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#044_ What Causes Addiction _ Depression · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Well, delighted to have you here. Thank you for coming up.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to this conversation for a long time,
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: as we just sort of spoke a moment ago. Everything
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: that you're about, the work that you do, is definitely
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: right in the sweet spot of the things that I
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: love to talk about. I think the work you're doing
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: is important and I'm excited to.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: Dig into it with all.
• 0:45
  Speaker 3: Right through, what are you?
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: What are you doing here in La?
• 0:49
  Speaker 3: Well, I'm here for one reason that I'm not allowed
• 0:52
  Speaker 3: to talk about because it's not been announced yet, so
• 0:53
  Speaker 3: I have to be slightly mysterious. But also I was
• 0:56
  Speaker 3: here to do I was at Politicon, you know, the
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: with political convention that happens here. So I was debating
• 1:03
  Speaker 3: addiction with Chris Christy, the disgusting form of Governor New Jersey,
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: and Dr Drew. So that was I wouldn't exactly call
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: it fun, but it was intriguing.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: That's interesting.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: I'm familiar with doctor Drew's opinions on addiction, but where
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: does where does Chris Christie fall.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: We Christy pretends to be, you know, in favor of destigmatization,
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: but he got very angry when I asked him, so
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: he keeps saying, you know, I'm against stigma against people
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: with addiction problems, but he's not in favor of changing
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: the laws. And I said, well, the laws criminalized drug
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: use and drug addiction, right, genesis of the stigma exactly?
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: Do you It's at least a significant expression of the stigma.
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: So I kind of said to him, do you see
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: any contradiction there? How do you how do you reconcile them?
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: And he just did his kind of sub soprano stick
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: where he starts, great body, I'm from New Jersey, you
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: don't get to bully me. He just didn't want to
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: have a serious discussion about it.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: And what about doctor Drew.
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: Honestly, I just didn't think he understood quite basic things
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: about addiction. It seemed like a fairly nice person, but
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: he didn't really understand. You know, the debate about the
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: opioid crist We were discussed on the opioid crisis. The
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: debate about the opioid crisis in the US is so
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: removed from really basic facts about even what addiction is
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: not critical of people for that. Before I started doing
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: the research for my book Chasing the Screen, which is
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: about addiction and the drug war, I don't think I
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: didn't understand many of these basic things as well. I
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: don't think Dodor Drew really, I think both Chris Christy
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: and Dtor Drew were making the mistake. I don't want
• 2:41
  Speaker 3: to overrescribe this to d Drew. I think he's a
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: bit more sophisticated than he's certainly more sophisticated than Chris Christie,
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: but just making a basic mistake about why this crisis
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: is happening. Right, So, if you'd ask me when I
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: started doing the research for Chasing the Scream, whenever it
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: was eight years ago, now, what causes addiction? Heroin addiction?
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: Because that played out in people I love, and I
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: would have looked at you like you're an idiot, and
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: I would have said, well, obviously heroine causes heroin addiction. Right,
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: We've been told this story for one hundred years about
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: addiction that's become totally part of our common sense. One
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: one of my relatives and not being able to. I
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: didn't understand why then, but as I got older, I
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: realized we had drug addiction in my family. And so
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: when I thought about saying like heroin addiction. Obviously, I thought,
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: you know, we're sitting here in you know, in Los Angeles.
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: We think if I grabbed the next twenty people to
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: walk past your house, and I injected them all with
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: heroin every day for a month, like a villain in
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: a Saw movie, at the end of that month, they'd
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: all be heroin addicts. For a simple reason. There's chemical
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: hooks in heroin that bodies would start to desperately physically need.
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: They'd have this desperate physical craving. They'd be hooked. That's
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: where we get the phrase hooked from, and that's what
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: addiction is, right. That's what I thought had happened in
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: my family, That's what I thought i'd seen happen in
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: front of me. And I only learn that while there's
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: some truth in that story, it's actually a small part
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: of the story, and that there's something much bigger and
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: more important going on. When I went to Vancouver and
• 4:12
  Speaker 3: interviewed this amazing man called Professor Bruce Alexander. So Professor
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: Alexander explained to me this story we've got in our heads.
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: The addiction is caused primarily by the chemical hooks, and
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: the drug comes from a series of experiments that we've
• 4:26
  Speaker 3: done earlier in the twentieth century. They are really simple experiments.
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: Your listeners can try them at home if they feel
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: a little bit sadistic. You take a rat, you put
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles.
• 4:35
  Speaker 3: One is just water and the other is water laced
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: always kill itself quite quickly. So there you go, right,
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: that's our story. But in the seventies Professor Alexander came
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: along and said, well, hand in a minute, you put
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: their rat alone in an empty cage where it's got
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: nothing that makes life meaningful for rats. What would happen
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: if we did this differently? So he built a cage
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: that he called rat Park, which is basically like paradise
• 5:03
  Speaker 3: for rats. Right, They've got loads of friends, they can
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: have loads of sex, they've got loads of cheese and
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: colored balls and wheels. Anything that makes life meaningful to rats,
• 5:12
  Speaker 3: it's there in rat Park. And they've got both the
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: water bottles, the normal water and the drug water. But
• 5:17
  Speaker 3: this is the fascinating thing in rat Park. They don't
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: like the drug water. They almost never use it, none
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: of them ever use it compulsively, none of them ever overdose.
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: So you go from almost one hundred percent compulsive use
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: and overdose when they don't have the things that make
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: life meaningful to none when they do. There's loads of
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: human examples that we can talk about at this but
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: to me, the core lesson of this is the opposite
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: of addiction is not sopriety. Important though that is to
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: many people. The opposite of addiction is connection and having
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: your psychological needs met. And I think we need to
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: understand the opioid crisis in that context. Right, It's not
• 5:49
  Speaker 3: a coincidence that the opioid crisis is at its most
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: intense in the place where the non opioid based suicide
• 5:55
  Speaker 3: rate is highest, where antidepressant prescriptions are highest. That tells
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: us something despair clusters together. Right. There's a leading economist
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: which called the opioid death's despair deaths, Whereas it seemed
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: to me Dr Drew and Chris Christie were Chris Christi
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: exclusively and dtor Drew way too much. We're focusing on
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: the drug itself right now. The drug itself plays a role.
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: There are chemical hooks. They can cause physical dependence and
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: neglecting much more so. For example, I think the core
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: of addiction is about not wanting to be present in
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: your life because your life is too painful a place
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: to be. Once you understand that, you can see why
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: the drug war imposing more pain and more punishment on
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: people is such a disaster, right, because it causes more pain,
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: it actually deepens the addiction. So I was very disturbed
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: both that Chris Christie is a supporter of the drug war.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: He's in favor of punishment. I mean, he says, oh, well,
• 6:50
  Speaker 3: we'll make the prisons nice treatment centers for some people
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: rather than just brutal prisons. But that's still a criminal
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: You're still criminalizing people, stigmatizing them. And the drug treatment
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: centers he wants to put in the prisons are not
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: so impressive either. And doctor Drew was still saying things like, well,
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: we need to impose negative consequences. You know that that
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: can be helpful for some people. That is not helpful
• 7:13
  Speaker 3: that there's nowhere in the world that has reduced addiction
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: through imposing negative consequences. As your friend of mine, Dr
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: Gable Mante said. It said to me once, if negative
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: consequences stopped a diction, there wouldn't be a single addict
• 7:24
  Speaker 3: anywhere in the world because what negative consequences have they
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: not expected?
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: I mean, listen, I agree with everything that you're saying, certainly,
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: and I think to be fair to doctor Drew, he's
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: not going to be on Chris Christie's punitive page like
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: he's He's been very spoken about rehabilitation over punitive measure, but.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: He was saying that there should be He did say
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: that with some of his This is what's surprised me
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: because I thought all.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: The negative consequences for your behavior, I think is I
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: think where he's kind of the space where he's dancing
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: around is something that I can relate to, which is
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: when you I've heard that, you know, I know about
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: that rat study, and I think it's super informative in
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: terms of getting people to kind of rethink the paradigm.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: It's very powerful in that regard. But I also think
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: it's it's more complicated than that. It is indeed.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: Certainly true that.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: The compulsion to use that the addict is coming from
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: a place of of being uncomfortable in their own skin,
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: in their own life, whether that's the result of childhood
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: trauma or some kind of psychological miswiring which we can
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: get into. It's it's a complex, you know, matrix of
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: many factors that I think contribute to somebody becoming an
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: addict versus somebody who's just a casual user in the
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: case of you know, your heroin example, and you know,
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: genetics probably plays a small role in that some role.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: But in terms of unpacking that, like I know, for myself,
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: long time sober guy, when you know my loved ones fled,
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: that was not you know, that was not lost on me,
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: Like that was definitely a motivating factor in me finally
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: reckoning with the damage that I had created and ultimately
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: starting to walk the path towards sobriety. So I think
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: there is some wisdom in this idea of not being
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: complicit and as they say, codependent in an addict's behavior.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: And I thought one thing that was striking in your
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: amazing tech talk, which I loved, was this idea of
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: moving towards the addict as opposed to away from them.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: This idea that we should.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Sing love songs, not war songs, with respect to them,
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: that we should bring the addict closer and let them
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: know that we love them. I think that's important, But
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: I also think it's important to use discernment so that
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: the addict understands, like this is not acceptable, that there
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: is some conditional aspect of the relationship, that if they
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: do X, Y and Z, that not necessarily that you're
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: retracting your love, but that you can't make yourself available
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: to be a punching bag for that person's errant ways.
• 10:01
  Speaker 3: I mean, love doesn't mean I think you're making important points.
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: Love doesn't mean giving someone everything they want in any situation. Right.
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: You don't love your children by giving your child candy
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: all the time, and no loving relationship involves just one
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: hundred percent giving the person what they want. And that
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: goes for people with addictions and people without addictions, So
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: that's obviously true. I think one of the reasons why
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: the debate about the war on drugs is so charged
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: is because it runs through the hearts of all of us,
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: right everyone. I feel this even now after all the
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: research I did purchasing the screen. Everyone has someone they
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: love who's got an addiction problem, has a part of
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: them that thinks, God, someone should just stop you. Why
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: are you being so stupid? Why are you being so distructive.
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: And then there's another part that most people have that
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: is compassionate and sees, I wait a minute, this is
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: someone trying to deal with a very profound sense of pain.
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: They're anesthetizing themselves. Actually, we need to deal with the
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: causes of their pain.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because the drug is the solution, not that it's
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: not the cause.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: It's not the problem itself.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: The problem is the person you're left with when you
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: take the drugs away.
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: I think it's not just the person you're left with,
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: it's the environment, the cage you're left with. I mean,
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: there's a very challenging line in mary Anne Faithful's memoir,
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: you know, the Great British rock star. She says at
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: one point something like she she had heroin addiction in
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: the sixties when she was homeless. She said, heroin saved
• 11:27
  Speaker 3: my life because if it wasn't a heroine, I would
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: have killed myself at that point. That's a very challenging
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: thing to hear for a lot of people. It was
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: challenging for me when I read it. Now. Obviously Maryanne
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: Faithful is not saying heroin is a good solution to despair,
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: but I do think it's very important to understand why.
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: But let's think about the opioid crisis, right, Why is
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: this happening? Why? Why are so many vectors of despair?
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: I mean about what's.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: Serving a need that is so profound that it outweighs
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: the negative ramplifications of the behavior.
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: That's a really good way of putting it. One listening
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: to your show knows that they have natural physical needs, right, Obviously,
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: need clean air. If I took those things away from you,
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: you be in real trouble, real fast. But there's equally
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs.
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: You need to feel you belong. You need to feel
• 12:19
  Speaker 3: your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: that people see you and value you. You need to
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: feel you've got a future that makes sense. Our culture
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: is good at lots of things. I'm glad to be
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: alive today. I love dentistory, I love gay marriage, our
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: range of things. But we've been getting less and less
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs. And this
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: is manifesting in just an enormous range of problems. Right,
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: think about what the subjects are my more recent but
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: lost connections. You know, one in three middle aged women
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: in the United States at any given time is taking
• 12:49
  Speaker 3: a chemical antidepressant. Even more are depressed and not taking drugs.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: The suicide rate, combined with opioid deaths, is now so
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: high that white to male life expectancy has fallen for
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: the first time in the entire peacetime history of the
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: United States. Teenage girls, according to Professor joor Twini, he's
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: done really good research on this, now have the same
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: anxiety and the average American teenage girl now has the
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: same average anxiety level as a mental patient had in
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: the nineteen fifties. Right, So we've got this whole vector
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: of despair, these different forms of despair. I would argue
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: the political situation we're in as a manifestation of profound
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: despair and anger. We need to understand why this is happening,
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: and at the moment, I think we're being offered stories
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: that are too simplistic. So when it comes to the
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: opioid crisis, we're being offered a story that is not false.
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: The drug companies did do terrible things that they do
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: bear some responsibility. I'm in favor of the criminal prosecution
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: of Purdue and various other things, but are misselling their drugs.
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: But that's not the core of why this is happening,
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: right that if we think a better analogy to help
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: us to understand it. If you think about something that
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: happened in Britain in the eighteenthe of some Britain Britain
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: in the eighteenth century. So at that time, huge numbers
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: of people were driven out of the countryside into these
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: disgusting urban slums in places like London and Manchester. They
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: lost everything that have made life meaningful to them, and
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: they're suddenly totally disorientated in this place. They don't understand.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: And there was a huge outbreak of alcoholism. It was
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: known as the Gin craze. And it really did happen. Right.
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: There's a famous painting from the time called the Gin
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: Lane of a mother downing a bottle of gin while
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: her baby falls over some steps, right, And there really
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: was this crisis, really did happen. And if you look
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: at what people said at the time, what they said is,
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: look at this evil drug gin, look at what it's
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: done to us. If only we could get rid of
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: this evil drug gin, we wouldn't have this problem. Now,
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: when we look back, we know it can't be gin
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: that caused it, because anyone in Britain who's over the
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: age of eighteen can go and buy gin. It's easier
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: to get gin now than it was then. And while
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: we still have some alcoholism, of course, we don't have
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: mass alcoholism in the streets. We don't have babies falling
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: out of windows. What changed. What changed is not the
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: availability of the drug. What changes the amount of despair
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: and pain in the society. If you want to understand
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: why people are turning to painkillers in such enormous numbers,
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: we have to understand why they're in such pain, right.
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: I mean, people on the faculty at Harvard have much
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: easier access to opiate based painkillers than people in West Virginia,
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: who disproportionately don't have don't have medical insurance, and yet
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: West Virginia has a drastically higher level of opioid addiction
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: than the faculty at Harvard. What's going on. It's not
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: access to the drug, right, it's terrible, terrible, deep pain.
