The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1077

00:00:06.000 Johan Hari, I got it right.

00:00:08.000 You said it right.

00:00:09.000 You are literally the first person to ever say my name.

00:00:11.000 I was saying to your friend that I once waited for six hours with a broken arm in an emergency room because they were calling for Joanna Hairy to come forward.

00:00:17.000 So anyone who gets my name better than that is fine by me.

00:00:18.000 Didn't you just assume that was you when you heard Joanna Hairy?

00:00:21.000 To be fair, I had a broken arm and I was lying there like weeping and being like, fuck, someone help me.

00:00:26.000 In my normal mind, I would have done.

00:00:28.000 What went down with your arm?

00:00:30.000 I fell.

00:00:31.000 And tragically, no glamorous story to it.

00:00:33.000 I fell down a staircase.

00:00:34.000 I wasn't even drunk.

00:00:35.000 I wasn't even fucked on anything.

00:00:36.000 I just fell down the stairs, right?

00:00:38.000 I wasn't even a victim of domestic violence.

00:00:39.000 No surrounding narrative that would make that an interesting story, sadly.

00:00:44.000 So give me your, if you had like a one-paragraph take on depression.

00:00:52.000 Sure.

00:00:52.000 What is your take on depression?

00:00:54.000 So this is why I wrote this book, Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and Anxiety and the Real Solutions.

00:01:01.000 I wanted to understand why does depression and anxiety seem to be rising so much?

00:01:06.000 It's very personal to me.

00:01:07.000 When I was a teenager, I'd gone to my doctor.

00:01:09.000 I'd explained that I was in this deep sense of pain.

00:01:11.000 And all my doctor did was tell me a biological story.

00:01:14.000 He just said, basically, your brain's broken.

00:01:16.000 And all he did was give me drugs, right?

00:01:18.000 And drugs play a role in treating people.

00:01:21.000 I was still depressed all that time I was taking these drugs, right?

00:01:24.000 Most of the time.

00:01:26.000 And after 13 years of it, I thought, right, I need to understand what's really going on here.

00:01:29.000 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.

00:01:36.000 And what I discovered...

00:01:39.000 We've told a ridiculously simplistic story to people about what depression is and how to solve it.

00:01:45.000 Until I was a teenager and I went to my doctor, I thought depression was all in my head, meaning you're just being weak, you're being a pussy, basically.

00:01:53.000 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.

00:01:58.000 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.

00:02:08.000 But the causes of depression and anxiety are overwhelmingly in the way we're living.

00:02:11.000 There are these nine causes of depression and anxiety for which I could find scientific evidence, seven of which are in the way we're living, and some of which are rising, which explains this kind of epidemic.

00:02:20.000 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?

00:02:29.000 Like what how would you describe it if you had to describe it to someone who didn't understand depression?

00:02:34.000 Try to keep this about a fist away from your face.

00:02:37.000 I think depression is despair spreading.

00:02:43.000 Everyone has moments of hopelessness in their lives, right?

00:02:45.000 It's that spreading further.

00:02:47.000 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?

00:02:56.000 You need food, you need water, You need clean air, you need warmth.

00:03:00.000 If I took those things away from you, you would be in real trouble real fast, right?

00:03:03.000 There's equally strong evidence that human beings have natural psychological needs, right?

00:03:08.000 You've got to feel you belong.

00:03:10.000 You've got to feel your life has meaning and purpose.

00:03:12.000 You've got to feel that people see you and value you.

00:03:15.000 You've got to feel that you've got autonomy.

00:03:16.000 You've got to feel that you've got a future that makes sense.

00:03:19.000 And our culture is good at lots of things.

00:03:21.000 I'm glad to be alive today.

00:03:22.000 But our culture has been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs for lots of people.

00:03:29.000 And that is the key reason.

00:03:30.000 It's not the only one, but it's the key reason why we have this rising depression and anxiety epidemic.

00:03:34.000 That can sound a bit weird in the abstract, so I can give you some specific examples if you want.

00:03:37.000 Okay, sure.

00:03:38.000 So I'll give you one example.

00:03:39.000 I noticed that lots of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work, right?

00:03:45.000 I started to think, what's going on here?

00:03:47.000 So I started to look for evidence about how people feel about their work.

00:03:51.000 Best research on this was done by Gallup, the opinion poll company.

00:03:54.000 Massive detailed study, took a couple of years.

00:03:56.000 They found the figures for how people feel about work in the US and other comparable countries.

00:04:02.000 What they found is 13% of us, 1-3%, basically like our work.

00:04:07.000 Most of the time we get energy from it.

00:04:09.000 63% of us are what they call sleep working.

00:04:12.000 So don't like their work, don't hate their work, they're just kind of enduring it.

00:04:16.000 And 24% of people fucking hate their work, right?

00:04:19.000 Fear it and dread it.

00:04:20.000 So I was quite struck by that when I looked at it.

00:04:22.000 That means 87% of people...

00:04:25.000 Don't like the thing they're doing most of the time.

00:04:27.000 That's incredible.

00:04:28.000 It's striking.

00:04:29.000 And bear in mind, this thing that we don't like has spread over even more of our lives, right?

00:04:32.000 Average person answers their first email at 7.48am and leaves work at 7.15pm.

00:04:38.000 So this is most of our waking lives we're doing something we don't like.

00:04:41.000 I start to think, could there be some connection between that and this epidemic of All sorts of forms of despair, anxiety, depression, addiction.

00:04:50.000 So I started to look for scientists who'd studied this.

00:04:53.000 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?

00:05:02.000 There's several aspects to this.

00:05:03.000 I can tell you the story of how he discovered it, if you want, because I think it's an amazing story.

00:05:07.000 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.

00:05:18.000 You're even more likely to have a stress-related heart attack.

00:05:21.000 And I think the reason is clear, although I'm a bit further than Professor Marmot does.

00:05:24.000 Human beings need to feel our lives have meaning, right?

00:05:27.000 And if you're controlled all the time, you don't feel like your life has meaning.

00:05:32.000 It disrupts your ability to create meaning out of your work.

00:05:35.000 And it makes you feel like shit, right?

00:05:38.000 That makes sense.

00:05:39.000 And one of the things that was really important to me in everything I was learning in the research for Lost 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?

00:05:54.000 He said, you know, we know what causes depression, it's just some people naturally have low levels of serotonin in their brains.

00:06:01.000 You know, you're clearly one of them.

00:06:04.000 That's what's going on here.

00:06:05.000 And one thing that was really striking speaking to the leading experts in the world is that story is just not true.

00:06:09.000 There are real biological factors.

00:06:11.000 There are real things that happen in your brain, obviously.

00:06:13.000 But actually, Professor Andrew Scull at Princeton University says it's deeply misleading and unscientific to say depression is just caused by low serotonin, right?

00:06:20.000 This is just not true.

00:06:22.000 But one thing that was so important to me, looking at these nine real causes of depression and anxiety, was realising, actually, our pain makes sense, right?

00:06:31.000 If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you've been told, basically, that you're a bit crazy, there's something not working.

00:06:37.000 But actually, you're not a machine with broken parts, right?

00:06:40.000 You're a human being with unmet needs.

00:06:43.000 And that requires a very different set of responses.

00:06:45.000 So you think about, I start to think, well...

00:06:47.000 Let's think about that problem with work, right?

00:06:49.000 Most people feel they've got no control at work or low control and it's making them feel terrible.

00:06:53.000 They're not wrong to feel that, right?

00:06:55.000 They've got a need as human beings and it's not being met.

00:06:58.000 How can we deal with this?

00:06:59.000 And I learned there's a really interesting strategy to deal with this.

00:07:03.000 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.

00:07:09.000 I went to Baltimore and I interviewed a woman called Meredith Keough, a young woman.

00:07:14.000 Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night, just fucking sick with anxiety, right?

00:07:18.000 She had an office job.

00:07:20.000 It wasn't the worst office job in the world, right?

00:07:22.000 She wasn't being bullied.

00:07:22.000 She wasn't being harassed.

00:07:24.000 But she just couldn't bear the thought the next 40 years of her life were going to be this, right?

00:07:30.000 And one day with her husband, Josh, she did this quite bold thing.

00:07:33.000 Josh was a working class guy from Baltimore.

00:07:35.000 Since he was a teenager, he'd worked in bike stores.

00:07:39.000 And, you know, working in a bike store, your viewers will know it's insecure work.

00:07:44.000 It's controlled.

00:07:46.000 You do what your boss tells you.

00:07:47.000 You don't even get vacations unless the boss, you know, is nice to you.

00:07:51.000 And Josh and his colleagues in the store, they didn't hate their boss.

00:07:54.000 He wasn't a particularly bad boss as far as bosses go.

00:07:56.000 They quite liked him as a person.

00:07:57.000 But one day they just asked, What does our boss actually do, right?

00:08:02.000 We fix all the bikes, and he seems to make all the money.

00:08:04.000 What's going on here?

00:08:05.000 They decided to do an experiment.

00:08:08.000 They set up a different bike store, a rival bike store, it's called Baltimore Bicycle Works, and it works on a different principle.

00:08:15.000 So most people listening to this will work in corporations, right?

00:08:18.000 Top down, you do what the boss says, it's modelled like an army.

00:08:20.000 That is a very recent human invention, right?

00:08:23.000 It comes along in the late 19th century.

00:08:25.000 What they did was try a different model.

00:08:27.000 They're called democratic cooperatives.

00:08:29.000 So at Baltimore Bicycle Works, they take all the big decisions together about their work, they vote.

00:08:35.000 They share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks, so no one just gets stuck with all the shitty tasks.

00:08:39.000 They share the profits, obviously.

00:08:41.000 So they control their environment together.

00:08:43.000 They're like a little tribe that control their environment instead of an army with one guy at the top controlling it.

00:08:49.000 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, It's how many of them talked about having been really depressed and anxious when they were working in this controlled way.

00:09:03.000 And their depression and anxiety had largely gone, still had bad days of course, but that kind of nagging depression and anxiety had gone away in this different environment.

00:09:10.000 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.

00:09:18.000 It's not even more efficient.

00:09:19.000 A study at Cornell University found that democratic businesses grow four times faster than top-down businesses.

00:09:28.000 And I think what this opens up is a different way of thinking about depression.

00:09:32.000 As we've said, to depressed and anxious people, the job of fixing this is basically on you, buddy, right?

00:09:38.000 Maybe if you're lucky, your family.

00:09:39.000 Maybe if you're lucky, your doctor.

00:09:41.000 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 the things that's fueling the addiction crisis, which you can talk about if you want.

00:09:53.000 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's skull.

00:10:00.000 Do you see what I mean?

00:10:00.000 Yeah, so you're focusing on work environments, right?

00:10:03.000 And there's many reasons, as you were saying, for people being depressed.

00:10:08.000 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?

00:10:18.000 Yeah, and that was one of the things as well at Baltimore Bicycle Excess.

00:10:20.000 Most people are so removed from their work, right?

00:10:24.000 From the outcome of their work.

00:10:26.000 To give you an example of a guy I interviewed a lot, a guy called Joe.

00:10:31.000 He works in Philly and he worked when I met him in a paint store, right?

00:10:36.000 And Joe's job was to turn up at whatever it was, 8.30 in the morning, Stay there all day until 7pm and just take your order for paint.

00:10:43.000 And then when you ask for a specific shade, his job was to put it in a machine that shook it, right?

00:10:47.000 And then just give you the paint.

00:10:49.000 That's it.

00:10:49.000 That was his whole life, week after week, year after year.

00:10:53.000 And Joe was acutely depressed.

00:10:55.000 And Joe felt really guilty about telling me how depressed he was, right?

00:11:00.000 He kept saying, look, I know how lucky I am.

00:11:02.000 I know how lucky I am.

00:11:04.000 But he felt like shit.

00:11:06.000 And I remember him saying to me, look, I know people need paint, right?

00:11:09.000 It's not, I know that I have some function here in the economy.

00:11:12.000 Don't think you put it quite like that.

00:11:13.000 But this is not giving me any sense of meaning.

00:11:15.000 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...

00:11:23.000 So Joe, a lot 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?

00:11:32.000 Like one of my closest relatives is a struggling single mom.

00:11:36.000 You know, she works every hour she can, she gets home at the end of the day, collapses, right?

00:11:40.000 The idea of saying to her, your job now is to democratise your workplace is ridiculous, right?

00:11:44.000 She can't do that.

00:11:45.000 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.

00:11:51.000 Although there are things individuals can do that I go through in the book.

00:11:54.000 But the...

00:11:57.000 A lot of people...

00:11:59.000 How do I put it?

00:12:02.000 We live in such an individualistic culture that people think what you're saying is you need to do it yourself.

00:12:07.000 But Joe was in an unusual position in that Joe loved fishing, right?

00:12:12.000 He'd fished in, I think, 20 of the 50 states.

00:12:14.000 And he'd recently been to Florida.

00:12:16.000 And he said, you know, when I was in Florida...

00:12:19.000 I realised I could just quit this job.

00:12:21.000 I could go and live as a fisherman in Florida.

00:12:23.000 I'd make less money, but I'd be much happier, right?

00:12:27.000 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?

00:12:34.000 How did you know?

00:12:35.000 It's just the way he said it, it was a wistful longing, not a...

00:12:38.000 A whimsical idea, not something based on a real possibility.

00:12:42.000 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.

00:12:49.000 Joe, go to Florida!

00:12:51.000 Right?

00:12:51.000 And one of the things that really troubled me was, why are so...

00:12:55.000 So, a lot of people are trapped in the way our culture works, which is why we've got to change the culture.

00:12:59.000 And I talk about specific, concrete things that have been tried in other countries that have freed people up and have reduced depressions.

00:13:05.000 I'm sure we'll get to that.

00:13:07.000 But if you think about an individual like Joe, what's going on there?

00:13:09.000 And one of the things I learned from this amazing Professor Tim Kasser in Illinois, at Knox College in Illinois, is I think one of the things...

00:13:16.000 This is one of the hardest causes of depression to learn about, because I realised how much it played out in my own life as well.

00:13:22.000 So...

00:13:24.000 Just like we all know, junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right?

00:13:29.000 Something similar has happened with our minds.

00:13:31.000 The kind of junk values have taken over our minds.

00:13:33.000 When I started learning about this, I kept remembering.

00:13:35.000 So I ate nothing but junk food for like 10 years from my 20s, basically.

00:13:39.000 And I remember one day, it makes this story even sadder that it was Christmas Eve in 2009. At lunchtime, I went to my local KFC and I said my order, which I won't even repeat to you because it was so disgusting.

00:13:51.000 And the guy behind the counter said, oh, Johan, we're so glad you're here.

00:13:55.000 I was like, okay.

00:13:56.000 And he said, wait a minute, wait a minute.

00:13:58.000 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.

00:14:06.000 And my heart, it's like sang because I was looking at this and I suddenly realised this wasn't even the fried chicken shop I went to the most, right?

00:14:13.000 So I was at an extreme end of the junk food spectrum, right?

00:14:16.000 I'm not anymore, though I've relapsed a bit lately.

00:14:20.000 So we all know how that works, right?

00:14:22.000 Junk food appeals to the part of us that evolved to want nutrients, but it tricks that.

00:14:27.000 It's not actually a part of you that wants nutrients.

00:14:29.000 It actually makes you sick, right?

00:14:31.000 And what Professor Kasser found is that there's similar things happen in our minds.

00:14:36.000 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 going to feel like shit, right?

00:14:45.000 But it's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that's the gist of what he said, right?

00:14:49.000 But weirdly, no one had actually scientifically investigated this until Professor Kasser 25 years ago.

00:14:56.000 So he knew that basically, to put it crudely, there's two kinds of motives that human beings have, right?

00:15:02.000 You've got them, I've got them, Jamie's got them, everyone's got them, right?

00:15:06.000 The first set of motives, imagine if you play the piano, right?

00:15:09.000 I'm totally unmusical, but imagine if you play the piano.

00:15:12.000 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?

00:15:19.000 You're not doing it to get anything out of it, you're just doing it because you love it, right?

00:15:22.000 The experience is the point.

00:15:25.000 Now imagine you play the piano in a dive bar, you know, to pay the rent and you don't like it, right?

00:15:31.000 Or you play the piano because your parents really want you to be a piano maestro.

00:15:34.000 I don't know, there's a woman who's really into pianists, so you learn the piano to impress her.

00:15:38.000 That would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano, right?

00:15:41.000 You're not doing it for the thing itself.

00:15:43.000 You're doing it to get something out of it, right?

00:15:46.000 And what Professor Kasser discovered, loads of really important things about this, but there's a few.

00:15:50.000 We're all a mixture of these things, but we move throughout our lives.

00:15:53.000 And what he discovered is...

00:15:54.000 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.

00:16:08.000 There's loads of studies that show this.

00:16:11.000 And also he found that we have become much more obsessed with, much more driven by these values over the last 30 years for all sorts of reasons, partly because From the minute we're born, we're immersed in a machine that tells us life is about consumption, right?

00:16:25.000 About externally consuming things.

00:16:27.000 More 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own last name, right?

00:16:33.000 So there's this machine constantly geared towards getting us to think extrinsic.

00:16:37.000 Imagine an advert that said to you, you know, Joe, you look great today.

00:16:40.000 You smell great.

00:16:42.000 You're doing fine, right?

00:16:43.000 You don't need to buy anything today.

00:16:44.000 That would, from the perspective of the advertising industry, be the worst thing.

00:16:47.000 Worst advert ever, right?

00:16:49.000 It wouldn't make you want to buy anything.

00:16:50.000 So, this movement towards these kind of junk values, and he shows lots of reasons why these junk values make us feel like shit.

00:16:59.000 One is, it just corrodes the quality of your relationships, right?

00:17:03.000 If your wife, 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.

00:17:14.000 You know, oh right, if you suddenly got fat or if you suddenly lost all your money, it's over.

00:17:18.000 It creates that sand of insecurity enters all your relationships.

00:17:23.000 The more you're extrinsically motivated, the more insecure your relationships will be and the worse you'll feel.

00:17:28.000 Or another example would be...

00:17:30.000 Something that really makes human beings feel good are what are called flow states, right?

00:17:34.000 There are moments when you're doing something you love.

00:17:36.000 For me, it's writing.

00:17:37.000 For you, I'm sure it's partly broadcasting, partly working out.

00:17:39.000 As you can see, it's not working out for me.

00:17:42.000 Where you just get into the zone and time seems to collapse and you're in that moment, right?

00:17:48.000 But what thinking extrinsically, what being dominated by these junk values does, is it jolts you out of the intrinsic value.

00:17:55.000 So imagine, go back to the piano example.

00:17:57.000 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, right?

00:18:04.000 How are these people in this room thinking about my piano playing?

00:18:07.000 How much am I going to be paid for this piano playing?

00:18:09.000 You can see how that would jolt you out of the flow state, right?

