The Diary of a CEOJohann Hari: Everything You Think You Know About Meaning & Happiness Is Wrong | E82
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
155 min read · 30,747 words- 0:00 – 2:28
Intro
- JHJohann Hari
The most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we feel so bad in the first place. We need to stop asking, "What's wrong with you?" and start asking, "What happened to you?"
- NANarrator
(instrumental music plays)
- JHJohann Hari
If you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're gonna feel like shit. It's not like I'm explaining quantum physics, right? And we've all had that experience where you crave a consumer object, you build up to it, you get it, you get home, and you just feel flat. Is it's not the trauma that destroys you, it's the shame about the trauma. And giving people ways to release that shame is an antidepressant. Call it ch- change is really possible.
- NANarrator
(instrumental music plays)
- SBSteven Bartlett
Today, we have a real treat for you. This guest today, Johann Hari, is one of my all-time favorite ever podcast guests ever. And I'm not saying that to blow smoke up his ass. When I had the conversation with him, and when I started reading his books many years ago, I can quite honestly say that no book I've ever read in my life has had more of a positive impact, a more transformative impact, on the topics that matter most to my fulfillment and happiness than the work that Johann has done. He is a comedian on one hand. He's an incredible storyteller. He spends a decade writing his books, so you know the information he's gonna share with you today is both profound, it is evidence-backed, and it is compelling, true, important, and everything that our society, at this point in time, needs to hear. This could well be the most important podcast I've ever recorded. If you asked me if there was one podcast that I wished the world got to hear, it's definitely this one. Above all of the other podcasts I've ever recorded, this is the conversation. So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
- NANarrator
(instrumental music plays)
- SBSteven Bartlett
Johann, it's a, it's a real pleasure to have you back on the podcast. You are one of my all-time favorite guests, top three.
- JHJohann Hari
Aw.
- SBSteven Bartlett
I don't know the order, but you're definitely up there.
- JHJohann Hari
Who are these other two?
- SBSteven Bartlett
I don't actually know, but I... (laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
I tell you what, I'm really pleased that everyone will know that I have not bribed you, since you don't need the money.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Exactly. There you go. (laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
So. Exactly. This is authentic. I'm very happy.
- SBSteven Bartlett
But
- 2:28 – 9:28
Why do you like writing books?
- SBSteven Bartlett
no, I, I mean that.
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs)
- SBSteven Bartlett
And, and not just because of the conversation we had, but because you changed my fundamental beliefs around depression, mental health, the importance of human connection, and everything in between. And that had a really fundamental, positive impact on my life. It's also, you, you feature heavily in my book. I've, I talk about you on this podcast all the time. So my, you know, the amount of times I've plugged... So really what I brought you here today was to get the royalties from all the books...
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs)
- SBSteven Bartlett
No, but, no, but I do, I talk about you on this podcast all the time. So um-
- JHJohann Hari
I'll give you an old bag of crisps.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Please.
- JHJohann Hari
And that's all you're getting. (laughs)
- SBSteven Bartlett
That's why I wanted to get you on the podcast because you, you know, you changed my life. And I, I'm not saying that to blow smoke up your ass. I genuinely mean that with your book, Lost Connections. So the first question I have is like completely off track, but I've just finished writing my book, published it, it's all great and everything. You're, y- you're onto your third, fourth book now? Yeah?
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Talk to me about why you like writing books. What is it about writing books? Why are you doing that?
- JHJohann Hari
Oh, for me, I write books 'cause there's a question I wanna answer for myself that I don't know the answer to at the start. So with Lost Connections, I wanted to, there were, for me, there's always a core mystery that I wanna understand, right?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
So with Lost Connections, the core mystery was two really simple things. When I, uh, when the book came out, I was 40. Uh, all throughout my lifetime, depression and anxiety have increased in Britain, the US, across the world. I wanted to understand why, right? Why is it that with each year that passes, more and more of us are finding it harder to get through the day? I wanted to understand it for a personal reason, which is that I had been really depressed myself. I had done everything I was told to do by my doctors, and I remained depressed. Or Chasing The Scream, my book before that, um, I had a kind of core question, which was, you know, we had a lot of addiction in my family. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. Um, and I wanted to understand, well, what causes addiction and what can we actually do about it? I wanted to understand on a personal level-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hm.
- JHJohann Hari
... but also at a social level what we could do about it. So for me, I always start with a core question. Um, so I've become, been working on for the last 10 years that I'm sort of writing at the moment about, um, something, uh, I, I have to be careful what I say about it, but a series of crimes that have been happening in Las Vegas. For me, there's always a core question, a mystery, and then I'm like, okay, I want to take the reader on a journey as I try to unsolve this mystery, uh, I try to solve this mystery for myself, right? So, um, all of my books are long journeys where I, you know, for both books, I traveled more than 30,000 miles, went to a crazy mixture of people. And to me, the best journeys are not where you find yourself. Everyone goes, "Oh, you go on a journey to find yourself."
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hm.
- JHJohann Hari
To me, the best journeys are where you find other people, right?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
So I think about the crazy mixture of people that I've got to know for these books, who I love, who are still, you know, important people to me from, you know, uh, for the addiction book, I think about Chino Hardin, who's a, a trans crack dealer in Brooklyn-
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
... and one of the smartest people I've ever met. Uh, Rosalio Retzer, a hitman for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel. He's unfortunately not one of the smartest people I've ever met.
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
But, uh, you know, or, or for Lost Connections, uh, you know, I think about these, um, people will probably talk about these people in Berlin who transformed, uh, who starting from a position of terrible depression transformed their city and their country. I think about this couple, uh, homeless couple I know very well in Vegas. So for me, it's always about finding people and solving mysteries. And, uh, I write to figure out, to try to understand the world and to figure out what we can do about the world. You know?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hm.
- JHJohann Hari
So for me, it's, it's, I, I would, I can't imagine writing a book...... where I felt I knew in advance. Of course, I've got ideas when I start.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
Right? I've, I don't start as a blank slate. But I can't imagine writing a book where I felt I knew in advance, I was standing above the reader and going, "Well, reader." You know, I mean, there are books that do that, you know? If you've been an ex- I'm, I'm a journalist. I'm not an expert, right? So if you've been an expert for 30 years on, uh, I just read a fantastic book about octopuses, right? If you, uh, a guy's spent 30 years studying octopuses, he knows a shit ton about octopuses, I'm very happy for him to stand above me and say, "Let me tell you a load of crazy shit-"
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
"... about octopuses," and it is crazy shit, right? But, uh, that's great. It's called Other Minds. I really recommend that book. Um, but I'm not that, I'm not an expert. So for me, it's about the journey. Come on the journey with me. Come to all these different places. Come with me to a favela in Rio.
