Johann Hari - Lost Connections

Full transcript: Johann Hari on London Real

5:32 This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Johann Hari, the award-winning journalist, author, and TED speaker is written extensively on social, political, and cultural issues. Your New York Times bestselling book, Chasing the Scream, challenges addiction and examines the war on drugs. And your latest book, Lost Connections, has been described as a game changer for its groundbreaking thoughts on depression, anxiety, and antidepressants. It’s been endorsed by Elton Johann, Hillary Clinton, Russell Brand, and Arianna Huffington.

5:58 Johann, welcome to London Real. Great to be here. Great to have you here. You know, these are two really interesting books. And I think what’s resonated with me and a lot of people is that you’re not a scientist looking at these issues.

6:12 Like, these are journeys for you that are really personal. And I was just wondering if you could maybe just talk about that and how you went on these journeys with each book, maybe starting with Chasing the Scream, and why that was personal and what you kind of saw on the ground. Yeah, essentially, you picked up on that because for me, when I write a book, it’s because there’s a mystery I want to solve, a mystery I want to understand. So with chasing the scream, you know, it’s funny, it’s still not easy to talk about after all this time but one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. I didn’t understand why then but as I got older I realised we had addiction in my family. And at the point at which I started doing the research chasing the scream which was seven years ago nearly, like a lot of people who grew up with addiction family, it was still playing out in my family, but also I’d gotten into a relationship with someone who had an addiction problem. And I just, I really wanted to help the people I loved. I didn’t feel I was doing a good job of that at all. And I wanted to really understand what causes addiction, what we can do about it, the wider context of the war on drugs. So yeah, I went on this big journey. I didn’t realise at the start that That was quite what it was going to be like.

7:30 I ended up going over 30,000 miles, and I really wanted to, part of it was about meeting some of the leading experts in the world on addiction, including an incredible man who changed how I think about this profoundly, I’m sure we can talk about it if you want. And just meeting people, sitting and spending time with people who had very different perspectives on this, from a transgender crack dealer in Brooklyn who I got to know who’s still one of the wisest and smartest people I know, to a hit man for the deadliest Mexican and drug cartel to the only country that decriminalized all drugs, Portugal with incredible results. And I think I learned lots of things, but one of them, and it’s interesting because I think learning this gave me the confidence to write this new book, Lost Connections.

8:09 I actually wanted to write a book about what causes depression first, and I was too frightened to do it. When you’ve got a story about your pain and your distress, even if that story isn’t working very well for you, and that story was not working well for me, You’re very reluctant to challenge it, at least I was, because I think if you’ve got a story about your distress, which in my case was that depression is just a chemical imbalance in your brain, which is what I had been told by my doctor when I was a teenager. Although that story wasn’t working well for me, it hadn’t led me to solutions.

8:39 I was still really depressed. I guess, I was struggling to find a metaphor for it, and this is not a good metaphor, but it’s like putting a leash on a wild animal, getting a story for your pain. At least you know where it is, right? At least you feel you’ve got some sense of it. And I sensed that if I started to look into this, the story I had, I would begin to see that the story I had was over simplistic, right?

9:04 That much more is going on here than just something happening in your brain. And I was very frightened of that. The reasons I’m sure we’ll get to some of them were things that happened to me that I did not want to think about or contemplate. But actually it was the experience of doing chasing the screen. It’s a sign of how frightened I was to look into what I think about depression.

9:23 That I actually found it easier to go and spend time with hit men from Mexican drug cartels in Juarez than I did to look at this, right? But I guess it was partly what happened with the addiction debate, because many, I learned many things about addiction and actually part of Chasing the Scream is now being made into a movie. It opens with the, I’m really excited about that. The book opens with the story of the great jazz singer Billie Holiday and how she was stalked and effectively killed by the man who launched the war on drugs, Harry Anselinger, which is a story that had not been told in full before.

9:51 But the bit that, and many parts of chasing the screen kind of please got a kind of traction and affected people, but the part that most affected people, the part that most affected me, I think, one of the parts that most affected me was this different story about what addiction is and what causes it. So if you had asked me seven years ago, what causes, for example, heroin addiction, which was something playing out in someone I loved, I would have looked at you like you were an idiot. And I would have said, well, heroin addiction is caused by heroin, right?

10:21 There’s some good clues in the name, right? We’ve been told this story about addiction that’s become part of our common sense. It was part of my common sense. I thought I’d literally seen it play out in front of me. So we think that addiction is caused by chemical hooks in a drug, right?

10:35 So if we were sitting here in Shoreditch, where I used to live, if we kidnapped 20 people off the streets of Shoreditch and we injected them all with heroin every day for a month, at the end of that month, they’d all be heroin addicts, right? For a simple reason, there are chemical hooks in heroin. their bodies would desperately physically need them. And that’s what addiction is, right? Now, that story is not totally false, just like the story that there are brain changes during depression is, of course, not totally false.

11:01 But I began to realize something wrong with that story was when it was explained to me by lots of doctors, quite early in the research. And we have that story in our brain because of the way it’s been depicted in Hollywood or what we’ve been told as kids in school. Why do we have that version? Because I’d agree, that’s probably what most people would say. don’t touch it, because if you touch it, you’ll become an addict.

11:21 Why do we have that in our heads? It comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. And they’re really simple experiments. Your viewers can try them at home if they’re feeling a bit sadistic. You take a rat, and you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles.

11:35 One is just water, and 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 quickly. So there you go, that’s our story, right? And clearly, that story does play out for some people. But I only began to understand a different dimension to this when I went to Vancouver and got to know an incredible man called Professor Bruce Alexander, who did this experiment in the 70s that I think should really change how we think about addiction along with lots of other evidence that’s come to light since.

12:06 So Bruce explained to me, he had been looking at these experiments, right? He was working with people with addiction problems on the downtown east side of Vancouver, area with a lot of addiction. So I think, well hang on a minute, those rats were alone in an empty cage where they’ve got nothing to do except use this drug, right? What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage that he called Rat Park.

12:29 Rat Park is basically heaven for rats, right? They’ve got loads of friends, they’ve got loads of cheese, they’ve got loads of colored balls, they can have loads of sex. Anything a rat wants, it’s in Rat Park, right? And they’ve got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. But this is the fascinating thing.

12:46 Of course, they try both. They don’t know what’s in them. In Rapp Park, they don’t like the drug water that much. They use it, but none of them use it compulsively, and none of them ever overdose. So you go from almost 100% compulsive use and death by overdose when they don’t have the things that make life meaningful, to none when they do have the things that make life meaningful.

13:07 The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. Now, that experiment is led to lots of human insights that we can talk about if you like and actually played an instrumental role in the decriminalization of drugs in Portugal with extraordinary results. But to me what that showed is these, well it showed me many things, but it made me realize you can have a form of suffering, you can think you know what it is, you can think you’ve seen it play out, but actually very often there will be other things going on, big environmental factors, not the only thing, but very big environmental factors.

13:43 And actually, I think it gave me the confidence to write lost connections, because I realized, okay, firstly, if you go and look at the best social science and sit with people who are affected by these problems, firstly, you’ll find a different story. And once you find a different story that opens up a different set of solutions, ones that actually work. So for example, in the year 2000, I spent a lot of time there, Portugal, not in the year 2000, but later, Portugal had a huge drug problem.

14:08 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, which is staggering. Every year they tried the American way more, arrested more people, imprisoned more people, shamed more people. Every year the problem got worse. And finally, the prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together. And they decided to do something really radical, something no one had done in more than 70 years since the global war on drugs began.

14:29 They said, shall we like ask some scientists what they think? So they set up a panel of doctors and scientists led by an amazing man I got to know called Dr. Huau Guilhao. And they basically said to them, you guys go away, look at the best science, figure out what would solve this problem because we can’t carry on like this, and we’ve agreed in advance we’ll do whatever you recommend.” So just took the idea out of politics. Panel went away, looked at Rapp Park, looked at loads of other things that I wrote about in Chasing the Screen, came back and said, decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack everything but, and this is the crucial next step, take all the money we currently spend on screwing people’s lives up, shaming them, arresting them, imprisoning them, and spend all that money instead on turning their lives around.

15:12 Massive programs of support for people with addiction problems. The goal was to say to every person with an addiction in Portugal, we love you, we value you, we’re on your side, we want you back. And the results in Portugal were extraordinary. By the time I’d been there, it was 13 years since it had begun, it’s now 17 years. According to the best scientific study, this is the British Journal of Criminology, injecting drug use fell by 50%.

15:36 Overdose is massively down, HIV is massively down, Street crime is massively down. So I think it gave me the confidence to see, if you let yourself look at these issues differently, exactly guided by the best science and the best evidence, you can actually find better solutions. And that is indeed what I learned when I went on this other journey for Lost Connections, where I ended up traveling an even longer journey, 40,000 miles, sitting with the best experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety, and people who just have very different perspectives from an Amish village in Indiana, because the Amish have extremely low levels of depression, I wanted to understand why, to a city in Brazil that banned advertising to see if that would make people feel better, to a lab in Baltimore where they’re giving people psychedelics to see if that would help with their depression and their addictions.

16:21 And I think, again, I learned just this very different perspective that leads to very different solutions. And what’s with you and journeys? Because, you know, most of your, not competition, but your books are lined up to all a bunch of other books and a lot of those are probably written by professors who spend their time in universities, maybe doing clinical trials or lab studies and doing a lot of research. You hit the road. Why?

16:44 Has this always been something inside of you? It’s a good question. I mean, so I was trained in the social sciences at Cambridge University, and so I come at this with a perspective from the social sciences. Which is different than, say, a different, like a psychological background or something from biology. Yeah, yeah, I mean, of course, all these factors interact with biology and with psychology in ways that we can talk about, But so I partly it’s that I had this training in the social sciences, but mostly it was just, that’s what I can do.

17:15 That’s the perspective, look, I’m not a scientist, right? And then the findings that I put forward in Lost Connections, Lost Connections is partly the story of these amazing scientists who discovered these things who I interviewed very extensively. And the overall perspective that I put forward in Lost Connections, that actually we need to think about depression very differently for reasons and I will get to, is the perspective of the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization.

17:41 So I wouldn’t want, as a, you know, as not a scientist, I don’t want to stand here and go, oh, I’ve made these scientific discoveries, that would be ludicrous, right, that’s not my position. What I think I can do is communicate human stories and communicate the stories of these scientists in line with their work, and obviously I go through a very extensive fact-checking process with these scientists and put forward, because we’re in this weird position both with addiction and depression, where actually the best science really deeply conflicts with A, what our politics does, and B, often what our medical providers do, which is not the fault of the medical providers for reasons we can talk about. So I think it’s a weird situation where actually there’s all this scientific knowledge, but it’s not translating into action.

18:31 In fact, often it translates into action that’s harmful, but most obviously in the case of addiction with things like the war on drugs, which make addiction much worse, for reasons we can talk about if you want. So, I think it’s partly the journey, I think it’s partly that, and I think the best way to go on an intellectual journey, at least for me, I don’t think this is true for everyone, is to go on a physical journey, actually. I think if I’d stayed in my apartment and I’d just read a load of books, I think I might have learned some things, but there’s something about, you know, just really sitting with people who were affected by this and really going to places that have radically different perspectives.

19:05 And just sitting with the scientists and obviously reading through all their studies. And the thing about sitting with them and going, because in a sense, look, most people who read my books are not going to be specialists. Some of them are, and I’ve got a lot of specialists and I’m very nice about the books. But most of them are not. And I figure if I go and sit with the leading experts on addiction and depression and anxiety, I’m going to ask the kind of questions that I would hope a reader would want to ask.

19:29 So it’s partly a process of me puzzling it through with these people. and I try to kind of, the writers I most like and admire are people who kind of think out loud in their writing. They go, well, I wanted to know this, what about this? What about that? What about this?

19:44 How does that compare to this? So it’s a process of thinking out loud and trying to get onto the page, not the, you’re not like when you’re a kid and you do maths and they say, what is the thing they say, show your workings. Yeah, you know, I try to, very much my writing is about showing my workings. It’s not, I’m really, for many years I was a newspaper polemicist. And there’s something about, I now find it almost unbearable to read newspaper polemic, although there are still some great people who write newspaper columns in a slightly different way.

20:11 Because something about, as a polemicist, you’re, a good polemicist is standing above the reader, declare, in a position of superiority, explaining a conclusion, right? And I just think, this is just not how I wanna be in the world, I don’t wanna stand it, but it’s like being a pub bore. I don’t want to stand above the person going, you don’t know this and I know this. It’s more like, well, we’re both in a situation of ignorance. Most people are in a situation of ignorance about most things, even if you go and meet the cleverest people in the world, like Noam Chomsky.

20:45 You know, as he would be the first one to say, he doesn’t know most things about most things, right? We’re all ignorant about most things. Actually approach things with a disposition of humility and curiosity and go and ask questions and keep checking and keep saying, well, that makes me doubt this and how could that be, that to me is a much more, not just a more interesting way to be, but a more truthful way to be, actually, that no one knows that much. Yeah, well, it’s obviously resonating with people, so let’s just finish with Portugal, and we can jump into lost connections.

21:15 When you go on the streets there, now decriminalization means it doesn’t prosecute kind of the buyers and the consumers of the drugs, right? What’s it like? I mean, people would think it’s an open air drug market, I guess it isn’t, and what isn’t working, in your opinion, down there? So I don’t think Portugal goes far enough, and it’s important to, I’ll just explain why for a second. So, although I think Portugal’s made extraordinary advances.

21:38 So half of the problem, I mean, maybe half is too simplistic, we’re talking about a big part of the problem with the war on drugs and the system of prohibiting drugs is the way we treat drug users and people with addiction problems, right? We drug users, and I would draw a distinction between those two people. So 90% of people who use currently banned drugs, according to the UN Office of Drug Control, the main drug war body in the world, don’t have an addiction problem and aren’t harming their health, right?

22:03 We know that. We’re two minutes away from the nearest bar in Old Street. You know, if we go into that bar now, 90% of people in that bar will be drinking alcohol because it’s making their life better. It’s helping them chill out or flirt with the person they want to flirt with or whatever. And there will be some people in that bar who have addiction problems with alcohol or who need our love and support.

22:21 That’s actually true to my surprise, and this is something that really surprised me in the research of Chasing the Screen, partly because it was so different the experience of my own family. That’s true of all drug use. If you interviewed Professor Karl Hart, one of the- Karl Hart talks about that too, and says there’s a lot of people that recreationally use crack and cocaine and heroin, whereas we’re taught in the movies and as kids, you touch it once and now you’re the guy in the movie who’s shaking in the prison cell.

22:46 Yeah, and I really recommend people follow Professor Hart. I mean, he’s a wonderful scientist, a wonderful human being. Really recommend people follow Professor Karl Hart’s work, who’s done amazing work on that. So a big part of the palm we do in the war on drugs is we senselessly persecute drug users who are not harming themselves or anyone else and with people with addiction problems, the core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be.

23:13 That’s a strong statement. You said this in your TED Talk as well and I’ve suffered from addiction, I’ve suffered from alcoholism and funny enough, London Real actually brought me back to a state where I don’t feel like I suffer that. And it’s a way of hyper-connecting me to people and making me have to be there and produce every week and be a part of people’s lives. And I noticed that very, so that line really resonated to me. I wonder if you could explain it a little more because you say it really fast, but I think if people could get that concept in their head, it changes everything, right?

23:48 I find that really moving. And remind me to come back to the other point about Portugal in a second, but I think you’re right that the core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be. Yeah, and you want to escape. You want to escape it. Exactly, you want to be anesthetized, right?

24:04 If you want to understand why people turn to painkillers, you have to understand the pain, right? And which is partly what Lost Connections is about, of course, but there’s an extremely challenging line in Marianne Faithful’s memoirs that people who don’t know, Marianne Faithful is most famous to be Mick Jagger’s girlfriend in the 60s. Slightly annoying because she’s actually better than Mick Jagger, but that’s another debate. But she has this very powerful line.

24:24 She actually lived homeless here in East London in the 60s for a time. And she says, I’m not gonna get the words right, but she says something like, heroin saved my life, because if it wasn’t for heroin, I would have killed myself at that point, right? Now, one of the things that’s so important, one of the things that I learned through journeys for both chasing the screen and lost connections, is that so many things that seem like pathologies, that seem like signs of madness, are not pathologies, they make sense.

24:52 Doesn’t mean, of course, that I’m recommending heroin use, right, obviously. But we’ve got to understand why people do the things they do, why they become depressed, why they become anxious, why they become addicted. And one of the crucial things about the harm that this, the way we respond to people I love who’ve had addiction problems and globally, except in a few places, one of the things that’s so harmful about that is if the core of addiction is trying not to be present because you’re in pain, the war on drugs says, Well, the solution is to impose more pain on them in order to give them an incentive to stop.

25:25 And sometimes people say, oh, that doesn’t work. Much worse than that. It’s not that it doesn’t work. It’s that it makes the problem worse, right? And I went out in Arizona with a group of women who are made to go out on a chain gang by this psychopath, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was just pardoned by Trump, who I also interviewed.

25:40 And they’re made to go out wearing T-shirts saying, I was a drug addict while members of the public mock them and jeer at them, and they’re forced to dig graves, right? It’s missing the point to say that doesn’t work. Those women leave prison even more traumatized, even more addicted, right? Went to Vietnam where they make people with addiction problems, put them in gulags and forced labor camps, right? Study of this showed 99% of them, by the Open Society Foundations, 99% of them relapse immediately, right, when they get out.