00:18:12.000 People who, the more we're driven by extrinsic values, the less we get into flow states and the worse we feel.

00:18:16.000 There's lots of other reasons as well I can talk about.

00:18:18.000 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.

00:18:33.000 When you were young and you were experiencing depression, as you called it, what was the root cause of it?

00:18:38.000 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.

00:18:51.000 And if you don't mind, I'll tell you his story first.

00:18:53.000 I'll tell you what it made me realize about myself and actually why I was very resistant to this.

00:18:58.000 You were very resistant to this?

00:19:00.000 Very resistant to this insight that he had and really did not want to absorb it.

00:19:05.000 So he actually made this discovery, and this can sound like I'm talking about a whole other subject, but trust me, it gets to depression.

00:19:12.000 It led to an incredible breakthrough in depression.

00:19:13.000 So in the mid-1980s, Dr. Felitti is doing all this research into obesity.

00:19:18.000 Basically, Kaiser Permanente, a not-for-profit medical provider down in San Diego, just had a massive fucking problem with obesity, right?

00:19:25.000 It was just hugely...

00:19:27.000 Growing problem with obesity and they were trying everything and nothing was worth, like giving people nutritional advice, that stage wasn't working, right?

00:19:35.000 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.

00:19:40.000 So he went away and he started to work with, I think it was about 350 extremely obese people, right?

00:19:47.000 People who weighed more than 400 pounds.

00:19:49.000 And he starts doing all sorts of different research with them.

00:19:52.000 And one day he just had this kind of almost stupidly simple thought.

00:19:56.000 He thought, what if they just literally stopped eating and we gave them the nutrients they need?

00:20:03.000 Would they just lose loads of weight and then come down to a healthy weight?

00:20:06.000 So they obviously would like massive medical supervision.

00:20:09.000 They did this, right?

00:20:10.000 People, they just monitor them and they stop eating and they give them loads of vitamins and everything.

00:20:14.000 And it worked, right?

00:20:16.000 They did, in fact, lose loads of weight.

00:20:18.000 But then something happened that no one expected.

00:20:20.000 There's a woman I'm going to call Susan to protect her medical confidentiality.

00:20:23.000 She'd been over 400 pounds.

00:20:25.000 She got down to 138 pounds and everyone's celebrating.

00:20:29.000 They think Vincent's like a miracle worker.

00:20:31.000 And then one day she freaks the fuck out, starts massively, obsessively eating.

00:20:35.000 And very quickly she's back to not quite where she was, but close, right?

00:20:39.000 And Vincent sits with Susan and he's like, what happened?

00:20:42.000 And she's like, I don't know.

00:20:44.000 And he said, well, tell me about the day you cracked, right?

00:20:46.000 Turned out something had happened to her that hadn't happened to her in, I think, ever, or certainly in a very long time.

00:20:51.000 A man hit on her, right?

00:20:53.000 When she'd been hugely overweight, no man had hit on her.

00:20:55.000 A man hit on her, and that was the trigger, right?

00:20:58.000 And he's like, okay.

00:20:59.000 So they talk a lot more.

00:21:00.000 He's like, when was it you started to put on weight?

00:21:02.000 For her, it was when she was 11. And so he's 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?

00:21:10.000 And she said, oh, well, that's when my grandfather started raping me.

00:21:14.000 And this really stuck with him.

00:21:16.000 So he starts talking to the group and he discovered 55% of the extremely overweight people in the group, 50% of people in the group, had put on their weight after being sexually abused, right?

00:21:27.000 Which was an extraordinary, far more than the wider population.

00:21:30.000 He's like, wait, what's going on here?

00:21:31.000 This is really...

00:21:32.000 Susan said to him, overweight is overlooked and that's what I wanted to be, right?

00:21:37.000 So this thing that had looked like a pathology, right?

00:21:40.000 And it is a pathology in one sense.

00:21:41.000 Being extremely overweight will kill you.

00:21:43.000 It suddenly didn't look like a sign of madness.

00:21:45.000 It was actually performing a function that we couldn't see, right?

00:21:48.000 It was protecting them from sexual attention.

00:21:53.000 But, you know, this is a small group.

00:21:54.000 It's a small study.

00:21:55.000 So Vincent wanted to get a lot more research on this, and this is where it led to the breakthrough in depression.

00:21:58.000 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.

00:22:08.000 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.

00:22:19.000 And it asked about, it had two parts.

00:22:21.000 Firstly, it said, did any of these 10 bad things happen to you when you were a kid, right?

00:22:25.000 Could be sexual abuse, neglect, that kind of thing.

00:22:28.000 And then it says, have you had any of these problems as an adult?

00:22:32.000 Obesity, injecting drug use, and at the last minute they added depression, right?

00:22:36.000 By luck.

00:22:37.000 So, when they got the results back, The CDC were just like, what the fuck is this?

00:22:43.000 For every category of childhood trauma you went through, you were radically more likely to become depressed.

00:22:48.000 If you had six of those categories, you were 3,100% more likely to have attempted suicide as an adult.

00:22:54.000 If you'd had six of them, you were 4,600% more likely to have become an adult injecting drug user, right?

00:23:01.000 And...

00:23:02.000 There's a debate about why this is, and I'm going beyond what Vincent says now, beyond what the science says, and this brings it back to my experience.

00:23:12.000 So I had, when I was a kid, I'd experienced some very extreme acts of violence from an adult in my family.

00:23:17.000 You know, my mother had been very ill.

00:23:20.000 When I was a kid, my dad was mostly in another country, and I'd experienced these really, really extreme and frightening acts of violence.

00:23:28.000 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?

00:23:39.000 And it makes me realise, one of the reasons why I clung to this very simplistic chemical imbalance theory of depression for so long...

00:23:48.000 Because I did not want to give the individual who behaved so appallingly towards me that sense of power over me.

00:23:55.000 I didn't want to think about that stuff.

00:23:59.000 I wanted to cauterize it.

00:24:00.000 I wanted to cut it out of my life.

00:24:02.000 I wanted to say, well, okay, that's a bad thing that happens to you.

00:24:05.000 But the reason why I stayed with this and the reason why I 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.

00:24:19.000 So there was a second stage of Dr. Felitti's research that to me was so powerful.

00:24:24.000 It's one of the reasons why I make myself talk about this now.

00:24:27.000 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.

00:24:47.000 I'm really sorry that happened to you.

00:24:49.000 That should never have happened.

00:24:50.000 Would you like to talk about it?

00:24:52.000 And quite a lot of people said, thank you, but no, I don't want to talk about that.

00:24:55.000 But a lot of people did want to talk about it.

00:24:57.000 On average, the conversations lasted five minutes.

00:24:59.000 And then the doctor said, I can refer you to a therapist to talk more about this if you want.

00:25:03.000 And they were monitored to see what happened.

00:25:05.000 The results were kind of incredible.

00:25:07.000 There was an enormous fall in depression and anxiety just from the five minute meeting, right?

00:25:12.000 And from the, obviously, people who referred to therapy saw an even bigger fall.

00:25:15.000 And it seems to be, again, this is going beyond, this bit is going beyond what Vincent said.

00:25:19.000 I asked him, I said, no.

00:25:21.000 I think partly what happens is, it's related to shame, right?

00:25:25.000 If you are a kid and you experience some kind of abuse, you can basically do one of two things, right?

00:25:31.000 You can either say, look, I'm fucked here, right?

00:25:34.000 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.

00:25:41.000 Or you can say, This must be my fault at some level, right?

00:25:47.000 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.

00:25:52.000 And a weird thing is, if you tell yourself it's your fault, Actually, you gain a sort of weird internal power, right?

00:25:59.000 You're not the pinball being smacked around the machine.

00:26:01.000 You're the person controlling the pinball machine.

00:26:03.000 You can change your behaviour, right?

00:26:04.000 You can't change the other person's behaviour.

00:26:06.000 So you kind of develop this kind of shame.

00:26:09.000 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?

00:26:19.000 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?

00:26:27.000 Shame destroys you, it makes you sick.

00:26:29.000 And what Vincent found was this model of releasing your shame, which led to this significant...

00:26:35.000 I remember one of the letters he got was from an old woman, I think she was in her 80s, who'd been sexually abused when she was a kid.

00:26:41.000 And she said, thank you for asking.

00:26:42.000 I thought I'd die and no one would ever know.

00:26:45.000 And you can see how that release of shame would have a transformative effect on people.

00:26:50.000 Wow.

00:26:51.000 So, for you, you had this traumatic experience of violence when you were young.

00:26:57.000 You were depressed.

00:26:58.000 You were trying to figure out what the source of this was, whether it was some sort of a chemical imbalance in your brain.

00:27:04.000 Now, when they say chemical imbalance is in the brain, are they capable of measuring the level of serotonin in your brain?

00:27:12.000 Yes.

00:27:13.000 So there's a huge debate about this.

00:27:14.000 You can, for example, do autopsies.

00:27:16.000 There's a big debate about...

00:27:18.000 But that's when someone's dead?

00:27:19.000 Yeah.

00:27:19.000 But there's a big debate about...

00:27:20.000 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?

00:27:30.000 But it's not the same thing.

00:27:30.000 In the same way, stretch marks correlate with obesity, but they're not the cause of obesity, they're the product of it.

00:27:35.000 So there are real brain changes that happen, which I write about in Lost Connections, and important to say that, that I don't think they should be described as chemical imbalances.

00:27:42.000 But one of the things that was really shocking to me was one of 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.

00:27:57.000 There was never a time when half of the scientists in the field believed that, right?

00:28:01.000 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?

00:28:08.000 Because what it makes it sound like, if you've just got a chemical imbalance, the solution is just to give you chemicals.

00:28:12.000 Now, it's important to say chemical antidepressants do play a role.

00:28:15.000 We can measure that.

00:28:16.000 And there's a slightly nuanced point to make about this, which is, so depression is measured by something called the Hamilton scale, right?

00:28:22.000 I've always felt sorry for whoever Hamilton was, that the only way we remember him is by how fucking miserable we are.

00:28:26.000 But anyway...

00:28:27.000 So the Hamilton scale goes from 1, where you are, you know, dancing around in ecstasy or on ecstasy, to 51, when you would be acutely suicidal, right?

00:28:36.000 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.

00:28:46.000 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?

00:28:53.000 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?

00:29:04.000 About a third of what improving your sleep patterns does.

00:29:07.000 It's important to say that's an average, so some people do get more than that, some people get less.

00:29:11.000 And you can see 1.8 points It's not nothing, right?

00:29:14.000 If you're acutely suicidal, 1.8 points can take the edge off.

00:29:17.000 There's real value in giving people that relief.

00:29:19.000 But it is not solving the problem for most people.

00:29:21.000 I thought I was, you know, weird for being on antidepressants for so long and remaining depressed.

00:29:27.000 Turns out I was totally typical.

00:29:29.000 According to Dr. Steve Allardy, who's a professor of psychology, who's done a lot of work on this, between 65 and 80% of people taking chemical antidepressants become depressed again.

00:29:38.000 So you can see that's not 100%, there is some value.

00:29:42.000 Well, isn't that what a bilify is for, right?

00:29:44.000 A bilify is the idea that your antidepressant is not enough, so you take a bilify on top of your antidepressant, which is supposed to help you even further.

00:29:52.000 And it's one of the most prescribed medications in the country, and it's an anti-psychotic, which is terrifying.

00:29:59.000 The doling out...

00:30:00.000 I mean, one in five Americans will take a psychiatric drug in their lifetime, right?

00:30:03.000 It's a sign of a...

00:30:06.000 A cultural madness that we're doing this right where the now this is not to say that I want to stress again There is a real value in these drugs.

00:30:13.000 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 and But those things aren't stressed when you go to a doctor.

00:30:34.000 The first thing the doctor doesn't say is, listen, what we need to do is get you to start running and get you to start eating really healthy, and then let's talk about antidepressants.

00:30:42.000 You're totally right.

00:30:42.000 There's a $10 billion industry in that doctor giving you drugs.

00:30:45.000 That's a crazy number you just said.

00:30:47.000 $10 billion.

00:30:49.000 Exactly.

00:30:49.000 So this is why, although there is a real value for those drugs, why this is the first primary and for most people only option that's ever offered.

00:30:57.000 And one of the 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.

00:31:06.000 And Derek happened to be in Cambodia when chemical antidepressants were first introduced, right?

00:31:11.000 That's where they were introduced?

00:31:12.000 No, no, he was just there when they were first introduced in Cambodia.

00:31:15.000 I thought that would have been one of the last countries in the world they made their way to.

00:31:18.000 And the Cambodian doctors didn't know what they were, right?

00:31:21.000 So they're like, what is this?

00:31:22.000 And he explained.

00:31:23.000 And they said, we don't need them.

00:31:26.000 We've already got antidepressants.

00:31:27.000 And he said, what do you mean?

00:31:28.000 He thought they were going to talk about some kind of like herbal remedy or something.

00:31:32.000 Instead they told him a story.

00:31:33.000 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.

00:31:40.000 So they gave him an artificial limb and he went back to work in the rice fields.

00:31:43.000 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.

00:31:49.000 And I'm guessing it's pretty traumatic because he's in the fields where he's been blown up.

00:31:53.000 He starts to cry all day, doesn't want to get out of bed.

00:31:55.000 Classic depression, right?

00:31:56.000 They said to Derek, we gave him an antidepressant.

00:31:58.000 He said, what was it?

00:32:00.000 They explained.

00:32:01.000 They went and sat with him.

00:32:02.000 They listened to him.

00:32:04.000 They realised that his pain made sense.

00:32:06.000 They realised that it actually made perfect sense that he felt so bad.

00:32:09.000 They figured if they bought him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer.

00:32:12.000 He wouldn't be in these fields where he was being fucked up.

00:32:15.000 So they bought him a cow.

00:32:16.000 Within a couple of weeks, he stopped crying.

00:32:17.000 They said to Derek, so you see, Doctor, that cow was an antidepressant.

00:32:21.000 That's what you mean, right?

00:32:22.000 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?

00:32:28.000 I went to my doctor for an antidepressant and he gave me a cow.

00:32:31.000 If you understand what all these experts who I met have been, and 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?

00:32:44.000 You're not crazy to feel like shit.

00:32:46.000 You've got unmet needs, and what you need is help to get your needs met.

00:32:50.000 Now, some of the things you're talking about are Really good examples.

00:32:52.000 Exercise, diet.

00:32:53.000 Some of them are these bigger interventions.

00:32:55.000 So one of the heroes of Lost Connections is this doctor I got to know called Sam Everington, who is based in East London, actually near where I lived for a long time.

00:33:04.000 Very poor part of East London, and sadly he was never my doctor.

00:33:08.000 But Sam was really uncomfortable because he's a general practitioner, he's a general doctor.

00:33:12.000 Loads of people were coming to him with depression and anxiety, right?

00:33:15.000 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?

00:33:26.000 And Sam thought, like me, he's not opposed to the drugs, he does give them out to some people, but he just thought...

00:33:32.000 This is not right.

00:33:34.000 This isn't dealing with the reason they feel so shit, right?

00:33:37.000 So he tried a different approach.

00:33:38.000 He noticed that one of the factors that was making them depressed and anxious was how profoundly lonely they were.

00:33:43.000 It's a study that asks, obviously this is 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?

00:33:53.000 When they started doing the study years ago, the most common answer was five.

00:33:57.000 Today, the most common answer is none.

00:34:00.000 Right?

00:34:00.000 It's not the average, but more people say none than any other option.

00:34:04.000 So you think about that.

00:34:05.000 More people in America?

00:34:06.000 Yeah, more people in the United States have nobody to turn to when there's a crisis than any other option, right?

00:34:10.000 So you think about what life must be like when you're alone.

00:34:14.000 That is not the species we are.

00:34:15.000 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 savannahs of Africa were unbelievably good at one thing, right?

00:34:25.000 They weren't bigger than the animals they took down, but they were much better at cooperating than the animals they took down.

00:34:30.000 We exist because our ancestors formed into tribes.

00:34:34.000 Every instinct we have is to live in a tribe, right?

00:34:37.000 Bees need a hive, humans need a tribe.

00:34:39.000 We are the first humans ever to try to disband our tribes, right?

00:34:42.000 No one's ever done that before in human history.

00:34:45.000 And it's quite rightly...

00:34:46.000 Well, what do you...

00:34:46.000 Let me stop you there because we're getting...

00:34:48.000 Deep in the weeds here.

00:34:49.000 What do you say to someone who is happy with what they do?

00:34:54.000 Lives a fulfilled life, exercises, and is still depressed.

00:34:58.000 Yes, I thought a lot about this.

00:34:59.000 Remind me to come back to the thing about East London.

00:35:01.000 I know this is an issue with a lot of people.

00:35:03.000 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 pisses them off.

00:35:19.000 Yeah, no, I understand that.

00:35:20.000 And I would have been like that for many years.

00:35:23.000 Do you get that?

00:35:24.000 Do I get some people responding that way?

00:35:26.000 Sure, of course, of course.

00:35:28.000 So the World Health Organization is the leading medical body in the world, right?

00:35:32.000 They did a study of all the best evidence and they explained very clearly that Mental health is a social indicator, right?

00:35:41.000 It has social causes, it needs social solutions as well as individual solutions.

00:35:44.000 The science on this is overwhelming.

00:35:46.000 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?

00:35:54.000 Pretty much everyone agrees there's some social and psychological component.

00:35:58.000 It's a weird disconnect between what the scientists know and what the public is told, right?

00:36:02.000 I don't know anyone who went to their doctor who, apart from this wonderful doctor in East London who we can talk about, Who went with depression and anxiety and was told anything other than a biological story.

00:36:14.000 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.

00:36:18.000 But no one was told about these wider social causes.

00:36:21.000 No one was told, like, do you feel controlled at work?

00:36:22.000 Well, okay, it's a fact.

00:36:24.000 That could be making you depressed.

00:36:26.000 But in terms of the people who are depressed but don't...

00:36:31.000 Because this was a real mystery to me.

00:36:32.000 I knew people, I thought, but this guy's got everything and he feels still depressed.

00:36:35.000 What's going on here?

00:36:36.000 And I think there's two things to say about that.

00:36:38.000 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?

00:36:47.000 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.

00:36:54.000 People talked about it in terms of nerves then, we don't do that anymore.

00:36:57.000 There's something really wrong with my nerves because I've got everything a woman could possibly want.

00:37:01.000 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, but I feel like shit, right?

00:37:07.000 And the doctor would go, you're right, and give her Valiant.

00:37:09.000 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 of the culture are just wrong, right?

00:37:19.000 As a woman, as a human being, you need more than just a washing machine and a car, right?

00:37:24.000 You need a fulfilling life, you need to have meaning and purpose.

00:37:27.000 And a very similar thing I think is happening today.

