Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes - Get Off My Lawn #74 | Fed Up

00:06:15.000 in baltimore where they were giving people psychedelic drugs to see if that would work and i learned loads of things but i think you've gone to the part that's been to my surprise most controversial because i think in a way it's the most banal part of the book so one of the things i learned is uh it's simply not true that depression is caused by a spontaneous chemical imbalance in people's brains um that's not my doctor said that to you as a fact.

00:06:39.000 It wasn't like, here's what I think it might be.

00:06:41.000 It was just a fact that you were lacking serotonin and we needed to increase the serotonin.

00:06:47.000 Exactly.

00:06:47.000 And people all over the world were being told that in the 90s.

00:06:49.000 They're still being told that now it's shifted to other chemicals mostly, but they're still being told it's due to a spontaneous chemical imbalance in people's brains.

00:06:58.000 And yeah, it was really striking to me to learn that the leading experts on this say that's just not true, right?

00:07:04.000 Professor Andrew Scull at Princeton University says it is deeply misleading and unscientific, that's his phrase, to say depression is just by chemical imbalance.

00:07:13.000 Dr. David Healy, one of the leading experts in Britain, said you can't even say that story was discredited because it was never really credited.

00:07:20.000 There was never a time when half of the scientists in the field would have told you that.

00:07:24.000 That what happened, that story was promoted to us because it was the most congenial to the drug company PRs.

00:07:31.000 Now it's important to say the fact that depression isn't caused by a chemical imbalance, and in fact there are nine causes of it that I write about in the book, for which there is scientific evidence, none of which is a chemical imbalance, doesn't mean there's no value to chemical antidepressants.

00:07:44.000 And I think this is where some people have kind of willfully misunderstood what I was saying.

00:07:48.000 So we know the effects of chemical antidepressants.

00:07:50.000 They can be measured very well.

00:07:52.000 So depression is measured by something called the Hamilton scale, right?

00:07:57.000 And I've always felt sorry for whoever Hamilton was because he's only remembered for how miserable he makes everyone.

00:08:02.000 But anyway, the Hamilton scale goes from zero, where you'd be like dancing around after taking ecstasy, to 51 where you would be acutely suicidal, right?

00:08:11.000 And to give you a sense of movement on the Hamilton scale, if you improve your sleep patterns, you will move six points up the Hamilton scale, right?

00:08:19.000 And if your sleep patterns get worse.

00:08:21.000 12%, a big jump.

00:08:23.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:08:24.000 And if your sleep patterns get a lot worse, you would go six points down the Hamilton scale.

00:08:28.000 The average effect of chemical antidepressants, according to the best research by Professor Irving Kirsch at Harvard University, is they move you 1.8 points on the Hamilton scale, right?

00:08:38.000 So it's important to say that's an average.

00:08:40.000 So some people will have less, some people will have more.

00:08:43.000 Now, that's not nothing, right?

00:08:45.000 It's important to say that.

00:08:46.000 That's more than a placebo.

00:08:48.000 Pretty close.

00:08:48.000 That's 3.6%.

00:08:51.000 And sleeping changes 12%.

00:08:54.000 And with the cow, I'm sure the environment changes 20, 30%.

00:09:00.000 I'm sorry to interrupt you, but that is a crucial detail.

00:09:02.000 You wrote a book saying antidepressants aren't the be-all and end-all, and this Hamilton scale lists them as a 3.6% increase.

00:09:12.000 If I'm going to commit suicide, a 3.6% increase, I don't really see that talking me off the bridge.

00:09:20.000 I think you've read the right thing into it, Gavin, which is 3.6% is worth something when you're in acute pain.

00:09:26.000 It's not nothing.

00:09:26.000 It's important to say that.

00:09:28.000 But it doesn't solve the problem for most people, right?

00:09:30.000 So my argument is chemical antidepressants should absolutely remain one of the items on the menu.

00:09:35.000 They have real value.

00:09:37.000 They also have powerful side effects.

00:09:38.000 We should discuss.

00:09:39.000 I'm happy to do that if you want.

00:09:40.000 But they should never be the only thing on the menu.

00:09:43.000 They need to be much broader.

00:09:45.000 And part of that is about redefining what an antidepressant is.

00:09:47.000 So just to tell that cow story a little bit closer to the way it was told, but just closer to the way it was told to me, is, and this is something that really helped me to think differently about this.

00:09:58.000 So I spoke to this South African psychiatrist called Derek Sommerfeld.

00:10:02.000 And he was in Cambodia when chemical antidepressants were first introduced there, and I think it was 2001.

00:10:08.000 And the Cambodian doctors didn't know what they were, right? 0.76

00:10:12.000 So they asked him, and he explained, and they said, oh, we don't need them.

00:10:15.000 We've already got antidepressants.

