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the most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons
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why we feel so bad in the first place we need to stop asking what's wrong with you and start asking
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what happened to you if you think life is about money and status and showing off you're gonna
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feel like [ __ ] it's not like i'm explaining quantum physics right and we've all had that experience where you crave a consumer object
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you build up to it you get it you get home and you just feel flat is it's not the trauma that destroys you
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it's the shame about the trauma and giving people ways to release that shame is an antidepressant god
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change is really possible today we have a real treat for you this guest today johan hari is one of my
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all-time favorite ever podcast guests ever and i'm not saying that to blow smoke up his ass when i had the
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conversation with him and when i started reading his books many years ago i can quite honestly say that no book
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i've ever read in my life has had more of a positive impact a more transformative impact on the
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topics that matter most to my fulfillment and happiness than the work that johann has done he is
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a comedian on one hand he's an incredible storyteller he spends a decade writing his book so you know the information he's going to share with you today is both profound it is evidence-backed
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and it is compelling true important and everything that our society at this point in time
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needs to hear this could well be the most important podcast i've ever recorded if you asked me if there was one podcast that i wish the world's got to hear it's definitely this one
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above all of the other podcasts i've ever recorded this is the conversation so without further ado i'm stephen
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bartlett and this is the dire ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself
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[Music] johan it's uh it's a real pleasure to have you back on the podcast you are one of my all-time
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favorite guests top three i don't know the order but you're definitely up there these other two i don't actually
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and not just because of the conversation we had but because you changed my fundamental beliefs around depression mental health
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the importance of human connection and everything in between and that had a really fundamental
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positive impact on my life it's also you feature heavily in my book i talk about you on this podcast all the
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time so you know the amount of times i've plugged so really what i brought you here today was to get the royalties from all the friends no but no but i do i
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talk about this podcast all the time so give you an old bag of crisps please that's all you're getting that's why i
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wanted to get in the podcast because you know you changed my life and i'm not saying that's no smoke up your ass i
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genuinely mean that with your book lost connections so the first question i have is like completely
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off track but i've just finished writing my book published it's all great and everything you're you're onto your third fourth book now
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yeah yeah talk to me about why you like writing books what is it about writing books why are you doing that oh for me i write books because there's a question
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i want to answer for myself that i don't know the answer to at the start so we'd lost connections i wanted to
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there would for me there's always a core mystery that i want to understand right so we've lost connections to core mystery was two
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really simple things when i when the book came out i was 40. uh all throughout my lifetime depression and
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anxiety have increased in britain the us crossed the world i wanted to understand why right why is it that with
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each year that passes more and more of us are finding it harder to get through the day i wanted to understand it for a personal reason
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which is that i had been really depressed myself i had done everything i was told to do by my doctors and i remained depressed
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or chasing the screen my but before that um i had a kind of core question which was
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you know we had a lot of addiction in my family one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to
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um and i wanted to understand what causes addiction and what can we actually do about it i
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want to understand a personal level but also at a social level what we could do about it so for me i always start with a core question um
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so a book i'm been working on for the last 10 years that i'm sort of writing at the moment about um something i have to be careful what i
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say about a series of crimes that have been happening in las vegas for me there's always a core question a
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mystery and then i'm like okay i want to take the reader on a journey as i try to unsolve this mystery i tried to solve this mystery for myself right
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so um all of my books are long journeys where i you know for both books i traveled more than 30 000 miles went to a crazy mixture of people and for me the best journeys
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are not where you find yourself everyone goes are you on a journey to find yourself to me the best journey is where you find other people
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right so i think about the crazy mixture of people that i've got to know for these books who i love who are still you know important people to me from you know
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for the addiction book i think about chino hardin who's a trans crack dealer in brooklyn who's one
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of the smartest people i've ever met uh rosalia retta a hitman of the deadliest mexican drug cartel
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he's unfortunately not one of the smartest people i've ever met but uh you know or for lost connections uh you know i think about these people will probably
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talk about these people in berlin who transform who's starting from position a terrible depression
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transformed their city in their country i think about this couple homeless couple i know very well
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in vegas so for me it's always about finding people and solving mysteries and i write to figure out to try to understand the world and to figure out what we can do about the world you know
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so for me it's it's i would i can't imagine writing a book where i felt i knew in advance of course i've
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got ideas when i start right i don't start as a blank slate but i can't imagine writing a book
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where i felt i knew in advance i was standing above the reader and going well reader you know i mean there are books that do that you know if you've
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been in it i'm a journalist i'm not an expert right so if you've been an expert for 30 years on
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uh just read a fantastic book about octopuses right if you guys spent 30 years studying octopuses he knows a [ __ ] ton about octopuses i'm
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very happy for him to stand above me and say let me tell you a little crazy [ __ ] about octopuses that is crazy [ __ ] right
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but that's great it's called other minds i really recommend that book um but i'm not that i'm not an expert so
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for me it's about the journey come on the journey with me come to all these different places come with me to a favela in rio come
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with me to the killing fields in mexico come with me to a gulag in vietnam let's go on the journey let's figure out what
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the [ __ ] going on and of all the books and this is i know that i can probably guess the response here they'll hold like i'll choose your
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favorite kid which one oh chasing scream i have a really easy answer to that because only because um
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so chasing screams a book i wrote about the addiction and and the war on drugs and it's because
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it's the book that i've it sounds uh so fagrandizing and wanky but it's the book that i've seen do the most good in the world it's a place where i've been to so many places where people have used
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that book and the things that to me the happiest moment in any book and the whole process of writing
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is when so i track down people i think are really interesting and important uh so to give an example there's a guy
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in vancouver called professor bruce alexander one of the most amazing human beings alive
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who did a really important experiment this transformed how we think about addiction called rat park i suspect we'll talk
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about it and bruce you know that experiment was known before my book and before my ted talks
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and stuff but as bruce says you know it got a huge boost from that and and and that evidence is now used
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was used in norway where they're just on the brink of decriminalizing all drugs um in all sorts of places in mexico i
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remember having a surreal conversation with some mexican politicians about it in all sorts of different places
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and to me the most exciting moment is when the people i've written about get in touch with me and say oh people are contacting me because of you
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because they've read about me and it's that moment where you feel that you've been a conduit between someone who's doing something
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really important and people who needed to know it and to me that's like the blissful
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feeling you know so chasing the scream just because um that's that's what that's the book
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i've seen do the most work in the world you know what i mean quick interruption today we have luke with us behind the
00:08:44
scenes watching this podcast be recorded luke is a subscriber of this podcast and as i said in the previous podcast we're
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gonna start bringing in subscribers to watch the show being filmed to sit behind the scenes to and to meet me and
00:08:55
the guests if you want that to be you all you've got to do is hit the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this podcast
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so let's talk about rap park i i read about this study numerous times but i think it's you know
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you've probably talked about it before but i think it's so important and foundational for so many reasons and and speaks actually speaks a
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lot to lost connections as well in many respects um but i would love you to tell the story of rap park and
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exactly what it what it is you know rap park was for me i found it very challenging when i learned about
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rap park because i realized that all my life i've been misunderstanding some of the things i was seeing right in front of me so like
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i said we had addiction in my family we still have addiction in my family it's very difficult
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and when i started doing the research for chasing the scream god 10 10 years ago exactly 10 years ago almost i am if you'd asked me let's say her in
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addiction because i was close to me if you said to me john what causes heroin addiction i would have looked at you like you were thick and i would have said well stephen
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the clue's in the name right yeah obviously heroin causes heroin addiction right we've been told this story for a hundred
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years that's become totally part of our common sense it was definitely part of mine so we think we're sitting here in east
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london we think if we kidnap the next 20 people to walk past your flat in east london
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and like a villain in a saw movie we injected them all with heroin every day for a month at the end of that month they'd all be
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heroin addicts for a simple reason there's chemical hooks in heroin that as you use it
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your body starts to crave you want more and more of them and so at the end of that month people would have this tremendous physical hunger for
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the chemical hooks right that's why we call it being hooked um and that's that's the story we have in our heads
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now that story is not completely wrong it turns out it's a very small part of a much bigger picture
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and the first thing that i remember the first thing that alerted me to that was in my research i was interviewing
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doctors and experts and it was explained to me right here in britain if you and me step out
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into the street and we get hit you get hit by a truck right god forbid terrible loss to the world
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um you'll be taken to hospital and if you say you broke your hip you'd be given a lot of a drug called
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diamorphine right diamorphine is heroin it's much better than the [ __ ] you'd buy just like the