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: We've created a culture which for many people it's not
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: bearable to be present in. Right, So you think about
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: one false narrative is the or forces are one word
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: one limited narrative is the opioid crisis is simply the
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: result of opioids, and if only we got rid of
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: the opioids, we'd all be okay again, when in fact,
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: what would happen is think about Marian Fopole's quote or
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: what you're saying. There would just that it would be
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: in some ways better. Fewer people would overdose, but there
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: would be prof despair, right or think about depression. So
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: when I was a teenager, I went to my doctor
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: and I explained that I had this feeling like pain
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: was leaking out of me and I couldn't control it,
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: I couldn't regulate it. And my doctor told me a
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: story that, again I now realize, was really oversimplified. My
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: doctor said, well, we know why people feel this way.
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: There's a chemical called serotonin in people's brains. Some people
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: are just naturally lacking it. You're clearly one of them.
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: All you need to do is take this drug. In
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: this case, he gave me an antidepressant called paxil. You're
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: gonna feel, You're gonna be fine, right, So I started
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: taking this antidepressant. I felt significantly better for a few
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: months real boost, and then this feeling of pain started
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: to come back. So I went back to my doctor again.
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: I felt better again, this feeling of pain came back,
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: and I was really locked in this cycle of taking
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: higher and higher doses until for thirteen years I was
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: taking the maximum doze, at the end of which I
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: was still profoundly depressed. And I really felt haunted by
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: these two mysteries. One is really related to what we're
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: talking about. You know, I'm nearly forty. Every year that
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: I've been alive, depression and anxiety have increased in the
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: United States and across the Western world, and I think, well, why, right,
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: if it was just a problem inside our brains, which
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: I think is simplistic in the way the chemical Hooks
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: story is simplistic about drugs, If it was just a
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: problem in our brains, why would it be rising so much.
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: It can't just be that all our brains start to
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: malfunction at the same time. There must be something deep,
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: deeper going on. And so I ended up going on
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: this big journey all over the world for lost connections,
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: as you know, and I learned that there's kind of
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: scientific evidence been nine causes of depression of anxiety, two
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: of which are biological, but most of which are factors
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: in the way we live now.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting that the work that you've done in
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: addiction and in that first book really boils down to
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: an assessment of how we're living culturally, this lack of
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: connectivity that we have that is fueling in large part,
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: this increase in a substance addiction across the board. When
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: I and then how you've now extended that to look
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: at mental disorder, specifically depression and anxiety, and it's it's
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: really the same thing. And in order to really kind
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: of understand this as we begin to you know, look
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: at these nine reasons which we're going to get into, we.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: Have to look.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: We have to like step back and look at society.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: You know, it's like to echo Henry David Thureaux, you know,
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: the massive menly lives of quiet desperation. And it's more
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: true now than ever people are more disconnected from their
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: fellow man. I know, you have that statistic where I
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: don't know how long ago it was that if you
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: ask somebody how many good friends do you have that
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: would come to your aid, it was somewhere in the
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: range of five and now.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: For a lot of people it's zero.
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: The most common eyes now when you ask people how
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: many close friends do you have a tendiment a crisis
• 19:01
  Speaker 3: is none. Right, So there's been this enormous and this
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: is one of many pieces of Evidus Stows there's been
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: and we are the loneliest society there's ever been. Right,
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: there's been this enormous explosion in loneliness.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: Ironic given the connectivity that the devices we all carry
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: around in our back pocket, you know, provide us with.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: But it's elusive, illusory compared to real connectivity with another
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: human being. And I think laid on top of this
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: is a system, a cultural priority, that this engine that
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: is driving us to distance ourselves further and further away
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: from each other because the mandate is to succeed to
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: get as much as you can for yourself, to live
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: this life of luxury, of convenience.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: And we have lost sight of what it.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Is that that truly makes us human in the most
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: beautiful way, which is our relationship with each other, with
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: our families, the networks that we create, the conic activity,
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: the cooperation that allowed this species that you know, if
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: you ask, you've all Noah Harari should have never survived,
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: yet we were able to do so simply because of
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: this genetic predisposition that we have to be connected with
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: each other.
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: And that's what we've lost.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: And I think we're now seeing on a mass epidemic
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: scale the results of what happens when the human being
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: is removed from that basic requirement that we have in
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: order to feel contented, fulfilled, purposeful, engaged with life and
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: the sense that the lives that we're pursuing have meaning.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: It is a crisis of consciousness. It's a spiritual crisis
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: as much as anything else, and it really boils down
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: to the way that we've structured the society in which
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: we live.
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of things in what you
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: just said that totally right. So I learned a lot
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: about this from a man called Professor John Cassiopo. He
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: sadly just died, but he was the leading expot on
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: loneliness in the world. He was at the University of Chicago.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: He explained a few things to me that were really important.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: The touch on what you said. So he talked about
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: he said, I remember him saying to me, why are
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: we alive? Why do we exist. One key reason is
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: that our ancestors on the savannahs of Africa were really
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: good at one thing. They usually were not faster than
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: the animals they tracked down. They usually weren't bigger than
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: the animals they tread down. What they were was much
• 21:23
  Speaker 3: better at banding together into groups and cooperating. So, just
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: like bees evolved to need a hive, humans evolved to
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: need a tribe. In fact, humans who had wandered off
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: on their own would have died out right. A species
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: inclined to do that would not have continued to exist.
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: And actually, if you think about those circumstances, if you
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: were separated from the tribe and the circumstances where we evolved,
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: you would be depressed and anxious for a really good reason.
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: You were probably about to die. Those are the instincts
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: we have. Right, If you separate a bee from its hive,
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: it will go crazy. Look at it. It will lose its mind, right,
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: it will panic, it will freak out, It'll be profoundly distressed,
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: and it will just give up. In a similar way,
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: we are the first humans to ever try to disband
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: our tribes to try to live alone. And this is
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: a disaster for us a real disaster. And one of
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: the things I wanted to think about is, given that
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: there's overwhelming evidence that is a cause of depression, what
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: is the antidepressant for that? Right? And I learned one
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: of the heroes of my book Lost Connections is this
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: amazing man called Dr Sam Everington, who's a doctor in
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: East London, right, a poor part of East London where
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: I lived for a long time. And Sam was really
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: uncomfortable because, like me, he thinks there's some role for
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: chemical antidepressants. But he was just very conscious of two things. Firstly,
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: most of the people he was giving chemicalnity depressants too,
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: were becoming depressed again. It was giving a bit of relief.
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: And secondly they were depressed for perfectly good reason. So
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: you know, one of the nine causes that we're talking
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: about here is lost connection. Sorry, his loneliness. So one
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: day he decided to pioneer a different approach. A woman
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: came to see him who I got to know quite well,
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: called Lisa Cunningham. And Lisa had been shut away in
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: our home with just crippling depression and anxiety for seven years.
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'm going to
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: carry on giving you this drug. I'm also going to
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: prescribe something else. There was an area behind the doctor's
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: surgery that was known as dog Shit Alley, which gives
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: you a sense of what it was like. It's just
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: to kind of scrubland. And Sam said to Lisa, what
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: I'd like you to do is come and turn out
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: a couple of times a week. I'm going to come
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: to because I've been quite anxious, and with a group
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: of other depressed and anxious people, we're going to turn
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: dog shit Alley into something nice. Right, first time the
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: group met, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety. But
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: they decided this group that they were going to learn gardening. Right.
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: They were in a city, East London, people like me
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: and anything about gardening right. They started to get their
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: of the seasons. But an even more important things started
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: to happen. They began to by the way, she shoulday
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: about that, there's loads of evidence that exposure to the
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: natural world is a really.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Powerful antiprise and connection with others exactly.
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: They started to form a tribe. They started to form
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: a group. They started to care about each other. They
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: started to solve each other's problems. They started to notice
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: if one of them didn't show up and go and
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: check on them, the way Lisa put it to me,
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom.
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: It was a study in Norway of a very similar
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: program that found it was more than twice as effective
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: as chemical antidepressants. I think for an obvious reason. It
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: was dealing with some of the reasons why they were
• 24:25
  Speaker 3: depressed and anxious in the first place. This is something
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: I saw all over the world, from South Paolo to
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: Sydney to San Francisco. The best strategies for dealing with
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: this epidemic of despair, this depression, this anxiety, this addiction
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: are the ones that deal with the reasons why we
• 24:41
  Speaker 3: feel like this in the first place.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting that I feel like we're seeing this
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: trend of people like yourself that are coming out and
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: looking at problems that we were experiencing as a culture,
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: as human beings that we have traditionally treated in a
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: certain way, and that way being kind of part and
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: parcel of the the cashtalt of the scientific method, producing
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: less and less beneficial results, and then now we're kind
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: of looking in the rear view mirror and saying, hold on,
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: I know we all think this is working, but it's
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: actually not working so well, why don't we look back
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: through history and see how we've dealt with these problems
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: as a species in the past, and realizing that there's
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: a lot of wisdom there that we've overlooked. We like
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: to think that we've transcended, you know, these primal needs
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: that we can live in these hermetically sealed environments, that
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: we can drive around in air conditioning, and we can,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: you know, do what we do and be perfectly fine
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: and pop a pill if we feel less than stellar,
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: and that's the end of the story. When in fact,
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: in order to really fully redress this, we need to
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: look at it holistically and understand that it's not one thing.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: It's not.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: A constant or a variable that we can just tweak,
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: but we need to really reassess how we're fundamentally living,
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: you know, in every aspect of that.
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: I think that's a really good way of putting it,
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: you know. The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti said, it's no sign
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: of good health to be well adjusted to a six society.
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: And if you are uncomfortable and distressed in a world
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: where Donald Trump is the most powerful person, that's not
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: a sign that you're crazy. That's a sign that you're
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: saying And I think it's important to think about this.
• 26:37
  Speaker 3: So there's there's there's there's extremely strong scientific evidence that
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: there are three kinds of cause of depression and anxiety,
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: and to some degree, they play out in in fact,
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: all forms of mental and emotional problems. So there's biological
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: causes like your genes, like real brain changes that happen
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: when you become depressed that can make it somewhat harder
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: to get out. Those are real, right. There are people
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: who deny them. They are definitely wrong. The evidence is
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: very clear on that. There are psychological causes, which are
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: how you think about yourself, and there are social causes,
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: which are how we live together. And these are all real.
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: But what we've done is we've largely as a culture,
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: told a story that focuses exclusively on the biology. Right,
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: think about what my doctor told me, there's just a
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: problem in your brain. The problem with that, well, the
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: first problem with that is is not true, right, But
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: the second problem with that is what it tells people
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: is your distress doesn't mean anything. It's like a glitch
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: in a computer program. And someone who really helped me
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: to think a bit differently about this, I want to
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: interview this South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield, who's a
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: wonderful man, and he happened to be in Cambodia in
• 27:44
  Speaker 3: two thousand and one when they introduced chemical anity depressants
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: for the first time for the people in that country
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: and the local doctors. The Cambodian doctors have never heard
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: of these drugs, so they were like, what are they
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: and he explained, and they said, oh, we don't need them,
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: We've already got antid And he said, what do you mean.
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: He thought they were going to talk about some kind
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: of herbal remedy like Saint John's waters and thing. Instead
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: they told him a story. There was a farmer in
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: their community who one day stood on a lamb mine
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: and got his leg blown off. He worked in the
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: rice fields, so they gave him an artificial limb and
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: he went back to work in the rice fields after
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: I forget what it was some months, but apparently it's
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: very painful to work underwater. With an artificial leg. I'm
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: guessing it was traumatic for obvious reasons. The guy started
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: to cry all day, didn't want to get out of bed,
• 28:28
  Speaker 3: developed classic depression. They said to Dr. Somerfield, well that's
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: when we gave him an antidepressant. And he said what
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: They explained that. They went and sat with him, they
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense.
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: They figured if they brought him a cow, he could
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: that was screwing him up so much. So they brought
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped.
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: Within a month, his depression was gone. They said to
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: Dodor Summerfield, So that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: what you mean right now, if you've been raised to
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: think about this the way we have, that sounds like
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: a joke. I went about dodtr for an anti depressed
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: and he gave me a cow. But what those Cambodian
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: doctors knew, intuitively is what the leading medical body in
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: the world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: tell us for years. If you're depressed, if you're anxious,
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: you're not crazy. You're not a machine with broken parts.
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: You're a human being with unmet needs, and what you
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: need is practical love and support from the people around
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: you to get those deeper needs met. It's a very
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: different way of talking about these problems that explains to
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: people their pain is a signal, it means something, it
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: evolved for a reason, is telling you your needs aren't
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: being met, or some other things obviously reference to a biology.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: There's some you know, psychological event that occur that you
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: haven't really fully processed or worked through. There's some there's
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: some hitch in your operating system that requires redress.
• 29:51
  Speaker 3: And what I wouldn't say, I wouldn't call it a
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: hitch an operating system.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: I would say experiencing grief in the loss of a
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: loved one or something like like, yes, there are natural
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: reactions that you know, we've kind of been told we
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: should just get over that kind of stuff rather than
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: really just embrace them for what they are, because that
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: is that is what it is to be human, and
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: that's certainly fine. And to stigmatize that, or to to
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: to kind of pathologize that as certain is certainly wrong.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: But they're they're there are messages. They're wake up calls
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: that signal yeah, basically you need to do that.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: And I think to go back to the cultural piece.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: You know, someone's grieving the loss of a loved one
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: and they're uncomfortable sitting with that grief.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: We have a system that's set up to help you
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: and say you don't need to feel this way, like
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: take this, take this pill.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: Right, because we've gotten to a place where it's almost.
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: Understood that we never need to feel.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: Bored or uncomfortable or ill at ease, right, that we
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: can that we can just medicate all of that and
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: and place it in that as this idea that we
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: should all be happy all the time.
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: I think people are right to want to be happy
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: and satisfied in their lives. The question is is a
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: deeper thing I think you're getting at, which is so
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: let's think about grief. For example, there was this thing
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: that happened in the nineteen seventies that I think is
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: really revealing. So in the nineteen seventies, the APA, the
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: American Psychiatric Association, who are obviously the main body of
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: psychiatrists in the US and psychologists decided to do a
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: kind of basic kind of obvious thing. They decided they
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: were going to standardize how depression was diagnosed across the US,
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: so up to then, doctors were just basically deciding for
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: themselves what depression meant. So the APA drew up a
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: simple checklist of ten symptoms, a kind of obvious things,
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: crying a lot, you know, you could guess them. There's
• 31:49
  Speaker 3: ten list of ten symptoms, and they send it to
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: doctors all over the United States and they say, if
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: your patient shows more than five of these ten symptoms
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: for more than two weeks, diagnosed as mentally ill, and
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: do what you can. So they send this out, but
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: within quite a short period afterwards, psychiatrists start to come
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: back and go, we've got a bit of a problem here.