00:37:29.000 So for example, when I speak to people who say, I've got everything I could want, but I feel like shit.

00:37:33.000 So tell me about your life.

00:37:35.000 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.

00:37:44.000 It comes back to this hijacking by junk values that we're talking about that Professor Tim Kasser discovered.

00:37:48.000 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.

00:37:58.000 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.

00:38:04.000 We feel like shit, and rather than question the script, we think there must be something wrong with us biologically.

00:38:09.000 Now, there are biological contributions, it's important to say that, but one of the things that really blew my mind on this was...

00:38:14.000 I interviewed this amazing social scientist called Dr. Brett Ford in Berkeley.

00:38:19.000 She did this research, it's kind of simple research.

00:38:21.000 It just asked...

00:38:25.000 If you consciously decided you were going to spend more hours a day trying to make yourself happier, would you actually become happier, right?

00:38:33.000 And they did this research, she didn't do it alone obviously with her colleagues, in the United States, Japan, Russia and Taiwan.

00:38:42.000 And what they found was, in the US, if you try to make yourself happier consciously, you do not become happier.

00:38:49.000 In the other countries, if you try to make yourself happier, you do become happier.

00:38:54.000 And they were like, what's going on?

00:38:56.000 So they did more research, and what they discovered was, in the US, and obviously I spend a lot of my time here, but in Britain as well, if you try to make yourself happier, You try to do something generally for yourself.

00:39:06.000 You buy something for yourself.

00:39:08.000 You big yourself up.

00:39:09.000 You try to get a promotion.

00:39:11.000 In the other countries, generally, if you try to make yourself happier, you do something for someone else, right?

00:39:16.000 You try to help your friends, your family, your community.

00:39:19.000 Wait a minute.

00:39:19.000 What countries?

00:39:20.000 It's Japan, Russia, and China.

00:39:22.000 It's most of the rest of the world.

00:39:23.000 They stress this?

00:39:24.000 That this is a part of their culture?

00:39:25.000 That if you want to be happy, you do something for someone else?

00:39:29.000 It's so implicit in the culture that they live collectively, that it's not even...

00:39:33.000 Just like we wouldn't even...

00:39:34.000 If you said, do you think happiness is an individualistic thing, we'd be like, what are you even talking about?

00:39:37.000 Isn't that sort of an extrinsic idea as well?

00:39:40.000 The idea that you're going to be happy by trying to make other people happy?

00:39:44.000 Well, this is the thing.

00:39:44.000 So intrinsic values are not about just internal to yourself.

00:39:47.000 They're things that you value.

00:39:48.000 So your intrinsic value could be spending time with your kids, right?

00:39:51.000 That was probably most people's strongest intrinsic value, if they're parents, is being with their kids, bonding with their kids, loving their kids.

00:39:57.000 But my point is, if your goal is to get happy, and the way you've chosen to get happy is, I'm going to get happy by making other people happy.

00:40:05.000 That seems very strange.

00:40:08.000 I don't think so.

00:40:09.000 No?

00:40:09.000 If you think about where humans are going...

00:40:11.000 But shouldn't you just make other people happy because you love them?

00:40:14.000 But that is a way.

00:40:15.000 Loving people and being present with them is a way of...

00:40:17.000 But not as, like, a specific...

00:40:20.000 With a specific goal of making yourself happy.

00:40:23.000 That seems...

00:40:24.000 That's not why they do it.

00:40:25.000 It's not like...

00:40:26.000 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.

00:40:35.000 But if you think about it in terms of human evolution, it makes total sense, right?

00:40:38.000 Think about our ancestors, where they evolved, If our ancestors had been individualists who were out to big up themselves as individuals, we wouldn't be having this conversation, right?

00:40:50.000 So it makes sense that we evolved as a species with instincts that are...

00:40:53.000 No, there's no argument there.

00:40:55.000 The question is the motivation.

00:40:57.000 Of trying to get happy by helping other people.

00:41:00.000 It's so implicit in the culture for most people in, say, China, that they wouldn't even articulate it that way.

00:41:06.000 It's only if you force them to say, look, try to make yourself happier, that the script becomes obvious.

00:41:11.000 It's implicit.

00:41:12.000 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.

00:41:20.000 And how you look to other people.

00:41:21.000 Let's stop there, because there is not one script in this country of how to make yourself happy.

00:41:25.000 I think that's sort of disingenuous, this idea that the only way to make yourself happy is to do that.

00:41:31.000 That's not what people are trying to do.

00:41:33.000 What people are trying to do is be successful.

00:41:36.000 And I don't think they necessarily equate success with happiness, but what they do equate success with is an alleviation of debt, an alleviation of problems, an alleviation of a lot of the issues that people face.

00:41:48.000 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.

00:41:59.000 So you say, someday I'm going to get to a point where that is no longer an issue.

00:42:03.000 I'm going to make it.

00:42:04.000 I'm going to be successful.

00:42:06.000 They're not doing it thinking this is going to make me happy.

00:42:10.000 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.

00:42:24.000 Like, don't pursue your dream of becoming an actor or a singer or whatever it is.

00:42:29.000 Instead, pursue your dream of being the foreman at the company you work at because that's attainable.

00:42:35.000 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.

00:42:44.000 There's an interesting study that found people who have an income from property are ten times less likely to develop an anxiety disorder than people who don't.

00:42:52.000 And there was a really interesting experiment in how we can respond to that.

00:42:55.000 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.

00:43:01.000 So in Canada in the 70s, the Canadian government chose a town at random.

00:43:07.000 It seems to genuinely have been random.

00:43:08.000 It's a town called Dauphin.

00:43:10.000 Anyone who knows Canada, it's about four hours out of Winnipeg.

00:43:13.000 And they said to a big group of people in this town, We're going to give you guys, for the foreseeable future, we're going to give all of you a guaranteed basic income.

00:43:23.000 We're going to give you the equivalent of, in today's money, $15,000, right?

00:43:27.000 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.

00:43:32.000 We're just citizens of our country.

00:43:33.000 We want you to have a good life, right?

00:43:34.000 It was partly because they had a kind of welfare system, but a lot of people were falling through the cracks, and they wanted to do a little experiment to see if this worked better.

00:43:41.000 And this was studied very carefully by a woman I interviewed called Dr. Evelyn Forgey.

00:43:45.000 To see what happened.

00:43:46.000 Loads of interesting things happened.

00:43:48.000 People spent more time with their kids.

00:43:50.000 Very few people quit work, but a lot of people turned down shitty jobs.

00:43:55.000 So actual overall work standards improved because employers had to attract people with better standards.

00:44:01.000 But for me, the most interesting thing is there was a huge fall in depression and anxiety, right?

00:44:06.000 Depression and anxiety that were so severe people had to be hospitalized fell by nine percent, which is remarkable in just three years.

00:44:14.000 And then the program ended.

00:44:15.000 Dr. Forge said to me, I thought so much about that, that I'd learned about the cow.

00:44:20.000 Dr. Forge said, You know, that's an antidepressant, right?

00:44:25.000 We should expand our idea of an antidepressant to be anything that reduces depression.

00:44:29.000 That should include pills, but also...

00:44:31.000 So you're totally right.

00:44:31.000 I mean, look, I grew up...

00:44:32.000 My dad's a bus driver.

00:44:34.000 My mum worked in a shelter.

00:44:35.000 My grandmother cleaned toilets.

00:44:37.000 Financial anxiety is a massive driver of the despair.

00:44:42.000 I mean, more than half of all Americans have not, because of the incredible financial pressure they've been put under, Do doctors still say that?

00:45:04.000 All the time.

00:45:05.000 My nephew's best friend just literally a couple of weeks ago went to the doctor and was told, yeah, you've got a dopamine imbalance.

00:45:11.000 The doctor said it's migrating Was this in England or in the United States?

00:45:15.000 This was in England, but I get contacted constantly by people who are being told they've got chemical imbalances in their brains.

00:45:20.000 Are they just as likely to prescribe antidepressants in England as they are American?

00:45:25.000 It's slightly lower, but it's still exceptionally high.

00:45:29.000 There's that narrative that an antidepressant must be in some sort of a pill form.

00:45:34.000 And even the expression antidepressant, an antidepressant, it's a very confusing thing that we've sort of adopted very quickly in this country.

00:45:43.000 And it's relatively recent, you know, over the last 60, 70 years.

00:45:48.000 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.

00:46:02.000 I have a friend, she's very smart, and she's one of the people that will Very aggressively debate this idea that it's anything but a chemical imbalance.

00:46:19.000 But she doesn't take care of her body.

00:46:20.000 She doesn't exercise all the time.

00:46:23.000 She's slightly overweight.

00:46:25.000 She doesn't eat the best foods.

00:46:27.000 You know, it's a weird thing.

00:46:29.000 Well, and she's living in a society and culture that has all these forces that are rising that make people feel terrible, right?

00:46:34.000 Yeah.

00:46:34.000 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.

00:46:41.000 First thing for me, I always say is, I want to expand the menu of options.

00:46:44.000 I don't want to take anything off the table, right?

00:46:47.000 It's not about...

00:46:47.000 You say that, and I think you're probably being pretty honest, but you really do want to.

00:46:53.000 You want to eliminate...

00:46:54.000 But just by the standard of improvement, You do probably want to take most people off of antidepressants, don't you?

00:47:02.000 Wouldn't you rather they have a better choice?

00:47:05.000 I would draw an analogy.

00:47:06.000 Obesity has massively risen in the Western world.

00:47:08.000 It hasn't risen because people suddenly became greedy and lazy.

00:47:11.000 It's risen because our food system is terrible, the food supply system is terrible, and we've built cities that people can't walk and bicycle around, right?

00:47:17.000 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.

00:47:22.000 In that context, some people will do stomach stapling, liposuction, that kind of thing, right?

00:47:28.000 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, you know, they had access to healthy food, far fewer people would need stomach stapling or liposuction, right?

00:47:41.000 So I would draw, it's not a perfect analogy, but I'd say, 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 chemical antidepressants.

00:47:54.000 I would stop you with a couple of things.

00:47:57.000 First of all, I don't think it's access to healthy food.

00:47:59.000 I think most people have access to healthy food.

00:48:02.000 They choose not to eat it.

00:48:03.000 They choose to eat refined carbohydrates, high sugar foods, fast food.

00:48:09.000 Those are the things that are getting people fat.

00:48:11.000 And I don't think that salad is so outside of the reach of the normal person.

00:48:15.000 I just don't agree with that.

00:48:17.000 I just think they make unhealthy choices.

00:48:19.000 That's much more...

00:48:20.000 And they get addicted to refined carbohydrates.

00:48:23.000 I understand what you're saying, and I think there's some truth in it.

00:48:25.000 But I think people make choices in a context, right?

00:48:27.000 So, for example, you know...

00:48:32.000 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?

00:48:43.000 And to eat pretty shitty food, right?

00:48:46.000 I'm not critical of her for that.

00:48:48.000 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.

00:48:54.000 Do you know what I mean?

00:48:55.000 I mean, I think of this in relation to addiction and you tweeted once a TED talk I gave, everything you think you know about Addiction is wrong, which I'm grateful, thank you, which is 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.

00:49:09.000 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, I say drug addiction, I say heroin addiction, right, which is something very close to me.

00:49:25.000 Most people think heroin addiction, if you said what causes heroin addiction, they'd say, Dar, heroin causes heroin addiction, right?

00:49:31.000 We've been told this story for a really long time that, you know, if we kidnapped someone off the street, 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,

00:49:47.000 and that's why they would be addicted, right?

00:49:50.000 The first thing that alerted me about something 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.

00:50:03.000 Diamorphine is heroin.

00:50:04.000 It's much better than street heroin because it's medically pure, right?

00:50:07.000 If anyone listening to this has a British grandmother who had a hip replacement operation, your grandmother's taken a lot of heroin, right?

00:50:13.000 If what we've been told about the chemical hooks is right, what should be happening to all these people in hospital?

00:50:18.000 Loads of them should be becoming addicted.

00:50:20.000 It doesn't happen in Britain with people who are given diamorphine.

00:50:23.000 So it's like, well, wait, what's going on?

00:50:24.000 I only began to understand it when I went to Vancouver and interviewed this incredible professor there called Bruce Alexander who did this experiment.

00:50:31.000 It's changed how we think about addiction and I think it's very relevant to what you're saying about food.

00:50:34.000 So this theory, the chemical hooks theory of addiction, and chemical hooks are real, they're just a small part of it.

00:50:39.000 The chemical hooks theory of addiction comes from a series of experiments that were done years ago They're really simple.

00:50:45.000 You take a rat, you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles.

00:50:49.000 One is just water, the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine.

00:50:53.000 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.

00:50:58.000 So there you go.

00:50:59.000 You might remember this famous advertisement from the 80s.

00:51:02.000 So there you go, right?

00:51:03.000 That's our story.

00:51:03.000 But in the 70s, Professor Alexander came along and said, well, hang on a minute.

00:51:08.000 You put the rat alone in an empty cage where it's got nothing to do except use these drugs.

00:51:13.000 What would happen if we did this differently?

00:51:15.000 So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically like heaven for rats, right?

00:51:19.000 They've got loads of friends.

00:51:20.000 They can fuck all the time.

00:51:21.000 They've got grain they like and coloured balls.

00:51:24.000 And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water.

00:51:27.000 But the fascinating thing is in Rat Park, they don't like the drugged water that much.

00:51:31.000 None of them used it, they do use it, but none of them used it compulsively and none of them ever overdosed.

00:51:36.000 So when they're deprived of the things that make life meaningful, they turn obsessively to the drug.

00:51:40.000 When they've got the things that make life meaningful for rats, they don't.

00:51:42.000 The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection.

00:51:46.000 I think you can see a similar principle playing out with food, right?

00:51:48.000 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.

00:51:53.000 Very far away from this woman, these people that were on this diamorphine.

00:51:58.000 So why are you saying that they don't get addicted to it?

00:52:01.000 Because they go back to their lives that are meaningful.

00:52:02.000 There's a human example that happened at the same time as Rat Park, right?

00:52:05.000 Why are their lives particularly meaningful in relationship to the lives we're talking about here?

00:52:10.000 So I think you can see in an example, a good example that was happening at the same time as Rat Park, an experiment at the Vietnam War, right?

00:52:17.000 Huge numbers of American troops in Vietnam, about 40% used heroin, right?

00:52:22.000 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.

00:52:30.000 They're going to come home because they believe the chemical hooks theory.

00:52:33.000 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.

00:52:39.000 And what it found was 95% of them just stopped, right?

00:52:44.000 Didn't go into some catastrophic withdrawal.

00:52:47.000 Some of them did experience some physical discomfort, but they didn't, you know, they didn't...

00:52:51.000 Now, if you believe the old theory of addiction that you're taken over by the chemical hooks, that makes no sense, right?

00:52:56.000 But they've been exposed to all the same chemical hooks as any homeless street addicted person living on the streets.

00:53:03.000 But if you understand this different way of thinking, it makes perfect sense.

00:53:06.000 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?

00:53:18.000 And then when we come back to our lives when we have meaning and purpose, We would find heroin a lot less appealing.

00:53:24.000 The core of addiction is not wanting to be present in your life, because your life is too painful a place to be.

00:53:29.000 So when an intervention happens that reduces the amount of pain in your life, you're going to be less addicted.

00:53:34.000 There's a very challenging line, Marianne Faithfull, you know, the British Rocks.

00:53:37.000 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.

00:53:47.000 So do you think that's because of lack of meaning in their life, or is it because there is an absolute real chemical hook?

00:53:53.000 Like, I have a good friend who had his nose broken, and they fixed his nose, and he got on some, I think it was Oxycontin afterwards, they prescribed it to him, and then four months later, he's taking it every day, all day.

00:54:04.000 So there's a few things to say about that.

00:54:06.000 Firstly, chemical hooks are real, but they're a small part of the picture.

00:54:08.000 We know how much they are, so there's experiments that measure this.

00:54:12.000 So 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?

00:54:24.000 Because the chemical hook in cigarettes is nicotine, right?

00:54:27.000 Nicotine patches give you the chemical hook you're addicted to.

00:54:30.000 And so there was this huge wave, they're like, oh great, we're going to give people the chem, because addiction is caused by chemical hooks, we're going to give them the chemical hook, they'll stop wanting these filthy smoke.

00:54:40.000 Smoking's gonna end, right?

00:54:42.000 In fact, what happened is 17% of people, according to the US Surgeon General's report, when they use nicotine patches and they're motivated to stop smoking, right?

00:54:51.000 Really important to say, 17% is not no one.

00:54:54.000 It's a big number.

00:54:54.000 Big number that has saved hundreds of thousands of people's lives at a conservative estimate.

00:54:58.000 But it still leaves 83% where something else is going on, right?

00:55:01.000 But isn't that because of the delivery method?

00:55:03.000 The delivery method of cigarettes is incredibly satisfying.

00:55:05.000 You take a hit, you get it right into your system, and boom, you get that nicotine.

00:55:09.000 The patch is transdermal, it's very slow, it's not the same feeling.

00:55:14.000 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.

00:55:21.000 And this is very important to relate to the opioid crisis.

00:55:24.000 So one in 130 opioid prescriptions result in an addiction, right?

00:55:29.000 So it's a small number, but a catastrophic and devastating number, and I've reported from the places that have been most affected by this, like Keene in New Hampshire.

00:55:37.000 It's one in what?

00:55:37.000 One in 130 of the users become addicted.

00:55:40.000 That's it?

00:55:41.000 Yeah, it's a relatively small proportion.

00:55:43.000 Now, because so many people in the country...

00:55:45.000 That seems wrong.

00:55:46.000 Yeah, I can send you the study.

00:55:47.000 That's the best study we've got.

00:55:49.000 And that's in the United States or in the UK? Yeah, in the United States.

00:55:52.000 That's one in 130 prescriptions, but bear in mind, some people get more.

00:55:59.000 But one of the things that's really important to understand about that is the context in which this is happening, right?

00:56:05.000 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.

00:56:12.000 In Britain in the 18th century, there was this thing that happened called the gin craze, right?

00:56:17.000 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...

00:56:25.000 they've lost everything that made life meaningful to them, right?

00:56:28.000 And what happened was an outbreak of mass alcoholism.

00:56:30.000 Huge outbreak.

00:56:31.000 It's called the Gin Craze.

00:56:32.000 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?

00:56:38.000 And it really happened.

00:56:39.000 And at the time, what people said is, look at this evil drug gin.

00:56:43.000 Look at what it's done to people.

00:56:44.000 If only we could get rid of these evil people selling this evil drug gin, this problem would go away.

00:56:49.000 Now, when we look back at it, we know that it can't have been because of gin, because...

00:56:52.000 We could both have gin in these glasses now.

00:56:55.000 Anyone in Britain can go and buy gin at any point, pretty much, if they're an adult.

