#142 — Addiction, Depression, and a Meaningful Life
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Summary
Johan Hari is the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream, which is being adapted into a feature film. He has been twice-named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International, UK, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, and many other journals. His TED Talk, Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong, has more than 20 million views, and his most recent book is Lost Connections, uncovering the real causes of Depression and the unexpected solutions. In this episode, we talk about the dynamics of addiction and depression, and how this leads us to talk about politics and the state of the world, and humanity s search for meaning. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, are made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here. You'll get access to all sorts of great resources, including our newest podcast, Making Sense Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts, including Audible, iTunes, and Podchaser. Thanks for listening to Making Sense. -Sam Harris Make Sense is a podcast that helps you understand the world around you, and help make it a little bit more beautiful and less scary than you're going to be in real life. Thank you for listening, again and again, again, thank you for being a friend of the making sense Podcasts. - Thank you, Sarah and I hope you re having a good day. - Sarah and Jonathon Hari. - Jonathon and Jonothynne - Sarah and Jonathan and Jonestown, ~ < + & Jonestrode And Jonothorne Thankyou, Jonothoree and Jonellis . Thanks, Jonofrode & Jonofroe AND Jonothode , etc. & @ # & so on & , etc., etc., (p & etc., & ) & ) - & Johnonoree & Co, etc., and so on, etc. & etc, etc, etc, & etc. - etc.. ... :) CHASING THE SCARTER AND THE PODCAST, & THE MAKING MENTIONED
Transcript
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Johan is the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream, which is being adapted
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He has been twice-named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International, UK.
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He's written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and many other journals.
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His TED Talk, Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong, has more than 20 million
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And his most recent book is Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and
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And we talk about both his recent books, Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections.
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So we mostly speak about the dynamics of addiction and depression, but this leads us to talk about
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politics and the state of the world and humanity's search for meaning.
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Anyway, Johan is interested in many things, and I was very happy to get him on the podcast.
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You're one of the very few people I know who said my name right first time.
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I once waited for six hours in an emergency room because they were calling for Johan Hari
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I think what happened is I noticed you wrote a review of my first book, The End of Faith,
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I thought I got a feeling we met through Richard Dawkins, but that might be a completely
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But I mean, you probably, you seem, you must have been 14 when you wrote that.
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I've got a friend who gives a baby, and for some reason, babies always react positively
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to me, and she thinks it's because babies think I'm their king when they see me.
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You have a new book out that I haven't read, but I believe I have the gist from seeing some
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of your public utterances, but they seem clearly connected.
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The first book, Chasing the Scream, was a call to sanity with respect to the war on
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And now you have this new book, Lost Connections on Depression, right?
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And it seems to me that the connection there, correct me if I'm wrong, is that you're arguing
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that we are not just bags of chemicals that can be best thought of as suffering chemical
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imbalances with respect to addiction and depression.
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There's much more to be understood about our circumstance to account for both of these
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And while it seems to me that you're often assumed to be discounting any neurophysiological
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understanding of these problems, I don't think you're doing that in either case.
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But neurophysiology isn't the whole language game we need to play with respect to talking
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about these problems and talking about solutions.
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So I wanted to understand addiction because we had a lot of addiction in my family.
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One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being
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But as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family.
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So I ended up for my book, Chasing the Scream, going on this big journey all over the world
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to try to figure this out and to look at the war on drugs more generally.
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And I think the thing in that that led me to the second book was what I learned about
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So biology is an important part of both addiction and depression.
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With all mental health problems, there's a very broad scientific consensus.
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There are biological causes like your genes and brain changes.
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There are psychological causes, how you think about yourself.
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And there are social causes, your environment and how we live together.
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And they play out in all mental health problems to some degree.
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So you think about something like dementia, right?
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Dementia has clearly got a very heavy biological component.
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But even with dementia, we know your psychology can slow it down significantly if you speak
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And we know your environment can have a massive role in slowing it down.
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People who are socially connected, have a strong sense of meaning and purpose, can develop
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So one thing that surprised me is what I learned about addiction in relation to that.
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And you and I talked about this a few times before.
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But I think about this, it was a real moment that changed my life.
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It made me realize I had misunderstood even what I thought I'd seen in front of me with
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So if you'd said to me when I started doing the research for Chasing the Scream, what
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causes, for example, heroin addiction, I would have looked at you like you were an idiot.
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And I would have said, well, the clue's in the name, dummy, right?
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Obviously, heroin addiction is caused by heroin.
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For 100 years, we've told this heavily biological story about addiction, which is that addiction
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We think, you know, I would have thought if we'd kidnapped the first 20 people to walk past this
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hotel and I would have injected them all with heroin every day for a month, like a villain
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At the end of that month, they would all have been heroin addicts for a simple reason that
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there are these chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically
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And I actually learned that while chemical hooks are real, and I can talk about the real
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role of them, and it's important to stress they're real.