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: If we use this checklist in the way you're telling
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: us to, we're going to have to diagnose every grieving
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: person in the United States is depressed, because these are
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: also the symptoms of grief. And the APA got together
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: and they said, well, that's not what we meant. Clearly
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: we didn't intend that. So they invented something that became
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: known as the grief loophole, where they said, okay, if
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: your patient has come to you and they've got more
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: than five of these ten symptoms for more than two weeks,
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: diagnose them as mentally ill unless someone they love has
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: died in the last year, in which case it doesn't count.
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: Except they're not a crazy well exactly, so they started
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: doing this, but this began to beg the question, Hang
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: on a minute, why is someone you love dying? What
• 32:47
  Speaker 3: we're saying is what we meant to tell Dr Mentell people,
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: is so, if you feel this way, it's just a
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: problem in your brain that just needs to be drugged
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: into submission. Except there is one circumstance in life where
• 32:57
  Speaker 3: it's an understandable response. Well, why is that the only circumstance?
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: Why if my mother dies, I'm allowed to feel like that,
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: But not if I lose my job? Why not if
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: I become homeless? Why not if I'm stuck in a
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: job I hate for the next forty years? Right? But
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: what that does is wonderful woman called Dr Joan Cassiotrre,
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: who's the leading expert on traumatic grief in the United States,
• 33:17
  Speaker 3: has really done amazing work on this, asking well, once
• 33:21
  Speaker 3: you acknowledge that depression can be largely a response to life,
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: that just challenges the whole system we've built. The system
• 33:30
  Speaker 3: we've built is not designed to talk about context. It's
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: not designed to talk about how do we sit with
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: you and hold you and love you and help you
• 33:38
  Speaker 3: change your life? Right, as she puts it, we just
• 33:41
  Speaker 3: don't understand pain in this culture. We've developed a bizarre
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: way of talking about paying. It's so bizarre that I
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: did an interview recently on a radio show where I
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: was talking about we were talking before in a similar
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: way to the way were between before, about loneliness causing depression,
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: and the interview said to me, well, this is an
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: extremely controversial theory, And I thought, how do we get
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: to the point where it was regarded as controversial to
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: point out the most banal and obvious thing, which is
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: if you're lonely, you're going to be much more likely
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: to be acutely unhappy. So I think the grief exception
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: debate reveals something really deep about how we have misunderstood pain.
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: And so Joanne dot To Cassiatrure would be a great
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: person for you to talk to and give an intro
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: to her. She's an extraordinary woman and her baby died
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: during birth, her daughter Cheyenne, as she was devastated, and
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: she was horrified to be to see how many other
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: grieving parents were very rapidly being diagnosed as mentally ill
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: and drugged. Right, because the APA was so uncomfortable with
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: this debate about the grief loophole, they just got rid of.
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: It doesn't exist anymore, right, So now you can be
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: diagnosed almost immediately after your child dies. In fact, nine
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: percent of parents who lose a baby in the United
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: States are diagnosed and drugged in the first forty eight hours. Right.
• 34:58
  Speaker 3: And it's dot to Cassiotoy puts it, We grieve because
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: we've loved, right, grief is a testament to our love.
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: It's not a glitch, it's not a pathology. It's a
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: profound form of love. If someone you love dies, it
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: is natural and necessary to grieve. If you interrupt that process,
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: if you pathologize the pain, if you say you know,
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: it's a sign of so for example, one of Joanne's clients,
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: she now treats people who've gone through terrible traumatic grief.
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: You know, one of her parents, one of the parents
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: she work with, mentioned to a psychiatrist that when she
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: would lie there at night, she would sometimes hear her
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: son's voice talking to her, not in a distressing way,
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: in fact, soothed her entirely natural form of grieving. She
• 35:47
  Speaker 3: was diagnosed as psychotic and prescribe loads of antipsychotics. You
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: can see what, ironically, what a crazy system that is
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: that's telling us we're crazy for having perfectly natural human responses.
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting that somebody would say that these ideas
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: are controversial. I mean, there is a little controversy around
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: your book, and I read a couple of those articles
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: trying to understand what exactly that controversy is, and it
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: seems to me to be a misreading of what you
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: actually say in the book. It's this perspective that you're saying,
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: everything we know about SSR eyes and these drugs that
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: were over prescribing to people.
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: Is wrong.
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: We shouldn't be doing this at all. And here's the
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: real reason, when in fact, you're saying, listen, let's look
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: at these SSR eyes, let's look at these drugs. Let's
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: look at the system and the history behind how we
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: got to this point so that we can fully understand
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: the context of the world that we're talking about. And
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: nowhere in the book do you say these things should
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: be gotten rid of you say, look, if this is
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: working for you, you should do it. I've been on and
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: off them, and for certain people they do work. And
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: you're also not saying that any of these ideas are
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: new or your own, or that they aren't already part
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: of the literature and the protocols that a lot of
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: you know, well intentioned psychologists and psychiatrists are putting into
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: practice with their patients.
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: It's just that it's not enough, right.
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: You're zeroing in on the scenario in which the overplayed
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: scenario in which the person goes to their shrink or
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: doctor and because of the healthcare system that we have,
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: they have fifteen minutes to diagnose this person and prescribe
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: them something, and more often than not, people leave those
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: appointments with a script that they go and they fill
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: and that's the end of the story. There isn't that aftercare.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: There isn't the functional medicine, you know, sort of rubric
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: established that gives the well intentioned medical practitioner the time,
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: the bandwidth to really have the kind of conversations that
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: are required in order to provide the person with the
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: optimal care that they need.
• 38:07
  Speaker 3: So I think there's loads of things in what you said,
• 38:09
  Speaker 3: I think you're right that I mean, so the people
• 38:12
  Speaker 3: who responded to the book in the way that you mention,
• 38:15
  Speaker 3: I mean, they to be fatter than they admit they
• 38:17
  Speaker 3: hadn't read it.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: So there was a bunch of people who they were
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: like they got little snippets of it or whatever, and
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: we're writing reviews.
• 38:23
  Speaker 3: But yeah, so it's not even a misreading, it's a
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: non reading. But no, I think in terms of but
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: I do understand why some people when they hear some
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: of these things find it deeply challenging, because I found
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: it really challenging. Right For thirteen years, I was very
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: committed to the idea that my depression was just the
• 38:42
  Speaker 3: problem with my brain chemistry, and I found that relieving
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: and a sort of ways so happy to talk about.
• 38:47
  Speaker 3: But I think there's a few things in what you
• 38:50
  Speaker 3: said that are worth bringing up. So one is you're
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: absolutely right. I'm not against chemical innterer depressions. I just
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: think we need to have a nuanced conversation about them.
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: So the two most important thing about chemicalientty depressants that
• 39:01
  Speaker 3: I learned from the leading scientists in the world who've
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: studied this are One is so depression is generally measured
• 39:08
  Speaker 3: by something called the Hamilton scale. I've always felt really
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: sorry forever Hamilton was that we only remember him by
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: that miserable we are.
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: But anyway, this is the one to fifty one then.
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so it goes from one where you would be
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: dancing around in ecstasy or maybe on ecstasy, to fifty
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: one where you would be acutely suicidal. And to give
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: you a sense of movement on the Hamilton scale, if
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: you improve your sleep patterns, you'll generally gain six points
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: on the Hamilton scale, and if your sleep patterns deteriorate,
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: you'll generally go six points the other way.
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: I can definitely validate that.
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you've had children. Yeah, but so according to the
• 39:42
  Speaker 3: leading expert Harvard Medical School who's looked at the data,
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: all the data inclaning the data the drug companies didn't publish,
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: but you managed to get hold of on average, over time,
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: chemicaliantity depressants will move people one point eight points on
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: the Hamilton scale. It's important so a few things personally,
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: that's an average. So I initially got much more than that.
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: Over time, I got less, is what I say. One
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: point eight points isn't nothing, right, that's a real effect.
• 40:05
  Speaker 2: A good night of sleep gets you six points.
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean some people will get more than that.
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: But I think that fits also with the and by
• 40:13
  Speaker 3: the way, some people say he slightly underestimates the effect
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: of looking at the same data. They say it's three
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: points on the Hamilton scale, but no one says it's
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: more than three points, or so more than half of
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: improving your sleep pans. But that fits with I think
• 40:24
  Speaker 3: the even more important piece of research, which is that
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: the only good long term research we have on the
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: effects of chemicalenter depressants when it comes to depression. It's
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: then called the star de trial. It's really simple. They
• 40:35
  Speaker 3: follow people go to their doctor, they say I'm depressed,
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: and they follow The study follows them over two years
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: to see eighteen months to two years to see well
• 40:45
  Speaker 3: do they stop being depressed. What it found is the
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: vast majority of people taking chemicaland of depressants do become
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: depressed again. Now that doesn't mean they don't get some relief.
• 40:53
  Speaker 3: They do get some relief, a lot of them. But
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: what we can see is it's not solving the problem.
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: And in a way, I think this is a rather
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: banal insight.
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: It actually in certain cases can prevent you from solving
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: the actual problem because you think that you've solved it
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: when actually you're just treating a symptom without actually getting
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: at the rationale, the reason behind what's driving the depressive emersion.
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: I think there's several things going on there. I think
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: you're right to raise that. So one is some people
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: benefit and get a benefit which outweighs the side effects.
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: It's true some of my closest relatives, some people get
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: a benefit and enormous side effects, like a lot of people.
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: I gained a huge amount of weight, seventeen percent of men,
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: affects their sexual functioning, all sorts of problems. So some
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: people get a benefit, but the side effects out way
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: the benefit. Some people don't get a benefit and get
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: her into side effects. But I think you've gone to
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: the I think in a way the more important thing,
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: which is if you are told a story that your
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: depression is simply a biological problem and can only be
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: treated with drugs, it comes back to what we're saying.
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: That just tells people there's no meaning to their pain.
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: It actually cuts them off from finding the causes of
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: their pain in their life, and it cuts off offers
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: a society. But I would just say, just a second
• 42:03
  Speaker 3: thought about what you said before, and it's worth saying
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: this is not my views is to be the leading
• 42:07
  Speaker 3: medical body in the world, the World Health Organization. But
• 42:10
  Speaker 3: when you said, you know so, part of the problem
• 42:13
  Speaker 3: is that your doctors only have fifteen minutes and so
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: when it's actually seven minutes now is the average? But
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: that's true, and it's an even deeper thing if we
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: think about road accidents, right, Car accidents still the single
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: biggest cause of death although operioids are coming up close
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: behind it in our society. When you think about how
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: do we prevent road accidents, right, one of or deaths
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: in car crashes. One of the things we do is
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: we have doctors in emergency rooms and they do heroic
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: jobs when someone's already been horrifically mauled. And the doctors
• 42:44
  Speaker 3: are heroes and they're amazing, but they are not the
• 42:46
  Speaker 3: people who save the most lives. Right, What do we
• 42:48
  Speaker 3: do as a society. We have driving tests, so we
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: make sure you can drive before you get onto the road.
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: We have speed limits, we have seat belts, we have
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: air bags, and the cops out to chase down people
• 43:01
  Speaker 3: driving chaotically to see if they're deuis or drug driving
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: environmental control exactly precisely, because it's a social problem. We
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: have an enormous social response, of which one part which
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: is amazing and heroic, is the biomedical response of doctors
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: patching you back together. But that's one thing on a
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: big long list, right. In the same way, the evidence
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: is overwhelming that depression and anxiety have huge social and
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: psychological causes alongside the biological causes. Right, Very few people
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: will dispute that, although it's rarely explained to the public
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: that needs a social response, right. So, there are lots
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: of things that the evidence shows very clearly can reduce
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: this epidemic that are much earlier down the chain, if
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: you like. Then by the time the person becomes acutely
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: depressed and goes to the doctor. So I'll give you
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: an example. I noticed that lots of the people I
• 43:53
  Speaker 3: know who are depressed and anxious, that depression anxiety focuses
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: around their work. So I started to to think, are
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: the people I know unusual? I start to look at
• 44:03
  Speaker 3: the evidence of this. So Gallup did the best research,
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: enormous study, three year study that figure out how do
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: people feel about their jobs. In the United States, what
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: they found was thirteen percent of us like our jobs
• 44:16
  Speaker 3: most of the time, one three percent, sixty.
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: Three percent pretty high, that's higher than it.
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: Oh my god, sixty three percent of what they called
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: sleep working. You don't like it, you don't hate it,
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: You just kind of get through the day. And twenty
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: four percent of people hate and fear their jobs. It
• 44:35
  Speaker 3: was quite struck when I saw that. I mean, eighty
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: seven percent of people don't like the thing they're doing.
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: Most of their waking.
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: Lives and jobs.
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: You know, most jobs these days are not nine to five,
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: they're you know, from the minute you wake up in
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: the morning and check your phone to the last you know,
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: check on the phone before you go to bed, and
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: constantly we're you know, we're all on call twenty four
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: to seven.
• 44:57
  Speaker 2: If you don't like what you do, it's academic that
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: this is going to lead to psychological issues.
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: Well, I think that's right, and I started to look
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: for the evidence. How is there any evidence about depression
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: and work. I discovered there's an amazing man, Australian social scientist.
• 45:14
  Speaker 3: So I went to go and see called Professor Michael Marmott,
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: who made a real breakthrough about this in the nineteen seventies.
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: So he discovered the key factor, not the only one,
• 45:23
  Speaker 3: but the key factor that causes depression at work. If
• 45:26
  Speaker 3: you go to work tomorrow and you are controlled, so
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: you have low or no control over your work, you
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: are much more likely to become depressed and anxious. And
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: at first, when I was looking at this evidence, and
• 45:36
  Speaker 3: I went to interview with Professor Mormot a few times,
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: I kept misunderstanding it. So I thought the lesson of
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: this was, Okay, you've got this elite thirteen percent at
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: the top who get to have nice jobs where they
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: control it and they're going to be fine, and then
• 45:49
  Speaker 3: you've got everyone else who's condemned to this shitty life.
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: And I thought, wow, my brother's an uber driver, my
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: dad was a bus driver. My grandmother's job was to
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: clean toilets. Are we saying that these people I love
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: are condemned. Professor A. Marment kept explaining, it's not the
• 46:02
  Speaker 3: work that makes you depressed, it's a lack of control
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: over the work, and there's something we can do about that,
• 46:06
  Speaker 3: which I think is the equivalent of your seat bags
• 46:08
  Speaker 3: and your DUI arrest. Right, So I went to Baltimore
• 46:12
  Speaker 3: and went to interview a wonderful person called Meredith Keoh.