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road from here on the street because it's medically pure heroin right and anyone watching this if you if
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you're british and your nan's had a hip replacement operation your nan's taken a lot of heroin right now if what we think about addiction is
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right that it's caused primarily or entirely by exposure to the chemical hooks what should be happening to all these people in british hospitals who've been given a lot of powerful heroin
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some of them should be leaving and trying to score on the streets you should be meeting people in their name meetings who say well you know i started i had a
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hip replacement this has been studied very carefully it never happens right i remember when i
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learned that i'm just thinking the first person who told me that was dr gabor marte
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and i remember thinking saying to him gabor that can't be right how could you have a situation where
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you've got someone in a hospital bed they're using a [ __ ] ton of really powerful heroin they don't become
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addicted and you've got someone in the alleyway outside who you know is shooting up actually a
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weaker shittier form of the drug and they and they do become addicted how could that be and i only began to
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understand it when i went to vancouver and interviewed professor alexander professor bruce alexander so bruce explained to me the story we've
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got in our heads that addiction is caused primarily or totally by the chemical hooks comes from a series of experiments that
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were done earlier in the 20th century they're really simple experiments um your viewers can try them at home if they're feeling a little bit sadistic and bored in covid times right not heroin is it
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no they don't have to try it you take a rat you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles
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one is just water the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine if you do that the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself quite
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quickly within a week or two right so there you go that's that's our story that's that's how we think it works but in the 70s professor alexander was
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working where i met him on the downtown east side of vancouver which has a lot of he's working with a lot of people with very bad addiction problems
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and he starts to look at these experiments and he says well hang on a minute you put the rat alone in an empty cage
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it's got nothing that makes life worth living for rats all it's got is the drugs what would
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happen if we did this differently so he built a cage that he called rat park which is basically heaven for rats right they've got loads
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of friends they've got loads of cheese they've got loads of colored balls they can have loads of sex everything that
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makes life worth living for rats is there in rat park and they've got both the water bottles the drugged water and the normal water
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this is the fascinating thing in rat park they don't like the drug water they don't use it very much none of the music compulsively none of them overdose so you go from almost 100 compulsive use
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and overdose when rats don't have the things that make life worth living to no compulsive use and overdose when
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they do have the things that make life worth living and obviously we are not rats we're more complicated
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but the core of this there's lots of human evidence that i can talk about but what what this taught me and a lot
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of the other evidence taught me is the core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life
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because your life is too painful a place to be and it actually makes you realize why our approach of punishing people with
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addiction problems is such a disaster actually makes the problem worse the opposite of addiction is not sobriety although that
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is valuable for some people the opposite of addiction is connection and we're living through a great example of that right now just
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just i think two days ago the government announced massive increase in alcohol-related deaths massive increase in other drug-related
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deaths in britain and in the united states why would that be right we i think rightly in order to suppress the virus which we had to do we have had to become more disconnected
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and that has caused an increase in addiction now that tells us something about what was causing addiction all along and what the paths out of
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addiction are so i thought it was a very long answer perfect answer and obviously with the with that in mind you know covert
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has um accelerated the um adoption of remote working which i you know there's been a lot of debate around that whether it's a good thing or a bad thing my stance is pretty clear i think it's
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an awful thing and i say this because you know after reading your book i understand that um
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connection organic connection in our lives is has this like has been on this sort of macro decline and one of the like
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institutions in our lives that has held that together has been the office so like most of my friends come from
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working in a big office you know if i think about where 90 of my connection comes it came from the office
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and to think especially as a young person who hasn't got a family or kids whatever that that is also now going to move to a
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screen i think is a [ __ ] terrible idea to be honest um i wanted to get your your thoughts on that because i think
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i i don't i think people think of the convenience factors but we thought of the convenience factors when we in we created social media and
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dating apps and all these other things but the unintended consequences of the convenience tends to be
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you know stripping us of connection once again and like what do we have left like everything else is on a screen now
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so if you take away work from me i'm like i probably wouldn't see anybody like porn you know i can do that online now
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dating swipe swipe swipe so it feels like you know the last institution of connection is being uh is that war i think that's really interesting i
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think there's a there's two things i was thinking about as you talked about that stephen one is
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what a lot of us get out the web the relationship between social media and social life
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is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex and she mentioned porn because i'm not anti-porn porn's going
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to meet a basic itch right um but no one you know spends an hour looking at porn and feels
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like satisfied and seen speaks me physically not the way you do after you've had sex
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right unless you're having a very bad sex step in a similar sort of way you know it's not that the these
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a lot of these technologies are attempts our unhealthy relationship with the technology itself is neutral
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a lot of our relationships with these technologies are attempts to fill holes in the way we're living right phil whole but unfortunately we're talking about porn but you know what i mean um the the the and even if you just
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think about when the internet arrived right the internet arrives for most of us the early 2000s or 1999 i got my first email
00:17:33
address in 2000 and a lot of the things that we're talking about had already been going rising for a long time big increase in loneliness before that and what happens is the internet arrives
00:17:45
and it looks a lot like the things we've lost right you've lost friends here's facebook friends you've lost status in the
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economy here's some status updates but they're not the things we've lost it's like giving pawn to a sex starved man in
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prison or something it's not the thing you've lost right i mean it'll meet a certain basic hitch but it's not the thing you've lost
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and if interacting through screens met our basic needs as human beings we would all be very happy zooming all
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the time right sitting on zoom would be as good as sitting in the office right you know and people often say to me why
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do you travel to so many places to do all these interviews why don't you just talk to them on skype or zoom and
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always say because you get 10 of the experience through a screen people don't open up to
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you they don't feel they've met you i wouldn't remem all these people i'm describing to you i can picture them so vividly
00:18:32
people have interviewed zoom i can never remember even what they look like right so these forms of interaction they've got a place you know look it's better to
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have zoom in a time of a plague than than nothing which would have been the alternative in in the context of covid
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but it's not it doesn't we evolved to interact to look into each other's eyes to see
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each other to interact in three dimensions we did not evolve to interact through screens it doesn't meet our deeper needs
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that is why i've never done this podcast over zoom despite the temptation yeah so we we started doing
00:19:02
in just we started we upped everything in december and really started going for it you know built the team and all these things
00:19:08
and that's obviously in the middle of the pandemic there's flight restrictions no one can fly in and we've got the most amazing guests in
00:19:13
the world that want to come on via zoom and i just said i do this because i enjoy it right
00:19:19
that's like the fundamental reason that's the reason why i'll keep doing it for the next 10 years and i would not enjoy doing it over zoom
00:19:25
it would become like a job to me because i like meeting people and obviously the the conversation we have now
00:19:32
you can feel the emotion you can you can hear the you know you can see it my eyes you can see at
00:19:37
certain points you know you can feel what i'm thinking and that unlocks for a podcast that's meant to be a little bit more
00:19:43
um deeper it unlocks that depth we've had you know tears and we've had all sorts and i formed real friendships
00:19:49
from it so many pretty much all of my guests i feel like i'm friends with it straight after because of the vulnerability so i just i just made a rule that i
00:19:56
would not do anything over zoom and when people ask me to go on their podcast over zoom the answer is the same i don't want to do it and i with my team
00:20:02
my office is actually downstairs so we come in every day there is one thing about work i think everything you
00:20:08
said is totally true so there's one thing about work i would say which is a slightly different point uh but relates to remote working which
00:20:14
is so uh i mean we can talk about some more detail if you want but for the purposes of this part of the conversation
00:20:20
there's a lot of evidence that um lacking control over your work makes you depressed
00:20:25
right i'm sure we could talk about that more um one thing that people do benefit from i
00:20:31
think from zoom not actually funny interestingly not so much in covid times as evidence people are working
00:20:36
more hours under kobe than they were normally partly because zoom meetings take so damn long
00:20:42
um but some people i think as we come out of this which we will as we come out of covid um the pandemic some people i think would like to have
00:20:55
more leeway about when they are in the office oh yeah and would like to and i think
00:21:00
it's interesting when you look at the research on this it's not so much the ratio is it 20 at
00:21:05
home it's whether you can choose yes it's the amount of agency you have um so in that sense i think that's where and of course we didn't have any choice
00:21:16
about coping but the that's the bit where i would say we'll probably have some value going forward 100 agree
00:21:22
i i actually wrote about um motivation intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation and one of the
00:21:28
big factors of people feeling motivated in work is as you say autonomy feeling like you have
00:21:33
control of your work and and that's the that's also the balance that i've always tried to create at my companies which is
00:21:38
um one way you can book um as much time off as you need without having to put like tell a
00:21:45
computer and ask it for approval and there is no bitchiness there is no one that's going to look at you the next
00:21:50
day and be like oh you've had a couple of days off and giving people the same level of freedom that i've always had has been super
00:21:55
important um but at the same time like i'm i've been super clear even though it's an unpopular narrative right now
00:22:01
i think this remote working future where you know these companies are coming out and doing all their virtual signaling
00:22:06
you know whatever i think it's a load of nonsense and i think they're actually harming people by supporting the idea that we're
00:22:13
going to all especially younger people live our lives through screens and i think that people are going to figure this out i actually
00:22:19
think people have overestimated the stickiness of remote remote working because the narrative is companies that
00:22:26
offer remote working will attract all the staff all the good talent so you're gonna have to do it but i actually think companies that are
00:22:32
able to offer community and much more than work which is for me is what a good job is much what's the
00:22:38
it's the friends you make the experiences you have the challenges you're driving towards together the worthwhile
00:22:44
it's like the worth while striving for a challenge with a group of people you love for me that's like become my
00:22:50