26:09 Russia has a similar view of addiction, right? Well, Russia has the worst drug policies in the whole world. It’s just a weakness and they just persecute it. And that’s the way they deal with it. Except alcoholism, interesting.

26:19 But so just to say about Portugal, so that’s one thing we do, right? And what Portugal has done deals with that problem. What they’ve done is they’ve taken all the money they used to spend on screwing people’s lives up into turning their lives around. Incredible results. But Portugal doesn’t deal with what I think is the biggest harm of the war on drugs.

26:35 The biggest harm is when you ban drugs, they don’t disappear. They’re transferred from the people who used to control them, pharmacists and licensed businesses, to armed criminal gangs. Those armed criminal gangs work very differently. If you want to understand why, you can do a little experiment. If you and I walked out of here, there’s an off-license around the corner.

26:52 If we walked out of here, we went into that off-license and tried to steal a bottle of vodka. And they caught us. That store would phone the police. The police would come and take us away. So that store doesn’t need to be violent, doesn’t need to be intimidating.

27:04 They’ve got the power of the law to uphold their property rights. Okay. Now, if we went out of here and we went and tried to steal a bag of weed or a bag of coke instead, and we sort of got to Brick Lane to do that one, and those guys catch us. Obviously, they can’t ring the police, right? Police would arrest them.

27:19 They have to fight us. Now, as many drug dealers explain to me in the process of right chasing the screen, you don’t wanna be having a fight every day, right? You wanna establish a reputation for being so frightening, no one will be so foolish as to take you on. The war on drugs creates a war for drugs, right? As a dealer, you have to establish your place through violence and maintain your place through violence because you have no recourse to the law to uphold your property rights.

27:41 Now, that’s bad enough if you live in one of the estates around here, around where I used to live. 10% of the economy of that estate is in the hands of armed criminal gangs. It’s gonna be a miserable place to be. If you’re talking about cities in Mexico that I went to, like Ciudad Juarez, 70% of the economy of Juarez, the point that I was there at that, just after the height of the violence, is in the hands of armed criminal gangs. It means they take over the state, they take over the area, right?

28:04 So, and of course, with absolutely, I mean, by some estimates, I mean, this will have actually, the time Chasing Screen was written, this was true, it probably isn’t true now. But by the point Chasing Screen came out, More people had died in the violence in Colombia and Mexico than had died in Syria and Iraq, right? I mean, you’re talking about extraordinary death toll. And this is violence that we can end, right? If you look at alcohol prohibition, where are the violent alcohol dealers today?

28:30 I doubt anyone watching this show knows the name of the head of Smirnoff. I bet they all know the name of Al Capone. What’s the difference, right? You look at the graph of the murder rate, Professor Jeffrey Myron at Harvard has done this, graph of the murder rate in the US and massively spikes up into alcohol prohibition, massively spikes down. So what Portugal does is they no longer, the crudest way of putting it is, decriminalization shuts down orange is the new black, and legalization shuts down breaking bad and narcos, right?

28:57 And what they’ve done in Portugal is they don’t arrest users anymore, they don’t arrest people with addiction problems anymore, but they do still arrest dealers, right? Now, it’s not a situation where I don’t want dealers to be given a free-for-all, what we want is a licensed regulated trade. That means different things for different drugs, I can explain how if you want. So clearly, Colorado was recently legalized cannabis. There it’s sold like alcohol.

29:22 It got a bit over 21 and so on. No one is proposing legalizing heroin like that. I went to Switzerland where they legalized heroin. People with addiction problems are giving it in clinics. There have been zero heroin overdose deaths in those clinics.

29:34 None, and not a single person, since they began, since they legalized heroin. So different things for different drugs. So I think Portugal has made a huge step forward, But it’s still, I mean, every drug that’s used in Portugal is supplied, you know, is on a supply route that’s filled with violence and chaos. So it’s not a full solution, but it’s a real advance. Okay, and the solution to that problem is?

29:54 Legalization. Right. Legalization means different things for different drugs. Yeah. And just to get back briefly to what you said about, you know, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, it was the heroin that kept me from killing myself.

30:04 I think the point you’re making, and if I look back at my life, and funny enough, I saw an interview with Sean Penn that I’ll talk about too recently, is for her at that point, taking the heroin got her out of that pain that might have made her commit suicide. And yet we look at an addict and say, you’re weak, you’re making bad choices, you have a flawed personality, let’s punish you. But for them, it’s actually the right decision at the right time. And to understand that as just as a pure logical human behavior, that’s what you mean.

30:29 People are trying to get away from your reality. Yeah, I think you put it well. I would just qualify that. It’s the right solution in the absence of better solutions, right? And what we clearly need to do, it’s not a good solution.

30:40 Heroin depresses your breathing, it can kill you, right, a particularly contaminated shitty heroin that’s provided by, you know, illegal markets. What we needed, what Marianne Faithful needed was not heroin, but much better solutions. If the choice is heroin or suicide, then heroin is the better option, but clearly there should be better options on the menu. But I think you’ve gone to a really important point, and this is the key insight, I think, of lost connections, which is our pain makes sense, right?

31:08 What we’ve been told for so long, we’ve been given this pathologized story of our pain. We’ve been told these things, so I’ll give you an example, and actually the two mysteries that really impaled me to write Lost Connections. When I was a teenager, I went to my doctor and I explained that I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me, I couldn’t control it or regulate it, I felt very embarrassed by it. And my doctor told me an entirely biological story about why I felt this way.

31:41 He said, there’s a chemical called serotonin in people’s brains, makes people feel good, some people are naturally lacking it, you’re clearly one of them, we just need to give you some drugs and they’ll boost your serotonin levels, you’ll feel better. So I started taking the drugs and I felt an immediate and a huge boost, right? For a couple of months, I felt great. And then this feeling of pain started to bleed back through, so I went back to the doctor, he said cleanly didn’t give you a high enough dose, gave me a high dose. Again I felt better, I started to, by that time I was experiencing some quite powerful side effects, I was putting on a huge amount of weight, but I’d felt better. Again the pain bled through when I was in this cycle of being given higher and higher doses until for 13 years I took the maximum dose you can possible take. At the end of which I was still depressed, right? I had experienced some boost from the drugs initially but I was still depressed and I wanted to understand Well, what’s going on here?

32:33 I’m doing what I’m told to do, right? I also had a therapist, but the bigger mystery for me is why were there so many other people like me? I’m 39 years old, almost every year I’ve been alive, depression and anxiety have increased across the Western world, right? And I thought, at some level, from quite early on, although I really resisted this insight, I didn’t let it into my head very much, I thought, it can’t just be a chemical imbalance. Why would it be rising so much if it was just a chemical imbalance, right?

33:03 It would be like, you know, that didn’t seem intuitively right to me. But as we were saying, I was very afraid to look at this. But what I learned is related to the Marianne Faithful thing as well, I think, in an interesting way. So until I was a, when I was a teenager, until I went to my doctor, I thought my depression was all in my head. Meaning, I don’t think this phrase existed then, but I needed to man up, right?

33:27 I was just being weak, you know, I need to pull myself together, fill in your stigmatizing cliche, whatever you want, right? And then for the next 13 years, I thought it was all in my head in a very different way. That actually, it was a chemical imbalance in my brain, it was a malfunction in my skull. And what I learned in the research for lost connections and speaking to the leading experts in the world on this is there are real biological factors that make you more vulnerable to depression and anxiety for sure and I go through what they are.

33:55 I’m sure we’ll talk about them. But actually, mostly, according to the World Health Organization, leading body in the world, according to the leading doctor at the United Nations. The causes are mostly not in our heads, they’re mostly in the way we’re living. So I learned there’s scientific evidence for nine causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are biological, but the rest are social and psychological.

34:17 They’re not just in our minds. They’re in the way we live, they’re in the way we’re taught, they’re in the way we interact with other people. And that opens up a very different kind of solution to depression and anxiety, very different paths out. What should be offered is important to say alongside chemical antidepressants which do give some relief to some people as they gave me some relief for a short time. Right and do those other seven factors explain this massive increase in in depression and anxiety? Some of them do. I don’t want to that insight too far because there’s a lot we don’t know about that but I’ll give you a specific example of something that’s both been proven to cause depression anxiety and has been proven to have really massively risen. So we We are one of the loneliest societies there has ever been, right?

35:01 There’s a study that asks Americans, there are similar trends for Britain, they’re not quite as extreme, but they’re getting there, asks Americans, how many close friends do you have who could call on in a crisis? And when they started doing those studies years ago, the most common answer was five. Today, the most common answer, not the average, but the most common answer is none, right? So you think about what it’s like to be an scientist all the time, I travel around the U.S. a lot of the time, what is it like to be alone, you know? And one of the people who really helped me to understand this is a man who sadly died yesterday. I’m heartbroken about this, a wonderful man called Professor Johann Cassiopo, who’s at the University of Chicago, who I interviewed a lot in my book. He is what he was until yesterday, the leading expert on loneliness in the world. He made incredible scientific breakthroughs on this.

35:46 And he, for example, demonstrated. So when we’re stressed as human beings, we release set a hormone called cortisol. He showed that being acutely lonely releases as much cortisol as being punched in the face by a stranger. This is how terrible the experience of loneliness is for human beings. Professor Casiopo explained to me, you think about why are we sitting here, right? One of the reasons you and I exist is because our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren’t bigger than the animals they took down, but they They went stronger than the animals they took down.

36:21 They were much better at banding together in tribes and cooperating, right? They were brilliant at it. And every instinct we have as human beings is to do that, right? Just like bees evolved to need a hive, humans evolved to need a tribe. And we are the first human beings to try to disband our tribes and live alone, tell ourselves we can do it ourselves.

36:42 And as Professor Cassiope put it to me, you know, in the circumstances where human beings evolved. If you were separated from the tribe, you were depressed and anxious for a really good reason. You were in terrible danger. Right, you’re going to die. So those are evolved instincts. Now, I mentioned that because we’ve got two things there. Professor Cassiope proved that loneliness causes depression and anxiety, and there’s overwhelming social science evidence that loneliness has significantly increased. So I think that tells us that’s a contributing, certainly not the only explanation, there’s a lot more things going on. It helps us to understand why there would be, one of the reasons why there would be a rising depression and anxiety crisis. And that opens up a very different set of solutions. It’s funny, where we are in East London, I was thinking about it on the way here, that there are people who’ve tried to build different ways of responding to depression around these insights. So not far from here, an amazing man, one of the heroes of Lost Connections called Dr. Sam Everington. So Sam’s a doctor, he’s a Bromley by Bowe, and Sam is a general practitioner.

37:44 He was just really uncomfortable because like me he’s not opposed to chemical antidepressants, he gives them out sometimes, but he had loads of people coming to him with depression and anxiety and he could see they were really lonely. A lot of the other factors that I talk about cause depression and anxiety were playing out in their lives and he could see that while antidepressants gave people some relief sometimes, they were not solving the problem for a lot of them. So he decided to pioneer a different approach. One day a woman who I got to know quite well called Lisa Cunningham came to see Sam. Lisa had been shut away in her home for seven years. She barely left, crippling depression and anxiety.

38:21 And Sam said to her, don’t worry, I’m going to carry on giving you these drugs. I’m also going to try something else. I’m going to prescribe something different. I’m going to prescribe for you to take part in a group, right? There was an area behind the doctor’s I’m not sure I can swear on your program, so I’ll say it euphemistically.

38:36 It was an area behind the doctor’s surgery, it was known as dog crap alley, that’s not the word they used. It was just kind of scrubland where dogs would go and mess. And Sam said to Lisa, what I need to do is turn up twice a week, I’ll come and support you, other people from the surgery will come and support you, meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people, and we’re going to turn this alley into a beautiful garden, right? meeting, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety, right? But several things happened. Firstly, they had something to talk about that wasn’t how bad they felt, right? They had something to talk about. We’re gonna learn gardening.

39:12 The group, they started to, I mean these were inner-city East London people, they were from around here, like I lived here for a really long time. They didn’t know anything about gardening, right? They started to put their fingers in the soil, they started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. There’s a huge amount of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a very powerful antidepressant for reasons we can talk about. They also realised, as they got to know each other, they did what human beings do when we form tribes and groups. They started to solve each other’s problems.

39:41 So for example, this is an extreme example, but one of the people in the group was sleeping on the bus, right? I think it was the number 39 bus, right? Everyone else in the group was like, well, of course you’re depressed. You’re sleeping on a bus. They started lobbying the local council here, Tower Hamlets Council, to get him housed. They got him housed. It was the first time most of them had done something for someone else in years. That made them feel really good, right? And the way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom. There was a study in Norway of a very similar programme that found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants. I think for kind of obvious reason, right?

40:21 It was dealing with some of the deep underlying reasons why they were depressed in the first place it was dealing with a disconnection from other people it was dealing with their disconnection from the natural world doesn’t deal with all of the nine causes of depression anxiety right back lost connections but those are two really really crucial ones and two that have we know there’s very strong evidence have risen can we run studies on this I mean these are great anecdotal stories and you have tons of them in this book I mean what is the next step well there’s hundreds of studies of course there’s dozens of studies that I referenced in the book of what’s called social prescribing and therapeutic horticulture so you can study that very easily you just get a group of depressed people you split them into two groups you assign one to a program like that one at Bromley by Bow and the other you either just give them drugs or give them therapy whatever you follow them over time and then you compare the two groups and when you do that that’s how they found it was more than twice as subtle so these are not of course I’m telling an individual story in that case but everything I wrote about in the book is backed up by enormous amounts of scientific evidence these are the programs that the World health organisation, the leading body of the world, this is in the direction the world health organisation says we need to go. I mean they said, based on a massive review of

41:28 The evidence, mental health is produced socially, it’s above all a social indicator, it needs social as well as individual solutions. So yeah, I mean these are not, you know, this is very rigorous science. Of course we need more research. How could we convince the NHS to take action on this? Like how will you get the medical establishment to take these ideas and respond to them and not just write that prescription.

41:52 Yeah, well, I just met the other day with the Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hahn and I’m meeting with people from other political parties and there’s obviously a huge number of people who’ve been lobbying for this and it’s really interesting because it’s again, there’s this curious disjunction, right? Nothing I’m saying here is going to be news to people who follow the literature about depression, anxiety and detail, right? Unless they’re quite blinkered and they’re only in one silo, which most people are not, right?

42:16 Psychiatry actually they’re taught a lot of this stuff in their training not that specific program but the social causes of depression anxiety is something that are pretty well taught in in Britain to psychiatrists and I’m not particularly critical of psychiatrists because as a society we’ve given them one lever to pull right I mean there’s a few levers they can there’s one big lever called antidepressants chemical antidepressants then there’s a smaller lever cognitive behavioral therapy and then there’s some wonderful people like Dr. Sam Everington who have got smaller levers still that are different programs, but it’s not their fault we’ve only given them these levers, right? I mean, it’s the thought of the society and the culture. We’ve refused to look at the best evidence about what causes depression.

42:56 We’ve refused to listen to the World Health Organization and the UN’s leading doctor. And so we need to move in these different directions. Now, some of the things we have to do are what I would call enhanced medical interventions, so like Sam’s social prescribing, Which is not a debate, it’s not a medical intervention, it’s not giving them drugs. And some of them are just bigger social changes, and some of them are individual changes that we can make.

43:21 So there’s a range, for something as complex as depression and anxiety, it would be absurd to say there’s one solution, and part of my criticism of what we’ve done up to now, think about what my doctor told me, and actually one of my nephews, his best friend who’s 18, went to the, three or four weeks ago, I was told he went to the doctor, for help with depression and anxiety, the doctor said, oh, you’re lacking dopamine in your And I thought, Jesus, 20 years, the only migration that’s been made in what GPs are saying, in this case, there are better GPs than this clearly, is I was told it’s a serotonin depletion. He’s told it’s a dopamine depletion. So what we need to do are tell more complex and truthful stories about depression, acknowledge the many factors that are going on, and we need to deal with all of those factors as best we can.

44:04 And there’s a whole range of ways we can do that. Talk to me about the internet, social media, and mobile devices as a contributing factor to this loneliness, this separation, the depression, the anxiety. So I wanted to understand this, so one of the things I did, I spoke to lots of experts about it, but one of the things I did is I went to the first ever rehab center for internet addicts. Where is that? It’s just outside of Spokane in Washington.

44:27 I have to admit, first thing, this is completely unconscious of my part. I arrived there in a car, it’s a clearing in the woods. thing I did absolutely instinctively was glance at my phone see I couldn’t check my email and feel really irritated and I thought you’re in the right place mate right and we blocked her signal out there it’s just no signal it’s the middle of nowhere and and it was really fascinating so the woman who runs this center co-founded one called Dr. Hilary Cash who’s an amazing person and Hilary became a kind of accidental expert on this because she happened to be a psychotherapist with an office near the Microsoft offices in the 90s so she caught the first wave, they were obviously the first wave of people that data becomes a tsunami that catches all of us, right?

45:08 Well, not all of us, a lot of us. And it was really interesting because she said lots of things to me. So they get a lot, all kinds of people, it’s called Restart Washington, this centre. They get all sorts of people in their rehab centre, but there’s a disproportionate number of young men who’ve become obsessed with multiplayer, role-player games like World of Warcraft. So I spent time talking to these young men, obviously.