- 9:28 – 15:04
Rat Park
- JHJohann Hari
that all my life I'd been misunderstanding some of the things I was seeing right in front of me. So like I said, we had addiction in my family. We still have addiction in my family. It's very difficult. And when I started doing the research for Chase & Scream, God, 10, 10 years ago, exactly 10 years ago almost, I, um... If you'd asked me, let's say heroin addiction, 'cause that was close to me, if you'd said to me, "Johann, what causes heroin addiction?" I would have looked at you like you were thick and I would have said, "Well, Steven, the clue's in the name, right?"
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
Obviously, heroin causes heroin addiction, right? We've been told this story for 100 years. It's become totally part of our common sense. It was definitely part of mine. So we think, we're sitting here in East London, we think if we kidnap the next 20 people to walk past your flat in East London and, like a villain in a Saw movie, we injected them all with heroin every day for a month, at the end of that month, they'd all be heroin addicts. For a simple reason. There's chemical hooks in heroin that as you use it, your body starts to crave, you want more and more of them. And so at the end of that month, people would have this tremendous physical hunger for the chemical hooks, right? It's why we call it being hooked. Um, and that's, that's the story we have in our heads. Now, that story is not completely wrong. Turns out it's a very small part of a much bigger picture. And the first thing that... I remember the first thing that alerted me to that was that in my research I was interviewing doctors and experts, and it was explained to me, right? In, here in Britain, if you and me step out into the street and we get hit, you get hit by a truck, right? God forbid, terrible loss to the world.
- SBSteven Bartlett
(clears throat)
- JHJohann Hari
Um, you would be taken to hospital, and if you, say you broke your hip, you'd be given a lot of a drug called diamorphine, right? Diamorphine is heroin. It's much better than the shit you'd buy just up the road from here o- on the street 'cause it's medically pure heroin, right? Um, anyone watching this, if you're British and your nan's had a hip replacement operation, your nan's taken a lot of heroin, right? Now, if what we think about addiction is right, that it's caused primarily or entirely by exposure to the chemical hooks, what should be happening to all these people in, in British hospitals who've been given a lot of powerful heroin? Some of them should be leaving and trying to score on the streets. You should be meeting people in NA meetings who say, "Well, you know, I started, I had a hip replacement." Uh, this has been studied very carefully. It never happens, right? And I remember when I learned that, I was just thinking... The first person who told me that was Dr. Gabor Mate. And I remember thinking, saying to him, "Gabor, that can't be right." How could you have a situation where you've got someone in a hospital bed, they're using a shit ton of really powerful heroin, they don't become addicted. And you've got someone in the alleyway outside who, you know, is shooting up actually a weaker, shittier form of the drug, and they, and they do become addicted. How could that be? And I only began to understand it when I went to Vancouver and interviewed Professor Alexander, Professor Bruce Alexander. So Bruce explained to me, this story we've got in our heads that addiction is caused primarily or totally by the chemical hooks comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century.They're, they're really simple experiments. Um, your viewers can try them at home if they're feeling a little bit sadistic and bored in COVID times, right?
- SBSteven Bartlett
It's not heroin, is it?
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs)
- SBSteven Bartlett
There's nothing wrong with that. Okay.
- JHJohann Hari
No. They, they don't have to try it. You take a rat, you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles. One is just water, the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself quite quickly within a week or two, right? So there you go. That's, that's our story. That's, that's how we think it works. But in the '70s, Professor Alexander was working where I met him on the downtown east side of Vancouver, which has a lot of... He was working with pe- a lot of people with very bad addiction problems. And he starts to look at these experiments and he says, "Well, hang on a minute. You put the rat alone in an empty cage. It's got nothing that makes life worth living for rats. All it's got is the drugs. What would happen if we did this differently?" So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats, right? They've got loads of friends. They've got loads of cheese. They've got loads of colored balls. They can have loads of sex. Everything that makes life worth living for rats is there in Rat Park. And they've got both the water bottles, the drugged water and the normal water. This is the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They don't use it very much. None of them use it compulsively. None of them overdose. So you go from almost 100% compulsive use and overdose when rats don't have the things that make life worth living, to no compulsive use and overdose when they do have the things that make life worth living. And obviously, we are not rats. We're more complicated. But the, the core of this... And there's lots of human evidence that I can talk about, but what, what this taught me and a lot of the other evidence taught me is, the core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life 'cause your life is too painful a place to be. Um, that actually makes you realize why our approach of punishing people with addiction problems is such a disaster. It actually makes-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
... the problem worse. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, although that is valuable for some people. The opposite of addiction is connection. And we're living through a great example of that right now. Just the, just, I think two days ago the government announced massive increase in alcohol-related deaths, massive increase in other drug-related deaths in Britain and in the United States. Why would that be, right? We, we, I think rightly, we, in order to suppress the virus, which we had to do, we have had to become more disconnected and that has caused an increase in addiction. Now, that tells us something about what was causing addiction all along and what the paths out of addiction are. So I feel that was very long answer to your question.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Perfect answer. And obviously with the, with that in mind, you know, COVID has, um, accelerated the, um, adoption of remote working, which
- 15:04 – 24:07
Working from home, living through screens
- SBSteven Bartlett
I, you know, there's been a lot of debate around that, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. My stance is pretty clear. I think it's an awful thing. And I say this because, uh, you know, after reading your book, I understand that, um, c- connection, organic connection in our lives is, ha- has this like, has been on this sort of macro decline. And one of the, like, institutions in our lives that has held that together has been the office. So like, most of my friends come from working in a big office. You know, if I think about where 90% of my connection comes from, it came from the office. And to think, especially as a young person who hasn't built a family or kids, whatever, that that is also now gonna move to a screen, I think is a fucking terrible idea, to be honest. Um, I wanted to get your, your thoughts on that because I think r- I, I do, I think people think of the convenience factors, but we thought of the convenience factors when we'd, in, it, we created social media and dating apps and all these other things. But the unintended consequences of the convenience tends to be, you know, stripping us of connection once again. And like, what do we have left? Like, everything else is on a screen now. So if you take away work for me, I'm like, "I probably wouldn't see anybody." Like, porn, you know, I can do that online now. Dating, swipe, swipe, swipe. So it feels like, uh, you know, the last institution of connection is being, uh, is, is at war.