my the reason for why i live i i managed to get it down to those three things which is people i love uh worthwhile challenge
00:22:58
right and i don't know how that links into your work but that's i think the most foundational i've managed to get with like my reason to live is like
00:23:05
oh at least my reason to work so if i think like you've gone to a really important um
00:23:13
one of the most important things that relates to depression anxiety in your own life which is meaning right so there's all
00:23:19
this i mean it's funny exactly a year a little bit more than a year ago a year and a month ago i was in moscow
00:23:24
it was the last thing i did before i got covered it was grim i interviewed this fascinating uh russian
00:23:30
psychologist called um dimitri leontyev and his um so his dad had actually been a super
00:23:36
famous uh so his grandfather had been an incredibly famous psychologist but he's a very distinguished psychologist as well and
00:23:42
um i remember him saying like um british and american people british american philosophy if you go back it's very often about happiness the belief that you should try to make yourself happy
00:23:53
right obviously it's in constitution the pursuit of happiness right and he said when russians hear that we
00:23:58
just laugh right that's a child's game trying to chase happiness it's the child's philosophy so
00:24:04
you can't you don't have that much say about whether happiness will come and go he said what life is about is not happiness but
00:24:09
meaning right the pursuit of meaning and actually when you've got meaning in your life you can tolerate a lot of
00:24:14
unhappiness and you even think about something as simple as uh a dentist or a good example
00:24:19
a dentist drill right so if i now took out a drill opened your mouth and you know jabbed it into your teeth and
00:24:26
it was agony because that would have no meaning in the context between us it would be different it would literally be torture it would cause you
00:24:32
terrible suffering and you'd be traumatized for ages but you've been to the dentist and they've done that right and it didn't traumatize you most likely
00:24:38
some people do get traumatic dentists that's a different story it's rare um why because it had a meaning right you could tolerate the
00:24:44
pain because there was because it was for a purpose all right if i don't tolerate this pain my teeth are going to get [ __ ] up right
00:24:49
um it's worthwhile and i think that's one of the things that's a big a big driver depression anxiety is one actually it was one of the two hardest causes of
00:25:01
depression and anxiety that i wrote about lost connections for me to it was the one one that was most chat one of the two that was most challenging
00:25:07
for me was this crisis of meaning so for thousands of years philosophers have said if you think life is about money and status and showing off you're going to feel like [ __ ] right
00:25:18
it's not an exact quote from confucius but that is basically what he said right but weirdly nobody had ever scientifically i'm looking to is this
00:25:24
true how do we know no one had actually scientifically investigated this until an amazing man i got to know
00:25:29
named professor tim casa who did an incredible amount of uh spent 35 years researching these
00:25:35
questions he discovered loads of things but i think for what we're talking about there's two in particular firstly he discovered exactly as the
00:25:42
philosophers warned if you think life is about money and status and showing off all the values you get from advertising instagram everything like them the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by a significant
00:25:54
amount and secondly he discovered as a society as a culture we have become much more driven by these
00:26:01
junk values right they've been rising all throughout my lifetime your lifetime and and i was talking
00:26:08
about well why is that right and there's many reasons that i go through the book why does that make us feel so bad um a key reason i think is just
00:26:18
it trains us to look for happiness in all the wrong places right you know your technical crew know
00:26:24
everyone knows everyone watching this knows you're not going to lie on your deathbed and think about all the likes you've got
00:26:31
on instagram right you're going to think about moments of love and meaning and connection um but but as professor casa put it to
00:26:38
me we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life right
00:26:43
we live in a machine where we are bombarded more 18 month old children know what the mcdonald's m
00:26:49
means than know their own last name right so from the moment you're born you are trained to think if you don't
00:26:55
feel good there's a solution for that work harder buy [ __ ] display on instagram to make people go omg so
00:27:01
jealous right that is the script of our society and it's it's like kfc for the soul right you're
00:27:07
not going to find happiness there but the more meaningful values are lying just beneath the surface right nothing i just said i mean it's almost like a hallmark card at the level of banality everyone knows that at
00:27:19
some level and yet we don't live by it and this is true of a lot of things to learn from lost connections it's not like i'm explaining quantum
00:27:25
physics right it's not like i'm not that i could do that it's not like i'm explaining at noam chomsky's linguistics or something
00:27:31
these are things at some level we all know but we live in a machine like professor casa put it
00:27:36
we live in a machine that has taught us to neglect to mistrust our own instincts about what will give us a good life
00:27:42
and to and to pursue um other things instead do you know what i mean does that make sense of course it
00:27:48
makes [ __ ] sense to me of course it makes sense do you feel but i really feel the reason it was challenging is
00:27:55
because i could see how much of my own life was driven by these junk folks i was never a materialistic person i was never i was once nominated for an award as the worst dressed gay man in britain so i
00:28:07
was never like a kind of did you in material no i was beaten by david furnish who i've always thought was very well dressed so i show so much i know but you know
00:28:18
a big part not i was never like i was never like trump it was never 100 but a big part of my life
00:28:25
was driven by trying to think about how people perceive me managing people's expectations does it
00:28:31
still yeah of course it's still a part of my character but it's a radically smaller part of my personality than it was
00:28:37
uh 15 years ago because i was thinking as you're saying that i was just thinking i was thinking this is also
00:28:43
true but again the question posed my mind was how would i get out of the machine
00:28:48
when so much of the things i enjoy keep me within the machine so you know i could i could abscond and go to bali and go and live on a beach and just you surround myself with a couple of
00:29:00
friends and you'd give up my louis vuitton shoes i don't have a ton shoes but you know what i mean give up my lamborghini
00:29:05
which i also don't have and i could i could escape but much of the joy of my life comes from doing things like this having conversations
00:29:11
with people like you which means that i have to live in london and then to promote this i'm gonna have to use instagram and social media and then i'm
00:29:17
gonna get a little pat on the back from the algorithm if it's good or bad and and so in the pursuit of some of my
00:29:22
intrinsic joy and fit goals i i'd have played with this a lot i i i'm i'm putting myself in the machine and i can't see another way to live the best i say to myself the best you
00:29:34
could probably do steve is live within the machine but just live much more consciously know that you're in the machine and it's
00:29:41
the minute that you don't know you're in the machine that the machine becomes your puppet master and then i'll start [ __ ] buying louis vuitton again so it's funny there's
00:29:48
doing things you're saying louis vuitton because i once a party met calvin klein and until that moment i i thought calvin
00:29:54
klein was a fictional character like rory mcdonald so someone said oh this is kevin clinton i almost said i like the clothes and then i was like
00:30:01
is this like it was it was like suddenly meeting you like ronald mcdonald or something
00:30:18
so i think tim caster discovered two answers to actually lots of answers but two specific things that he discovered
00:30:24
that i think really help answer your question so and they operate at different levels so
00:30:30
what can we do about the fact we live in the machine there's two things there's one thing that's going to sound very big and is very big which is we can dismantle the machine
00:30:36
the machine was created by human beings and it can be dismantled and again i went to places that have started
00:30:41
that sao paulo in brazil uh city was full of advertising it was doing people's heads
00:30:46
in they banned outdoor advertising people felt much better do you remember the campaign that happened here when was it
00:30:52
it's in the books it must have been at least four years ago five years ago maybe there was a campaign on the tubes skinny
00:30:58
too i know this is funny yeah exactly somebody who don't remember there were it was a picture of
00:31:04
a super ripped guy and a super lean woman and it said are you beachbody ready right and it was an advert for some john i'm so out of touch with sorry i
00:31:16
know so what was it a protein shake it was like a a protein a powder right right right i'm so unhealthy i don't even know what that powder would you conceive of what you would do with that powder except snort it which i
00:31:29
assume is not what you did but anyway and city khan just banned it just said you know what this makes people feel like [ __ ] it's got an insidious
00:31:36
vile message which is if you don't look like these people i.e if you're like 99.99 the population
00:31:41
you're not fit to go to the beach just banned it there was a campaign to vandalize that poster which uh people vandalized
00:31:47
it just with the slogan advertising shits in your head so that was a great slogan so you can do
00:31:53
a political thing we don't have to allow all this stuff right um and we can build up to that in
00:31:58
all sorts of ways smaller steps and one is a more personal one and that's something i now do i have a
00:32:04
group of friends we talk you know once every couple of weeks we talk about okay what are the times when we've been
00:32:09
tempted by [ __ ] you know like uh we had the conversation the other day and one of my friends said you know oh
00:32:15
she'd got retweeted by some famous person and it lifted her move for five minutes and then she was like i need more i need more i
00:32:20
need more and then we're like okay but did you write that day she's writer she said no no it distracted me i didn't
00:32:26
write and we're like okay but and of course you only had to say it don't you oh yeah
00:32:31
that's the thing that gives my life meaning that's the moments when i feel flow not the sugar high of you know um i've tried to remember it
00:32:37
was it was someone really famous um so just having these so i would say and and those things are complementary by the way when we have those conversations with the among ourselves it makes us
00:32:48
feel more powerful to take on the aspects of the machine that are [ __ ] us up as well what you've
00:32:53
described is like a counterbalance right because you've got the machine whispering in your ear every day every time you log on
00:32:58
social media walk down the street look at the internet look at the newspaper and it's saying bye louis vuitton
00:33:03
[ __ ] and then what you've described there is just by having someone um in your ear once in a while going
00:33:10
down by louis vuitton live your life for you know intrinsic your intrinsic values you know things that actually matter it acts as a bit of
00:33:16
a counterbalance and it's so true because i know this stuff right done a lot of reading about it
00:33:22
your book really helped me understand it lots of other books i've you know you talked about um
00:33:27
professor tim casa read his writings after you wrote about it in your book i know this stuff yet
00:33:37
once every quarter i'll pop up in the whatsapp group with dom and sophie and i'll go
00:33:44
what about a lamborghini and they'll and they'll they'll respond to me i mean dom goes [ __ ] get it because he's this
00:33:50
he's bad egg but um he's like you might as well know but um but my all it takes is one of my good friends to go to me but why do you need that and i go yeah of course you're right but this is what
00:34:02
tim casa puts him really well i remember him saying it to me we all have a need intrinsic values but intrinsic values are very fragile yeah and they can be very easily
00:34:13
hijacked by signaling around us which is why you're right we need to counterbalance it we also need to actually get less of this [ __ ]
00:34:24
please right and that's a social thing that we can fight for right there's all sorts of there are countries that regulate these
00:34:30
things sao paulo banned outdoor advertising there's all sorts of things we can do we but also
00:34:36
um it's not just that we're bombarded with the advertising externally we then police that among
00:34:41
ourselves right when i remember when i was a kid and people were obsessed with nike sneakers and i was a kind of fat
00:34:47
kid who sat in the corner of reading i didn't give a [ __ ] about um uh basketball and yet i wanted these things right
00:34:52
why did i and it wasn't it partly it was exposure to advertising but actually it was more um
00:34:59
the way we police it among ourselves so once you set and train those values people then police among themselves so
00:35:05
that's about how do we undo that and it's partly about saying people how does this really make you feel right
00:35:11
very occasionally you will meet an extremely materialistic person who will tell you that donald trump
00:35:17
would be a good example right who will tell you this makes me feel good and yet you look at them
00:35:22
and you see that they are achingly unhappy right i've rarely seen a more unhappy person
00:35:28
than donald trump um so you can see but one of the dangers of these values is one of the reasons that makes us they make us feel so bad is that those values can then pollute
00:35:40
your relationships when you measure it scientifically people have high levels of junk value what called extrinsic values is the
00:35:45
scientific term people have high levels of extrinsic values junk values have less successful relationships that
00:35:52
break up more often because relationships where you value the other person for very superficial external things like you know do other men feel jealous when they see me with this person
00:36:03
um those aren't good relationships right i've been in uh so many of them you were nodding very i
00:36:09
thought yeah it's just exactly yeah no it is and um you talked about how you know there's the fear one of the
00:36:15
reasons why people are less happy in those relationships is the fear that this person would leave if i lost my money or my looks whatever
00:36:21
and then you alluded to the point that i was thinking most about which is um you formed your connection with them
00:36:27
based on something basically extrinsic something superficial so you have these like surface level connections
00:36:33
and then your life with that person you don't your psychological needs don't get met because you don't have the you know
00:36:39
in my case like an intellectual connection with them you can't talk about the things you want to talk about you haven't formed that basis on a deeper
00:36:45
level but then i just wanted to this is if this was a confession box here's what i would say in the same way
00:36:51
that as a young 28 year old guy who's been successful um uh you know i guess that word in my ear
00:36:59
that just says buy a lamborghini like a little kermit every three months i also get in the same year from the
00:37:04
same little [ __ ] evil kermit says to me there's that a hot girl who's completely i don't know i don't want to get cancelled because i've got some stuff coming up in the media but there's that hot girl who has made
00:37:18
herself look um beautiful on the outside do you usually see the distinction stephen
00:37:23
right like there's nothing wrong with sexual attraction in front of people we don't want to counter pose a world of