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Actually, I went and interviewed a wonderful man in Vancouver called Professor Bruce Alexander,
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who's really changed how we think about addiction.
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It led to some really amazing changes all over the world.
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So Professor Alexander explained to me the story we've got in our heads that addiction
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is caused just by the chemical hooks comes from a series of experiments that were done
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Your listeners can try them at home if they feel a bit sadistic.
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You take a rat, you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles.
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The other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine.
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If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always
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You might remember the famous ad in the 80s, the Partnership for Drug-Free America advert
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that showed this experiment and said, you know, saying like, it will happen to you.
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But in the 70s, Professor Alexander came along and said, well, hang on a minute.
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You put the rat alone in an empty cage where it's got nothing that makes life meaningful
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So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats, right?
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Anything a rat can want in life that a rat finds meaningful, it's there in Rat Park.
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And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water.
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In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water very much.
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So when rats don't have the things that make life meaningful, you get almost 100% compulsive
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When they do have the things that make life meaningful, they don't develop problematic
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And there's lots of human examples of this that I'm sure we'll get to.
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But for me, the core of this is I realized that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety.
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As you tightly rightly put out, it doesn't mean there aren't real biological dimensions to
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There's biological, psychological and social aspects.
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But I realized how much I had underestimated the role of these social aspects.
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And when I started talking about this all over the world, and that line got a lot of
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traction, the opposite of addiction is connection, people totally reasonably started saying to
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I'd written about how Portugal had taken the lesson of Rat Park and applied it to their
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I guess it was this mystery that was hanging over me, which was partly what does connection
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And I was thinking about that through these two other mysteries that were really paying
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Depression and anxiety have increased here in the United States and across the Western
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And loads of indicators of despair have been increasing, suicide, addiction, and so on.
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And I want to figure out why, partly because I myself have been quite depressed.
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So I ended up going on this journey and I realized there was a real, excuse the pun,
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connection between the mystery I was trying to understand with addiction and the mystery
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I was trying to understand with depression and anxiety.
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Just to seize on the last data you referenced, do you recall how much, what the metrics are
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and how much depression, anxiety, and suicide have gone up?
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With depression, it's, depression and anxiety, it's hard to measure for several reasons.
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What we can measure relatively easily is reported depression and anxiety.
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Those are probably not the best figures in the sense that for two reasons, there's been a
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significant decrease in stigma, which means more people are willing to come forward.
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Also, because we've got much lower threshold treatment for depression, right?
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It used to be, if you think about when, you know, my grandmother was the age I am now,
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But if she had, the only treatments they had were really very potent things that kind of
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Now, obviously, someone can go to the doctor, they can be given much kind of, still very powerful
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and potent drugs, but much lower, it's much easier to get a hold of, and there's much less weight
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put around taking those drugs, partly because they're still potent, but they're less potent
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People describing themselves as depressed is important.
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The reason why I feel fairly confident that depression has risen is because when I went
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all over the world, interviewed the leading experts about this, I learned that there's
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scientific evidence for nine causes of depression and anxiety.
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Generally, people, when they go to their doctors, are told a very simplistic story.
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I mean, when I was a teenager, I went to my doctor, and I said that I had this feeling like
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pain was kind of leaking out of me, and I couldn't control it, I couldn't regulate it.
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And my doctor said to me, well, we know why people feel this way.
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There's a chemical called serotonin in people's brains.
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So I started taking an antidepressant that's marketed in the US as Paxil.
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I felt significantly better for a few months, really a lot better.
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And then this feeling of pain started to come back.
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I kept being given higher and higher doses until for 13 years, I was taking the Max
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one possible dose and really believing this story that it was just about serotonin, which
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was leaving me rather confused about why I kept this depression was coming back.
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But what I learned is there's, in fact, scientific evidence for nine causes.
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Two of them are indeed biological, although I don't think a chemical imbalance is the right
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And lots of those factors, those factors that we know cause depression and anxiety, have
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So given that we know that they cause depression and anxiety, I'm sure we'll get to them.
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And given we know they've been rising, given we know they cause depression and anxiety,
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And given that significantly more people are describing themselves as depressed and anxious,
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I think you can reasonably put all that evidence together and say there has been a real
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I mean, it's extraordinary fact that when you put together suicide and opioid deaths, average
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white male life expectancy has fallen for the first time in the peacetime history of the
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So there are all sorts of indicators of depression for which we have very robust numbers, which
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I think, which not coincidentally are clustering together in the same places, right?
