different causes of depression and anxiety is because once you understand what's happened you can find solutions you otherwise didn't find so there was a second stage of vincent dr feliti's research that to me was so powerful. It's one of the reasons why I make myself talk about this now.

So if you'd indicated on the form that you'd experienced one of these forms of childhood trauma, the next time you went back to your doctor, you weren't called back. But the next time you went to your doctor, your doctor was told to say something to you like, Hi, Joe, I see on the form you indicated that you were violently abused when you were a child i'm really sorry that happened to you that should never have happened would you like to talk about it and quite a lot of people said thank you but no i don't want to talk about that but a lot of people did want to talk about on average the conversations lasted five minutes and then the doctor said i can refer you to a therapist to talk more about this if you want and they were monitored to see what happened the results were kind of

incredible there was a enormous fall in depression and anxiety just from the five-minute meeting right and from the obviously people referred to therapy saw an even bigger fall and it seems to be again this is going beyond this bit is going beyond what Vincent said said he said I asked about it and I think partly what happens is it's related to shame, right? If you are a kid and you experience some kind of abuse, you can basically do one of two things, right? You can either say, look, I'm fucked here, right?

I'm like a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine because I can't stop this happening and I've just got to accept it and I'm really vulnerable. Or you can say, this must be my fault at some level, right? Which is what I did. And of course, it's what you're being told anyway, by whoever's treating you badly in almost every case. And a weird thing is, if you tell yourself it's your fault, actually, you gain a sort of weird internal power, right? You're not the pinball being smacked around the machine. You're the person controlling the pinball machine. You can change behavior right you can't you can't change other person's behavior so you kind of develop this kind of shame and one of the things we know is and there's plenty of evidence

from this people like professor jim pennebaker have shown it shame is a catastrophe for human psychology right we know for example openly gay men died two years later than closeted gay men in the AIDS crisis even when they got medical care at the same time, right? Shame destroys you. It makes you sick. And what Vincent found was this model of releasing your shame, which led to this significant... I remember one of the letters he got was from an old woman, I think she was in her 80s, who just said...

She had been sexually abused when she was a kid, and she said, thank you for asking. I thought I'd die and no one would ever know. And you can see how that release of shame would have a transformative effect on people wow so for you you had this traumatic experience of violence when you were young you were depressed you were trying to figure out what the source of this was whether it was some sort of a chemical imbalance in your brain now when when they say chemical imbalance is in the brain have are they capable of measuring the level of serotonin in your brain yes so there's a huge debate about this you can for example do autopsies um there's a big debate about but that's when someone's dead yeah but there's a big debate about

so there seems to be most scientists agree not all of them and there are some people who dissent from this but most scientists agree low serotonin correlates with depression right but it's not the same thing the same way stretch marks correlate with obesity but they're not the cause of obesity they're the product of it so there are real brain changes that happen which are right about in lost connections and important to say that um that i don't think they should be described as chemical imbalances but one of these was really shocking to me was uh one of the the British experts on this. Dr. David Healy said to me, you can't even say the idea that depression causes serotonin. You can't even say that that theory is discredited because it was never credited.

There was never a time when half of the scientists in the field believed that. Right. The reason that story got sold to me and most people listening to this in the 90s is because it worked really well for the drug companies right because what it makes it sound like if you've just got a chemical imbalance the solution is just to give you chemicals now it's important to say chemical antidepressants do play a role we can measure that and there's a slightly nuanced point to make about this which is so depression is measured by something called the hamilton scale right i've always felt sorry for whoever hamilton was. The only way we remember him is by how fucking miserable we are. But anyway, so Hamilton scale goes from one where you are, you know, dancing around in ecstasy or on ecstasy to 51 when you would be acutely suicidal, right?

And to give you a sense of what movement on the Hamilton scale looks like, if you move six points on the Hamilton scale, sorry, if your sleep patterns get better, you'll gain six points on the Hamilton scale. And if your sleep patterns deteriorate, say you have a baby who's crying all the time, you'll generally lose six points on the Hamilton scale. Right. So Professor Irving Kirsch at Harvard Medical School did the best research on this. And what he found is on average, chemical antidepressants move people 1.8 points on the Hamilton scale. Right. About a third of what improving your sleep patterns does. It's important to say that's an average. So some people do get more than that. Some people get less. And you can see 1.8 points is not nothing, right? If you're acutely suicidal, 1.8 points can take the edge off. There's real value in giving people that relief,

but it's not solving the problem for most people. I thought I was, was you know weird for being on antidepressants for so long and remaining depressed turns out i was totally typical according to dr steve eladi as a professor of psychology he's done a lot of work on this between 65 and 80 percent of people taking chemical antidepressants become depressed again right so you can see that's not 100 there is some value isn't that that's what it billifies for right is a billifies the idea that your antidepressant is not enough so you take a billify on top of your antidepressant which is supposed to help you even further and it's one of the most prescribed medications in the country and it's an anti-psychotic yeah well this is terrifying the the doling out i mean one in

five americans will take a psychiatric drug in their lifetime right it's a sign of a a cultural madness that we are doing this right whether now this is not to say that i want to stress again there is a real value in these drugs there is some value to them there's some value to them but they're most certainly over prescribed and there's most certainly actual methods that you could use to improve your life without any sort of chemical intervention that are readily available to everybody like exercise and diet yeah well i'll give you really but those things aren't stressed when you when you go to a doctor the first thing the doctor doesn't say is listen what we need to do is get you to start running and get you start eating really healthy and then let's talk about antidepressants you're totally right there's a

10 billion dollar industry and that doctor giving you drugs that's a crazy number yeah so and and i think billion dollars exactly so this is why although there is a real value for those drugs the the the why this is the first primary and for most people only option that's ever offered and one of things that really helped me change think about this differently and it fits exactly what you're saying joe is i went to interview this south african psychiatrist called derek summerfield and derek happened to be in cambodia when chemical antidepressants were first introduced right that's where they were introduced no he was just there when they were first introduced in cambodia they i thought that would have been one of the last countries in the world they made their way to and the cambodian doctors didn't know what they were right so they're like what is this

and he explained and they said oh we don't need them we've already got antidepressants and he said what do you mean he thought they were going to talk about some kind of like herbal remedy or something instead they told him a story there was a farmer in their community who one day he worked in the rice fields who one day had stood on a landmine and got his leg blown off so they gave him an artificial limb and he went back to work in the rice fields but apparently it's super painful to work in water when your leg's been you know when you've got an artificial limb and your leg's been blown off and i'm guessing it's pretty traumatic because he's in the fields where he's been blown up he starts to cry all day doesn't want to get out of bed classic depression right they said to derek we gave him an antidepressant he said what was it they said they

explained they went and sat with him they listened listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense They realized that actually made perfect sense that he felt so bad. They figured if they bought him a cow He could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in these fields where he was being fucked up So they bought him a cow within a couple of weeks. He stopped crying. They said to Derek. So you see doctor That cow was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right? now if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have we've been propagandized to that sounds like a bad joke right i went to my doctor for an antidepressant he gave me a cow if you understand what all these experts who i met have been interviewed extensively have been trying to tell us if you understand what the world health

organization has been trying to tell us those cambodian doctors knew intuitively what they knew through the science which is our pain makes sense right you're not crazy to feel like shit you've got unmet needs and what you need is help to get your needs met now some of the things you're talking about are really good examples exercise diet some of them are these bigger interventions so one of the heroes of lost connections is this doctor i got to know called sam everington who who um is based in in east london actually where i near where i lived for a long time, very poor part of East London. And sadly, he was never my doctor. But Sam was really uncomfortable.

He's a general practitioner, he's a general doctor. Loads of people were coming to him with depression and anxiety, right? And he'd been told in his medical training, even though he knew the science was much more complicated than this, to just say to people, you know, you've just got a chemical imbalance in your brain and just drug them right and sam thought right like me he's not opposed to the drugs he does give them out to some people but he just thought this is this is not right this isn't dealing with the

reason they feel so shit right so he tried a different approach he noticed that one of the factors that was making them depressed and anxious was how profoundly lonely they were it's a study that asks that obviously it's in britain but figures are similar to britain by giving american examples a study that asks americans how many close friends do you have who you could call on in a crisis when they started doing the study years ago the most common answer was five today the most common answer is none right it's not the average but more people say none than any other options you think about that more people in america yeah more people say none than any other options. You think about that. More people in America?

Yeah, more people in the United States have nobody to turn to when there's a crisis than any other option, right? So you think about what life must be like when you're alone. That is not the species we are. The reason why you and I are sitting here, Joe, in LA, the reason why we're alive is because our ancestors in Africa, on the savannas of Africa, were unbelievably good at one thing, right? They weren't bigger than the animals they tookas of Africa, were unbelievably good at one thing, right? They weren't bigger than the animals they took down, but they were much better at cooperating than the animals they took down. We exist because our ancestors formed into tribes. Every instinct we have is to live in a tribe, right? Bees need a hive. Humans need a tribe. We are the first humans ever to try to disband our tribes, right? No one's ever done that before in human history. And it's quite rightly- Well rightly well what do you let me stop you there because we're getting

deep in the weeds here what do you say to someone who is happy with what they do lives a fulfilled life exercises and is still depressed yes i thought a lot about this remind me to come back to the thing about east london i know this is this is an issue with a lot of people i i know people that worship at the altar of science and modern medicine that firmly believe that all depression is because of some sort of chemical imbalance in the brain and anything that debates that or anything that disputes that notion is is pisses them off you know i understand that and i would have been like that for me do you get that yeah of course i was like that for many years do you get that oh do i get some people responding that way? Sure, of course, of course. I think the, so

the World Health Organization is the leading medical body in the world, right? They did a study of all the best evidence and they explained very clearly that mental health is a social indicator, right? It has social causes, it needs social solutions as well as individual solutions. The science on this is overwhelming. You won't get many scientists who say, in fact, you struggle to find any scientists who say depression is purely a biological phenomenon, right? Pretty much everyone agrees

there's some social and psychological component. I think when we, there's a weird disconnect between what the scientists know and what the public is told, right? I don't know anyone who went to their doctor who um apart from this wonderful doctor in east london who we can talk about who went with depression anxiety was told anything other than a biological story i mean they may be asked you know some of them were asked about childhood you know what was your childhood like and referred to a therapist but no one was told about these wider social causes

no one's told like do you feel controlled at work well okay it's a fact that could be making you make you depressed but in terms of the people who who um who are depressed but don't uh because this was a real mystery to me right i knew people i thought but this guy's got everything and he feels he's still depressed what's going on here i think there's two things to say about that one is i started to for various reasons for research for something else i was reading some like feminist texts from the early 60s, right? And a really common thing that happened in the early 60s is women would go to their doctor and they'd say, doctor, there's something really wrong with my nerves. People talked about nerves then, we don't do that anymore. Something really wrong with my nerves because I've got everything a woman could possibly want.

I've got a husband who doesn't beat me. I've got a car, I've got a washing machine, I've got two kids've got two kids but i feel like shit right and the doctor would go you're right and give a valium now if we could travel back in time and speak to those women what we'd say is right you've got everything you could possibly want by the standards of the culture but standards the culture just wrong right as a as a woman as a human being you need more than just a washing machine and a car right you need a fulfilling life you need more than just a washing machine and a car, right? You need a fulfilling life. You need to have meaning and purpose. And a very similar thing, I think, is happening today.

So for example, when I speak to people who say, I've got everything I could want, but I feel like shit. So tell me about your life. Very often, they're working really hard in prestigious jobs that they don't like. They don't enjoy hour by hour to buy things that don't give them pleasure. It comes back to this hijacking by junk values that we're talking about that Professor Tim Kasser discovered. So what you've got is because we've been told a totally misleading story about what makes us satisfied and happy as human beings. I think this comes up again and again in the interviews you do. Because we've been taught in different ways, because we've been told a misleading story about that, we live our lives according to the wrong script.

We feel like shit. And rather than than question the script we think there must be something wrong with us biologically now there are biological contributions it's important to say that but one of the things that really blew my mind on this was um i interviewed this woman amazing social scientist called dr brett ford in berkeley she did this research it's kind of simple research it just asked um if you consciously decided you were going to spend more hours a day trying to make yourself happier would you actually become happier right and they did this research she didn't do it alone obviously with her colleagues in the united states uh japan russia and taiwan and what they found was in the US,

if you try to make yourself happier consciously, you do not become happier. In the other countries, if you try to make yourself happier, you do become happier. And they were like, what's going on? So they did more research. And what they discovered was in the US,

and obviously I spend a lot more time here, but in Britain as well, if you try to make yourself happier, you try to do something generally for yourself. You buy something for yourself, you big yourself up, you try to get a promotion. In the other countries, generally, if you try to make yourself happier, you do something for someone else, right?

You try to help your friends, your family, your community. Wait a minute, what countries stress this? Japan, Russia, and China. They stress this, that if you, this is a part of their culture, that if you want to be happy, you do something for someone else. It's, it's, it's so implicit in the culture that they live collectively, that it's not even, just like we wouldn't even, if you said, do you think happiness is an individualistic thing? We'd be like, what are you even talking about? Isn't that sort of an extrinsic idea as well? The idea that

you're going to be happy by trying to make other people happy well this is the thing so intrinsic values are not about just internal to yourself the things that you value so your intrinsic value could be spending time with your kids right that was probably most people's strongest intrinsic value if their parents is being with their kids bonding with their kids what my point is if your goal is to get happy and the way you've chosen to get happy is I'm gonna get happy by making other people happy. That's that seems very strange. I don't think so. I think that's that if you think about where humans shouldn't you just make other people happy because you love them. But that is a way loving people and being present with them is a way but not as like a specific for with a specific

goal of making yourself happy. That seems That's not why they do it. It's not like when they were told, make yourself happy, they had an implicit script in their culture, which was like, oh, right, if I want to make myself happy, I'll spend time with other people. I'll do things with other people. But if you think about it in terms of human evolution, it makes total sense, right?