00:10:17.000 And he said, what do you mean?

00:10:19.000 He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy or something, right?

00:10:23.000 So they told him a story.

00:10:25.000 They told him, like you said, there was a rice farmer in the fields that they knew who one day had stood on a landmine, had his leg blown off.

00:10:34.000 So they gave him an artificial limb.

00:10:36.000 He goes back to work in the rice fields, but it's apparently super painful to work underwater with an artificial limb.

00:10:42.000 I'm imagining it's pretty traumatic because he's been blown up.

00:10:45.000 And the guy just starts crying all the time, doesn't want to get out of bed, classic depression.

00:10:49.000 So they said to Derek, well, we gave him an antidepressant.

00:10:52.000 And he said, what did you do?

00:10:55.000 And they said, well, they basically described going and sitting with this guy, listening to him, realizing his pain made sense.

00:11:03.000 And they figured, well, if they bought him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer.

00:11:08.000 He wouldn't have to go into these fields where it was such a nightmare for him.

00:11:10.000 So they bought him a cow, and within a few weeks, his depression went away.

00:11:12.000 And they said to Derek, so you see, doctor, that cow was an antidepressant.

00:11:18.000 Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that it's due to a chemical imbalance in the brain, for which there was never a scientific consensus, and there certainly isn't now, that just sounds like a joke, right?

00:11:29.000 But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what has subsequently been discovered by a huge number of scientists.

00:11:34.000 It's now the position of the World Health Organization, the leading medical body in the world, which is if you're depressed and anxious, your pain makes sense, right?

00:11:42.000 You're not crazy, you're not biologically broken, you're not a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs, right?

00:11:49.000 Everyone listening to this knows you have innate physical needs, right?

00:11:54.000 You need food and water and shelter and clean air.

00:11:57.000 And if I took that away from you, you would be really f ⁇ ed up really fast, right? 1.00

00:12:01.000 There's equally strong evidence that human beings have natural psychological needs, right?

00:12:05.000 You've got to feel you belong.

00:12:07.000 You've got to feel your life has meaning.

00:12:08.000 You've got to feel you have autonomy and freedom.

00:12:11.000 You've got to feel that people see you and value you.

00:12:13.000 You've got to feel you've got a future that makes sense to you.

00:12:16.000 And our culture is good at lots of things.

00:12:18.000 I'm glad to be alive today.

00:12:20.000 But our culture has got less good at meeting a lot, not all, but a lot of these underlying psychological needs that people have.

00:12:27.000 And that is the main reason why we have a rising depression and anxiety epidemic.

00:12:31.000 Could it be that big pharma has too much of a financial incentive to allow any criticism?

00:12:37.000 I mean, you're watching Fox News and MSNBC and CNN, and they're taking pot shots at every corporation and everyone in society with, you know, the left is obviously biased to the left, the right's obviously biased to the right.

00:12:50.000 But one thing you don't see on the news is someone crapping on the family who is responsible for OxyContin.

00:12:58.000 And you go, there's an opioid epidemic.

00:13:00.000 Why is no one talking about it?

00:13:01.000 Then it cuts to the commercial and it says, Valototrex is please talk to your doctor, side effects include.

00:13:08.000 And you realize these guys aren't discussing big pharma because they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them.

00:13:14.000 I think there might be something in that.

00:13:15.000 I wouldn't want to go too far with it, but I think the it's not the only reason why this has happened, but I do think, look, it was established in court.

00:13:25.000 Elliot Spitzer, when he was the AG of New York State, took a case against the pharmaceutical companies for the way they had massively exaggerated the claims about the benefits of antidepressants.

00:13:36.000 And it was established in the court beyond doubt they had, and there was a massive payout as a result.

00:13:40.000 So I think the fact that they exaggerated the claims is really not beyond dispute now.

00:13:45.000 Now, I just want to stress that doesn't mean there's no value.

00:13:49.000 But if you want to really think, now, it's important to say to people, we need antidepressants.

00:13:53.000 If you understand antidepressants as something that reduces depression, right?

00:13:57.000 We have got a real depression and anxiety crisis.

00:13:59.000 It is not imaginary.

00:14:01.000 It's not in people's heads.

00:14:02.000 It's a really deep form of despair that's spreading across the culture.

00:14:06.000 And we do need things that deal with that.

00:14:08.000 Now, I think alongside chemical anti-depressants, we need things that more learn, like the lesson of the cow.

00:14:13.000 And I'll give you an example of something that, because all this can sound a bit weird and abstract to people if you don't apply it something very direct to them.

00:14:19.000 So I want to give a very direct example, as Muggle at Lost Connections does.

00:14:23.000 So I noticed that lots of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and their anxiety focuses around their work.

00:14:32.000 So I thought, well, let's start looking at the evidence about work.