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So why is, if depression was just a chemical imbalance in the brain, if addiction was just
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a response to accidental chemical hooks, why would we see that depression clusters in
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the same places as suicide, in the same places as addiction, in the same places as antidepressant
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The fact that these indicators in the same places as support for President Trump, interestingly,
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in a lot of them, we wouldn't see these things clustering together if they weren't densely
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Well, some of those things are clearly causally related.
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So if you're depressed and you're being prescribed antidepressants or you're addicted to opioids
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and suffering the consequences of that, that's a cluster of problems and subsequent dysfunction.
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Clinical depression begets all kinds of other dysfunction in your career and your relationships.
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So it is that you do have a chicken and the egg phenomenon that you have to tease apart
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I think it helps if we see it in the context of clustering with something else.
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And this is something that unites a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that
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So everyone listening to your podcast knows they have natural physical needs, right?
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Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air.
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If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast.
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But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs,
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You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose.
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You need to feel that people see you and value you.
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You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense.
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There's a whole range of things that I'm thrilled to be alive now.
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My ancestors in many ways had Irish peasants and Swiss peasants had significantly worse lives
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But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological
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And while it's certainly not the only thing that's going on, I think it's the thing that
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This is the loneliest society there's ever been.
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There's a study that asks Americans, how many close friends do you have that you could turn
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And when they started doing it years ago, the most common answer was five.
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Today, the most common answer, not the average, but the most common answer is none.
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There are more people who have nobody to turn to than any other option.
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This is part of an enormous array of social science that shows there's been an explosion
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And I spent a lot of time talking about this with an amazing man called Professor John
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Cassiopo at the University of Chicago, who sadly just died.
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He was the leading expert in the world on loneliness.
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And I remember him saying to me, you know, why are we alive?
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In part, it's because our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one
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They weren't, in a lot of cases, bigger than the animals they took down.
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They weren't, in a lot of cases, faster than the animals they took down.
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They were much better at banding together into tribes and cooperating.
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Just like bees evolved to need a hive, humans evolved to need a tribe.
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And if you think about those circumstances where we evolved, if you were separated from the
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tribe, you were anxious and depressed for a really good reason, right?
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Those are the physical responses we still have to feeling isolated.
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Yet we are the first humans ever to try to disband our tribes and tell ourselves that we
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And it's a key factor in why we're so distressed.
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One issue is there are no bright lines between biology and psychology and social phenomenon
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At every point, it is coherent to think about an individual as being entirely the inheritor
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of whatever neurophysiological states are being kindled on his brain as a result of all of the
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influences and the underlying genetic propensity he's got to respond to those influences.
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So what you have is your brain and its states in each moment producing the character of your
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And the cash value of any cultural meme or presence or lack of healthy relationships, anything
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that's getting in, is getting in by virtue of making some impression physiologically on
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So it's always tempting to think the nearest lever to hand is making a change directly in
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So if we could get a pill that would truly cancel depression, it's not incoherent to think that
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Because depression, you know, to arrive and be expressed has to be a matter of what your
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I mean, that's true with any other state of mind that you could experience.
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And we're sort of meandering into a time where the possibility of intruding on ourselves
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technologically and pharmacologically is going to become more precise and more tempting.
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And we could become untethered to the more certainly traditional, more normal, probably more normative
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So it's one thing to regulate your state by diverting yourself with social media or a
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video game or some entertainment, something that further isolates you but may actually scratch
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some kind of psychological itch for the time being.
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It's another thing to actually establish a real connection to another person that begets
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It's conceivable that we could find ourselves on a path to a Aldous Huxley-like terminus where
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we essentially all self-medicate in a way that becomes more and more effective.
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And what you're bemoaning here is how ineffective the status quo is for most people.
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There's lots of addiction to things that are obviously unhealthy, but it's conceivable that
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we're just going to get in over the hump of all of these less than optimal ways of isolating
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ourselves pleasurably and heading toward a future where there are more ideal ways of becoming
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I think, as I said, you could imagine a better place to arrive than that, but it seems to
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me that there's a lot of energy and effort directed at solving the problem in that direction.
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I think that's a brilliant way of putting it, and it's something I kind of tried to think
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There's a lot in what you just said that I want to think about.
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So I went to see this South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield, who's a great guy.
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And Derek happened to be in Cambodia in 2001, I think it was, when they first introduced
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And the local doctors, the Cambodians, had never heard of these drugs.
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And he thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy, like St. John's
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There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields.
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And one day, he stood on a landmine, and he got his leg blown off.
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So they gave him an artificial limb, and he went back to work in the rice fields sometime
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And the guy started to cry all day, didn't want to get out of bed.
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Apparently, it's very painful to work underwater when you've got an artificial leg.