00:37:29
junk values versus puritanism do you know what i mean it's like sexual attraction is one of the great joys of
00:37:35
life yeah i was just trying to i don't want to i don't want to say it in in the words
00:37:40
there is that person who offers nothing more than um just they look good they offer
00:37:47
nothing more and the same way it says come on steve go for it and every time i've gone for it it doesn't take me very long to be miserable in that situation and then on the other hand i've got
00:37:59
these other this other person in my life who is the antithesis of that who is all substance
00:38:05
and um something in my life tries to sway me back to the junk people but i think there's a thing about
00:38:11
um i in several ways i think what you said is really important because it's not like there's this category of
00:38:18
saintly benign human beings who are immune to all these temptations and you know we need to be more like
00:38:24
that every human being is a conflict of intrinsic and extrinsic values and extrinsic values are
00:38:30
a certain measure of them is healthy right desire for external success is nothing to be ashamed of
00:38:35
uh finding people hot and wanting to have sex with hot people is perfectly is something we all have right at the
00:38:40
expense of a meaningful relationship it's like a balanced diet isn't it you want to have
00:38:46
um you want these you want these things to exist in a balance with all your other motivations but what i don't think
00:38:56
what definitely doesn't work is because i tried this myself i remember being quite cut off from my own um
00:39:04
status seeking behavior and sort of not owning it and i think actually when you just acknowledge oh yeah this is part of me this is a part this will always be a part of me there are some pleasures to be found
00:39:18
there it's not it's not barren right um but you always want that to be one part of a much bigger picture then you can have a healthy conversation with yourself and with other people
00:39:29
about these aspects of yourself that's very different to and especially if you live in a society and culture that is all about
00:39:35
getting you to be that one thing and you know presenting as images of success i mean you and i both met lots of rich people and i've got to say they are the most
00:39:46
miserable bastards or you're one of the very few cheerful rich people i know right
00:39:51
if i think about says a handful who are happy and they're almost always uh i'm trying to think of
00:39:59
i can look well one person who inherited it so i don't count that um some artistic people like a few
00:40:06
people who pursued their artistic dream like elton john and became really rich he's happy
00:40:12
after a [ __ ] rocky journey as everyone knows and the machine that's [ __ ] us all up do you believe that because it's
00:40:19
making us all care it's conditioning us to care more about extrinsic values and these like you know all this nonsense do you
00:40:26
think it's in it's it's hindering our chances of forming meaningful romantic connections i for just from
00:40:33
what i've grown up in this instagram era where it looks like everybody's getting prettier on the outside and everyone's getting uglier in
00:40:38
the inside because instagram and the machine have told us that this is what society values
00:40:44
how big is your ex how white is your why how perfect is your hair you know so it feels like life is gone okay the game everybody get in get in everybody get in okay you're gonna this is how you win you'll
00:40:57
get the most points in life if you have the best hair the best uh eyes the best boobs you know biggest six-pack chest that is the game do you understand
00:41:08
everyone's going yeah okay okay and if you see someone that has that as well pam on the back and we go okay cool and
00:41:13
we've had ten years of this black mirror experiment so all of our values have gone you know extrinsic and junk values
00:41:18
and i think we're struggling to form meaningful connections because that didn't the
00:41:26
machine told us that didn't matter you know it's funny after the book came out a group of people i did not expect to so
00:41:34
i was absolutely inundated on it was particularly my ted talk about it came out inundated on instagram by massive instagram
00:41:44
yeah um start what we call it influences like really people with some of the biggest instagram followings in the world
00:41:58
messaging me saying you're so right i feel like and i remember getting a message i always say who it was but from someone
00:42:05
who was a big instagram influencer messaging me saying i'm so depressed i don't want to get a bed in the morning my life is terrible i didn't hear this person also i clicked on the instagram page and literally five
00:42:17
minutes before sending me that message and five minutes after yeah she had done a kind of glowing my life is you know i can't know the words
00:42:23
but you know kind of my life is so great um bragging and and i really yes but the thing i would say that is so important about this it's a
00:42:36
funny thing to say i know it might sound odd but the widespread nature of our depression anxiety and addiction crises
00:42:43
in one sense although terribly painful and horrible and excruciating and i've been there
00:42:50
is a positive thing because the system is not working for more and more people and it becomes harder to defend this system and these values when it makes everyone feel like [ __ ]
00:43:02
right at some point you have to go you know what this ain't [ __ ] working for us so think about where we are i lived here
00:43:08
as i said for 10 years right just not far from here so tower hamlets you know i mean the tahoe says some of
00:43:15
the hot i think if i remember rightly when i lived here it was i think it was the constituency
00:43:20
in england that had the highest level of poverty right um so there's a lot of distress in tower
00:43:26
hamlets right i mean and by the way you can be distressed and not be poor a lot of this distress is happening in middle class and wealthy areas but think
00:43:32
about where we are look for signs of distress connect with the people who are distressed fight together with them for
00:43:38
something better and of course that has to be something people do i can't tell people what the signs of distress around them are and they'll be different
00:43:43
in you know um a coastal village in kent to you know glasgow where my mom's from to
00:43:49
the isle of skye different there'll be certain shared factors but look for the signs of distress i mean
00:43:56
you're spoiled for signs of distress they're all [ __ ] around us right i mean think about um the number of
00:44:03
people who drank themselves to death in britain last year and how much that went up as we said and then meet them where they are
00:44:08
because god change is really possible right and i think about that in my own life
00:44:15
you know i'm gay right i didn't hear the concept of gay marriage till i was 20 and my friend andrew sullivan wrote the first book advocating it right literally i did never crossed my mind i remember the first person i was ever in love with
00:44:27
when i was 16. i never had a sense of a future didn't even occur to me that we could get
00:44:33
married it never even entered my head right um you think about the scale of that transformation
00:44:40
i remember just before kovid i was on the tube and there were these two girls who can't
00:44:45
have been more than 16 and they were making out and i was staring at them and i think they thought i was like an elderly person
00:44:50
and i had to go oh no no i'm gay i'm just really this is really moved this could never happen when i was your age like i said i just thought i was like a
00:44:56
mental person but the the how did that happen right it happened because ordinary people
00:45:06
came out they appealed to other people around them lots of heterosexual people saw that it
00:45:12
was pointless to be cruel to gay people and they could be loving and accepting instead and that change happened unbel you
00:45:19
basically got 2 000 years of gay people being horrifically persecuted and then like 70 years of this from
00:45:27
from less than 70 years 60 years from send them to prison to yay they can get married right so absolutely change on when we talk about things like oh
00:45:39
you know we're trapped in this machine that's making us depressed right that can sound like such a big thing right we had
00:45:45
2 000 years of homophobia right and i'm not saying we've completely overcome it obviously but there's stunning progress right
00:45:53
the things we're talking about are much more recent inventions than homophobia right like infinitely more recent and
00:46:00
homophobia terrible though it was only ever affected a small part of the population the things we're talking about
00:46:06
[ __ ] make they don't make everyone depressed but they make everyone less happy than they could be so these are you know these are
00:46:14
absolutely things that can be challenged they can be challenged in individuals lives and we can deal with them at the
00:46:19
political level as well it requires a transformation in consciousness which is happening
00:46:26
and we can talk about addiction if you want in places that solved that made extraordinary changes in that
00:46:31
and massively reduce their addiction deaths that i went to but we need to understand this
00:46:37
differently and we need to listen to our pain we need to stop insulting our depression anxiety and addictions
00:46:42
by saying they're a sign of weakness or madness or purely biological although there are
00:46:47
some biological contributions and start listening to them listen to the signal as a society
00:46:54
and as a culture because it is telling us where we need to go and what we need to
00:46:59
do i've been a hill fan for a long time as you obviously know by now but in the last six months i've got a real opportunity to get to know the people to get to know the ceo of huell which is
00:47:09
james to get to know the founder which is julian the teams that agonize over the ingredients that go into these amazing
00:47:14
recipes and i can honestly say with my hand on my heart my appreciation and admiration for huel and its people
00:47:21
has multiplied by a factor of 10 because and this is the singularities not only are they nice people
00:47:27
but because i've seen first hand how much they are non-negotiable about the values of huel they will not
00:47:33
compromise they will not compromise on the the goodness of the ingredients that goes into the products the amount
00:47:39
of proteins and minerals and these things regardless if they can't get to where they want to get to with the products
00:47:45
they will cancel the product i've tasted products and they've said we've not managed to make it this we've not delivered on our promise of
00:47:50
veganism we've not added enough fiber so we're canceling it and that sort of non-negotiable set of values
00:47:56
has made me realize that they have my back when i choose cure let me talk about you okay
00:48:03
and your connections yeah and your romantic connections your friendships and all of those things sometimes i find it fascinating that
00:48:10
obviously since you know people can know a lot of stuff but applying it to oneself is challenging
00:48:15
i've you know some of my my favorite guests that i've sat here with i'm thinking about jamal kreishi who i sat here with who's like a
00:48:21
you know you one could call him like a motivational uh coach you know probably doesn't quite
00:48:27
characterize who he is but my last question to him was um are you good at taking your own advice he went
00:48:32
absolutely [ __ ] not he was like i'm the least motivated motivational coach in the world so my question to you is how are you
00:48:37
doing with your connections in your life in your mental health and all of these questions
00:48:43
i think people are often most articulate about the things they most struggle with right so and it's interesting because
00:48:49
sometimes that's presented as hypocrite give you an example there's a left-wing political who but there's a left-wing politician
00:48:55
i know who is incredibly articulate about greed and how terrible it is and is incredibly
00:49:01
greedy right now you could look at that and go that's hypocrisy and of course at one level a kind of
00:49:07
boringly obvious level it is but to me what's more interesting is that is a person who's internally struggling against his own flaw
00:49:13
right that is a person who has this force within him and is genuinely trying is so articulate
00:49:22
because he's wrestling with it all the time and so i think um in a sense taking your
00:49:28
own advice is sort of like the fact that you needed to articulate the advice suggests that internal struggle do you know what you mean yeah
00:49:34
i think about um ian foster one of my favorite writers who famously said only connect
00:49:41
who was someone who really struggled with connection um partly because he was a gay man of a much earlier generation
00:49:47
who uh well his connections his loving romantic connections were a crime right so he was really there were other ways in which he struggled with with connection as well
00:49:57
so in terms of myself um i was always very lucky with friendships um all my life i've had amazing friendships for me um you know i said before there
00:50:10
were two causes of two cause out of the nine causes of depression anxiety that wrote about in
00:50:15
the book there were two that i struggled with a lot and this so one was drunk values the other
00:50:21
it this was a hard journey for me in the book i learned about this through a story of
00:50:27
a scientist discovered it who i met and she explained i think people understand it better if they know the story even though for like a minute
00:50:33
you're going to think what the [ __ ] has this got to do with what he just said but just bear with me so in the mid 1980s there was a doctor
00:50:40
called vincent felitti who um was approached he was in san diego in california and he was approached by kaiser permanente who are one of the big not-for-profit
00:50:51
medical providers in california and they came to him and were like we've got a problem and we need your help and the problem was
00:51:02
um obesity obesity was massive rising hugely exploded since then but it was rising and rising and they were like look nothing we're doing is working we give people diet advice we talk to them about nutrition
00:51:14
we even give some of them personal trainers nothing is working so they just gave him a quite big budget
00:51:19
and said just do blue skies research work with really obese people just figure out what the hell we can do so dr felitti starts working with
00:51:26
uh 250 severely obese people people who weighed more than 400 pounds so people who are really you know in terrible danger he's working on this thing
00:51:37
he's interviewing them he's thinking what can i do and one day he's talking to one of them and
00:51:43
he has an idea which sounds like it actually is a quite stupid idea he said what would happen if really
00:51:49
obese people literally stopped eating and we gave them like i know vitamin c shot so they didn't get
00:51:56
scurvy we gave them like vitamin shots would they just burn through the fat supplies in their body
00:52:01
and get down to a normal way so with a [ __ ] ton of medical supervision they try it
00:52:07
and incredibly at first it worked there's a woman i call her susan that's not a real name um who went down from being more than
00:52:14
400 pounds to 138 pounds it's amazing right and people are like how can this be what's going on uh and her family are like you've saved her life and then one day something happened they
00:52:26
didn't expect susan cracked she went to kfc she wasn't kfc that's me projecting whatever it was
00:52:32
uh some fast food place she starts obsessively eating and pretty soon she's back at her
00:52:37
dangerous weight not where she'd been but a dangerous weight and dr felitti called her in he's like
00:52:43
susan what happened said i don't know i don't know and he's kind of dumbfounded and he says well tell me about the day that you cracked what did anything happen that day it turned
00:52:55
out something had happened that day that never happened to susan she was in a bar and a man came up to
00:53:01
her and hit on her not in a nasty predatory way in a nice way and she felt really freaked out and she goes and she starts eating and