- JHJohann Hari
I think that's really interesting. I think there's a, there's two things I was thinking about as you talked about that, Stephen. One is, what a lot of us get out the web, the relationship between social media and social life is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex, and actually you mentioned porn. 'Cause like, I'm not anti-porn. Porn's gonna meet a basic itch, right? Um, but no one, you know, spends an hour looking at porn and feels like, satisfied and seen.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Speak, speak for yourself.
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs)
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs) No, I'm joking, I'm joking.
- JHJohann Hari
Not, not the way you do after you've had sex, right?
- SBSteven Bartlett
I'm joking there, of course not.
- JHJohann Hari
Unless you're having very bad sex, Stephen, which I like-
- SBSteven Bartlett
I've got virtual reality headset on. (laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
No. Well, there's, there's definitely a satisfaction to looking at porn, but there's not-
- SBSteven Bartlett
I'm joking.
- JHJohann Hari
It's not as satisfying as sex, right?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah, of course not.
- JHJohann Hari
Unless something's gone very wrong-
- SBSteven Bartlett
No, I promise you, I promise you.
- JHJohann Hari
And we can talk about that (laughs) when the cameras are off. You know, I'm very happy to have that conversation. But, um, in a similar sort of way, you know, it's not that... The, the, these, a lot of these technologies are attempts at, uh, uh, our unhealthy relationship with... The technology itself is neutral. A lot of our relationships with these technologies are attempts to fill holes in the way we're living, right? Fill holes, it sounds a bit unfortunate 'cause we've been talking about porn, but you know what I mean.
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
Um, the, the, the, uh, and even if you just think about when the internet arrived, right? So internet arrives for most of us the early 2000s or 1999. I got my first email address in 2000. And a lot of the things that we're talking about had already been going, rising for a long time. Big increase in loneliness before that. And what happens is, the internet arrives and it looks a lot like the things we've lost, right? You've lost friends? Here's Facebook friends. You've lost status in the economy? Here's some status updates. But they're not the things we've lost. It's like giving porn to a sex-starved man in prison or something.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
It's not the thing you've lost, right? I mean, it will meet a certain basic itch, but it's not the thing you've lost. And if interacting through screens met our basic needs as human beings, we would all be very happy Zooming all the time, right? Sitting on Zoom would be as good as sitting in the office, right? You know, and people often say to me, "Why do you travel to so many places to do all these interviews? Why don't you just talk to them on, on Skype or Zoom?" And I always say, "'Cause you get...... 10% of the experience through a screen. You, people don't open up to you, they don't feel they've met you. I wouldn't reme- all these people I'm describing to you, I can picture them so vividly. I, people I've interviewed on Zoom, I can never remember what, even what they look like, right?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
So these forms of interaction, they've got a place. You know, look, it's better to have Zoom in a time of a plague than, than nothing, which would've been the alternative in, in the context of COVID. But it's not, it doesn't, we evolved to interact, to look into each other's eyes, to see each other, to interact in three dimensions. We did not evolve to interact through screens. It doesn't meet our deeper needs.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hm. That is why I've never done this podcast over Zoom despite the-
- JHJohann Hari
Really?
- SBSteven Bartlett
... temptation. Yeah. So we, we started doing it in dec-, we started, we upped everything in December and really started going for it, you know, built the team and all these things. And, uh, that's obviously in the middle of the pandemic. There's flight restrictions. No one can fly in. And we've got the most amazing guests in the world that want to come on via Zoom. And I just said, "I do this because I enjoy it." Right? That's like the fundamental reason. That's the reason why I'll keep doing it for the next 10 years. And I would not enjoy doing it over Zoom. It would become like a job to me because I like meeting people. And obviously the, the conversation we have now, you can feel the emotion. You can, you, you can hear the, you know, you can see it in my eyes and you can see at certain points, you know, you can feel what I'm thinking. And that unlocks, for a podcast that's meant to be a little bit more, um, deeper, it unlocks that depth. We've had, you know, tears and we've had all sorts. And I formed real friendships from it. So many, pretty much all of my guests. I'm like, I feel like I'm friends with straight after because of the vulnerability. So I, I just, I just made a rule that I would not do anything over Zoom. And when people ask me to go on their podcast over Zoom, the answer is the same. I don't wanna do it. And I, with my team, my office is actually downstairs. So we come in every day.
- JHJohann Hari
There is one thing about work-
- SBSteven Bartlett
And-
- JHJohann Hari
... I think everything you said is totally true.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
So there's one thing about work I would say, which is a slightly different point, uh, but relates to remote working, which is so, uh, and we can talk about this in more detail if you want, but just for the purposes of this part of the conversation, there's a lot of evidence that, um, lacking control over your work makes you depressed, right?
- 24:07 – 40:16
Finding meaning within the machine
- JHJohann Hari
go. He said, "What life is about is not happiness, but meaning," right? The pursuit of meaning. And actually when you've got meaning in your life, you can tolerate a lot of unhappiness.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So true.
- JHJohann Hari
And you, even think about something as simple as, uh, a denti- what would be a good example, a dentist drill, right?So if I now took out a drill, opened your mouth and, you know, jabbed it into your teeth and it was agony, because that would have no meaning in the context between us-
- SBSteven Bartlett
It's just suffering.