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And I'm guessing it was traumatic for obvious reasons, right?
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And they said to Dr. Summerfield, well, so we gave him an antidepressant.
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And they said, well, they went and sat with him.
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That it wasn't purely some biological malfunction.
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They figured if they bought him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer.
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He wouldn't be in this situation that was screwing him up so much.
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And they said to Derek, well, you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant.
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Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that sounds like a joke.
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But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the whole
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world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years.
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If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not crazy.
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And you need real love and help and support to get your needs met.
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And what I think is interesting is we've spent so much time and so much of our money and
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resources as a society trying to find a physical, technical fix where we have not succeeded
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Chemical antidepressants have some role to play.
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But the best long-term research into chemical antidepressants, the STAR-D trial, shows most
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I want to stress again, that doesn't mean they have no value.
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We've been massively increasing these attempted technical fixes for the last every year, for
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And every year, depression and anxiety has continued to rise.
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There's clearly something we're missing in those pictures.
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And one of the things that struck me going all over the world and trying to find, well,
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who has built solutions based on the best evidence?
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Actually, the people who, I admire the people doing the technical biological work.
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But they have so far yielded quite limited results.
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Actually, the places that have done, have yielded the best results, have often been the
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One of the heroes of the book is an incredible man called Dr. Sam Everington.
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He's a doctor in a poor part of East London, where I lived for a long time.
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And Sam was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to him with terrible
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And like me, he thinks chemical antidepressants have some valuable role to play.
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But he could also see that they were not solving the problem for most of his patients.
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And he could also see that they were depressed and anxious for perfectly understandable reasons,
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So one day he decided to pioneer a different approach.
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A woman came to see him who I got to know quite well called Lisa Cunningham.
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And Lisa had been shut away in her home with just crippling depression and anxiety for seven
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And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs.
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There was an area behind the doctor's surgery that was known as Dog Shit Alley, which gives you
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It was just kind of scrubland where dogs would go and shit.
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And he said, what I'd like to do is come and turn up a couple of times a week with a group
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I'm going to come because I've been quite anxious myself.
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And we're going to turn this into something nice, right?
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So the first time the group met, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety, terribly
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But as the group met, they decided what they were going to do is turn this scrubland into
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These inner city, East London people, they knew nothing about gardening, right?
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The first was they started to get their fingers into the soil.
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They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons, right?
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There's a lot of evidence, enormous evidence that exposure to the natural world is a really
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But even more importantly, they started to form a tribe.
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If one of them didn't turn up, someone would go to their house and check they were okay.
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The way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom.
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And there was a study in Norway of a very similar program, which is part of a growing body of
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evidence, that found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants.
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And this is something I saw all over the world.
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The most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that
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deal with the reasons why we're so depressed and anxious in the first place.
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And yet what we've done as a society and as a culture is both when it comes to drugs and
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when it comes, although drugs can provide relief to people, not just antidepressants.
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There's all sorts of drugs that provide you with some relief from pain for a time, while
00:24:44.660
But I think more generally, I think what you said about these growing technologies, I thought
00:24:50.680
And one of the ways I want to understand this was, I went to the first ever internet
00:24:53.980
rehab center in the United States, just outside Spokane in Washington.
00:24:58.040
Actually, I have to admit that when I arrived, it's a clearing in the woods, I get out of the
00:25:02.120
The first thing I did totally instinctively was look at my phone and feel really pissed
00:25:10.560
So I arrive and they get all kinds of people in this.
00:25:15.500
And they get all kinds of people there, but they disproportionately get young men who become
00:25:20.220
obsessed with multiplayer role-player games like World of Warcraft and Fortnite.
00:25:24.380
And I remember talking to these young men and then talking to the woman who runs it, you
00:25:29.680
A woman called Dr. Hillary Cash, who runs this center.
00:25:33.600
I remember her saying to me, these aren't her exact words, they're on the website, but
00:25:36.320
she said something like, you've got to ask yourself, what are these young men getting
00:25:45.260
They're getting the things they used to get from the culture, but they no longer get.
00:25:50.820
They get a sense that they're good at something and they can rise at being good at something.
00:25:54.340
They get a sense that people see them and notice them.
00:25:56.480
They get a sense they can physically roam around.
00:25:58.760
Study in Britain that found the average British child now spends less time outdoors than the
00:26:02.820
average maximum security prisoner, because by law, a maximum security prisoner has to
00:26:08.420
But of course, as she put it, what they're getting is like a parody of those things, right?
00:26:13.160
In the same way I started thinking about it, I think the relationship between social media,
00:26:16.320
which only have become more and more advanced as VR, virtual reality develops.