00:14:35.000 Gallup did the most detailed study that's ever been done of how people in the United States and Britain think about their work.

00:14:42.000 And what it found was kind of striking.

00:14:44.000 13% of us like our work most of the time.

00:14:49.000 63% of people are what they called sleepwalking through their work, so they don't like it, they don't hate it, they kind of tolerate it.

00:14:55.000 And 24% of people hate their work, right?

00:14:58.000 So think about that.

00:15:00.000 That's 87% of people who don't like the thing they're doing most of the time.

00:15:04.000 Average person answers their first work email at 7.48 a.m. and clocks off at 7.15 p.m.

00:15:10.000 This is most of our waking lives and we don't like it, right?

00:15:13.000 You're almost twice as likely to hate your job as love your job. 0.98

00:15:16.000 And I started to think, well, could there be some relationship between that and the fact that so many people feel like shit, right? 0.99

00:15:22.000 So I started looking into this. 0.98

00:15:24.000 I discovered an Australian social scientist called Michael Marmot had done incredible research on this in the 1970s.

00:15:30.000 I got to know him.

00:15:31.000 So I can tell you how if you want, but just to give you the headline, he discovered the key factor in work that makes people depressed.

00:15:38.000 The key factor is if you feel controlled at work.

00:15:42.000 If you go into work and you feel you can't use your mind, you can't use your creativity, you're just doing what you're told, and you're like the equivalent of on a kind of conveyor belt, right?

00:15:50.000 The more you feel controlled, the more likely you are to become depressed.

00:15:54.000 Actually, the more you feel controlled, the more likely you are to have a stress-related heart attack as well.

00:15:58.000 Now, we all know that when we think about other societies, right?

00:16:00.000 It's one of the reasons why we know people in the Soviet Union were the most miserable people you can ever imagine, because they were controlled all the time, right?

00:16:08.000 I want to get that.

00:16:09.000 Oh, yeah, please.

00:16:12.000 And I actually misunderstood what Michael Marmot was saying when I first met him.

00:16:17.000 Because I thought he was saying, okay, so some people are going to get to have fancy jobs like you and me do, and then everyone else is going to be condemned to be miserable because there are going to be jobs, like, you know, my dad was a bus driver, my brother's a delivery guy, my sister's a nurse.

00:16:29.000 Is he just saying, but I kept going back to him, and it was only quite a while into it, I realized I was completely misunderstanding what he was saying.

00:16:37.000 It's not the work that makes you depressed.

00:16:40.000 It's being controlled at work.

00:16:41.000 And that can be changed.

00:16:43.000 So I went to Baltimore, met this woman called Meredith Keogh, who's part of this movement that's a really interesting experiment in how we do this differently.

00:16:50.000 So Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night, just sick with anxiety, right?

00:16:56.000 She had an office job. 0.99

00:16:57.000 It wasn't the worst office job in the world.

00:16:58.000 She wasn't being, you know, harassed or bullied.

00:17:01.000 But she couldn't bear the thought that her next 40 years of her life were going to be this, right?

00:17:06.000 You know, for so much of her waking life.

00:17:09.000 And one day with her husband, Josh, they did this quite bold thing.

00:17:12.000 Josh had worked in bike stores since he was a teenager.

00:17:16.000 And working in a bike store is obviously controlled.

00:17:18.000 It's pretty insecure work.

00:17:19.000 It's low-paid as well.

00:17:21.000 One day, Josh and his friends in the bike store had asked themselves, what does our boss actually do?

00:17:27.000 They lied to their boss.

00:17:28.000 He wasn't a bad guy.

00:17:29.000 But they thought, well, we fix all the bikes.

00:17:31.000 We do most of it.

00:17:31.000 They didn't actually like this experience of being controlled.

00:17:34.000 So they decided to set up a business that runs in a different way.

00:17:36.000 It's a democratic cooperative.

00:17:38.000 It's called Baltimore Bicycle Works.

00:17:40.000 And the way it works is they don't have a boss.

00:17:42.000 They take all the big decisions together.

00:17:44.000 They vote.

00:17:45.000 They review each other's work.

00:17:47.000 They share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks. 0.69

00:17:49.000 So, you know, no one gets stuck with all the shitty tasks. 0.62

00:17:52.000 And they share the profits.

00:17:54.000 And one of the things that was so fascinating going there, it's a really successful business, and speaking to them, which is completely compatible with what Professor Michael Marmot found, is how many of them talked about having been depressed and anxious before in their previous controlled work and not being depressed and anxious now.

00:18:10.000 And it's important to say, they fixed bikes before, they fixed bikes now.

00:18:13.000 It's not like they left their jobs and became Beyoncé's backing singers.

00:18:18.000 But what had changed was not the work, it was whether they were controlled in a kind of humiliating way at their work.