- JHJohann Hari
... it would be, it would literally be torture. It would cause you terrible suffering and you'd be traumatized for ages. But you've been to the dentist and they've done that, right? And it didn't traumatize you. Most likely some people do get traumatized by the dentist, but that's a different story. It's rare. Um, why? Because it had a meaning, right? You could tolerate the pain because there was, because it was for a purpose. "Oh, right, if I don't tolerate this pain, my teeth are gonna get fucked up," right?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
Um, it's worthwhile. And I think that's one of the things that's a big, a big driver of depression and anxiety. It's one of... Actually, it was one of the two hardest causes of depression and anxiety that I wrote about in Lost Connections for me to... It was the one, the one that was most cha- one of the two that was most challenging for me, was this crisis of meaning. So for thousands of years, philosophers have said if you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're gonna feel like shit. Right? It's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that is basically what he said, right? But weirdly, nobody had ever scientifically looked into is this true, how do we know? No one had actually scientifically investigated this until an amazing man I got to know named Professor Tim Kasser, who did an incredible amount of, uh, spent 35 years researching these questions. He discovered loads of things, but I think for what we're talking about there, there's two in particular. Firstly, he discovered, exactly as the philosophers warned, if you think life is about money and status and showing off, all the values you get from advertising, Instagram, everything like them, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by a significant amount. And secondly, he discovered as a society, as a culture, we have become much more driven by these junk values, right? They- they've been rising all throughout my lifetime, your lifetime. And, and I was talking about, well, why is that, right? And there's many reasons that I go through in the book. Why does that make us feel so bad? Um, a key reason I think is just (sighs) it trains us to look for happiness in all the wrong places, right? You know, your technical crew know, everyone knows, uh, everyone watching this knows you're not gonna lie on your deathbed and think about all the likes you got on Instagram, right? You're gonna think about moments of love and meaning and connection. Um, but, but as Professor Kasser put it to me, we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life, right? We live in a machine where we are bombarded, more 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own last name, right? So from the moment you're born, you are trained to think, "If you don't feel good, there's a solution for that. Work harder, buy shit, display it on Instagram to make people go, 'OMG, so jealous,'" right? That is the script of our society. And it's- it's like KFC for the soul, right? You're not gonna find happiness there. But th- the more meaningful values are lying just beneath the surface, right? Nothing I just said, I mean, it's almost like a Hallmark card at the level of banality. Everyone knows that at some level, and yet we don't live by it. And this is true of a lot of things I learned in Lost Connections. It's not like I'm explaining quantum physics, right? It's not like I'm, not that I could do that. It's not like I'm explaining Noam Chomsky's linguistics or something. Th- these are things at some level we all know, but we live in a machine, like Professor Kasser put it, we live in a machine that has taught us to neglect, to mistrust our own instincts about what will give us a good life and to, and to pursue, um, other things instead. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense to you?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Oh, of course it makes fucking sense to me. Of course it makes sense to me.
- JHJohann Hari
Do you feel... But I really feel the reason it was challenging is 'cause I could see how much of my own life was driven by these junk values. I was never a materialistic person. I was never, I was once nominated for an award as the worst dressed gay man in Britain. So I was never like a kind of-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Did you win?
- JHJohann Hari
... material... No, I was beaten by David Furnish, who I've always thought was very well-dressed. So-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Nice. (laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
... that shows how much I know. But, you know, a- a- a- a big part, not, it was never like, I was never like Trump, it was never 100%, but a big part of my life was driven by trying to think about how people perceive me, managing people's expectations.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Does it still?
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah, of course, it's still a part of my character, but it's a radically smaller part of my personality than it was, uh, 15 years ago.
- SBSteven Bartlett
'Cause I was thinking as you were saying that, I was just thinking, I was thinking this is also true, but again, the question posed in my mind was, how would I get out of the machine when so much of the things I enjoy keep me within the machine? So, you know, I could, I could abscond and go to Bali and go and live on a beach and just surround myself with a couple of friends and you'd give up my Louis Vuitton shoes. I don't, I don't have Louis Vuitton shoes, but you get what I mean. Give up my Lamborghini, which I also don't have. And I could, I could escape. But much of the joy of my life comes from doing things like this, having conversations with people like you, which means that I have to live in London. And then to promote this, I'm gonna have to use Instagram and social media, and then I'm gonna get a little pat on the back from the algorithm if it's good or bad. And, and so in the pursuit of some of my intrinsic f- joy and goals, I, I've played with this a lot. I ha- I, I'm, I'm putting myself in the machine and I can't see another way to live. The best, so I say to myself, "The best you could probably do, Steve, is live within the machine, but just live much more consciously." Know that you're in the machine. And, and it's the minute that you don't know you're in the machine that the machine becomes your puppet master and then I'll start fucking buying Louis Vuitton again.
- JHJohann Hari
So it's funny there's ............................ saying Louis Vuitton because I once at a party met Calvin Klein, and until that moment, I, I thought Calvin Klein was a fictional character like Ronald McDonald.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Oh, it's real, it's a real guy.
- JHJohann Hari
So someone said, "Oh, this is Calvin Klein." I almost said, "Oh, like the clothes?"
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
And then I was like, "Oh, right." (laughs)
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
Is this like... It was, it was like suddenly meeting-
- SBSteven Bartlett
You should have said-
- JHJohann Hari
... like Ronald McDonald or something.
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
But...
- SBSteven Bartlett
You said, "Hi, I'm Gap." (laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah, I think he thought I was an... Exactly. I'd been like, "Oh, really?"
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- 40:16 – 48:00
Are we struggling to form meaningful connections
- SBSteven Bartlett
that's fucking this all up, do you believe that because it's making us all care, it's conditioning us to care more about extrinsic values and these like, you know, all this nonsense, do you think it's in- it's, it's hindering our chances of for- forming meaningful romantic connections? I, for just from what I... I've grown up in this Instagram era where it looks like everybody's getting prettier on the outside and everyone's getting uglier on the inside. Because Instagram and the machine have told us that this is what society values. How big is your X? How white is your Y? How perfect is your hair? You know? So it feels like s- life has gone, "Okay, the game. Everybody get in, get in. Everybody get in. Okay. You're gonna... This is how you win. You'll get the most points in life if you have the best hair, the best, uh, eyes, the best boobs, you know, biggest six-pack chest. That is the game. Do you understand?" Everyone's going, "Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. And if, uh, if you see someone that has that as well, pat them on the back." And we go, "Okay, cool." And we've had 10 years of this Black Mirror experiment. So all of our values have gone, you know, extrinsic and junk values. And I think we're struggling to form meaningful connections because that didn't, the, the machine told us that that didn't matter.
- JHJohann Hari
You know, it's funny. After the book came out, a group of people I did not expect to... So I was absolutely inundated on, it was particularly after my TED Talk about it came out, inundated on Instagram by massive Instagram-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
... um, star, what are we calling it?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Influencers.
- JHJohann Hari
Stars? Yeah, influencers is the word. Um-
- SBSteven Bartlett
It's so good-
- JHJohann Hari
Like-
- SBSteven Bartlett
... that you don't know that word.