00:26:20.200
The relationship between social media and social life is a bit like the relationship between
00:26:29.780
But if your entire sex life consisted of looking at porn, you'd be going around pissed off and
00:26:34.700
irritated the whole time because you didn't evolve to wank over a screen.
00:26:40.320
In a similar way, we did not evolve to interact with each other through screens.
00:26:43.960
We evolved to actually do what we're doing, sit face to face, see each other.
00:26:48.620
But I think the crucial thing I learned from Dr. Cash, you have to think about the moment
00:26:53.200
For most of us, it's the late 90s that I think I sent my first email in the year 2000,
00:26:57.360
which seems incredible to me now that I live most of my life without it.
00:27:00.360
But at that, a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I'm writing about, that I
00:27:05.720
learned about from these scientists, were already supercharged by that point, right?
00:27:10.180
Think about loneliness, which we've talked about already.
00:27:12.800
Massive increase in loneliness well before the internet.
00:27:14.940
What happens is the internet arrives and it looks a lot like the things we've lost, right?
00:27:23.820
There's been a huge rise in inequality, a humiliation at work.
00:27:29.520
But what we've got is a kind of simulacra of those things, a parody of those things.
00:27:35.280
We're going to be offered better and better simulacra of the things we've lost.
00:27:39.600
But what I would argue is the things we've lost are right there in front of us, right?
00:27:47.040
We don't need a small number of people will need brain interventions.
00:27:51.000
But the vast majority of people who are distressed do not.
00:27:53.860
In a way, what I'd argue for is a kind of return to much more obvious insights rather than a turn to very expensive and more easily monetizable kind of parodies or simulacras of those things.
00:28:06.680
Let's talk about the generic solutions to depression.
00:28:11.460
Again, I haven't read your book, so I'm just going to guess what you would recommend.
00:28:15.760
I'll just add to the list you've already started here.
00:28:18.180
So engagement with the natural world is a net positive for many of us, most of us.
00:28:24.060
I would imagine physical exercise should be on the list.
00:28:27.800
Getting enough sleep must be on the list, although you do have a chicken and egg problem here where depression begins to erode sleep.
00:28:35.000
Social connection is the primary thing you've mentioned.
00:28:39.520
I would guess finding meaning in one's work, but doing work that one finds meaningful rather than doing work that one finds synonymous with drudgery.
00:28:51.800
Well, let's develop a few of those because I think the solution, you've identified the problems there, but it can seem daunting to people.
00:29:01.040
I noticed that lots of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work.
00:29:06.340
So I started to look at, well, what's the evidence about this?
00:29:12.200
So Gallup did the best research on that here in the U.S. and across the world.
00:29:17.620
What they found is 13% of us, 1-3% like their work most of the time.
00:29:28.580
And 24% of people fucking hate and fear their jobs, right?
00:29:33.460
87% of people don't like the thing they're doing most of their waking life, right?
00:29:37.780
I still think, could this have some role to play in our mental health problems?
00:29:42.100
So I started to look at all the evidence around this, and I learned there was an incredible man who I went to meet called Professor Michael Marmot, who discovered, he's an Australian social scientist, and he discovered in the 1970s, the single biggest, it's not the only one, but the single biggest factor that causes depression at work.
00:29:56.380
He discovered, if you go to work tomorrow, and you have low or no control over your job, you are much more likely to become depressed and anxious by a really significant amount.
00:30:08.500
And at first, when I was talking to him and learning what he'd said, I actually misunderstood what he was saying.
00:30:12.960
I thought he was saying, okay, you've got this 13% of people at the top who get to have nice jobs.
00:30:21.060
And everyone else is condemned to this kind of misery, right?
00:30:30.560
Are we saying these people are condemned to this misery?
00:30:34.700
And he kept stressing, it's not the work that makes you depressed.
00:30:40.480
And so I think, well, what's the kind of solution for that?
00:30:43.600
I learned there's really good evidence for this.
00:30:45.020
I went to meet in Baltimore a woman called Meredith Keough, who's a totally interesting person.
00:30:49.880
And Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night, just sick with anxiety, right?
00:30:55.680
As she would tell you, it wasn't the worst office job in the world.
00:30:57.380
She wasn't being bullied or harassed or anything.
00:31:02.400
And she couldn't bear the thought, this is going to be the next 40 years of my life till I retire.
00:31:09.420
So one day with her husband, Josh, she decided to do this quite bold thing.
00:31:12.440
And at first, when listeners hear me say this, they're going to think I'm saying, this is what you should do.
00:31:18.400
This reveals the wider insight that we can act on together.
00:31:22.120
So Josh, her husband, had worked in bike stores since he was a teenager in Baltimore.
00:31:35.500
And one day, Josh and his friends who worked in the store just asked themselves, what does our boss actually do?