00:18:24.000 And as Josh put it to me, there's no reason why any business should work this way, should work in this depressing, controlled-down way, right?

00:18:31.000 How many people do you know who would feel better if they knew that tomorrow they were going into a workplace where they set the priorities with their colleagues, where the boss was accountable to them, where the boss was elected if there has to be a boss?

00:18:51.000 Now, I would say that is an antidepressant, right?

00:18:55.000 That's dealing with the reason why people are depressed.

00:18:58.000 It's a big antidepressant.

00:19:00.000 It's not like a pill, but I think it's part of the shift we've got to make.

00:19:04.000 I have a bone to pick with you, Johan.

00:19:07.000 And as a gay man, you'll appreciate it because it's a big bone. 1.00

00:19:11.000 Exactly. 0.96

00:19:11.000 I like a bone. 0.96

00:19:13.000 Big, big, gigantic bone.

00:19:16.000 Just trying to browse me to distract me more.

00:19:18.000 I'm trying to disarm you with lust.

00:19:24.000 In this story with the Baltimore Bike Club, there seems to be an underpinning of sort of a socialist Collective.

00:19:30.000 We need a socialist collective.

00:19:32.000 And that rubs me the wrong way as a free market capitalist because I honestly believe, I agree with you, that you need to be empowered to be happy.

00:19:40.000 And I honestly believe that that happens more in capitalism than any other system.

00:19:47.000 And by you focusing on like an American bike shop, where, by the way, this guy had amassed all these bicycle mechanics, and then they leave.

00:19:56.000 I mean, we have non-competes to avoid this ripoff, and they start their own.

00:20:02.000 And it looks like a utopia at first glance.

00:20:04.000 But I think big business is, in its ideal form, and that's usually what it is, or I shouldn't say usually, but that's often what it is, is a self-empowerment.

00:20:13.000 And we talked about this before, Frank Mars, he has a big banner at Mars Bars.

00:20:18.000 It says, make your own decisions.

00:20:20.000 If the axe falls, the axe falls hard. 0.72

00:20:22.000 So I feel like when you're going into corporate America and saying, oh, it's the corporate system, I feel like you're looking at supermodels and you're saying, a lot of these supermodels look like crap because they let their bangs get sweaty and they get matted to their forehead. 0.53

00:20:36.000 And I'm sitting here going, yeah, but they're supermodels. 1.00

00:20:40.000 Like, there's a lot of uglier people out there. 0.83

00:20:42.000 And the reason I bring this up is to say, I think Brits are more depressed. 0.97

00:20:48.000 I think Canadians are more depressed than Americans.

00:20:51.000 And I think it's because they have a more socialist system.

00:20:55.000 And one more thing.

00:20:58.000 The proof of that is with Brits, the sentence, it's in all the Mike Lee movies where he says, well, do you want to be middle class?

00:21:08.000 And the working class says, oh, I was manu when I was a kid.

00:21:12.000 My dad was manu.

00:21:13.000 My grandpa was a coal miner.

00:21:15.000 I'm proud to be.

00:21:16.000 And they have this sedentary lack of ambition.

00:21:20.000 And I think that, with also the rain, makes them more depressed.

00:21:25.000 Look at how addicted they got to MDMA.

00:21:29.000 I think there's a few things to separate out there.

00:21:30.000 So one is a system where 87% of people don't like the thing they're doing most of the time cannot be described as a free system.

00:21:38.000 Now, it can be freer than other systems.

00:21:40.000 It's much freer than the Soviet Union, for example, which was a dungeon. 0.88

00:21:43.000 But wait, where was that 87%?

00:21:46.000 What country was that?

00:21:48.000 It was in the United States.

00:21:50.000 So what is it in Canada and what is it in Britain?

00:21:52.000 I think it was pretty similar.

00:21:53.000 I can't remember the figures off the top of my head, but it was pretty similar.

00:21:56.000 The attitude towards work is pretty similar across the Western world.

00:21:58.000 I think there was kind of mild, but I haven't looked at it in a while, so I don't want to get it wrong, but I don't think there was a huge variation.

00:22:07.000 I think the important thing to say about that is you're absolutely right to put a very high premium on freedom, but I think you're putting the locus of freedom on the wrong institution.

00:22:16.000 The locus of freedom should be on the individual and the group, not on the corporation, right?

00:22:20.000 Freedom for corporations is what we have now, and particularly in the United States where there are basically no labor unions.

00:22:28.000 And actually, that's created a system where you have 87% of people not liking the thing they're doing most of the time.

00:22:34.000 But it's important to also say, democratic cooperatives are part of market competition, right?

00:22:44.000 I believe, I'm not a communist, right?

00:22:47.000 I think there should be market competition.

00:22:49.000 I don't think it should be everything in the economy.

00:22:51.000 I'm a social democrat.