00:53:07
if he's like huh what's the significant could this be significant and then he said to her saying he never asked his patients
00:53:12
before he said susan when did you start to put on your weight in her case it was when she was 11.
00:53:18
and he said to her well did anything happen that year that didn't happen any other year anything when you're eleven
00:53:25
she said she looked down she said yeah that's when my grandfather started to rape me
00:53:32
dr philippe interviewed everyone in the program and he discovered that more than 60 percent of them have put on their
00:53:37
extreme weight in the aftermath of being sexually abused or assaulted and he's thinking what's what's that
00:53:43
about how what and susan explained it to him really well she said overweight is overlooked
00:53:50
and that's what i need to be this thing that seems so destructive and of course it's bad for you to be severely obese was performing a positive function for all these people it was protecting them
00:54:02
from sexual attention right um and just things like ah this is this is kind of interesting um so he but this is a small group of people it's 250 people it's not much you can't
00:54:13
draw big scientific conclusions based on this so dr felitti goes to the cd center for disease control who fund a lot of
00:54:20
medical research and he got funding to do a massive study everyone who came to kaiser permanente in san
00:54:26
diego so more than 17 000 people for a whole year no matter what for headaches schizophrenia broken leg
00:54:33
anything got given two questionnaires first part says did you have any of these bad experiences when you were a kid things like sexual abuse severe neglect that kind of thing second
00:54:45
part said um have you had any of these problems as an adult it was initially only going to
00:54:51
say obesity but and this is where it comes to our story at the last minute they had loads of other things like depression addiction suicide attempts
00:54:58
and at first when they added up the figures people they were like no there's been a mistake added up again because the figures were so extreme for
00:55:04
every category of childhood trauma that you experienced you were two to four times more likely
00:55:10
to be depressed obese and addicted but when you got into the multiple categories the figures just went crazy
00:55:16
if you had six categories of chance of trauma you were 3100 more likely to have attempted suicide and 4 600 percent more likely to have an injecting
00:55:28
drug problem i mean these are just insane figures you very rarely get that in science right
00:55:33
and i remember dr felitti saying to me like that that he he realized it was like there had been a house fire and we have been focusing on dealing with the smoke
00:55:47
not on dealing with the fire right dr robert ander who's one of the other scientists who worked on it said to me
00:55:52
he realized when you see things like obesity depression addiction we need to stop asking what's wrong with
00:55:58
you and start asking what happened to you but it's kind of difficult to talk about
00:56:04
this but so dr felicia is a super nice guy right if you met him you'd really like him when i interviewed him he was
00:56:10
like 81 so ages ago lovely good decent admirable man and when i interviewed him in san diego the first time i was sitting with him
00:56:22
and i was getting angrier and angrier and i actually ended the interview early because i was getting so angry i remember walking to the beach in san diego walking around thinking
00:56:34
what the [ __ ] is this about why am i so angry with this lovely old man who's done this amazing research that's helped so many people
00:56:40
and i'm thinking so when i was a child i'd experienced some very extreme things from an adult in my life and i had i didn't want to think about
00:56:51
that i didn't want to uh i didn't want to think about that in relation to the depression i had
00:56:56
experienced i didn't i didn't want to give this individual power over me now um but one of the reasons i'm glad that i went back and carried on
00:57:08
talking to him is because of what dr felicity do you think is really relevant to what you're asking so
00:57:15
obviously they'd asked all these people who came for healthcare about their childhood trauma so suddenly they've got all this data so
00:57:21
they said to people's gps don't call them back in but next time they come in look at the
00:57:28
childhood trauma thing and if they've experienced childhood trauma say to them something like this i see that when you were a child you
00:57:33
were sexually abused or whatever it was i'm really sorry that happened that should never have happened to you you
00:57:39
should have been protected that was a failing would you like to talk about it and 40 percent of people did not want to talk
00:57:46
about it but 60 of people did and they wanted to talk about it on average for five minutes and then it was randomly assigned some
00:57:52
of them were told we can go to therapists to talk about it more what they found was just five minutes of
00:57:58
an authority figure saying i'm so sorry this should never have happened to you that alone
00:58:04
led to a significant fall in depression and anxiety and people who refer to a therapist had an even bigger form
00:58:10
and what this shows it fits with a whole load of other evidence from people like professor steve coles at ucla professor
00:58:16
james pennebaker at florida state university is it's not the trauma that destroys you
00:58:22
it's the shame about the trauma and giving people ways to release that shame is an
00:58:28
antidepressant so for me learning that and it's one of the reasons i made myself put it in the book and talk about it is so very often people who survive
00:58:40
abuse as children internalize the voice of the abuser right almost invariably the abuser says
00:58:46
you made me do this you're a bad person you made me do this right and so although of course there
00:58:53
was never any point in my adult life where i thought that was a rational you know there was never a point where i would have if you
00:58:58
you know if someone had told me they had been abused and told me negative things they'd been told i would never have thought yeah the
00:59:04
abuser was right obviously i didn't reckon with that internalization in my own life and i
00:59:09
think it meant that a lot of the time although i always had great friendships with romantic relationships um they would i would often cauterize them
00:59:21
at a certain point because i didn't feel at that time that i deserved to be loved i didn't feel that i deserved to be treated well so it would mean that sometimes i would get into relationships
00:59:32
people who didn't treat me well or sometimes if they did treat me well i would end it prematurely
00:59:37
at the point at which they were treating me well because i've internalized so many of these negative
00:59:43
uh and destructive and untrue ideas and and the process of thinking that through obviously i had a therapist as well the process of thinking that through and releasing that shame made me
00:59:55
much more open to know love you know uh because i didn't it was possible to overcome that does that make sense stephen does that are you still on that journey oh yeah and i think anyone who you know
01:00:12
how would i put it yeah of course of course and through all of your your work and your writing you've you know you've highlighted to the world but also clearly to yourself the importance of
01:00:26
that um of romantic connections well it comes right back to where we started isn't it
01:00:31
why do i write to understand to understand things i didn't understand at the start to go on a journey there are things i
01:00:38
want to understand um and and sometimes they're big things right um and sometimes they're very personal things and sometimes they're both uh and then to track down okay who
01:00:52
who knows a lot about this who's found interesting things out about this and go and sit with them and kind of pester them and keep going
01:00:57
back year after year until i feel i understand it and i feel now i understand it
01:01:02
and i gotta say it's quite frustrating watching some of the kovid debate at the moment because um there's been this big increase in addiction depression
01:01:16
and a lot of the way it's taught even by super well-meaning admirable people as almost everyone in this debate is
01:01:25
so many of the ways in which people are encouraged to think they are helping people with the best will in the world and with a good heart
01:01:37
often strip these things of meaning so there's a thing for example that very well meaning people say which is so depression is just like you know depression is
01:01:48
a disease like diabetes you know you wouldn't shame someone having a broken leg they're absolutely right that depressing anxious people should never be stigmatized but actually that that's not the way you remove stigma you
01:02:01
don't remove i mean no one ever doubted that leprosy and aids were biological phenomena and you might notice there was a damn
01:02:07
lot of stigma about them right saying something is biological and it's true there are some biological components we can talk about if you want
01:02:13
some biological contributions your genes can make you more vulnerable to these things so they do not write your destiny
01:02:19
um but but sexting is biological does not actually the there's some good scientific evidence it it increases the stigma because it makes
01:02:25
people think god those people are really different to me they're like a different species what actually undoes stigma is to say although there are some
01:02:31
biological contributions any of us would feel like this in this situation actually that your pain makes
01:02:39
sense there was a moment that really all this really fell into place for me as well as one of the two totally revolutionary moments for me in
01:02:45
the research for lost connections i went to interview this south african psychiatrist called derek summerfield
01:02:52
and he told me this story about something that happened to him so derek was in cambodia in 2001 when they
01:02:58
first introduced chemical antidepressants for people in cambodia they've never had them in the country before and the local doctors the the cambodians
01:03:05
were like what are they they didn't know what they were antidepressants and and derek explained and they said to him oh we don't need them we've already got antidepressants and he was like well
01:03:16
what do you mean he thought they were going to talk about some kind of like herbal remedy like jinkobeloba or something
01:03:22
instead they told him a story they had a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields and one
01:03:28
day he stood on a land mine left over from the wall with the americans and he got his leg blown off so they gave him an artificial limb they
01:03:34
did that in cambodia because they've got a lot of land mines and after a while several months the guy goes back to work right so he goes back
01:03:40
to work in the rice fields and but apparently it's super painful to work under water when you've got an artificial limb
01:03:46
and i'm guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up the guy started to cry all day
01:03:53
after a while he just wouldn't get out of bed he developed what we would call classic depression right this is when
01:03:59
the cambodian doctor said well you know that's when we gave him an antidepressant and derek said what was
01:04:05
it they explained that they went and sat with him they listened to him they realized that his pain made sense he only had to talk to him for five minutes to realize why he felt so [ __ ]
01:04:16
one of the doctors said well we realized if we bought this guy a cow he could become a dairy farmer he
01:04:22
wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much so they bought him a cow within a couple
01:04:27
of weeks his crying stopped within a month his depression was gone it never came back they said to derek
01:04:33
so you see doctor that cow that was an antidepressant that's what you mean right
01:04:38
now if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have that it's primarily or entirely a malfunction in your brain
01:04:44
that sounds like a bad joke i went to my doctor for an antidepressant she gave me a cow but what those cambodian doctors knew
01:04:50
intuitively from this individual unscientific anecdote is what the leading medical body in the whole world the world health
01:04:56
organization has been trying to tell us for years right your pain makes sense if you're depressed if
01:05:02
you're anxious you're not weak you're not crazy you're not in the main a machine with broken parts
01:05:09
you're a human being with unmet needs and what you need is practical help and support to get those needs met so one of the
01:05:15
things we have to be asking as a society and culture is what's the cow for the things that are screwing us up right what's the cow for
01:05:21
the things that are making us depressed instead of seeing depression as a malfunction we've got to see it as a signal that's
01:05:28
telling us the person is distressed and and has unmet needs and and together help them get those disparate because what the doctors didn't say is all right mate this is your problem you're on your own right together they
01:05:40
help to solve the problem we've got to solve the underlying problems for which depression is a signal
01:05:46
and you said you tweeted um about this you said um there is good evidence that after covid
01:05:51
we can reverse our spiraling depression and anxiety crisis but to do that we need to radically
01:05:56
expand the menu of responses to it yeah think about what we were talking about to give one example just from up
01:06:01
the road social prescribing right every single doctor's surgery should have a social prescribing wing
01:06:07
it should be the first thing that is suggested certainly for mild and moderate depression uh is figure out if the person's lonely
01:06:14
and disconnected from the natural world if they are suggest they might prescribe and there's a real power in doctors
01:06:20
prescribed not just saying oh you might want to think about this because people feel so disempowered to find each other in such a
01:06:25
lonely and atomized society that's one example obviously the last third of lost connections is loads of very practical examples and
01:06:31
we have to do that in our own lives right like we can socially prescribe ourselves yeah i think there's an authority in doctors
01:06:38
absolutely we can we shouldn't we should be doing it for ourselves we should be urging other people to do it but in a culture that's become so
01:06:44
disconnected from understanding our needs and actually where we've been told a rival
01:06:50
story that has some truth in it you know there are as i stress a lot in the book i have a
01:06:56
chapter about this there are real biological contributions to depression and anxiety that can make you more sensitive to these problems
01:07:02
and can make it harder to get out but what's happened is an overly simplified biological story
01:07:08
has become the main thing we say about depression when i went to my doctor and i was a
01:07:14
teenager and i was felt like pain was leaking out of me my doctor who was a very well-meaning
01:07:19
decent person just said the same wrong with your brain and all you need to do is drug yourself right and chemical anti-depressants gave
01:07:24
me a little bit of relief for a while also gave me really severe side effects in my case although not everyone
01:07:30
and ultimately i remain depressed right so what that story did that over simplified story which has some truth in
01:07:36
it for some people well that oversimplified story did is cut me off for many years for
01:07:42
13 years from exploring the deeper causes if right early on there's no criticism
01:07:48
of my doctor they're just part of a system you know that's not of their own creation and a lot of doctors want to do
01:07:54
better and want to have better options to give people that they haven't been offered them themselves
01:07:59
and it cut me off from a deeper more nuanced story that helps me to find a way out of my
01:08:05
depression so i think one of the things we've got to do is help people to find stories that make
01:08:10
sense of their pain because that's the way once you understand why you feel something you can begin to find your way out of it
01:08:17