00:31:44.680
But they were like, we seem to fix all the bikes and he seems to make all the money.
00:31:49.300
They decided they were going to set up a bike store of their own that worked on a different principle.
00:31:52.880
So where they had worked before was a corporation.
00:31:58.040
This is, you know, people will know it because most people listening to this will work in a corporation.
00:32:01.640
You know, you've got like the boss at the top and he's like the commander of the army and everyone below them is like a soldier that takes their orders.
00:32:09.320
And sometimes the commander is nice and asks your opinion.
00:32:12.780
They decided they were going to open a bike store that worked on a different principle, an older American principle.
00:32:21.300
So they fired their boss and he had to go on antidepressants.
00:32:26.300
So they opened this bike store and so they take the decisions together by voting.
00:32:33.960
But once every couple of weeks in practice, they agree on almost everything anyway.
00:32:38.640
They share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks.
00:32:42.740
But they're one of 10,000 democratic cooperatives in the US.
00:32:46.660
But what was fascinating spending time with the people in Baltimore Bicycle Works, their store,
00:32:50.840
which is totally in line with Professor Marmot's findings,
00:32:52.780
is how many of them talked about how they've been depressed and anxious before but were not depressed and anxious now.
00:32:59.660
And what's interesting is it's not like, you know, they didn't quit their jobs fixing bikes and go off to become like Beyonce's backing singers, right?
00:33:08.920
The difference is now they've got control over their work.
00:33:11.420
Now if they have an idea, they can translate it into practice, if they can persuade their colleagues.
00:33:16.660
It's a very different way of being in your daily life, right?
00:33:19.840
Now there's no reason why we should be structuring the way we work, the thing we do most of the time, you know, in a way that depresses and humiliates so many people, right?
00:33:29.300
Every corporation could be turned into a democratic cooperative.
00:33:33.800
We've lived through enormous changes, you and I.
00:33:36.240
That is about understanding a deep cause of depression and anxiety.
00:33:40.380
People are soaking up a huge amount of humiliation or just plain boredom at work.
00:33:45.900
And by restoring control to people, they can infuse their work with meaning in a way you can, which of course doesn't mean, of course there's still going to be some jobs that have to be done that are not the best jobs in the world when it comes to creativity.
00:33:57.780
But the more you get, and there's scientific research about this, the more you give people control over their work, the more they find meaning in that work.
00:34:05.180
Did you write about or research meditation at all in this?
00:34:08.400
Yeah, so I was really interested in a few kinds of, both meditation and psychedelics.
00:34:12.960
I actually came to the evidence about meditation, and I loved what you wrote about this in Waking Up.
00:34:17.840
And I came to the evidence about meditation actually through the psychedelic stuff, and it led me back to re-read Waking Up.
00:34:23.900
So your listeners will know, because you've talked about this a lot on the show, but until the mid-1960s, or a little bit later,
00:34:31.320
there was lots of evidence, lots of research into giving people psychedelics that was, you know, not done to the standards we want scientific research to be done today for sure,
00:34:40.020
but was very promising about giving it to people who had alcohol addictions, giving it to people with depression that seemed to have quite striking results.
00:34:46.860
And then the Nixon administration shuts the whole thing down, and the research goes dormant.
00:34:51.400
Until eight years ago, a man I interviewed, an incredible guy called Professor Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins University,
00:35:01.900
And subsequently, there's been a huge reawakening of it.
00:35:04.080
So I went to interview the teams that have done this new research here in Los Angeles, at UCLA,
00:35:09.700
at UCL in London, some of the people from NYU, at Johns Hopkins, and in Sao Paulo in Brazil, and in Aarhus in Denmark.
00:35:20.040
And there are loads of fascinating things about psychedelics, which you know much better than I do.
00:35:24.200
There was one subset of the findings that I found particularly fascinating, and I think reveals a lot and leads us into the debate about meditation.
00:35:36.840
They took people who were chronic, long-term smokers.
00:35:43.900
There's a photograph of me and my mother when I'm six months old.
00:35:46.540
She's breastfeeding me, smoking, and resting the ashtray on my stomach.
00:35:51.460
She would wind up on 60 minutes and then swiftly carted off to jail.
00:35:55.440
This was 1970s Scotland, where you were sent to jail if you didn't do that, right?
00:35:58.560
But actually, when I showed her this photograph, when I found it a few years ago, she said,
00:36:04.100
So they take people like my mother, who'd been chronic, long-term smokers, and they gave
00:36:09.520
them three doses of psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms, and they followed
00:36:16.140
What was incredible was 80% of them stopped smoking.
00:36:20.500
To give you a comparison point, the next most successful smoking cessation tool we have,
00:36:25.500
nicotine patches, have a 17, 1.7% success rate.