45:29 And Hilary said to me something that was really revelatory to me. She said, what do these young men get out of these games? They get the things they used to get from the culture but no longer get. They get a tribe. They get a sense of status.

45:46 They get a way to increase in status and rise. They get a way to roam around. And it’s interesting. So, I mean, there’s a study here in Britain, I think it’s extraordinary, it found the average British child now spends less time outdoors than the average maximum security prisoner. Because by law, a maximum security prisoner has to have 70 minutes and most British kids don’t get that, right?

46:08 So you think about it, we’ve raised these kids as prisoners, right, actually worse than our prisoners in that respect. So you’ve got this interesting thing where, so they’re getting these things that I innate human needs, right? We need tribes, we need a sense of status, we need to feel people see us, right? They get that from the game. But in one sense, although there’s some value in those things, I’m not against video games obviously, in some ways it’s like a parody.

46:33 To me the interesting thing is to think about the moment when the internet arrives. So for me, and I’m guessing for you, it was like the late 90s, early 2000s. Yeah. Yeah, I think I sent my first email in the year 2000, which is incredible to me now. And you think about that moment, a lot of the things that caused depression and anxiety had already been massively increasing.

46:53 So we already talked about one, loneliness. was spiking well before the internet, right? But what happens is the internet appears and it looks a lot like the things we’ve lost, right? You’ve lost your friends, well here’s some Facebook friends, you’ve lost your status, here’s a status update, right? But in a way it’s like a parody of the things we lost, or it’s like a hologram of the thing we’ve lost. It’s not that it has no purpose or value, it does have some value, clearly. But it’s not, and I began to think, I remember leaving for last time that rehab center and thinking In a way, I think the relationship between social media and social life is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex, right?

47:32 I’m not anti-porn, porn will meet a certain basic itch. But if your entire sex life consisted of looking at porn, you’d go around feeling frustrated and irritable all the time because we didn’t evolve to masturbate over screens, we evolved to have sex, right? No one spends an hour looking at porn, and at the end of it feels satisfied and valued and held the way you do after sex, if it goes right, right? And I think there’s a similar thing going on here, which is that social media has a place just like porn has a place.

47:59 But if it takes up too much of your social life, it’s just not going to meet your deeper needs. And this goes to one of the key insights that connects so many of the causes of depression and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connection. It’s not all of them, but most of them, which was everyone watching this program knows that you have natural physical needs. You need food, you need water, you need clean air, you need shelter. If I took those things away from you, you would be in real trouble real fast, right?

48:31 There’s equally strong evidence that human beings just have natural psychological needs, right? You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you’ve got a future that makes sense.

48:45 Our culture is good at lots of things. I’m glad to be alive today, but we’ve been getting less good at meeting these underlying psychological needs for really large numbers of people. And we’re replacing them with a digital alternative that is never going to be the same. And in a weird way, we think it ticks the box, because I’ve got 300 Facebook friends. But in fact, it actually is going to make me more depressed and lonely in the longer run, because I think I’m kind of social.

49:09 Is that some of the problems with these things? That’s a good way of putting it. Martin Maron, the comedian who I’ve met, said, not to me, he said in his writing, 90% of all Facebook status updates could be boiled down to the sentiment, will somebody somewhere please acknowledge I exist, right? And I do think there’s a big aspect of that which is, and you can see it playing out online and there’s always been all this research. Dr. Susan Pinker’s done very good research and some other people I remember interviewing her about it, and she’s written about it very well, which is the more time you spend on online, does this evidence the more depressed you become?

49:48 There’s a bit of a debate about what is it that more depressed people are just spending more time? And the causation goes both ways. But funny enough, Facebook admitted this about a month ago and then said the solution was you should just spend more time on Facebook but be cheerful, which I thought was a hilarious confession. But yeah, I think that’s true, that we’ve got these, yeah, Professor Johann Cassiopo, the loneliness expert who tragically died yesterday, said to me, that was a good rule of thumb, if social media is a way stationed meeting people offline and stay in touch with them and you’re going to see them offline, then it’s a good thing. If it’s the final destination on the line, then you should be too much of the time, then you should be worried.

50:28 And what happens when social media and mobile devices take over your in-person connections? You know, the classic couple having dinner on their phones. I had this experience recently, really gave me an insight into this, it was horrifying. One of my nephews loves Elvis for reasons that are entirely clear to me, although I like Elvis as well. So I took him to Graceland in Memphis. I’ve been promising to take him for ages and I thought, I’ll bet take him. And so if you’ve been to Graceland, it’s fascinating.

50:55 You should go for a million reasons, but it’s titled Memphis is amazing anyway. So you arrive in Graceland and I assume for commercial reasons they don’t have a person who shows you around anymore. What they do is they give you an iPad and you put in headphones and the iPad guides you around, right? So we’re going around and what happens is these These people who paid loads of money to go to Graceland just look at everything on their iPads, right? So your experience is walking around glancing up and then looking at this iPad the whole time, right?

51:22 And we were in the jungle room, Elvis’s famous jungle room. And so you got in front of you, someone’s talking in your ear about the jungle room, and you can see it in front of you on the iPad. So what happens is everyone’s looking at the iPad, and a guy turned to his wife and said, hey, honey, this is great. If you swipe left, you can see the room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the room to the right.

51:44 And I looked at him and I said, right, but sir, there’s an old fashioned form of swiping which is turning your head because we are, in fact, in that room, right? You don’t have to look at it on a screen. And he just looked at me like I was mad and went back to looking at it on the screen. I looked around the room and everyone was looking at it on the screen and I thought this is so interesting. We talked before about addiction is the attempt to not be present in your life.

52:04 We have a real crisis in being present, right? You see this, you know, I also took my niece on a different, I don’t, I travel all half the year, but I don’t do tourism that much, but I took my niece to Rome and Paris in the last summer, and it is so fascinating. People just can’t be physically present in places, right? No one needs your picture of the Eiffel Tower, right? It’s documented.

52:27 We’ve got it, right? No one will ever want to see it. No one cares. But it’s this push towards, and this goes to… We’ve seen that in music concerts as well.

52:35 Everyone’s recording them. It’s where the artists are now trying to ban that. Yeah, and no one ever wants to watch your shitty tinny video of, you know, Rihanna from 30 Roseback. It’s madness. And being in a live concert is almost the ultimate, you’re paying to be present, and yet people still would rather not be.

52:52 But this goes to one of the, there were two causes of depression and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connections that I found most challenging to learn about. I could talk about the other one if you want as well, but they were hard because they played out so much in my own life and it was the pain and recognition. So one of them, and it is really related to what we’re talking about here, is, so everyone knows junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right?

53:19 I’m very conscious of that here because I used to live just off Brick Lane and I remember in 2009 on Christmas Eve I went to my local KFC at lunchtime, it makes it even sadder this is Christmas Eve, it’s like a dick in the story. And I went and I said my order, which was so disgusting I won’t even say it, and The guy behind the counter said, what was it? I literally can’t say it. And it’ll give me cravings as well. And the guy behind the counter said, oh, Johann, I’m so glad you’re here.

53:44 I was like, all right. And he said, wait a minute, wait a minute. And he went in the back, and he came out, and like several other stuff just came out. They had bought me a massive Christmas card in which they’d written to our best customer, and everyone had signed it. And my heart sank partly because I thought, this isn’t even the fried chicken place I come to the most, right?

54:01 So we’re basically- And they knew you’d be there on Christmas. Exactly. This is basically like a maze of fried chicken shops in my head, right? I was like, eat that, eat fried chicken anymore. But the, and actually funny enough the other day when KFC ran out of stock here in Britain, I had quite a few people who I hadn’t seen in years who texted me saying, yeah, honey, you’re okay, fuck, I’m fine.

54:18 But so we all know that this junk food has taken over our diets made us physically sick, right? Sure, obesity, diabetes in the States, and we’ve seen that, yeah. Exactly. What was interesting is this really interesting evidence that a similar thing has happened with our minds, that our kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. So I learned about this incredible man called Professor Tim Casa, who’s at Knox College in Illinois.

54:39 So Professor Casa, for thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money and status and showing off and how you look to other people, you’re going to be really unhappy. But from Confucius to Socrates, a whole range of people have said that. But weirdly, no one had actually scientifically investigated that to see if it was true. Until 25 years ago, when Professor Tim Casa began doing this really important research. So it was already known before Professor Casa, to put it crudely, there are two kinds of motivation that human beings can have, right?

55:11 So imagine if you play the piano. I’m totally musical, but you might not be. Imagine you play the piano. If you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it gives you joy, that’s called an intrinsic reason to play the piano, right? You’re not doing it to get anything out of it.

55:24 You’re not doing it because you look to other people. You’re just doing it because you love that thing, right? Now imagine you played the piano, you know, not because you love it, but I don’t know, in a dive bar around the corner from here to pay the rent, or because your parents are really pressuring you to be a piano maestro, or I don’t know, to impress a woman, maybe some piano fetishist out there, whatever, right? That would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano.

55:47 You’re not doing it for the experience itself, you’re doing it for something, you’d get one removed from it, right? And every human being is a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic values, of course, and we move throughout our lives, right? But Professor Casser has shown several really interesting things. The first is, the more you’re driven by extrinsic values, the more you’re driven by how you look to other people, how you appear to other people and not, but do you think this thing is worthwhile and do you think it connects with other people in a meaningful way, the more you will become depressed and anxious.

56:13 There’s loads of studies that have shown this in loads of countries now. So the more you think life is about how you look to other people, the more you will become depressed and anxious. And secondly, as a culture, we have become much more driven by these junk values, right? we’ve become much more driven by extrinsic values than we were before. I think of it as like a kind of KFC for the soul, right?

56:32 We’ve been constantly, from the moment we’ve bought, more 18-month-old children know the McDonald’s M than know their own last name, right? So in this culture where from the moment we’re born, we’re immersed in this machine that tells us life is about buying, consuming, and how you look to other people. So to relate it back to this thing about concerts, right? So here’s this thing, if you love Rihanna, who’s a genius, and you’re at a Rihanna concert, you’re in the place you want to be, right?

57:03 You’re paying good money to be there. You’re paying a fortune to be there, right? You’ve got your intrinsic value. You like Rihanna’s music. You’re in a room full of people who like Rihanna’s music.

57:12 You get to sing along. She’s right in front of you. But what we do, what we’re trained to do by this culture and we’re jolted so often to do, is say, wait, I’ve got to show other people that I’m doing this, right? It’s a shift from the intrinsic value, sing the damn song with Rihanna, right? That’s the intrinsic value.

57:30 Think about how great you feel when you do that. You jolt it out to the extrinsic value, which is, I want other people to know I’m doing this, right? And that move, that’s a kind of crude example, but that move is happening the whole time. And Professor Casa has shown, he goes through four reasons, he’s shown in his scientific research, really, he’s a brilliant scientist. He’s shown four reasons why that, why this move towards junk values makes us more depressed.

57:56 I’ll just give you one example. It, apparently, I’ll give you two examples, actually. One is, we know that one of the things that gives people most joy is what are called flow states. They’re moments when you’re doing something you love, for me it’s writing, for someone else it might be running or singing, whatever. When you’re totally in the zone, time falls away, You’re just, you’re in it, right?

58:24 And you love it and you feel yourself flowing into the experience, right? Now, what junk values, what extrinsic values do is jolt you out of that flow state, right? People who are driven more by extrinsic values experience significantly fewer flow states. So think about that Rihanna concert, right? You and your flow state, Rihanna’s singing, yeah, one of her great songs, and you’re jolted out to go, I want people on Instagram to know that I’m doing it.

58:52 And by the way, people on Instagram are gonna feel terrible when they see that you’re at the Rihanna concert and they’re not, right? So it’s this kind of thing about, at some level, you know, it’s not, you want your friends to celebrate that you’re at the Rihanna concert, right? It’s not that you’re, they’re not gonna go, oh great, Billy’s at the Rihanna concert. I’m so happy for him, right? Maybe they are, but most people, they think, ah, screw you, mate.

59:09 You know what I mean? They’re so, I don’t know if it’s a bit harsh, but the point I’m making here. So partly it’s jobs that are places. The other thing is, the more you’re driven by these junk values, it really causes a deterioration in the quality of your relationships. So a good example, and it’s gonna sound like a bit of a dig, I genuinely don’t mean it as a dig, so I need to get the words, I need to go and check the quotes of this, but the gist of it is as I read it.

59:32 In 2009, I think Melania Trump went to speak at NYU to students, can’t imagine why, and one of the students asked her, would you have married Donald Trump if he wasn’t rich? And she replied, do you think he would have married me if I wasn’t beautiful. Now, think about what that reveals about what Melania Trump and Donald Trump know about each other. She knows, it means that their relationship is totally driven by extrinsic values. Melania Trump knows if she got fat, if she got burned in a fire or whatever, it’s over.

1:00:02 She ceases to be gorgeous, it’s over. And Donald Trump knows if he ceases to be rich, if he ceases to be the big man, it’s over, right? So imagine that you can see how that would be much more score. Now, compare that to say Barack and Michelle Obama, and I’m obviously more politically sympathetic to them as well, but compare that to- At least the Trumps are honest. Well, I’m pretty sure Barack and Michelle Obama do honestly take joy in each other’s company and love each other.

1:00:22 And even if Michelle Obama was burned in a fire or became physically deformed or lost all their money, they’d still be by each other’s side, right? So you can see how one of those relationships will be more insecure, more anxious, more prone to depression than the other, right? Now, the Trumps are an extreme example, but we’re all driven much more by that dynamic. Our whole culture has become much more driven by extrinsic junk values. So I think that’s another example of the kind of dynamic we’re doing.

1:00:46 And what can we do about that, just recognize it on ourselves and just try to take a good look at our behavior and just say, okay, not only does this stuff not make me feel good, it’s also eating away at my core. Yeah, no, it’s not enough just to know it. There are programs that lead us to act on it. So I write in the book about Professor Castle worked with this great guy who I interviewed a lot called Nathan Dungun. So the way Nathan came into this is quite interesting.

1:01:10 And Nathan was a financial advisor in Minnesota. And a lot of schools, school, in fact, initially one school, it was kind of middle class school, not of rich school, but middle class, approached him and said, look, we’ve got a bit of a problem. Loads of our kids are obsessed with getting, like, the latest sneaker trainers, they’re obsessed with getting these designer clothes or labels, and it’s really screwing up their parents’ budgets, and the parents can’t afford it, they just go, they really get angry.

1:01:38 Could you come in and talk to these kids about budgeting, right? So he goes in to talk to him about budgeting as part of his job and quite quickly he realizes this is not a conversation about budgeting, right? These kids don’t want to hear about numbers. They got in an existential panic if they haven’t got like Nike sneakers. This is a deeper thing.

1:01:55 So this is when he got in touch with Tim. He met Tim at a conference and they pioneered this really interesting strategy. So what they did is it was kind of like a kind of alcoholic synonymous for consumerism. What happened is the teenagers would come to a meeting with their parents, and I think there were, the meetings went on, I’m getting numbers slightly wrong here, but I think it was meeting every couple of weeks for I think four or five months, right?

1:02:22 And they were designed to do two things, firstly to get them to think about their extrinsic values and where they came from, and then to think about what were their intrinsic values. So they had these extrinsic values. They’d say, I need these Nike sneakers. And they’d say, well, how would you feel if you’ve got these Nike sneakers? Very often, the kids, very close to the surface, the kids didn’t take much prodding to think about this.

1:02:45 They’d say, I’d feel I belonged. I’d feel people respected me. Then they’d look at advertising and say, where did that feeling that you would belong and be respected come from? Kids would go, well, I’m not affected by advertising. And then they would watch the ads.

1:02:56 And they’d be like, well, you know, and they would begin to think about how these ideas were constructed. Again, it didn’t take much nudging for them to everyone thinks they’re smarter than the ad at first. And then when you think about it, you think, well, actually, why do I want this thing, right? I think that as the route started looking at this route, I think, why do I want that, right? So initially there’s the deconstruction of the extrinsic values.

1:03:17 And then they’d say, what do you think is important in life, right? If you discovered you wanna die next year, would you be worried about whether you had Nike sneakers or would you be worried about what would you think you should have done in that year, right? And again, you know, people would talk about spending time people they love, they talk about meaningful work, something that’s really denied to people in our culture and we can talk about how we can reconnect with meaningful work, all sorts of things.

1:03:39 Anyway, this was followed, Professor Casser studied very closely and what they found is just maybe a couple of times a week for a few months really significantly reduced their junk values which we know correlates with reduction in depression, right? So I think that tells us something really important. These things, you know, and I thought about this before the book came out. At some level, it’s not like, another book I’m writing is a biography of Noam Chomsky with his cooperation, right?

1:04:06 Chomsky’s ideas are really complicated in a lot of cases. They’re difficult to explain to people. It takes a lot of time. If I started explaining generative grammar to you, you would not be nodding appreciatively the way you are now. It would be a real effort, right?

1:04:17 These ideas, I mean, everyone knows them at some level, right, they’re just beneath the surface. If we stop someone on Old Street Roundabout now, just outside here, and we said, Do you think if people were lonely and they think life is about money and they hate their jobs and they’re really financially insecure, do you think they’d be more likely to be unhappy, depressed and anxious? They’ll look at us like we’re an idiot, right? But it’s so curious that in a sense part of the job, of course there’s many things I learned about in the book that are not intuitively obvious like that and many of the solutions are not intuitively obvious, but it’s a funny thing where actually what I’m trying to restore to people is the stuff they already know, that actually we We were diverted by this story for so long, which doesn’t have no truth in it, but this biological story that said it’s just a problem in your skull, which disconnects us from finding the sources of pain and meaning in our lives, and in our society, and as a society, fixing those problems.