00:56:59.000 And we don't have...

00:57:00.000 I mean, there's still some alcoholism, of course, but we don't have...

00:57:02.000 I understand what you're saying.

00:57:02.000 There was some despair, and that was what's causing...

00:57:04.000 So, yeah.

00:57:04.000 What changed is not the availability of the drug.

00:57:06.000 What changed is the amount of pain in the society.

00:57:08.000 And that is the key factor that's playing out here with opioids, right?

00:57:11.000 It's not the only factor.

00:57:13.000 Chemical hooks are real.

00:57:14.000 But, you know, I remember interviewing a guy who was...

00:57:15.000 Absolutely adamant that, you know, he'd become medically addicted.

00:57:19.000 It was an accidental.

00:57:20.000 Chemical hooks had taken him over.

00:57:21.000 He'd been a college athlete, right?

00:57:23.000 And he was in a...

00:57:24.000 I think he was about 21. He was in a terrible car accident.

00:57:27.000 And they gave him loads of opioids and he became addicted.

00:57:31.000 But then I said, well, tell me about what else was going on.

00:57:33.000 Turned out he couldn't be a college athlete anymore.

00:57:35.000 His whole life had been built around being an athlete.

00:57:37.000 And because of his injuries, he couldn't become an athlete anymore.

00:57:40.000 And I said, well, do you think it might have been related also to the despair around that?

00:57:43.000 It doesn't take long for people...

00:57:45.000 I think part of the problem is because we've got such stigma about depression, anxiety, addiction, people will latch onto 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 stigmatised in any fucking circumstance,

00:58:01.000 whether it's because you're in pain, psychological pain, physical pain.

00:58:05.000 Do you see the point I'm making?

00:58:06.000 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 for interesting evidence about that, but do you see the point I'm making, Joe?

00:58:14.000 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.

00:58:29.000 But I know too many people that have had, like, real issues getting off of them.

00:58:34.000 Like, physical issues.

00:58:36.000 Painful withdrawals.

00:58:37.000 Of course.

00:58:38.000 And most people, I mean, you're talking about the same people that have a hard time not eating shitty food, right?

00:58:44.000 People that have a hard time getting disciplined enough to go to the gym.

00:58:49.000 These are the same kind of people we're talking about.

00:58:51.000 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 it, he said, it's like getting over the flu.

00:59:06.000 He goes, that's what heroin's like.

00:59:07.000 Everyone wants to pretend that you're gonna die.

00:59:09.000 He goes, no, you feel like shit for a little while, and then you're fine.

00:59:11.000 He goes, it's not the thing that everybody makes it out to be.

00:59:14.000 Withdrawals are not the thing that everybody makes it out to be.

00:59:16.000 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.

00:59:25.000 And if they stop taking those pills, they get the flu.

00:59:27.000 People are comfort junkies.

00:59:30.000 I think that's too simplistic.

00:59:31.000 I think there's some truth in what you're saying.

00:59:33.000 So I think the key thing that happens, so I think Dr. Hart, who's a friend of mine, is totally right, but the physical withdrawal is, you know, a flu is not a nice thing, but it's not the most onerous thing in the world.

00:59:44.000 But the thing that's really devastating is the resumption of the psychological pain that you were anaesthetising with the drug, right?

00:59:52.000 Right.

00:59:52.000 If you want to understand why people are taking so many painkillers, we've got to understand why they're in so much pain.

00:59:56.000 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.

01:00:03.000 So, again, that's about if you're...

01:00:06.000 So, let's say, Joe, right?

01:00:07.000 Joe in the paint store, who I was talking about, who's, you know, who has this job he can't bear, has very little meaning in his life, feels his life is just slipping through his fingers.

01:00:17.000 He took Oxy for quite a long time.

01:00:19.000 He actually contacted me because of my book.

01:00:22.000 And my TED talk, and he thought he was telling me a story about addiction, right?

01:00:26.000 But the truth is, when he took Oxy, he was numbed.

01:00:29.000 It made him as numb as the work itself.

01:00:31.000 And then when he stopped, he was acutely depressed and felt like shit.

01:00:34.000 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 think life is about screaming at each other through screens,

01:00:51.000 a lot of those people are going to feel like shit.

01:00:53.000 And it's not because they're individually weak, right?

01:00:56.000 Maybe individual weaknesses, of course, we all have flaws.

01:00:59.000 Every human being has flaws.

01:01:01.000 But I think it's much more...

01:01:03.000 Because the fact that it's risen so much tells you that it's a response to social changes, right?

01:01:08.000 Just like the fact that obesity has risen so much tells us...

01:01:11.000 Now, there, of course, individual agency.

01:01:12.000 I don't want to infantilise anyone.

01:01:14.000 There are things individuals can do, obviously, and I talk about them a lot in Lost Connections.

01:01:18.000 But I think the fact that it's a social transformation does tell you something.

01:01:23.000 There's a good illustration of this, a kind of weird thing that was discovered about depression in the 70s.

01:01:28.000 That was so inconvenient that psychiatrists tried to brush it under the carpet.

01:01:32.000 So in the 70s, the American Psychiatric Association, for the first time, wanted to standardize how depression is diagnosed across the US. Because up to then, doctors were just using their own judgment about what it even was, right?

01:01:43.000 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.

01:01:51.000 And they send this out to doctors all over the US, and they use it.

01:01:56.000 But within a couple of months, doctors start to come back and go, look, we've got a real problem here.

01:02:02.000 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?

01:02:09.000 Everyone, when you lose someone, wants to cry a lot, has persistent feelings of sadness, that kind of thing.

01:02:16.000 So what do we do?

01:02:17.000 So the psychiatrists regrouped and they were like, okay, we'll create something.

01:02:21.000 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.

01:02:30.000 So they start using that.

01:02:31.000 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.

01:02:42.000 Unless there's one situation in life where it's perfectly legitimate to react this way, but if that begs the question...

01:02:48.000 What about all the other different things in your life?

01:02:50.000 Why not if you're made homeless?

01:02:52.000 Why not if you're stuck in a shitty job you hate?

01:02:54.000 Why not if you're really lonely?

01:02:56.000 The minute you admit all that, you have to admit context.

01:02:59.000 And that was so inconvenient, they just got rid of the grief exception.

01:03:02.000 That's a fascinating fact.

01:03:04.000 And that seems to be a huge issue.

01:03:07.000 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.

01:03:25.000 That are factors.

01:03:27.000 You're totally right.

01:03:27.000 Whether it's a job, financial stress, relationship stress, loneliness, friendship issues, or death in the family, or losing someone they love.

01:03:36.000 But the fact that losing someone they love, like, we'll count that.

01:03:40.000 That's the one thing we'll count, right?

01:03:42.000 That seems very preposterous.

01:03:44.000 And the woman who did the most research on this, one of the best people I got to know for Lost Connections, a woman called Dr. Joanne Cassiotores, an amazing person.

01:03:50.000 She lost her baby in childbirth.

01:03:53.000 Her baby was called Cheyenne.

01:03:54.000 And she became an expert on this.

01:03:56.000 And she said, you know, she talks about the craziness of this.

01:03:58.000 It just shows we don't understand pain in this society.

01:04:01.000 She put it to me, grief isn't a pathology, right?

01:04:06.000 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.

01:04:14.000 And she said, this is a sickness, right?

01:04:17.000 Grief is not a pathology.

01:04:18.000 We grieve because we've loved someone, right?

01:04:20.000 It's not a malfunction.

01:04:21.000 It's not a sign of madness.

01:04:23.000 It's a sign that you loved the person.

01:04:25.000 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.

01:04:33.000 Because I think depression is grief for your own life not going how it should, right?

01:04:38.000 It's grief for your own needs not being met.

01:04:41.000 Now when someone we love dies, all we can do is hold the survivors and love them, right?

01:04:45.000 But with...

01:04:50.000 With your own needs not being met.

01:04:51.000 I mean, a really interesting example of something you've covered 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.

01:04:58.000 So, as you know, you know better than anyone.

01:05:01.000 Until the mid-60s, loads of research was done giving LSD to...

01:05:06.000 People with depression, alcoholism, various problems.

01:05:08.000 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?

01:05:15.000 In the last six years, there's been a huge reawakening of this.

01:05:18.000 I went and interviewed for Lost Connections, the teams that have worked on this, in Here in LA, at UCLA, at NYU, at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, in London at UCL, in Sao Paulo, and in Norway.

01:05:31.000 And loads of fascinating things.

01:05:32.000 I'm a fan about this, but there's one that I think really relates to our conversation powerfully.

01:05:36.000 Well, loads of things, but I'll talk about one.

01:05:39.000 So there was a sub-finding of one of the studies that I became obsessed with.

01:05:44.000 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.

01:05:59.000 I thought about my mother a lot because my mother is a chain smoker.

01:06:02.000 There's a photograph of me and her when I'm six months old.

01:06:05.000 She's breastfeeding me, smoking and resting the ashtray on my stomach.

01:06:08.000 Oh my god.

01:06:10.000 And so they take people like my mother, right?

01:06:12.000 When I showed her that picture, she said, you were a fucking difficult baby.

01:06:14.000 I needed that cigarette.

01:06:15.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

01:06:16.000 Isn't it funny how they try to blame you?

01:06:18.000 I was a fucking baby.

01:06:20.000 It's okay.

01:06:21.000 She's a good person.

01:06:23.000 So they take these people, chronic long-term smokers, and they gave them three doses of psilocybin over, I think it was six months.

01:06:32.000 So two-month intervals, I think.

01:06:34.000 And what they found was extraordinary.

01:06:36.000 80% of them stopped smoking, right?

01:06:38.000 And it still remained not smoking more than two years later.

01:06:40.000 Incredible.

01:06:41.000 Think about we were comparing it to 17% with nicotine patches.

01:06:44.000 And they were like, what's going on?

01:06:45.000 So they did all this research in this.

01:06:47.000 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.

01:06:57.000 Clearly, a chemical process happens in the brain.

01:06:58.000 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...

01:07:05.000 Sub-finding.

01:07:06.000 So, if you take psilocybin, most people will have a kind of spiritual experience, right?

01:07:14.000 Some people will have a super intense spiritual experience, some people have a mild one, and a minority will have no spiritual experience.

01:07:20.000 It turns out the positive effects, like a reduction in depression, addiction, correlate exactly With the intensity of the spiritual experience.

01:07:28.000 So if you have no spiritual experience, you don't have...

01:07:31.000 But isn't this dose dependent?

01:07:32.000 No, this is across doses.

01:07:34.000 They gave them three varying doses.

01:07:36.000 What were the doses?

01:07:37.000 I can't remember, but it's in the book.

01:07:38.000 That's pretty significant, though.

01:07:39.000 It's a very important factor.

01:07:40.000 Yeah, so across the three...

01:07:42.000 So you were given it three times, and you were always given three different doses.

01:07:46.000 So obviously you would have a more...

01:07:47.000 Most people have much more intense experience with the strongest dose.

01:07:51.000 But the key thing, I think, about that finding is 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.

01:08:01.000 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.

01:08:12.000 Have you had psychedelic experiences?

01:08:14.000 When I was a teenager, I bought some and I think they were a drug dealer in Camden Town Market.

01:08:19.000 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.

01:08:24.000 So you've never had?

01:08:25.000 No.

01:08:26.000 I'm getting that from the way you're describing this.

01:08:28.000 That's interesting.

01:08:28.000 I interviewed huge numbers of people who had.

01:08:30.000 Tell me what you're getting.

01:08:31.000 That's interesting.

01:08:32.000 Well, what it is is a dissolving of the ego.

01:08:36.000 That's a general factor that almost everybody reports.

01:08:41.000 It also releases you from deeply ingrained patterns of behavior and thinking.

01:08:47.000 Exactly.

01:08:47.000 Yeah.

01:08:47.000 And highlights them.

01:08:49.000 So as much as it is a spiritual experience, it's also a dissolving of the self.

01:08:53.000 And the way we define ourselves is oftentimes very limiting.

01:08:58.000 You have this...

01:08:59.000 This is the way I describe it.

01:09:01.000 And this is the way I describe very powerful psychedelic experiences.

01:09:05.000 It's like...

01:09:06.000 Do you remember the old Windows thing?

01:09:07.000 Control-Alt-Delete.

01:09:09.000 That's how you'd reboot.

01:09:10.000 It's like Control-Alt-Delete for your brain, and your brain reboots with a fresh new desktop.

01:09:16.000 There's nothing on it except one folder, and that one folder is titled My Old Bullshit.

01:09:22.000 And you have two choices.

01:09:23.000 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.

01:09:39.000 And those things are common because it's comforting.

01:09:43.000 It's comforting for people to repeat patterns that they're familiar with.

01:09:46.000 I think there's a few things in that.

01:09:47.000 You're totally right and the scientific evidence is overwhelming.

01:09:49.000 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?

01:10:01.000 I remember one of the most moving interviews I did was a guy called Mark, who was in one of the studies in Baltimore, who was a very shy, reserved, shut down guy.

01:10:12.000 When he was 10, his dad had died and no one had talked to him about his dad's death.

01:10:17.000 His mother was just totally devastated and no one had talked to him about it.

01:10:21.000 And he'd always been very shut down and he takes this psilocybin 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,

01:10:38.000 I want to thank these walls.

01:10:39.000 They've protected my son.

01:10:41.000 They've done a good job, but you can let them go now.

01:10:44.000 And after that, Mark really changed how he lived.

01:10:46.000 He actually went and, as you say, was able to sustain that insight.

01:10:49.000 He went and learned a lot of meditation.

01:10:51.000 I think you're absolutely right.

01:10:54.000 It's about dissolving of the ego.

01:10:55.000 And what an experience of egolessness can do is...

01:11:01.000 Almost point a direction on a compass, right?

01:11:04.000 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.

01:11:11.000 So in London, they did this research with chronically depressed people.

01:11:15.000 And Robin Carhart 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.

01:11:27.000 And then she goes back to her job in a shitty seaside town where you just can't live compatible with those insights, right?

01:11:33.000 She just couldn't.

01:11:34.000 And so her depression came back.

01:11:36.000 So to me, where individuals can change their lives, obviously they should, right?

01:11:40.000 And we would totally agree on that.

01:11:41.000 And a lot of people do have more margin to change their lives than they think.

01:11:44.000 And we're in total agreement on that.

01:11:46.000 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 then 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 and 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

01:12:16.000 the things that are causing this pain in the first place.

01:12:19.000 Yes changing the way society works though is a grand in Entangled, gigantic undertaking.

01:12:28.000 Whereas changing your own life is not.

01:12:30.000 Changing your own life is difficult.

01:12:32.000 It can be very difficult for a lot of people, but it's far easier than changing society.

01:12:38.000 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.

01:12:48.000 That's like opening up the folder of my old bullshit.

01:12:51.000 It's the same thing.

01:12:52.000 She's going back to the same patterns.

01:12:53.000 Well, I would say she's being forced into that folder because what's she going to do?

01:12:57.000 Well, what she's going to do is what a lot of people do.

01:13:00.000 I mean, a lot of people change their lives.

01:13:02.000 I mean, it's not impossible to do.

01:13:03.000 I don't know if this woman had kids.

01:13:05.000 I didn't ask if the woman had kids.

01:13:06.000 You can't imagine people being stuck.

01:13:09.000 It makes it very difficult.

01:13:11.000 It makes it very difficult, but she's not in jail.

01:13:13.000 She's not a prisoner.

01:13:14.000 But I think, actually, and this might sound strange, in some ways I think changing the society is easier than isolated individuals changing themselves.

01:13:23.000 I'll give you an example.

01:13:24.000 How is that possible?

01:13:24.000 Well, I'll give you an example.

01:13:25.000 I'm gay, right?

01:13:27.000 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?

01:13:34.000 1994, Andrew was diagnosed with HIV. His first thought was, I deserve this.

01:13:39.000 He'd been raised in such a homophobic world.

01:13:42.000 He thought, you know what, I deserve to have this...

01:13:45.000 Illness that's going to kill me.

01:13:46.000 He was watching his friends die all around him.

01:13:48.000 He thought he was about to die.

01:13:49.000 This was before protease inhibitors.

01:13:51.000 And he goes to Provincetown, a little town in Cape Cod, to do what he thought would be the last thing he would ever do, right?

01:13:58.000 And he wrote a book about a crazy utopian idea that he thought, this is never going to happen.

01:14:03.000 I'm never going to live to see this, but maybe generations from now this will happen.

01:14:06.000 It was the first book ever arguing for gay marriage, right?

01:14:09.000 And if I get depressed about this, I try to imagine going back in time and saying to Andrew, OK, I've got some good news.

01:14:14.000 25 years from now, you're going to be alive, but that's not the good news.

01:14:18.000 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.

01:14:26.000 And the next day you'll be invited to the White House, which will be lit up in the colours of the rainbow flag, to celebrate with the president.

01:14:32.000 And by the way, that president is going to be black.

01:14:35.000 Right?

01:14:35.000 That would have sounded like ridiculous science fiction.

01:14:38.000 Now imagine saying to gay people 50 years ago, you're not going to change the society.

01:14:42.000 That's way too hard.

01:14:43.000 What you can do is focus on changing yourself.

01:14:46.000 Actually, gay people would be really fucking miserable if that's what they'd done, right?

01:14:50.000 If that's how it was, my life would be immeasurably worse if gay people had just said, you know what, it's so hard to change society, let's change ourselves.

01:14:57.000 We would have remained trapped in shitty, awful institutions and systems that kept us down.

01:15:03.000 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?

01:15:13.000 Think about what we're talking about, universal basic income, for example, right?

01:15:16.000 We're going to another subject here.

01:15:18.000 I think it's very related to that.

01:15:20.000 Keep going then.

01:15:21.000 Because you keep going on one to the next to the next.

01:15:24.000 I'm trying to stop with one.

01:15:26.000 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.

01:15:41.000 It's far easier To educate and illuminate one person.

01:15:46.000 And it also can be done with the aid of psychedelics, especially MDMA therapy.

01:15:51.000 That's one of the things that MAPS is doing right now with MDMA therapy.

01:15:54.000 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.

01:16:05.000 It's all these people that are, it's helping them alleviate a lot of the problems of their life.

01:16:10.000 There's patterns that people are, that they have in their mind that they can release.

01:16:16.000 Sure.

01:16:16.000 You can release and you can be educated and you can understand, you can change and grow as an individual.

01:16:22.000 It's far easier to do that with one person, for one person to change their life, than to change the entire culture.

01:16:28.000 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.

01:16:35.000 I think that's Connected to the exchange of ideas that we're experiencing now because of the internet.

01:16:41.000 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.

01:16:50.000 Even more religious people today are more open to homosexuality than they have been in the past.

01:16:55.000 I really believe that is a factor of all the information that's available and the amount of communication.

01:17:03.000 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.