00:22:52.000 I think there should be state provision of certain things.

00:22:55.000 We probably disagree on the ratio that should be provided by the state.

00:22:58.000 But I believe very strongly that market competition should exist.

00:23:01.000 But the question is, what should the market competition be between?

00:23:04.000 Should it be between this institution, between corporations, which happen to make people really miserable and unhappy?

00:23:11.000 Or should it be between democratic cooperatives, which are a different form of providing market competition?

00:23:19.000 Democratic cooperatives are cute and they're fun for a little soup shop or a cafe, but when you're trying to sequence the genome and accrue data of an entire nation's DNA, you need big corporations for better or for worse.

00:23:35.000 Cornell University did a really good study of this that found that the more democratic an institution was, the faster it grew.

00:23:42.000 Actually, the more democratic corporations they looked at grew four times faster than the kind of top-down ones.

00:23:47.000 I agree.

00:23:48.000 That sounds reasonable.

00:23:49.000 People are much more committed to democratic institutions.

00:23:54.000 I mean, you know, for such obvious reasons, it hardly needs to be said.

00:23:57.000 People at Baltimore Bicycle Works are much more motivated than they were in their previous store.

00:24:02.000 And I think this comes back to this question about underlying needs and how they cause depression, right?

00:24:12.000 I don't think the isolated, and this is something where we probably would disagree, I want to say it as fairly as I can because I don't want to mischaracterize anything.

00:24:23.000 I don't, so systems, how would I put it?

00:24:27.000 Our societies are the loneliest societies that have ever existed.

00:24:31.000 This can be measured.

00:24:31.000 It's been measured by Professor John Cassiopo.

00:24:34.000 Wait a minute.

00:24:34.000 Our societies, meaning what, Western societies?

00:24:37.000 Yeah, yeah, particularly the United States and Britain.

00:24:40.000 More than Indonesia, more than Rwanda? 0.95

00:24:44.000 Well, certainly more than in Rwanda, where they live in a highly communal way.

00:24:47.000 But if you look at Professor John Cassioppo, who's done this research, he's proven that loneliness causes depression and anxiety.

00:24:56.000 I can tell you how if you want.

00:24:58.000 And there's very strong evidence that loneliness has massively increased in the last, well, over the last 50 years in particular.

00:25:06.000 So there's a study, for example, that asked the average American, how many close friends do you have or you could call on in a crisis?

00:25:13.000 And the average answer when they started doing it many years ago was five.

00:25:17.000 So not the most average, the most common answer when they started doing it five years ago, many years ago was five.

00:25:23.000 Now, the most common answer is none.

00:25:26.000 It's not shut.

00:25:27.000 Yeah.

00:25:28.000 You Brits always do this. 1.00

00:25:28.000 But wait a minute. 1.00

00:25:30.000 You always take some terrible crap country and say, well, you know, we could learn a lot from them. 0.97

00:25:36.000 I actually had my buddy Penny up in Essex. 0.97

00:25:38.000 He goes, our system is so archaic with mother, father, cousin, uncle.

00:25:43.000 In Africa, where his brother lives, everything is, there is no mother-father. 1.00

00:25:48.000 The entire nation rules.

00:25:50.000 And I go, yeah, but they don't have shoes.

00:25:53.000 So please acknowledge that the West is the best.

00:25:57.000 Just because there's one worst thing, like our supermodels have matted bangs, doesn't mean that the third world or anywhere in the East can hold a candle to the West. 0.69

00:26:08.000 But Gavin, right?

00:26:10.000 25 people being on a psychiatric drug in the U.S. suggests something pretty deep has gone wrong.

00:26:14.000 Now, there are loads of things I love about the United States.

00:26:16.000 Well, that's also a sign of affluence.

00:26:19.000 I'm sure people in China and Beijing would love to be on antidepressants.

00:26:25.000 They can't.

00:26:27.000 I think there is good evidence that, so we know the more individualistic and lonely a society becomes, the higher its rates of depression become.

00:26:36.000 We are a very unusual culture now.

00:26:38.000 There's many good things, great things about our culture where you and I would completely agree.

00:26:42.000 Well, you're the best.

00:26:44.000 I think that's too simplistic.

00:26:46.000 We're really great at lots of things.

00:26:47.000 I'm a gay man.

00:26:48.000 I'm really, really glad to be living in the Western world today.

00:26:51.000 I don't want to throw you off a roof.

00:26:52.000 I want to buy you a beer.

00:26:53.000 Yeah, there are loads of things where you and I would agree.

00:26:57.000 But there are also, I mean, think about how we treat the elderly is absolutely obscene, right?

00:27:03.000 Everyone in the world is completely stunned.

00:27:06.000 Everyone else in the world is completely stunned.

00:27:07.000 I'll give you an example.

00:27:09.000 We're off at a tangent now.