1:05:11 So it’s a very… We need to be disciplined about some of these human connection moments, like these meetings on a regular basis, and get back to what we know intrinsically makes us happy, even Even though we get kind of these shiny objects come up and we start behaving extrinsically. So it’s about kind of having some self-discipline. No, I don’t think so. I think that’s an aspect of it.

1:05:32 I think it’s much more about social change. Think about the debate about obesity, which you mentioned before, right? We can say, look, obesity has, I was in Kentucky last year, right? Massive, enormous amount of obesity, right? You see people, regularly see people trailing oxygen canisters behind them on little leashes like they were dogs, right? Last year I also spent some time in the Netherlands.

1:05:55 You don’t see anyone doing that in the Netherlands. It’s not that people in Kentucky are weak willed and lazy and people in the Netherlands are, you know, strong willed and determined and disciplined. It’s that in Kentucky you can’t walk anywhere without a car. In fact, I literally say to people, how do I walk somewhere? And they looked at me like I was asking, you know, how can you charter me a private helicopter, please? You can’t walk anywhere.

1:06:18 The food supply is awful. It’s really hard to get fresh food. It’s really hard to eat well. And their lives are much more stressful, so they’re comfort eating a lot more, a bit like the Marianne Faithful dynamic in a different way. You comfort eat more when you’re overworked, insecure, don’t have healthcare, you’re screwed over.

1:06:39 So factors which are to a much lesser degree in place in the Netherlands, right? So we could say to the people in Kentucky, mate, you need to be more self-disciplined about not ordering your Big Mac, but it’s not going to get us very far. What they need is cities you can walk and bike around, a food supply system that makes fresh and healthy food affordable, and all sorts of social changes. It’s not that there’s no role for self-discipline. Of course, there’s some role.

1:07:05 And also, they need to not be working 10 hours a day, so at the end of the day, they’re so exhausted, they can’t go to the gym, and in fact, you just want to go and have a KFC bucket to drug yourself with some saturated fats. So that requires a much bigger social change, and a lot of things I talk about in Lost Connections. And this is very interesting, because I think this is one of the things that’s, the reaction to the book has been overwhelmingly positive and really moving.

1:07:27 But it’s been really interesting to see some people who, not people who’ve read the book, but some people who have heard some of the things I’ve said, and it’s very interesting to hear people kind of mishearing part of this message in a way that I think is really important to think about, which is, how to put it, we, for so long, we’ve been given on things like obesity, depression, to some degree, addiction, we’ve been given these two poles, right? We say to people, either you’re lazy, you’re weak, you need to discipline yourself, or it’s all your biology, it’s not your fault, it’s like having a, you know, just a catching some horrible disease. And if you come along and say, with the real biological factors, and it’s important to talk about them, but actually we’ve oversold the biology, what a lot of people hear is, Jesus, so you’re saying it’s my fault.

1:08:18 I can’t change my life, right? And I think about one of my closest relatives is a struggling single mother who works every hour she can to pay the rent for her two kids. And she gets home and she just collapses. She’s too tired to even watch Coronation Street, right? So the idea that you say to her, your job now is to transform the society and discipline yourself and all this.

1:08:40 It’d be cruel, it’d be absurd, right? What she needs is wider social change. The onus for solving that should not be on her, given that depression has social causes, the solution has to come through social change to a large but not entire degree there are things individuals can do that I write about in Lost Connections. One of the things it made me realise is how much we’ve internalised these kind of Thatcher ideas. When I was a child, Margaret Thatcher said, there’s no such thing as society, there’s only individuals and their families, right?

1:09:14 And as you can probably guess, I never liked Margaret Thatcher. But I’ve realized doing this research, how much I had internalized that. I was depressed and taking very powerful drugs for 13 years. I had been trained in the social sciences. It never occurred to me there were social causes of my depression and anxiety.

1:09:31 It never occurred to me. And so I totally understand why, if what you’re saying is, there’s real biological factors. There’s some individual changes people can make. But actually, as the World Health Organization says, this is primarily a social indicator and requires social change. A lot of people, we’ve just been trained at thinking about the world in that way.

1:09:50 So I’ll give you an example of this, and this can sound weirdly abstract if you don’t give a specific example. So I’ll give a couple of, if you don’t mind, a couple of specific examples of social changes that have been proven to reduce depression. So in Canada in the 1970s, the Canadian government was concerned, they had a welfare state, but lots of people were falling through the cracks. So they decided to try and experiment. They did this really interesting experiment.

1:10:12 They chose seemingly genuinely at random on the map of Canada, a town. It’s called Dorfin. It’s in, anyone knows Canada, it’s about four hours out of Winnipeg, it’s in Manitoba. And they said to a huge number of people in Dorfin, from now on, we’re going to give you a guaranteed basic income. It was the equivalent of about £12,000 in today’s British money.

1:10:33 They said, we’re going to give it to you and I think it was monthly installments. There’s nothing you have to do for this money, and there’s nothing you can do that means we’ll take it away. You’re a citizen of our country, we just want you to have a good life, right? And they followed it to see what would happen. It was studied quite carefully by an amazing woman called Dr. Evelyn Forger, who I interviewed.

1:10:51 And they discovered loads of interesting things happened. People spent more time with their kids. People studied more. Virtually nobody quit work, but some people quit crappy jobs and held out for better job management work standards overall improved. Biggest thing that happened, from our purposes of this conversation, massive fall in mental health problems. In fact, people who had to be hospitalized for mental health problems fell by 9% in just three years, right? Extraordinary result, right? Didn’t happen in any of the surrounding areas. What does that tell you?

1:11:26 Insecurity about your future, financial insecurity caused depression and anxiety, right? We It is loads of studies that show that and this is a way of restoring a sense of the future to people, right? It’s what I mean I think about my relative I was talking about if you gave her 12 grand a year She would be given a margin to change her life and reconnect with intrinsic values that she just does not have now Right, so it’s it’s about these That’s one example I go through seven now I think that should be implemented or you think that should be explored Well, there’s already lots of experiments happening, just doing this in Scotland now, a pilot program.

1:12:00 They’re doing another program in Canada and in Finland. I think we need more evidence, and it’s, look, it’s a big social change, a universal basic income. I’m strongly in favor of it, but I think it should be implemented. It’s expensive. It’s not going to happen overnight.

1:12:13 But I do think, and President Obama, very late in his term, said he thinks this will have to happen in the next 20 years, because the changes in the job market are causing such churn and automation is going to devastate low income. I think it’s half a million people in Britain who make a living out of driving cars. Those jobs aren’t going to exist ten years from now when we have self-driving cars. We’ll live to see a time when no one’s earning a living doing that, right? Those are some people most precarious, but that’s a big social And that’s just one of many examples in terms of technological transformation.

1:12:52 And we can live in a fantasy world where Donald Trump tells people they’re going to go back to manufacturing iPhones in Indiana or whatever. Everyone knows that’s not going to happen. We’re not going to restore the future that way by going back to a fantasy. But we can restore sense of the future through programs like this. So I think that’s one example.

1:13:08 Now, Evelyn Forger, who did that research, said to me, that program is an antidepressant, right? It’s an intervention that reduces depression and anxiety in it. And actually, I think it was after I spoke to Evelyn that I remember there was this thing that really fell into place for me about this. Obviously, lots of these things I learned intellectually and there were just these moments when emotionally they clicked into place and I was… I went to go and see this South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield, who’s a wonderful person.

1:13:37 And Derek said to me, so by coincidence, Derek was in Cambodia in 2001 when chemical antidepressants were first introduced there. And the Cambodian doctors said to him, well, what are these drugs? They hadn’t heard of them. So he explained, and they said, we don’t need them, we’ve already got antidepressants. And he said, what do you mean?

1:13:57 And he thought they were going to talk about some herbal remedy or whatever. And instead they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who one day had stood on a landmine and got his leg blown off. And they gave him an artificial limb, they’re good at that in Cambodia. and he went back to work in the fields, but apparently it’s incredibly painful to work underwater with an artificial limb. I’m imagining it was pretty traumatic. He’d had his leg blown off. He started to cry all day, didn’t want to get out of bed. Classic depression.

1:14:27 They said to Derek, so he gave him an antidepressant. Derek said, well, what was it? They went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realised that his pain made sense, that it wasn’t some irrational malfunction. It was in fact a product of his environment.

1:14:42 They figured if they bought him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn’t be in this position that was distressing him so much. They bought him a cow, within a month his depression was gone, he was fine. They said to Derek, so that cow, that was an antidepressant, that’s what you mean, right? Now what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years.

1:15:06 If you’re depressed, if you’re anxious, you’re not crazy. You’re not a machine with broken parts, you’re a human being with unmet needs, and you need love and support to get those things back, and you’ll notice those Cambodian doctors said this very important insight that runs all the way through my book, Lost Connections. They weren’t saying to that farmer, you’ve got to sort your problem out, right? You’ve got this problem, you’ve got yourself into this mess, you need to sort it out.

1:15:31 They realized that he needed the support of people outside, he needed social support, he needed a social support network that could lead to an individual transformation. That’s the core insight about depression and anxiety. We’ve put the onus for solving depression and anxiety for years now onto depressed and anxious people, right? But given this, we don’t do that with other problems. We don’t say, oh no, we don’t say the problem of solving car accidents has to only be solved by people who’ve been mangled in car accidents, right?

1:15:59 We don’t just say, pedestrians, it’s your job to walk safely. We have driving tests, and airbags, and speed limits, and seat belts, and we arrest people who drive when they’re drunk, right? We have a societal response to car accidents that massively, obviously have enormously reduced car accidents. If we just said to the individual, you know, mate, be careful when you cross the street, we would have terrible problems, much bigger problems than we do now, they’re bad enough at the moment, but you’d be terrible, right?

1:16:26 We need to apply a similar approach to depression and anxiety. This has huge social causes and also, more importantly, the nine factors I write about in Lost Connection that are causing depression and anxiety for some people are depleting the lives of most people in Britain, right? You would struggle to find a person in Britain whose life was not depleted by one of these nine causes, right? So we’re actually united in a common cause, right? Some of us are just made a little bit depleted and unhappy by these things, and some of us are made suicidal by those things. But actually, these transformations – and I go through seven very specific transformations in Lost Connections that we can make – these transformations will enrich the lives of virtually everyone in Britain and everyone across the Western world.

1:17:08 Let’s talk about work. And let me frame my experience with work, as it seems like you’ve been writing these books about me, and maybe other people find this similar to them as well. So for me, growing up in America, I’ve sold the American dream. As a kid, I’m taught, or I believe, that if I make all this money, I’ll be successful. And so ever since I was young, I was just trying to chase this thing.

1:17:30 And that’s why I came to London to be a banker, and about eight or nine years ago, I was in the city making millions and I actually started meditating and it actually gave me a chance to observe Brian Rose before I was just in my head and I was trying to put a square peg in a round hole and I was like, wait a second, the money will make me happy, the money will get me everything I want, I’ll be recognized, I’ll be that. And I realized that it wasn’t and I was actually, I was in a company where we got paid every quarter and I could see my balance going up every quarter and I could see myself getting no happier, if not more depressed. And I finally, with MIT education, concluded after nine years of this that there was no correlation.

1:18:13 And I walked away. I walked out of it and started broadcasting with London Real. And so what I found is that I started doing something I enjoyed. I started connecting with people. I started giving back and trying to help some other people.

1:18:28 First of all, my addiction issues just started withering away. Go figure your first book. And also I just felt like completely rejuvenated. And like I felt like my life had changed because I was doing work I really cared about. When I’m in the city, in the banking world, you’re just not, you know?

1:18:45 And I know you talk about that, how most of us are doing jobs that don’t fulfill us. And I was doing something that I was told was gonna get me everything I wanted, but then I could see that it just wasn’t. And it was also very selfish, very much about me. And I found that when I took that out of the equation, everything changed. And so now all of a sudden, the depression is gone, the addiction’s gone, and now it’s just a whole nother piece.

1:19:10 And so I’m kind of living a lot of the things that you say in this book, and I feel it every day. And again, at the same point, I was a smart guy, and I should have been able to see this coming. I couldn’t see any of this coming. I couldn’t see, we can call it brainwashing, because that kind of has a victim mode, but I couldn’t see my social conditioning giving me the wrong way, even from a scientific standpoint. I find that really moving, and really inspiring, And Professor Casser, who did all that research into junk values, said to me one day, you know, we’re constantly taught in this culture to pursue the things that don’t make us feel good and to neglect the things that will actually make us feel good.

1:19:48 And that’s a really powerful system that we’re inculcated in, right? And I think what you said about work is really important and I think there are ways, and as I was learning about this, actually missed it. This is one of the points that took me quite a long time to understand what people I was really learning. So I noticed that lots of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work. So I started to look at the evidence, well, what do we know about how people feel about their work? And Gallup, the opinion poll company, did this really detailed research in the US, Britain, most of the Western world, and absolutely extraordinary. It took them years. And the results were just So what they found is 13% of us, one 3% like our jobs most of the time.

1:20:32 63% of us are what they called sleep working. You don’t like it, you don’t hate it, you’re just kind of tolerating it. 24% of people hate their jobs, right? We’re only struck by that. 87% of people don’t like the thing they’re doing most of their waking lives.

1:20:46 And this is spread over more and more of our lives. The average person answers their first work email at 748 AM and leaves work at 715 PM, right? It’s average, huh? Yeah, yeah. So it’s, wow, and you’re almost twice as likely to hate your job as like your job, right?

1:21:01 It’s like, that’s striking. Could this be having some effect on our mental health, given that it’s what we do most of the time, right? Think about your story. So I learned that there was an amazing Australian social scientist called Professor Michael Marmot, who I went to get to know, who did this really important research on this. I can explain how, because I think the story is incredible, but just to give you the headline, he discovered the key fact is not the only factor, the key factor that causes depression at work.

1:21:26 If you go to work and you feel you have no control over your work, you’re low or no control, either you’re just following a script or you’re just doing what you’re told, you’re significantly more likely to become depressed or actually even significantly more likely to have a stress-related heart attack. And I thought, oh, that’s really interesting. And actually, again, I misunderstood what he was saying. what he was saying is, I thought the implication of this was okay, so you’ve got this 13% of people who have these nice jobs and they’re going to be okay and everyone else is consigned to this kind of bleak wilderness, you know, and I thought about my family, my grandmother’s job was to clean toilets, my dad was a bus driver, my brother’s a delivery guy, I thought, wait, are we saying that they’re just condemned to, and Professor Marmot said to me, no, you don’t understand, it’s not the work That makes you depressed It’s being controlled at work now there are ways to deal with that right now I’m gonna give an example of a story that’s gonna sound like I’m saying people at home should go and do this That’s not what I’m saying. This is a sign of a social change. We can make I’ll explain how so in Baltimore City, I love I wouldn’t met Baltimore. Huh? Why do you love Baltimore?

1:22:35 Oh, there’s so many reasons I love Baltimore, but a Baltimoreans are just fat lot of time there for chasing the screen man for this book But Baltimoreans are just joyful, hilarious. They’ve got the darkest sense of humor of any city in the United States, apart from New Orleans. So I love their, I love the kind of, Baltimoreans have just a joyful attitude to the circumstances in which they live, which is kind of to constantly laugh about it there. It’s just a hilarious, I love, anyway, so many reasons, and I’ve got good friends there, and there’s so many reasons, I love it.

1:23:07 People know Baltimore from The Wire. Is it The Wire?

1:23:13 Yeah, I mean, it does feel like you’ve walked onto the set of The Wire. I mean, well, I think The Wire is a complete masterpiece. It’s 10 years since it ended, actually, today. But the, oh, Baltimore. I mean, there’s just so many things I could say about Baltimore, but no, so for this purpose, I met this woman there called Meredith Keogh.

1:23:36 And Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night just sick with anxiety, right? She had an office job. It wasn’t the worst office job in the world. She wasn’t being bullied or harassed or anything. But it was monotonous and she couldn’t bear the thought this was gonna be the next 40 years of her life.

1:23:52 So one day with her husband, Josh, Meredith did this quite bold thing. Josh had worked in bike stores since he was a kid. And you know, it’s pretty insecure, controlled work as you can imagine. And one day Josh and his colleagues in the bike store were sitting there and they just kind of said, what does that boss actually do? They liked their boss, he wasn’t a bad guy, but they were like, we seem to fix all the bikes and he seems to make all the money, right?

1:24:17 It’s like, not right here. And they decided to set up a business that worked on a different principle. So the previous business they worked out was a corporation, right? Most people watching this were working corporations. Top down, boss at the top tells everyone what to do at the bottom, it’s like an army.

1:24:31 Very recent human invention, the corporation, right? Only comes along in the late 19th century. What Josh and his friends decide to do is to, it’s a business that works on a different principle. It’s called the democratic cooperative. They don’t have a boss.