Think about our ancestors, where they evolved. If you were a group, if our ancestors had been individualists who were out to big up themselves as individuals, we wouldn't be having this conversation, right? Right. So it makes sense that we evolved as a species with instincts. No, there's no argument there. The question is the motivation of trying to get happy by helping other people. Yeah, so it's so implicit in the culture for most people in say China that they wouldn't even articulate it that way It's only if you force them to say look try to make yourself happier that they then the script becomes obvious

It's implicit, but this script that we have this idea that the way you make yourself happier is as an individual You know just doing something for yourself and how you hold Let's stop sure because there is not one script in this country of how to make yourself happy. I think that's sort of disingenuous. This idea that the only way to make yourself happy is to do that. That's not what people are trying to do. What people are trying to do is be successful. And I don't think they necessarily equate success with happiness.

But what they do equate success with is an alleviation of debt and alleviation of problems and alleviation of a lot of the issues that people face. And they think of that as if you look at the problems that you have when you're growing up, especially if you grow up in a poor family, one of the main problems that you face is you're worried about paying your bills. So you say, someday I'm going to get to a point where that is no longer an issue. I'm going to make it. I'm going to be successful. They're not is no longer an issue. I'm going to make it. I'm going to be successful. They're not doing it thinking this is going to make me happy. I very rarely see that, which is one of the reasons why people, even people's parents, and this freaks me the fuck out, will tell them to not pursue their dreams, but instead

to pursue something that's more likely to happen. Like, don't pursue your dream of becoming an actor or a singer or whatever it is. Instead, pursue your dream of being the foreman at the company you work at because that's attainable. I think you're totally right. And I think there's a lot of evidence that you're right, that the financial anxiety is a massive driver of depression and anxiety, obviously, that There's an interesting study that found people who have an income from property are 10 times less likely to develop an anxiety disorder

than people who don't. And there was a really interesting experiment in how we can respond to that. It's one that President Obama said late in his term he thinks would have to happen across the country in the next 20 years for various reasons. So in Canada in the 70s, the Canadian government chose a town at random

seems to genuinely have been random it's a town called dofan it's um anyone who knows uh canada it's about four hours out of winnipeg and they said to a big group of people in this town we're going to give you guys for the net for the foreseeable future we're going to give all of you a guaranteed basic income we're going to give you the equivalent of in today's money 15 000 us dollars right there's nothing you can do that means we'll take it away from you and there's nothing you have to do in return for it we're just your citizens of our country we want you to have a good life right it was partly because they had a kind of welfare system but it was a lot of people were falling through the cracks and they wanted to do a little experiment to see would this work better and this was studied very carefully by a woman i interviewed

called dr evelyn forge to see what happened and loads of interesting things happened people spent more time with their kids very few people quit work but a lot of people turned down shitty jobs so actual overall work standards improved because employers had to attract people with with better standards but for me the most interesting thing is there was a huge fall in depression and anxiety, right? Depression and anxiety that was so severe, people had to be hospitalized, fell by 9%, which is remarkable in just three years. And then the program ended. Dr. Forger said to me, I thought so much about that, I'd learned about the cow. Dr. Forger said, you know, that's an antidepressant, right?

We should expand our idea of an antidepressant to be anything that reduces depression. That should include pills. But also, so you're totally right. I mean, look, I grew up, my dad's a bus driver. My mom worked in a shelter. My grandmother cleaned toilets. Financial anxiety is a massive driver of the despair. I mean, more than half of all Americans have not, because of the incredible financial pressure they've been put under, got $500 set aside for if a crisis comes along, right?

So you're talking about that's a huge drop. And again, that's really important to explain to people. If that's making you depressed and anxious, don't let a doctor tell you, you've just got a chemical imbalance in your brain, right? But do doctors still say that? All the time time my nephew's best friend um just literally a couple of weeks ago went to the doctor and was told yeah you've got a dopamine imbalance the doctor said it's migrated in the 20 years since i went there from a surgery was this in england or in the united states i mean i get contacted constantly by

people who are being told they've got chemical they're told they've got chemical imbalances in their brains are they just as likely to prescribe antidepressants in England as they are American? It's slightly lower, but it's still exceptionally high. It's still, yeah. There's that narrative that an antidepressant must be in some sort of a pill form, and that even the expression antidepressant and antidepressant, it's a very confusing thing that we've sort of adopted very quickly in this country and it's a relatively recent, you know over the last 60-70 years and the people that have Antidepressants in their body that take them all the time and swear by them Boy, if you try to tell them in any way that there's a better option they get extremely defensive

I have friend she's very smart smart, and she's one of the people that will very aggressively debate this idea that it's anything but a chemical imbalance. But she doesn't take care of her body. She doesn't exercise all the time. She's slightly overweight. She doesn't eat the best foods you know it's it's it's a weird thing and she's living in a society and culture that has all these forces that are rising that make people feel terrible right yeah and so a big thing for me is when i'm talking to this because i've had some of that reaction as well not too much but i've had some of that reaction as well first thing for me to i would say is i want to expand the menu of options i don't want to take anything off the table right it's not about you say that and i and

i think you're probably being pretty honest but you really do want to you want to eliminate but just by the standard of improvement you do probably want to take most people off of antidepressants don't you wouldn't you rather have a I would draw another choice yeah I would draw an analogy obesity is massively risen in the Western world it hasn't risen because people suddenly became greedy and lazy it's risen because our food system is terrible the way food supply system is terrible and we've built cities that people can't walk and bicycle around right and they're really stressed all the time and they get home from work exhausted so they don't have time to exercise a lot of them in that

context some people will do what's a it called, stomach stapling, liposuction, that kind of thing, right? Now, I'm not against that, but if we change the society in the way that I would want to with obesity so that people could walk and cycle and they had access to healthy food, far fewer people would need stomach stapling

or liposuction, right? So I would draw, it's not a perfect analogy, but I'd say is if the social changes that I want to happen happen, if we follow the places that have succeeded in reducing depression and anxiety over time you would see fewer people feeling they needed and chemical antidepressants it's not about saying stop you right with a couple of things first of all i don't think it's access to healthy food i think most people have access to healthy food they choose not to eat it they choose to eat refined carbohydrates, high sugar foods, fast food.

Those are the things that are getting people fat. And I don't think that salad is so outside of the reach of the normal person. I just don't agree with that. I just think they make unhealthy choices. That's much more – and they get addicted to refined carbohydrates. I understand what you're saying, and I think there's some truth in it but i think people make choices in a context right so for example um you know one of my relatives who's very overweight you know she's constantly fucking stressed because she's trying to hold together so much and one of the few reliefs and pleasures she has is to eat

too much right and to eat pretty shitty food. Right. I'm not critical of her for that. What I want is to help her change her life and change the society in which we live. So she's not got that constant stress. Do you know what I mean? I mean, I think of this in relation to addiction. You tweeted once my TED talk.

I gave everything you think you know about addiction is wrong, which I'm grateful. Thank you. And which is based on my previous partly taken from my previous book, Chasing the Scream, which is about addiction. And I think about what you're saying in relation to that context. So we had a lot of addiction in my family. And, you know, one of the things that really changed my mind about this, and I think it really relates to what you're saying about food,

is most people think, you know, addiction, say drug addiction, say heroin addiction, right? Which is something very close to me. Most people think the heroin addiction if you said what causes heroin addiction they'd say da heroin causes heroin addiction right we've been told this story for a really long time that um you know if you took if we kidnapped someone off the street we injected them all we injected them with heroin every day for 20 days at the end of that they'd have this desperate physical hunger for the chemical hooks in heroin their body would desperately need it and that's that's why they would be addicted right the first thing that led to me saying not right about that is when it was

explained to me in britain if you get hit by a truck and you know you break your hip and you're taken to hospital you'll be given loads of a drug called diamorphine right for the pain diamorphine is heroin it's much better than street heroin because it's medically pure right if anyone listening to this has a british grandmother who had a hip replacement operation your grandmother's taken a lot of heroin right if what we've been told about the chemical hooks is right what should be happening to all these people in hospital loads of them should be becoming addicted it doesn't happen in britain with with people who are given diamorphine so it's like well wait what's going on i only began to understand it when i went to vancouver and interviewed this incredible professor there called bruce alexando did this experiment

it's changed how we think about addiction i think is very relevant to what you're saying about food so this theory the chemical hooks theory of addiction and chemical hooks are real they're just a small part of it the chemical hooks theory of addiction comes from a series of experiments that were done years ago they're really simple 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 die quite quickly right within i think is a week so there you go you might remember this famous advertisement yeah from the 80s so there you go right that's our story but in the 70s professor, Professor Alexander came along and said, well, hang on a minute.

You put the rat alone in an empty cage where it's got nothing to do except use these drugs. What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically like heaven for rats, right? They've got loads of friends. They can fuck all the time. They've got grain they like and colored balls. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water but the fascinating thing is in rat park they don't like the drugged water that much none of them used it some of them

they do use it but none of them used it compulsively and none of them ever overdose so when they're deprived of the things that make life meaningful they turn obsessively to the drug when they've got the things that make life meaningful for rats they don't the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety the opposite of addiction is connection. I think you can see a similar principle playing out with food, right? Of course, there's some margin to the individual. I don't want to say that we're not entirely the product of our environment. You're getting very far away from this woman,

these people that were on this diamorphine. So why are you saying that they don't get addicted to it? Because they go back to their lives that are meaningful. There's a human example that happened at the same time as rat park why why are their lives particularly meaningful in relationship to like the lives we're talking about here so i think you can see in an example um a good example that was happening at the same time as rat park an experiment the vietnam war right huge numbers of american troops in vietnam about 40 used heroin right um and if you look at the reports from the time they were shitting themselves

because they were like my god when the war ends we're going to have all these heroin addicts on the streets of the united states they're going to come home and because they believe the chemical hooks theory it's a really good study in the archives of general psychiatry by professor lee robbins that followed these guys home a select group of them and what it found was 95 of them just stopped right didn't go into some catastrophic withdrawal. Some of them did experience some physical discomfort, but they didn't, you know, they didn't. Now, if you believe the old theory of addiction

that you're taken over by the chemical hooks, that makes no sense, right? But they've been exposed to all the same chemical hooks as any homeless, street-addicted person living on the streets. But if you understand this different way of thinking it makes perfect sense if you took you and me now and put us in a hellish pestilential jungle where we don't want to be we could die at any moment we'd be made to kill people you would definitely survive longer than me but we would both find heroin a lot more appealing than

we do now right and then when we come back to our lives when we have meaning and purpose we would be find heroin a lot less appealing the core of addiction is not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be so when something an intervention happens that reduces the amount of pain in your life you're going to you're going to be less addicted there's a very challenging line marianne faithful you know the british rocks i'm going to stop you right there because there is a giant issue though with people taking pain pills after operations that weren't on pain pills before and then they get addicted to them so you look at what's actually that's because a lack of meaning in their life or is it because there is an absolute real chemical hook like i have a good friend who

had his nose broken and uh they fixed his nose and he got on some i think it was oxycontin afterwards they prescribed to him and then four months later he's taking it every day all day so there's a few things to say about that firstly chemical hooks are real but they're a small part of the picture we know how much they are so there's experiments that measure this so we um lots of people will have taken in fact some people listening to this will be taking part in this experiment now when nicotine patches were invented in the late 80s and they become marketed in the early 90s there's this huge wave of optimism right because the chemical hook in cigarettes is nicotine right nicotine patches give you the chemical hook you're addicted to um and so there was this huge way they're like oh great we're going to give

people the chem because it's the addiction is caused by chemical hooks we're going to give them the chemical hook they'll stop wanting these filthy smoke smoking's going to end right um in fact what happened is 17% of people, according to the U.S. Surgeon General's report, when they use nicotine patches and they're motivated to stop smoking, right? Really important to say 17% is not no one. Big number that has saved hundreds of thousands of people's lives, a conservative estimate.