00:27:10.000 We're straying from the book, which is brilliant, by the way.

00:27:13.000 But where do they treat the elderly better?

00:27:17.000 Literally everywhere.

00:27:18.000 I mean, look at, if you explain, speak to any immigrant to the United States and ask them about retirement homes and what people in their home country think of retirement homes.

00:27:29.000 When someone they love becomes old, they look after them. 0.79

00:27:32.000 They don't abandon them in a fucking literally piss and sh ⁇ filled place where I forget the figure, but something like half of elderly people in retirement homes in Britain are drugged with antipsychotics to shut them up, right? 0.95

00:27:49.000 The idea that what we do to elderly people is we shunt them away and then they express their distress. 0.99

00:27:55.000 We drug them with antipsychotics.

00:27:56.000 That's a valid beef.

00:27:57.000 I will give you that.

00:27:58.000 And there's been studies with these centenarians where they say when these grandfathers around their grandkids, not only does it thwart senility and Alzheimer's, but there's cases where they had Alzheimer's or dementia and they were pulled out of it by being around their grandkids.

00:28:15.000 Yeah, so this comes back to depression in a really good way, actually.

00:28:18.000 One of the things we know is human beings are social animals.

00:28:22.000 The reason why you and I are alive is because our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing.

00:28:28.000 They were really good at cooperating, right?

00:28:31.000 They weren't bigger than the animals they took down.

00:28:33.000 They were much better at working together.

00:28:36.000 Every instinct human beings have is to be part of a tribe.

00:28:40.000 Just like bees need a hive, humans need a tribe. 0.93

00:28:43.000 We are the first humans ever to try to live without tribes, right? 0.99

00:28:47.000 And if you do.

00:28:48.000 And very recently, too.

00:28:50.000 Yeah, very recently.

00:28:51.000 Professor John Cassioppo, the loneliness expert at the University of Chicago, is an amazing neuroscientist.

00:28:57.000 You know, explained to me, think about in the circumstances where human beings evolved, if you were separated from the group, you were anxious and depressed for a really fucking good reason. 0.93

00:29:07.000 You were about to die. 0.79

00:29:08.000 That's the instinct we have when we are acutely lonely.

00:29:11.000 The instinct, he demonstrated that being acutely lonely releases as much stress hormone as being punched in the face by a stranger, right?

00:29:21.000 That's how stressful it is to be lonely.

00:29:23.000 And this is a huge driver of our depression and anxiety.

00:29:27.000 And I was really interested in looking at antidepressants that relate to that.

00:29:32.000 So this is, and it goes back to your question about Big Pharma in a way as well.

00:29:35.000 So there's a doctor called Sam Everington in London who was really uncomfortable.

00:29:40.000 He's a doctor in East London.

00:29:42.000 He ran a doctor's surgery, co-ran a doctor's surgery, and patients kept coming to him who were depressed and anxious.

00:29:48.000 And he felt really bad because he'd been told in his medical training, even though he knew the science doesn't say this, to tell them you've got a chemical imbalance in your brain and just drug them.

00:29:57.000 Like me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants, but he just thought this is inadequate to the scale of, this is not dealing with the problem in front of me, right?

00:30:05.000 This is blunting some of the symptoms.

00:30:06.000 There might be some planes for that.

00:30:08.000 So he decided to pioneer this different approach.

00:30:10.000 I'll give you an example of one of his patients who I got to know well, a woman called Lisa Cunningham.

00:30:14.000 She comes to Sam.

00:30:15.000 She'd been shut away in her home, crippled with depression and anxiety for seven years.

00:30:21.000 And Sam said to her, look, I'll carry on giving you these drugs if you want. 0.99

00:30:24.000 I'm also going to prescribe for you to take part in a group.

00:30:27.000 So there was an area behind the doctor's surgery that they called Dog Sh ⁇ Alley, which gives you a sense of what it was like.

00:30:32.000 It was a bit of scrub land where dogs used to sh ⁇ .

00:30:35.000 He said to Lisa, what I'm going to do, we're going to support you.

00:30:38.000 I want you to come twice a week and you, with a group of other depressed and anxious people, we're going to find a way to turn this alley into something beautiful, right?

00:30:46.000 First meeting, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety.

00:30:49.000 She turns up, all these jangly, anxious, depressed, depressed and anxious people, and they start talking over the weeks. 0.99

00:30:58.000 They have something to talk about that's not how shit they feel. 0.97

00:31:02.000 And they started to teach themselves gardening. 0.99

00:31:04.000 They didn't know anything about gardening.

00:31:05.000 They were inner-city people.

00:31:07.000 They start to learn gardening over time.

00:31:09.000 They start to listen to each other's problems.

00:31:11.000 They start to solve each other's problems because that's what humans do when they get together in groups.