01:17:12.000 Well, gay people can't be evil.

01:17:14.000 Ellen's so nice.

01:17:15.000 You know what I mean?

01:17:15.000 There's a lot of that.

01:17:16.000 I think you're totally right.

01:17:17.000 But I think that shows that the first thing you said is too simplistic.

01:17:21.000 What thing is that?

01:17:22.000 The division between...

01:17:23.000 I think the last point you made is...

01:17:26.000 Totally on the money.

01:17:27.000 But what's too simplistic?

01:17:27.000 I think you were saying that the division is the idea that it's easier to persuade individuals than persuade the society.

01:17:31.000 You persuade the society by persuading individuals.

01:17:33.000 You just persuade lots of individuals and they band together.

01:17:35.000 But you do it one at a time.

01:17:37.000 Sure.

01:17:38.000 Okay, I think we're splitting hairs here.

01:17:40.000 Because I think, obviously, if you change every individual, you change society.

01:17:44.000 But it's far easier to change one person than it is to change 350 million.

01:17:48.000 But that's obviously true.

01:17:49.000 But you change 350 million by changing one person and one person...

01:17:52.000 Yes.

01:17:53.000 Banding together.

01:17:53.000 Yes.

01:17:54.000 But you also, one of the ways that you change that one person is by banding together in a group, right?

01:18:00.000 So gay people, for example, would be a good example, but there are many, many good examples.

01:18:03.000 But what you're saying about individual psychology, it's important to say you're right about that.

01:18:07.000 So there's a very broad scientific agreement.

01:18:09.000 There are three kinds of cause of depression and anxiety and most mental health, in fact, all mental health problems.

01:18:15.000 The ratio varies.

01:18:17.000 So there's biological causes, which we talked about.

01:18:19.000 Your genes, for example, can make you more sensitive to these things.

01:18:23.000 There's psychological causes, which are the things you're talking about, which are very real and important.

01:18:27.000 And there's social causes, so that, you know, a lot of the other things we've talked about.

01:18:31.000 And I think in a way, you don't need to play them off against each other.

01:18:34.000 They're all real, right?

01:18:35.000 And you want to deal with all of them.

01:18:38.000 I wouldn't want to get into an argument with you 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.

01:18:43.000 You're totally right.

01:18:44.000 We should deal with both.

01:18:44.000 Well, I think we should deal with both.

01:18:46.000 Certainly.

01:18:48.000 Do you know what I mean?

01:18:49.000 Yes.

01:18:50.000 But I think that the idea that So, like, think of what you're saying in terms of people living unfulfilled lives, living in jobs or working in jobs that they don't enjoy, where they're being controlled by a boss.

01:19:06.000 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.

01:19:13.000 I agree.

01:19:14.000 Because CEOs, like, this is intent.

01:19:18.000 There's...

01:19:20.000 I mean, obviously that was a huge factor in the 2016 election.

01:19:25.000 It was one of the things that was talked about is wealth inequality.

01:19:29.000 Well, there's no greater version of wealth inequality than the difference between the CEO of a massive company and its lowest worker.

01:19:36.000 I mean, it literally is like a king and a peasant.

01:19:39.000 It's a very strange sort of a structure.

01:19:42.000 And very recently has it become like that.

01:19:43.000 Yes, yes.

01:19:45.000 It's so common.

01:19:46.000 I mean, it's ingrained.

01:19:48.000 I mean, how many corporations are there that operate like that, top-down?

01:19:51.000 I mean, it's gigantic.

01:19:53.000 And to change that, I think, would be far more difficult than to change an individual's path.

01:19:58.000 And to tell this one person, hey, man, what do you really want to do?

01:20:01.000 Do you really like making pottery?

01:20:03.000 Well, then you should try to make pottery for a living, because this working for Dow Chemicals, you're not going to ever feel fulfilled.

01:20:10.000 You're always going to have that same anxiety on Sunday night before you go to bed.

01:20:13.000 You're always going to feel like shit.

01:20:14.000 While you're at work, you're always going to be numb.

01:20:17.000 You're going to be probably listening to a podcast like this while you're working, just to try to pass the time.

01:20:22.000 I think you're right.

01:20:23.000 And totally, if you can do it, if you've got that margin for change, 100% my advice to you is to say in Lost Collections.

01:20:29.000 Why wouldn't you be able to do it eventually?

01:20:30.000 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?

01:20:36.000 I think about one of my closest relatives, right?

01:20:39.000 She's very depressed.

01:20:43.000 She's got two young kids.

01:20:44.000 She's working really hard.

01:20:45.000 She's in a shitty town.

01:20:48.000 She has very controlled work.

01:20:52.000 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?

01:20:58.000 And I've really struggled.

01:21:00.000 I mean, it's an environment where most people are depressed, most people are obese.

01:21:05.000 This is in England?

01:21:06.000 Yeah, yeah, but I mean it could just as easily be many places spent a lot of time in the US. In fact, I think there's more people with this problem in the US. You know, now, That's a tough case.

01:21:16.000 That's a very tough case.

01:21:17.000 I think we're essentially agreeing.

01:21:18.000 Anyone who has any margin of change, I go through in Lost Connections, the seven ways you can change your life that the science shows will reduce your depression and anxiety, very likely, right?

01:21:28.000 If you've got that margin, do it.

01:21:30.000 I think the only disagreement between us is I think you're more...

01:21:34.000 You think more can be done by individual will alone than I do probably.

01:21:38.000 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?

01:21:50.000 Work together.

01:21:50.000 towards improving yourselves.

01:21:52.000 Exactly.

01:21:52.000 Get together with the people in your community and making some sort of a bond.

01:21:56.000 Totally.

01:21:56.000 And one of the most moving things I learned about for the book was this incredible protest movement in Berlin that I can tell you about if you want, that transformed really is one of the places where so much of what I learned from these scientists really fell into place with me.

01:22:10.000 And it was where very isolated people came together and just said, you know what?

01:22:16.000 We're not going to take this anymore and fought for something better.

01:22:19.000 I can explain that it's a longer story, but if you want me to tell it, I will.

01:22:21.000 So I think you're right.

01:22:23.000 So you were saying, you know, what do you like to do?

01:22:25.000 And you said pottery is an example.

01:22:26.000 That's a good example.

01:22:26.000 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 and fight for something better.

01:22:35.000 And I think you're totally right about how this played out in the...

01:22:38.000 Dynamics around the election, I remember, so it really haunted me.

01:22:42.000 I was with some people who were doing some get out the vote work in Cleveland.

01:22:47.000 And I don't know if you know Cleveland.

01:22:48.000 I mean, it's like Detroit without the poetry of the ruins, right?

01:22:51.000 I mean, it's shocking.

01:22:52.000 And we were on this street in an area called Slavic City.

01:22:56.000 Don't know why it's not Slavic.

01:22:58.000 When you say that, I mean, there's great parts of Cleveland.

01:23:01.000 Cleveland is an uprising right now.

01:23:03.000 I was just there.

01:23:05.000 Sorry to be quiet, I mean the area that I was in.

01:23:07.000 It was this area of West Cleveland called Slavic City.

01:23:09.000 They'll kick your ass, dude.

01:23:11.000 They get mad.

01:23:11.000 They love Cleveland.

01:23:12.000 Clearly not the whole of Cleveland is like this, right?

01:23:14.000 There's a dude who had a t-shirt at one of my shows that I put on my Instagram.

01:23:16.000 It said, Cleveland or death.

01:23:18.000 They're fucking serious about Cleveland.

01:23:20.000 They have the heavyweight champion of the world, Stipe Miocic.

01:23:22.000 He lives in Cleveland.

01:23:24.000 So this street is one of those, which is clearly not representative of all of Cleveland, right?

01:23:29.000 Well, I mean, you can find a place like that in LA. I'll take you to Skid Row right now.

01:23:33.000 Sure, sure.

01:23:33.000 Or we could just go to Beverly Hills.

01:23:35.000 Your choice.

01:23:36.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:23:36.000 No, no, I understand.

01:23:37.000 But just about this street, there was this...

01:23:40.000 We're going down the street, 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?

01:23:49.000 Sounds like a children's math problem.

01:23:52.000 15 people live in this place, and they do heroin.

01:23:55.000 If they walk to the end of the street, how long does it take?

01:23:57.000 They're on OxyContin.

01:23:59.000 15 people live in that place, they're on antidepressants.

01:24:01.000 Who's happier?

01:24:04.000 We knocked on one door and there was a woman who, from looking at her, I would have guessed was 60, right?

01:24:09.000 She was actually the same age as me.

01:24:10.000 I was 37 at the time.

01:24:12.000 And she was very articulate.

01:24:13.000 She knew a lot.

01:24:15.000 She was really fucking angry.

01:24:17.000 She was raging.

01:24:20.000 And she made this verbal slip that's really stayed with me.

01:24:24.000 I thought about it while you were speaking earlier.

01:24:27.000 She's talking about what the area used to be like for her parents and grandparents, right?

01:24:31.000 And she meant to say, when I was young, what she actually said is when I was alive.

01:24:36.000 I was like, that's how she feels, right?

01:24:38.000 She feels like she has died.

01:24:40.000 And it made me think about this, this other research I was thinking about as you were saying this, I think relates to the individual versus collective debate that we've kind of been touching on.

01:24:47.000 So, Native American groups in Canada, they call them First Nations groups, have really high suicide rates, right?

01:24:55.000 And this professor I got to interview, Professor Michael Chandler, did this really big research on this, because what he realised is that 196 First Nations groups in Canada, some of them have really high suicide and some have none, right?

01:25:06.000 And he's like, why is that?

01:25:08.000 So he spent 10 years researching this, discovered loads of things.

01:25:11.000 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?

01:25:18.000 They've rebuilt their language, they've rebuilt their control of the schools and, you know, whatever.

01:25:24.000 And some have just been so kept down that they haven't been able to do that.

01:25:29.000 Suicide rate correlates really tightly with the amount of control they were able to regain over their community.

01:25:33.000 And the amount of meaning that you find in your life.

01:25:35.000 I think it's about meaning.

01:25:36.000 It's about having a story about who you are.

01:25:38.000 It's about having social connections around you so you're not alone.

01:25:41.000 You're part of something bigger than yourself.

01:25:43.000 Community pride.

01:25:43.000 Exactly.

01:25:44.000 I thought about that when you were saying, you know, what do you like to do?

01:25:48.000 What should you do?

01:25:49.000 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?

01:25:56.000 The constant distraction and refracting everything through screens, which makes us feel like, shit, I can talk about some of that if you want.

01:26:07.000 Actually, that initial step is quite hard because we're so broken up, right?

01:26:12.000 Listen, it's not just the initial step.

01:26:13.000 It's you've gone too far in one direction.

01:26:16.000 Like, say, look at it this way.

01:26:17.000 If we all start at this neutral point, right, and someone like Jamie...

01:26:23.000 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.

01:26:33.000 Or you have someone who goes the wrong way.

01:26:36.000 They get addicted to food and cigarettes and drugs and antidepressants and they get into bad relationships and then they have...

01:26:44.000 Children that they have to take care of and 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.

01:26:52.000 Well, they've got to find a way to not just move ahead, but to get back to that neutral point.

01:26:58.000 So they have to go back in time over all the shit they fucked up and they have a far longer path.

01:27:04.000 So it's not an impossible path, but it's a far longer path.

01:27:08.000 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.

01:27:21.000 That's the problem with people.

01:27:23.000 They look at the daunting nature of that task and it's very intimidating to them.

01:27:28.000 And they don't feel like they can make it.

01:27:30.000 They don't feel like they can.

01:27:33.000 There is satisfaction and hope and happiness in moving towards a positive direction.

01:27:39.000 And that's what people have to realize.

01:27:41.000 It's not about a goal.

01:27:43.000 It's about the journey being a positive journey and the feeling that you get of improving your life incrementally on a daily basis.

01:27:52.000 And it's also the mindset that you carry with you on that journey.

01:27:55.000 You can't look at yourself and go, God, why am I not successful yet?

01:27:59.000 Why am I not rich?

01:28:01.000 Why am I not this?

01:28:02.000 Why am I not that?

01:28:03.000 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.

01:28:09.000 And there is a lot of deep satisfaction and happiness in being on the right path.

01:28:15.000 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 gonna chew away at you, it's gonna chip away at you, and it's gonna move you away from that neutral point many,

01:28:31.000 many miles.

01:28:33.000 I totally agree with you.

01:28:34.000 I totally agree with you.

01:28:34.000 And I think that the, that thing about when people realise they have agency, that's one of the most, because especially, and it goes back to what we were 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,

01:28:50.000 right?

01:28:50.000 I remember talking to Joe, the guy in the paint store, who would say, you know, I would just go home, and initially it was alcohol and then later Oxy, He would just want to numb himself, right?

01:29:02.000 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 in Lost Connections is this transformation of work.

01:29:08.000 If the thing that most people are doing most of the time is making 87% of us, we don't like it at best, You've got to go to the heart of that, right?

01:29:18.000 And, you know, we're talking about margins of change.

01:29:21.000 People who set up that bike store in Baltimore, they were working class people, you know, who had not had fancy educations.

01:29:27.000 They set up a democratic cooperative, right?

01:29:29.000 They transformed their lives.

01:29:31.000 So they were a good example of people who appeared to have a relatively limited margin.

01:29:35.000 They were low wage workers in a low wage industry.

01:29:39.000 Who, you know, have made this transition.

01:29:42.000 So I'm certainly not saying that people can't make these transitions.

01:29:45.000 Even in difficult circumstances, they absolutely can.

01:29:48.000 I just think, yeah, I think, I'll think about the farmer in the field in Cambodia, right?

01:29:53.000 Whose leg's been blown off and he's in this field and it's agony.

01:29:57.000 He needed to change his life, but he also needed someone to buy him a cow, right?

01:30:01.000 He couldn't have bought that cow on his own.

01:30:03.000 In that situation, yes.

01:30:04.000 So I think he would be an illustration, or the rats in Rat Park, right?

01:30:10.000 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, whereas you could argue.

01:30:16.000 But you see the point I'm making?

01:30:17.000 I do.

01:30:18.000 You could attribute it just to individual...

01:30:20.000 I know this is not what you're doing, but 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.

01:30:35.000 I don't think of it that way at all.

01:30:36.000 I think of it as poor choices.

01:30:39.000 I don't think of it as individual failing.

01:30:40.000 I've made many, many poor choices in my life.

01:30:43.000 Here's one of the big ones you could tell people.

01:30:45.000 Because there's a lot of people that are listening to this at various stages of their life.

01:30:49.000 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.

01:31:02.000 Do not move towards a direction that is safe.

01:31:05.000 Don't do it.

01:31:06.000 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.

01:31:12.000 That is a bullshit, stupid way to think and that will fuck you.

01:31:15.000 That way to think will fuck you.

01:31:17.000 You can do what you do.

01:31:20.000 What you choose to do, you can get better at things.

01:31:23.000 What you choose to do, you can move forward and try to figure out a way to carve a path through that life.

01:31:29.000 And it's not going to be easy, but nothing worth doing is easy.

01:31:33.000 But this idea that if you want to just do construction, if that's appealing to you, you'd like to just be a laborer.

01:31:40.000 Look, there's a need for that in society if it doesn't bother you.

01:31:44.000 But find out what bothers you and find out what you enjoy.

01:31:47.000 If you're a laborer and you really want to be a songwriter, well, you better fucking chase that songwriting shit.

01:31:52.000 You better do it.

01:31:53.000 Because if you don't do it, you don't want to be a 60-year-old man sitting around just depressed and crying.

01:31:58.000 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 haven't pursued your interest.

01:32:12.000 You haven't pursued your passion.

01:32:13.000 You haven't pursued what you really want to do.

01:32:15.000 I would endorse every word you just said.

01:32:17.000 I would just add a layer.

01:32:29.000 I think universal basic income is probably a way that that's going to start happening.

01:32:34.000 That can help a lot of people where your basic needs, your food is taken care of.

01:32:40.000 And I think President Obama talked about this towards the end of his term, partly because he said, look, actually, I don't want to attribute this to him.

01:32:46.000 I can't remember if he said it made this point in this way, but he was interviewed at 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.

01:32:57.000 Or automation.

01:32:58.000 Exactly.

01:32:59.000 Elon Musk said that recently as well.

01:33:01.000 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.

01:33:06.000 The anger is going to be directed at Silicon Valley if there isn't a universal basic income.

01:33:10.000 I'm sure they have genuine concern for people as well.

01:33:13.000 So you think that's really why he's saying that?

01:33:16.000 I don't know.

01:33:18.000 Maybe I'm just more cynical.

01:33:20.000 Because they just make so much money.

01:33:22.000 Well, I can't remember who said this.

01:33:23.000 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?

01:33:31.000 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.

01:33:39.000 Look, I forget the figure.

01:33:41.000 I think three million people in the United States make a living through driving.

01:33:44.000 Mm-hmm.

01:33:44.000 That's not going to exist in 10 years from now, probably, right?

01:33:47.000 Self-driving cars are likely to just, that's going to be gone, right?

01:33:50.000 Now that's an extraordinary disruption to the economy.

01:33:53.000 Those are mostly men.

01:33:54.000 They're mostly men with low educational attainments for various reasons, a lot of which are not their fault.

01:34:01.000 And, you know, that's devastating, right?

01:34:04.000 So I think you're right that a universal basic income is one of the important strategies that can kind of deal with that.

01:34:10.000 But I think this comes back to, I think you're going back to a thing 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, looking at addiction and depression and anxiety, Both of them required me to go all over the world and just look at really different places that do things really differently.

01:34:29.000 And there were some things that just recurred for both, right?

01:34:32.000 I'll give you an example with addiction.

01:34:34.000 The places that have most reduced addiction have not been the places that have said, I'm not attributing this to you very clearly, you're not saying this, but 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.

01:34:48.000 The problem gets worse and worse.

01:34:49.000 The places that I went to where they said, actually, this is a collective problem, we need a collective solution, We're very different.

01:34:55.000 So Portugal, for example, in the year 2000, had one of the worst drug problems in the world, right?

01:35:00.000 1% of the population was addicted to heroin.

01:35:02.000 It was incredible.

01:35:03.000 Every year the problem got worse as they tried the American way more and more, arrested more people, imprisoned more people.

01:35:09.000 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?

01:35:15.000 We can't have ever more people in our country being addicted to heroin.

01:35:17.000 What are we going to do?

01:35:18.000 So they did this quite bold thing.

01:35:20.000 They set up a panel led by an amazing man I got to know, Dr. Hua Gu Lao, 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?

01:35:32.000 So they'd be like if Trump and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi agreed, everyone would abide by finding on this.

01:35:38.000 So they go away, they look at all the evidence, including Rat Park, loads of the things we've talked about.

01:35:42.000 They came back and said, decriminalise all drugs, 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, stigmatising them, imprisoning them.