But it still leaves 83% where something else is going on, right? But isn't that because of the delivery method? The delivery method of cigarettes is incredibly satisfying. You take a hit, you get it right into your system, and boom, you get that nicotine. The patch is transdermal, it's very slow. It's not the same feeling. Yeah, there are experiments that show there is pleasure

that comes from the delivery method, but it's also about self-soothing. It's about anxiety. It's about boredom. And this is very important to relate to the opioid crisis. So one in 130 opioid prescriptions result in an addiction right so it's a small number but a catastrophic and devastating number and i've reported from the places that have been most affected like this by this like keen in new hampshire one in what one in 130 if the users

become addicted that's it yeah it's a relatively small proportion now because so many people in the country wrong yeah i can send you the study that's the best study's relatively small proportion now that's so many people in the country wrong Yeah, I can send you the study. That's the best study. Is that that and that's in the United States or in the UK? Yeah in the United States, we've got that's one in 130 prescriptions, but bear in mind some people get more than one prescription so, you know, but The but one of the things that's really important to understand about that is the context in which this is happening Right in Britain in the 80 and this totally important to understand about that is the context in which this is happening, right? In Britain in the 80s, and this totally relates to what I write about in Lost Connections about depression,

as well as in Chasing the Scream about addiction. In Britain in the 18th century, there was this thing that happened called the gin craze, right? So huge numbers of people are driven out of the countryside into these disgusting urban slums where, you know, they're living in this awful, they've lost everything that made life meaningful to them right and what happened was an outbreak of mass alcoholism huge outbreak it's called the gin craze there's famous paintings of like a woman drinking a bottle of gin while her baby falls out a window that kind of thing right and it really happened and at the time what people said is look at this evil drug gin look at what it's done to people if only we could get rid of these evil people selling this evil drug gin look at what it's done to people if only we could

get rid of these evil people selling this evil drug gin this problem would go away now when we look back at it we know that can't have been because of gin because we could both have gin in these glasses now uh anyone in britain can go and buy gin at any point pretty much and if they're an adult and we don't have i mean there's still some alcoholism of course i understand what you're saying there was some despair and so yeah what changed is not the availability of the drug what changes the amount of pain in the society and that is the key factor that's playing out here with opioids right it's not the only factor chemical hooks are real but you know i remember interviewing a guy who was absolutely adamant that you know he he'd become medically addicted it was an accidental chemical hooks had

taken him over he'd been a college athlete right and he was in a i think he was about 21 he was in a terrible car accident and they gave and they gave him loads of opioids and he became addicted but then i said well tell me about what else was going on turned out he couldn't be a college athlete anymore his whole life had been built around being an athlete and because of his injuries he couldn't become an athlete anymore and i said well do you think it might have been related also to the despair around that it doesn't take long for people I think part of the problem is because we've got such stigma about depression anxiety addiction people will latch on to the biological explanation whether it's the chemical imbalance theory the chemical hooks theory as their path out of stigma whereas to me you shouldn't be stigmatized in any fucking circumstance whether it's because you're in pain

psychological pain physical pain do you see the point i'm making so i think one of the reasons why we're so committed to these and it's not even a good way out of stigma i can explain to you how if you want this interesting evidence about that but do you see the point i'm making joe i do see the point that you're making that people with lives that are unsatisfying or unfulfilling or there's some sort of a major issue in there like the athlete that's no longer going to be able to be an athlete, that that's going to make these drugs more enticing. But I know too many people that have had, like, real issues getting off of them, like physical issues, painful withdrawals.

Of course. And most people, I mean, you're talking about the same people that have a hard time not eating shitty food, right? People that have a hard time getting disciplined enough to go to the gym. These are the same kind of people we're talking about. They're going to have a massive problem if you give them pills, and those pills create a chemical hook. Even if it's a chemical hook that you or I or a disciplined person would be able to get. Like Dr. Carl Hart famously called famously called it he said it's like

getting over the flu he goes that's what heroin's like everyone wants to pretend that you're gonna die he goes no you feel like shit for a little while and then you're fine he goes it's not the thing that everybody makes it out to be withdrawals are not the thing that everybody makes it out to be but but if you have the average person and you give them pills and those pills can keep them from getting the flu they're gonna keep taking those pills and if they stop taking those pills can keep them from getting the flu they're going to keep taking those pills and if they stop taking those pills they get the flu people are comfort jumping junkies and i think it's that's too simplistic i think there's some truth in what you're saying but these two so i think the key thing that happens so i think dr hart is his friend of mine is totally right but

the the the physical um withdrawal is you know a flu is not a nice thing but it's not the most onerous thing in the world but the the thing that's really devastating is the resumption of the pain that you were in psychological pain that you were anesthetizing with the drug right right if you want to understand why people are taking so many painkillers we've got to understand why they're in so much pain and that comes back to the nine causes of depression and anxiety that i write about in lost connections and then the kind of seven solutions to this problem that i offer so again that's about if you're so let's say joe right joe in the paint store who i was talking about who's you know he who has this job he can't bear has very little meaning in his life feels his life

is just slipping through his fingers he took oxy for quite a long time he actually contacted me because of my my book um and because and my ted talk and he thought he was telling me a story about addiction right but the truth is when he took oxy he was numbed it made him as numb as the work itself and then when he stopped he was acutely depressed and felt like shit so i think the challenge is if you are coming off of this drug into a society of profoundly lonely and isolated people who are financially insecure who've been told that life is about money and status who who you know who think life is about screaming at each other through screens a lot of those people are going to feel like shit and it's not because they're individually weak right it's

because now maybe individual weaknesses of course we all have flaws every human being has flaws but but i think it's much more because the fact that it's risen so much tells you that it's a response to social changes right just like the fact obesity has risen so much tells us now they're of course individual agency i don't want to infantilize anyone there are things individuals can do obviously and i talk about them a lot in lost connections but i think the fact that it's a social transformation um does tell you something there's a good illustration of this kind of weird thing that was discovered about depression in the 70s that was so inconvenient that psychiatrists kind of tried to brush it under the carpet so in the 70s the american psychiatric association for the

first time wanted to standardize how depression is diagnosed across the u.s because up to then doctors were just using their own judgment about what it even was right so they drew up a list of 10 symptoms kind of obvious things like feeling worthless crying a lot you know you could guess what they were and they send this out to doctors all over the u.s and uh they use it but a couple within a couple of months doctors start to come back and go look we've got a real we've got a real problem here because if we just use this checklist we should be diagnosing every grieving person as mentally ill because these are the symptoms of grief right everyone when you lose someone wants to cry a lot you know has persistent feelings of sadness that kind of thing so what do we do so the psychiatrists regrouped and they were like okay we'll create

something it was called the grief exception which basically said use this checklist to diagnose depression unless the person has lost someone they love in the last year, in which case none of this counts. So they start using that. But over the next few years that followed, there's this really awkward debate because they're like, wait a minute. We're being told to tell our patients that depression is just a brain disease that you can just identify from a checklist. Unless there's one situation in life where it's perfectly legitimate to react this way but if that begs the question what about all the other different things in your life why not if you're made homeless why not if you've stuck in a shitty job you hate why not if you're really lonely the minute you admit all that you have to admit

context and that was so inconvenient they just got rid of the grief exception. That doesn't exist. That's a fascinating fact. And that seems to be a huge issue. That seems to be one of the primary reasons why people today, I mean, if you stop and ask the average person today who's not feeling well, I guarantee you they're going to be able to come up with at least one or two of those things on the list that are factors. You're totally right.

Whether it's a job, a financial stress, relationship stress, loneliness, friendship issues, or death in the family, or losing someone they love. But the fact that losing someone they love, like, we'll count that. That's the one thing we'll count, right? Yeah, that seems very preposterous. And the woman who did the most research on this is one of the best people I got to know for lost connections woman called Dr. Joanne Cassia Torres an amazing person. She lost her baby in childbirth. Her baby was called Cheyenne and she became an expert on this and she said, you know, she talks about the craziness of this.

It just shows we don't understand pain in this society. She said she put it to me. We don't grief isn't a pathology, right? She's done this research that shows, I think the figure is 32% of grieving parents are diagnosed and drugged in the first 48 hours after their child dies. And she said, this is a sickness, right? Grief is not a pathology. We grieve because we've loved someone, right? It's not a malfunction. It's not a sign of madness. It's a sign that you loved the person and in a way i'm going beyond what she says now but you know i think one of the things the fact that depression and grief have the same symptoms is really significant because i think depression

is grief for your own life not going how it should right it's grief for your own needs not being met now when someone we love dies all we can do is hold the survivors and love them right but with um but with um with your own needs not being met i mean a really interesting example of something you've come brilliantly on the show joe about psychedelics some of the research around psychedelics which taught me a lot about how we might think about this differently so as you know you know better than anyone until the mid-60s, loads of research was done giving LSD to people with depression, alcoholism, various problems. They weren't done to the standards

we want to do scientific experiments now, but they found really promising results. And then Nixon shuts the whole thing down, right? In the last six years, there's been a huge reawakening of this. I went and interviewed Velocity Connections, the teams that have worked on this, here in LA, at UCLA, at NYU, at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, in la at ucla at nyu at johns hopkins in baltimore

in london at ucl uh in sao paulo and in norway and loads of fascinating things and we found about this but there's one that i think really relates to our conversation powerfully um well loads of things but we'll talk about one um so there was a sub finding of one of the studies that i became obsessed with they did this research johns hopkins in balinding of one of the studies that I became obsessed with. They did this research at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, some of the leading scientists in the world, where they gave psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms, to chronic long-term smokers who tried everything to stop smoking and had not succeeded.

I thought about my mother a lot because my mother is a chain smoker. There's a photograph of me and her when I'm six months old. She's breastfeeding me, smoking and resting the ashtray on my stomach. Oh, my God. And so they take people like my mother, right? When I showed her that picture, she said, you were a fucking difficult baby. I needed that cigarette. Oh, Jesus Christ.

Isn't it funny how they try to blame you? I was a fucking baby. It's okay. She's a good person. So they take these people, chronic long-term smokers, and they gave them three doses of psilocybin over, I think it was six months. It was six months, so two-month intervals, I think. And what they found was extraordinary.

80% of them stopped smoking, right? And it still remained not smoking more than two years later. Incredible. Think about we were comparing it to 17% with nicotine patches. And they were like, what's going on so they did all this this research in this and what we've got to be careful with psychedelics is to not talk about it the way we were misleadingly told about antidepressants chemical antidepressants in the 90s which is oh it flips a chemical switch in your brain clearly a chemical process happens in the brain but but what they found i think the most

important thing and a lesson for people who don't want to use psychedelics as well is a sub-finding. So if you take psilocybin, most people will have a kind of spiritual experience, right? Some people will have a super intense spiritual experience. Some people have a mild one. And a minority will have no spiritual experience. It turns out the positive effects like a reduction in depression addiction correlate exactly with the intensity of the spiritual experience so if you have no spiritual experience you don't have but isn't this dose dependent no this cut across those so they gave them three varying doses what were

the doses i can't remember but it's in the that's pretty significant though it's a very important factor yeah so across the three so you were given it three times and you were always given three different doses so obviously you would have a more most people have much more intense experience with the most with the strongest dose but the key thing i think about that that finding is that as one of the experts put it to me it's not that it's a chemical process it's a learning experience what it does is it gives you an experience of what it can feel like to be deeply connected to feel deeply connected to the people around you to the natural world incredible strong natural antidepressant that we can talk about if you want have you had psychedelic experiences so when i was a teenager i bought some and i think they were a drug dealer in camden town market i'm holding off because i've got to go to the amazon

rainforest later this year and i want to use ayahuasca for the first time in the amazon you've never had because you know i'm getting that from the way you're describing this. That's interesting. I interviewed huge numbers of people who had. Tell me what you're getting. That's interesting. Well, what it is is a dissolving of the ego. That's a general factor that almost everybody reports. It also releases you from deeply ingrained patterns of behavior and thinking and highlights them.

So as much as it is a spiritual experience, it's also a dissolving of the self. And the way we define ourselves is oftentimes very limiting. You have this, this is the way I describe it. And this is the way I describe very powerful psychedelic experiences. It's like, do you remember the old Windows thing? Control-Alt-Delete. That's how you'd reboot. It's like Control-Alt-Delete for your brain.

And your brain reboots with a fresh new desktop. There's nothing on it except one folder. And that one folder is titled My Old Bullshit. And you have two choices. You can either start fresh and try to re-examine the world with fresh eyes, or what's more convenient is you slowly slip into the My Old Bullshit folder and start opening it up and repeating patterns

and lighting that cigarette up when you really shouldn't, having that drink when you probably shouldn't do that either. And those things are common because it's comforting. It's comforting for people to repeat patterns that they're familiar with. I think there's a few things in that.

You're totally right. And the scientific evidence is overwhelming. In fact, at UCL, at the University College London, Professor David Nutt did all this research that shows one of the things that happens in your brain when you take psychedelics is the part of the brain that relates to ego just doesn't function. Right. function right I remember interviewing one of the most moving interviews I did was a guy called Mark who was on one of the studies in Baltimore who was a very shy reserved shut down guy when he was 10 his dad had died and no one had talked to him about his dad's death his mother was just totally devastated and no one had talked to him about it and he'd always been very shut down and he

takes the side of cyber and he had this really intense experience where he thinks he's in space and he believed he met his father. And his father apologized for leaving him. And then he reached into Mark and he pulled out these walls. And he said, I want to thank these walls. They've protected my son.

They've done a good job, but you can let them go now. And after that, Mark really changed how he lived. He actually went and, as you say, was able to sustain that insight. He went and learned a lot of meditation. I think you're absolutely right. It's about dissolving of the ego and what an experience of egolessness can do is almost point a direction on a compass, right? But there's another aspect that emerged in that,

which I think is one of the slight differences between us, although I think there's a lot in what you're saying. So in London, they did this research with chronically depressed people. And Robin Carr-Harris, who led that study, said to me, you know, there's one woman, chronically depressed. She takes the psilocybin. She gets everything you're saying, the dissolution of ego, the need for all the things you're talking about and then she goes back to her job in a

shitty seaside town where you just can't live compatible with those insights right she just couldn't and so her depression came back so to me what the size of where individuals can change their lives obviously they should right and we would totally agree on that and a lot of people do have more margin to change their lives than they think. And we're in total agreement on that. And I think you would probably agree that there are some people who are, you know, through no fault of their own, like a lot of my relatives, fucking stuck, right? And very few people have no margin of change.