1:24:44 They take the decisions about the business together by voting, they share out the good tasks and the crappy tasks, so no one gets stuck with the crappy tasks, and they share the profits, obviously, and what’s fascinating going and spending time there is completely in line with Professor Marmot’s findings about control at work causing depression. It’s how many of them said they used to be depressed and anxious in their previous workplaces, but were not depressed and anxious in this different way of working, right? Now, it’s important to say, it’s not like they used to work in a bike store and now they’re, you know, Beyonce’s backing singers, right?

1:25:15 They worked and they fixed bikes before they fixed bikes now. The difference is now they’ve got control over their work, right? And Josh said to me, there’s no reason why any business should run in this top-down controlled way that causes depression, right? Think about how many people you know who are depressed and anxious. Who’d feel very differently if they knew that tomorrow they were going into a workplace where they made the decisions about how their work worked along with their colleagues.

1:25:39 Where if there had to be a boss, he was elected by them and accountable to them. Where if they’re a crappy task, they get shared out among people so you know one gets stuck with them with just the crappy tasks. Where they were the boss along with everyone else. You can see how that’s a very different way of living and working. Now that’s a big social change but I’d say that is an antidepressant.

1:25:58 I also think it’s good for the economy. There’s a study at Cornell University found more democratic businesses grow on average four times faster than non-democratic businesses. This is not some communist plot. This is actually a way of being more efficient in the marketplace as well. Because in a depressing, top-down, demotivated workforce, you can see why that’s gonna be a less effective business.

1:26:20 So I- Is this a big one for people? Do you think this is the main one if you had to go after one of them? No, I don’t think you could say there’s just one. Because I think there’s so many. I mean, we haven’t talked about childhood trauma.

1:26:31 There’s so many different ones. But I think it’s a big one. And I think it’s hard to see how we break the back of the growing depression and anxiety crisis. And also, what we have now, particularly, we talked about the move to screens. Most people’s work is now working through screens where you can be controlled and monitored much more.

1:26:48 Now, you know, think about people who work, I mean, extreme example is think about people who work in Amazon warehouses who now have to wear trackers that show that if they stop for more than a few minutes, They’ve got a certain amount of times they can use the bathroom, you know, attract all the time, the, you know, really, really extreme forms of control at work, which are now facilitated by technology and I think that will continue to grow, although you’ll have more autonomy for kind of elite people like us, where we have a lot of creative freedom, but there’s actually a movement towards more controlled work. For most people, not actually most is going too far, for a lot of people at the bottom of the work scale in inverted commas. So yeah, I think this is a growing challenge.

1:27:30 I think something we really have to get to the bottom of, and it is what we spend most of our lives doing. So you think it’s important to make sure the thing that we spend most of our lives doing is as depressing as, is as undepressing as possible and as creative and free as possible. Josh said to me, and it’s so true, you talked about, you know, the inculcation in the American dream. He said to me, it’s an incredible propaganda victory for the way our society works to to make people controlled and miserable most of the time, and then tell them they’re the freest people who ever lived.

1:28:00 There are a lot of freedoms in our society that are hard-won victories that are very important and that we need to defend, like free speech, like the right to organize labor unions, which actually has been massively suppressed in the U.S., as you know. There are all sorts of freedoms we do enjoy. We shouldn’t belittle the freedoms we do enjoy, which are enormous and really important. But actually, if you’re not free most of the time, the thing you do most of the time, That’s really an issue that needs to be contended with, and given that there are solutions, democratic cooperatives exist, they’re really good, there are ways to grow them, there are ways to move towards them.

1:28:35 This is not some pie in the sky, you know, claim. These are very concrete things. Baltimore Bicycle Works is a very successful business. Huge number, more than 10,000 democratic cooperatives in the US alone. Let’s talk about childhood trauma.

1:28:48 The last time I talked about childhood trauma was with Dr. Gavulmaty, who was here and he made the case and he really goes out on a limb and he puts this out there and people disagree with him and some don’t that childhood drama doesn’t always, but it can result in addiction. And then we treat addicts in a way, in a cyclical way, then of course can perpetuate that cycle of childhood trauma. And he really puts it all out there and says, this is something I really believe is true and I see.

1:29:20 Just your thoughts on that, because you broached those two worlds when it comes to these two books. Well, I love Gabbo. You read on trauma, and yeah, I’m a huge fan of him. I spent a lot of time with Gabbo on the downtown east side in Vancouver, and he’s a wonderful man. So this was the course.

1:29:35 He said that all addiction results in childhood trauma, but childhood trauma doesn’t cause addiction. I believe that’s one of his main assertions, right? I don’t think I would put it quite like that, I think it’s a bit too simplistic, This was the hardest cause of depression for me to write about, for personal reasons, and I think, how would I put it, I think it helped me to understand why I stayed with the chemical imbalance theory for a really long time even though I knew at some level it was too simplistic.

1:30:15 So I went to interview a man called Dr. Vincent Felitti in where you’re from, San Diego. And I’ll tell you a story, and it’s going to sound to the viewers for a moment. If you want to talk about something completely different, you can think, what the hell’s he on about? Right?

1:30:35 But bear with me, because it led to an incredible breakthrough in depression, in our understanding of depression and addiction. So it’s the mid-80s, it’s San Diego, and they’ve got hugely rising obesity-related costs in the healthcare system as everywhere in the U.S. at that time. And Kaiser Permanente, who were the biggest not-for-profit medical provider in California, were trying loads of things, giving people nutritional advice, all of that kind of thing.

1:30:58 Nothing was working, and it was a disaster in people’s health, it was a disaster for their budgets. It was just awful. So they said to Dr. Feliti, who was a very distinguished scientist, they gave him quite big budget and they said just do blue skies research, figure out what the hell’s going on here, right? So Dr. Feliti started to work with, I think it was just over 350 extremely obese people, people who weighed more than 400 pounds. And one day he had this really dumb idea, which seems like a dumb idea when you first hear it. He’d watched a news report about the hunger strikers in Northern Ireland who were protesting against Thatcher’s government by starving themselves, and several of them like Bobby Sands died, and he kind of thought, oh, what would happen if really overweight people just stopped eating, and we gave them loads of like medical support, you know, we gave them nutritional supplements and things.

1:31:53 Would they just live off, because he knows it actually took quite a long time for the hunger strikers to die, right? Would they just live off the fat stores in their body and be down to a normal weight, right? enormous amount of medical supervision, but they decided to try this, right? And the crazy thing is, in one sense, it worked. People who’ve been 400 pounds got down to healthy weights.

1:32:12 There’s a woman who I’m going to call Susan to protect her medical confidentiality, went down from, I think it was more than 400 pounds, to 138 pounds. Amazing. People are breaking open the champagne, they’re calling Vincent a lifesaver. And one day, something happened that no one anticipated. I’ll give you an example with Susan. Susan one day just freaked out, fleas, starts gorging on KFC or whatever it was. That’s a mental projection from my own memory. I don’t think it was KFC. And before long, she’s back to her. It wasn’t quite where she was but a very large way. And Vincent called her in and said, Susan, what happened? And she looks down and she said, I don’t know. I don’t know. And he said, well, tell me about the day you cracked. What happened? Turns out something had happened that day that hadn’t ever happened to her. A man hit on her. It didn’t happen to her when she was obese. And it really scared her and she went and she started eating. And I think it was at that session or later, Vincent said to her, Susan, when did you put on weight? And it was when she was 11. He said, well, what happened when you were 11 that didn’t happen when you were 8 or 14? Did anything happen that year? She looked down and she said, that’s when my grandfather started to rape me. Vincent starts speaking to the people in the program and he discovered that 55% of them are put on weight in the wake of being sexually abused,

1:33:37 Extraordinary figure. And it goes back to what we were saying right back to what we were talking about Marianne Faithful and addiction. This thing that seemed like a pathology, seems like an irrational thing and it does of course cause harm, it’s very dangerous to be very obese, had an internal logic that made perfect sense. Susan said to him, Overweight is overlooked, and that’s what I need to be What what was happening there is that the obesity was a form of self-defense against potentially predatory sexual behavior But this was a relatively small group small study vincent’s like this can’t be right right someone would have found this by now if it Was true he got funding from the CDC at the Center for Disease Control One of the biggest medical institutions in the US to do really detailed research Everyone who came to Kaiser Permanente for medical care of any kind over the following year was given two questionnaires. It didn’t matter whether they came in for broken leg, migraines, schizophrenia, whatever. First thing was they asked, did any of these ten bad things happen to you when you were a kid? Things like sexual abuse, physical abuse, so on. Then it asked, have you had any of these problems as an adult. Things like obesity, suicide attempts, and addiction.

1:34:57 And when they added up the figures, a CDC were just staggered. For every category of childhood trauma you experienced, you were radically more likely to become depressed and anxious. If you had had six of those categories happen to you, you were 3,100% more likely to have attempted suicide as an adult, and you were 4,600% more likely to have had an addiction problem, right? You don’t get figures like that in medical science very often. The reason I found this very hard to look at,

1:35:34 And I was very resistant to Dr. Feliti’s research and then all the research that’s emerged from it, is that when I was a child, my mother was very unwell, my dad was in a different country, and I had experienced some very extreme acts from an adult in my life. And there was something about the chemical imbalance theory. This wasn’t conscious. I didn’t want to act like it was conscious, it wasn’t.

1:36:02 But it was semi-conscious. I think I had flickers of these insights, and I pushed them away. When my doctor told me, right, so you’re depressed just because there’s biological break in your brain, which is just because of low serotonin, it just happens to some people naturally, What that said is, you don’t have to think about any of those things, right? It has no power over you. It’s not playing out in your life now.

1:36:25 You don’t have to think about it, which was a tremendous relief. And I think one of the things that helped me through these, to stay with Gabbel’s insights with Dr. Feliti’s insights was what Dr. Feliti discovered next, which I think is really important and has massive implications lots of people watching this, and not just people who experience childhood trauma. If you’d indicated on the form that you’d experienced childhood trauma, your doctor was asked, next time you come in, so you don’t call them back in, but next time they come in, to just say to them a script, it was something like, so I see that when you were a child you were sexually abused. I’m really sorry that happened to you. That should never have happened to you? Would you like to talk about it? Lots of people forget the figure.

1:37:22 Very significant minority said, thank you, but I don’t want to talk about it. But most people did want to talk about it. Average conversation was five minutes long. At the end of which, I forget what proportion, but some of them as part of the study were referred to therapy. The doctor said I can refer you to a therapist if you want. Not all of them were offered that. And they wanted to see what would be the results. What’s extraordinary is, just that five-minute conversation with an authority figure saying, I’m really sorry, this should never have happened to you, that alone led to a really significant decrease in depression and anxiety. And of course, people who referred to therapy had an even bigger decrease in depression and anxiety. What that tells us, and that’s part of a bigger body of research, Professor James Pennebaker in Florida has done really interesting stuff on this, is shame poisons people. We know from the AIDS crisis, openly gay men died on average two years later than closeted gay men, even when they got health care at the same time, right? Shame destroys people. And giving people ways to release, I remember Dr. Feliti saying to me, you know, like me, he’s an atheist, he said, oh, he’s an atheist, he’s not religious. He said to me, you know, I started to think maybe the Catholics had something going on with these 2000 years of confession, right? There’s something about a release of shame. And actually one old woman wrote to, women in her 80s wrote to

1:38:38 To one of the doctors. She’d been sexually abused when she was a child. She just said, thank you for asking. I thought I would die and no one would ever know. And I think one of the things that helped me to realize, and this is the insight at the heart of, I think every point of lost connections, is that our pain makes sense.

1:39:06 The worst thing about telling people that it’s entirely biological, there are real biological components, it’s important to stress that. But the worst thing about saying It’s just a chemical imbalance in your brain, it’s just your biology, it’s just your genes. Is that cuts people off from understanding the causes of their pain and their distress. And once people understand, and I understand the appeal of that because I felt the appeal of that, because it’s frightening to think about these causes, it’s destabilizing to think about these causes, it’s painful.

1:39:35 But what you get when you go into a deep journey into these causes is firstly the the insight that our pain makes sense, that you’re not crazy, you’re not broken. But more importantly, it opens up the way to solutions. And in Lost Connections, I talk about seven different kinds of solutions for which there’s evidence. Then we need a lot more work on these solutions. It’s incredible to me.

1:39:57 There’s been so little research into these solutions, given the evidence about the causes is quite strong. But, and it struck me as, if I’m honest, disgusting. that actually 13 years I was given very powerful drugs, how many times did a doctor say to me, is there any reason you might feel this way? Not once, not a single time, right? And what I object to is not that doctors give out chemical antidepressants, they play a real role, they have some value for some people, and not that doctors can’t change the whole society of course they can’t that’s not their job that’s the job of all of us but what I do object to is that my doctor told me a story that was grossly simplistic and that did set me off in a wrong direction right it’s not that taking the chemical antidepressants was the wrong direction but being told by an authority figure you feel like this just because something’s broken in your biology it does stop you dealing with these things right now it’s a big challenge to deal with those things even if you haven’t been told that story don’t misunderstand me it’s not it’s not the only thing that needs to happen. But I do think we need to stop doing that. And it’s not just that I think that.

1:41:10 The World Health Organization thinks that. The UN’s leading doctor thinks that, you know. Do you think that standard questionnaire should be required? And that five-minute conversation had with all doctors here in the NHS and around the world in similar places? Yeah, this is one of the things I was recommending. I met the other day with Jeremy Hunt, who’s the Secretary of State for Health. I covered very different politics to Jeremy and some of his advisors. And I was talking about some of this evidence about childhood trauma and some of the other things social prescribing, the wider world health organization, guidance on how we might be responding to this.

1:41:43 I do, I think that would be a really valuable thing. And Professor, Dr. Feliti has done really great work on the happened places that have started doing this and it does have a, you know, I mean, what’s called, it’s called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study and it’s been replicated now a crazy number of times. I mean, this evidence is rock solid. So you’re right, I mean, Gabbel gets a lot of, well, you mentioned Dr. Gabbel Marte, wonderful man who’s done a lot to, a friend of ours, who’s been done a lot to, well done amazing work in Vancouver with some of the people who had some of the most unbelievable and devastating childhood trauma and therefore had terrible addiction problems, but also has done a lot to therefore explain this to the wider public through his writing, which is wonderful.

1:42:26 Yeah, yeah, I think the answer to your question is yes, it’s a long way of saying yes, sorry. This seems like the ultimate conclusion of this book is that it’s a very nuanced and complicated problem and going down these single solutions is just we’re hurting ourselves and everyone’s involved in this problem and to a certain extent everyone’s involved in the solution. I don’t know, it feels like we’re kind of this worn organism that needs to start healing itself by looking at these things completely different and treating people and having more conversations around this.

1:42:58 It’s a really good way of putting it, I like the way you put that. You know, it’s interesting because we’ve talked about a lot of the things I write about in Lost Connections I learned about intellectually and there were these like I said before there were these moments that fell into place for me And there’s one place in particular What I really felt I absorbed what these scientists have been teaching me and it’s place I think about all the time. I’m gonna go back there later this year so in the summer of 2011 on a big anonymous council estate in Berlin a A woman called Nuria Chenges put a sign in her window.

1:43:33 She lived on one of the basement, not basement, one of the ground floor flats. And the sign said something like, I got my eviction notice for Thursday night, next Thursday night, so on Wednesday night I’m going to kill myself. Right? Now this is, like I said, a big anonymous council state, a bit like where I’m here in East London, where we are, people don’t really know each other. It’s a kind of funny area, it’s called COTI, and it was, when they threw out the Berlin Wall in 1961. They drew it through, obviously, very quickly. If you look at it, it’s like a tooth. This was the bit of West Berlin that jutted into East Berlin, right? If the Soviets had invaded, it would have been the front line. So basically, no one wanted to live in Kotti for years, and the only people who lived there were recent Muslim immigrants like Nuria, gay people, and punk squatters. And you can imagine these three groups looked at each other with a lot of suspicion, right? So this is a big anonymous hatchback. No one knows each other, and people see Nuria’s sign in the window, and lots of them are pissed off that their rents are rising as well, because when the Berlin Wall came down suddenly it was like prime real estate in the middle of Berlin. It’d be like if you woke up tomorrow and the South Bronx was in the middle of Manhattan, right? So people start knocking on the door and they’re like, do you need any help? And she’s like, screw you,

1:44:40 I don’t want any help, I’m killing myself, right? Shut the door. There’s this big thoroughfare into Mitter, into the centre of Berlin that goes through COTI. And some of them, this was, you might remember, this was the summer of the revolution in Egypt, people have been watching the TV, I just said, you know, if we just blocked the road for a day and we wheeled Nuria out, I bet the media would come, they’d do something, actually they’d let her stay in her flat, right? So they decided to do it, right? And they hoped it would get some pressure to stop the rents going up for everyone, right? So they wheeled Nuria out into the middle of the road, Nuria was like, well, I’m going to kill myself anyway, I might as well do this. And they blocked the road for the day and the media do come and it’s a little news story in Berlin. And then at the end of the day, the police come along and say, okay, you’ve had your fun, take it down. And the people who live in Cottie said, well, hang on, you haven’t told Muriel she gets to stay. And actually, we want a rent-freeze for the whole housing project, right? And the police are like, no. So they knew that, of course, the minute they left, the police would take it down. So one of my favorite people at Cottie is one called Tanya Gartner who came. She’s a punk, squatter, Tanya wears tiny miniskirts even in Berlin winters, which is hardcore, right?