but just being lost in a haze if you're just biologically broken no one is there are some biological contributions
01:08:23
but no one is broken by their biology no one is no one is with there's nobody who with the right support can't find their way out but with the right support is a crucial clause there
01:08:35
that we have to build as a society that we have not built right we just haven't built got me thinking
01:08:41
about psychedelics for a number of reasons because psychedelics you know it's been of a
01:08:46
i think there's a bit of a revolution going on in the the perception of psychedelics you know we had the war and nixon's like war on drugs in the like
01:08:53
50s or 60s or whatever it was i wasn't alive then so excuse my uh inaccuracy but we were
01:08:58
lucky you dodged the bullet of nixon not a good guy yeah i wasn't there either but i'm not ready to talk about him but i just i know that he was
01:09:04
pivotal in like you know slamming the the gauntlet down on the the chance of even researching some of these compound
01:09:10
psychedelic compounds but what i've come to learn over the last six months working in uh you know one of the
01:09:15
world's leading um sort of psychedelic and non-psychedelic mental health companies which is a tie
01:09:20
and spending some time there is how remarkable the s these stats evidence and findings
01:09:28
are um for things like psilocybin which is the compound derived from magic mushrooms at helping those with
01:09:35
treatment-resistant depression to overcome um their you know their their feelings
01:09:41
of depression and it matches up perfectly to the philosophy and really the the perspective that your book gave me on mental health because it approaches the um the
01:09:53
what's the correct word to use the indication of treatment resistant depression from the stance that something has
01:09:58
happened to you and that thing might live in your subconscious you know and it's an unlocker of that
01:10:04
thing in the same way that therapy might be for some for some people but what's your you know having written this book and studied
01:10:10
depression for so long and anxiety what do you think of psychedelics so as you know for the book as chapter about psychotics because i went and interviewed the leading experts in the world on this people who've been doing the
01:10:21
cutting-edge research i interviewed them in um johns hopkins in baltimore at ucla here in london at ucl at nyu
01:10:29
and somewhere else oh in brazil and um so i'm strongly informed of psychedelics for some people it's a slightly
01:10:35
complicated picture in a way that i think helps us to understand what's going on so think about treatment you mentioned
01:10:41
treatment resistant depression some really good research was done on this here in london by david professor david nutt and dr
01:10:48
robin carhart harris they get people who've been depressed for a long time and nothing's helped them and they've tried lots of things
01:10:54
and nothing's helped them and they gave them remember rightly three doses of psilocybin in the active
01:10:59
component magic mushrooms might be wrong on the number but something like that and exactly as you
01:11:06
say huge numbers of them have a it's amazing they feel the strong feeling of connection to the natural world to their own traumas to everyone around them as
01:11:17
anyone as you see psychedelics experience a really profound spiritual experience and that deeply lifts their depression and anxiety
01:11:29
so a taste of connection this wasn't true for literally everyone but it was a very high percentage an intense feeling of meaning and
01:11:35
connection helps to lift them out of their depression there's a coder to that which robin talks about um
01:11:42
so i'll give you an example one of the people who told me about it's a woman in the program who worked in um she worked in an office in like a
01:11:49
coastal town in britain that was quite kind of run down and grim should be very depressed she goes she
01:11:56
takes the silocybin her depression lifts she feels deeply connected and then she goes back to work in
01:12:01
the office and she comes back and is like i can't go around my office acting like
01:12:08
we're connected we're all equal nature is beautiful i have to live in this disconnected way to exist in my
01:12:14
office right so over time her depression comes back because she's had a taste of connection but then
01:12:20
she goes back to live in a disconnected landscape right a disconnected emotional landscape
01:12:26
and i think um so what the evidence shows is the way i think of psychedelics is administered in the right way of course that's an important clause what they can do is give you a taste of
01:12:40
how it feels to be connected to have meaning but i think of that as like a compass that can point you in the direction you need to travel it doesn't do the j it gives i mean it
01:12:52
gives you a flash of what it's like to be at the end of the journey but then you're back at the start of the journey and you know the com you know
01:12:57
the direction in which you need to travel what it doesn't do is do the journey for you right or not for more than the six
01:13:02
or seven hours you know you're you're under the effects of the the psychedelic so and this is true of a lot of the
01:13:09
i mean there's some i'll come to some complexity of the evidence in a minute but so most people are not going to want to
01:13:16
take psychedelics a huge amount at the time right i mean there's some exceptions amanda fielding i don't know if you met her so amanda who people don't know amanda
01:13:22
is um kind of amazing uh british heiress who's a great champion of psychedelics who um seems to remember i don't want to get it wrong cause i didn't write about her so i didn't uh i don't remember the
01:13:34
exact number but i seem to call her saying she took psychedelics for the whole of 1986. so just every day right so some people will
01:13:40
have the means and want to take psychedelics all the time but that's a very small part of the population right so
01:13:47
what what we know works is giving people psychedelics to give them a sense of what it can be like to be connected and then helping them to integrate into their lives ways they
01:13:58
can bring take that connection forward so there was a guy i interviewed who was part of the johns hopkins study
01:14:04
who had had this very profound experience with psychedelics his dad had died when he was very young
01:14:10
no one had talked to him about his dad's death when he died it was just kind of silence and when he died he had this vision
01:14:16
where his he saw his dad he found his dad in a wood and his dad said to him you know you
01:14:23
built up these walls to protect yourself but we can take these walls down now you're safe go and seek right because
01:14:30
he'd been cutting himself off for so long from from things like romantic connections
01:14:35
and then when he when the psychedelics the effect of the psychedelics the immediate effect of the psychedelics
01:14:40
went away he then started becoming like a very deep meditator doing all sorts of things that kind of
01:14:46
built in that that that sense of connection into his life so i think that that to me is the great value of now there are some people who say they have more enduring effects beyond just that immediate taste of connection and
01:14:58
the my kind of compass metaphor so the good evidence for that would be the johns hopkins study so the guys at johns hopkins did her
01:15:05
amazing scientists did it i always think about this in relation to my mother because um they took really long-term smokers so my uh my
01:15:12
mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day and uh there's an amazing there's a photo of me and her two at a time
01:15:19
she's like there's a photo of me and her when i'm uh about six months old i found a few years ago
01:15:25
where she's um she's breastfeeding me smoking and resting the asteroid in my stomach and when i showed it to her she said my
01:15:31
mother's scottish uh what i showed it to her she said you were a difficult baby i needed that cigarette
01:15:36
[ __ ] [ __ ] but um so they took people like my mother who a super super long-term
01:15:42
smoker she's been spoken since she was 14. and they gave them i think it was three doses of silocybin over a few months
01:15:49
and 80 of them stopped smoking and a year later 60 of them were still non-smokers so
01:15:54
there's some evidence of though positive long-term outcomes it's quite a small study so yeah i think this is a really
01:16:02
important i think some people oversell it and say it's the answer which is not right but i
01:16:09
think it can be a very useful tool when i talk about with depression what we've done up to
01:16:14
now is basically since the since the 90s is with depression when people present with depression almost all the time there is one option
01:16:27
on the menu which is chemical antidepressants which do give some people some relief um
01:16:33
we need to radic that needs to stay on the menu but we need to radically expand the menu of options
01:16:39
and psychedelics are another great example of something that should totally be beyond the menu should be available to
01:16:46
people in a medical context and i would argue outside medical context as well i mean it's part of the argument of um
01:16:54
my book chasing the scream about how we need to end the war on drugs and move towards regulated models of
01:16:59
access to drugs for all sorts of drugs so yeah i think i think it's really important i think we're getting there as
01:17:04
well it's uh you know the public markets and the commercial model and the amount of investment that's going into
01:17:10
psychedelics is just staggering a thai have raised i think 400 million in the last 24 months it's another thing
01:17:17
where you know we're thinking about change when we feel like we're up against when we are indeed up against these very powerful forces
01:17:22
what think about cannabis right yeah when the day george w bush becomes president in 2000
01:17:28
15 of american citizens support legalizing cannabis today it's 70 and because new york just
01:17:34
legalized uh that hasn't started yet they've just voted the legislature voted to legalize now half of all american citizens live
01:17:40
in a state where cannabis is legal right so you think about how quickly that happened cannabis being unbelievably
01:17:46
demonized from the 1930s to the to the to like your lifetime yeah um and then this huge shift in opinion really quickly because people saw it in practice right
01:17:57
people saw cannabis legalization and practice colorado went first um mason taver who led that campaign i
01:18:03
interviewed a lot for chasing the screen just all it takes is one place to breach the damn two places washington state did
01:18:09
at the same time and people are like oh is this the thing we were so [ __ ] afraid of oh actually you know it's you know
01:18:16
pretty straightforward just i feel like social media has played it played a role in this because
01:18:22
we now have this like connected consciousness of like a whole country or the whole planet where we can we can pick up on an idea
01:18:30
share it and like virtue signal it signal it rapidly into existence into where we all go yep
01:18:36
that's right yeah like a whole country can do it when you think about if you go back hundreds of years before the advent of the internet
01:18:42
if the king of the land or whatever the politician had said something we couldn't um sort of get together in
01:18:48
the same way and um form our own opinion as this like because i see like i think about twitter as this one brain
01:18:55
and one day it will say you know same-sex marriage is great and that idea can very quickly
01:19:02
become adopted because you can get that idea to like a billion people and basically vote
01:19:08
it into existence using like you know likes and retweets and a couple of influences
01:19:14
and so i you know so i would have said that if you i would have said that 10 years ago what you just said i would have had the
01:19:20
optimistic view i think the evidence since then has gotten you're definitely right one of the good things about social media is we're
01:19:26
geographical distance feels much more collapsed and we feel much closer to the whole world ideas are spreading yeah and i
01:19:32
just but if you look at the mechanisms by which those ideas spread this is not inherent to social
01:19:37
media this is inherent to the current business model of social media so if you look at my friend tristan
01:19:42
harris uh has done his totally interview has done a really important work on this he was a google engineer
01:19:48
who uh saw what was happening inside google and and spoke out um so if you look at how these ideas spread so we tend to think of it as a neutral playing field right
01:20:00
so here's a good idea gay marriage psychedelics help depression whatever it might be
01:20:05
enters this level playing field some people like it it spreads it grows right now sometimes that happens of course
01:20:10
but if you look at um so these business models of premise the business model of youtube twitter facebook is all promised
01:20:18
on you pick up your phone now you scroll through twitter you scroll through facebook the longer you are scrolling the more
01:20:26
money facebook makes obviously because of both exposure to adverts and because they're learning more about you every time you do anything
01:20:32
so their business model is premised every time you put down your phone it's a disaster for them
01:20:38
and every time you carry on scrolling it's great for them so they've designed very complex algorithms to figure out what keeps you scrolling
01:20:44
what keeps everyone who walks past this building scrolling and it turns out because of the quirky human beings that we could talk about
01:20:49
well if you want things that make you angry will keep you scrolling longer than thing things that out things things that outrage and anger you will keep you scrolling longer than things that make you feel
01:21:01
good if you see something that makes you feel good it makes you want to go and be out in the real world if you see something that
01:21:06
makes you angry you want to keep scrolling you want to express your rage right if it's enraging it's engaging so
01:21:12
although that's not the goal of youtube and facebook they want you to be angry their algorithms are figured out
01:21:18
angering and enraging content keeps people scrolling longer therefore although it's not the intention of the designers
01:21:24
the the practical effect of these apps is they are designed to make the algorithms
01:21:29
function in such a way that they will feed you things that make you angry and upset so this thing that you thought was a level playing field
01:21:35
right oh good ideas will prevail bad ideas or die out is not right actually on in the main it will select
01:21:42
for things that make people angry so you look at the nyu study if you look at the um the figures for
01:21:48
the 2016 u.s presidential election i think the figure was 19 out of 19 out of the 20 most uh shared stories on facebook were lies like actual lies like
01:21:59
the trumpet um donald trump was endorsed by the pope right which was not true in fact the pope criticized donald trump um so you see
01:22:06
when you think about infowars the disgusting filth uh this guy alex jones who uh is a a cynic cynic not even not even a lunatic a cynic who says
01:22:19
things like the sandy hook massacre didn't happen the parents were are liars they're crisis actors so
01:22:25
you think about you know how many children it was 26 i think were murdered at school
01:22:31
and he unleashes a mob against these parents whose children have been murdered where those parents
01:22:36
have had to move loads of times because they are hounded by his supporters threatening to kill their surviving children
01:22:41
it's hard for me to imagine a more evil thing infowars in the 2016 election more infowars stories were shared on facebook in the world than the entire new york times washington post guardian
01:22:54
and bbc combined so you think about this landscape that is enraging people um so it's not now you don't have to have a business model like that social media doesn't have to
01:23:05
work that way right you can have all the good things about social media the collapsing of social distance the
01:23:10
connection of the world without that if you have a different business model we can talk about another time and tristan talks about that brilliantly
01:23:17