But a lot of people have such a small margin of change that that margin will not carry them out of depression or anxiety or addiction. that's why we need the widest what the world health organization says you need social solutions as well as individual solutions we need to change the way the society works in all sorts of ways that reduce the things that are causing this pain in the first place do you see what i mean changing the way society works, is a grand, entangled, gigantic undertaking. Whereas changing your own life is not. Changing your own life is difficult. It can be very difficult for a lot of people.

But it's far easier than changing society. So this woman who you're telling me has this psychedelic experience experiences this dissolving of ego this beautiful spiritual awakening but then goes back to her job that's like opening up the folder of my old bullshit it's the same thing she's going back to the same patterns well i would say she's being forced into that folder because she's what's she going to do but well being what she's going to do is what a lot of people do i mean a lot of people change their lives i mean it's not impossible to do i don't know if this woman had kids I didn't ask if the one I don't know

Imagine even can't imagine people being stuck. It's big it makes it very difficult. It makes it very difficult, but she's not in jail She's not I understand the point making but I think actually and this might sound strange in some ways I think changing the society is easier than isolated individuals changing themselves. I'll give you an example. How's that possible? Well, I'll give you sample example. How is that possible? Well, I'll give you an example. I'm gay, right? If I think about the incredible transformation I've seen in my life, so I tell the story in Lost Connections

about my friend Andrew Sullivan, right? 1994, Andrew was diagnosed with HIV. His first thought was, I deserve this, right? He'd been raised in such a homophobic world. He thought, you know what? I deserve to have this illness that's going to kill kill me he was watching his friends die all around him he thought he was about to die this is before protease inhibitors and he goes to province town little town in cape cod to do what he thought would be the last thing he would ever do right and he wrote a book about

a crazy utopian idea that he thought this is never going to happen i'm never going to live to see this but maybe generations from now this will happen it was the first book ever arguing for gay marriage right and if i get depressed about this i try to imagine going back in time and saying to andrew okay 1994 okay i've got some good news 25 years from now you're going to be alive but that's not the good news the supreme court of the united states is going to quote this book in their ruling making it mandatory for all states in the United States to introduce gay marriage. And the next day you'll be invited to the White House, which will be lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate with the president. And by the

way, that president is going to be black, right? That would sound like ridiculous science fiction. Now, imagine saying to gay people 50 years ago, you're not going to change the society. That's way too hard. What you can do is focus on changing yourself actually gay people would be really fucking miserable if that's what they've done right if that's how it was my life would be immeasurably worse if gay people had just said you know what we it's so hard to change society let's change ourselves we would have remained trapped in shitty awful institutions and systems that kept us down i I actually think if I think about most of the people I know who are depressed, to be honest, their margin for individual change is limited, but banding together their margin for change is huge, right? Think about what was about universal

basic income, for example, right? We're getting, we're going to another subject here. So let me just start. Keep going then, because you keep going on one to the next to the next, and I'm trying to stop with one. It's far easier to explain to one person, one life, why it's wrong to be homophobic than it is to change all the rednecks and all the ignorant people who don't read and all the people who have deeply ingrained archaic religious ideas about homosexuality, it's far easier to educate and illuminate one person. And it also can be done with the aid of psychedelics, especially MDMA therapy. That's one of the things that MAPS is doing right now with MDMA therapy. And they're involved in a bunch of clinical trials right now, helping people with all sorts of traumatic stress experiences, soldiers, people that experience physical violence, all these people that are, it's helping them alleviate a lot of the problems in their life.

There's patterns that people are, that they have in their mind that they can release. Sure. You can release and you can be educated and you can understand, you can change and grow as an individual. It's far easier to do that with one person, for one person to change their life, than to change an entire culture. I do agree that there have been great strides in this country when it comes to discrimination, when it comes to racism, when it comes to so many different ideas. But I think that's connected to the exchange of ideas

that we're experiencing now because of the internet. I think because of the fact that there's so many different arguments back and forth, and there's so many different ways to approach things that people are being forced to change their opinions. Even more religious people today are more open to homosexuality than they have been in the past. I really believe that is a factor of all the information that's available and the amount of communication, the amount of gay people that people know from television, from news programs, from all these different talk shows where they get a different sense of, you know, you see Ellen every day. Well, gay people can't be evil. Ellen's so nice.

You know what I mean? There's a lot of that. I think you're totally right. But I think that shows that the first thing you said is too simplistic. So the division between, I think the last point you made is totally on the money but what i think you were saying that the division is the idea that it's easier to persuade individuals than persuade the society you persuade the society by persuading individuals you just persuade lots of individuals and they band together it's not one at a time but there's sure there's okay i think we're splitting hairs here because i think

if obviously if you change every individual you change. But it's far easier to change one person than it is to change 350 million. But that's obviously true. But you change 350 million by changing one person and one person, by banding together. But you also, one of the ways that you change that one person is by banding together in a group, right? So gay people, for example, would be a good example. But there are many, many good examples. But what you're saying about individual psychology, it's important to say you're you're right about that so there are there's a very broad scientific agreement there are three kinds of cause of

depression and anxiety and most mental health in fact all mental health problems although there the ratio varies so there's biological causes which we talked about your genes for example can make you more sensitive to these things there's psychological causes which are the things you're talking about which are very real and important and there's social causes so that you know a lot of the other things we've talked about and i think in a way you don't need to play them off against each other they're all real right and you want to deal with all of them um so it's not i don't think it's i wouldn't want to get into an argument where it's like you're saying we should deal with the psychological factor and i'm saying we should deal with the

social factor you're totally right we should deal with well i think we should deal with the psychological factor and I'm saying we should deal with the social factor. You're totally right. We should deal with both. Well, I think we should deal with both. Yeah, yeah. Certainly. Do you know what I mean? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that the idea that, so look, think of what you're saying in terms of people living

unfulfilled lives, living in job or working in jobs that they don't enjoy where they're being controlled by a boss, it's far easier for one person to choose to change the path of their life than to try to restructure society where that doesn't exist anymore. I agree. Because CEOs, like this is what, this is intent. There's, I mean, obviously that was a huge factor in the 2016 election. It was one of the things that was talked about is wealth inequality.

Well, there's no greater version of wealth inequality than the difference between the CEO of a massive company and its lowest worker. I mean, it literally is like a king and a peasant. It's a very strange sort of a structure. And very recently has it become like that. Yes, yes. But it's so common i mean it is it's ingrained i mean how many corporations are there that operate like that top down i mean it's it's gigantic and to change that i think would be far more difficult than to

change an individual's path and to tell this one person hey man what do you really want to do do you really like making pottery well you should try to make pottery for a living because this working for dow chemicals you're not going to ever feel fulfilled you're always going to have that same anxiety on sunday night before you go to bed you're always going to feel like shit while you're at work you're always going to be numb you're going to be probably listening to podcasts like this while you're working just to try to pass the time i think you're right and totally, if you can do it, if you've got that margin for change, 100% my advice to you is I say, why wouldn't you be able to do it eventually? You might not be able to do it right now, but if you plan for it,

why wouldn't you be able to do it? I think about one of my closest relatives, right? She's, she's very depressed. She's got two young kids. She's working really hard. She's in a shitty town. She has very controlled work. I'm trying to think. I've desperately tried to think of the margins of change that I can help her facilitate in her life, right? And I've really struggled. I mean, it's an environment where most people are depressed.

Most people are obese. This is in England Yeah, yeah, but I mean it could have just as easily many short spent a lot of time in the u.s But I think there's more people with this problem in the u.s You know now I think we're essentially tough case. That's a very essentially agreeing anyone who has any margin of change I go through lost connections the seven ways you can change your life that the science the science It shows will reduce your depression and anxiety very likely, right? I go through in lost connections the seven ways you can change your life that the science the science shows Will reduce your depression and anxiety very likely right if you've got that margin do I think the only disagreement is I think you're more youth

You think more can be done by individual will alone than I do probably and I would say But that's not disempowering in the sense that i would say the most powerful individually empowering thing you can do is band together with other people like you and fight for something better right work together towards improving yourselves exactly get together with the people in your community and making some sort of a bond totally and one of the most moving things i learned about for the book was this incredible protest movement in berlin i can tell you about if you want that transformed it really is one of the places where so much of of what I what I learned from these scientists really fell into place with me and it was where very isolated people uh came together and just said you know what we're not

going to take this anymore and fought for something better I can explain that it's a longer story but if you want me to tell that I will but the so I think you're right that so you were saying you know what do you like to do and you said pottery is an example that's a good example but i would also say it may be that what you like to do and actually because we're a social species this is what most we like to do is get together with the people around you yes and fight for something better and i think you're totally right about how this played out in the dynamics around the election i remember so it really haunted me i was um with some people who were doing some get out the vote work in cleveland and uh i don't know if you know cleveland i mean it's like detroit without the

poetry of the ruins right i mean it's shocking and we were on this street in an area called slavic city um don't know why it's not slavic and when you say that i mean there's great parts of cleveland right now no the area i was just I was just there sorry to be climbing the area that I was in sorry I should have it was this area of West Cleveland called Slavic City

they'll kick your ass dude they get mad they love Cleveland clearly not the whole of Cleveland is like this there's a dude who had a t-shirt

at one of my shows that I put on my Instagram it said Cleveland or death they're fucking serious about Cleveland they have the heavyweight champion of the world Stipe Miocic

he lives in Cleveland so this street is one of those which is clearly not representative of all of Cleveland. Well, I mean, you can find a place like that in LA. I'll take you to Skid Row right now. Oh, sure, sure. Or we could just go to Beverly Hills. Your choice. You know what I'm saying?

No, no, I understand. But just about this street, there was this, we're going down the street, and a third of the houses have been demolished. A third were abandoned. A third still have people living in them. Some of them literally behind barbed wire, right? Sounds like a children's math problem. 15 people live in this place and they do heroin. If they walk to the end of the street, how long does it take?

They're on Oxycontin. 15 people live in that place, they're on antidepressants. Who's happier? So we knocked on one door and there was a woman who from looking at her i would have guessed was 60 right she was actually the same age as me i was 37 at the time and she was very articulate she was she knew her she knew a lot she was really fucking angry she was raging and um she made this verbal slip that's really stayed with me i thought about it while you were speaking earlier.

She talked about what the area used to be like for her parents and grandparents, right? And she meant to say, when I was young, what she actually said is when I was alive. I was like, fuck, that's how she feels, right? She feels like she has died. And it made me think about this. There's other research I was thinking about as she was saying this, I think relates to the individual versus collective debate that we've kind of been touching on so native american groups in canada they call them first nations groups have really high suicide

rates right um and this professor i got to interview professor michael chandler did this really big research on this because what he realized is 196 first nations groups in canada some of them have really high suicide and some have none right and he's like why is that so he spent 10 years researching this discovered loads of things but one of the things he discovered was some of these groups have basically been able to fight to regain control of their community right they've rebuilt their language they've rebuilt their school control of the schools and you know whatever and some have just been so kept down that they haven't been able to do that suicide rate correlates really

tightly with the amount of control they were able to regain over their community the amount of meaning that you find in your life i think it's about meaning it's about having a story about who you are it's about having social connections around you so you're not alone you're part of something community pride exactly so i think when you when we were talking i thought about that when you were saying you know what what do you like to do what should you do if someone's listening to this and they're lonely and isolated you know because we're such a fractured society and because we find it so difficult to be present with each other right the the the constant um distraction and refracting everything through screens which makes us feel like shit I can talk about some of that if you want.

Actually, that initial step is quite hard because we're so broken up, right? It's not just the initial step. It's you've gone too far in one direction. Like, say, look at it this way. If we all start at this neutral point, right, and someone like Jamie does what he wants to do and finds a good path and starts going in that direction and keeps improving his life. And then eventually is a happy human being as an adult. Or you have someone who goes the wrong way.

They get addicted to food and cigarettes and drugs and antidepressants and they get into bad relationships. And then they have children that they have to take care of and then they have a job that they hate and then they find themselves at 37 years old looking like they're 65 trying to figure out how to get back well they've got to find a way to not just move ahead but to get back to that neutral point so they have to go back in time over all the shit they fucked up and they have a far longer path so it's not an impossible path but it's a far longer path if you all if everyone's going in a direction and that direction is 25 miles away but you go 37 miles backwards you have to go 37 miles forward and then the additional 25 miles that's the problem with people people. They look at the daunting nature of that

task, and it's very intimidating to them. And they don't feel like they can make it. They don't feel like they can. But there is satisfaction and hope and happiness in moving towards a positive direction. And that's what people have to realize. It's not about a goal. It's about the journey being a positive journey and the feeling that you get of improving your life incrementally on a daily basis. And it's also the mindset that you carry with you on that journey. You can't look at yourself and go, God, why am I not successful yet? Why am I not rich? Why am I not this? Why am I not that?