1:45:50 And Tanya happened to have in her flat a, what they call a klaxon, one of those loud things that make a noise at soccer matches. And so she went and got a klaxon and she said, what we’re going to do, we’re going to drop a timetable to man this barricade. We’re all going to take turns and if the police come to take it away, let off the klaxon, we’ll all come down and we’ll stop them, right? So people start signing up to man this barricade from this house where no one knows as anyone, and they get these really weird pairings.

1:46:17 So Tanya, in her miniskirt, is paired with Nuria. I think they did the, if I remember this rightly, Thursday night shifts. And Nuria is a very conservative religious Muslim in a headscarf, right? Tanya is very much not a religious conservative woman in a headscarf. And they sit there through the night, and the first few nights, on the shifts together, they’re just really awkward.

1:46:39 They don’t really talk very much. Tanya’s tapping away on her laptop. And then they started to talk to each other. They realised, they thought they were so different, they realised they were incredibly similar. Tanya had, Nuria had come to Berlin, to Germany when she was 17 years old.

1:46:56 She left her village in Turkey, she came with her two kids and her job was to raise enough money to send for her husband who stayed behind in her village. After she’d been there for a year, she got word from home that her husband had died. So she was on her own with these two kids in this country where she didn’t understand it. She actually told Tanya, in one of those nights in Koti, something she’d never told anyone. She’d always told people her husband died of a heart attack.

1:47:19 He actually died of tuberculosis, which was regarded as a disease of poverty. She’d been really ashamed of that. And then Tanya started to tell Nuria something. Tanya was thrown out at home when she was, think, 15, kind of middle class home. She comes to Koti, she was living in a squat, she was going to all these punk gigs.

1:47:35 She got pregnant when she was 15. They had actually discovered they had both been alone with kids in this really anonymous place when they were really young women, right? Not even, still teenagers. And what was happening across Qati was people were just talking to, like people were being paired up. That was a young guy, Matt Memet, young Turkish-German lad, loves hip hop, kept being nearly thrown out of school.

1:47:58 He’s paired with a grumpy old white guy who loved Stalin and so he didn’t believe in direct protest and they started talking. Yeah, just, all these pairings were happening across Qati. Opposite the housing project, there’s a gay club called Zudblock, It’s run by a man I love called Richard Strauss. To give you a sense of what this gay club is like, the previous club that Richard owned was called Cafe Anal, right? They are uncompromising.

1:48:21 Cutting edge. Well, that’s a pun in German as well, but anyway, it still means Cafe Anal, right? And when they opened this gay club, you can imagine it’s an area with a lot of conservative Muslims. People smashed the windows. There was a lot of resistance.

1:48:34 And Richard said, and the other people who run sub-block said, you know, you guys can have our furniture to support the barricade, you could have your meetings here. They gave loads of free drinks and food to the protest. And after a while, they said, you know, you could start having your meetings in our club if you want. And at first, even the lefties at COTI were like, we’re not going to get these conservative religious Muslims to come and have a meeting in a pretty out there gay club.

1:48:56 But people started to come. As Uli, one of the protesters said to me, Uli Hartman said to me, we all made these small steps. We all learned to talk to each other in ways we hadn’t learned before. One day, after it’s been going on for a while, about a year the protests have been going on, I think, a guy arrived at COTI called Tung Kai. Tung Kai was in his early fifties at the time, and Tung Kai clearly has cognitive difficulties, developmental problems, he’d been living homeless, and he started just seeing if he could help out.

1:49:28 By this time, the block in the road had become a permanent structure, right? They’d literally built like a little building there. And people really liked Tonkai. He’s really lovely energy about him. And he united the gays, the Muslims and the punks, right? Everyone liked him.

1:49:48 So they all started working together for common goals. Yeah. He said, well, but this thing happened where they said to Tonkai, you know, you can start sleeping here if you want, right? So he started sleeping here. They could see he was homeless. And after he’d been there for about six months and everyone loved him, one day the police would come and do these inspections. And Tonkai doesn’t like it when people argue, so he thought the police were arguing, so he went to hug one of them, and they thought he was attacking them, so they arrested him.

1:50:12 That was when they discovered that Tung Kai had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital for 20 years and had escaped just before he came to COTI. So the police took him back to the psychiatric hospital, he was literally put in a padded cell. The whole of this, the COTI movement, turns into a kind of free Tung Kai movement. They descended on this psychiatric hospital in the suburbs of Berlin, And these psychiatrists are like, what is this? There’s these like gays, Muslims, and punks demanding the release of this person.

1:50:39 They’ve kept locked away for 20 years, right? And Uli, one of the predecessors said, but we love him, he belongs with us. He doesn’t belong with you. Anyway, it took them a long time, but they got him released. Many things happened at COTI.

1:50:52 The headline is they got a rent freeze for their entire housing project. They then launched a referendum initiative to get effectively a kind of rents being held down across Berlin. They got the largest number of written signatures any referendum initiative in the history of the city of Berlin. But I remember the last time I went to see Nuria, she said to me, the woman who’d started the sword by putting the sign in her window, she said, look I’m really glad I got to stay in my neighborhood. I gained so much more than that. I was surrounded by these amazing people all along and I never knew. And I was speaking to one of Nuria’s his friends, Nariman, who said to me at one day at Koti, she said, when she’d grown up in Turkey, she called her whole village home. That was what home was, the village. And she came to live in the Western world in Germany and she learned that what you call home is just your four walls, right? And then this protest began and everyone got to know each other and she said, and this whole place became her home again. And what she realised is that in some very real sense, she had been homeless all the time.

1:51:59 She’d been living in the Western world, right? That human beings need to feel we belong. And our sense of home in this culture is too small, it’s too shriveled, to meet that need for home. And one of the things that, I remember Tanya, the miniskirt of punk saying to me, you know, when you’re isolated and you’re alone and you feel terrible, you think it’s just you. But what we did is we came out of our corner fighting, right, we stopped crying.

1:52:26 We came out of our corner fighting and it makes you strong. And I realized they didn’t need to be drugged. They needed to be together, right? There’s so many problems that seem insoluble when you are alone and are insoluble when you’re alone. Become soluble when you have a tribe of people looking out for you.

1:52:42 Nuria was suicidal. Tonkai was shut away in a literal padded cell. Mehmet, that young Turkish German lad, he kept being nearly thrown out of school because they said he had ADHD. It turned out when he had some adults paying attention to him and helping him, that problem went away. So many of these problems are, not all of them clearly, and there’s many things going on, but so much of what’s happening here is that we’re not meant to live in these isolated ways. And again, a bit like what we were saying before about thinking differently about the values we have, these insights are just below the surface. I didn’t take much in kotty for those people to see that what they needed and what they craved and what wanted and I thought a lot about, you know, when Tonkai was taken away, I thought, how many of us, if we were taken away, would have hundreds of people saying, no, he belongs with us, right?

1:53:35 There’s a great Bosnian writer called Alexander Heyman who said, home is where people notice when you’re not there, and I thought, how much of a home do most of us have? How many people notice when we’re not there, right? And I think what Cotti showed me is that you can see how you could have given a biological explanation for every problem that everyone had at Cotti, right? You could have gone in and said to Nuria, you’ve got a chemical imbalance in your brain and we’re just going to drug you now, right?

1:54:03 You could have said to Mehmet, you can’t focus, we’ll drug you with Ritalin, right? You could have said to Tonkai, oh, you’ve got these, you know, you need to be drugged with very powerful tranquilizers, which I think is what they had been giving him, right? how what they needed was connection, not drugging. Right now, of course, there’s a role for drugs. Not everyone is like them, but do you see the point I’m making about how emotionally that made me see what we’ve lost and what we can have and what we need as human beings.

1:54:33 Tell me about your home. Do you have a place where people miss you? Yeah, I’m very lucky like that. I mean, actually, it’s interesting. This is one of the changes thought about this when you were talking before about your your work and when you went from this work you felt was very selfish to this kind of work where you were connected with other people. One of the things that really helped me in the research for my book Lost Connections, I went to interview this woman in Berkeley, a great person called Dr. Brett Ford, she’s at the University of Toronto now, who did this really interesting research with her colleagues. What they looked at was, if you consciously decided you were going to spend more time trying to be happy, would you actually become happier, right? Kind of simple question. And they looked at it in four countries. I keep getting one of the countries wrong. So it’s definitely the US, China, Russia, and I think Japan, I keep saying that wrong. And what they found was really interesting. In the US, and I’m pretty sure for reasons I’ll explain, to be true Britain, if you try deliberately to make yourself happier, you do not become happier. But in the other countries, Russia, China, and Japan, you did become happier.

1:55:47 They were like, what’s going on here? They did more research. What they discovered is in the US, and I think here, if you try to make yourself happier, generally what you do is you do something for yourself. You buy something for yourself, you show off on Instagram like we were saying, try to get a promotion, try to earn more money like you mentioned you know seeing your bank balance go up. In the other countries generally not every time but generally if you try to make yourself happy you try to do something for someone else. You know try to you know help your friends, your family, your community. So we have an instinctively individualist conception of what happiness is. They have an instinctively collectivist vision of what happiness is and it turns out our vision of happiness just doesn’t work very well right and because it’s not what we evolved to be. A species of individualist humans would have died out, right, because they wouldn’t have been able to cooperate in the way that we needed to to survive.

1:56:44 So that was really interesting for me because I realized how much, not every time, but how much in the past when I had felt these painful feelings coming, how much I’d tried to big myself up and what a failure that had been. And actually, I kind of, and it It took a while to make this adjustment. Of course, I’d done some of these things before. I was never totally selfish, obviously, but I kind of discipline myself that now when I feel these painful feelings coming, what I do is I make myself do something for someone else.

1:57:20 And I don’t mean I’m not like Oprah, I don’t turn up with a free car or something, right? I mean, just leave your phone at home, go and sit and listen to them, right? We live in a culture where so few people are heard. Just turning up and giving the gift of your attention and caring is one of the most powerful things It’s also the most powerful thing you can do for yourself, right? So binding yourself to these bigger groups, spending less time on yourself and more time on other people.

1:57:41 And it’s been an interesting experience for me because I’ve been able to restructure my life like that. And then, you know, the last two months, my book came out about two months ago. And suddenly I’m jolted into this mode where you have to think egotistically, right? You have to be like, you know, how am I, I’ve tried to minimise my exposure to this stuff, but how am I selling? What are people saying about it?

1:58:00 You know, and I can feel a marked increase in anxiety, right? I wouldn’t say I was depressed, but I can feel a marked increase in anxiety, precisely for that reason, because it’s not like, so the bits where I feel good, like in this interview, the bits where I feel good is I think, oh, I managed to talk about Vincent Feliti and what an amazing person he is. I managed to get those people at COTI. They’re great people. One of the most moving things for me about Chasing the Screen, my previous book, was about, and it began about, you know, quite soon after it came out, the people I’d written about started to get in touch to say people have been contacting us to say you’re really great right it was like Lee Maddox is this amazing cop in Baltimore to Baltimore again who I don’t want to ruin her story but did an incredibly brave and bold and amazing thing about the war on drugs she’s one of the best people I know and Lee said to me oh people are emailing me and saying I wish your every cop was like you right and Bruce Alexander who did the rat park experiment I mean that was known about before my book I I certainly didn’t discover it, but you know, it caused a real renaissance in interest in Bruce’s work, and Bruce is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met, that, in line with this insight I learned in Berkeley, that is, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the book sold, I’m glad I made money, I’m glad all sorts of nice things happen for me too, right?

1:59:16 But that is the thing that I think if you told me I had cancer and I was going to die in a month’s time, I think the thing I would feel really satisfied about is, oh people didn’t know Lee’s story and I managed to tell them that and Lee got a load of credit and people felt empowered because of that story to do things themselves or people who didn’t know about Rap Park did learn about Rap Park and that you know that gave Bruce the credit he deserved that gave them a different way of thinking you know it’s those things it’s the thing where you feel that you’ve but our culture is so structured to get most of us into the mode that I’ve been in in book promotion which is Sal yourself you know I think Zadie Smith said a brilliant essay about Facebook it turns everyone into a kind of paparazzi and PR department for themselves, right?

1:59:58 And that’s true. And we’ve really got to get out of those modes. Of course, I’m not saying people should be self-abnegating. We have egos for a reason, the perfectly good reasons why we want to promote things. And I’ve promoted a lot of things about myself in relation to this book.

2:00:13 So in this interview and in other places, so I’m not saying we should abandon all of that. But I think if that becomes too much, you become sealed off in your own ego. That’s a catastrophe. Yeah. What’s it like being kind of famous now or in demand the past two months?

2:00:32 I’m not famous. I mean, I’m not. You know, I know some people who are famous. Okay. I can contrast myself with them.

2:00:38 I’m not famous. You don’t want some big news programs. I had a funny experience with them. Actually, after my TED Talk did well, I was on a tram in San Francisco and I was sitting opposite this incredibly good looking man who was staring at me. I thought, oh, is he checking me out?

2:00:50 This is great. and I was trying to make eye contact back and then just, he didn’t say anything, and as I was about to get off the tram he said, you, and I said yes, and he said, addicted rats, and then because he’d seen the thing I said about a rat park and gave me a hug, right, so I was like, well that’s not exactly what I was hoping for, but I’ll settle for it, right? But the, no, I would say, it’s the nicest kind of public recognition what I have, which is people just say, I like what you say and it helped me to think about this thing differently.

2:01:22 So I’d say I have all the benefits and none of the drawbacks. I mean, I’ve got friends who are, in fact, famous and who can’t walk the street and that’s terrible. It’s a terrible way to live. Yeah. How did you have such an amazing group of people endorse your book?

2:01:40 Hillary Clinton and Elton Johann and Russell Brand. I mean, how did that happen? It’s been a really moving experience, actually. So most of them are people I don’t know. things have got to people through publishers or whatever. I mean, some of the people I do know. And people, actually, in a lot of cases, people I’ve bonded with over a lot of these questions. So, obviously, Russell has, you know, talked very bravely about his addiction problems. Elton Johann has talked about, you know, having had very painful periods of depression in his life and has been through some really hard times. Hillary Clinton, I met her very briefly once years ago, but I don’t know her. Most of the people I don’t know. I think one of the really fascinating things that I did not expect with Chasing the Scream, and I didn’t expect with this, and it is really heartening, as you can tell I’m a lefty, right? Very proud to be a lefty. I have politics from a specific place. One that I absolutely did not expect was how many conservatives and right-wingers would engage with both of these books in a really positive way. I would not have anticipated, so one of the most moving things about Chasing the Scream is I was contacted a good while after it came out, a couple of years after it came out, by a guy called Joel Bongar, who’s a conservative Christian, Mississippi, Republican state senator, who said, I read this book, I love it, this is what we need to do in Mississippi, come and talk to us.

2:02:59 And I was like, if you had told me when I was writing that book that I would have a Republican, conservative, evangelical Christian, and Joel is a wonderful person, and he’s just an amazing person, right? And Ditto actually, I did one of the most unexpected experiences of the book because I did Tucker Carlson, the top rated show on Fox News. Tucker Carlson has very different politics to me, right? And I went on and he was incredibly positive about the book and I think actually someone said to me in a Venn diagram of Hillary Clinton, Tucker Carlson, and left people much more politically congenial to me, like Naomi Klein.

2:03:41 I think I’m literally the one person who could. It’s kind of sad that the one thing that you notice is always how miserable we are. But no, I think it’s really, that’s really heartening. And one of the things it taught me is to get out of these tribal ways of thinking, right? Most of the most important, I’m very proudly lefty.

2:04:01 It doesn’t mean I’m not one of these idiots going, oh, you just leave behind left and right, I’m not saying that at all. I believe very strongly in the left-right causes that I fight for and believe in. But a huge number of the things that are affecting us kind of lie beneath that left-right divide. Now I think some of the solutions come from left-right politics, but actually I think the less we can get into communicating these things through these tribal, you know I originally had a chapter about Trump in the book and I took it out Because, I just thought, I want to speak to Trump supporters, I spent a lot of time talking to Trump supporters, I have spent a lot of time talking to Trump supporters, it’s been fascinating and by the way, most of them are not stupid and are not particularly racist and we really need to stop talking this way and obviously here in Britain, yeah, and the worst thing we can do with Brexit and Trump is, you know, half my family voted for for Brexit, not quite half, but some of them.

2:05:04 And they’re not thick and they’re not racist, right? I begged them not to do it, don’t misunderstand me. I think they made a terrible mistake that will harm the world. But if we get into a mode of saying people are thick and racist, actually a lot of what’s going on is unmet psychological needs. You know, it’s a story I did put in the book that really stayed with me.

2:05:21 In the run-up to the election, the presidential election 2016, I spent some time in West Cleveland with a great group from the Los Angeles LGBT Center for something else I’m writing, who do this amazing canvassing work. It’s really fascinating to talk about another time, because it’s not relevant to this, but we were on this street in West Cleveland. It’s like Detroit without the poetry of the ruins. It’s horrifying, right? A third of the houses demolished, a third abandoned, a third still have people living in them.

2:05:52 Sometimes actually behind barbed wire some of the houses had. We knocked on one door. There was a woman who I would have guessed from looking at her was the same age as me. I was 37 at the time. I discovered from talking to her, sorry, I would have guessed she was 60.

2:06:07 I discovered she was in fact the same age as me. She said that and I was quite taken aback and she was very angry, very articulate, really angry with the whole political system. She said she wasn’t gonna vote. I had a hunch she was gonna vote for Trump but she certainly wasn’t gonna vote for Hillary. And she made this verbal slip that really knocked me back.