00:36:29.580
And a year later, more than 60% of them had still stopped.
00:36:32.420
It's important to stress this was a relatively small trial, but a very striking result.
00:36:36.600
But there's a sub-finding of all these results they did with long-term meditators that did
00:36:42.240
They've done it with depression that I think is really, really important.
00:36:47.560
So when people take psychedelics, the majority of people have something that they would describe
00:36:56.740
And that's interpreted broadly, you and I are both atheists, I don't mean you see God.
00:37:01.560
But it turns out there's a big range in how intensely people have a spiritual experience.
00:37:06.280
So some people will have an extraordinarily potent spiritual experience, and some people,
00:37:10.400
a minority, have no spiritual experience at all.
00:37:12.780
It turns out the positive effects, things like smoking cessation, reduction in depression,
00:37:17.920
and so on, correlate very closely with how intense your spiritual experience is.
00:37:22.260
If you have a very intense spiritual experience, you have all sorts of positive outcomes.
00:37:26.260
If you do not have an intense spiritual experience, you have very few positive outcomes.
00:37:30.620
And I think this tells us something that fits with the wider evidence that we're piecing
00:37:33.120
together in this conversation, which goes back to the opposite of addiction is connection.
00:37:37.160
There's a fascinating guy in Mississippi who's doing work giving psilocybin to people with
00:37:42.140
cocaine addictions, and is having really striking results.
00:37:45.860
Because what the psychedelics do, we don't want to get into a debate where we act like
00:37:50.920
we talk about it the way people talked about antidepressants in the 90s, like it flips a
00:37:54.780
switch in your brain, and that transforms your brain.
00:37:58.220
Of course, there's a physical effect in your brain when you take a psychedelic, obviously.
00:38:01.700
But what it does is it gives you a spiritual insight.
00:38:04.040
It gives you a moment, a taste of deep and profound connection if it goes well.
00:38:08.680
But as Bill Richardson, an incredible guy, who also would be a great guest for you, he's
00:38:14.520
the only person who was doing the scientific research in the 60s, who was still around for
00:38:22.500
He said to me, I think it was him, it breaks your addiction to yourself.
00:38:29.160
We live in a culture that's constantly like kind of itching powder for the ego.
00:38:33.000
It's constantly getting us to think egotistically.
00:38:34.880
It gives you a moment of what life is like to not be that way.
00:38:41.240
So I remember speaking to Robin Carhart-Harris, who's the professor who led the, along with
00:38:46.180
Professor David Nutt, the depression trial in Britain.
00:38:48.880
So they gave chronic long-term depressed people psychedelics, and again, had an extraordinary
00:38:54.080
But there was a kind of catch to this that Robin explained to me.
00:39:01.080
She takes the psychedelics, been depressed for a long time.
00:39:05.980
She realizes she's deeply connected to the natural world, to other people.
00:39:09.840
And then she goes back to her job as a receptionist in a shitty English seaside town.
00:39:15.100
And she simply cannot live in a way that is consistent with these lessons, right?
00:39:19.240
If you go around your office in an English seaside town or Atlantic City or whatever,
00:39:23.680
thinking that you're deeply connected, we're all the same, you're not going to have your
00:39:27.960
So we've built an environment that in many ways militates against the insights that psychedelics
00:39:33.820
And I think in a way, what psychedelics are, because most people are not going to want
00:39:37.900
to take psychedelics at all, and a lot of people are not going to take them repeatedly.
00:39:41.600
It's more like setting a direction or a compass in which we want to travel towards a more connected
00:39:48.660
What you then have to do is figure out, well, how do we develop these insights away from
00:39:55.400
You know, maybe people want to carry on taking it again and again.
00:39:58.640
And that's where it led me to look at the research on meditation and so on.
00:40:06.380
One is that this notion that real change, permanent change, can be anchored to an insight.
00:40:14.340
Having a reference point outside of your usual routine of unhappiness can actually give you
00:40:21.020
a tool cognitively and emotionally to change the way you feel.
00:40:25.260
And I think many of us would be familiar with this.
00:40:28.640
And it might not even be a peak experience, like a psychedelic experience.
00:40:34.040
It could just be a conceptual reframing of the experience that you have been finding
00:40:43.780
I mean, there's a few examples of this that I'll just float by you.
00:40:46.580
I mean, one is, one I often think about and have referenced on the podcast before is that
00:40:51.600
if you take the physical symptoms that are unpleasant, they don't actually have intrinsic
00:40:56.860
significance until you frame them conceptually.
00:41:01.880
So you can have, imagine what it's like to be at the peak of a very intense workout, right?
00:41:10.780
Where you're just, you know, you're either lifting weights or you're running.