You have to say, I am better than I was yesterday. Tomorrow, I will be better than I am today and I am on the right path. And there is a lot of deep satisfaction and happiness in being on the right path. Now if you're a person who wants to be an author, but instead you're an accountant, every day you spend not feeding that idea that you can be an author is going to chew away at you it's going to chip away at you and it's going to move you away from that neutral point many many miles i totally agree with you i totally agree with you and i think that the that thing about when people realize they have agency that's one of the most because especially and it goes back to what we're

saying about work if you are spending nine hours a day being controlled one of the things you do to get through that is a process of internal deadening right i remember talking to joe uh the guy in the paint store who would say you know i would just get go home and initially it was alcohol and then later oxy he would just want to numb himself right right because there's an internal deadening you have to do to get through that which is why i think one of the key aspects that i talk about lost connections is this transformation of work if the thing that most people are doing most of the time is making 87 of us we don't like it at best that you've got to go to the heart of that right and and you know we're talking about margins of change people who set up that bike store in

baltimore they were working class people you know who who had not had fancy educations they set up a democratic cooperative right they they transformed their lives so they were a good example of people who appeared to have a relatively limited margin they were low wage workers in a in a in a low wage industry who you know have made this transition so i'm certainly not saying that people can't make these transitions right even in difficult circumstances They absolutely can I just think yeah I think I'll think about the the farmer in the field in Cambodia right whose legs been blown off And he's in this field and it's agony

He needed to change his life, but he also needed someone to buy him a cow right he couldn't have bought that cow on his own In that situation yeah, yeah, so i think he would be an illustration or um or the rats in rat park right uh if you're in that isolated cage i mean it's not a great example because you know the rat can't leave the cage as you could argue yeah but you see the point i'm making i do you could attribute it just to individual i know this is not what you're doing. I think some people attribute this just to, it's definitely not what you're saying, but just to individual weakness or individual failing. When I think that individual psychology

is a significant component alongside other components. I don't think of it that way at all. I think of it as poor choices. I don't think of it as individual failing. I've made many, many poor choices in my life. Here's one of the big ones you could tell people, because there's a lot of people that are listening to this at various stages of their life. If you're young and you have an open future, you don't have massive obligations and debt and all

the different things that become a real hindrance as you get older, move towards a direction that is attractive to you. Do not move towards a direction that is safe. Don't do it. Because if you do do that, if you just take that safe job, and then there's a lot of people that, well, not a lot of people can do that. That is a bullshit, stupid way to think, and that will fuck you. That way to think will fuck you. You can do what you do.

What you choose to do, you can get better at things. What you choose to do, you can move forward and try to figure out a way to carve a path through that life. And it's not going to be easy, but nothing worth doing is easy. But this idea that, look, if you want to just do construction, if that's appealing to you, you'd like to just be a laborer. And there's, look, there's a need for that in society, if it doesn't bother you's but find out what bothers you and find out what you enjoy if you're a laborer and you really want to be a songwriter well you better fucking chase that songwriting shit you better do it because if you don't do it you don't want to be a 60 year old man sitting around just depressed and crying and then maybe you call your friend up who does do that for a living and he's

having a great time and he just released his new album and you both started out together in high school and now here you are at different stages of your life and you you haven't pursued your interest you haven't pursued your passion you haven't pursued what you really want to do i would endorse every word you just said i would just add a layer but alongside it which is and we should change our society so fewer people get trapped and more people at the moment a lot of feel, we want to be giving people trampolines up, right? I think universal basic income is probably a way that that's going to start happening. I think that can help a lot of people where your basic needs, your food is taken care

of. And I think President Obama talked about this towards the end of his term, partly because he said, look, actually I I don't attribute this to him. I can't remember if he said it made this point in this way, but he was interviewed Wired Magazine and he said he thinks this will have to happen in the next 20 years, partly because of the extraordinary disruption that's coming to the economy through, you know, robotization. Automation. Exactly.

Elon Musk said that recently as well. Yeah. Well, I think Elon Musk is saying it for a slightly different motive in that he knows the pitchforks are going to come for people like him and Mark Zuckerberg. The anger is going to be directed at Silicon Valley if there isn't a universal basic income. I'm sure they have genuine concern for people as well. But I think that – So you think that's really why he's saying that?

I don't know. I don't know. I'm after him. My gut – maybe I'm just more cynical. Because they just make so much money. Well, I can't remember who said this. Someone said, you know, the path the economy's on, there's going to be seven tech billionaires

and everyone else employed to give them massages, right? And I think there's something going on here, which is I think they know at some level if they don't start providing some, if the society doesn't start providing some baseline of security. Look, I forget the figure. I think 3 million people in the United States make a living through driving.

That's not going to exist in 10 years from now, probably, right? Self-driving cars are likely to just, that's going to be gone, right? Now, that's an extraordinary disruption to the economy. Those are mostly men. They're mostly men with low educational achievement attainments for various reasons, a lot of which are not their fault. And, you know, that's devastating, right? and and you know that's devastating right so i think you're right that a universal basic income is one of the important strategies that that can that can kind of deal with that but i think this comes back to i think you you've got you're going back to the thing that that is a kind of recurring theme in this conversation which is you know for both my books for chasing the scream and for lost

connections addiction and depression anxiety both of them required me to go all over the scream and for lost connections addiction and depression anxiety both of them required me to go all over the world and just look at really different places that do things really differently and there were some things that just recurred for both right give the example with addiction the places that have most reduced addiction have not been the places that have said this is an i'm not attributing this to you very clearly you're not saying this but people who the places that have said this is a problem for the individual and the individual needs to fucking sort themselves out, have a massive and growing addiction crisis. The problem gets worse and worse. The places that I went to where they said, actually, this is a collective problem. We need a collective solution. We're very different. So Portugal, for example, in the year 2000, had one of the worst drug problems in the world.

Right. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin. It was incredible. Every year the problem got worse as they tried the American way more and more, arrested more people, imprisoned more people. And one day the prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they were like, look, we can't go on like this, right? We can't have ever more people in our country being addicted to heroin. What are we going to do? thing they set up a panel led by an amazing man i got to know dr hua gu lao um and they said to this panel you guys go away figure out what would actually solve this and we've agreed in advance we'll do whatever you recommend right so they got to be like if trump and chuck schumer and nancy polosi agreed they would everyone would abide by a finding on this so they go away they look at all the evidence including rat park loads of the things we've talked about they came back and said decriminalize all drugs from from cannabis to crack, everything. But, and this is the crucial next step,

take all the money we currently spend on fucking people's lives up, on arresting them, shaming them, stigmatizing them, imprisoning them, and spend it instead on turning their lives around. And interestingly, it wasn't really what we think of. There was a little bit of residential rehab. Most of it was a big program of job creation. They set up microloans so people with addiction problems could set up and run small businesses about things they cared about. They set up a big program of subsidized work.

So, you know, say you used to be a mechanic. They go to a garage. They say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages, right? The results in Portugal have been incredible. According to the best scientific study published in the British Journal of Cr of criminology injecting drug use fell by more than 50 overdose deaths massively fell hiv massively fell one thing that was so striking there was going around speaking to people i mean one of the most moving interviews i did for chasing the screamers with them a guy called juan figuero who was the top drug cop in portugal and he led the opposition to the decriminalization

when it first happened right he said He said, this is fucking madness. We're going to have a massive explosion in drug use. It's going to be a nightmare. And he said to me, everything I said would happen didn't happen. And everything the other side said would happen did. And he talked about how he felt really ashamed that he'd spent 20 years before the decriminalization fucking people's lives up. And I think that goes to the debate that we're talking about. Because that was, now that's individuals changing right that's that's very clearly individuals changing making

better choices but they're making those better choices in a context a context where the society instead of beating them down is trying to lift them up do you see what i mean that's a very good point it's a very important point and what portugal has done should be studied by our country which is now falling right back into the old nancy re Reagan just say no bullshit days with Jeff Sessions at the helm of Catastrophe he's a terrifying person in that regard because he's so ignorant as to what's going on. He's so ignorant He's still calling marijuana gateway drug. He's a fool I mean he really is and that the the pattern is terrifying because they're trying to call kratom an opiate right now there's there's all sorts of

resistance to what we know of as safe alternatives to pharmaceutical medications like cbd that's another one they're demonizing they want to categorize that with heroin and cocaine it's terrifying it's it's it's a very very weird time because there's so much evidence and so much science and so much history when it comes to things like portugal where it's been successful to decriminalize everything and spend the money on treatment programs but they're ignoring that they're ignoring that because it's convenient you're so right but my concern is it's not jeff sessions is you can imagine what i think about jeff sessions is disgusting and insane what he's saying but my worry is it's not well i'm worried

about jeff sessions primarily but my other worry is it's not well i'm worried about jeff sessions primarily but my other worry is it's not just jeff sessions i actually think even our side you know when it comes to the the the opioid crisis i think i've been talking about this in quite quite the wrong way so it made me realize actually how deep this nancy reagan script is in the culture that even liberals my side of politics have basically been saying their story about the pharmaceutical the opioid crisis is basically evil drug dealers came along they gave people these drugs they got accidentally hurt in this case the evil drug dealers are the big pharma right they got them accidentally hooked um and that's why we have this crisis right now there's as you can tell from my conversation about antidepressants there's a lot

to criticize big pharma about I'm very critical of them. But that story is just ridiculously simple. If that were true, antidepressant prescriptions have been given across the United States, right? If that were true, it would not make sense that the opioid prescriptions are also concentrated,

the opioid addictions are also concentrated in the places where suicide is highest, where depression is highest, where, of course, there's some everywhere. But there's a reason for that, right? Angus Dayton, the economist who studied this, described the opioid deaths as despair deaths, right? If you go to the places where, I know you travel around the country, when I go to places that have been most affected by the opioid crisis, what's going on? It's they've been deprived of the things that make life meaningful so they want to be anesthetized all the time there's a devastating line marianne faithful who was mick jagger's best known for being mick jagger's

girlfriend but kind of pisses me off because i think she's even better than mick jagger but she was i know it's controversial better than mick jagger it's controversial this fucking conversation's over shut it down jamie so marian our faithful had a heroin addiction in the 60s when she was homeless. And she has this very challenging line in her memoir where she says something like, Heroin saved my life because if it wasn't for heroin, I would have killed myself, right? And don't misunderstand what I'm saying. Heroin is not a good solution to despair. If we want to, clearly, for all sorts of very obvious reasons,

if we want to understand why there's been this huge increase in opioid use we have to understand these things that i'm writing about connections in the world health organization is explaining this deep kind of despair and my worry is that gives you back to the worry about how our side is getting it wrong so we've got jeff sessions getting it wrong in the most obvious insane way right right you know it's just we need to crack down on the mexicans and that'll stop right right we the united states has spent a trillion dollars on the war on drugs it's done it for a hundred years it's imprisoned more people than any other country in human history and at the end of all that you guys can't even keep drugs out of your prisons where you pay people to walk around the fucking perimeter the whole time so good luck keeping them out of a country with two three thousand mile borders that's so ridiculous and

so absurd that it's not just that it's why would you think that you could tell a grown adult what they can and can't do with their body? Of course. But it's really simple. But I think I'm pretty sure all of your listeners agree with us on just say, or pretty much all of them agree with us on Jeff Sessions. What I think more of them will be tempted by will be the more liberal argument. I say as a liberal, so I'm not attacking liberals,

but the more liberal argument, which is this simplistic, which even Bernie Sandersers who i love and would have voted for well i think he's got this wrong which is that although i think bernie sanders's politics would deal with some of the deeper problems as well clearly but there's this story that it's about the drug companies we've got to look at the one place that solved an opioid crisis we talked about portugal the one other place so switzerland i'm a swiss citizen because my dad's from there as well as british obviously switzerland had a massive heroin problem in the 90s right huge almost as you know not quite as bad as what's happening with opioids here but it was massive and uh switzerland got this amazing

kick-ass female president called ruth dreifuss who explained to people, look, when you hear the word legalization, what you picture is anarchy and chaos, right? What we have now is anarchy and chaos. When you prohibit drugs, what you get is unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown drug users, all in the dark, filled with violence, disease and chaos. What she proposed to do is legalize heroin, right? And it's important to understand that what that doesn't mean doesn't mean there's like a heroin aisle in the cvs in in switzerland right so different things can be legalized differently i don't know the rules in la but i'm pretty sure you could legally if you wanted to own a dog a monkey and a lion but i'm pretty sure the rules are different right yeah i don't think you can own a monkey or a lion but could you not get if you really wanted to one and you were rich you know you could get them in texas right so you could do whatever the fuck you want except you can't have pot in texas hilarious it's a pretty sure in texas it's licensed so you could you know they're all legal but they're legal in different ways right right and a similar way what ruth dreyfus the swiss president was posing is heroin should be legal but not in the way that alcohol

is legal so the way it works is if you've got heroin problem in switzerland you're assigned to a clinic i went to the one in geneva where the former president now lives across the street which tells you something um you go you you have to go early in the morning for reasons i'll explain you're given your heroin there you can't take it out with you you've got to use it there and then you leave and you go to your job because they give you they do two things and it's the exact opposite of what's been proposed in the u. What's been proposed in the US is stop prescribing and don't give support, right? Well, they didn't. Switzerland is the exact opposite. In Switzerland, they'll give you the drug you're addicted to,

and then they give you loads of support to figure out why you're in such pain in the first place. They help you get housing. They get you subsidized work. They give you loads of therapy. Are you aware of a BOGA? Yeah, of course, yeah. Well, that's probably one of the very best ways for people to quit drugs and especially some horrible drug and it's a ruthlessly introspective drug that many many people have found great success in kicking heroin cigarettes alcoholism uh getting over past abuse. I mean, it's a long experience.