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs)
- SBSteven Bartlett
It's such a-
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs)
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
Like really people with some of the biggest Instagram followings in the world messaging me saying, "You're so right. I feel like..." And I remember getting a message. I, I wo- I, I won't say who it was, but from someone who was a big Instagram influencer messaging me saying, "I'm so depressed. I don't wanna get out of bed in the morning. My life is terrible." And I didn't know who this person was so I clicked on their Instagram page and literally five minutes before sending me that message and five minutes after-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
... she had done a kind of glowing, "My life is..." You know. I can't, I can't remember the words but, you know, kind of, "My life is so great." Um, bragging. And, and, and I really... Yes. But the thing I would say that is so important about this, it's a funny thing to say, I know it might sound odd-But the widespread nature of our depression, anxiety, and addiction crises, in one sense, although terribly painful and horrible and excruciating, and I've been there, is a positive thing because the system is not working for more and more people. And it becomes harder to defend the system and these values when it makes everyone feel like shit, right? At some point you have to go, "You know what? This ain't fucking working for us." So think about where we are. I lived here, as I said, for 10 years, right? Just n- not far from here. So Tower Hamlets, you know, I mean, the- Tower Hamlets has some of the h- I think it, if I remember rightly, when I lived here, it was th- I think it was the constituency in England that had the highest level of poverty, right? Um, so there's a lot of distress in Tower Hamlets, right? I mean, and by the way, you can be distressed and not be poor. A lot of this distress is happening in middle class and wealthy areas. But think about where we are. Look for signs of distress, connect with the people who are distressed, fight together with them for something better. And of course, that has to be something people do. I can't tell people what the signs of distress around them are. And they'll be different in, you know, um, a coastal village in Kent to, you know, Glasgow, where my mom's from, to the Isle of Skye, uh, difference, uh... There'll be certain shared factors, but look for the signs of distress. I mean, you're spoiled for signs of distress. They're all fucking around us, right? I mean, think about, um, the number of people who drank themselves to death in Britain last year and how much that went up, as we said. And then meet them where they are because, God, ch- change is really possible, right? And I think about that in my own life, you know, I'm gay, right? I didn't hear the concept of gay marriage till I was 20, and my friend Andrew Sullivan wrote the first book advocating it, right? Literally, I did, never crossed my mind. I remember the first person I was ever in love with when I was 16. I never had a sense of a future, didn't even occur to me that we could get married. It never even entered my head, right? Um, you think about the scale of that transformation. (laughs) I remember just before COVID, I was on the Tube, and there were these two girls who c- can't have been more than 16, and they were making out. And I was staring at them, and I think they thought I was like an elderly pervert.
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
And I had to kind of go, "Oh, no, no, I'm gay. I'm just really... this is really moved. This could never have happened-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah. (laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
... when I was your age." Like, so they just thought I was like a mental person. But the, the... a- how did that happen, right? It happened because ordinary people came out. They appealed to other people around them. Lots of heterosexual people saw that it was pointless to be cruel to gay people, and they could be loving and accepting instead. And that change happened unbeli- you basically got 2,000 years-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
... of gay people being horrifically persecuted and then like 70 years of this from pers- from, less than 70 years, 60 years, from send them to prison to, yay, they can get married, right? So absolutely change on... When we talk about things like, oh, you know, we're trapped in this machine that's making us depressed, right? That can sound like such a big thing, right? We had 2,000 years of homophobia.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
Right? And I'm not saying we've completely overcome it, obviously, but there's stunning progress, right? The things we're talking about are much more recent inventions than homophobia, right? Like infinitely more recent. And homophobia, terrible though it was, only ever affected a small part of the population. The things we're talking about, fuck- me- they don't make everyone depressed, but they make everyone less happy than they could be. So these are, you know, these are absolutely things that can be challenged, that can be challenged in individuals' lives, and we can deal with them at the political level as well. It requires a transformation in consciousness, which is happening.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
Uh, and we can talk about addiction if you want, and places that solved... that made extraordinary changes in that and massively reduced their addiction deaths that I went to. But we need to understand this differently, and we need to listen to our pain. We need to stop insulting our depression, anxiety, and addictions by saying they're a sign of weakness or madness or purely biological, although there are some biological contributions, and start listening to them. Listen to the signal as a society and as a culture 'cause it is telling us where we need to go and what we need to do.
- SBSteven Bartlett
I've been a Huel fan for a long time, as you obviously know by now. But in the last six months, I've got a, a real opportunity to get to know the people, to get to know the CEO of Huel, which is James, to get to know the founder, which is Julian, the teams that agonize over the ingredients that go into these amazing recipes. And I can honestly say with my hand on my heart, my, my appreciation and admiration for Huel and its people has multiplied by a factor of 10 because, and this is the singular reason, not only th- are they nice people, but because I've seen firsthand how much they are non-negotiable about the values of Huel. They will not compromise. They will not compromise on the, the goodness of the ingredients that goes into the products, the amount of proteins and minerals and these things, regardless. If they can't get to where they wanna get to with the, with the products, they will cancel the product. I've tasted products and they've said, "We've not managed to make it this. We've not delivered on our promise of veganism. We've not added enough fiber, so we're canceling it." And that sort of non-negotiable set of values has made me realize that they have my back when I choose Huel.
- 48:00 – 1:08:40
How good are you at making connections
- SBSteven Bartlett
Let me talk about you.
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs) Okay.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And your connections.
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And your romantic connections, your friendships and all of those things. Sometimes I find it fascinating that obviously s- you know, people can know a lot of stuff, but applying it to oneself is challenging. I've, you know, some of my, my favorite guests that I've sat here with, I'm thinking about Jamal, uh, Qureshi, who I sat here with, who's like a, you know, you, one could call him like a motivational, uh, coach, you know? Probably doesn't quite characterize who he is, but, um, my last question to him was, um, "Are, are you good at taking your own advice?" He went, "Absolutely fucking not." (laughs) He was like, "I'm the least motivated motivational coach in the world." So my, my question to you is, how are you doing with your connections in your life, in your mental health and all of these questions?