00:41:14.100
So you're having some anaerobic or aerobic extreme experience.
00:41:18.280
If you simply woke up in the morning and felt those bodily sensations, you would call 911,
00:41:25.460
you know, and just wait for the ambulance, right?
00:41:27.680
But because they're happening in the context of a workout, not only are they, it can still
00:41:35.540
I mean, I think we would all notice them as still as unpleasant in some sense.
00:41:39.320
But the framing, our knowledge of the context and the meaning of being able to push yourself
00:41:47.600
And therefore, many of us are, even to some degree, quote, addicted to exercise, right?
00:41:53.260
It's one of the best things we do with our days.
00:41:55.840
And yet, the moment-to-moment character of the sensory experience can be negatively valence.
00:42:03.300
Again, it's just if your beliefs about what you're feeling are scary, well, then those symptoms
00:42:08.800
can be, you know, to be told that that ache in your stomach is, you know, almost certainly
00:42:14.020
indigestion, or it's very likely cancer, right?
00:42:19.360
The sensations don't change, but one's experience would be impressively changed by the framing.
00:42:26.680
Another, I guess, even more extreme example for me, it does come from meditation.
00:42:31.840
And it offers a kind of edge case to many of the things we've been talking about.
00:42:35.860
So, for instance, I totally concede the importance of connection in our lives.
00:42:44.000
And the quality of your life, it seems to me, is, in most people's cases, is almost entirely
00:42:48.960
defined by the quality of the relationships in it, right?
00:42:53.100
Social isolation, for most people, most of the time, is just perfectly correlated with
00:43:01.840
But it is also true to say that some of the most ecstatically happy and wisest people
00:43:09.360
I've ever met have spent a good portion of their lives in total isolation, and in some
00:43:15.540
cases, literally in caves for years at a time, right?
00:43:19.340
And so it is possible to be completely isolated, and isolated in a way that most people would
00:43:27.540
consider the realization of their worst nightmares.
00:43:30.460
This is a point I've made before, that it's telling that solitary confinement is considered
00:43:35.860
a punishment even inside a maximum security prison.
00:43:38.980
And most people prefer the company of rapists and murderers to being locked in a room alone
00:43:45.580
And yet it's possible to, in the context of isolation, experience profound well-being, and the difference
00:43:58.580
And meditation, in this case, is really just being able to notice what the mind is like when
00:44:05.280
you're not continuously identified with and lost in thought, and, you know, so much of
00:44:12.680
The character of one's identification with thought is, you know, almost entirely painful.
00:44:17.680
But meditation, kind of in the normal range of people's experience, forget about isolation
00:44:23.980
in caves for a moment, and this can happen very, very quickly.
00:44:26.520
I mean, literally in like your first 10 minutes of attempting it, you can discover that it can
00:44:32.740
be quite pleasant, and even profoundly pleasant, to simply pay attention to the breath, or to
00:44:44.680
The breath is a very common one that people use for training mindfulness.
00:44:48.780
And yet, in reality, there's nothing more boring than the breath, right?
00:44:53.020
It's like, if your job was just to sit and pay attention to your breath, that would be
00:44:57.960
And yet, if you know how to pay attention, boredom is not a problem.
00:45:05.780
And it's not to say there's not a distinction between profoundly interesting and creative and
00:45:10.640
easily rewarding jobs and more classically boring and oppressive ones.
00:45:16.500
But there's something about, I mean, just based on these two examples, I would expect that
00:45:23.900
being able to reframe what one is doing, even if one has to do it, which is to say, think
00:45:31.560
differently about one's situation, and pay attention more carefully to one's experience, which is
00:45:39.280
to say, actually become interested even in what is routine and repetitive.
00:45:45.860
Again, I'm not discounting the fact that making substantive changes to what one is doing may
00:45:51.000
But it is just possible to not be unhappy doing something that is classically boring and
00:46:00.560
Ironically, what happens when you look at what people do when they join religious cults or
00:46:06.880
religion, traditionally, they submit themselves to some course of training that is about crushing
00:46:15.480
or at least rebuffing their egocentricity and their notion of deriving meaning from their
00:46:22.320
extrinsic accomplishments and the story they're telling themselves about how they're not normal,
00:46:27.600
they're extraordinary in some way. And so you have these Ivy League-trained attorneys and
00:46:32.700
businessmen going to Rajneesh's ashram and they're being asked to scrub toilets and dig
00:46:38.420
ditches. I mean, it's a cliche of what happens to a self-important person who's successful when he or
00:46:44.320
she gets into the company of some religious adept, whether he's a fraud or not. But the truth is,
00:46:50.220
it actually works for people. People are not pretending to have punched through to some new
00:46:58.120
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00:47:04.080
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