It can last more than 24 hours. Totally illegal in the United States, but a lot of people go to Mexico and do it. And I've had very good friends that have had problems with pills that went over there and kicked them because of Iboga. I'll give your producers an intro to Dr. Gabor Marte. He's a friend of mine. Sure, I know who he is.

He would be a great guest for you. Does he live in England? No lives in vancouver but he comes to la fairly often you should definitely talk to him i would really recommend people look at his work but the in terms of just to say with the last point about switzerland because there was something really and i think it relates to iboga in a way so one of the things that really surprised me in that going spending time in that clinic i remember this chief psychiatrist there dr rita mangy so they will give you as they will give you any dose you want except one that will kill you and there is never any pressure to cut back which really surprised me so you could go to this clinic and they'll dose you up with heroin they give you the heroin you you have to use it there you can't take it out with you because they want them selling people selling it on and also that's

kind of badass you're monitored by a by a nurse but the results are really incredible right right so um the headline most important fact is there have been zero heroin overdose deaths on legal heroin in switzerland in the 12 years that program has existed what has the ratio of people using to uh not using how's it gone down really significant fall in heroin use the best researchers by professor Ambrose Uchtenhagen? Who's shown there have been no deaths in the legal program and an enormous fall in deaths in the illegal program an enormous fall in use overall Hmm for various reasons I can talk about but the thing that blew my mind was so they give them whatever does they want For as long as they want and I was like what we're told that comes back to chemical hooks What we're told is they'll just want more and more forever, right?

But actually what happens is almost everyone chooses to cut back over time and stop, right? When I went there, I think there were like two people who'd been on the program at the start. And I said to Dr. Mange, who runs it, I don't understand this. How is this happening? And she looked at me like I was an idiot. And she said, well, people's lives get better. And as their lives get better, they don't want to be anesthetized so much, which seems almost stupidly obvious, right? It goes right back to what you were saying about antidepressants and and people's

lives like the choice that you make and the paths that you take and the people you surround with and the happiness that you feel from your community that's ultimately what leads to a fulfilling life and if you have all that why would you fuck it up with heroin right i think the you're totally right that the the whole premise of lost is, it goes back to something we were saying at the start, human beings have needs, right? And if your needs are being met, you don't want to be anesthetized. I think what you said is very important. There's psychological needs that are just as valuable and important as physical needs. Like we know we have needs for nutrients.

We know of needs for water. We have needs psychological for all sorts of different things. Our communities are incredibly important. Love is incredibly important. Family is incredibly important. You know, I know some people that are older men that have been bachelors their whole lives and they're childless and now they're, know they just they don't have a deep connection with anybody and they get to this very weird strange place where they're like is this it now i'm 70 years old and i've never really uh had children and i don't know what to do and this is this is my life now and it's they they've all their friends have had families now and their

families a lot of times the kids are grown up and it becomes very, very strange. You know, I thought about that a lot. I interviewed this guy, Professor John Cassiopo at the University of Chicago, who's the leading expert in the world on loneliness. And he said this thing to me that it's so, it's a bit like what the woman in Geneva said. What a lonely way to live your life. He's actually quite a cheerful person, actually.

But he had this really interesting with this very simple point but he just said if you think about the circumstances where we evolved right if you got separated from the tribe if you were alone right you were depressed and anxious for a really fucking good reason you were about to be eaten right you were in terrible danger if you got injured no one would help you you would die right so all the he showed that so when as you know when we're when we're stressed, we release a hormone called cortisol. He showed this interesting experiment that I wrote about in the book. Being acutely lonely is as stressful as being punched in the face by a stranger when it comes to cortisol release. Right.

That's how deeply we are resistant to loneliness. Right. It's a signal telling you to get back to the tribe. That's why we bought. It's a really important signal. If humans hadn't had that signal, we wouldn't be here, right? And I think you're right. So when you look at these men, if you have an isolated... There was this woman... So I covered this incredible protest movement that happened in Berlin on a big anonymous housing project

where no one knew each other and they came together to protest. It was a woman who was about to kill herself because she was about to be evicted. And the whole housing project came together to say she should be allowed to stay in her home and they should have a rent freeze. And it's an amazing story. I tell it in the book. But there's something one of the women said to me that I never forgot. She's called Neriman.

She'd grown up in Turkey and she'd come to Germany, I think, when she was 17. She said, when I grew up in Turkey, what I called my home was my village and everyone in it and then I came to live in the western world and I learned that what you're meant to call home is just your four walls and if you're lucky your family and then this protest began and we all got to know each other and this whole place became my home and I think of everywhere here is home now and and she realized that that we are homeless in some sense in the western world that us humans have a need for a sense of belonging and our sense of home is too small to meet our sense of home belonging belonging there's a wonderful uh bosnian writer called alexander hayman who said um home is where

people notice when you're not there right and a lot of us like these guys you're talking about these older guys who notices if they're not there right probably no one probably they are in a sense homeless yeah right they are spiritually homeless and um i said that i'm not a religious person i don't mean that i think that's what you're saying yeah we're saying it's very do you know what i mean yes and so i think it's about and and this comes back to think about how different that is. What everything we're talking about, think how different our conversation has been to what my doctor told me when I was a teenager. And I go in and I say, I'm in real pain and I feel like pain is leaking out of me and I can't control it.

And he says, you've just got a malfunction in your brain, right? One of the worst things about that, there are many things wrong with that. Firstly, what he said to me is not true. I'm sure he believed it i think he was misinformed i don't think he was deliberately lying to me but what he said was not true but also to me the biggest problem with just telling this exclusively biological story about depression and anxiety there's some real biological factors of course is it cuts us off from having this conversation right all those people you were talking about who are so insistent as I was, that their depression is just the result of a chemical imbalance.

If you think that, it disconnects you from the source of your pain. It tells you you're just biologically broken, and presumably always going to be biologically broken. When the conversation we're having, which is a different conversation, it's a difficult conversation, it's a nuanced conversation, it's not simplistic, it's not difficult conversation. It's a nuanced conversation. It's not simplistic. It's not one problem, one lever to solve it. It's a much deeper and more textured way of thinking.

That is the conversation we have to have. That's what the best scientists in the world are telling us, the World Health Organization. And my worry is we're just being pushed in. Like you said, that very good metaphor about driving 37 miles in the wrong direction. Right. We're just driving in the wrong direction. We're driving away from the source of our pain rather than towards it where it can be understood and solved. Of course, it was going to be some pain in human life. But the fact that we have this one in five people taking a psychiatric drug. You know, I think the figure is one in 10 13 year old boys is taking a stimulant drug to make them focus.

I think the figure is 30% of old people in retirement homes are being given antipsychotic drugs to shut them the fuck up because they're rebelling against the way they're being treated. In between, one in four middle-aged women in the United States is taking a chemical antidepressant at any given time. One in four. One in four. You're talking about a society that, I mean, the figure's about how many children, it's much lower, but it's so much more extreme. The number of toddlers who've been given antipsychotics in the United States is just off the scale, right? I think Dr. Sami Tamimi has written about this. There's some extraordinary figure, I might be getting the figure slightly wrong, but it's something like a majority of children in foster care in the united states are being given stimulant drugs basically to shut them up yeah that's that's a disturbing one the

ritalin and various various stimulants that they give to children um what's that about what's the cause of that well i think it's related i've researched this much less than the other things we've talked about okay but from it came up a lot in the conversations that I had. There are many things going on here. One of them is a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I wrote about, I couldn't help but notice reading all the research, interviewing the scientists, also can lead to decrease in focus and attention. So, for example, if you are deadened at work

and you feel controlled all the time, you have to deaden yourself to get through it. It's harder. Attention's a muscle, right? It's harder to bring your brain back to focus. Like Joe wanted to just go and collapse and watch, you know, watch whatever shit was on The Bachelor or whatever. I don't think Joe would have watched The Bachelor, actually.

Whatever shit would have been on the TV. So even in his full state of depression the bachelor that was a line i can't do it he was prepared to take oxy but not to go to that level of self-harm right but the but the or think about loneliness right there's really professor cassiope was showing this if you are lonely that triggers what's called hyper vigilance right again for a very good reason. If you're on your own in the savannas of Africa, you want to be hypervigilant. Of course. So you find it.

One of the things that was most challenging to me is this evidence that the people with the lowest levels of attention problems and depression and anxiety in the United States are the Amish, right? And I am a atheist, gay, liberal. So the idea of going and like learning something from the amish was initially challenging to me and i've got to admit i felt really humbled by going and spending time and i went to this village called elkhart lagrange which is just outside fort wayne in indiana and you know there's still a lot i disagree with about the amish don't get me wrong

not least because i just re-watched witness but uh the the but but you know they i could see that they've got so it's very interesting about the amish as you know when you turn 16 if you're an amish you've got to leave and go and live in what they call the english world our world right and then you decide whether to come back about 80 decide to come back 20 don't it's one of the reasons why the amish is never counted as a cult because no cult would do that right no cult's going to tell you to leave for two years and then decide whether to come back. In fact, the exact opposite. So they have lived in our world.

They know our world really well. And I remember having this very challenging conversation with, what's his name? Lauren Beachy. His name is an Amish guy there, who said, there was so many, it goes back to the weight conversation we had. He said, look, there's loads of things I miss. He talked about missing that 70s show. He said used to love driving in trucks because they obviously don't drive they don't use electricity off the grid and he said but you know if i kept those things i wouldn't spend time with my family i wouldn't spend time with my children i wouldn't i wouldn't

know who my neighbors were and he said this very challenging thing he said you know weight watchers and i said yeah and he said well the idea of weight watchers is you can only lose weight together as a group right it helps or not only but helps you to lose weight together as a group that you would find it harder on your own this is like that and i said what are you saying like the amish is like weight watchers for the problems of western civilization and he's like yeah that's what i'm saying and to me that was so challenging the idea that you've got to give because we it comes back to what we say about junk values. In our culture, we're told the solution is always to get more. And the idea that the solution is to have less and be present more is really challenging, right?

I don't even think it's about having less. It's about what they're doing is, look, think about what the Amish are doing. First of all, massive sense of community, right? They're very connected. They're not using cell phones. They're not using email. So the community is also based on one-to-one interaction, real social cues, real social interaction, which is critical. It's a big part of being a human being. And it's one of the more absent things in modern society. Two, physical labor. They're

involved in a lot of physical labor because they don't use electricity. They don't use power tools. There's so many things that they don't do. So because of their culture, they're making their own homes, right? So they have a vested interest in helping each other, working together as a community, and they have a deep sense of satisfaction of constructing each other's homes. You construct my home with me. I help you build your home. They take care of their animals. They take care of their crops. There's a real connection with where they get their food from, a real connection with where they live, their community, the sense of belonging to something that's bigger than you.

There's so many factors involved in their happiness that you can kind of see where, where yeah there's a lot of wacky shit with the the cult aspects of being an amish person but what you get out of it it's almost like if you had a self-help group that subscribed to all the positive benefits of being amish and they just called it like re-grounding or something like that you just go out there and you become a part of nature and i mean that, that seems like a co-op. That seems like some sort of a farm-based co-op, right? Yeah.

Build each other's houses. Stay together. You don't have to wear sexy clothes. Let's just all wear the same shit. It's no big deal. I love how you put that. You're right. So the inequality, the richest Amish is as wealthy as the poorest Amish.

It's the same thing, yeah. But it's not like they're not holding them back. I think that's true. One of the things that I was thinking about this in relation to attention is so there's this theory that Amish kids

don't seem to develop ADHD, right? And it's been surprisingly understudied. Maybe they have Amish doctors. Maybe that's the problem. These fucking kids are bouncing off the wall like he's normal. I don't think it's that.

I wondered if it was that. And I also wondered if it was like they don't have electronics. Obviously, I'm kidding. And I think there's an element going on there. But actually, the main thing is when I spoke to them, they said, yeah, we've got some kids who don't want to concentrate and sit in school. So we just let them run around and go fishing and hunting instead, right? Yeah. And I suddenly realized, all right, so there's always going to be maybe and there may be factors making it harder for us to concentrate in the environment.

I think there are. But there's always going to be a natural variation in people who want to sit and focus on one thing compared to people who want to, you know, run around medically. And that's actually, you can see how as a species it benefits us to have both, right? Right. But what we do is we try to bash every child into one particular mode of being. Of course. Which actually is designed to prepare them for shitty

deadening work the reason our schools are shitty and deadening there's a guy called alfie cone who says every school has an official curriculum and a hidden curriculum the official curriculum is like history geography whatever and the hidden curriculum is this is what we're training you to put up within your life right right and if you've got a society where 87 percent of people don't like their work and you're more twice as likely almost twice as likely to hate your job as love your job part of the job of the school system will be to deaden children so they learn you've got to fucking sit there and shut up and do what you're told right so that's not a malfunction of the system that's an unconscious function of the system right so we've got this system where we're

bashing these kids to prepare them for this economic system that's making us feel miserable to me the solution is to change the way we work so we don't have to fucking deaden our children right so actually our children can be but but the arm issue who you know do what as you say it's not like they're doing um high-end cognitive labor is probably the fancy way of putting it right but the the the their kids to them having a kid who goes fishing and running around it's normal is as valuable actually as it may even be more valuable than the kid who sits there reading all day right yeah because actually so um and i think there's a real thing about this what that tells us it comes back to one of the

themes that's come up all through our conversation joe these things that we're told are pathologies make sense in their contexts right depression we're told it's a pathology actually anxiety which is positive actually it's largely not entirely but largely a response to things going wrong we're told addiction is a pathology it's a response to things happening we're told that obesity is a pathology in some cases it's a response to things going wrong we're told that kids not wanting to be able to focus as a pathology and adults not being able to focus i think we need to understand that these things have meaning they make sense right doesn't mean they're good most it's clearly not good to be obese it's clearly not good to be addicted obviously but if you

understand that they make sense that opens up a totally different way yes of responding to them ones that actually fucking work right the places, if I think about the drug war, right? For Chasing the Scream, my book about addiction and the drug war, I went out with a group of women in Arizona, in that prison run by that fucking psychopath Joe Arpaio, who I also interviewed, who Trump pardoned.