• 46:17
  Speaker 3: Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night just
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: sick with anxiety. She had an office job. As she
• 46:22
  Speaker 3: would tell you, it wasn't the worst office job in
• 46:24
  Speaker 3: the world. She wasn't being bullied or harassed or anything,
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: but it was monotonous, low control. She couldn't bear the
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: thought this was going to be the next forty years
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: of her life. So one day, with her husband, Josh,
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: Meredith did this quite bold thing. And at first time
• 46:38
  Speaker 3: people hear this, the thing I'm going to think, I'm
• 46:39
  Speaker 3: saying you should do this too. Are You're going to
• 46:42
  Speaker 3: think I can't do that? And it's true most people can't.
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: It leads to a different insight. So Josh worked in
• 46:47
  Speaker 3: a bike store in Baltimore, you know, and he'd done
• 46:51
  Speaker 3: it since it was a teenager. And as you can imagine,
• 46:54
  Speaker 3: that's insecure work. It's controlled what You don't even have
• 46:56
  Speaker 3: any vacation, paid vacation, or paid sick pain unless your
• 47:00
  Speaker 3: boss happens to be generous. And one day Josh and
• 47:03
  Speaker 3: his colleagues were in their bike store and they just
• 47:06
  Speaker 3: ask themselves what does that boss actually do. They liked
• 47:10
  Speaker 3: their boss. He wasn't a terrible guy, but they were like,
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: we seem to fix all the bikes and he seems
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: to make all the money. Could this work out differently here?
• 47:19
  Speaker 3: And they decided they were going to set up a
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: bike store of their own that worked on a different principle.
• 47:22
  Speaker 3: So the place they'd worked before was a corporation. Right,
• 47:25
  Speaker 3: most people listening to your show working corporations. You know
• 47:28
  Speaker 3: how it works. You've got a boss at the top
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: who's like the dictator, and we're all the little serfs.
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: And sometimes the dictator chooses to be nice, and sometimes
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: they don't. But you don't have much say over that.
• 47:37
  Speaker 3: Josh and his friends and colleagues and Meredith decided they
• 47:41
  Speaker 3: were going to set up a bike store that works
• 47:42
  Speaker 3: on a different principle, an older American principle. It's a
• 47:45
  Speaker 3: democratic cooperative. They don't have a boss. They take the
• 47:48
  Speaker 3: decisions about the business together by voting. In practice, they
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: agree almost all the time, but they vote once every
• 47:52
  Speaker 3: a couple of weeks. They share the profits, obviously, they
• 47:56
  Speaker 3: share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks, so
• 47:58
  Speaker 3: no one gets stuck with the shitty task. And one
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: of the things that was fascinating spending time with them
• 48:04
  Speaker 3: at Baltimore Bicycle Works, which is their store, is how
• 48:07
  Speaker 3: many of them talked about having been depressed and anxious
• 48:10
  Speaker 3: in this previous way of working. But we're not depressed
• 48:14
  Speaker 3: and anxious in this different way of working it and
• 48:18
  Speaker 3: it totally fits with what Professor Mahmut had taught me.
• 48:21
  Speaker 3: It's not like they quit their jobs fixing bikes and
• 48:23
  Speaker 3: went off to become Beyonce's backing singers. Right. They fixed
• 48:26
  Speaker 3: bikes before they fixed bikes. Now the difference is now
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: they've got control over their work. And when you control
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: your work, you can create meaning out of it. Right,
• 48:33
  Speaker 3: If you have an idea, you can try to persuade
• 48:35
  Speaker 3: the people around you, you can try to put it into practice.
• 48:38
  Speaker 3: You don't feel humiliated, you don't feel subordinated. There's no
• 48:41
  Speaker 3: reason why we should be structuring our society. So most
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: of us are spending time in institutions that make us
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: feel like shit.
• 48:49
  Speaker 2: Right, we can see the sense of agency exactly right.
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: It's I mean, it's.
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: Multifaceted because you have ownership, you have decision making control,
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: you have some you know, sense of decision making power
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: over your hours. I would imagine there's a whole variety
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: of things that get played into that, but fundamentally, it's
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: about agency over your life. When people lack that, whether
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: it's in their job or other areas of their life,
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: that's going to lead to a sense of disempowerment that
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: I think will quickly, you know, cascade into despair.
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: You have a that's a bring up a pinon. You
• 49:22
  Speaker 3: have a natural human need to seek meaning in your life,
• 49:27
  Speaker 3: and if you're doing something that's controlled by someone else
• 49:30
  Speaker 3: almost all of your waking hours, that disrupts your ability
• 49:34
  Speaker 3: to create meaning out of it. Right.
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: I think the idea of meaning gets confused, Like if
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: you say, well, does your life have meaning or what
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: is the you know, are you living a meaningful life?
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: That can get misconstrued into.
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: You know, this idea that you're on a grand quest
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: to answer some universal question or something like that. But
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: I think, you know what I mean, yeah, like you're, yeah,
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: you're searching for the ring or like you're trying to
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: find God.
• 50:01
  Speaker 2: But it's really just I.
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: Think some some sense of control and purposefulness on a
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: very basic level that so many of.
• 50:10
  Speaker 2: Us, uh, so many of us lack and as you.
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: Know, cities become larger and all these what you're seeing
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: is the the the acceleration of specialization in all of
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: these fields, where now jobs become so regimented into performing
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: these very you know, very specific tasks. You see it
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: in medicine. It used to be the family doctor who
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: paid house calls. Now every doctor has a very specific
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: specialty that allows them to be very good at that
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: one thing, but they they lack a general understanding or not,
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: like we lose sight of the bigger picture. And I
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: think when you know, we're being funneled in that direction
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: of greater and greater specificity, with that comes a loss
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: of that level of agency as well.
• 50:59
  Speaker 3: This is what one of the causes of depression and
• 51:02
  Speaker 3: anxiety that I wrote about in Lost Connections that I
• 51:04
  Speaker 3: found quite challenging. Actually, so everyone knows that junk food
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: has taken over our diets and made us physically sick,
• 51:13
  Speaker 3: but there's equally strong evidence that our kind of junk
• 51:16
  Speaker 3: values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick.
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: Question about it.
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but for thousands of years philosophers have said, you know,
• 51:24
  Speaker 3: from Confucius to Socrates, on down. If you think life
• 51:28
  Speaker 3: is about money and status and showing off, you're going
• 51:32
  Speaker 3: to feel like shit. Right, that's not exact quote from Confucius,
• 51:34
  Speaker 3: but that is the gist of what he said.
• 51:35
  Speaker 2: We all think were they going to be the exemption
• 51:37
  Speaker 2: to that rule?
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: Though? You know what I mean?
• 51:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: But well, this is what's fascinating because although people have
• 51:46
  Speaker 3: thought that for a long time, no one had actually
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: scientifically investigated it got until an incredible man I got
• 51:51
  Speaker 3: to know called Professor Tim Kassa, who's at Knox College
• 51:54
  Speaker 3: in Illinois, started to do amazing research into this. Professor
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: kass had discovered some really important things. One of the
• 52:02
  Speaker 3: things he discovered is the more you think life is
• 52:06
  Speaker 3: about money and status and showing off, the more likely
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: you are to become depressed and anxious, because that's not
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: a way of living that meets your deeper needs. He
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: also found as a society, as a culture, we've become
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: much more driven by these drunk values. They've really begun
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: to dominate the culture over time, and it's making us
• 52:24
  Speaker 3: feel terrible. There's a little experiment. It wasn't a number,
• 52:26
  Speaker 3: Professor Cassa. It has done just before he started his work.
• 52:28
  Speaker 3: But I think it's kind of a revealing one's starting
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy eight. It's very simple. They've got a
• 52:34
  Speaker 3: bunch of five year olds and they split them into
• 52:36
  Speaker 3: two groups, and the first group was shown an advertisement,
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: two advertisements for a specific toy, whatever the equivalent of
• 52:43
  Speaker 3: Dora the Explorer or the Tellytubbies was in nineteen seventy eight.
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: Second group was shown no advertisements. Then they say to
• 52:50
  Speaker 3: all the kids, go, kids, you've got a choice. Now.
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: You could either play with a nice boy who doesn't
• 52:56
  Speaker 3: have the toy that was in the ad, or you
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: can play with a nasty boy who's got the that
• 53:00
  Speaker 3: was in the ad. The kids who have not seen
• 53:02
  Speaker 3: the advertuse the nice boy. The kids who haven't so
• 53:05
  Speaker 3: the kids who haven't seen the advirtues the nice boy.
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: The kids who have seen the advertisement choose the nasty boy.
• 53:11
  Speaker 3: He's got the toy. Just two advertisements primed those kids
• 53:15
  Speaker 3: to choose an inanimate lump of plastic over the possibility
• 53:18
  Speaker 3: of connection and fun and friendship. Right, everyone sees more
• 53:21
  Speaker 3: than two adverts a day, Right, We're just bombarded with it.
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, I mean I don't know what the
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: number is, but it's got to be in the hundreds
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: of nine thousands every single day, depending upon where you
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: live in your media habits.
• 53:34
  Speaker 3: Well, as Professor Kassa put it to me, you know,
• 53:38
  Speaker 3: we all live in a machine that is designed to
• 53:42
  Speaker 3: get us to neglect what is important in life. Right,
• 53:45
  Speaker 3: Nobody listening to your show thinks they're going to lie
• 53:49
  Speaker 3: on their deathbed and think about all the things they bought. Right,
• 53:52
  Speaker 3: they will lie on their deathbed and think about moments
• 53:53
  Speaker 3: of love and connection and meaning in their lives. And
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: yet we've created a culture that is designed to get
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: to neglect those things. And Professor Cassa proposes two kinds
• 54:03
  Speaker 3: of solutions to this. So one is we need to
• 54:06
  Speaker 3: just get these contaminants out of the environment, right, analogous
• 54:09
  Speaker 3: to getting rid of environmental contaminants. You know, so I
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: went to sal Plo in Brazil where they just banned
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: out or advertising. Right, that's one thing we can do.
• 54:18
  Speaker 3: We should much more tightly regulate advertising. Advertising is the
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: ultimate frenemy. Right. Imagine an advert that said to you, hey, rich,
• 54:28
  Speaker 3: you look great today, you smell great, You're doing fine.
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: You don't need anything.
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: More save your money.
• 54:33
  Speaker 3: That would be the worst advert ever, right from the
• 54:35
  Speaker 3: perspective of the advertising industry. Advertising only. The advertising industry
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: talks about this openly in their documents. It's about creating
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: manufactured wants, manufactured needs, creating feelings of inadequacy that they
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: then have to keep selling the solution to over and
• 54:48
  Speaker 3: over again. That was a kind of example a few
• 54:50
  Speaker 3: years ago. That was a nice, illustrated, rare moment when
• 54:52
  Speaker 3: people push back where I think it was Dove, although
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: I could be wrong, a cosmetics company. It started to
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: sell a product. They said, are you embarrassed by how
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: wrinkly and disgusting your armpits are? Compassionately, we've created this
• 55:08
  Speaker 3: beautiful solution. Of course, no one was worried about how
• 55:11
  Speaker 3: their armpits look, because no sane person thinks about that. Right.
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: Of course, what it's subtly saying is you like the
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: ultimate front of me, our babe. I really care about you.
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: I'm on your side. Just so you know, people are
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: kind of saying your armpits look gross. You can see
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: how it works, right, I was a moment where people
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: really kicked back. There was another good moment in London.
• 55:27
  Speaker 3: I guess two years ago now where a company that
• 55:30
  Speaker 3: did I think there were protein shakes, launched a huge
• 55:33
  Speaker 3: ad campaign all over the London subway system that said,
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: are you beach body ready? And a picture of an
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: impossibly buff man or woman, right, the implication being if
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: you don't look like these people, you're not ready and
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: you better start drinking our protein shakes. Right. And there
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: was a huge backlash. You get people vandalized it, and
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: in the end they took them down from the subway system.
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: I think the mayor actually mayor in London City Car
• 55:56
  Speaker 3: and actually banned them because of course we could see
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: the occasionally they go too far and we see the
• 56:01
  Speaker 3: implicit message, right, But most of the time we're just
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: soaking this up. So part of the solution is get
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: the contaminants out of the environment, just get rid of
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: most advertising, extremely tightly regulate what remains. But professor, how
• 56:14
  Speaker 3: likely is that a lot more likely than gay marriage
• 56:17
  Speaker 3: seemed fifty years ago? You think, wow, you know, a
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: lot more likely than a black president seemed fifty years ago,
• 56:21
  Speaker 3: a lot more likely than President Trump seemed five years ago. Right,
• 56:25
  Speaker 3: go either way, but we're all the beneficiaries of things
• 56:29
  Speaker 3: that seem completely impossible, right. I mean, my grandmothers were
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: not allowed to have a bank account once they got married,
• 56:36
  Speaker 3: right of their own. That's not so long ago, right.
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: The weekend was a crazy radical idea when American trade
• 56:42
  Speaker 3: unionists proposed it for the first time. Now we take
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: it for granted, you know. So we're all the beneficiaries
• 56:49
  Speaker 3: of impossible seeming things that people fought for and didn't
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: give up and demanded. But Professor Cassa also said, there's
• 56:56
  Speaker 3: another another set of solutions w aitractionally more immediate achievable,
• 57:01
  Speaker 3: which are about how we inculcate these these more meaningful
• 57:05
  Speaker 3: values in ourselves. So he did this interesting experiment with
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: a guy called Nathan Dungan who I interviewed. So Nathan
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: was a came back in a kind of slightly funny way.
• 57:14
  Speaker 3: Nathan was a financial advisor in Minneapolis to adults help
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: them do budgeting things like that, And one day he
• 57:22
  Speaker 3: got contacted by this school in a middle class nabor
• 57:25
  Speaker 3: but not particularly fancy neighborhood saying, look, we've got a problem.
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: The kids in their school were demanding really expensive consumer
• 57:35
  Speaker 3: objects like Nike sneakers, and they were getting extremely distressed
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: when they didn't get them, and it was freaking out
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: the school. It's freaking out their parents that they're like,
• 57:44
  Speaker 3: what can we do? And they asked him to come
• 57:46
  Speaker 3: in and do what he did, which was give budgeting advice.
• 57:48
  Speaker 3: So he comes in to advise the kids on budgeting
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: and quite quickly realizes this ain't a budgeting issue, right,
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: There's something deeper going on here. So he starts to
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: work with the He did this interesting experiment that the
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: money to set up with Professor Cassa that was monitored.