00:31:15.000 The way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, they began to bloom.

00:31:19.000 There was a study in Norway.

00:31:20.000 This approach is called social prescribing.

00:31:22.000 There was a study in Norway that found it was more than twice as effective on the Hamilton scale for depressed and anxious people as chemical antidepressants.

00:31:32.000 I think the reason is obvious.

00:31:33.000 It was dealing with the actual reason why they were depressed in the first place, right?

00:31:37.000 It's a very different way of thinking about depression and anxiety because what we do is we tell depressed and anxious people, this is a pathology in your brain.

00:31:45.000 There's something wrong with you.

00:31:46.000 You're broken.

00:31:47.000 And what I learned from all these different approaches that are working better is they tell people, you're not broken, you're not crazy.

00:31:54.000 You've got human needs.

00:31:56.000 They're not being met.

00:31:57.000 will help you find ways to get those means net.

00:32:00.000 Do you see what I mean about that being a different...

00:32:02.000 By the way, our guests are usually on for five minutes.

00:32:06.000 This is an unprecedented episode.

00:32:09.000 Dave, how are we doing for time?

00:32:12.000 I'm going to say we're at about 40 minutes now.

00:32:15.000 Okay, well, we're out of time.

00:32:17.000 I just want to throw one last thing at you.

00:32:19.000 Sure.

00:32:20.000 A lot of these things, and I think you're right, the six friends you would call becoming zero is daunting, a shocking statistic.

00:32:29.000 I blame social media.

00:32:30.000 I think it's unnatural.

00:32:32.000 We have all these friends on Facebook that aren't really our friends.

00:32:34.000 You wouldn't call them if, say, your dad died or something.

00:32:38.000 You don't know them well enough.

00:32:40.000 and it seems like the more we adhere to tradition and sort of our caveman values and keep grandpa around, the more we benefit, the less depressed we are.

00:32:48.000 You ready for the awkward elephant in the room?

00:32:51.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:32:52.000 Homosexuals don't get married and have kids. 1.00

00:32:56.000 And you said Mormons have a disproportionately high thing, high level of joy.

00:33:03.000 I've noticed, and I'm not one of them, but young Catholic Christians who get married when they're 20 and just have a brood, they seem to be the happiest people I've met. 0.97

00:33:12.000 So is it possible, and believe me, I think you're born gay. 1.00

00:33:15.000 I don't think it's evil or anything. 0.98

00:33:17.000 But is it possible that gays suffer more depression because for whatever reason, I see them as like albinos. 1.00

00:33:24.000 They were just born a bit different. 0.52

00:33:26.000 For whatever reason, they're sort of from birth knocked off kilter from the cave instincts and it f ⁇ s with their synapses.

00:33:35.000 Oh, but Gavin, you missed the last 15 years.

00:33:37.000 Gay people just fought a massive fight so they can get married and have kids.

00:33:40.000 You missed the boys.

00:33:41.000 Yes, seven of them.

00:33:43.000 I mean, it's not, it's very uncommon. 0.82

00:33:46.000 But also, I think what that misses is, so huge numbers of gay people have children, but more importantly, the idea that I want to just say something about social media as well, don't let me forget, but the idea that gay people who don't have children are not involved in the raising of children, I think is crazy.

00:34:02.000 We are the first people ever to try to raise children in human history as isolated individuals, right?

00:34:09.000 And isolated couples.

00:34:12.000 Children have always been raised collectively and communally.

00:34:15.000 I think one of the reasons why, Because horrible has to have 70 minutes outside or whatever it is, right?

00:34:29.000 So that's because you've got an isolated parent, not part of a community.

00:34:33.000 They're fighting to let their children outdoors.

00:34:35.000 That is very recent.

00:34:36.000 That was not life for your mother or my mother, right?

00:34:39.000 That's so recent.

00:34:40.000 And I think, for example, so I don't have children.

00:34:43.000 I'm not gonna have children, so I'm presumably part of Well, I think the norm is massively shifting, actually.

00:34:49.000 I think among my gay friends as part of it.

00:34:51.000 This is the only thing that you haven't been scientifically sound about and you're being more emotional.

00:34:57.000 But what I would say is, I absolutely am involved in the raising of children, right?

00:35:01.000 I've got three nephews and a niece who I'm incredibly close to.

00:35:04.000 I speak to every day.

00:35:06.000 I'm massively involved in their lives.

00:35:08.000 My friend whose husband died in terrible circumstances, I'm incredibly close to her children.

00:35:13.000 There's this lovely, Robert Putnam has this nice, political scientist, noticed this shift.

00:35:19.000 In the 1950s, if you look at the phrase, our kids, when people talked about our kids, what they meant was the country's children.

00:35:26.000 That phrase meant everyone's children.

00:35:28.000 Now, the phrase, our kids, means your biological children, my biological children, right?