2:06:29 She meant to say, she was talking about what the area used to be like for her parents and grandparents, how when they left 16 they could get good jobs, they had middle class lives. And she meant to say when I was young, what she actually said is when I was alive, and I thought that that’s how you feel, right? And she’s not wrong to feel that. It goes back to what we’re saying. She’s been deprived of the things that make life meaningful.

2:06:51 I bet almost all of the nine factors of depression and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connections are playing out in her life. I suspect she had an addiction problem because her teeth, I mean she may have just been, she was very poor and couldn’t afford dental care, but I suspect she had an addiction problem for various reasons, although she didn’t say she did. You know, this is very deep in our culture now. A lot of people’s basic psychological needs are not being met, and not just poor people, right?

2:07:16 You know, you mentioned being a banker. You would have seen in the bank, I mean, these are not people whose psychological needs for belonging and, you know, love and compassion are being met, right, in a lot of cases. One of the reasons why addiction is unusually high in the banking sector, actually. So this is not just the thing about poverty. Poverty aggravates some of these things, but it’s not, it’s not, some people don’t understand what I’m saying, so talk about poor people.

2:07:37 That’s not right, actually. One of the areas with the worst poverty in Europe is the Basque Country, which also has some of the lowest depression, because they do have very strong communities, actually relatively high equality within the Basque Country. You know, It’s not like you’re suddenly looking at these rich people and you’re really poor. So, I think a lot of these dynamics are playing out and if we don’t deal with these crises, depression is one alarm sign, right?

2:08:05 One alarm that’s going off. The fact that Donald Trump is now the most powerful person in the world, that’s another alarm sign going off. The opioid crisis is another alarm sign going off. There’s a whole, the fact that average white male life expectancy has fallen in the United States for the first time since the Civil War is another sign. The fact that suicide is massively spiking up now.

2:08:26 These are indicators of a deep cultural problem, but it’s not an insoluble cultural problem. And actually the insights are, I don’t wanna sound like Deepak Chopra here, but the insights are within us, right? We all have these needs. The solutions are within us that within our best instincts that we, at some level, we do know these things, right? And what we need to do is, in a sense, deprogram our consciousness from these stories that are not false in most cases.

2:08:56 The biological, I mean, it is too simplistic to call it a chemical imbalance, but there are real brain changes that happen during depression that do make it harder to get out. That’s real, and everyone agrees with that. And there are real biological, other real biological contributions. So it’s not that those stories are false, but that they came to occupy so much of the story. they came to dominate the picture, that has been really problematic and we do have to, and also just a lot of the corruptions and values that we’ve talked about that just overall have just, even things like, recently someone I know, an old school friend, went through a crisis with his family, and I noticed that people were, even if you look at the memes that people shared on Facebook, genuinely thinking they would cheer him up, One of them was the only person who can help you is you, right?

2:09:50 Now, I don’t know the person who shared this, but I’m sure they didn’t mean that maliciously. I’m sure they meant that as a kind gesture. That’s the exact opposite of the truth, right? If the only person who had to rely on with himself, he would be miserable as hell, right? Actually, the only person who can help you is everyone else, right?

2:10:05 Of course, there are things you can do yourself, but actually thinking in these individualistic ways, I’m always on the lookout for metaphors that help us to think in non-individualistic ways. I love during the floods in Houston, I was in the US then, and not in Houston, and I love that, you know those moments when someone was at the other side of the water and people formed human chains to go and rescue that person, right? And I thought that instinct, we tell so many negative stories about our instincts, and of course there are very dark things in human nature that are all capable of terrible cruelty.

2:10:39 But that impulse, and I remember seeing an interview with one of the guys who made that human chain, it was a kind of right-wing Republican, and he’d gone to save this Latina woman, and maybe he would have voted to deport that woman, but in this moment of crisis, he saw and he thought and he said and she sang like it was the right thing to do, right? And that impulse is so deep in us, right? That’s so profound to human beings, to help each other, to protect our tribe, to form tribes, including with strangers, and to love each other and care for each other.

2:11:11 We need to hold onto these metaphors and these stories that tell us that we’re not just the worst in human nature. We’re not just Donald Trump. We’re not just, you know, Nigel Farage. Actually, Nigel Farage is very good on the question of drug legalization, so he’s got a redeeming feature there. And Trump was actually good on drug legalization in the 80s, but I can’t imagine he actually wrote the things he said about drug legalization in the 80s anyway.

2:11:36 But you see the point I’m making. Yeah. What’s next for you? Working on a couple of projects. So the film of Chasing the Scream, It looks like it’s gonna be made, which is very exciting.

2:11:44 I mean, I don’t get really excited about these things. Tom Wolf, the writer, said the job of a writer when it comes to film adaptations is one thing. Run up to the fence, grab the bag of money, run away from the fence, right? But, so I’m trying to stick that rule, but I’m a little bit involved in that, and that’s really exciting. And there’s gonna be- Is it like a Hollywood thing?

2:12:00 Yeah, big Hollywood, Joe Roth, the big Hollywood producer, former head of one of the major studios is producing it, and there’s gonna be an announcement about that soon that I’m not allowed to say, but a really exciting announcement. That’s exciting. be more involved than passing it off? Yeah, a little bit more involved. I’m going to try to let… I’ve had Irving Walsh in here and he said for the train spotting he would just show up on the set for one day and then realized he shouldn’t be there. Yeah.

2:12:23 But I don’t know if it’s like that. It’s still exciting, that’s for sure. I think it’s, yeah, that’s basically my golden principle. So it’s that and I’m working on a couple of projects. So generally the expensive bit of what I do is the travel. So I tend to combine research for a few things, so I’ve been working on three things and I’m not sure I’ve now got to pick which one of them I’m going to do next, but I’ve been writing this biography of Noam Chomsky, who’s someone I really admire, and a world-changing, I think probably the most important thinker alive today.

2:12:55 So for the last- You don’t have to finish that. Do you need to go and spend more time with him? Is it staying here? So for the last five years, I’ve been basically interviewing everyone in his life because I was consciously- Why did you learn how to do this? Because you do a lot of interviews, and I was just thinking about the art of your interview.

2:13:12 It must be quite a challenging thing to ask the right questions to the right people, and you probably get a few hours with these people, right? I think… That’s a skill. I’m genuinely curious about people. I almost never meet someone who I’m not curious to hear their story, right?

2:13:26 There’s an American thing Americans say, I realize that I’ve never heard a British person say this. There’s only one context I can imagine a British person saying this. American’s ask all the time when they meet each other which is what’s your story which I find such a charming and every American whether it’s you know a kind of 80 year old white guy in Florida or you know 17 year old kid in West Baltimore they all have an answer to that right the only context I can imagine a British person asking what’s your story would be in the context of a police interrogation right what’s your story it would be a very hostile and aggressive question to a European right you can’t imagine a French person saying can’t imagine German say we don’t narrativize our lives that way So, I think it’s partly that I’m genuinely curious about people and I’m excited.

2:14:08 Humans are infinitely fascinating and what an amazing thing to get to go and you get this weird license as a journalist. No one else gets, even therapists, someone has to come to you, your client has to come to you. I think it constantly amazes me as a journalist is how few people say, I’m not answering that. No. You get to turn up and go, tell me about your childhood, tell me about your mother.

2:14:29 Amazing license you get to just ask and the world is so infinitely fascinating and exciting and crazy and weird and so in the last year I was in favelas in in Rio to write for the Brazilian edition of Chasing the Scream which is about to come out I was in El Salvador tracking down people who knew Chomsky I was in god where else was I god it’s also jumbled up in my head now Do you like being on the road? I just love meeting people. It’s just so interesting.

2:15:03 And I get to go to Paris next week. I’m going to interview Michel Foucault’s partner about the debate Foucault did with Chomsky. Get to meet these people who’ve made this incredible. Because the other two projects I’m working on, one is I’ve been researching this for the last five years as well. I’m really interested in the question of how people change.

2:15:19 People change their minds, how people change their personalities, how we change as people. So I’ve been interviewing people about that. So I’m interviewing someone who’s done amazing. Don’t let me talk about that, because it’s not fully formed in my head yet, but someone who’s done an incredible French, sociologist who’s done, I think, world-changing work, I mean, work that’s as big as Rat Park, I think. And then I’m interested in why we can’t focus and concentrate.

2:15:42 So I’m interested in looking at that. And again, we’ve been told this very biological story about why we can’t focus and concentrate, which again, has some truth to it, but I think there’s a much bigger story to be told. Although that book would have to be short because people who want to read it can’t focus long enough. But do you usually get yeses when you ask someone to interview? Is it 99% yeses?

2:16:02 I wouldn’t say 99%, but I’d say about 90%. It’s very rare you get a no. Sometimes you have to badger people a bit and just come back to them a few times. So I’m going to go to Israel soon to someone I’ve really wanted to interview for the Chomsky project that I’ve been asking for five years. And generally, I find with the 10% who say no, if you keep going back and you say, after a while, you go, Well, these four people told me their side of the story.

2:16:28 So I really wanna know your side of it as well. It’s quite hard to resist after all. And the one thing that really unlocks it, so with this woman, the thing that really unlocked it was in the end, I only use this as an absolute last, was what I say, well, this person told me this about this thing you were present at. I’d really like to know what you saw that day. Because then it’s hard for someone to go, I’m so unimportant, I don’t want my perspective to be recorded by history, right?

2:16:52 It’s rare, and you do still tell them, So every now and then you get, so there’s one person actually for the Chomsky project who’s a French far right winger who’s involved in Chomsky’s story for bizarre reason, who I’ve been trying to get and I’m just not getting it. I’m tempted, I might just go and turn up at his house next week, but I’m going to go to Paris to talk about Lost Connections, so I might just go and do it. You’ve done that before? I really don’t like doing it.

2:17:16 Okay, but it probably works. Well, at least they know who you are. Also my French is, I can speak French, but my French is pretty bad. Okay. Do you bring interpreters to favelas in El Salvador?

2:17:26 Yeah, I don’t speak any Portuguese, so I had to. Whenever I’m in a foreign country, even France, where I can follow the language, I would always bring in a transfer. Because you miss it in Germany as well. You miss the nuances if you don’t. What else do you love about America, besides the fact that people say the major story?

2:17:43 I am such an evangelist for the United States. I mean, there’s so many things. For me, it forms in moments when I’m in the US, where I think, this is why I love this culture, and I feel very at home there, I spend about half the year in the US. It’s funny, a moment just came into my head, I don’t know why, I was once on a bus that broke down in Oklahoma, a Greyhound bus, and about half the people had cell phone reception, half the people didn’t. And two things happened that really struck me, everyone on the bus got involved in solving the problem of how we were gonna get the bus going again.

2:18:14 There was an immediate impromptu seminar where everyone was like, I think we should do this, I think we should do this, and the driver was like, well, why don’t I try this? And everyone was involved. And I thought that would never happen in Britain. We would all sit there with our folded arms, and we’d go, oh god, we won’t sigh at each other. And the other thing that happened is, about half the people had cell phone reception and half people didn’t.

2:18:34 The half of them had cell phone reception absolutely instinctively gave their phones to the people who didn’t, and said, do you wanna use my phone, right? In Britain, if the, I love Britain, don’t get me wrong, I’m very proud of my country, but if the bus had crashed and half of us had died, we might share our phones. We’d be like, well, is it a local number, right? Yeah, I mean, so there’s a kind of pro-sociality to Americans and a kind of openness and a willingness to narrativise their lives and tell stories.

2:19:00 There is such, I mean, you really, when you go to France, for example, and do interviews there, it’s really different. People don’t narrativise, you get this constant tendency to, I mean, I’m slightly exaggerating, but very often in French interviews, people will want to tell you abstract insights and try to go, because in my interviews, am I saying, you know, what did he look like? What did it sound like? If I’ve been standing there with you, what would I have seen?

2:19:27 And Americans get those questions immediately. They go with you on those questions absolutely immediately. French people don’t, generally. And British people are kind of in the middle. And French people generally are like, and that might be the language barrier as well.

2:19:40 And that probably is an element of that. Probably over general. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a cultural thing. I think there is a cultural thing where they do tend much more towards, It’s funny, when my book came out in French, called La Bremade de Steube, it was the weirdest – Chasing Scream, Lost Connections isn’t out in French, it will come out. It was quite weird, the reaction in France. They have a terrible drug debate anyway. But people kept saying to me, I remember one interviewer said – it wasn’t an interviewer, it was a potential publisher who I didn’t go with – said, because Chasing Scream is these stories of people affected by the war on drugs in different ways, and he said to to me, we don’t do non-fiction in France like this.

2:20:21 You tell these stories and you tell the story of the president of Uruguay as if he’s as important as this drug dealer in the Bronx. And I was like, he is as important as the drug dealer in the Bronx? And they’re like, oh, this is very bold. And I just thought, they don’t, non-fiction, kind of narrative, the non-fiction market in France is very peculiar. You do get narrative non-fiction, but it’s mostly like biographies of well-known people, I don’t know, Lev Astras or Napoleon or something.

2:20:54 All they have nonfiction, they have a big nonfiction market, but it’s very often an investigation of Sarkozy’s finance or something, that kind of storytelling nonfiction, which is what I write, is much, it would be, a French person wouldn’t write a book like this. So I’d be interested to see what the reaction, but actually France was the only country where Lost Connections came out where it sold nothing, basically, and loads of other countries that did really, really well, but in France, they were like, the interviews were bizarre, and for all the interviews they just asked, sitting with people like you, the French equivalent of you, and they’d ask these bizarre, one of the interviews began with a question, is love a drug? And I was like, I don’t know, I can tell you about how Portugal decriminalised drugs, if you want, I don’t know how to answer these weird philosophical questions.

2:21:45 That’s a funny question. It was bizarre. And I remember, yeah, they were just one person, completely ridiculous. One person said to me, a French interviewer said, you want to legalize drugs? I apologize for my bad French accent.

2:21:57 I said, papillopiou. You want to legalize drugs because you want to tranquilize the working class so we will not have a revolution. I was like, what are you talking about? I was just like, nowhere else do people say things like that to me, right? Nowhere.

2:22:11 It was just bizarre. Chomsky says he refuses to go speak in France because whatever he does, he’ll give a speech about human rights abuses in Algeria, and the first question will always be something like, how do we know the world exists? He’s like, to answer this, let’s assume it does and keep going, right? Tell me a bit more about you. If I was to ask a bunch of your friends, what’s Johann’s superpower, how does he able to do all these things, to write these books, what would they say yours is?

2:22:42 Would they say my superpower was? What would my friends say? They would say I do not have a superpower. If they were pushed, they would say it’s the capacity to consume KFC and various forms of saturated fats. What would they say that would be nice? I hope they would say that I’m genuinely interested in other people. And I think that’s the, ultimately, because sometimes people say, oh, you work hard. And I think it’s not work if you’re curious and you want to know the answer, right? I’m very, very bad at relaxing, because I kind of think…

2:23:16 You feel guilty about relaxing. No, it’s not guilt. It’s not a protestant guilt thing. It’s the exact opposite, actually. It’s more like a kind of hedonism, where actually it’s like, but there’s so many things I want to do that I love, and I’m in this incredibly fortunate position that none of my ancestors were ever in, where I get to go and do the things I love, right? And you feel like, why if you could go and talk to someone amazing, would you lie at home or read an amazing book why would you just you know relax and I’m just very there’s a story about Margaret Thatcher I don’t know if it’s true the one story about Margaret Thatcher that makes me like her actually too she was quite good on the about the AIDS crisis as well but some of my friends gonna hate me for saying anything positive about her but despite her 99% of the time but when she was prime minister I think it was with Douglas Hurd her foreign secretary I could be getting some details this wrong she was being driven to some summit somewhere, and in fact it’s in Portugal I think, and they go past this beach where loads of people are sunbathing, and she says, Douglas, all these people on the beach, what are they doing? And he’s like, well, Prime Minister, they’re sunbathing. And she’s like, yes, I understand, but what do they do all day? And she just couldn’t understand the concept that you would just lie on a beach and do nothing, and I feel that.

2:24:28 When I see people like, you know, just came back from a long flight, and you see people sitting on planes who just sit there and don’t do anything, right? And I really feel this urge to say to them, I’m so sorry to interrupt, I just want to check. You do realise that you have a limited amount of time in which you’ll be alive and then you’re dead forever, right? And there are loads of books you haven’t read, there are loads of films you haven’t seen, there’s people you haven’t talked to. Don’t just sit there, but I appreciate that, you know, some people like relaxing and ruminating in their thoughts, I do not like that. So I think that I hope they would say curiosity. And one thing, if I’m baffling, is when you meet people who are not very curious. That’s the very few kinds of of people that I react badly to, right?

2:25:04 I think I like most kinds of people. I’m fascinated by most kinds of people. I write about a ridiculous range of people in this book, you know, in Lost Connections, and the Amish city in Brazil, you know, like a huge range of people.

2:25:21 People who aren’t curious, puzzle, I just, I don’t know what to do with them. Also, humorless people, I don’t know. I have this issue with humorless people where I refuse to believe that there are human beings you don’t have a sense of humor. So, but when I’m confronted with someone who appears to be humorless, I just start making more and more ridiculous jokes and a desperate attempt to make love, which of course, if you are humor, extremely irritates them, and they then just think you’re an absolute fool, basically.