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: So what they did is they would get teenagers and
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: their parents to come. They would meet in groups. I
• 58:08
  Speaker 3: think it was once a fortnight for six months, something
• 58:10
  Speaker 3: like that. And at first, the first thing, the very
• 58:14
  Speaker 3: first session, the teenagers and parents had to write down
• 58:17
  Speaker 3: what they thought they had to have right and initial
• 58:21
  Speaker 3: course people would initially say food and shelter and perfectly
• 58:23
  Speaker 3: sensible things, and quite quickly the teenagers would say I
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: got to have you know, whatever the latest designer object was,
• 58:29
  Speaker 3: and then they would say, tell me what you would
• 58:32
  Speaker 3: feel if you got those objects, if you got that thing.
• 58:36
  Speaker 3: Quite quickly, the teenager quite quickly it was clearly not
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: about an inherent property of the consumer objects. So, for example,
• 58:44
  Speaker 3: when I was a teenager, I remember craving Nike sneakers.
• 58:46
  Speaker 3: You could not have had a child who was further
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: away from playing basketball like Michael Jordan than me. Right,
• 58:52
  Speaker 3: why did I want it? You know? Why did these
• 58:54
  Speaker 3: kids want it? They would say things like, well, I
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: would feel accepted by the group.
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: It's social acceptance. It's where you fall in the pecking order.
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: And I think at that age the social dynamics are
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: feel like life and death. It's very acute at that age.
• 59:10
  Speaker 3: And it didn't take long for the kids to articulate
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: what you're saying for them to go, huh, why do
• 59:17
  Speaker 3: I think that? Right? They didn't need much prompting as
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: the sessions went on, So where did you get the
• 59:23
  Speaker 3: idea that you will have value as an individual if
• 59:26
  Speaker 3: you have this lump of shitty.
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: From the eight thousand commercials and billboards that I've seen
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: in the last twenty four hours exactly?
• 59:34
  Speaker 3: So they would firstly what they did was work on seeing, well,
• 59:37
  Speaker 3: where did those junk values come from? They would look
• 59:39
  Speaker 3: at the ads. Everyone likes to think they're smarter than
• 59:41
  Speaker 3: the ad, and everyone began to realize, oh shit, the
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: ad got me right. But then they did it well,
• 59:46
  Speaker 3: I thought was the more interesting bit. They began to say, okay,
• 59:49
  Speaker 3: well set that stuff aside. What do you actually value,
• 59:54
  Speaker 3: what do you think is actually important in life? And
• 59:56
  Speaker 3: they started writing about and they started discussing it in groups.
• 59:58
  Speaker 3: We don't really have those conversations very often in culture,
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 3: certainly much less than we have conversations about shopping. And
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: they started talking about what they actually thought was important,
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 3: what actually gave them joy in their life. Something they
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 3: talked about, playing music, something talked about just love, the
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 3: whole range of things. I'm talking about being in the
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: natural world. And they started talking about, well, how could
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 3: you build more of that stuff into your life and
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 3: less of the junk. And they started to do it.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 3: And this was monitored over time, and what it found
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 3: was just this intervention and meeting once a fortnite led
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 3: to a really significant shift in people's values. What this
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 3: teusas Professor Kasser argues, I think persuasively, is these insights
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 3: are just below the surface, right. This is not like
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 3: explaining quantum physics or complex linguistics or something. In some ways,
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 3: these are almost banal insights. And yet the reason they
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 3: have to be stated and argued for is because we
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: created a culture that's all about getting us to not
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 3: see them. It's a machine that in fact faces real
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: challenges if we stop buying crap. Right. The problem is
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 3: if we carry on buy in the crap and thinking
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 3: that's what life is about, we have the crisis, not
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 3: that system. So I think it's about and you can
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 3: see again we've going touched on a few of the
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 3: causes obviously that I talk about lost connections, but you
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 3: can see again, this is a very different story than
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 3: telling someone there's just a chemical missing in your brain
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 3: and all you need to do is drug yourself. Right.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 3: It leads to a different set of attempted solutions. And
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: I believe very strongly in antidepressants in the sense that
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 3: people are really depressed. They're not making it up, they're
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 3: not imagining it. They are terribly depressed and anxious. They
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 3: need solutions to that. But what I argue is we
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 3: need to expand our concept to what antidepressants are. For
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: some people. One of the things on the menu should
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 3: remain chemical antidepressants. They have value, but we need a
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 3: much broader range of antipressants on the cow model, right,
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 3: that group that Nathan and Professor Kassa lead where they've
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: got people to talk about their values and it shifted
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 3: their values over time. That's an antidepressant. That gardening program
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 3: in East London that was an ant to depress. The
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 3: loss of the book is about these different kinds of antidepressants.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 3: They are just as real and just as important easily
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 3: as the kind of chemical solutions because they're tending to
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: some of the other closes.
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I think we're seeing some interesting
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: cultural movements at the moment that are kind of incarnations
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: of what you're talking about. I mean, this whole minimalism
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: thing that a lot of young people are super you know,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: all about and keen on that didn't really exist even
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: I don't know, five or.
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 2: Ten years ago.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: Now there's movies about it, there's movements, there's YouTube channels,
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: there's people with podcasts about this who are basically speaking
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: to gen Z and saying, listen, everything that you see
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: all around you every single day is promising you a lie.
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: The answers that you seek will not be found, you know,
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: in these in this material way, and in truth, that
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: which we seek the most will be found through connectivity,
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: through getting back to nature, to these things that you're
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: talking about, and it requires like a material shedding as
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: much as it does kind of.
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 2: A psychological rebooting of your software to really understand that
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 2: you need to look at the world through a different
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 2: pair of glasses.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 3: I think that's true, and I think it's interesting that
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 3: this is playing out with teenagers so much because the
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 3: figures for teenage distress are really shocking.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, what are they?
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 3: They're super high, the exception home. There's a varying part. Promise.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: It's difficult to measure distress over time because some of
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: the figures that show astronomical increases I think are slightly
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 3: misleading because there's been a decline in stigma of talking
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 3: about it. So that would mean that more people. For example,
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 3: my grandmother, I'm sure from having discussed this with her
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: while she was alive, was terribly depressed in her thirties
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 3: and forties. If anyone had ever asked, are you depressure?
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: What it said? No, and she will never dream to
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: go into the doctor. So there's been whereas it would
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 3: you know, if you know a relative mind the same
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 3: age now doesn't they would say yes and they would
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 3: get help. They would go to the doctor for help.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 3: So I think the kind of stratospheric figures for increase
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 3: and misleading. But I do think there's good evidence there
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 3: has been a significant increase. We know teenage suicide, for example,
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 3: has gone up, which is obviously a very relatively easy
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 3: way of measuring extreme distress. But I want to think
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 3: about obviously one of the factors we think about when
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 3: we talk about teenagers is social media and so on.
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 3: I want to think about this. One place is that
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: really helped me to understand it is I went to
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 3: the first of internet rehab center in the United States.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: Oh well, there's something like that. It's glad it does.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: It should exist.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 3: It's in Spokane. It's just outside Spokane in Washington. And
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 3: I remember when I arrived there. I remember getting out
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: of the car and absolutely instinctively looking at my phone
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 3: and being really pissed off that there was no reception
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 3: to check my email. And I was like, oh, right,
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 3: you're in there? Are you? Who is this place? Are
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 3: going in there? It was hell? What can I say?
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 3: But I remember going in there and talking to these
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 3: so they get also kind of it's place called Restart Washington.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 3: They get all kinds of people at Restart Washington, but
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 3: they disproportionately get young men who become obsessed with these
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 3: multiplayer roleplayer games like World of Warcraft or Fortnite or
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 3: their Fortnight didn't exist at the time that I was there.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: It's become an issue for them since I'm sure, and
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 3: speaking of these young men, I felt like I was
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: getting this kind of insight. And then I spoke to
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 3: doctor Hillary Cash, who runs the co runs the place.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: It was a great person and she really helped me
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 3: to understand it. So she said to me something like,
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 3: You've got to ask yourself, what are these young men
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 3: getting out of these games. They're getting the things they
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 3: used to get from the culture, but they no longer get.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 3: So what do they get. They get a sense of
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 3: tribe an identity. They get a sense of status and
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 3: a way they can gain status that they can feel
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 3: they're good at something. They get us and as they're
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: physically roaming around. The average child in Britain now spends
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 3: less time outdoors than the average maximum security prisoner because
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 3: by law, a maximum security prisoner has to have seventeen
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: minutes a day and most of our kids don't get that.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: But what they're getting is like a kind of parody
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: of those things. Right, I began to think because I
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 3: was speaking to her and the young men there, the
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 3: relationship between social media and social life is a bit
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 3: like the relationship between porn and sex. Right. I'm not
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 3: anti porn, but if your entire sex life consists of
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: looking at porn, you're going to be going around pissed
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 3: off and irritated the whole time because you didn't evolve
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 3: to masturbate over a screen. You evolved to have sex
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 3: in the same way. There's a place for screen based interaction.
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 3: Of course, I'm not some weird luod ie, but that's
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 3: not what we evolved to have. If you and I
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 3: were having this conversation over Skype, I wouldn't feel you
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: were hearing me, and you wouldn't feel you were hearing
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 3: now the other way around, in the way that we
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 3: feel we're hearing and seeing each other now, right, And
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: that let me to think about, Well, you've got to
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 3: think about when did the Internet arrive? Right, Because you
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: can get to a simplistic dialogue where you say, this
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 3: is just the Internet's for the Internet's this horror show.
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: But if you think about it and you look at
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 3: the evidence on this. The Internet arrives from most of
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 3: us in the late nineties the early two thousands. I
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 3: set my first email in the year two thousand and
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 3: a lot, not all, but a lot of the causes
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 3: of depression and anxiety that I write about and lost
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 3: connections had actually already been super charged by that point.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 3: So we've talked about couple of the loneliness meaningless work,
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 3: but adjunk values. What happens is the Internet arrives and
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 3: it looks a lot like the things we've lost. Right,
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: You've lost friends. Here's a whole range of Facebook friends,
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 3: You've lost status, as many status updates as you want. Right,
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 3: but again, it's like a parody of the thing we've lost.
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 3: And the expert on loneliness, Professor John Cassio Post said
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 3: to me, I'm a good kind of rule of thumb,
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 3: which is, if you're turning to the Internet as a
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 3: way station to meet people offline, great, If it's the
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 3: last destination on the line, generally something's gone wrong.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's it's a tricky thing because this is
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: the lexicon, you know, this is how more and more
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: people are communicating. And the solution isn't to completely put
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: the phone away and never use it and become a luddite.
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: But these devices are specifically designed to create that addictive response.
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think this is a perfect example of
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: where the work that you've done in an addiction and
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: depression dovetail directly into each other because you have a
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: highly addictive device in the hands of an undeveloped young
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: mind with apps on it that are specifically created to
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: create that you know, serotonin response that makes it almost
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: impossible for that kid to put that phone away.
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 2: So short of.
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: Completely putting it away, how do we as a parent,
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: Like this is something I think about all the time,
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: like how do we create structures around it to foster
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: a healthy relationship with the best of what it can do,
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: which is, you know, like they communicate with their friends
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: and they see their friends at school, so there is
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: that offline component to it, but it very easily, if
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: left unchecked, can evolve, and I think it does and
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: has with thousands, if not millions, of teenagers into a
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: compulsive behavior pattern that is truly an addiction that you know,
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: leads these young people to a very very dark place.
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 2: And it's not necessarily just young people.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 3: I think that's true, and I think we also going
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 3: to look at a bit like going back to wrap puk.
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 3: That addiction occurs in a context, right, And I think
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 3: it's worth explaining to people the way we are raising
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 3: our children is deeply weird and has never been tried
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 3: by any group of human beings before.
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 2: We have no idea the long term.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 3: But I don't mean just with our phones. If you
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 3: think about the nuclear family, right, where the child remains
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 3: indoors with two adults or if they're lucky, or one
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 3: adult if they're not, that's not a model of child
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 3: ring that's ever been tried by human beings. Right. Human
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 3: beings have always been raised by villagers, by groups, by tribes. Right.
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 3: It's a very recent thing that we would imprison our
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 3: children in the home and get them try to get
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 3: them to get all their emotional or most of their
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 3: emotional needs from just one or two adults, who, by
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 3: the way, are working fifty hours a week or whatever
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 3: it is. So we've got this. I think the cell
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 3: phone addiction occurs rather like the heroin addiction, and the
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 3: rats occurred in the circumstances of isolation and imprisonment. The
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 3: cell phone addiction is an unmet psychological needs. The cell
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 3: phone addiction is happening in a context where the children's
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 3: basically needs are not being met. That's a wonderful guy
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 3: called Professor Peter gray Or was speaking to about this
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 3: recently in Boston. So, just children have a need to
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 3: run around, they have a need to play, an unsupervised play.
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of evidence unsupervised play is an absolutely
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 3: essential part of child development. There's been I think the
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 3: figure is something like a twenty percent decline at least
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 3: in unsupervised play in the last ten years. Right, it's been.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: Sar afraid to let their kids go outside and all.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah, or when they do play, they've got to be
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 3: constantly referencing back to you know, the adult for what
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 3: do I do now? What do I do now?
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: Or it's all super organized exactly? Are from structured avert
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: to a structural af air exactly.
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 3: That's and that's good for children in some of course,
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 3: as part of a balance diet. That's a healthy thing.
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 3: But if that's most of what the kid is getting,
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 3: they're not able to develop in a healthy way. And
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 3: so you've got this context of a very weird form
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: of toxic childhood and weird child ring often tragically motivated
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 3: by love, right, not motivated by desire to hurt the child.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 3: Quite the opposite, a desire to protect the child that
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 3: has led to so in that context gives If the
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 3: one thing that gives you any sense of relief or
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 3: pleasure is the phone, Fortnite, whatever it is, you're going
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 3: to not to just speak. There are things about the game.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 3: These games are designed by some of the cleverest people
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 3: in the world to keep you hook at the points
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 3: you're making it absolutely right. But like all addiction, you
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 3: need to look at the object of the addiction and
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 3: then the context in which the addiction occurs. And I
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 3: think both those things are really important. And the factors
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 3: that causing depression and anxiety and adults through unmet needs
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 3: are even more heartbreaking when you see them playing out
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 3: and children. And we're doing the same over biologization. I
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 3: think one of the great scandals in this country is
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 3: thirty percent of children in the foster care system are
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 3: being given at least one psychiatric drug. Think about that.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 3: It is not that thirty percent of children in the
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 3: foster care system happen to have defective brains, right, These
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 3: are profoundly distressed children, and as a culture, what are
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 3: we doing. Rather than dealing with their distress, loving them,
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 3: caring for them, looking after them, We're drugging them into submission.