- JHJohann Hari
I think people are often most articulate about the things they most struggle with, right? Yeah. So, and it's interesting 'cause sometimes that's presented as hypocri- I'll give you an example. There's a left-wing polit- I won't say who, but there's a left-wing politician I know who is incredibly articulate about greed and how terrible it is, and is incredibly greedy, right? Now you could look at that and go, "That's hypocrisy." And of course at one level, a kind of boringly obvious level, it is. But to me what's much more interesting is that is a person who's internally struggling against his own flaw, right? That is a person who has this force within him and is genuinely trying, i- is so articulate because he's wrestling with it all the time. Mm-hmm. And so I think, um, in a sense taking your own advice is sort of like, the fact that you needed to articulate the advice suggests that internal struggle, do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think about, um, E.M. Forster, uh, one of my favorite writers who famously said, "Only connect," who was someone who really struggled with connection, um, partly 'cause he was a gay man of a much earlier generation who, uh, well, his connections, his loving romantic connections were a crime, right? So he was really ... and there were other ways in which he struggled with, with connection as well. So in terms of myself, um, I was always very lucky with friendships. Um, all my life I've had amazing friendships. For me, um, you know, I said before there were two causes of, two cause- uh, the nine causes of depression and anxiety that I write about in the book, there were two that I struggled with a lot. And the s- uh, so one was junk values. The other, it w- this was a hard journey for me in the book. I learned about this through a sto- a story of a scientist who discovered it, who I met, and to explain it, I think people can understand it better if they know the story, even though for like a minute you're gonna think, "What the fuck does this got to do with what he just said?" (laughs) But just bear with me. So in the mid 1980s there was a doctor called Vincent Felitti who, um, was approached ... he was in San Diego in California, and he was approached by Kaiser Permanente who are one of the big not-for-profit medical providers in California, and they came to him and were like, "We've got a problem and we need your help." And the problem was, um, obesity. Obesity was massive rising. It's hugely exploded since then but it was rising and rising, and they were like, "Look, nothing we're doing is working. We give people diet advice, we talk to them about nutrition, we even give some of them personal trainers. Nothing is working." L- and so they just gave him a quite big budget and said, "Just do blue skies research, work with really obese people, just figure out what the hell we can do." So Dr. Felitti starts working with, uh, 250 severely obese people, people who weighed more than 400 pounds, so people who are really, you know, in terrible danger. And he's working with these people and wha- he's interviewing them, he's thinking, "What can I do?" And one day he's talking to one of them and he has an idea, which sounds like it actually is a quite stupid idea. He said, "What would happen if really obese people literally stopped eating and we gave them, like, I don't know, vitamin C shots so they didn't get scurvy, we gave them, like, u- vitamin shots. Would they just burn through the fat supplies in their body and get down to a normal weight?" So with a shit ton of medical supervision they try it, and incredibly at first it worked. There's a woman, I'll call her Susan, that's not her real name, um, who went down from being more than 400 pounds to 138 pounds. This is amazing, right? And people are like, "H- how can this be? What's going on?" Uh, and her family are like, "You've saved her life." And then one day something happened they didn't expect. Susan cracked, she went to KFC ... uh, actually it wasn't KFC, that's me projecting. (laughs) Whatever it was, uh, some fast food place, she starts obsessively eating, and pretty soon she's back at her dangerous weight. Not where she'd been but a dangerous weight. And Dr. Felitti called her in, he's like, "Susan, what happened?" She said, "I don't know. I don't know." And he's kind of dumbfounded and he says, "Well, tell me about the day that you cracked. Wha- wh- did anything happen that day?" It turned out something had happened that day that had never happened to Susan. She was in a bar and a man came up to her and hit on her, not in a nasty predatory way, in a nice way, and she felt really freaked out and she goes and she starts eating and D- he's like, "Huh, well what's the signific- could this be significant?" And then he said to her, something he'd never asked his patients before, he said, "Susan, when did you start to put on your weight?" In her case it was when she was 11. And he said to her, "Well, did anything happen that year that didn't happen any other year? Anything when you were 11?" She said, she looked down, she said, "Yeah, that's when my grandfather started to rape me." Dr. Felitti interviewed everyone in the program and he discovered that more than 60% of them had put on their extreme weight in the aftermath of being sexually abused or s- or assaulted. And he's thinking, "Huh, what's, what's that about? H- what?" And Susan explained it to him really well, she said, "Overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be." This thing that seems so destructive, and of course it's bad for you to be severely obese, was performing a positive function for all these people, it was protecting them from sexual attention, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and just being like, "Ah, this is, this is kind of interesting." Um, so he ... but this is a small group of people, it's 250 people, it's not much, you can't d- draw big scientific conclusions based on this. So Dr. Felitti goes to the CD- Center for Disease Control who fund a lot of medical research, and he got funding to do a massive study. Everyone who came to Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, so more than 17,000 people, for a whole year, didn't matter what for, headaches, schizophrenia, broken leg, anything, got given two questionnaires. First part says, "Did you have any of these bad experiences when you were a kid?" Things like sexual abuse, severe neglect, that kind of thing. Second part said, um-... "Have you had any of these problems as an adult?" It was initially only gonna say obesity, but, and this is where it comes to our story, at the last minute, they add loads of other things like depression, addiction, suicide attempts. And at first when they added up the figures, people, they were like, "No, there's been a mistake. Add it up again," 'cause the figures were so extreme. For every category of childhood trauma that you experienced, you were two to four times more likely to be depressed, obese, and addicted. But, when you got into the multiple categories, the figures just went crazy. If you had had six categories of childhood trauma, you were 3,100% more likely to have attempted suicide, and 4,600% more likely to have an injecting drug problem. I mean, these are just insane figures. You very rarely get that in science, right? And I remember Dr. Felitti saying to me, like, that, that, he, he, he realized it was like there had been a house fire, and we had been focusing on dealing with the smoke, not on dealing with the fire, right? D- Dr. Robert Ander, who's one of the other scientists who worked on it, said to me, he realized when you see things like obesity, depression, addiction, we need to stop asking, "What's wrong with you?" and start asking, "What happened to you?" But it's kind of difficult to talk about this, but... So Dr. Felitti's a super nice guy, right? If you met him, you'd really like him. When I interviewed him, he was, like, 81, so this was ages ago. Um, lovely, good, decent m- admirable man. And when I interviewed him in San Diego the first time, I was sitting with him, and I was getting angrier and angrier. A- and I actually ended the interview early 'cause I was r- getting so angry. And I remember walking to the beach in San Diego, walking around and thinking, "What the fuck's this about? Why am I so angry with this lovely old man who's done this amazing research that's helped so many people?" And I remember thinking... So, uh, when I was a child, I'd h- had experienced some very extreme things from an adult in my life, and I had, I didn't wanna think about that. I didn't wanna, uh, I didn't wanna think about that in relation to the depression I had experienced. I didn't, I didn't want to give this individual power over me now. Um, but one of the reasons I'm glad that I went back and carried on talking to him is 'cause of what Dr. Felitti discovered next, which I think is really relevant to what you're asking. So obviously, they'd, they'd asked all these people who came for healthcare about their childhood trauma. So suddenly, they've got all this data. So, they said to people's GPs, "Don't call them back in, but next time they come in, look at the childhood trauma thing, and if they've experienced childhood trauma, say to them something like this, 'I see that when you were a child, you were sexually abused,' or whatever it was. 