2:25:48 Daily habit that’s changed your game. Maybe it’s a writing habit, or maybe just a personal habit that changed things for you. I mean, it’s funny, all these writing guides always say, ah, you need a routine, where you write three hours of debt. I don’t have really, I suppose I lost a lot of weight years ago. I used to be four stone heavier than I am now, and I started going to the gym, but that’s a really boring answer.

2:26:11 I need to start doing that again, but I’ve been travelling so much. I don’t know. No writing rituals. You just- I don’t have writing rituals. I don’t really understand it.

2:26:20 That’s a ritual answer. I think because I’m so, the only second I can imagine needing a ritual is if I was writing something I didn’t want to write, where you had to make yourself do it. Because I’m really curious about these things, it’s like, wait, what’s the answer, right? And you only figure out, I forget who said this, but someone said, I only know what, I think it might have been Ian Foster, I could be wrong about that, they’re like, I know what I think only when I write it, right, you discover what you think in the process of writing.

2:26:46 You assimilate the stories you’ve experienced through writing, for me anyway, I sometimes wonder how people who don’t write know what they think, you know. So, for me, writing is part of the process of discovery, right? You realize what you’ve, like I just interviewed an amazing person in LA for the changing minds thing and I was just looking this morning at the transcript and thinking, oh right, that’s what he said to me, right? That’s what he means. And I’ll go back and see him again in LA in a few months and say, wait, is that what you meant?

2:27:18 And, you know, there’s this, the real pleasure of being able to, of just having time to go and pursue your curiosity and think, oh right, what’s happening here? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Do you record it and someone transcribes it for you and then you look at that versus your notes and see if there’s something that maybe you missed or you can read it back. So when I’m interviewing someone, I don’t take that many notes.

2:27:36 The minute I leave the room, I write down all my impressions, but when I’m interviewing them, because I want to pay attention to them and I want to listen, and there’s something about if you’re writing, people instinctively feel you’re not listening to them. So when I’m interviewing someone, no, I have a digital recorder, I record absolutely everything. I’ve got thousands of hours of recordings. only, never video. No, people, it’s very interesting, people talk completely differently on video.

2:27:58 I’ve tried videoing people and you get a complete, it massively inhibits people. Unless you need to film people, I mean this is different because this is broadcast context, but no, filming people doesn’t work, so in fact it really inhibits people. They posture, they get conservative, they just, they. They just talk differently because I use a tiny little digital recorder that’s a really good digital recorder. It wasn’t, you know, it’s like £150 or something, but so not massively expensive, but it’s a tiny, I deliberately bought a tiny little one because what I want is for them to forget that we’re talking in that and you know it’s not like I’m trying to trick every everyone I quote pretty much I send them what I’m going to quote beforehand and I send them the audio and I say look if there’s anything you really don’t want me to I don’t want to I don’t do kind of interviews where I screw people over so it’s not like I want to say you know so for the last seven years where I worked on chasing scream and lost connections and for my other books you know and I put the audio everything I quote I put the audio online on the books websites as well so So I don’t want to make someone, even when I disagree with them, and there’s not really many people I’ve written about and chasing the screen while I’ve lost connections where I feel, you know, I’ve kind of taken them on, there are a few but not that many.

2:29:02 No, you just generally want it to be a normal conversation where you’re trying to find something out and there, and I, you know, and I talk about myself as well and, you know, because that create, disclosing something creates a feeling of disclosure in the other person. I don’t generally just want to tell the person something anyway, you know? Yeah, what scares you? I think being stuck without something to read would really frighten me. I was on a long flight a few weeks ago and I stupidly, I was so tired, I’d put all my books except one in my check-in luggage

2:29:47 And I finished the book that I was reading and all the films on the thing I’d seen or I didn’t wanna watch. That frightened me. I grew up in a very chaotic environment, and the way that I dealt with that was by constantly learning things, right? My way of not being present with that was to read all the time, watch loads of TV, just extract myself in the situation as best I could and read and learn. So that is my soothing place.

2:30:17 And if I’m ever in, it’s very rare, I’ve structured my life so I’m never in that. I mean, you will notice I brought like three books with me on the way here, and it’s only 20 minutes on the Northern line to where I live, the, I think what would scare me would be either having nothing to read and nothing to learn. Yeah, that’s what would, and you know, bad things happening to people I love would be the other things that would scare me. I don’t get particularly physically,

2:30:47 Afraid I get a bit more now than when I was taking antidepressants, but you know, I’ve been to lots of dangerous places. I’ve covered the wall in the Congo I’ve been to Gaza and Iraq and northern Mexico at the height of the violence, I was just in these favelas in Rio. I don’t get particular, I don’t know why, I don’t get particular, maybe because I grew up in a violent environment.

2:31:08 I don’t get particularly frightened by that stuff. I mean, I feel cautious in those environments, but I don’t feel, some people just freak out. I don’t feel that. Okay, but being alone with yourself and only your thoughts is a little bit freaky. Well, if I didn’t have a notebook which I could write things down.

2:31:24 That would be absolutely awful. I think you should try doing more of that this year maybe. Yeah, no, I can’t do that, I can’t do that. It’s terrible, it’s an awful experience, I’ll never do that. Best day of your life, worst day of your life.

2:31:39 God, that’s a difficult question. The worst day of my life would have been when my grandmother died. Because my grandmother basically brought me up and I loved my grandmother and that was dreadful. I mean, she had the best kind of death, she lived a really long life. she did have dementia in the last years of her life but the best day of my life. Probably something to do with one of my nephews or my niece. Probably be just a day I spent with them. It would probably be a prosaic day. It wouldn’t be a big glitzy day. In terms of the best day of my professional life, I actually think the one that comes to mind, two years ago I went to Australia and I spoke in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane and when you do the Brisbane Writers Festival they ask you to speak in a library and like not quite the outback but somewhere a long way out in Brisbane and they drive you out there and I went and I think I’m pretty sure for both Chasing the Screen and Lost Connections it was by far the smallest audience I’ve had. I turn up it’s this library and as far as you can get on the planet earth from where we are now and from where I grew up in the other under the Northern Line. And 12 people turned up and I thought that was a bit of a waste of time. And every single one of them I read the book and they’d all, I pretty much all had addiction problems and they all talked about how the people I’d got to meet learning their stories had affected their lives. And they talked in particular about one person,

2:33:09 One of the people I most loved of all the people I got to know from my books, a guy called Bud Osborne who was a homeless street addict in Vancouver who started a movement that transformed the city and the drug laws of Canada. He’s an absolutely remarkable man. He sadly died shortly before this meeting in this library. And I remember just thinking, this is why you write. These people are really far away from me.

2:33:38 I had never pictured them at the start of writing Chasing the Screen, or at any point in writing Chasing the Screen, and I was able to introduce them to people who really helped them in their lives. I think that’s probably the best moment in my professional life, I make a name swanky moments, but I don’t think I ever felt more affirmed or like I was doing the right thing more than in that library and wherever it was outside Brisbane. That makes sense. What keeps you awake at night?

2:34:06 Caffeine. I drink enough caffeine to kill like herds of cows, right? I would have caffeine running into my veins on an IV drip if it was logistically possible and people would let me do it. I’m a pretty good sleeper, I need a lot of sleep and I don’t, I don’t, it’s funny even when I was very depressed, I slept a lot, I mean with them it was more like what’s called hypersonambulism, I would sleep like 18 hours a day, obviously not for long periods of time but for you know, some, a fair few days, so I don’t have that sleepless anxiety, I mean I watch things on, I do that stupid thing you’re not meant to do and every guy to sleep tells you not to do which is I watch things on my laptop before I go to sleep but TV shows which of course wakes you up because of the light and the disruption of your diurnal rhythms. I tell you the other thing that keeps me awake under this saw there is jet lag. Until I turned 35 I thought jet lag was a myth right? We talked about it I was like what do they mean I don’t understand it now I get crushed with jet lag so yeah jet lag keeps me awake at night so thank God for melatonin. Okay and any bigger issues are like are you concerned that you know, something in the future, or do you think I’ve got these things I have to do before I go?”

2:35:19 No, that would be a bit grandiose and messianic. I think James Baldwin, one of my favorite writers, said, I would like to be a good man and a good writer. And I think, yeah, that’s pretty the best loadster you can have. I mean, in terms of bigger things I worry about, I went to the Arctic nine years ago. So I was born in 1979. By that point, 40% of the sea ice that existed when I was born had disappeared. Last week, as we sit here, Essex was colder than the Arctic, right? The Arctic, I mean, we are at the most extreme pessimistic end of predictions about global warming. You read those, I interviewed a lot of climate scientists over the years. That is, I remember one of the most disturbing stories I ever worked on, I went to the, I don’t remember the order in which I did them, I think Arctic was second, but going to the Arctic and it just being terrifying to, oh wait, all this was frozen and now it’s the ocean. And then I went, I think before this I went to Bangladesh.

2:36:29 Bangladesh is the most densely populated big country in the world, it’s also the lowest lying country in the world. If the middle level predictions for global warming are right, you and I will live to see a time when Bangladesh is not there. And we’re way beyond the middle level predictions. That was chilling beyond belief. I remember an architect, his name I can’t remember, but he was the Richard Rogers of Bangladesh, basically their leading architect.

2:36:51 And one day he just realised, why am I building these buildings? I’m not going to be here. He learned about global warming. So he had moved people onto floating villages. But at level he knew, if you get supercharged cyclones and so on, that’s not going to protect people.

2:37:06 But yeah, that was so, in terms of long term stuff, I think it’s kind of irresponsible to write about anything except global warming, but I don’t really have anything to say that hasn’t been said better by other people. Anyone who’s interested in this, I cannot recommend highly enough that people read Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything, absolute masterpiece, essential book to read about global warming. And there’s lots of other great writers, George Monbiot, Bill McKibbin, and I read Naomi and George and Bill and I think I can’t say any of this better. I don’t feel my skill and yet I feel like it’s kind of inadequate to just know that there’s this thing that’s already transforming the way we live and we’re having calculable consequences, not do people say oh my grandchildren, my grandchildren, I’m like screw your grandchildren worry about yourself mate, right? Look at the timescales for this. I hope to be alive 60 years from now. We’re not talking about my grandchildren’s life, we’re talking about my life. So actually 60 years from now I’d be 98, I probably won’t be like 50 years from now.

2:38:08 It might be. It might be. But yeah, does that answer your question? No, it does. Yohan, I always ask everyone here a couple of questions at the end. I’m going to ask you, if I could give you a magic phone where you could ring up the 20-year-old Yohan Hari and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him?

2:38:26 I would say it would be related to the themes of what we’ve been talking about. I would say your pain makes sense. You’ve been told that you’re depressed because there’s something wrong inside your brain. That’s not true. You’re depressed for perfectly understandable reasons. You’re depressed because you live in a culture that doesn’t meet your psychological needs very well. You need to feel you belong. You need to have meaning and purpose. And because you experienced some terrible childhood trauma that you should not have experienced and you did not deserve, and was not your fault.

2:39:01 And the path out of this is not to just drug yourself, but to deal with these deeper underlying problems. And you can do that, and you are surrounded by people who have the same pain as you, who also want to do that. And you need to unite with them, and you need to build a home with them, and you can do that. And there are people who will be very responsive to you if you try to do that. Good advice.

2:39:25 Second part of that question, best advice you ever received. These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy. Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more. Now back to the rest of the show. You know, I didn’t know one of my, my grandfather, my mother’s father died when he was very young of terrible circumstances.

2:40:05 But the other three I knew and lived to be burial, they all lived to be 91. And just the awareness of, my God, you think about, you know, when I feel pessimistic about the possibility of change, right? Think about the world my grandparents were born in. Think about the world your grandparents were born in. It’s unimaginable.

2:40:26 My grandparents were born, two of them were born on Swiss mountains where radio didn’t exist. They died in a world where all their grandchildren had iPhones. I mean, just the scale of the trans, my Swiss grandfather, I think he left Switzerland twice in his life, once was to go to Italy, where it was a two hour drive away, he didn’t like it, he came back, right? So you think about that and think about my life compared to his, right? He never, basically never leaves this Swiss village.

2:40:54 And here I am, you know, my life would be impossible for him to comprehend, right? So incredible transformations are possible. Certainly the idea in the world he was born of, him having a gay grandson who could get married would have seemed like, what on earth are you talking about? Right, so there’s a whole positive and negative, and you know, negative changes can happen as well, but yeah, I’m fundamentally optimistic about a lot of the challenges that I write about in Lost Connections.

2:41:25 I think partly because I’m gay and I’ve seen this incredible transformation in my lifetime. You know, I tell the story in the book of Virgil’s The Last Thought before my caffeine wears off. A friend of mine, Andrew Sullivan, is one of the most extraordinary people I know. So in 1994, Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive. And it’s the height of the AIDS crisis, protease inhibitors don’t exist yet.

2:41:49 He’s watching his friends die all around him. first thought Andrew had when he got his diagnosis was I deserve this because he’d been raised in such a homophobic culture here in Britain and although he was an American by then. And Andrew left his job at the New Republic and he’s convinced he’s got a couple of years to live, his best friend Patrick had just died and he goes to Provincetown, this little town in Cape Cod, to write what he thinks is going to be the last thing he ever writes, right?

2:42:21 He thinks this is his dying gesture and he writes a book about, first book ever to be written on this subject, about a crazy utopian idea that he thinks, well, I won’t live to see this, people are alive. No, I won’t live to see this, but someone somewhere down the line might live to see it. That idea was gay marriage, right? And whenever I get depressed and I think, oh, God, you know, these things I’m writing about your lost connections and in chasing the screen are such big things.

2:42:45 How are we gonna win this? I try to imagine going back in time and saying to Andrew, okay, you’re not gonna believe me. 26 years from now, you’ll be alive, great news. That’s not the best bit. The Supreme Court of the United States will quote this book when they issue a ruling making gay marriage, making it mandatory for all states to introduce gay marriage across the United States.

2:43:10 And I’ll be with you the next day when you receive an invitation from the President of the United States to go to the White House that night. The White House will be lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag and the President will want to celebrate with you because of what you and so many other people achieved. Oh, and by the way, that President, he’s gonna be black, right? That would have sounded like the most ludicrous science fiction you could ever imagine.

2:43:35 Andrew lived to see it, right? When we band together and we appeal to people’s decency and love and compassion and we don’t give up, we can make the most incredible changes to the world. But it doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because people band together and fight for it and they don’t get discouraged and they don’t give up. And that’s what we need to do with the whole range of problems that I write about in Chasing the Screen when it comes to the appalling things we do to people with addiction problems and the wider problems of the war on drugs.

2:44:04 That’s what we need to do with these deep causes of depression and anxiety. But you know, a lot of these things that I’m writing about in Lost Connections, it’s more realistic to deal with them than gay marriage was in 1994, I can assure you. Yeah, so we need to have hope. Definitely, and we should have hope because we can solve a lot of these problems and we can massively reduce depression and anxiety and addiction problems and there are places that have done it and we can carry on a society of profoundly lonely, isolated people told that life is about money and status, encouraged to scream at each other through screens, will have a depression and anxiety crisis for a really good reason.

2:44:42 That way of living is not compatible with our human nature. We can live in different ways that are more compatible with our human nature and we will experience less depression and anxiety as a result. Amen to that. And I wanna thank you, grandmother, because you took the time and you introduced yourself to every member of my team here and we appreciate that. So she obviously taught you well.

2:45:02 I’m sure you’d be proud of that. She would be proud. Johann, thank you so much for writing these books. They obviously mean a lot to me because I see my journey reflected in them. And I’m talking about that more and more on London Real, and I think it’s important to let people know what didn’t work for me and how I failed at seeing these things.

2:45:22 And I really appreciate your personal stories. And when we’re off there, I’ll give you a list of people that I think you should talk to about this subject. There’s so many great people here in London who are doing amazing work work on these issues and these questions. I just want to shout out one group. Anyone who’s interested in reform on drug policy is an amazing Facebook group of people who are launching.

2:45:38 They’re called Recovering Justice. They’re people with addiction problems who are fighting for decriminalization of drugs because the war on drugs makes addiction problems worse, run by some friends of mine, Suzanne and Fiona, who are amazing people. So if you want to take action on that, and there’s so many other things on which people can take action, and that you are incredibly powerful. Everyone watching this has extraordinary power to change the lives of other people.

2:46:03 And I should also say to my publishers, tell me off if I don’t do this, anyone who wants any more information about the book, I feel like I’ve turned into salesman mode, I feel like I’ve got a jingle at this point, can go to the book’s website where they can find out what loads of people have said about the book, they can listen to audio of loads of the people we’ve talked about, they can take a quiz to see how much they know about depression and anxiety. It’s www.thelostconnections.com, It’s only because it turns out there’s a band called lost connections who own the website down then so the lost connections calm fantastic Well the book is called lost connections They can pick it up guessing bookstores and audio as well you’re gonna read the first part of the audio and I read the whole thing You do yeah, that means a lot. Oh, I always love it when someone does that so fantastic. I really appreciate the time I appreciate the thoughts and yeah, let’s see if we can solve some of these big problems Well, thank you for engaging so deeply with the topic. It’s really moving. Thanks so much. No, it’s my pleasure on London Real We say it’s about the journey.

2:46:57 I wish you all and yours, be safe and keep writing. Oh, cheers. Thanks, my friend, cheers.