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 3: That's thirty percent, by the way, at any given time,
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 3: so it's actually gonna be more over the span of
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 3: their time in foster care. That's an obscenity. One in
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 3: ten American thirteen year old American boys has been given
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 3: a stimulant drug at any time. You don't tell me
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 3: that one in ten American boys has some kind of defective, broken,
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 3: diseased brain. This is bullshit, right. These are kids who
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 3: who need to you know, need love, They need to
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 3: have their needs met, they need to run around, they
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 3: need to play. There's all sorts of things going on
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 3: here that are being boiled down in this extraordinarily simplistic
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 3: way to you know, a brain disease that needs to
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 3: be drugged. Not to say that some of them don't
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 3: have some problems in their brains, of course they do.
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 3: But this is a we've ended up with a grossly
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 3: simpler stick narrative about our distress from childhood where they're
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 3: dropped into submission to when you're in an old people's
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 3: tell them and half of them give an antipsychotics to
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 3: shut them up, you know, right the way through their lives.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 3: This is not a sensible way. We need to think
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 3: in a much deeper, more honest, more loving and complex
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 3: way about our distress. Need to listen to the signals
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 3: that it's giving us.
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: What are the statistics on the diagnosis of ADHD with kids?
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 3: And I haven't written about that, so I don't want to.
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 3: I don't want to.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: I know it's super high, right, And I often wonder
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: like are we over diagnosing these people? Certainly we're over
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: medicating them, and we've thought we've created this syndrome or disease.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 2: And look, I'm not a doctor. I'm not going to
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 2: say it doesn't exist.
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: But there is an argument that you know, a hyperactive
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: kid or a slightly active kid who has trouble sitting
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: in a classroom and focusing, there's an argument to be
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: made that that's it's perfectly normal out of that age.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: And to pathologize that and say we need to medicate
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: this kid because he can't pay attention, I think is
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: really problem matter.
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 3: Well, you get rid of recess and gym and kids
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 3: can't sit still, and you go from mysterious thing, these
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 3: children developed brain diseases. What a funny coincidence. Right. It's
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 3: not to say there aren't some children who, for a
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 3: complex range of reasons, genuinely have problems focusing and need help.
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 2: Certainly there are.
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 3: But this connects to another thing that it was the
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 3: hardest cause of depression and anxiety for me to write about.
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 3: And it has a manifestation very related to what you're
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 3: what you're saying. So if I tell you the story
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 3: of how it was discovered, for a minute, you're going
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 3: to think, why is he telling me this? What's they
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 3: got to do? Anything? But I think it's only possible
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 3: to really understand you got to tell the story. So
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 3: not so far from here, in San Diego in the
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 3: mid nineteen eighties, a doctor called Dr Vincent FELTI was
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 3: given a quite difficult task. He was approached by kinds
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 3: of Permanente, the big not for profit cor provider in
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 3: San Diego and here in California, and they said to him, look,
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 3: we've got a big problem. Every year obesity is rising,
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 3: and everything we're trying, like giving people diet advice, all
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 3: that stuff, none of it's working. What can we do.
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 3: So they gave him quite a big budget and they said, look,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 3: just do Blue Sky's research. Figure out what the hell
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 3: we can do. So Dr Fildi started to work with
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty extremely obese people we could to
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 3: weigh more than four hundred pounds. And one day he's
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 3: interviewing one of them and he has this idea which
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 3: seems like an insumt. I mean, it actually is a
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 3: kind of dumb idea. He asked himself, what would happen
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 3: it really obese people literally just stopped eating and we
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 3: gave them like vitamin Sea shots so they didn't get
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 3: scurvy and all of those things. Would they just burn
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 3: through the fat stores in their body and get down
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 3: to a normal weight. So obviously, with a huge amount
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 3: of medical supervision, they start doing this, and in one
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 3: sense it worked. So there's a woman who I'm going
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 3: to call Susan to protect her medical confidence, who went
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 3: down from being more than more than four hundred pounds
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 3: to one hundred and thirty eight pounds. Credible, right, Her
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 3: family are telling Doctor Phillidy he's saved her life. She's rejoicing,
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 3: he's rejoicing. And then one day something happened they didn't expect.
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 3: Susan cracked. She starts obsessively eating at KFC or whatever
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 3: it was, and quite soon she's back at a dangerous
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 3: weight and she comes in to see doctor FELTI calls
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 3: her in and he says, Susan, what happened? And she
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 3: looks down. She's really ashamed. She sas, I don't know,
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 3: I don't know. And after a while he said, well,
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 3: tell me about the day you cracked. What happened that day.
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 3: It turns out something had happened that day that had
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 3: never happened to Susan. She'd been in a bar and
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 3: a man had hit on her, not in like a
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 3: predatory or awful way, but expressed sexual interest in her.
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 3: She felt really frightened. She went and started eating toots.
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 3: Felicity thought this was interesting. He said to her, when
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 3: did you start to put on weight? In her case,
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 3: it was when she was eleven. He said, did anything
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 3: happen when you were eleven that didn't happen when you
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 3: were five, or nine or fourteen, anything that year? And
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 3: she looked down and she said, yeah, that's when my
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 3: grandfather started to rape me. He started to interview everyone
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 3: in the program. He discovered that fifty five percent of
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 3: them on their extreme weight in the aftermath of being
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 3: sexually abused. And he was really puzzled by this, like,
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 3: what's going on here. Susan explained it to him. She said,
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 3: overweight is overlooked, and that's what I want to be.
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 3: He realized, this thing that seems pathological and of course
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 3: is bad for you, obesity was performing a function, right,
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 3: I had a rational function. It was protecting them from.
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: Sexual defense mechanism for dealing with unhealed childhood trauma.
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 2: You know, it makes perfect sense.
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: It's very much in the vein of what Gaboramante talks
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: about unhealed childhood trauma fueling addiction or unhealthy behavior patterns.
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: It's so interesting that all it took was this person
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: asking the right questions to get to the bottom of
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: what was fueling this entire problem.
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 3: For It's interesting because this was a relatively small study,
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 3: so Dr Philidi, it's hard to dalk conclusions from group
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty people. So Dr Philidi went to
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 3: the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, the main body
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 3: that funds medical research in the United States, and he
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 3: got huge amount of funding to do this, to do
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 3: a massive study. So everyone who came to San Diego,
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 3: everyone in San Diego who came for medical care for
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 3: an entire year was given it. No matter what four headaches,
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 3: broken legs, schizophrenia, anything, was given a questionnaire I had
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 3: two parts. First part said did any of these bad
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 3: things happen to you when you were a kid? Things
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 3: like sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect? And the second part
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 3: asked have you had any of these problems as an adult?
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 3: Things like b cit, addiction, suicide, attempts, depression. And at first,
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 3: when they calculated it out, the CDC thought they'd made
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 3: a mistake because the figures were so extreme. For every
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 3: category of childhood trauma you experienced, you were two to
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 3: four times more likely to become depressed and anxious. But
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 3: it was when you got into the multiple categories the
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 3: figures just exploded. If you'd had six categories of childhood trauma,
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 3: you were three percent more likely to attempted suicide and
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 3: four six hundred percent to have an addiction problem. I mean,
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 3: you just don't get figures like that very often. And
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 3: it's funny when I remember the first day, the first
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 3: time I interviewed Dr Feliiti. I went to see him
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 3: down in San Diego, and he's a wonderful, wonderful man,
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 3: and if you met him, he would really admire him.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 3: And I remember leaving and like shaking with anger, being
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 3: so angry. I actually thought I might hit him, which
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 3: is really why am I reacting this way? This is
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 3: so weird. And I had the experienced as a chance,
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 3: some very extreme acts from an adult in my life.
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 3: And I remember thinking that day, you know, I'd never
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 3: thought about that in relation to my depression, which seems
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 3: ludicrous now looking back at it.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 2: Was that a repressed memory or just something I'd always remembered.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 2: I just had a dismissive of it.
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, so I was dismissive of it. It's
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 3: just it was in one silo in my head, you know,
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 3: under stuff that happened then, and I didn't really think
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 3: of it as related to the silo that was about
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 3: depression and anxiety and why I might feel that way.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 3: I think it's one of the reasons actually why I
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 3: clung to this very simplistic story my doctor told me
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 3: about serotonin for so long.
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 2: Because then you don't really have to go look at that.
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I didn't want to exactly, I didn't want to
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 3: think about I didn't want to give this individual power
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 3: over me. Now. I didn't want to think about these things.
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 3: But one of the reasons I'm glad that I did
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 3: stay with this insight and I did go and see
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 3: doctor Gluty again was because of what he discovered next. Right, So,
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 3: once they've done this study and people all over San Diego,
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 3: a lot of them had indicated that experienced childhood trauma,
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 3: that doctor was told, don't call them back, but next
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 3: time they come in, say to them something like this,
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 3: I see that when you were a child you were
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 3: sexually abused or whatever the nature of the abuse was.
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 3: I'm really sorry that happened to you. That should never
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 3: have happened. Would you like to talk about it? Forty
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 3: percent of people said, I don't want to talk about it,
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 3: but sixty percent of people did want to talk about it,
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 3: and they want to talk about it on average for
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 3: five minutes. What was extraordinary was just those five minutes
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 3: of an authority figure saying I'm so sorry that should
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 3: never have happened. That alone led to a significant fall
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 3: and depression of anxiety. And then it was randomly as
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 3: some of them were randomly assigned to a therapist to
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 3: talk about it more, and they had an even bigger fall.
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 3: And the reason is, I think it fits with a
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 3: much wider body of research into shame. The guy called
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 3: Professor James Pennebaker at Florida State University has done interesting
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 3: work on this, so we know that shame destroys you, right, physically,
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 3: mentally destroys you. During the AIDS crisis, openly gay men
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 3: died on average two years later than closetive gay men,
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 3: even when they got healthcare at the same time. Right,
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 3: shame is desperately physically destructive and mentally destructive, and those things.
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 3: Of course, I'm not entirely separate, as you've done lots
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 3: of work on and giving people a way to release
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 3: their shame. It's profoundly physically healing and mentally healing. In fact,
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 3: should be regarded as an antidepressant. And you know it
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 3: was after one of the other scientists who worked on
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 3: that program, a man called Dr Robert Ander, said to
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 3: me it had made him realize, when we see someone
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 3: who's behaving with an apparent pathology, whether it's a beastly
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 3: addiction depression, we need to stop asking what's wrong with
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 3: you and start asking what happened to you? And I
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 3: think it was that, more than any other causes of
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 3: depression and anxiety that I learned about, although the other
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 3: eight are really important, that made me realize how mistaken
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 3: what my doctor did was. When I was a teenager, right,
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 3: so i'd gone to my doctor, I've been profoundly distressed.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 3: I'm not sure I suspected the doctor had said to me,
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 3: has anything happened to you that made you for this way?
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 3: I would not have been able to talk about it anyway.
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 3: So I don't want to be simplistic about this, but
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 3: the fact that I was given a story, I was
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 3: given a story that diverted to me from these real causes.
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 3: That wasn't the only cause of my depression, but I
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 3: think it was really significant the story I was told
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 3: diverted to me from that story now with my complicity,
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 3: for sure, and I think I would have been able
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 3: to deal with my depression much earlier had I been
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 3: told a more truthful or complex and nuanced story and
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 3: given a more complex menu of options for how to
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 3: respond to it. That's not a criticism of that individual doctor.
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 3: Seven minutes to see each patient, and I'm sure was
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 3: saying what he honestly thought was true. But it is
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 3: a criticism of a society that puts in this position,
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 3: that's responding to distressed children and distressed adults with this
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 3: remarkably simplistic story that we know isn't right.
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there is.
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: I mean there are plenty of people like what would
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: have happened had you been directed to therapy instead, right,
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: and told listen, you're going to get you know, six
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: one hour sessions and you can sit there and not
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: answer any other questions, but you're going to have to
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: shild up for them. Like if your parent or somebody
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: in your family had said, look, we can see you're suffering,
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: like let's try this, perhaps that would have led you
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: in a different direction.
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 3: I think part of the problem is that most of
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 3: the therapy that people are assigned to is cognitive behavioral therapy, right,
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 3: which does have some value, So people might not know
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 3: cognitive behavior therapies descends from the ideas of a psychology
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 3: is called Aaron Beck, who basically argued, I'm slightly caricaturing him,
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 3: but I think most of his followers slightly caricaturing him.
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 3: As well, that most of our problems, certainly depression, come
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 3: from defective thought patterns. Right, there's some truth in this.
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 3: This is not untrue, right. We all know people. For example,
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 3: I saw someone but not so too many details about this,
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 3: but I recently year in LA saw an old friend
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 3: whose life is going great and is miserable as hell,
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 3: and just is one of those people who just looks
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 3: at all their benefits in life. We are kind of
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 3: looking for the worst in everything, right, exactly, that's true,
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 3: it's true, but it's actually all my British friends here
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 3: with one exception. I like that, But that is poor
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 3: cognitive skills, right partly, and there's lots of other things
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 3: going on in the individual's life. Obviously, I don't want
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 3: to be simplicity, but that person has poor cognitive skills.
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 3: Their thought patterns tend them to look for the worst,
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 3: and I believe this individual would benefit from CBT. So
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 3: I'm not saying there's no role for CBT, But I
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 3: also think CBT is really limited right now. There are
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 3: lots of CBT practitioners who go beyond the limits of
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 3: CBT and are actually complex and so on, but it's
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 3: limited because this explanation of human distress is really limited.
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 3: And think about that farmer in the field in Cambodia,
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 3: you know, who's having to to you know, with an
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 3: artificial leg, is having to work in the rice fields
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 3: right now. The CBT treatment for him would be to say,
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 3: we've got to help. No, know, wouldn't It wouldn't even
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 3: be less talking about your mother. That's the Freudian thing, right,
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 3: it'd be even worse than that that. Maybe it would
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 3: bring up to all about his mother. What they would
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 3: say is we've got to think about the thought patterns.
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 3: That I mean, if they were to adhere strictly to
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 3: the simplistic edicts of this, I suspect most CBT practitioners
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 3: would be more sophisticated. But it would be to say,
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 3: let's think about how we can alter your thought patterns
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 3: and your habits of mind so you will be less distressed. Right,
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 3: that guy didn't need CBT. That guy needed a cow.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 3: He needed a practical intervention to change his environment. Right.