How the fuck did he pardon that guy? Don't get me started on that. That bothers me deeply. It's funny, I can tell you about you about joel pie because in a funny sort of way i felt very sorry for him but anyway i went out on this group of with this group of um women who are made to go out on a chain gang wearing t-shirts saying i was a drug addict while members of the public mock them and jeer at them right and i remember going back to the prison with them it's called tent city and the women were terrified of something called the hole which is where you were sent if you up right and i said to the guards will you take me to see the hole and i've been in i've

done a lot reporting from prisons and guards always don't want to show you the bad things in this one because it's a pantomime of cruelty they want you to see it right so they took me to the hole it was in fact a hole it's a concrete cell bare concrete cell with nothing in it no tv nothing um and i saw this woman in there who was when like she saw my face through that was just so desperate to see a human being who wasn't one of these guards she'd been there for a month and i remember the audio is actually on the chasing the screen website um chasing the screen.com and i remember looking in this cell and thinking this is the closest you could get to a literal human reenactment of the cages that guaranteed addiction in rats and this is what we're doing thinking it'll stop this woman from being addicted all the places which had approaches based on punishment and shame towards these things sometimes people say oh punishing people with

addiction problems doesn't work that's way too soft on it it makes the problem worse right those women go in fucking broken devastated then they're even more broken and devastated they go out even more fucking addicted right it's a reason why portugal has massively for portugal and switzerland have massively falling addiction problems and the united states have massively increasing ones right right so to me again the evidence is approaches towards these problem that are based on compassion connection uh love understanding seeing that it makes sense work they're not magic bullets there's still going to be problems in anything we do. Approaches based on shame and stigma and rage and just condemning people,

they just make the problem worse. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. And there's also no doubt about what you were speaking about when you started that rant about schools. About schools with children trying to fit them into these very convenient categories and trying to get them to get comfortable with doing things that they don't want to do. That's great if we've resigned ourselves to turning children into work robots. I love that way of putting it.

You just said that's brilliant. Yeah, it shouldn't be that. That's a brilliant way of putting it. Look, I went through through that myself i thought i was a fool when i was in high school i was like there's got to be something wrong with me i can't concentrate i can't do it i'm like i'm never going to be good at anything i was like i'm just going to resign myself to be an outcast i'm going to resign myself to be a loser because i just couldn't sit still in class i couldn't pay attention i didn't want to do the homework. I was bored out of my fucking mind. And I didn't even realize there was anything that I could do that I would be intellectually curious about.

I mean, I didn't think that that was a part of my life. I didn't think I was a curious person. And it was just merely because I was being forced to do a bunch of shit that I didn't want to do and it tainted my idea of learning. being forced to do a bunch of shit that I didn't want to do and it tainted my idea of learning. And when I got out of school, and then when I started reading books just for my own amusement and interest, then I realized, oh, I'm a very curious person. I just didn't want to do what they wanted me to do. I didn't want to study what they wanted me to study. And I didn't want to be stuck in some room with some person who was under motivated and really didn't have any understanding of how to deal with children. It was the rare person, one out of five, one out of six teachers

that would come along that would give you like some spark of happiness and love. And you'd go like, Oh, this class is pretty cool. That's a good teacher. Like, Oh, she's nice. You know, he's fun. You know, it was rare. It was very rare. Most of the time it was a dull grind. And I would wake up with nightmares after I'd graduated that I'd fucked up and didn't get the right amount of credits and I had to go back to school. I would have crazy nightmares that I would have to repeat the 12th grade and go back to school because it was soul-sucking. And to me it represented the future because the future was going to be more soul-sucking

because you were going to be working 40 hours a week plus overtime doing something that you hated and this is what you had to do if you wanted to get by in this life and that is what was presented to me and that's what's presented to a lot of people and if you take that and keep going with it you eventually become that guy who's in that job and then you say well maybe i'll get some happiness if i get a nice car and so you take out a lease on a nice car and then now you have this debt that you have to pay so now you have to keep working and you keep working so you can keep this car well i'm gonna get a condo and then you get a condo you got more debt then well i'm getting married we're getting married well we got to take out a loan for the marriage because it's real expensive to get married and oh she

wants a big wedding and then you get a big wedding and a big ring and all this and now you're fucking deep deep in the hole now you have children oh shit and then you know you're like wow i really don't want to be selling insurance anymore i wish i could have wish i could have been an artist i wish i could have done this i wish i could have pursued my interest well it's kind of too late you're 150 miles away from the neutral point so you've got to go 150 miles back before you could start at zero i think you put that so well. And I'm just thinking about that. This is the heart of my book, Lost Connections, is saying we don't have to have a human culture that deadens people, right?

We don't have to have a culture where people are controlled, deadened, and isolated. That's not how most humans have ever lived. The Amish live much closer. Far more human beings have lived in the way the Amish lived than have ever lived in the way we lived. Now, I don't want to go fully back to the Amish, obviously. But there are lessons we can learn from all these things that we're talking about, about reconnection to meaning and purpose. And part of what you're saying is we live in a landscape that has been constructed not to serve people but to serve corporations, right? This very unusual recent human innovation.

Actually, as I said know imagine if every corporation was converted into a democratic cooperative so imagine everyone listening to this tomorrow knew they were going into work in a place where if there is a boss he's elected by them he's accountable to them where you decide the priorities for your workplace with your colleagues by voting maybe once every three months once a year whatever but the boss is accountable to you that's a very different way of living and thinking about the things we do most of the time to you. That's a very different way of living and thinking about the things we do most of the time. And that would, again, require a very different school system that prepared people to be citizens taking part in a workplace, not, as you put it brilliantly,

like robot workers, you know, just passively receiving orders. That requires a big systemic change. Now, lots of people are making that transition, you know, like the people I talked about in Baltimore Bicycle Works, who've made that transition on their own but these are these are big social changes we can make that and again one of these is so important is about saying to people like it sounds to me like no one said to you joe the fact that you fucking hate this school is a sign that you are more likely to be successful, not less, right? The things that will make you a success in your life are the things that this school is trying to beat out of you, right? I'm presuming not literally beat out of you, but mentally beat out of you, right? And in a sense, that's what we need to say to a lot of people about a lot of these forms of

discomfort. It's not a sign of craziness. It makes perfect sense you feel this way, and you're right to feel this way. I wonder if that's what's causing all these children to be on Adderall and on, you know, all the various stimulants they put kids on, you know, Prozac and all the different things that they do. It's literally because they're trapped in this thing and they can't do it and they can't do it and they can't do it and they just can't concentrate. And so they give them something and they give them this pill and that pill turns them into a worker robot and it's related to a lot of the things we've talked about as well that increase in competition for example so parents are

in such an unequal society if you if you have a society like norway where if your kid doesn't do well they're gonna have a good life and if your kid does really well they're gonna have a good life right you know there's less anxiety about oh my kid's fallen behind here if your kid falls behind they can have a really fucking terrible life yeah but here to but the counter that is rich kids don't do well at all oh yeah they're miserable as hell yeah yeah i mean that's a real problem yeah it's a real problem with kids that don't have to do well but i think this this you've got a society that drugs kids at the bottom to shut up these kids in foster care who are traumatized not being looked after they're being drugged to just basically make them docile you've got kids at the top who are drugged to make

them compete you know i mean i've got a friend who's a wall street banker who um put his kid on on uh i can't remember aderal or ritalin one of the stimulant drugs when he was a young teenager because he said but every other fucking kid in the class is on it so if he doesn't go on it he's falling behind right right um so you have i mean what a what a sick culture is giving their children a cocaine like drug yeah to make them compete in an unnatural way and the fucked up part is it works yeah well it's interesting so the research on this is interesting i think this is something that's worth pointing out i haven't read about this in in my book but um the actually there's evidence that um kids develop tolerance to it over time right so actually

initially it works really really well and then gradually you have to give higher and higher doses until eventually they uh you there's a maximum limit it's just cranked out all day and then but then you have this real problem where actually if you then take the kid off it they will experience really severe withdrawal right and often what that's misinterpreted is oh my god look at what happens to my kid when i take him off it he goes it's like no that's not the baseline of your kid that's your kid in withdrawal from a cocaine like remark i mean i had a i've spoke about this before so i think i can say i had a very close relative who had a cocaine addiction and i remember at the height of her cocaine addiction she had a my one of my

a young relative of mine i'm trying to phrase this ambiguously who um she was drugging with ritalin the doctor given it because he didn't want to focus because he was traumatized because his mother was a cocaine addict right and i remember she used to go drive into school in the morning she would snort a line of coke before she went. And then in the car, he'd have to swallow his cocaine-like pill. And I thought, what a crazy culture that her cocaine use is illegal and would end up with her being criminally punished. And his cocaine-like substance is required by the police. Not required by the police, sorry.

Required by the school and mandated by the doctor. What a crazy, what a culture that is fucked up about how it thinks about altering itself chemically, about children, about connection. And that my relative was very deprived of the capacity to understand what was happening to her. This is the cruelest thing we've done. If you just give people these ridiculously simplistic stories about addiction, it's just the chemical hook. Or this ridiculously simplistic story about depression, it's just the chemical hook or this ridiculously simplistic story about depression it's just a chemical imbalance it's like we say you cut them

off from understanding the thing that's right in front of them and sometimes i think with with both my books with chasing the scream and lost connections at times i thought do i even need to say this it's so fucking banal right right if you're lonely if you're insecure you're going to be but actually it does need to be said when you say it when you say to people it it's a very unusual position to be in a position where you're saying something that is both unbelievably obvious and really quite radical right that's a weird i can't think of many do you know what i mean common sense but it's not common that's i'm gonna write that down that really is what it is it's not a common understanding now i want to get in to this um with you what

about the criticisms of your work and how have you how have you taken that in if you debated anyone about your work because i read quite a few things online uh that were very critical and i didn't agree with them i didn't agree with what they were saying but i wanted to get your take on it sure so there were a few few points that have been made and there were a few pieces that were written as soon as the book came out by psychiatrists who admitted they to be fair to the hand read the book right and they were responding to an extract from the book yes and obviously in an extract you can't make every point you want to make right so the book is a hundred thousand what was the extract what was the so what they thought I was saying is even though the piece I think very clearly didn't say this what they thought I was saying is, even though the piece, I think, very clearly didn't say this, what they thought I was saying is chemical antidepressants are bad for everyone and people should stop taking them.

If I had said that, it would be totally right to criticize me. That's not my position. But it's an easy way to criticize you. Just cherry pick. And my position is, you know, what we said before, chemical antidepressants give you 1.8 points on the Hamilton scale, right? That's not nothing. It's not much on average average but it's not nothing some people like for example one of my relatives the one that we talked about who is trapped she takes chemical antidepressants i think she's right to

take them right she's got very limited margin of change she's not experiencing extreme side effects as lots of people do i think she's right to care for her 1.8 points on the hamilton scale is worth having but it's not solving her problem, right? It's not solving the problem for the vast majority of people And so I think there's been some criticisms that are He's telling people to stop That's a dangerous and terrible thing to do So that's the my response to that is read the book because I didn't say that in fact I say explicitly you should carry on taking them if for you the benefits outweigh the side effects.

Another criticism, which I have more sympathy for in that I understand where it's coming from, is it's more like an ideological misunderstanding. Like we're saying, we live in such an individualistic culture that if someone comes along, so we basically think there's two ways of thinking about this, right? Either your depression, your anxiety, your addiction are due to a biological problem along so we basically think there's two ways of thinking about this right either you your depression your anxiety your addiction are due to a biological problem in which case you deserve love and support or if you dismantle the biological story what a lot of people hear is oh my god you're saying it's my fault that i'm a fuck-up that i've got to solve this on my own and lots of people

talk and say well i can't fucking go and democratize my workplace. I can't fucking go and, you know, take a load of ayahuasca and learn. They're just saying, what are you talking about? And I think because I'm talking in this third category, which is biology's real, psychology's real, but most of the drivers of this are social, they're in the way we live,

because for so long we've been trained to not think in social terms. I think a lot of people just literally don't get what I'm saying, right? When I was a kid, Margaret Thatcher said, the Prime Minister at the time said, there's no such thing as society, there's only individuals and their families. Now, I never liked Margaret Thatcher. But this debate has made me realize how much I internalize that, I was depressed for 13 years i'd fucking studied social sciences right it never even occurred to me there was a societal component to how bad i felt right so i was kind of like a thatcherite to my own pain and distress do you see what i mean and i think we've so we've so individualized and internalized we've so

internalized this individualism that i think people understand and again they were riffing on the extracts these are not people who read the book in the main but i think it was kind of understandable for them to be like fuck you i can't do that you know i can see why they're saying that i'm not so i wouldn't push back on them so hard because i think well there are narrow margins and this is why we need to change and people get that if you talk about car accidents right we individual drivers should drive safely um but we don't just leave car safety up to that we have airbags and seat belts and speed limits driving tests we arrest people under duis right if we just took away all those things and just said to individual drivers hey drivers do it and pedestrians pedestrians take care drivers take care we would have far more people dying in car accidents than we do now right so we accept that there's individual an individual role but there's a

social role right the whole society deals with the problem of car accidents and what i'm saying is the whole society should deal with the problem of depression and anxiety we need social changes like democratizing workplaces is one we've talked about a lot that reduce the reasons why people are so depressed and anxious in the first place. But I think in a society that is so devalued the idea of the social, I may as well be speaking fucking Swedish for all they could understand. Do you see what I mean? Yes, I think they're just neglecting to consider the possibility that some of the factors are because of your life and the social aspects, the physical aspects, the exercise, the diet, all those various things. There's many, many people that just are neglecting to take those even into consideration.