'I'm really sorry that happened. That should never have happened to you. You should've been protected. That was a failing. Would you like to talk about it?'" And 40% of people did not want to talk about it, but 60% of people did, and they wanted to talk about it on average for five minutes. And then it was randomly assigned. Some of them were told, "You can go to a therapist to talk about it more." What they found was just five minutes of an authority figure saying, "I'm so sorry. This should never have happened to you," that alone led to a significant fall in depression and anxiety. And the people who were referred to a therapist had an even bigger fall. And what this shows, it fits with a whole load of other evidence from people like, uh, Professor Steve Coles at UCLA, Professor James Pennebaker at Florida State University, is it's not the trauma that destroys you. It's the shame about the trauma. And giving people ways to release that shame is an antidepressant. So for me, l- learning that, and it's one of the reasons I made myself put it in the book and talk about it, is wh- so very often people who survive abuse as children internalize the voice of the abuser, right? Almost invariably, the abuser says, "You made me do this. You're a bad person. You made me do this." Right? And so although of course there was never any point in my adult life where I thought that was a rational, you know, there was never a point where I would've, if you'd, you know, if someone had told me they had been abused and told me negative things they'd been told, I would never have thought, "Yeah, the abuser was right, obviously." I didn't reckon with that internalization in my own life, and I think it meant that a lot of the time, although I always had great friendships, with romantic relationships, um, they would, I would often cauterize them at a certain point because I didn't feel at that time that I deserved to be loved. I didn't feel that I deserved to be treated well. So it would mean that sometimes I would get into relationships with people who didn't treat me well, or sometimes if they did treat me well, I would end it prematurely at the point at which they were treating me well because I'd internalized so many of these negative, uh, and destructive and untrue ideas. And, and the process of thinking that through, obviously I had a therapist as well, the process of thinking that through and releasing that shame made me much more open to, you know, love, you know, uh, because I didn't... It was possible to overcome that. Does that make sense, Stephen? Does that-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Are you still on that journey?
- JHJohann Hari
Oh, yeah. A- and I think anyone who, you know... How would I put it? Yeah, of course. Of course.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And through all of your, your work and your writing, you've, you know, you've highlighted to the world, but also clearly to yourself the importance of that, um, of romantic connections.
- JHJohann Hari
Well, it comes right back to where we started, isn't it? Why do I write? To, to understand, to understand things I didn't understand at the start, to go on a journey. There are things I want to understand, um, and, and sometimes they're big things, right? Um, and sometimes they're very personal things, and sometimes they're both. Uh-And, and, and then to track down, "Okay, who, who knows a lot about this? Who's found interesting things out about this?" And go and sit with them and kind of pester them and keep going back year after year until I feel I understand it. And I feel now I understand it. And it, and it... I gotta say, it's, it's quite frustrating watching some of the COVID debate at the moment because, um, you know, there's been this big increase in addiction, depression, and a lot of the way it's taught, even by super well-meaning, amiable people, as almost everyone in this debate is, so many of the ways in which people are encouraged to think they are helping people, with the best will in the world and with a good heart, often strip these things of meaning. So there's a thing, for example, that, uh, very well-meaning people will say, which is, "Oh, depression is just like a..." You know, "Depression is, uh, a disease like diabetes." You know, "I- y- you wouldn't shame someone for having a broken leg." They're absolutely right that depressed and anxious people should never be stigmatized. But actually that, that is not the way you remove stigma. You don't remove... I mean, no one ever doubted that leprosy and AIDS were biological phenomena. And you might notice there was a damn lot of stigma about them, right? Saying something is biological... And it's true, there are some biological components. We can talk about that if you want. Some biological contributions, your genes can make you more vulnerable to these things, though they do not write your destiny. Um, but, but saying something is biological does not r- Actually, there, there's some good scientific evidence that it, it increases stigma because it makes people think, "God, those people are really different to me. They're like a different species." What actually undoes stigma is to say, although there are some biological contributions, any of us would feel like this in this situation. Actually, that your pain makes sense. You know, there was a moment that really all this really fell into place for me as well. It's one of the two totally revelatory moments for me in the research for Lost Connections. I went to interview this South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield, and he told me this story about something that happened to him. So, Derek was in Cambodia in 2001 when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for people in Cambodia. They'd never had them in the country before. And the local doctors, the, the Cambodians were like, "What are they?" They didn't, they didn't know what they were, were antidepressants. And, and Derek explained, and they said to him, "Oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants." And he was like, "Well, what do you mean?" He thought they were gonna talk about some kind of like herbal remedy like Ginkgo biloba or something. Instead, they told him a story. They had a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields, and one day he stood on a landmine leftover from the war with the Americans and he got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial limb. They're good at that in Cambodia 'cause they've got a lot of landmines. And after a while, several months, the guy goes back to work, right? So he goes back to work in the rice fields. Um, but apparently it's super painful to work underwater when you've got an artificial limb. And I'm guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up. The guy started to cry all day. After a while, he just wouldn't get out of bed. He developed what we would call classic depression, right? This is when the Cambodian doctor said, "Well, you know, that's when we gave him an, an antidepressant." And Derek said, "What was it?" They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense. You only had to talk to him for five minutes to realize why he felt so shit. One of the doctors said, "Well, we realized if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much." So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone. It never came back. They said to Derek, "So you see, Doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right?" Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that it's primarily or entirely a malfunction in your brain, that sounds like a bad joke. "I went to my doctor for an antidepressant. She gave me a cow." But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively from this individual unscientific anecdote is what the leading medical body in the whole world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years, right? Your pain makes sense. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not, in the main, a, a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is practical help and support to get those needs met. So one of the things we have to be asking as a society and culture is, what's the cow for the things that are screwing us up, right? What's the cow for the things that are making us depressed? Instead of seeing depression as a malfunction, we've gotta see it as a signal that's telling us the person is distressed and d- and has unmet needs and, and together help them get those needs met. 'Cause what the doctors didn't say is, "All right, mate, this is your problem. You're on your own," right? Together they helped to solve the problem. We've got to solve the underlying problems for which depression is a signal.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And you said, you tweeted, um, about this. You said, um, "There is good evidence that after COVID we can reverse our spiraling depression and anxiety crisis. But to do that, we need to radically expand the menu of responses to it."