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 3: There are some people who will benefit from CBT. I'm
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 3: in favor of it for some people. In fact recommended
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 3: it to my friend. But that's not most of what's
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 3: going on, right, it's not attending to most of what's
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 3: going on, which is why the evidence shows rather like
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 3: with chemical antidepressants, for most people, CBT has a real
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 3: effect that diminishes quite rapidly over time. Right, So I
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 3: think part of the problem is there's a reason, by
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 3: the way, why CBT is very popular with neoliberal governments,
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 3: whether it's in Britain massively championed by David Cameron, in
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 3: Florida Governor Rick Scott, there's a whole range of places
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 3: of the champion because it's basically a kind of get
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 3: back to work, right, come on, now, come on, now,
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 3: enough of this silly thinking. We're going to get you
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 3: back to workming. That's again I'm caricaturing, But there is
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 3: an aspect of it. There's like that, right, rather than
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 3: say Joan Cassiatore, who's the amazing woman who do that
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 3: work on grief, which is about well, you know, you're
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 3: not wrong to feel terrible your thought patterns for many people,
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 3: You're not wrong to be angry and distressed. In fact,
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 3: you should be angry, distressed and hostile in this situation.
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 3: Let's use that anger and hostility to change your environment.
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 3: And I think the most important places I saw with
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 3: places where they had they acted on those insights, which
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 3: is not so CPT doesn't have some useful insights, because
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 3: it does.
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 2: That's interesting.
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: Well, I love the idea of how powerful can be
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: to change your environment. And when I look at you know,
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: like we go through the causes that you talk about
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: in your book that are contributing to this epidemic of
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: anxiety and depression, and they all kind of fall under this,
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: you know, rubric of disconnection, and the solutions are all
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: about reconnection. And when I look when I hear you
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: talking about, you know, changing your environment to make the
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: environment more conducive to the solution, it reminds me of
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: the work that Dan but has done with blue zones.
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 3: You know about this.
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: So Dan is an amazing guy, and he spent many
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: years traveling all over the world to find the people,
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: the cultures that live the longest, the highest concentration per
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: capita of centenarians.
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 2: He found these I don't know, there's six or nine
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 2: of them or something like that.
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: They're called blue zones. They're in places that have been
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: sort of removed from modern progress for lack of a
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: better phrase, like Ikaria and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica.
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: There's various pockets around the world, and there's one in
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: just outside of Los Angeles with the Seventh Day Adventist
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: faith community. And it's super interesting what he's discovered. And
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: then he kind of yeah, it's super interesting. I'm getting
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: to the more interesting, relevant part for you. But then
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: he then did it again to say, Okay, I want
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: to find the happiest people. And there was some overlap
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: between these happiness blue zones and the centenarian blue zones.
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: And then he was able to extract from this experience
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: and all the time that he spent with these people
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: to kind of divine the principles that are contributing to
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: longevity and happiness, and these overlap as well, and they're
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: very similar to yours, Like it's almost a blueprint here
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: that's emerging if you were to synthesize his work and
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: your work, and so much of it is about connection,
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: and from his perspective, connection, you know, it's about maintaining
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: households with your elders and keeping the extended family around.
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 2: It's about your faith community.
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: It's about always moving your body gently throughout the day.
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: It's all of these things that we have done historically
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: throughout the ages of human evolution that it's only recently
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: that we've been disconnected from. So I think that's super interesting.
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: And now he has this program where he goes to
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: cities who have high incidences of obesity and on you know,
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: lots of unhealthy people, and you know insurance companies that
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: you know, corporations that are paying high premiums. I want
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: to get their premiums down. And he helps consult with
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: governments and corporations to create systems and structures that will
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: contribute to a healthier population that will live longer. And ultimately,
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: you know, through this experience he will say to you, look,
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: you can give people.
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 2: You can have them read self help books. You can
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 2: give them this diet or that diet, or tell them
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 2: they need to do this, that or the other thing.
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: But ultimately, for the most part, like these things don't
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: really work or they don't stick over the long haul.
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: What does work is when you change the environment to
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: make the environment conducive to the healthy choice, whether that
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: healthy choice is emotional, mental, physical, nutrition related, whatever it is,
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: it is, the healthy choice has to be at arms reach.
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: So you have to create bike paths and make bikes available,
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: you know, make it easy for people to ride.
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 2: Their bikes to work.
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: As a simple example, you need to get the soda
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: machines out of the schools, like very simple things, so
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: that doing the unhealthy thing becomes harder.
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: And when I look at your work and I think
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: about how that applies to depression, anxiety, mental illness, even
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: addiction in certain respects, like, I see a lot of overlap.
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's true. There's there's an academic interview
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 3: called Breadth. Dr Brett Ford, who did up in Berkeley
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 3: did there's really interesting research I think is very relevant
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 3: to what you just said. It's kind of simple. She
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 3: did it with their colleagues. They did it in full countries.
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 3: They want to figure out if you decided you were
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 3: going to spend more time consciously trying to be happier,
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 3: would you actually become happier. They did this research in
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 3: the United States, in Taiwan, in Russia, and in Japan.
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 3: What they found at first was really odd. In the
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 3: United States, if you try consciously to make yourself happier,
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 3: you do not become happier. In the other countries, if
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 3: you try to make yourself concious to become happier, you do.
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 3: And at first they were like, what's going on here?
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 3: Can that be? What they discovered was in the United States,
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 3: if you try to make yourself happier, generally, what we
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 3: do is do something for yourself. Right, I go shopping,
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 3: I treat myself, I indulge myself, I eat whatever it is.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 2: But it's me, me and me.
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 3: It's an individualistic vision of happiness exactly in the other
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 3: countries generally, and of course there would exceptions on both sides,
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 3: but generally, if you try to make yourself happier, you
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 3: do something for someone else. You're saying for your friends,
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 3: your family, your community. So while we have an instinctively
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 3: individualistic idea of happiness, they have an instinctively collective idea
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 3: of happiness. It turns out our vision of happiness just
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 3: doesn't work. Right. Like we said before, species that thought
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 3: like that would have died out on the savannahs of Africa.
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 3: And it was striking to me. I spent some time
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 3: in an Amish village in Indiana, and you know, the
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 3: army share not congenial to me in many ways, right,
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 3: And yet I went there because because.
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 2: You can imagine, right, they just they were not welcoming
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 2: of you.
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 3: No, they were very nice, but they you know, look,
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 3: I'm a left wing gay atheist, and you know they're
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 3: not having any pride parades in the Armish village anytime soon, right,
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 3: And yet there's always evidence that the Armies show exceptionally
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 3: low levels of depression and anxiety, as do generally groups
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 3: who live like them, like the Hudder Rights. And I
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 3: can kind of see why, right they. Which is not
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 3: to say there are not serious problems with the Amish
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 3: and the way they live, because there are. But it
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 3: was very striking to me. And I think, you know,
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 3: as the keys you were talking just thing. I learned
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 3: a huge amount of the stuff that I talk about
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 3: in Lost Connections and other books Chasing the Screen from
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 3: scientists and experts and so on. But actually one of
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 3: the places that taught me the most about what you're
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 3: saying is a totally different place. I just tell you
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 3: the story of it if you want, because I think
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 3: about it every day. So in the summer of twenty eleven,
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 3: on a big anonymous housing project in Berlin, a woman
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 3: called Nuria Chengis climbed out of her wheelchair and she
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 3: put a sign in her window. She lived lived in
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 3: a ground floor apartment, and the sign said something like
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 3: I got a notice saying I'm going to be evicted
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 3: from my apartment next Friday. So next Thursday night, I'm
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 3: going to kill myself. Now, this is a kind of
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 3: housing project in a slightly strange place. It's in the
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 3: middle of Berlin. And when they threw up the Berlin Wall,
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 3: they built it very quickly. Obviously, this was the bit
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 3: of West Berlin that kind of jutted into East Berlin
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 3: right when they did the walls. It's like a fang, right,
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 3: so if the Soviet said invaded, it would have been
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 3: the front line. So no one wanted to live there.
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 3: So the only people who lived there when the wall
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 3: was there were three groups recent Muslim immigrants like this woman, Nuria,
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 3: gay men, and punk squatters. Right, And as you can imagine,
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 3: these three groups looked at each other with someone exactly well,
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 3: no one really knew anyone, right, and then the wall
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 3: came down and suddenly they've got like this prime real
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 3: estate in the middle of Berlin. So everyone's rent was
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 3: going up. Loads of people were being evicted anyway, no
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 3: one knew this woman. People start to knock on a
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 3: door and they're like, do you need any help, she'd
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 3: screw you, or don't want any help. I'm going to
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 3: kill myself. And outside the apartment, some of the people
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 3: who lived there didn't know each other, started chatting and
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 3: one of them had this idea. There's a big thoroughfare
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 3: that goes into the central Berlin that runs through this project.
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 3: It's called Cotti. But I had the idea, if we
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 3: just block the street for a day on a Saturday,
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 3: they'll probably be a fuss. The media will probably come,
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 3: they'll probably let Nuria stay in her apartment. Maybe there'll
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 3: be some pressure for us to, you know, our rents
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 3: to be kept down too, and this disaster to stop.
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 3: So decided to do it. They went and built a
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 3: barricade in the middle of the road and Nuria was like, well,
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 3: I'm going to kill myself anyway, and as well let
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 3: them real me out there. They all are out there,
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 3: and the media did come and they interviewed Nuria and
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 3: the other residents. It's a bit of a fuss, and
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 3: it gets to the end of the day and the
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 3: police say, okay, you've had your fun and take it down.
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 3: But the people who lived in. Kottie said, well, hang
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 3: on a minute, you haven't told Nuie she gets to stay.
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 3: And actually we want to rent freeze for our entire block,
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 3: this whole housing project. So when you give us that,
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 3: we'll take it down. But of course they knew the
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 3: minute they left the barricade the police would just tear
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 3: it down. So one of my favorite people at Kotia,
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 3: one of the punk squatters, her names Tanya Gartner. She
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 3: was tiny miniskirts even in Berlin winters. She's hardcore. Tanya
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 3: had this in her apartment. She had a clack sen,
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 3: you know those things that make allowed noise a football matches.
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 3: She went and got it. She came down and she said, okay, everyone,
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 3: what we're going to do is we could drop a
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 3: timetable to man this barricade twenty four hours a day
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 3: until we get what we want. If the police come
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 3: to take it down, off the clackson and we'll all
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 3: come down from our apartments and we'll all stop them. Right,
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 3: So people start to sign up to man the barricade, right,
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 3: don't know each other. Tanya in her tiny little miniskirt
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 3: was paired with Nuria in her full hedge up right
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 3: and these kind of pairings were happening all over Kotti.
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 3: And first I think I think they had the Thursday
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 3: night shift. Tanya and Nuria are like, we got nothing
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 3: to talk about, right, what were we going to talk about?
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 3: It couldn't be more l likely. So they sit there
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 3: through the night, barely speaking. First few times, as the
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 3: nights went on they started to talk. They realized that
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 3: had something incredibly powerful and common. Nuria told Tanya something
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 3: she'd never told anyone. So she had come to Berlin
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 3: when she was sixteen from a village in Turkey with
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 3: her two young children, and she was sent to raise
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 3: enough money to send back for her husband would come
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 3: and join her. After she'd been in Berlin for a year,
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 3: she got word from home that her husband had died,
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 3: and she told Tanya that she'd always told people that
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 3: he died of a heart attack. Actually he died of tuberculosis,
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 3: which was seen as like a disease of poverty. So
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 3: when Tanya told Nuria something she didn't talk about very often.
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 3: She had come to Koti when she was fifteen. She'd
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 3: been thrown out by her class family. She found her
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 3: way to a squat. She'd lived there for a little
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 3: while she got pregnant. They realized they had both been
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 3: kind of children with children themselves in this place, that
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 3: they were very where they've been very frightened. They realized
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 3: they're saying really powerful and common. These kind of parents
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 3: were happening all over COTTI. There was a young lad
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 3: called Memet who kept being They kept nearly throwing him
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 3: out of school. They said he had ADHD. Was paired
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 3: with this grumpy old white guy who said he didn't
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 3: believe in direct action because he loved Stalin, but in
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 3: this case he'd make an exception. They did a shift together.
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 3: The old white guy started helping me met with his homework.
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 3: It started doing a lot better. And directly opposite this,
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 3: this housing project, there's a gay club called Zubloc that
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 3: opened four years before the protest began, and it's run
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 3: by a guy I love called Rick Coldstein, who they're
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 3: pretty uncompromising, to give your sense of it. The previous
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 3: place he owned was called Cafe anal Right, So as
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 3: you can imagine, there's a lot of Muslim immigrants in this,
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 3: Muslim Germans in this, in this, in this housing project.
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 3: When they first opened the club, there was a lot
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 3: of people who were really pissed off. In fact, their
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 3: windows got smashed. But after the protests had been going
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 3: for a little while, fat very early on, the gay
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 3: club gave all their furniture to the protests. They were like,
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 3: they gave free drinks. They were like, you know, after
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 3: a while they said, you know, you guys should have
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 3: your meetings in our club. But even the lefties at
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 3: Koti were like, we're not going to get these very
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 3: religious Muslims to come and you know, have their meetings
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 3: underneath posters for fisting night. Right, it's not going to happen. Right,
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 3: Actually it did start, as one of the Muslim women
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 3: there said to me, we all realized we had to
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 3: take these small steps to understand each other. After the
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 3: protest to be going on for about a year, one
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 3: day a man arrived at Koti. He was in his
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 3: early fifties. He was called it's called tung Kai, and
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 3: it's clear when you meet Tunkai he's got some kind
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 3: of cognitive difficulties. He'd been living homeless, but he also
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 3: has an amazing energy about him. Everyone immediately liked him,
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 3: and after he was there for two or three days
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 3: that by this time they had actually turned their barricade
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 3: into a permanent structure in the street, and they said
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 3: with a roof and everything, and they said, you know,
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 3: you should start living here. We don't want you to
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 3: be homeless. He started living there. He became a much
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 3: loved part of the Koti protest. Nine months later, one
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 3: day the police came to inspect. They become an inspect
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 3: every now and then, and Tun Kai doesn't like it
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 3: when people argue. He thought the police were arguing, so
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 3: he went to try to hug one of the officers.
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 3: They thought he was attacking them, so they arrested him.
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 3: That was when it was discovered that Tung Kai had
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 3: been shut away in a psychiatric hospital, a psychiatric hospital
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 3: often in a padded cell, for twenty years. He'd escaped
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 3: one day. He lived on the streets for a few
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 3: months and they found his way to Kotti. So the
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 3: police took him back to the psychiatric hospital and he's
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 3: put back in his cell, at which point the entire
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 3: Kotti housing project turned into a kind of free Tong
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 3: Kai movement. Right, they descend on this psychiatric hospital and
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 3: the psychiatrists are like, what is this. They've got all
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 3: these like Muslim women in h jabs, these game very
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 3: camp gay men and these punks demanding the release of
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 3: this person they had shut away for twenty years. They
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 3: didn't understand it. But I remember Uli Cartonborne, one of
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 3: the protesters, saying to them, you know you don't love him.