but so i i i get what you're saying and i understand there's a truth in what you're saying which is we can hear ideas more readily but there's a cost well it's not just a
01:23:29
cost there'll be a cost in any model but actually we're communicating through a poisoned mechanism that doesn't promote the
01:23:36
spread of good ideas that actually promotes the spread of false and uh hateful ideas um and we've got to
01:23:42
fix that as well as um yes then we can have all the joys of connection without this you know
01:23:49
infowars [ __ ] or or other forms of i completely agree um and you you know i saw you'd written
01:23:55
when you went off to write your new book which we're not we're probably not allowed to talk about on this uh my publishers will tase me that's fine
01:24:02
they've told me very specifically i'm super excited to read it it's january next year january next year yeah
01:24:07
how exciting yeah can you you can say the title that's on amazon uh it's called stolen focus
01:24:13
nice okay i'm not i'm why you can't focus and how to think deeply again okay but my publishers literally don't i can't do an american accent
01:24:26
that's a [ __ ] word they don't actually smell like that i've told them like they're the they're actually like very nice new york
01:24:31
we won't talk about that but um what i would like to talk about is focus what are you doing in that process where you're writing you're writing a new book now what are you doing are you out researching you're on the
01:24:46
internet you're reading other books you're speaking to people what are you doing so i spend a lot i spent a long time
01:24:52
researching my book so the book that i'm gonna the book that i'm writing now which is about i'm really not meant to talk about
01:24:58
because it's about a specific set of crimes that uh other people have written about i don't want to i don't want to set up the
01:25:04
journalists but um so i've been going there for 10 years and i've been getting to know the people
01:25:10
10 years and i've been deeply researching it for 10 years and there's a thing about
01:25:16
um when you're trying to understand a subject whether it's depression or las vegas or i'm writing a biography of name
01:25:22
chomsky that i've also been working on for a really long time and i probably won't write for another 10 years at least
01:25:28
there's a thing about such an important part of my books is people opening up to me
01:25:35
and people generally don't open up to you the first time they meet you you know they think who is this person why
01:25:40
does he want why do you want to ask me these very personal questions what's going on here generally people open up to you at the
01:25:46
end of the second year so for me it's so important it's incredible privilege and luxury that i get to do
01:25:51
this um for me what's so important is this very long span so i'll spend ten years
01:25:58
writing in in this moment since you know what i'm doing at the moment so i'm writing about vegas so there's a couple tommy and shea
01:26:04
who i knew over many years uh when he was murdered um and what i'm doing at the moment is i've got all the audio i've ever recorded i've got hundreds of hours of audio with them i
01:26:17
paid to have it all transcribed and i'm just reading through just mounds and mounds of transcripts they keep all right
01:26:23
that's a scene that's a moment ah i forgot he said that you know this is that's the time this
01:26:28
happened to us that's the time we were you know in caesar's palace and then oh yeah and the guy so it's just going
01:26:34
through so at the moment i'm in the stage of what i think of as finding out what jigsaw pieces i've got
01:26:40
i'm not even assembling the jigsaw at the moment i'm just going over okay and you know there'll be i'll read 300 pages of transcripts and think oh we've
01:26:46
got nothing that time you know and then another time there are days when you're like oh they were so articulate that day or
01:26:53
this crazy thing happened so at the moment i'm assembling the jigsaw pieces and then
01:26:58
probably in two months i start to put the jigsaw pieces together so i'll i'll have some i'll like index it and
01:27:03
i'd be like all right okay so he talked about his childhood in hawaii this time that time that okay then you put all that together and then you go oh okay this is this is where he described
01:27:14
gambling all right okay so you're trying to piece it all together slowly over time be to do that you've got to initially
01:27:21
immerse yourself in the actual place and go back a lot and build up a huge reservoir of just stuff and
01:27:30
the other thing and this was hard for me because i was a newspaper journalist for a long time where you know everything had to be
01:27:39
you know you've got 24 hours to write it you don't have time for dead ends you have to have a high tolerance for
01:27:45
dead ends so for every expert i've quoted to you i need to be 10 experts who were decent people and told me nothing i used in the book right there's
01:27:52
a great uh i know absolutely nothing about nature so this could be [ __ ] but there's a metaphor that thoreau the american
01:27:58
19th century american writer used where he said um apparently if you want to find a beehive and you don't know where the
01:28:04
beehive is if you stay in a place and wait for a bee to come along and catch it in a jar just keep it there
01:28:11
for a couple of minutes it will fly off in the direction of the hive so you let it go and you run and it the b is faster than you will
01:28:17
then you stand you follow it as far as you can and then you wait there you catch another bee let that one go
01:28:22
follow that and if you do that like 30 times you'll find the beehive right i don't that's true but that's what thoreau says um and i think of writing
01:28:30
as a bit like that it's like you you start with a subject it's really big why are so many people depressed you look for people who've talked about an interesting way you go and talk to
01:28:42
all of them and then at the end of every interview you say who else should i talk to and you're going to talk to all of them and you say who else should i see and
01:28:48
you get this kind of growing concentric circle until sooner or later you find the person who like vincent felitti i interview i can't
01:28:53
tell you how many people are interviewed about childhood trauma and depression many of whom you know were nice people who told me nothing of
01:28:59
interest and i forget who it was it was a chain it was a chain through about five people who said someone said
01:29:05
you should talk to vincent felitti who's he went to san diego and you're like ah this is this is the thing right and and
01:29:11
some of that can be sometimes you're lucky i knew in chasing the scream i want to tell the story of a drug dealer
01:29:17
and i remember chino was the second drug dealer i interviewed him to be the guy in baltimore and i remember chino uh first thing he
01:29:24
said to me almost the very first thing was i was conceived with my mother who was a
01:29:30
crack addict was raped by my dad who was an nypd officer and i was like tell me more and i never looked for another drug dealer i was like she knows my person right and china is
01:29:42
an unusually incredible human being in all sorts of ways he's no longer a drug dealer he's um he
01:29:47
he arrested no no he was arrested he was wreckers but he uh he now campaigns to end the war on drugs
01:29:54
and actually had shut down the horrific spafford the horrific youth detention center that he was detained in he's a
01:30:00
completely incredible person but um yeah so sometimes you're lucky and you don't have to do the long chain you just find
01:30:06
the right person very early and sometimes you spend five years finding the right person
01:30:12
but for me it's a the the fun is the the journey right the part of the fun sometimes it's the fun of getting an answer vincent felitti you're like oh i now understand childhood drama and addiction
01:30:23
and depression but yes it's a long a long journey but i i i'm really lucky i just love you
01:30:28
sometimes you meet writers who go it's agony it's agony and i always want to go can't [ __ ] work in a call
01:30:34
center for a week and come back and tell me how difficult i'm not saying there aren't challenges in writing there are but anyone who is a
01:30:40
writer a professional writer whose attitude is not everyday thank god i'm an atheist but metaphorically thank god i get to do this job i'm so lucky
01:30:52
that's got to be your default position it's a it's an incredible privilege to get to do it i know that sounds hashtag blessed and wanky but
01:30:59
like it really is like a great um to get to kind of investigate complicated things and try to find answers and explain them to people who need to know and there's a lot of
01:31:10
people who need to know the answers to these questions it's a great thing but that's clearly why you've written so
01:31:15
many great books because you have a intrinsic joy for your work because the lengths you've described there ten years five years three years the air
01:31:26
miles you must have done to write these books there's a whole part of greenland that has melted because there you go yeah i i i i'm not
01:31:35
going to [ __ ] i finish i wrote my book um over the space of a year and a half but
01:31:40
i wouldn't have done what you did i i and and that speaks to where my intrinsic motivations and joy comes from i enjoyed the process of writing the book but the thoroughness that you put
01:31:52
into your books is just staggering to me because i don't share that intrinsic joy for the process which
01:31:58
you clearly do um but you have a lot of intrinsic joy for the other things that you yeah exactly important it's a shame it's just shame
01:32:05
to some degree i think part of my conditioning of growing up in the social media era where we get instant gratification
01:32:10
made the the thought of you know when i've got a instant instagram story i can do or this
01:32:17
five-year book project but that's why i really restrict i give you an example i won't say his name but there's someone a contemporary of mine a british writer
01:32:24
who's now based in the u.s who is one of the cleverest people i know a totally brilliant i mean just politically intellectually just an outstanding
01:32:34
person and 10 years before if he'd been exactly the same person 10 years before he would have written three brilliant books that changed how people think about the subjects and i've watched and it's been really
01:32:48
depressing as he just atrophies his energy tweeting all the time and he's got a huge twitter following and i'm not saying that doesn't do any good it does sound good but and ever whenever
01:33:00
i see him i you know i mean uh in the cities and i would say he he you know we i see him and he's just adult and you know
01:33:08
there's a line um and ginsburg the poet said uh i saw the best minds of my generation consumed by
01:33:14
madness i feel like i saw the best minds of my generation consumed by twitter just [ __ ] i'm not saying there's no
01:33:22
value in it but atrophying that energy and i've been there right um years ago but
01:33:28
and so for me you're right a huge part of writing a book is deferred gratification i've gotta
01:33:36
interview people for this biography for example i'm writing noam chomsky he's an incredible person i interviewed someone two days ago
01:33:43
knowing i'm not gonna look at that transcript for seven years right and knowing somewhere down the line i'm going to be glad i did that interview because that person is quite old and they'll be dead if i
01:33:54
wait seven years and you know and so you've got to be it's very hard to defer gratification if you
01:34:00
can get an immediate hit of but it's a very shallow hit right when i meet people and i quite feel
01:34:05
difference right sometimes people come up to me in the street and they go uh i follow you on instagram or whatever and there's and
01:34:13
it's a very shallow connection and sometimes people come up to me and they'll say i read your book
01:34:18
and they will even their physical demeanor is different it's like being approached by someone
01:34:24
who is a friend right and they will always have some not always but most of the time have some
01:34:30
much more detailed story i always feel like i feel like if someone follows you on twitter it's the equivalent
01:34:35
of shouting to you across a crowded bar whistling exactly whereas if you're lucky whistling i'm
01:34:41
slightly throwing the pint at you and glassing you but whereas if someone's read my book i feel like i've gone on holiday with them
01:34:47
right the level of kind of intimate because it takes a long time to read a book right deeply personal it's very and they've been in your head
01:34:53
right they've been injured childhood yeah they've been and they've and they've been on this if they remember it's a really big journey right so
01:35:02
there's an intimacy to that so i think it's it's worth it comes back to what you're saying
01:35:07
about porn right you could spend your whole life sitting at home wanking over porn right i'm not against porn right i look
01:35:14
at it myself but sometimes but we all know the hard work of having a relationship
01:35:20
is ultimately going to be more satisfying than your whole life one can overpower right speak for yourself exactly okay
01:35:26
very and i feel like a lot of life is on that principle right like of course you can to me the people i
01:35:44
know i mean i know who look who are tweeting all the time and i know a lot of people with really big twitter followings
01:35:50
it's not just that they partly it's their atrophying their lives on [ __ ] also it makes them really
01:35:56
[ __ ] unhappy i know someone i won't say who but someone who's got a very big twitter following
01:36:01
who's got an ex it's a bit like our instagram inspired so we're talking about before huge instagram photos sort of huge
01:36:07
twitter following bumped into in the street a good few years ago now again like miserable as [ __ ]
01:36:14
right and made more miserable by i mean i think about someone i know this is not a famous person someone i know who
01:36:21
uses a uses a lot of meth and is on twitter all the time and genuinely if you said to me should this individual quit twitter or meth first i would say quit twitter it's
01:36:32
worse for him right i don't mean that as a glib joke not that meth is so great but it it
01:36:39
it just has such a negative effect on people the thing i dislike most about it is
01:36:45
for me um [Music] almost everything about being an effective person in the world is about being sincere and open-hearted
01:36:57
you know with humor and comedy and all that stuff but you want to be sincere and open-ended and what i don't
01:37:02
like about church and i think again it's one things i feel happening to me as i look at it is the voice of twitter the kind of
01:37:07
generic voice is you are sarcastic you're cold you're one-upmanship a one-upmanship all of these things that are antithetical to
01:37:21
just a good life right if you want to succeed on if you want to win at twitter and i've seen this happen to so many people i know um how do you do it be sassy be nasty
01:37:36
be maximally judgmental there's no tweets and going oh this person's screwed up but we all screw up sometimes let's you know
01:37:43
let's forgive the person to move on there's no tweets in that all the tweets are in kill the person destroy them escalating outrage because
01:37:50
of the algorithms because the way they work um binary exactly just it's not a forum it's a forum that promotes unkindness and aggressive certainty when
01:38:02
almost everything in life that's meaningful comes from kindness doubt listening to people also
01:38:10
encourages people to respond to different to me the worst possible way to go through life
01:38:15
is to inc and again this is a big lesson for me i think about chasing the screams person
01:38:21
is a good example i can say worst way to go through life is to meet people who are different to you
01:38:26
and say that they're terrible and condemn them right to me that almost all the pleasure
01:38:31
in life is encountering people encountering people who are different and listening to them and think oh this person's different to me that's really
01:38:37
interesting i think about someone when people i most admire in the world is a woman called christina dent
01:38:42
who read chasing the screams which is why she got in touch with me so christina is an evangelical christian