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah. Think about what we were talking about. I could give one other example just from up the road. Social prescribing, right? Every single doctor's surgery should have a social prescribing wing. It should be the first thing that is suggested. Certainly for mild and moderate depression, uh, is... Figure out if the person's lonely and disconnected from the natural world. If they are, suggest them- prescribe. And there's a real power in "Doctors prescribe," not just saying, "Oh, you might wanna think about this," 'cause people feel so disempowered to find each other in such a lonely and atomized society. That's one example. Obviously, the last third of Lost Connections is loads of very practical examples of what we can do.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And we have to do that in our own lives, right? Like, we can socially prescribe ourselves.
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
I think there's an authority in doctors doing it.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Brilliant.
- JHJohann Hari
Absolutely, we can, we shouldn't... We should be doing it for ourselves and we should be urging other people to do it. But in a culture that's become so disconnected from understanding our needs, and actually where we've been told a rival story that has some truth in it... You know, there are... As I stress a lot in the book, I have-... chapter about this. There are real biological contributions to de- to depression and anxiety that can make you more sensitive to these problems, and can make it harder to get out. But what's happened is, an overly simplified biological story has become the main thing we say about depression. When I went to my doctor and I was a, a teenager, and I was r- I felt like pain was leaking out of me, my doctor, who was a very well-meaning, decent person, just said, "Oh, there's something wrong with your brain and all you need to do is drug yourself." Right?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
And chemical antidepressants gave me a little bit of relief for a while, also gave me really severe side effects in my case, although not everyone-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
Um, and ultimately I remained depressed, right? So, what that story did, that oversimplified story which has some truth in it for some people, what that oversimplified story did is cut me off for many years, for 13 years, from exploring the deeper causes. If right early on ... There's no criticism of my doctor, they're just part of a system, you know, th- that's not of their own creation, and a lot of doctors want to do better and want to have better options to give people they, they haven't been offered them themselves. Um, it cut me off from a deeper, more nuanced story that helped me to find a way out of my depression. So, I think one of the things we've gotta do is help people to find stories that make sense of their pain.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
Because that's the way ... Once you understand why you feel something, you can begin to find your way out of it. But just being lost in a haze of, "You're just biologically broken," no one is ... there are some biological contributions, but no one is broken by their biology. No one is, no one is with- uh, there's nobody who, with the right support can't find their way out. But "with the right support" is a crucial clause there that we have to build as a society that we have not built, right? We just haven't built.
- 1:08:40 – 1:18:18
psychedelics
- SBSteven Bartlett
Got me thinking about psychedelics for a number of reasons, because psychedelics, you know, it's b- it's been of a ... I think there's a bit of a revolution going on in the, the, the perception of psychedelics. You know, we had the war on, Nixon's like war on drugs in the like, '50s or '60s or whatever it was. I wasn't alive then, so excuse my, uh, inaccuracy, but-
- JHJohann Hari
You were lucky you dodged the bullet of Nixon. Not a good thing to be alive through.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Oh, really. I, yeah, yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
I wasn't there either, but-
- SBSteven Bartlett
I've not read a ton about him, but I just-
- JHJohann Hari
Or Kim.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... I know that he was pivotal in like, you know, slamming the, uh, the gauntlet down on the, the, you know, the chance of even researching some of these compounds, psychedelic compounds. But what I've c- come to learn over the last six months working in, uh, you know, uh, one of the world's leading, um, sort of psychedelic and non-psychedelic mental health companies, which is Atai, and spending some time there, is how remarkable these, these stats, evidence and findings are. Um, for things like psilocybin, which is a compound derived from m- magic mushrooms, um, at helping those with treatment-resistant depression to overcome, um, their, you know, their, their, their feelings of depression. And it matches up perfectly to the philosophy, and really the, the, the perspective that your book gave me on mental health. Because it approaches the, um, the ... What's the, the correct word to use? The indication of treatment-resistant depression from the stance that something has happened to you, and that thing might live in your subconscious, you know, and it's a- an unlocker of that thing in the same way that therapy might be for some, for some people. But what's your ... You know, having written this book and u- studied depression for so long, and anxiety, what do you think of psychedelics?
- JHJohann Hari
So, as you know for the book, I, there's a chapter about psychedelics 'cause I went and interviewed the leading experts in the world on this, people who have been doing the cutting edge research. I interviewed them in, um, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, at UCLA, here in London at UCL, at NYU and somewhere else. Oh, in Brazil. And, um, so I'm strongly in favor of psychedelics for some people. It's a slightly complicated picture in a way that I think helps us to understand what's going on. So, think about treatment, you mentioned treatment-resistant depression. Some really good research was done on this here in London by David, Professor David Nutt and Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris.
- SBSteven Bartlett
He-
- JHJohann Hari
They get people who've been depressed for a long time and nothing's helped them, and they've tried lots of things and nothing's helped them. And they gave them, if I remember rightly, three doses of psilocybin, the active component of magic mushrooms. I might be wrong on the number, but something like that. And exactly as you say, huge numbers of them have a r- uh, it's amazing. They feel this strong feeling of connection to the natural world, to their own traumas, to everyone around them as anyone who's used psy- psychedelics, or most people who use psychedelics, experience a really profound spiritual experience. And that deeply lifts their depression and anxiety. Uh, so a taste of connection. This wasn't true for literally everyone, but it was a very high percentage. Uh, an intense feeling of meaning and connection helps lift them out of their depression. There's a coda to that which Robin talks about. Um, so I'll give you an example of one of the people he told me about. It's a woman in the program who worked in, um, she worked in an office in like, a, a coastal town in Britain that was quite kind of rundown and grim. She'd been very depressed. She goes, she takes the psilocybin. Her depression lifts, she feels deeply connected and then she goes back to work in the office and ... She comes back and is like, "I can't go around my office acting like we're all connected, we're all equal, nature is beautiful. I have to live in this disconnected way to exist in my office." Right? So, over time her de- depression comes back because she's had a taste of connection but then she goes back to live in a disconnected landscape, right? A disconnected emotional landscape. And I think, um ... So, what the evidence shows is the way I think of psychedelics is, administered in the right way of course, and that's an important clause, um, what they can do is give you a taste of how it feels to be connected, to have meaning. But I think of that as like, um, a compass that can point you in the direction you need to travel. Doesn't do the j- it gives y- I mean, it gives you a flash of what it's like to be at the end of the journey.
Episode duration: 1:53:52
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