01:35:54.000 And spend it instead on turning their lives around.

01:35:57.000 And interestingly, it wasn't really what we think of.

01:35:59.000 There was a little bit of residential rehab.

01:36:01.000 Most of it was a big program of job creation.

01:36:04.000 They set up microloans so people with addiction problems could set up and run small businesses about things they cared about.

01:36:10.000 They set up a big program of subsidized work.

01:36:13.000 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?

01:36:19.000 The results in Portugal have been incredible.

01:36:21.000 According to the best scientific study published in the British Journal of Criminology, injecting drug use fell by more than 50%.

01:36:26.000 Overdose deaths massively fell.

01:36:29.000 HIV massively fell.

01:36:30.000 One of the things that was so striking there was going around speaking to people.

01:36:33.000 I mean, one of the most moving interviews I did for Chasing the Scream was with a guy called Juan Figueroa, who was the top drug cop in Portugal.

01:36:39.000 And he led the opposition to the decriminalisation when it first happened, right?

01:36:44.000 He said, this is fucking madness.

01:36:45.000 We're going to have a massive explosion in drug use.

01:36:48.000 It's going to be a nightmare.

01:36:49.000 And he said to me, everything I said would happen didn't happen, and everything the other side said would happen did.

01:36:55.000 And he talked about how he felt really ashamed that he'd spent 20 years before the decriminalisation fucking people's lives up.

01:37:00.000 And I think that goes to the debate that we're talking about, because that was...

01:37:03.000 Now, that's individuals changing, right?

01:37:05.000 That's very clearly individuals changing, making better choices.

01:37:08.000 But then making those better choices in a context, a context where the society, instead of beating them down, is trying to lift them up.

01:37:14.000 Do you see what I mean?

01:37:14.000 That's a very good point.

01:37:15.000 It's a very important point.

01:37:16.000 And what Portugal has done should be studied by our country, which is now falling right back into the old Nancy Reagan, just say no bullshit days with Jeff Sessions at the helm of catastrophe.

01:37:27.000 He's a terrifying person in that regard because he's so ignorant as to what's going on.

01:37:31.000 He's so ignorant.

01:37:32.000 He's still calling marijuana a gateway drug.

01:37:34.000 He's a fool.

01:37:35.000 I mean, he really is.

01:37:36.000 And the pattern is terrifying because they're trying to call Kratom an opiate right now.

01:37:43.000 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.

01:37:54.000 They want to categorize that with heroin and cocaine.

01:37:56.000 It's fucking terrifying.

01:37:58.000 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.

01:38:10.000 But they're ignoring that.

01:38:12.000 They're ignoring that because it's convenient.

01:38:14.000 You're so right.

01:38:14.000 But my concern is it's not...

01:38:16.000 Jeff Sessions is...

01:38:17.000 You can imagine what I think about Jeff Sessions is disgusting and insane what he's saying.

01:38:21.000 But my worry is it's not, well, I'm worried about Jeff Sessions primarily, but my other worry is it's not just Jeff Sessions.

01:38:27.000 I actually think even our side, you know, when it comes to the opioid crisis, I think I've been talking about this in quite the wrong way.

01:38:36.000 So it made me realise 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...

01:38:48.000 Evil drug dealers came along.

01:38:50.000 They gave people these drugs.

01:38:51.000 They got accidentally hooked.

01:38:52.000 In this case, the evil drug dealers are the Big Pharma.

01:38:54.000 They got them accidentally hooked.

01:38:57.000 And that's why we have this crisis, right?

01:38:59.000 Now, as you can tell from my conversation about antidepressants, there's a lot to criticise Big Pharma about.

01:39:03.000 I'm very critical of them.

01:39:05.000 But that story is just ridiculously simple.

01:39:08.000 If that were true, antidepressant prescriptions have been given across the United States, right?

01:39:12.000 If that were true, it would not make sense that the opioid prescriptions...

01:39:20.000 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?

01:39:30.000 Angus Dayton, the economist who studied this, described the opioid deaths as despair deaths, right?

01:39:35.000 If you go to the places where, as 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?

01:39:44.000 They've been deprived of the things that make life meaningful, so they want to be anaesthetized all the time.

01:39:48.000 There's a devastating line, Marianne Faithfull, who was Mick Jagger, who's best known for being Mick Jagger's girlfriend, but it kind of pisses me off because I think she's even better than Mick Jagger.

01:39:55.000 What?

01:39:56.000 I know, I know, it's controversial.

01:39:57.000 She's better than Mick Jagger?

01:39:58.000 I know, it's controversial.

01:39:59.000 This fucking conversation's over.

01:40:01.000 Shut it down, Jamie!

01:40:02.000 So, Mariam 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?

01:40:15.000 And don't misunderstand what I'm saying.

01:40:17.000 Heroin is not a good solution to despair.

01:40:19.000 If we want it, 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 in this connection so that the World Health Organization is explaining this deep kind of despair.

01:40:32.000 And my worry is, because you're 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?

01:40:38.000 You know, it's just we need to crack down on the Mexicans and that'll stop.

01:40:41.000 The United States has spent a trillion dollars On the war on drugs.

01:40:46.000 It's done it for a hundred years.

01:40:47.000 It's imprisoned more people than any other country in human history.

01:40:51.000 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.

01:40:56.000 So good luck keeping them out of a country with two, three thousand mile borders.

01:40:59.000 That's so ridiculous and so absurd that...

01:41:02.000 Well, it's not just that.

01:41:03.000 It's why would you think that you could tell a grown adult what they can and can't do with their body?

01:41:09.000 Of course.

01:41:10.000 But...

01:41:10.000 It's really simple.

01:41:11.000 But...

01:41:11.000 I'm pretty sure all of your listeners agree with us, or pretty much all of them agree with us on Jeff Sessions.

01:41:16.000 What I think more of them will be tempted by will be the more liberal argument, as a liberal, so I'm not attacking liberals, but the more liberal argument, which is this simplistic, even Bernie Sanders, who I love and would have voted for, Well, I think he's got this wrong, which is that, although I think Bernie Sanders' politics would deal with some of the deeper problems as well,

01:41:34.000 clearly.

01:41:35.000 But there's this story that it's about the drug companies.

01:41:38.000 We've got to look at the one place that solved an opioid crisis.

01:41:41.000 We talked about Portugal, the one other place.

01:41:42.000 So Switzerland, I'm a Swiss citizen, and my dad's from there as well as British, obviously.

01:41:48.000 Switzerland had a massive heroin problem in the 90s, right?

01:41:51.000 Huge.

01:41:51.000 Almost as, you know, not quite as bad as what's happening with opioids here, but it was massive.

01:41:55.000 And Switzerland got this amazing kick-ass female president called Ruth Dreyfuss who explained to people, look, When you hear the word legalisation, what you picture is anarchy and chaos, right?

01:42:08.000 What we have now is anarchy and chaos.

01:42:10.000 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.

01:42:19.000 What she proposed to do is legalise heroin, right?

01:42:22.000 And it's important to understand what that doesn't mean.

01:42:24.000 Doesn't mean there's like a heroin aisle in the CVS in Switzerland, right?

01:42:28.000 So different things can be legalized differently.

01:42:30.000 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.

01:42:37.000 But I'm pretty sure the rules are different, right?

01:42:39.000 Yeah, I don't think you can own a monkey or a lion, but you can definitely own a dog.

01:42:41.000 If you really wanted to one and you were rich, you could get them in Texas.

01:42:45.000 You could do whatever the fuck you want, except you can't have pot in Texas.

01:42:49.000 Hilarious.

01:42:50.000 I'm pretty sure in Texas it's licensed, so you could, you know, they're all legal, but they're legal in different ways, right?

01:42:55.000 Right.

01:42:55.000 In a similar way, what Ruth Dreyfuss, the Swiss president, was posing is heroin should be legal, but not in the way that alcohol is legal.

01:43:01.000 So the way it works is, if you've got a heroin problem in Switzerland, you're assigned to a clinic.

01:43:05.000 I went to the one in Geneva, where the former president now lives across the street, which tells you something.

01:43:11.000 You have to go early in the morning for reasons I'll explain.

01:43:14.000 You're given your heroin there.

01:43:15.000 You can't take it out with you.

01:43:17.000 You've got to use it there and then you leave and you go to your job because they do two things and it's the exact opposite of what's being proposed in the US. What's being proposed in the US is stop prescribing And don't give support, right?

01:43:29.000 Well, Switzerland is the exact opposite.

01:43:31.000 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.

01:43:38.000 They help you get housing, they get you subsidized work, they give you loads of therapy.

01:43:43.000 Are you aware of a boga?

01:43:45.000 Yeah, of course, yeah.

01:43:46.000 Well, that's probably one of the very best ways for people to quit drugs, especially some horrible drug.

01:43:52.000 And it's a ruthlessly introspective drug that many, many people have found great success in kicking heroin, cigarettes, alcoholism, getting over past abuse.

01:44:04.000 It's a long experience.

01:44:06.000 It can last more than 24 hours.

01:44:08.000 Totally illegal in the United States, but a lot of people go to Mexico and do it.

01:44:12.000 And I've had very good friends that have had problems with pills that went over there and kicked them because of Iboga.

01:44:20.000 I'll give your producers an intro to Dr. Gabor Marte, who's a friend of mine.

01:44:23.000 Sure, I know who he is.

01:44:25.000 He would be a great guest for you.

01:44:26.000 Does he live in England?

01:44:27.000 No, he lives in Vancouver, but he comes to LA fairly often.

01:44:29.000 Does he?

01:44:30.000 You should definitely talk to him.

01:44:31.000 I would love to.

01:44:31.000 I would really recommend people look at his work.

01:44:32.000 But in terms of, just to stay with the last point about Switzerland, because there was something really, I think it relates to Iboga in a way.

01:44:37.000 So one of the things that really surprised me in that guy spending time in that clinic, I remember this chief psychiatrist there, Dr. Rita Mangies.

01:44:44.000 So 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.

01:44:54.000 So you could go to this clinic and they'll dose you up with heroin?

01:44:57.000 They give you the heroin.

01:44:58.000 You have to use it there.

01:44:59.000 You can't take it out with you because they don't want people selling it on.

01:45:01.000 That's kind of badass.

01:45:02.000 You're monitored by a nurse.

01:45:04.000 But the results are really incredible, right?

01:45:06.000 Right.

01:45:07.000 So, 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.

01:45:16.000 What happened?

01:45:16.000 How's the ratio of people using to not using?

01:45:20.000 How's it gone down?

01:45:21.000 There's been a really significant fall in heroin use.

01:45:22.000 The best research is 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, and enormous fall in use overall, for various reasons I can talk about.

01:45:33.000 But the thing that blew my mind was they give them whatever days they want for as long as they want.

01:45:37.000 And I was like, what we're told, so it comes back to chemical hooks, what we're told is they'll just want more and more forever, right?

01:45:42.000 Right.

01:45:43.000 But actually, what happens is almost everyone chooses to cut back over time and stop, right?

01:45:47.000 When I went there, I think there were like two people who'd been on the program at the start.

01:45:50.000 And I said to Dr. Mangy, who runs it, I don't understand this.

01:45:53.000 How is this happening?

01:45:54.000 And she looked at me like I was an idiot.

01:45:55.000 And she said, well, people's lives get better.

01:45:59.000 And as their lives get better, they don't want to be anesthetized so much.

01:46:02.000 Which seems almost stupidly obvious, right?

01:46:04.000 It goes right back to what you were saying about antidepressants and people's lives.

01:46:10.000 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.

01:46:19.000 And if you have all that, why would you fuck it up with heroin?

01:46:22.000 I think you're totally right.

01:46:24.000 The whole premise of Lost Connections comes back to something we were saying at the start.

01:46:29.000 Human beings have needs, right?

01:46:32.000 And if your needs are being met, you don't want to be anesthetized.

01:46:35.000 I think what you said is very important.

01:46:37.000 There's psychological needs that are just as valuable and important as physical needs.

01:46:41.000 Like, we know we have needs for nutrients.

01:46:43.000 We know we have needs for water.

01:46:44.000 We have needs, psychological, for all sorts of different things.

01:46:49.000 Our communities are incredibly important.

01:46:51.000 Love is incredibly important.

01:46:53.000 Family is incredibly important.

01:46:55.000 I know some people that are older men that have been bachelors their whole lives and they're childless and now they don't have a deep connection with anybody and they get to this very weird, strange place where they're like,

01:47:10.000 is this it?

01:47:11.000 Now I'm 70 years old and I've never really had children and I don't know what to do and this is...

01:47:18.000 This is my life now.

01:47:21.000 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.

01:47:28.000 You know, I thought about that a lot.

01:47:29.000 I interviewed this guy, Professor John Cassioppo at the University of Chicago, who's the leading expert in the world on loneliness.

01:47:35.000 And he said this thing to me.

01:47:37.000 It's a bit like what the woman in Geneva said.

01:47:38.000 What a lonely way to live your life, studying loneliness.

01:47:40.000 He's actually quite a cheerful person, actually.

01:47:45.000 But he had this really interesting, this really simple point.

01:47:47.000 But he just said, if you think about the circumstances where we evolved, right?

01:47:51.000 If you got separated from the tribe, if you were alone, you were depressed and anxious for a really fucking good reason.

01:47:55.000 You were about to be eaten.

01:47:56.000 You were in terrible danger.

01:47:57.000 If you got injured, no one would help you.

01:47:59.000 You would die, right?

01:48:00.000 So he showed that...

01:48:02.000 So as you know, when we're stressed, we release a hormone called cortisol.

01:48:06.000 He showed this really interesting experiment that I wrote back in the book...

01:48:10.000 Being acutely lonely is as stressful as being punched in the face by a stranger when it comes to cortisol release, right?

01:48:15.000 That's how deeply we are resistant to loneliness, right?

01:48:19.000 It's a signal telling you to get back to the tribe.

01:48:22.000 That's why we evolved.

01:48:22.000 It's a really important signal.

01:48:24.000 If humans hadn't had that signal, we wouldn't be here, right?

01:48:27.000 And I think you're right.

01:48:28.000 So when you look at these men, if you have an isolated...

01:48:32.000 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.

01:48:43.000 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.

01:48:52.000 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.

01:48:58.000 She's called Neriman.

01:48:59.000 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.

01:49:08.000 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.

01:49:16.000 And then this protest began, and we all got to know each other, and this whole place became my home.

01:49:23.000 And I think of everywhere here as home now.

01:49:25.000 And she realised that we are homeless in some sense in the Western world.

01:49:30.000 That us humans have a need for a sense of belonging.

01:49:34.000 And our sense of home is too small to meet our sense of home belonging.

01:49:37.000 There's a wonderful Bosnian writer called Alexander Heyman, who said, home is where people notice when you're not there.

01:49:45.000 Right?

01:49:46.000 And a lot of us, like these guys you're talking about, these older guys, who notices if they're not there?

01:49:51.000 Probably no one.

01:49:51.000 They are in a sense homeless.

01:49:53.000 They are spiritually homeless.

01:49:56.000 I'm not a religious person.

01:49:58.000 I don't mean that.

01:49:58.000 I get what you're saying.

01:50:00.000 Do you know what I mean?

01:50:01.000 And so I think it's about...

01:50:03.000 And this comes back to...

01:50:05.000 Think about how different that is.

01:50:07.000 Everything we're talking about.

01:50:08.000 Think about how different our conversation has been.

01:50:10.000 To what my doctor told me when I was a teenager.

01:50:13.000 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.

01:50:18.000 And he says, you've just got a malfunction in your brain, right?

01:50:21.000 One of the worst things about that, there are many things wrong with that.

01:50:23.000 Firstly, what he said to me is not true.

01:50:26.000 I'm sure he believed it.

01:50:27.000 I think he was misinformed.

01:50:28.000 I don't think he was deliberately lying to me.

01:50:30.000 But what he said was not true.

01:50:31.000 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, It cuts us off from having this conversation, right?

01:50:42.000 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.

01:50:52.000 It tells you you're just biologically broken, and presumably always going to be biologically broken.

01:50:58.000 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 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.

01:51:14.000 That's what the best scientists in the world are telling us, the World Health Organization.

01:51:18.000 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?

01:51:25.000 We're just driving in the wrong direction.

01:51:27.000 We're driving away from the source of our pain rather than towards it where it can be understood and solved.

01:51:32.000 Of course, there's always 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 ten 13-year-old boys is taking a stimulant drug to make them focus.

01:51:45.000 I think the figure is 30% of old people in retirement homes have been given antipsychotic drugs to shut them the fuck up because they're rebelling against the way they're being treated.

01:51:54.000 In between, one in four middle-aged women in the United States is taking a chemical antidepressant at any given time.

01:52:00.000 One in four.

01:52:02.000 You're talking about a society that, I mean, the figures about how many children, it's much lower, but it's so much more extreme.

01:52:09.000 The number of toddlers who've been given anti-psychotics in the United States is just off the scale, right?

01:52:15.000 I think Dr. Sami Tamimi has written about this.

01:52:18.000 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.

01:52:27.000 Basically to shut them up.

01:52:28.000 Yeah, that's a disturbing one, the Ritalin and various stimulants that they give to children.

01:52:36.000 What's that about?

01:52:37.000 What's the cause of that?

01:52:38.000 Well, I think it's related.

01:52:40.000 I've researched this much less than the other things we've talked about.

01:52:42.000 But it came up a lot in the conversations that I had.

01:52:45.000 There are many things going on here.

01:52:48.000 One of them is...

01:52:51.000 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.

01:53:05.000 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.

01:53:13.000 Attention's a muscle, right?

01:53:14.000 It's harder to bring your brain back to focus.

01:53:16.000 Like Joe wanted to just go and collapse and watch, you know, watch whatever shit was on The Bachelor or whatever.

01:53:21.000 I don't think Joe would have watched The Bachelor, actually.

01:53:22.000 Whatever shit would have been on the TV. Even in his full state of depression, The Bachelor would have been too much.

01:53:29.000 That was a line too far.

01:53:30.000 I can't do it.

01:53:30.000 He was prepared to take Oxy, but not to go to that level of self-harm, right?

01:53:35.000 Or think about loneliness, right?

01:53:37.000 There's really...

01:53:38.000 Professor Cassiope was showing this.

01:53:39.000 If you are lonely, that triggers what's called hypervigilance, right?

01:53:43.000 Again, for a very good reason.

01:53:44.000 If you're on your own in the savannas of Africa, you want to be hypervigilant.

01:53:48.000 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?

01:54:00.000 And I am an atheist, gay, liberal.

01:54:04.000 So the idea of learning something from the Amish was initially challenging to me.

01:54:08.000 And I've got to admit, I felt really humbled by going and spending time.

01:54:11.000 I went to this village called Elkhart La Grange, which is just outside Fort Wayne in Indiana.