01:38:48
in mississippi who's a republican right pretty different to me i'm a gay atheist who
01:38:53
hates republicans right and christina um so christina is very opposed to abortion and she put her money where her mouth is she believes that if you're going to say
01:39:05
that women shouldn't have abortions you've got to help them look after the children that are then produced so she fosters a lot of um children
01:39:13
in mississippi and if you foster children in mississippi you know most of the kids who get taken away from their parents
01:39:18
their parents have addiction problems so christina gets to know lots of women with addiction problems the mothers are
01:39:23
the kids she's fostering and because christine is a fundamentally kind and good person
01:39:29
she's just like she starts thinking why did no one help these mothers years ago why are they criminalized why
01:39:35
are they put in prison and denied access to public housing and all of these things someone should have
01:39:41
helped them so she starts learning a lot about drug policy one of the ways was through reading my book chasing the screen and
01:39:46
she set up a group called end it for good that is evangelical christians in mississippi who are campaigning to end the drug war
01:39:52
right and i got to know christina well she's an amazing person and i think if i had ever interacted with christina on twitter if i got to know her through twitter we would hate each other right we would
01:40:04
look like diametrically opposed people in fact she's a friend of mine i love her she's a fundament i mean really a deeply admirable person right
01:40:16
often that that kind of connection can't happen through anger-fueled algorithms it can only happen in fact angerfield algorithms will destroy those
01:40:26
connections right and so i used to remember what was it that happened something happened with theresa may who i'm sure you can guess i was not politically sympathetic to
01:40:37
and i was about to tweet something nasty about her and i knew it would do well on twitter
01:40:43
i'm trying to remember what this was it wasn't when she resigned it was before that i was about to tweet it and i just thought i don't want to be part of this
01:40:49
[ __ ] machine do i part this even someone who deserves to be criticized as i believe you know powerful all powerful people deserve to
01:40:56
have criticism and i think theresa may deserved a lot of criticism because i disagree with a lot of things she did but she thought what is this adding to
01:41:02
the world other than more spite and more anger and more cruelty there are ways to oppose harmful things
01:41:09
that are not cruel and angry and and i just see so many people that i've known for years
01:41:16
you know senior media people who i just feel have been poisoned by these ways of interaction it's made them
01:41:22
cruel and i don't see any superiority i was crawl when i was heavily using these sites it's made them
01:41:29
cruel and mean and petty and and and worst of all i'm persuasive yeah you know when i see people because i think i won't name the person but i think if someone is one of the most
01:41:43
followed uh political people on twitter in britain boris johnson no no no no uh kirsten i'm not gonna go through it but not a politician but someone who's a publicly political person who i knew
01:41:56
god 15 years ago who was a thoughtful interesting person when i met them and is now just cuddled with uh anger and
01:42:07
when i met this person you could have sat them down with any ordinary british person they would talk about politics and they
01:42:12
would have thought about what he said you know they wouldn't always have agreed but it would have been thoughtful now
01:42:18
he could talk to maybe five percent of the british population who would fire up to share the anger he has and 95 just be
01:42:24
like what is this this is just so aggressive and hyperbolic and over the top and i don't blame this individual it's not his fault you've got a step away from these things
01:42:36
you what i don't think you can do is be in the middle of it be looking at it all the time
01:42:41
and not be made crude or meaner by it i just don't think you can i do think we can change the algorithms in ways that
01:42:47
would mean that we wouldn't have to be like that but we're a long way off that right so for me
01:42:52
if someone's listening to this now and i had to ask you the very binary question
01:42:57
should they delete their twitter instagram or not in the so we're always encouraged
01:43:04
to think in these d and it's perfectly good question but we're always encouraged to think in these deeply individualistic
01:43:10
ways right it's a bit like think about global warming biggest crisis in the world terrible disaster right um and we're
01:43:17
always encouraged to think uh global warming's so bad should i personally recycle more should i personally buy this and not that and the truth is your individual consumer choices make no [ __ ]
01:43:28
difference to global warming what you have no virtually no power as a consumer what you have is a huge amount of power
01:43:34
as a citizen right we've got to if we band together as citizens enough of us and demand that
01:43:40
everyone has to do certain things that are necessary to stop to to deal with the climate crisis then
01:43:45
you have power and agency you personally tweaking your individual behavior i mean don't do grossly harmful
01:43:51
things and i feel we mentioned my own flying that's obviously a harmful thing i i never fly just to go on holiday but i do fly a lot
01:43:58
to go to research my books and that is a a big burden but it's much more meaningful to focus on
01:44:05
collective activity so if people want to think about the harm that twitter does the heart that facebook does i would say go to the website at the center for humane
01:44:11
technology run by my friend tristana harris which is about putting pressure on the truth is my friend james williams who's
01:44:18
a former google engineer brilliant guy lives in moscow he always says talking about you know
01:44:26
should i individually delete these things it's like thinking the solution to air pollution is should i put on a gas mask
01:44:32
well all right if the air pollution is really bad in beijing you might want to put on a gas mask but a much better thing to do is to you
01:44:38
know as citizens demand we deal with the sources of air pollution right which can be dealt with
01:44:44
in a similar way deleting your twitter may well be a good thing to do i don't use i don't ever look at twitter
01:44:50
almost never i use go through buffer app but that's the equivalent of me putting
01:44:55
on a gas mask it gives me a very short-term personal uh protection but if i then go
01:45:00
out into a society where people are being made angrier more politically extreme having their attention destroyed because they're all on this stuff me putting on my own [ __ ] gas mask it's worth doing i'm glad to protect
01:45:11
myself but that's not where we should start thinking about it right but if i'm a selfish bastard and i want to be happier
01:45:18
should i delete my instagram and my facebook and my twitter i must i don't give a [ __ ] about everybody else this is
01:45:24
me being you know just pretending um i just want to make sure that my life is more peaceful
01:45:29
less chance of depression less chance of anxiety should i delete twitter and facebook and instagram i
01:45:35
mean i personally would say you know i mean i have it because i'm a crudely because i
01:45:41
want to reach people with my messages um you know and there's a mixture of that some of that is the kind of benevolent thing i think these things are important and people need to know about and some of that is a more junk values uh i want to sell my
01:45:54
books right but um i don't feel i could tell an individual they have to make their own assessment what do they what do they get out of it maybe they're you know promoting their charity or whatever i don't know
01:46:06
that's all following kim kardashian i mean what i would say is know that it comes with a huge cost now you only you can weigh is the benefit
01:46:17
worth this huge cost yeah and there's some people who for whom it will be right and there's many people for whom
01:46:22
it won't be but i would say the constant focus on individualism even if you're purely selfish
01:46:28
to me it's a bit like okay imagine we were having this conversation in 1937 and we're really worried about the rise
01:46:33
of the nazis yeah uh and people who worried about the rise of the nazis let's imagine they were
01:46:39
saying well i'm signing a pledge saying i personally will not invade poland right that's very nice i'm glad you're
01:46:46
not going to invade poland but someone's going to go and have to stop the people who are going to invade poland yeah yeah in a similar way
01:46:51
fine say i'm not going to participate in these hateful anger field agreements good good for you just like you shouldn't invade poland
01:46:58
but someone's going to have to stop the people who are polluting the society and [ __ ] us all up which doesn't mean shutting down facebook and twitter it means uh
01:47:05
changing their business model um which absolutely can be done i mean as james williams always says the
01:47:10
google engineer i was talking about um the acts existed for more i'm gonna get this wrong the
01:47:17
axe existed for more than a hundred thousand years before anyone thought to put a handle on it um the internet has existed for less
01:47:23
than 10 000 days sure but we can change these things if we want to it comes back to so many things we're
01:47:28
talking about people need to know that they have power you are so much more powerful than you think as a citizen incredible changes can happen
01:47:38
when enough people persuade the people around them right and and do it in a spirit of love and compassion
01:47:45
i think that's the perfect way to end this conversation hooray optimism exactly well and it's not even
01:47:51
like a kind of airy theory at all let's be honest it's true it's very practical margaret mead the anthropologist said
01:47:56
never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world it's the only thing that ever has it reminds me of um
01:48:03
watching martin luther king's last speech where he said to this huge black congregation on this stage he said um he was telling
01:48:10
he said i'm like you know will you guys get there you guys get to the mountaintop he goes i don't get there with you
01:48:15
but you guys get there and at that time you never would have imagined that america could make the progress it's made to as you
01:48:21
said to the point where it's got a black president now and when he said those words it sounded like you know wishful thinking or whatever
01:48:27
but obviously the world um to some degree you know last couple years haven't been the best you know example of that but we got there well progress is possible there's obviously still a long way to go
01:48:38
on as you know much better and i don't want racism and all sorts of things but huge amount of progress is possible and
01:48:44
we must never we've got to never discount the progress that's been made because that's very disempowering actually you know i remember uh you know
01:48:52
even just things as simple as of course we've got a huge way to go on gender but i think about my grandmother's right
01:48:57
that's not some distant past i know my grandmothers i loved my grandmothers i knew them well obviously um
01:49:04
when they were the age i am now my grandmothers were not allowed to have bank accounts in their own names
01:49:09
my swiss grandmother um wasn't allowed to have a job outside the home without her husband's written permission he could legally beat
01:49:16
her he could legally rape her he didn't but he could in fact it was legal for men to rape their wives
01:49:22
everywhere in the world when my grandmothers were the age i am now there were no women leaders there were
01:49:27
no women leaders of companies there were no women leaders of countries um there were almost no women elected
01:49:33
representatives right this is not some distant past and i know we've got a lot and it's very aggravating for women to hear a man like
01:49:39
me mansplain this i get that um but and because especially because we've still got so much further to go but
01:49:46
you gotta always bear in mind the incredible progress that happened and how did that happen right
01:49:51
women didn't blow anything up they didn't you know uh tear the society down they they they
01:49:57
banded together and they fought for something better i mean my great my swiss grandmother didn't even have the vote when she was 42 years old right and my
01:50:03
scottish grandmother had a [ __ ] hard life right incredible transformations and changes are are
01:50:09
possible we need to seize the power that we have because we were talking before we live in a machine that's designed
01:50:15
to get us neglect to neglect what's important about life we also live in a machine that's designed to make us think we are not powerful
01:50:21
a machine that's designed to make us think we can't change things or the only mechanism to change things
01:50:26
is to change the way you shop right and there's some value in changing the way you shop but um
01:50:33
pick up the power you have right as citizens you have we have incredible power we are all better off because of the power the previous generations have seized you know think about you know
01:50:47
i'm gay you're black think about what the lives just two generations back again black people were in this country
01:50:52
they were a lot grimmer than our lives right um so incredible changes are possible we
01:50:58
just need to fight for them thank you i always say thank you to my guest at the end of the podcast for
01:51:04
various reasons but obviously and i know it probably makes you feel uncomfortable because i just repeatedly blow smoke up your ass but
01:51:10
um the uh you know you can literally bless no no not with the cameras but the effort you
01:51:16
go to to put this work together is just like outstanding right and there's so much as
01:51:21
we've discussed there's so much like there's such a lack of patience and a superficial nature to the society we
01:51:27
live in and people want instant gratification but the delaying of the gratification and doing the hard work
01:51:33
i i just you know it's just a tremendous service that you're doing to our society at a time that needs it the
01:51:39
most and especially the topics in which you're sticking your finger into and poking to
01:51:44
understand our topics that are at the very heart of much of our sort of social problems and
01:51:50
um it also present much of the opportunities if we find the right answers so thank you you've taught me a ton
01:51:55
i can't wait for your new book right when people ask me at any point in my life they asked me to recommend a book i
01:52:00
always say lost connections because it was that transformative and um yeah um and what's your twitter handle all right
01:52:06
what's my snapchat my publishers give me this [ __ ] horrendous blurb please knock it out but i meant to say if anyone wants to know where to get the audio book or the book then go to um for the depression book
01:52:20
www.thelostconnections.com because it turned out there was a [ __ ] band called lost connections
01:52:26
who knew and the uh um and the addiction book is chasing the scream as in dot com uh and they on those websites you can find out where to follow me
01:52:39
everywhere except snapchat because i'm strongly opposed to so and your new book's coming soon
01:52:45
and soon yeah i can't wait [ __ ] me that's going to be amazing and people can uh also watch the film adaptation of chasing the screen
01:52:50
which i meant to plug the oscar nominated film adaptation uh which is called the united states versus billie holiday and is where do we
01:52:56
go in britain on sky cinema in the us on hulu and you should interview andrea who
01:53:02
played billy holliday who is beyond a goddess and a [ __ ] incredible person lure her i'll give you an intro she's she was nominated for the skirt did not get it i am the true victim of covered because
01:53:13
i would have been in the oscars as one of the producers and i was gutted that didn't happen anyway
01:53:20
plenty of time there for you for that to happen exactly no one suffered in covey mode
01:53:26
thank you so much anne cheers thanks so much i really appreciate it [Music] [Music]