00:35:34.000 And I think we need to go back to this idea of thinking about everyone's kids.

00:35:37.000 Can I tell you one last thing about social media, which I think you find interesting because you mentioned that I totally.

00:35:41.000 So this really fascinated me.

00:35:42.000 I went to, I wanted to understand exactly what you were saying about.

00:35:46.000 Is it about social media?

00:35:47.000 I went to the first ever internet rehab center.

00:35:49.000 It's in Washington State.

00:35:50.000 It's called Restart Washington. 0.79

00:35:52.000 And after a bit, first thing I did when I was there, I realized what a prick I'd become.

00:35:56.000 I arrived there.

00:35:57.000 It's in the woods in the middle of nowhere.

00:35:58.000 I arrived there.

00:36:00.000 The first thing I did was look at my phone and feel really pissed off that I didn't have cell phone reception yet.

00:36:06.000 I think that might be the crux of this whole book.

00:36:09.000 I'm addicted too. 0.98

00:36:11.000 These things are separating us from each other, and they're turning us into these isolated, depressed people, and then we're medicating and getting back on our fucking phones. 0.91

00:36:21.000 I think you're onto something, but I think it's a bit more complicated than that. 0.85

00:36:24.000 And I learned this there.

00:36:25.000 So the woman who runs this rehab center is called Hilary Cash, amazing person, doctor. 0.99

00:36:30.000 And I spent a lot of time there with her and with these patients there.

00:36:33.000 And one of the things I thought was so interesting that emerged from kind of talking to her and thinking about it, you've got to think at the moment in history the internet arrives, right?

00:36:41.000 So it starts, comes along the late 90s, early 2000s for most of us, right?

00:36:46.000 And what's interesting is a lot of the trends we're talking about, like massive increase in loneliness, for example, had already massively been in place for several decades before.

00:36:56.000 They've been rising and rising and rising.

00:36:58.000 But what happens is the internet arrives in the middle of this disconnection and it looks like the things we've lost, right?

00:37:07.000 It gives you Facebook friends in place of.

00:37:11.000 Right, like porn does. 1.00

00:37:12.000 Porn gives you all these women that want to have sex with you. 0.99

00:37:14.000 Facebook gives you all these friends that want to hang out with you. 0.99

00:37:17.000 Instagram gives you this colorful life that you're not having.

00:37:20.000 It's so interesting you said that because that was exactly the analogy I started to think of.

00:37:23.000 That the relationship between social media and social life is like the relationship between porn and sex, right?

00:37:28.000 I'm not anti-porn.

00:37:29.000 I look at it sometimes. 0.84

00:37:31.000 But if all of your sex life was porn, you would be constantly frustrated and angry because your deeper needs would not be being met.

00:37:38.000 In the same way, social media does not meet your deeper needs, right?

00:37:42.000 In the same way, you know, you spend an hour looking at porn, you don't feel sated and valued the way you do after sex, right?

00:37:48.000 You spend an hour on Facebook, you don't feel like you've been seen and heard and you've seen and heard someone else that you do if you sit with someone for an hour.

00:37:55.000 And I think, so partly.

00:37:57.000 Go ahead.

00:37:58.000 We're playing the music at the Academy Awards. 1.00

00:38:01.000 Well, people can read the fucking book then. 0.96

00:38:04.000 Anyone who wants any more information about it can go to www.thelostconnections.com where they can figure out where to buy the book, the audio book. 0.98

00:38:12.000 They can hear what loads of people have said about it.

00:38:14.000 We'll have the URL at the bottom of the screen.

00:38:16.000 Congratulations on being the only guest in the history of the show that dominated the entire show.

00:38:22.000 This is the first.

00:38:23.000 I really enjoyed talking to you despite the fact that you missed the whole of Gay History for the last 15 years. 0.92

00:38:28.000 It was a real pleasure, Devin.

00:38:30.000 Thanks, buddy.

00:38:31.000 Let's make you a regular on the show.

00:38:32.000 I'd love to have you back.

00:38:34.000 I'd love that.

00:38:34.000 Cheers, Gavin.

00:38:35.000 I really appreciate it.

00:38:36.000 Cheers, Johan.

00:38:42.000 So speaking quite simply, Johan never said don't take antidepressants.

00:38:46.000 He said they only represent 1.8 on the scale of happiness.

00:38:51.000 That's 3.6% improvement of your life.

00:38:54.000 Why don't you change your environment?

00:38:56.000 That has a much bigger chance to improve your life.

00:38:59.000 I love this Subject because no one talks about the dangers of pharmaceuticals because they want ads from big pharma.

00:39:05.000 We don't have ads from big pharma, so we can dish on the trouble with drugs.

Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes - January 31, 2018

Get Off My Lawn #74 | Fed Up

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