01:54:16.000 And, you know, there's still a lot I disagree with about the Amish, don't get me wrong.

01:54:20.000 Not least because I just re-watched Witness.

01:54:22.000 But, you know, I could see that they've got...

01:54:27.000 So there's a very interesting thing about the Amish, as you know, when you turn 16, if you're an Amish, you've You've got to leave and go and live in what they call the English world, our world, right?

01:54:36.000 And then you decide whether to come back.

01:54:37.000 About 80% decide to come back, 20% don't.

01:54:39.000 It's one of the reasons why the Amish is never counted as a cult, because no cult would do that, right?

01:54:44.000 No cult's going to tell you to leave for two years and then decide whether to come back.

01:54:47.000 In fact, the exact opposite.

01:54:48.000 So they have lived in our world.

01:54:50.000 They know our world really well.

01:54:52.000 And I remember having this very challenging conversation with, what's his name, Lauren Beachy, his name is an Amish guy there, who said, it comes back to the weight conversation we had.

01:55:01.000 He said, look, there's loads of things I miss.

01:55:03.000 He talked about missing that 70s show.

01:55:05.000 He said, I used to love driving in trucks because they obviously don't drive, they don't use electricity off the grid.

01:55:11.000 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 know who my neighbours were.

01:55:18.000 And he said this very challenging thing.

01:55:20.000 He said, you know Weight Watchers?

01:55:22.000 And I said, yeah.

01:55:23.000 And he said, well, the idea of Weight Watchers is you can only lose weight together as a group, right?

01:55:26.000 It helps, or not only, but it helps you to lose weight together as a group, that you would find it harder on your own.

01:55:31.000 This is like that.

01:55:32.000 And I said, what?

01:55:33.000 Are you saying like the Amish is like Weight Watchers for the problems of Western civilization?

01:55:37.000 And he's like, yeah, that's what I'm saying.

01:55:39.000 And to me, that was so challenging.

01:55:41.000 The idea that you've got to give...

01:55:42.000 Because it comes back to what we say about junk values.

01:55:44.000 In our culture, we're told the solution is always to get more.

01:55:47.000 And the idea that the solution is to have less and be present more...

01:55:51.000 It's really challenging, right?

01:55:53.000 I don't even think it's about having less.

01:55:55.000 It's about what they're doing is...

01:55:57.000 Look, think about what the Amish are doing.

01:55:59.000 First of all, massive sense of community, right?

01:56:02.000 They're very connected.

01:56:03.000 They're not using cell phones.

01:56:04.000 They're not using email.

01:56:05.000 So the community is also based on one-to-one interaction, real social cues, real social interaction, which is critical.

01:56:12.000 It's a big part of being a human being, and it's one of the more absent things in modern society.

01:56:16.000 Two, physical labor.

01:56:18.000 They're involved in a lot of physical labor because they don't use electricity.

01:56:21.000 They don't use power tools.

01:56:23.000 There's so many things that they don't do.

01:56:25.000 So because of their culture, they're making their own homes, right?

01:56:29.000 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.

01:56:38.000 You construct my home with me.

01:56:40.000 I help you build your home.

01:56:41.000 They take care of their animals.

01:56:43.000 They take care of their crops.

01:56:45.000 There's a real connection with where they get their food from, a real connection with where they live, their community, the sense of Just the sense of belonging to something that's bigger than you.

01:56:58.000 There's so many factors involved in their happiness that you can kind of see where, yeah, there's a lot of wacky shit with the cult aspects of being an Amish person, but...

01:57:10.000 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, and you just go out there and you become a part of nature.

01:57:24.000 I mean, that seems like a co-op.

01:57:26.000 That seems like some sort of a farm-based co-op, right?

01:57:30.000 Build each other's houses.

01:57:32.000 Stay together.

01:57:32.000 You don't have to wear sexy clothes.

01:57:34.000 Let's just all wear the same shit.

01:57:35.000 It's no big deal.

01:57:36.000 I love how you put that.

01:57:37.000 And you're right, to the inequality, the richest Amish is as wealthy as the poorest Amish, right?

01:57:41.000 It's the same thing, yeah.

01:57:41.000 But it's not like they're not holding them back.

01:57:45.000 I think that's one of the things that I think about this in relation to attention is so there's this theory that Amish kids don't seem to develop ADHD right and there's been it's been surprisingly understudied.

01:57:57.000 Maybe they don't have Amish doctors.

01:57:59.000 Maybe that's a problem.

01:58:00.000 These fucking kids are bouncing off the wall like he's normal!

01:58:03.000 I don't think it's that.

01:58:04.000 I wondered if it was that and I also wondered if it was like they don't have electronics so then obviously I'm kidding and I think there's an element going on there but actually Yeah.

01:58:16.000 Yeah.

01:58:32.000 Run around medically.

01:58:33.000 And that's actually, you can see how as a species it benefits us to have both, right?

01:58:36.000 Right.

01:58:37.000 But what we do is we try to bash every child into one particular mode of being, which actually is designed to prepare them for shitty deadening work.

01:58:47.000 The reason our schools are shitty and deadening, there's a guy called Alfie Cohn who says every school has an official curriculum and a hidden curriculum.

01:58:54.000 The official curriculum is like history, geography, whatever.

01:58:57.000 And the hidden curriculum is, this is what we're training you to put up with in your life.

01:59:01.000 Right?

01:59:02.000 And if you've got a society where 87% of people don't like their work, and you're 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,

01:59:18.000 right?

01:59:18.000 So that's not a malfunction of the system, that's an unconscious function of the system, right?

01:59:22.000 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?

01:59:33.000 So that actually our children can be...

01:59:35.000 But the Amish who, you know, do what, as you say, it's not like they're doing...

01:59:41.000 High-end cognitive labour is probably the fancy way of putting it, right?

01:59:44.000 But their kids, to them, having a kid who goes fishing and running around is as valuable, actually, as it may even be more valuable than the kid who sits there reading all day, right?

01:59:54.000 And I think there's a real thing about this.

01:59:57.000 What that tells us, it comes back to one of the themes that's come up all through our conversation, Joe.

02:00:02.000 These things that we're told are pathologies make sense in their contexts, right?

02:00:07.000 Depression, we're told it's a pathology.

02:00:09.000 Actually, anxiety, we're told it's a pathology.

02:00:11.000 Actually, it's largely, not entirely, but largely a response to things going wrong.

02:00:15.000 We're told addiction is a pathology.

02:00:17.000 It's a response to things happening.

02:00:18.000 We're told that obesity is a pathology.

02:00:20.000 In some cases, it's a response to things going wrong.

02:00:22.000 We're told that kids not wanting to be able to focus is a pathology and adults not being able to focus.

02:00:26.000 I think we need to understand that these things have meaning.

02:00:29.000 They make sense, right?

02:00:30.000 Doesn't mean they're good.

02:00:32.000 It's clearly not good to be obese.

02:00:33.000 It's clearly not good to be addicted, obviously.

02:00:36.000 But if you understand that they make sense, that opens up a totally different way of responding to them.

02:00:42.000 Ones that actually fucking work, right?

02:00:43.000 The places that...

02:00:44.000 If I think about the drug war, right?

02:00:46.000 For Chasing the Scream, my book about addiction and the drug war, I went out with a group of women...

02:00:52.000 In Arizona, in that prison run by that fucking psychopath Joe Arpaio, who I also interviewed, who Trump pardoned, How the fuck did you pardon that guy?

02:01:02.000 That bothers me deeply.

02:01:05.000 It's funny, I can tell you about Joe Alpaio, because in a funny sort of way, I felt very sorry for him.

02:01:09.000 But anyway, I went out on this group of, with this group of 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?

02:01:21.000 And I remember going back to the prison with them.

02:01:26.000 It's called Tent City.

02:01:28.000 And the women were terrified of something called the hole, which is where you were sent if you fucked up, right?

02:01:34.000 And I said to the guards, will you take me to see the hole?

02:01:37.000 And I've done a lot of reporting from prisons and guards always don't want to show you the bad things.

02:01:41.000 In this one, because it's a fucking pantomime of cruelty, they want you to see it, right?

02:01:46.000 So they took me to the hole.

02:01:47.000 It was in fact a hole.

02:01:48.000 It's a concrete cell, bare concrete cell, with nothing in it, no TV, nothing.

02:01:53.000 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.

02:02:01.000 She'd been there for a month.

02:02:02.000 And I remember, the audio is actually on the Chasing the Scream website, chasingthescream.com.

02:02:06.000 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.

02:02:18.000 And this is what we're doing, thinking it'll stop this woman from being addicted.

02:02:22.000 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.

02:02:31.000 That's way too soft on it.

02:02:32.000 It makes the problem worse, right?

02:02:35.000 Those women go in fucking broken, devastated.

02:02:38.000 Then they're even more broken and devastated.

02:02:39.000 They go out even more fucking addicted, right?

02:02:41.000 So the reason why Portugal and Switzerland have massively falling addiction problems and the United States have massively increasing ones, right?

02:02:49.000 So to me...

02:02:52.000 Again, the evidence is approaches towards this problem that are based on compassion, connection, love, understanding, seeing that it makes sense, work.

02:03:04.000 They're not magic bullets.

02:03:04.000 There's still going to be problems in anything we do.

02:03:07.000 Approaches based on shame and stigma and rage and just condemning people, they just make the problem worse.

02:03:17.000 Yeah, there's no doubt about that.

02:03:18.000 And there's also no doubt about what you were speaking about when you started that rant about schools.

02:03:23.000 About schools with children, trying to fit them into these very...

02:03:29.000 Convenient categories and trying to get them to get comfortable with doing things that they don't want to do.

02:03:35.000 That's great if we've resigned ourselves to turning children into work robots.

02:03:40.000 I love that way of putting it.

02:03:42.000 You just said that's brilliant.

02:03:43.000 It shouldn't be that.

02:03:45.000 Look, I went through that myself.

02:03:47.000 I thought I was a fool.

02:03:48.000 When I was in high school, I was like, there's got to be something wrong with me.

02:03:51.000 I can't concentrate.

02:03:51.000 I can't do it.

02:03:53.000 I'm never going to be good at anything.

02:03:54.000 I was like, I'm just going to resign myself to be an outcast.

02:03:57.000 I'm going to resign myself to be a loser.

02:03:59.000 Because I just couldn't sit still in class.

02:04:02.000 I couldn't pay attention.

02:04:03.000 I didn't want to do the homework.

02:04:04.000 I was bored out of my fucking mind.

02:04:06.000 And I didn't even realize there was anything that I could do that I would be intellectually curious about.

02:04:12.000 I mean, I didn't think that that was a part of my life.

02:04:15.000 I didn't think I was a curious person.

02:04:17.000 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.

02:04:24.000 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.

02:04:33.000 I just didn't want to do what they wanted me to do.

02:04:36.000 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.

02:04:46.000 It was the rare person, one out of five, one out of six teachers that would come along that would give you some spark of happiness and love, and you would go like, oh, this class is pretty cool.

02:04:56.000 That's a good teacher.

02:04:57.000 Like, oh, she's nice.

02:04:58.000 You know, he's fun.

02:05:00.000 It was rare.

02:05:01.000 It was very rare.

02:05:01.000 Most of the time, it was a dull grind.

02:05:03.000 And I would wake up with nightmares after I had graduated that I had fucked up and didn't get the right amount of credits and I had to go back to school.

02:05:11.000 I would have crazy nightmares that I would have to repeat the 12th grade and go back to school because it was soul-sucking.

02:05:19.000 And to me it represented the future because the future was going to be more soul-sucking because you're 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,

02:05:37.000 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.

02:05:43.000 And so you take out a lease on a nice car, and then now you have this debt that you have to pay.

02:05:48.000 So now you have to keep working, and you keep working so you can keep this car.

02:05:51.000 Well, I'm gonna get a condo, and then you get a condo, you got more debt.

02:05:54.000 Then, well, I'm getting married.

02:05:55.000 We're getting married.

02:05:55.000 Well, we've got to take out a loan for the marriage because it's real expensive to get married.

02:05:59.000 Oh, she wants a big wedding.

02:06:00.000 And then you get a big wedding and a big ring.

02:06:02.000 And now you're fucking deep, deep in the hole.

02:06:04.000 Now you have children.

02:06:05.000 Oh, shit.

02:06:06.000 And then, you know, you're like, wow, I really don't want to be selling insurance anymore.

02:06:10.000 I wish I could have been an artist.

02:06:12.000 I wish I could have done this.

02:06:13.000 I wish I could have pursued my interests.

02:06:14.000 Well, it's kind of too late.

02:06:16.000 You're 150 miles away from the neutral point.

02:06:19.000 So you've got to go 150 miles back before you can start at zero.

02:06:24.000 I think you put that so well, and I'm just thinking about that.

02:06:26.000 This is the heart of my book, Lost Connections, is saying we don't have to have a human culture that deadens people, right?

02:06:33.000 We don't have to have a culture where people are controlled, deadened, and isolated.

02:06:37.000 That's not how most humans have ever lived.

02:06:39.000 The Amish live much closer.

02:06:41.000 Far more human beings have lived in the way the Amish lived than have ever lived in the way we lived.

02:06:45.000 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.

02:06:52.000 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?

02:06:59.000 This very unusual recent human innovation.

02:07:02.000 As I said, imagine if every corporation was converted into a democratic cooperative.

02:07:06.000 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.

02:07:20.000 The boss is accountable to you.

02:07:23.000 That's a very different way of living and thinking about the things we do most of the time.

02:07:27.000 And that would, again, require a 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.

02:07:39.000 That requires a big systemic change.

02:07:41.000 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.

02:07:47.000 But these are...

02:07:49.000 These are big social changes we can make.

02:07:52.000 And again, one of the things that's 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?

02:08:04.000 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?

02:08:10.000 I presume not literally beat out of you, but mentally beat out of you, right?

02:08:14.000 And in a sense, that's what we need to say to a lot of people about a lot of these forms of discomfort.

02:08:19.000 It's not a sign of craziness.

02:08:21.000 It makes perfect sense you feel this way, and you're right to feel this way.

02:08:25.000 I wonder if that's what's causing all these children to be on Adderall and on...

02:08:30.000 You know, all the various stimulants they put kids on, you know, Prozac and all the different things that they do.

02:08:36.000 It's literally because they're trapped in this thing and they can't do it.

02:08:39.000 They can't do it.

02:08:40.000 They can't do it.

02:08:41.000 They just can't concentrate.

02:08:42.000 And so they give them something.

02:08:43.000 And they give them this pill and that pill turns them into a worker robot.

02:08:46.000 And it's related to a lot of the things we talked about as well.

02:08:49.000 Increase in competition, for example.

02:08:51.000 So parents are in such an unequal society.

02:08:54.000 If you have a society like Norway, where if your kid doesn't do well, they're going to have a good life.

02:08:58.000 And if your kid does really well, they're going to have a good life.

02:09:01.000 You know, there's less anxiety about, oh, my kid's fallen behind.

02:09:04.000 Here, if your kid falls behind, they can have a really fucking terrible life.

02:09:08.000 Yeah, but the counter to that is rich kids don't do well at all.

02:09:11.000 Oh, yeah, they're miserable as hell.

02:09:12.000 Yeah, I mean, that's a real problem.

02:09:14.000 That's a real problem with kids that don't have to do well.

02:09:16.000 But I think you've got a society that drugs kids at the bottom to shut up.

02:09:20.000 These kids in foster care who are traumatised, not being looked after.

02:09:23.000 They're being drugged to just basically make them docile.

02:09:25.000 You've got kids at the top who are drugged to make them compete.

02:09:29.000 You know, I've got a friend who's a Wall Street banker who put his kid on, I can't remember if it was Adderall 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.

02:09:41.000 So if he doesn't go on it, He's falling behind, right?

02:09:46.000 So you have, I mean, what a sick culture that's giving their children a cocaine-like drug to make them compete in an unnatural way.

02:09:55.000 And the fucked up part is it works.

02:09:57.000 Yeah.

02:09:58.000 Well, it's interesting.

02:09:58.000 So the research on this is interesting.

02:09:59.000 I think this is something that's worth pointing out.

02:10:00.000 I haven't read about this in my book.

02:10:02.000 But actually, there's evidence that kids develop tolerance to it over time, right?

02:10:08.000 So actually, initially, it works really, really well.

02:10:11.000 And then gradually, you have to give higher and higher doses until eventually, there's a maximum limit.

02:10:16.000 It's just cranked out all day.

02:10:18.000 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?

02:10:25.000 And often what that's misinterpreted is, oh my God, look at what happens to my kid when I take him off it.

02:10:29.000 He goes, it's like, no, that's not the baseline of your kid.

02:10:32.000 That's your kid in withdrawal from a cocaine-like, remarkable...

02:10:36.000 I mean, I had a...

02:10:37.000 I've spoken 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 young relative of mine, I'm trying to phrase this ambiguously, who she was drugging with Ritalin,

02:10:52.000 the doctor had given it, because he didn't want to focus because he was traumatised because his mother was a cocaine addict, right?

02:10:58.000 And I remember she used to 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.

02:11:07.000 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 substances required by the police.

02:11:19.000 Not required by the police, sorry, required by the school and mandated by the doctor.

02:11:23.000 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.

02:11:37.000 This is the cruelest thing we've done.

02:11:38.000 If you just give people these ridiculously simplistic stories about addiction, it's just the chemical hook.

02:11:43.000 Or this ridiculously simplistic story about depression, it's just a chemical imbalance.

02:11:47.000 It's like we say, you cut them off from understanding the thing that's right in front of them.

02:11:51.000 And sometimes I think with both my books, with Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections, at times I thought, do I even need to say this?

02:11:57.000 It's so fucking banal, right?

02:11:59.000 If you're lonely, if you're insecure, you're going to be depressed.

02:12:02.000 But actually...

02:12:03.000 It does need to be said.

02:12:04.000 When you say it to people...

02:12:06.000 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?

02:12:13.000 That's a weird...

02:12:14.000 I can't think of many...

02:12:15.000 Do you know what I mean?

02:12:16.000 Well, it's common sense, but it's not common.

02:12:18.000 I'm going to write that down.

02:12:19.000 That really is what it is.

02:12:20.000 It's not a common understanding.

02:12:22.000 Now, I want to get in...

02:12:24.000 To this with you, what about the criticisms of your work?

02:12:29.000 And how have you taken that in?

02:12:31.000 Have you debated anyone about your work?

02:12:34.000 Because I read quite a few things online that were very critical, and I didn't agree with them.

02:12:39.000 I didn't agree with what they were saying, but I wanted to get your take on it.

02:12:42.000 Sure.

02:12:43.000 So there were a few points that have been made.

02:12:45.000 There were a few pieces that were written as soon as the book came out by psychiatrists who admitted that, to be fair to them, they hadn't read the book.

02:12:51.000 And they were responding to an extract from the book.