I also think people work way too much. I don't think that's the way to live your life. I think we've got a really bad system and I think this system has existed for so long that we assume that this is the only way to live, that you have to do a 40-hour work week. I think it's ridiculous. I think we should work maybe four days a week, and it might be three. Maybe people would be more productive, they kicked ass for three days a week, and then had a fun time for four. Maybe it's like one on, one off, one on, one off, one on, one off.

Maybe it's like that, and just that's the way we live life. Like have a fucking work day and have a day where you don't work. And if you choose to live more, to work more because, you know, you're trying to pursue something and you're a dedicated person, you have a job, that's one thing. But I just think this soul sucking grind of, you know, getting out of college at 21 and grinding until you're 65 and then you look forward to your golden years you're dying motherfucker there's no golden years that's all horse shit you know you're watching on golden pond too many times you're not gonna make it no one's gonna make it

bad example he hated his daughter maybe the golden girls right it's a really shit film actually funny she's like i watched it for the first time when i played recently but i think there's another thing going on there's another thing going on. There's another thing going on. I have to make sure I don't miss my flight. But there's another thing going on which is what we've done is we've told people the path out of stigma is to say that the problem is just biological. Right? Right. So we said people, you should not be criticized.

You have an imbalance. Exactly. Or even more than that. It's like having a pancreas disease. We just need to give you a medication. Exactly. We've told people, you should not be judged for your depression, anxiety, addiction, because it's a biological problem. Right.

I entirely agree. Obviously, people should not be judged for their anxiety, depression, or addiction. But actually, there's a really interesting experiment that showed that this is just a complete... This first triggered me on this is I interviewed an amazing neuroscientist called Mark lewis who i was talking about this i said oh you know i'm worried because you're explaining a lot of the things we've talked about to me early in my research and i said you know i'm worried about this mark because won't this just reintroduce stigma right if we're saying it's not just biological and he said johan did anyone ever doubt that leprosy or aids were biological problems right literally nobody ever doubted that zero you might

have noticed there was some stigma against leprosy and aids why do you think saying something is biological removes the stigma around it i thought again it's a simple point but i thought wow i'd never thought of that but there's actually this experiment by a woman i interviewed called uh professor sheila meta which looked at this question of stigma she so she wanted to figure out which looked at this question of stigma. So she wanted to figure out which is more destigmatizing, telling people that mental health problems are caused by your biology or saying they're caused by your life. So what they do is, it's a little bit of a complex experiment,

but I think it's worth explaining. Say you're the guys taking part in the experiment. They bring you in and they say, before the experiment begins, we just want you to sit here and fill in a questionnaire. Right. This is you don't realize, but this is actually the experiment. So you're sitting next to someone else who you don't realize is an actor and you get chatting and the actor will run it two ways. Sometimes the actor will say, I've got a mental health problem because of my biology. And sometimes he'll say, I've got a mental health problem because of bad things that have happened

to me right then you're told the experiment's beginning come through to this room and you're told you joe have got to teach this other person the person you don't realize is an actor a pattern it's like a pattern on a computer is we're testing how well people learn patterns and every once you've taught it to him every time he gets it wrong i want you to push this button and this button will give him a short, sharp electric shock, right? Won't kill him or anything. It's not going to fuck him up, but it is uncomfortable, right? And they wanted to see, would there be a difference in how many electric shocks and how hard you hit the button, depending on what you were told.

What they found was you were significantly more like, you zapped the person more and harder if you thought their problem was just due to their biology than if it was due to things that happened to them in their lives and i think that's because i think this is the stuff we're talking about is the path out of stigma because what it says if what we're saying is there's just this class of people who are biologically different to us and they have this flaw that you and i don't have um you can see why that leads to stigma right but if what you're saying is actually we're all uniquely we're all vulnerable to this stuff um actually the things that are making some people depressed anxious and addicted are making loads of us just less happy than we could be less fulfilled than we could be what that does instead of making dividing us into two tribes it says we're all on a continuum and actually the fight that will help these people who are depressed and

anxious will also improve your life right that's to me a much more powerful message it's something on a continuum and actually the fight that will help these people who are depressed and anxious will also improve your life right that's to me a much more powerful message it's not a problem being an inexplicable biological malfunction it's a response to things that you can see in your life right well it's interesting that we've always had the term sadness right people have always experienced sadness but if you go back and go through ancient literature you don't see a lot of stories about people suffering from depression that's a relatively new distinction you do get people who talk about melancholy yeah sure I do think depression has always been acute and extreme unhappiness there's always been

people living unhappy lives but the state of being depressed as being a clinical psychological sort of a Diagnosis that's relatively recent. Well the idea that it's a pathology. Yeah is right And you know, it's funny come up to us thinking about this way you're speaking earlier and When we talk about food, there's a thing of this you can tell i'm obviously i'm british when i um first came to the the u.s i never remember i remember the first time someone ever offered me an indigestion pill which they don't exist in digestion pill yeah you know that you can buy them in like pepto-bismol or something like that and i remember just saying but but wait

indigestion is a sign from your body you're eating too fast you don't want to you don't want to get rid of that signal you'll you'll you'll you'll eat too much you'll hurt yourself right that that's that's not a malfunction that's that's a function right and i remember thinking as well about that you know that it comes back to so many things we're saying the things the feelings that we have of distress are not malfunctions. They're telling us something is missing in the environment, in the psychology, in our lives. They're not fuck-ups. They're signals that we should listen to.

There's an industry that they benefit from filling that void. Like, if you've got an issue, they've got a pill for it. And as soon as you create that sort of an environment, they're going to constantly be innovating and trying to come up with new pills for new issues and even create ailments, make up ailments and come up with solutions for those ailments. And a lot of those are actually, we've shown this on the podcast

many times. Those were done by advertising agencies. They've actually created names of diseases and issues just so they can come up with solutions. One of the things that was most shocking in the research for the lost connections was realizing how much of what I had been told was invented not by scientists but by drug company PRS so I'll give you an example of two examples and I'm gonna have to go in a second no worries I would love to stay all day. I've got to do one other interview before my flight. Fuck that interview. Sorry. There's this...

So everyone knows, if you think about, I don't know, taking selfies, right? You take 30 selfies, you throw away 29, you only use the one that... Can't do that. Don't be a bitch. Take a selfie and go with it. It's like De Niro and the deer hunter. One bullet.

You know, you use the one where you look good, right? Turns out, in the whole process when antidepressants were first being marketed to us, they basically did that with scientific studies. What they did is they would commission 100 studies. 90 of them would say, find mixed results or poor results. Those all got put in the trash can. And only the ones, I mean, there's one study I cite in the book, I think it was, they tested the drug on 247 people

and they only published the results for 27 of them who you will not find hard to guess were the 27 for whom it worked. So the early results were hugely exaggerated. You'll remember that, you know, when antidepressants were first marketed, people are told, you know, it'll make you better than well, right? No one says that now. You'll notice that stuff's all gone away, right? It doesn't happen anymore.

So there's this huge... Actually, Eliot Spitzer did an amazing job when he was attorney general in New York State of taking the pharmaceutical companies to court because it particularly affected me when I read it because it was the drug that I was given as a teenager. It's called paroxetine or Paxil in the US. The company that manufactures it literally had a leaked memo from them

in which they say, this doesn't work for teenagers, but I think the phrase they used was this would be unacceptable for the commercial profile of paroxetine. So they just said that it did. And that's the fucking drug I was given, right right it's shocking to see the drug that you were given the this company involved so it didn't work for people like you right right um and and you know

it had very powerful side effects on me i gained a huge amount of weight it has all sorts of side effects um the did it help you at all i felt a strong initial boost and i would say it probably did give me 1.8 points on the hamilton scale like what we're talking about probably gave me a very mild boost but it didn't solve my problem and the problem is the story i was told about it that this is the solution because the problem is the chemical imbalance disconnected me from a much wider program of reconnection in my life that did in fact solve my depression when i embarked on it right right the the so so i think the the drug companies it's scandalous what they did it's not that the drugs have no value they do but when you read through what they actually did and the way these stories were constructed um and the the the the the bullshit we were told you know

i mean i remember interviewing a clinical psychologist dr lucy johnson and who's a brilliant person and her just saying you know everything you were told is bullshit and me just sitting there and going through this is what my doctor told me this is what my doctor told me this is what my doctor the fact that there's no repercussions no legal repercussions against those people for doing that is just stunning. I mean, there was some. You think about like insider trading, how devastating the penalties are for that. This is far worse.

One of the scandals is the FDA, how much of it is funded by the drug companies itself, right? 40% of the budget. I mean, imagine if you had a ball game where one side was fun where one of the teams paid the referees wages right right i think you'd find that game that that that team would win a lot more often right so what we think is oh there's this dispassionate judge i mean one of the other scanners even the way the rules are constructed so to get a drug i think the rules have been slightly tightened recently but when antidepressants were first introduced, to get a drug to market, you only had to demonstrate two studies anywhere that showed any efficacy, right?

So that means you could commission 3,000 studies, and if two of them, it's not that the FDA would take the balance of the research. If you could show two that it worked, that would be enough. So they would present those studies to the FDA. They didn't have to show them everything they've done. Exactly. It's gotten a bit better now. There's now more publication required, which is one of the reasons why so few new chemical antidepressants are coming onto the market, because the rules have been slightly tightened.

And as a result, where are all the new ones? They're not coming on. I mean, there are some, but they're far more limited. Haven't they shown also that rigorous exercise is actually more effective in treating depression than antidepressants? I think I was going a bit too far, but there's evidence that, well, there's very strong evidence. Dr. Isabel Benke, who you would love, I should introduce you to her. She's a Chilean primatologist, basically the best person in the world as far as I'm concerned.

She's a hardcore Chilean. She's currently in some jungle somewhere. Better than Mick Jagger's ex-wife? Yeah. I mean, I like Marianne Faithfull, but Isabel is something else, something else right so is about to make this my last point but isabel so she's demonstrated she's shown loads of things one of the really interesting things is um nature so she's shown that exercise is a massive really powerful antidepressant but interestingly exercise in nature is even more effective and she's shown her theory is and i really like this

she did a lot of work with bonobos both in zoos and in the wild and she's got really good stories about how bonobos basically bond by lesbian group sex and she she she shows how they pioneered how they managed to create vibrators when they were in the zoo it's an amazing story but but the uh like literally she would like give them buckets and they would find a way to turn it into a vibrator she was an awe of them right but and then have massive lesbian orgies with their vibrators and it was in a british zoo so these like polite british parents would be like mommy mommy what's happening and they'd be like nothing darling come over here but the um isabel's theory is so animals go crazy in zoos a lot of the time right parrots rip out their feathers horses start obsessively

swaying uh elephants will grind their tusks down to nothing um uh and and she basically argues it's sure well this is simplifying her argument she says there's many things going on here but um the the humans are being animals deprived of their habitat feel like shit and we are increasingly deprived of our habitat the habitat we evolved in right there's lots of evidence that people who live in areas with no green space are much more likely to become depressed than people who don't and people who move from one area without green space to an area

with green space become much less depressed there's loads of research on this there's such an amazing study Michigan State Prism looks out just by accident no one designed it this way one part State Prison looks out just by accident. No one designed it this way. One part of it looks out over just bare concrete and one part of it looks out of like lovely green space. And the people who were there, which is random where you ended up. But the people who looked out over the concrete were 23 percent more likely to develop mental health problems.

Right. So this thing about, as Isabel says, we are animals that were designed to move through nature if you are not an animal moving through nature you are not a healthy human being you are not in your habitat you need to be in that habitat at least some of the time right and um yeah i mean she's got isabel has the best stories ever so you should you should you would love her anyway she i'm sure i would she has both lesbian group sex stories and stories about how you can cure your depression with nature exposure so johan thank you very much and one more time the name of your book so the book is called lost connections uncovering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions if you go to the book's website www.thelostconnections.com you can find out what loads of people from

hillary clinton to tucker carlson to Elton John have said about the book. You can take a quiz to see how much you know about depression and anxiety. And the book has a Facebook page. It's facebook.com slash the lost connections. And the other book we talked about is chasing the scream, which is about addiction. You can find out more about that at www.chasing the scream. Scream as in ah like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween

dot com thank you very much I really enjoyed that Joe thank you so much that was fantastic cheers hooray I really enjoyed that Joe we got into the proper meat of it didn't we