02:12:54.000 And obviously in an extract, you can't make every point you want to make, right?

02:12:57.000 So the book is 100,000...

02:12:58.000 What was the extract?

02:12:59.000 What was the...

02:13:00.000 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, chemical antidepressants are bad for everyone and people should stop taking them.

02:13:09.000 If I had said that, it would be totally right to criticize me.

02:13:12.000 That's not my position.

02:13:14.000 It's an easy way to criticize you.

02:13:16.000 Exactly.

02:13:17.000 And my position is, you know, what we said before, chemical antidepressants give you 1.8 points on the Hamilton scale, right?

02:13:23.000 That's not nothing.

02:13:24.000 It's not much, on average, but it's not nothing.

02:13:27.000 Some people, like, for example, one of my relatives, the one that we talked about who is trapped, She takes chemical antidepressants.

02:13:33.000 I think she's right to take them, right?

02:13:35.000 She's got very limited margin of change.

02:13:36.000 She's not experiencing extreme side effects, as lots of people do.

02:13:40.000 I think she's right to care.

02:13:41.000 For her, 1.8 points on the Hamilton scale is worth having.

02:13:45.000 But it's not solving her problem, right?

02:13:47.000 It's not solving the problem for the vast majority of people.

02:13:49.000 And so I think there's been some criticisms that are He's telling people to stop.

02:13:56.000 That's a dangerous and terrible thing to do.

02:13:59.000 So my response to that is, read the book, because I don't say that.

02:14:02.000 In fact, I say explicitly, you should carry on taking them if for you the benefits outweigh the side effects.

02:14:07.000 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.

02:14:16.000 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?

02:14:24.000 Either 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,

02:14:39.000 that I've got to solve this on my own.

02:14:41.000 And lots of people go, well, I can't fucking go and democratise my workplace.

02:14:45.000 I can't fucking go and, you know, take a load of ayahuasca and learn.

02:14:50.000 They're just saying, what are you talking about?

02:14:52.000 And I think because I'm talking in this third category, which is...

02:14:57.000 Biology is real, psychology is real, but most of the drivers of this are social, they're in the way we live.

02:15:03.000 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?

02:15:10.000 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.

02:15:18.000 Now, I never liked Margaret Thatcher, but...

02:15:20.000 This debate has made me realise how much I internalised that, right?

02:15:24.000 I was depressed for 13 years.

02:15:26.000 I'd fucking studied social sciences, right?

02:15:28.000 It never even occurred to me there was a societal component to how bad I felt, right?

02:15:33.000 So I was kind of like a Thatcherite to my own pain and distress.

02:15:36.000 Do you see what I mean?

02:15:37.000 And I think we've so, we've so individualised and internalised, we've so internalised 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.

02:15:49.000 But I think it was kind of understandable for them to be like, fuck you, I can't do that.

02:15:54.000 I can see why they're saying that.

02:15:56.000 I wouldn't push back on them so hard because they think, well, there are narrow margins and this is why we need to change.

02:16:01.000 And people get that if you talk about car accidents, right?

02:16:06.000 Individual drivers should drive safely, but we don't just leave car safety up to that.

02:16:12.000 We have airbags and seat belts and speed limits, driving tests, we arrest people under DUIs, right?

02:16:19.000 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?

02:16:29.000 So I accept that there's an individual role, but there's a social role, right?

02:16:33.000 The whole society deals with the problem of car accidents.

02:16:36.000 And what I'm saying is the whole society should deal with the problem of depression and anxiety.

02:16:39.000 We need social changes, like democratising workplaces is one we've talked about a lot, that reduce the reasons why people are so depressed and anxious in the first place.

02:16:46.000 But I think in a society that has so devalued the idea of the social...

02:16:51.000 I may as well be speaking fucking Swedish for all they could understand.

02:16:54.000 Do you see what I mean?

02:16:55.000 Yes, I think they're just neglecting to consider the possibility that some of the factors are because of your life.

02:17:01.000 And the social aspects, the physical aspects, the exercise, the diet, all those various things.

02:17:08.000 There's many, many people that just are neglecting to take those even into consideration.

02:17:12.000 I also think people work way too much.

02:17:16.000 I don't think that's the way to live your life.

02:17:18.000 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.

02:17:26.000 I think it's ridiculous.

02:17:27.000 I think we should work maybe four days a week and it might be three.

02:17:32.000 Maybe people would be more productive if they kicked ass for three days a week and then had a fun time for four.

02:17:38.000 Maybe it's like one on, one off, one on, one off, one on, one off.

02:17:43.000 Maybe it's like that.

02:17:44.000 That's the way we live life.

02:17:45.000 Have a fucking work day and have a day where you don't work.

02:17:48.000 If you choose to work more because you're trying to pursue something and you're a dedicated person, you have a job, that's one thing.

02:17:56.000 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.

02:18:06.000 You're dying, motherfucker.

02:18:07.000 There's no golden years.

02:18:08.000 That's all horse shit.

02:18:10.000 You know, you watch it on Golden Pond too many times.

02:18:12.000 You're not going to make it.

02:18:13.000 Even he was quite fucking miserable on Golden Pond.

02:18:15.000 Even that, right?

02:18:16.000 Bad example.

02:18:17.000 He hated his daughter.

02:18:18.000 Maybe The Golden Girls, right?

02:18:20.000 It's a really shit film, actually.

02:18:21.000 I watched it for the first time when I played recently.

02:18:23.000 But I think there's another thing going on.

02:18:25.000 There's another thing going on.

02:18:26.000 I have to make sure I don't miss my flight, but there's another thing going on, which is...

02:18:29.000 What we've done is we've told people the path out of stigma...

02:18:35.000 Is to say that the problem is just biological, right?

02:18:38.000 Right.

02:18:38.000 So we said, people, you should not be criticized for being...

02:18:41.000 You have an imbalance.

02:18:42.000 Exactly.

02:18:42.000 Or even more than that...

02:18:43.000 It's like having a pancreas disease.

02:18:45.000 We just need to give you a medication.

02:18:47.000 Exactly.

02:18:48.000 We've told people, you should not be judged for your depression, anxiety, addiction, because it's a biological problem.

02:18:53.000 Right.

02:18:54.000 I entirely agree, obviously, people should not be judged for their anxiety, depression, or addiction.

02:18:58.000 But actually, there's a really interesting experiment that showed that this is just a complete...

02:19:01.000 This first triggered me on this is I interviewed an amazing neuroscientist called Mark Lewis, who I was talking about this, and I said, you know, I'm worried because he's been explaining a lot of the things we've talked about to me early in my research.

02:19:11.000 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?

02:19:16.000 And he said, Johan, did anyone ever doubt that leprosy or AIDS were biological problems?

02:19:22.000 Right?

02:19:23.000 Literally nobody ever doubted that.

02:19:25.000 Zero.

02:19:25.000 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?

02:19:32.000 I thought...

02:19:33.000 Again, it's a simple point, but I thought, wow, I'd never thought of that.

02:19:36.000 But there was actually this experiment by a woman I interviewed called Professor Sheila Mehta, which looked at this question of stigma.

02:19:42.000 So she wanted to figure out which is more de-stigmatising, telling people that mental health problems are caused by your biology or saying they're caused by your life.

02:19:53.000 So what they do is, it's a little bit of a complex experiment, but I think it's worth explaining.

02:19:58.000 Say you're the guy who's taking part in the experiment.

02:20:00.000 They bring you in, and they say, before the experiment begins, we just want you to sit here and fill in a questionnaire, right?

02:20:05.000 You don't realise, but this is actually the experiment.

02:20:08.000 So you're sitting next to someone else who you don't realise is an actor, and you get chatting, and the actor will run it two ways.

02:20:15.000 Sometimes the actor will say, I've got a mental health problem because of my biology.

02:20:20.000 And sometimes he'll say, I've got a mental health problem because of bad things that have happened to me.

02:20:25.000 Right?

02:20:26.000 Then you're told, the experiment's beginning, come through to this room.

02:20:28.000 And you're told, you, Joe, have got to teach this other person, the person you don't realise is an actor, a pattern.

02:20:33.000 It's like a pattern on a computer.

02:20:35.000 We're testing how well people learn patterns.

02:20:38.000 And once you've taught it to him, every time he gets it wrong, I want you to push this button.

02:20:42.000 And this button will give him a short, sharp, electric shock.

02:20:45.000 Right?

02:20:46.000 It won't kill him or anything.

02:20:47.000 It's not going to fuck him up, but it's uncomfortable.

02:20:50.000 Right?

02:20:51.000 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.

02:20:58.000 What they found was you were significantly more like...

02:21:00.000 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.

02:21:08.000 And I think that's because...

02:21:11.000 I think this is the stuff we're talking about is the path out of stigma.

02:21:13.000 Because 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, you can see why that leads to stigma, right?

02:21:23.000 But if what you're saying is, actually, we're all vulnerable to this stuff, 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.

02:21:36.000 What that does, instead of 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?

02:21:47.000 That's, to me, a much more powerful message.

02:21:49.000 Instead of the problem being an inexplicable biological malfunction, it's a Response to things that you can see in your life, right?

02:21:59.000 Well, it's interesting that we've always had the term sadness, right?

02:22:02.000 People have always experienced sadness.

02:22:03.000 But if you go back and go through ancient literature, you don't see a lot of stories about people suffering from depression.

02:22:09.000 That's a relatively new distinction.

02:22:12.000 You do get people who talk about melancholia.

02:22:16.000 I do think depression has always...

02:22:18.000 There's always been acute and extreme unhappiness.

02:22:21.000 There's always been people living unhappy lives, but the state of being depressed as being a clinical, psychological sort of diagnosis, that's relatively recent.

02:22:32.000 Well, the idea that it's a pathology...

02:22:34.000 Yeah.

02:22:35.000 I was thinking about this when you were speaking earlier.

02:22:39.000 When we talk about food, there's a thing, as you can tell, obviously I'm British.

02:22:43.000 When I first came to the US, I remember the first time someone ever offered me an indigestion pill.

02:22:52.000 Indigestion pill?

02:22:53.000 Yeah, you know, you can buy them in like CVS. Oh, like Pepto-Bismol or something like that?

02:22:56.000 Yeah.

02:22:56.000 And I remember...

02:22:58.000 Just saying, but wait, indigestion is a sign from your body you're eating too fast.

02:23:03.000 You don't want to get rid of that signal.

02:23:07.000 You'll eat too much.

02:23:08.000 You'll hurt yourself, right?

02:23:10.000 That's not a malfunction.

02:23:11.000 That's a function, right?

02:23:13.000 And I remember thinking as well about that, you know, that it comes back to so many things we're saying.

02:23:21.000 The feelings that we have of distress are not malfunctions.

02:23:25.000 They're telling us something is missing in the environment, in the psychology, in our lives.

02:23:29.000 They're not fuck-ups.

02:23:31.000 They're signals that we should listen to.

02:23:33.000 They benefit from filling that void.

02:23:37.000 Like, if you've got an issue, they've got a pill for it.

02:23:39.000 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.

02:23:52.000 And a lot of those are actually, we've shown this on the podcast many times, those were done by advertising agencies.

02:23:58.000 They've actually created names of diseases and issues.

02:24:02.000 Just so they can come up with solutions.

02:24:04.000 One of the things that was most shocking in the research for Lost Connections was realizing how much of what I had been told was invented, not by scientists, but by drug company PRs.

02:24:15.000 So I'll give you an example, two examples, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to go in a second.

02:24:20.000 No worries.

02:24:21.000 What time is your flight?

02:24:22.000 Well, I've got to do one other interview before my flight.

02:24:24.000 Fuck that interview.

02:24:30.000 Sorry.

02:24:30.000 There's this...

02:24:31.000 So everyone knows, if you think about, I don't know, taking selfies, right?

02:24:35.000 You take 30 selfies, you throw away 29, you only use the one that...

02:24:39.000 Can't do that.

02:24:40.000 Don't be a bitch.

02:24:41.000 Take a selfie and go with it.

02:24:42.000 It's like De Niro in The Deer Hunter.

02:24:44.000 One bullet.

02:24:45.000 One bullet.

02:24:48.000 You know, you use the one where you look good, right?

02:24:50.000 Turns out, in the whole process when antidepressants were first being marketed to us, they basically did that with scientific studies.

02:24:58.000 What they did is they They would commission 100 studies.

02:25:04.000 90 of them would say, find mixed results or poor results.

02:25:08.000 Those all got put in the trash can.

02:25:10.000 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.

02:25:23.000 So the early results were hugely exaggerated.

02:25:26.000 You'll remember that, you know, when antidepressants were first marketed, people are told, you know, it'll make you better than well, right?

02:25:32.000 No one says that now.

02:25:33.000 You'll notice that stuff's all gone away, right?

02:25:34.000 It doesn't happen anymore.

02:25:35.000 So there's this huge...

02:25:36.000 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.

02:25:47.000 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.

02:26:03.000 So they just said that it did.

02:26:05.000 And that's the fucking drug I was given, right?

02:26:06.000 It's shocking to see the drug that you were given The company involved didn't work for people like you, right?

02:26:14.000 And it had very powerful side effects on me.

02:26:17.000 I gained a huge amount of weight.

02:26:18.000 It has all sorts of side effects.

02:26:21.000 Did it help you at all?

02:26:24.000 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.

02:26:30.000 Probably gave me a very mild boost, but it didn't solve my problem.

02:26:34.000 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?

02:26:47.000 Right.

02:26:49.000 So I think the drug companies, It's scandalous what they did.

02:26:55.000 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 and the...

02:27:07.000 Bullshit, we were told.

02:27:08.000 You know, I mean, I remember interviewing a clinical psychologist, Dr. Lucy Johnson, who's a brilliant person, and her just saying, you know, everything you were told is bullshit.

02:27:17.000 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 told me.

02:27:21.000 In fact, there's no repercussions, no legal repercussions against those people for doing that.

02:27:26.000 It's just stunning.

02:27:27.000 You think about insider trading, how devastating the penalties are for that.

02:27:33.000 This is far worse.

02:27:34.000 One of the scandals is the FDA, how much of it is funded by the drug companies itself, right?

02:27:41.000 40% of the budget.

02:27:42.000 I mean, imagine if you had a ballgame where one of the teams...

02:27:48.000 Paid the referee's wages, right?

02:27:49.000 I think you'd find that team would win a lot more often, right?

02:27:54.000 So what we think is, oh, there's this dispassionate judge, even the way the rules are constructed.

02:27:59.000 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?

02:28:12.000 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.

02:28:22.000 So they would present those studies to the FDA. They didn't have to show them everything they've done.

02:28:26.000 Exactly.

02:28:26.000 It's gotten a bit better now.

02:28:27.000 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.

02:28:34.000 And as a result, where are all the new ones?

02:28:36.000 They're not coming on.

02:28:37.000 I mean, there are some, but they're far more limited.

02:28:40.000 Haven't they shown also that rigorous exercise is actually more effective in treating depression than antidepressants?

02:28:46.000 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.

02:28:51.000 I should introduce you to her.

02:28:53.000 She's a Chilean primatologist, basically the best person in the world, as far as I'm concerned.

02:28:57.000 She's a hardcore Chilean.

02:28:58.000 She's currently in some jungle somewhere.

02:29:00.000 Better than Mick Jagger's ex-wife?

02:29:02.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:29:02.000 I mean, I like Marianne Faithful, but Isabel is something else, right?

02:29:06.000 So Isabel, I have to make this my last point, but Isabel, so she's demonstrated, she's shown loads of things.

02:29:10.000 One of the really interesting things is nature.

02:29:13.000 So she's shown that Exercise is a massive, really powerful antidepressant.

02:29:18.000 But interestingly, exercise in nature is even more effective.

02:29:23.000 And her theory is, and I really like this, she did a lot of work with bonobos, both in zoos and in the wild.

02:29:29.000 And she's got really good stories about how bonobos basically bond by lesbian group sex.

02:29:34.000 And she shows how they pioneered, how they managed to create vibrators when they were in the zoo.

02:29:39.000 It's an amazing story.

02:29:41.000 Literally, she would give them buckets and they would find a way to turn it into a vibrator.

02:29:45.000 She was in awe of them, right?

02:29:47.000 And then have massive lesbian orgies with their vibrators.

02:29:49.000 And it was in a British zoo, so these polite British parrots would be like, Mummy, Mummy, what's happening?

02:29:55.000 And they'd be like, nothing, darling, come over here.

02:29:57.000 But Isabel's theory is, so animals go crazy in zoos a lot of the time, right?

02:30:02.000 Parrots rip out their feathers, horses start obsessively swaying, elephants will grind their tusks down to nothing.

02:30:11.000 And she basically argues, this is simplifying her argument, she says there's many things going on here, but that humans are being, animals deprived of their habitat feel like shit, and we are increasingly deprived of our habitat, the habitat we evolved in,

02:30:27.000 right?

02:30:28.000 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.

02:30:33.000 And people who move from one area without green space to an area with green space become much less depressed, right?

02:30:38.000 There's loads of research on this.

02:30:39.000 There's such an amazing study, Michigan State Prison, Just by accident, no one designed it this way.

02:30:46.000 One part of it looks out over just bare concrete, and one part of it looks out over lovely green space.

02:30:53.000 It was just random where you ended up, but the people who looked out over the concrete were 23% more likely to develop mental health problems.

02:31:00.000 Right?

02:31:00.000 So this thing about, as Isabel says, we are animals that were designed to move through nature.

02:31:07.000 If you are not an animal moving through nature, you are not a healthy human being.

02:31:11.000 You are not in your habitat.

02:31:13.000 You need to be in that habitat at least some of the time, right?

02:31:17.000 And, yeah, I mean, she's got...

02:31:19.000 Isabel has the best stories ever, so you should...

02:31:21.000 you would love her anyway.

02:31:22.000 I'm sure I would.

02:31:24.000 Both lesbian group sex stories and stories about how you can cure your depression with nature exposure.

02:31:30.000 Johan, thank you very much.

02:31:32.000 And one more time, the name of your book?

02:31:33.000 So the book is called Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions.

02:31:38.000 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.

02:31:48.000 You can take a quiz to see how much you know about depression and anxiety.

02:31:53.000 And the book has a Facebook page.

02:31:54.000 It's facebook.com slash thelostconnections.

02:31:57.000 And the other book we talked about is Chasing the Scream, which is about addiction.

02:32:00.000 You can find out more about that at www.chasingthescream.com.

02:32:05.000 Thank you very much.

02:32:10.000 I really enjoyed that, Joe.

02:32:10.000 Thank you so much.

02:32:11.000 That was fantastic.

02:32:12.000 Cheers.

02:32:14.000 Hooray!

02:32:14.000 I really enjoyed that, Joe.

02:32:15.000 We got into the proper meat of it, didn't we?

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 12, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1077 - Johann Hari

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