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 3: He doesn't belong with you. We love him. He belongs
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 3: with us. I remember thinking, you know, how many of
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 3: us if someone carted us away, would have hundreds of
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 3: people descending saying, no, we love this person. Right. Anyway,
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 3: many things happened to Kotti.
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 2: I mean that's like a movie. Yeah, it's like that's
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 2: like a movie you'd see at Sundawn.
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 3: I think they think that I'm slightly crazy, that the
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 3: people Atkotti, because I would turn up every you know,
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 3: four or five months, talk to them and just burst
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 3: the tears. I've had this so movie. I remember one
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 3: of them say to me once, Yohanna, I think maybe
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 3: you have allergies because my eyes were waters touch.
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: Anyway, So did she get to keep her apartment and
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: she didn't commit suicide.
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 3: They got Tunkai back, They got Nuria got to stay
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 3: in her neighborhood. They got a rent freeze for their
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 3: entire housing project. They then launched a referendum initiative to
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 3: keep rents down across Berlin, got the largest number of
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 3: written signatures in the history of the city of Berlin.
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 3: But the last time I saw Nuria, she said to me,
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 3: you know, I'm really glad I got to stay in
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 3: my neighborhood. That's wonderful. I gained so much more than that,
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 3: you know, she said, You know, I was surrounded by
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 3: these amazing people all along, and I never knew. And
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 3: I remember, I'm thinking that, you know, one of Nuria's friends,
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 3: another one of the women who took part in the protests,
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 3: is this woman called Neriman man Care, who's a Turkish gairmanman.
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 3: And she said to me, you know, when I grew
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 3: up in in Turkey, I grew up in a village
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 3: and I called my whole village home. And I came
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 3: to live in the Western world, and I learned that
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 3: what we're meant to call home is just our four walls.
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 3: And then this protest began and I started to think
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 3: of this whole place and all these people as my home.
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 3: And I realized talking to her that in some sense,
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 3: in this culture, we are homeless. You need to feel
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 3: you belong. The sense of home we've built is not
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 3: big enough for that sense of belonging that the Bosnian
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 3: writer Alexander Hayman said, home is where people notice when
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 3: you're not there, right, Lots of people are homeless in
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 3: that sense, and I remember think he's so clearly, and
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 3: Kotty think about how distressed these people were. Nuriya was
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 3: about to kill herself, men Matt kept being nearly thrown
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 3: out of school. This he had adhd Tungkai was shut
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 3: away in a padded cell. Loads of them were depressed
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 3: and anxious. These people did not need to be drugged.
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 3: Most of them. They needed to be together, They needed
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 3: to have a sense of meaning and purpose. They needed
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 3: a home. And I remember remember one time sitting with
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 3: Tanya outside Zubloc, the gay club, and her saying to me,
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 3: you know, when you're at home and when you're in
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 3: your house and you're all alone and you feel like shit,
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 3: you think there's something wrong with you. But what we
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 3: did is we came out of our corner fighting and
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 3: we realized we were surrounded by people who feel like
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 3: felt like this, and we realized how strong we could be.
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 3: And to me, it was such an important lesson about
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 3: about what's gone wrong. And you know the people at KOTTI.
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 3: I love them people. They are amazing people, but in
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 3: one sense they are not exceptional people, right, they are
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 3: ordinary people. This was just beneath the surface. It did
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 3: not take much for them to see how powerful this
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 3: could be. And this is just beneath the surface. Everywhere
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 3: this is. I remember in the run up to the
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 3: twenty sixteen election being in West Cleveland with a group
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 3: of people who were doing get out the vote work.
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 3: I was following for a different book I'm writing. And
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 3: we were on one of those streets in West Cleveland
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 3: where third of the houses had been demolished, a third
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 3: had been abandoned, a third still had people living in them,
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 3: often behind actual barbed wire I mean. Were knocked on
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 3: one door and there was a woman, well, I would
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 3: a guest when looking at her was sixty. I realized
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 3: she was actually the same she said, it was the
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 3: same age as me. I was thirty seven at the time.
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 3: I was amazed. She'd had a really hard life. She
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 3: was very articulate, extremely angry, absolutely refusing to vote Hillary.
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 3: And she made this verbal slip that really stayed with me.
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 3: She started out the area used to be like her
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 3: parents and grandparents. And she meant to say when I
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 3: was young. What she actually said is when I was alive,
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 3: and it really knocked me back. And I remember looking
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 3: at her street and all these people hiding behind barbed
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 3: wire with all these cameras in front of the house,
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 3: and they have no money, but they've got enough to
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 3: buy a camera, right, And I thought, the solution to
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 3: what you need is all around you, and you've been
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 3: cut off by this culture from seeing it, right. You've
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 3: literally put barbed wire between you and the people next
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 3: to you. And I thought about Cottie, and I thought
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 3: about what this woman needed, and I thought about the
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 3: sickness in this culture that we've been so we've been
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 3: driven away from seeing the solution that's right in front
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 3: of us. Do you know what I mean?
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 2: It's hunting that story about the woman. But I think
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 2: that that story about Kati.
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: Perfectly encapsulates essentially every facet of what you talk about.
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: It's like this amazing drama that plays out that elucidates
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: not only the problem but also the solution and the
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: simplicity of the solution. And we have to wind this
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: down because we've got to get you to Santa Monica.
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: But I want to leave it on a little bit
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: of a solution oriented, optimistic note. Understanding the cultural drives
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: that are compelling so many of us in this unhealthy
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: direction that's contributing to all of these disorders that we're seeing,
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: and intellectually understanding that the solution is within arm's reach.
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 1: It's still so difficult for people to access. And we
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: could tell these stories and you can inspire people, but
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: there's that person who's listening who's like, you don't understand
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: my pain. Like that's great, but like I got three
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 1: kids and I'm super depressed. I can barely get out
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: of bed, and I'm just trying to make it through
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: the day. I don't live in an apartment building where
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: we can block off the street and have a protest.
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: So what are some of the things that, like, where
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: can somebody begin to try to build community and connection
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: with others with nature so that they can find that
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: hopeful threat that they can pull on that will shine
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: some light.
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 3: So I would say two things about that. The first
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 3: is one of my closest relatives is a struggling single
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 3: mom who works every hour she can to keep her
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 3: kids in their apartment, and when she gets home she
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 3: collapses and it's too tired to be much television most nights.
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 3: The idea that I would say to her, well, your
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 3: job now is to democratize your workplace, fight for universal
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 3: basic income. It would be grotesque to say that to her, right,
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 3: We don't roach most problems like this. We don't when
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 3: we have a discussion about car accidents, we don't say, well,
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 3: we can't solve the problem of car accidents. What do
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 3: you say to this person who's just been mangled the
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 3: on the I ninety five and is bleeding in the wreckage? Right, Well,
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 3: i'd say I don't want to talk to that person.
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 3: I mean, I'll call them an ambulance. I very much
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 3: want to out them. Let's talk about how we can
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 3: change things, like by having speed limits and seat bags
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 3: as seat belts and air bags, so it doesn't get
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 3: to the point where so many people are mangled on
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 3: the I ninety five. Right. So the first thing I
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 3: would say is, in a sense I think the it's
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 3: totally natural and right question. I wouldn't start at that point.
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 3: I would say, mostly my message to the person I
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 3: love in my family who's in that position is. Firstly,
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 3: your pain makes sense. You're not crazy to feel this way.
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 3: You have been given a really rough deal. And I
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 3: will try to love you and be present with you
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 3: and help you change your life. And I will try
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 3: to change the culture so you are set free to
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 3: make more of the changes that you need to make. Right. So,
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 3: what the person you're talking about who's trapped in this look?
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 3: We live in a culture where huge numbers of people
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 3: are trapped. Half of Americans have less than five hundred
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 3: dollars if a disaster happens, right through no thought of
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 3: their own, because that money has been transferred to the rich. Right,
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 3: the six heirs to the Walmart fortune, who are heirs,
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 3: They have done nothing to earn that money, and more
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 3: than own more and have more money than the bottom
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 3: one hundred million Americans. Right, where did your money go?
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 3: What happened? Right? So, we created a culture where lots
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 3: of people are trapped. I want to fight to change
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 3: the culture so they are no longer trapped. I don't
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 3: want to give people a false kind of bromide, which
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 3: is you know, I go through in the book lots
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 3: of things people can do. Some of them are coming
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 3: together and fighting for collective solutions and some of the
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 3: things people can do on their own. There's a particular
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 3: kind of meditation called loving kindness meditation that's been proven
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 3: to really help. I go through other examples, but I
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 3: don't want to be misleading about this. I don't think
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 3: there are very good individualistic solutions in a society that's
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 3: falling apart, where Donald Trump is the most powerful person,
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 3: where people are profoundly lonely, where they've been taught to
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 3: value the wrong things, where many of the whether inequality
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 3: is going off the scale, where they are humiliated and
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 3: controlled at work. I don't want to be saying to
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 3: an individual person, hey, here's my little solution for you.
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 3: It needs a big solution right now. There are smaller
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 3: things that people can do. Even if you're in solitary
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 3: confinement in a prison for the rest of your life,
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 3: there are things you can do. Of course, I don't
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 3: want to be literal the possibility of individuals to do things,
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 3: because there are individuals they can do. But the most
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 3: important thing we can do is come together, and that's
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 3: happening right There are amazing struggles and they're not privileged people.
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 3: Right think about the fight for fifteen, the fight for
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 3: a higher minimum wage, and maybe you know workers who
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 3: work in you know, McDonald's, Burger King and Jack in
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 3: the Box, you know, coming together to fight for a
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 3: higher minimum wage a great example, which gives you more time,
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 3: which gives you more more of everything. Right, there's a
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 3: whole range of campaigns happening. So I would say the
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 3: single most important thing is if you possibly can and
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 3: I appreciate this, some of you can't do this. If
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 3: you possibly can get to a group of people who
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 3: feel like you, who can see that they're upset, who
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 3: can see they've been that they're wounded, and are seeking
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 3: a solution together. Because partly what I learned at Cotty
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 3: is the struggle is the solution, right, the act of
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 3: coming together and saying we've been made to feel like
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 3: this through no fault of our own, and we can
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 3: fight for a solution together. And sometimes they are long fights. Right,
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 3: I'm gay. The first people to fight for gay rights
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 3: in the eighteen seventies. That's a long journey from eighteen
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 3: seventy to you know, that was Supreme Court decision in
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 3: twenty fifteen, you know, for granting equal marriage rights. Right,
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 3: that's a long fight, but the act of coming together
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 3: and fighting for their own dignity, even in eighteen seventy
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 3: when they were really early in the fight and they
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 3: didn't live to see much progress other than the dignity
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 3: that they stood up and said, the problem here isn't
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 3: with me, right, that there is a dignity in asserting that,
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 3: in showing it to other people, in standing with other people.
• 1:54:21
  Speaker 3: So I would say, wherever possible, and there is nowhere
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 3: in the United States where this is not the case,
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 3: where you are not surrounded by people who feel in
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 3: a similar way, find those people, right, We have tools
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 3: to find those people, even if all you can do
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 3: is sit with them for half an hour a week,
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 3: sit with them if you possibly can. And if you're
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 3: so wounded you can't do that, okay, then help is
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 3: on the way. The rest of us are going to
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 3: understand this problem differently, and if you can't fight for yourself,
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 3: we will try to fight for you.
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 2: That's powerful, It is no, it's great, you know.
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, look, we could spend another five hours stuff
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: and we could talk about all manner of things that
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: people can do to try to, you know, alleviate some
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: of this pain. But I think that's very great, very
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: practical and powerful advice. I mean that's look essentially, that's
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 1: how that's the premise of twelve Step Right, which I'm
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: a member of. And it's all about getting together with
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: people that share a common dilemma and share a common solution.
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: And the struggle is the solution. It is the community
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 1: that is created around a shared interest. That that is
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 1: fundamentally you know, it's not about arriving at a future place.
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 2: That is in and of itself the salve to the wound,
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 2: I think, and a great place to start. So we
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 2: got to let you go, You got to go.
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 3: I should just say. My publishers always tell me off
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 3: if I don't say this. If you would like any
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 3: more information about the book, If you would like to
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 3: know where to get the book the audiobook, If you
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 3: would like to take a quiz to see how much
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 3: you know about the causes of depression and anxiety. If
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 3: you would like to listen to audio of lots of
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 3: the people we've talked about. What's the other thing they
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 3: always tell me to say. If you would like to
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 3: know what a range of people have said about the book,
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 3: from Elton John to Hillary Clinton to Tucker Carlson tod
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 3: you go.
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: To Blur, I don't know what's going on, and you're like,
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: but like, you got the coolest people the blur of
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: your books.
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 2: And by the way, I was going to do all
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 2: that for you both.
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 3: Continue please if you want to any of those things.
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 3: I just feel like I'm doing something like nineteen fifties
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 3: advert But here we go. If you go to www
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 3: dot Thelost Connections dot com, it's not Lost Connections dot
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 3: com because it turns out there's a fucking band called
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 3: Lost Connections that they want to be about. When I
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 3: was play the book, although they no longer exist, they
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 3: seem very good. I listened to one of their songs. Yeah,
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 3: go to ww dot the Lost Connections dot com. You
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 3: can also find out where to follow me on Twitter, Facebook,
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 3: and Instagram. Or that was asked in an interview recently.
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 3: They had watch your two to what's your Facebook? And
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 3: then they said what's your Snapchat? And I said, I
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 3: am a thirty nine year old man, right, The only
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 3: thirty nine year olds on Snapchat are certainly pedophiles. You
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 3: cannot buy me on Snapchat.
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 2: That's moment, but that moment is passed exactly.
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: And also Chasing the Scream, which is oh yeah, conversation
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: and Chasing the Scream dot com where you.
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 3: Get Chasing scream dot com. And other people said nice
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 3: things about that as well. Yeah.
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: What I love about both of these websites and your
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: books is that, as you mentioned, you could go to
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: the sites and you literally have all of these audio
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: of all of these interviews that you've done with all
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 1: of these people there, so you.
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 3: Can listen to the people at Kotti. The people at
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 3: Kotti the audio, you can hear how much choked I
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 3: get talking to them. Yeah. Yeah, you can listen to
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 3: audio with all the experts and all these people I
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 3: thought would be good things to put out there and
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 3: kind of resource for people.
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 2: And how's the depression now? How you feel? You look happy?
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 2: You're smiling.
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I feel I'm not depressed at all. I
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 3: haven't been for quite some time, although I'm always careful
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 3: to caveat that, which is that I was in the
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 3: privileged position that I could change my life and in
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 3: a way fighting boys for everyone to have the opportunity
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 3: to do that, rather than just going in a kind
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 3: of simplistic way, Hey, I did this and you can too,
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 3: because like my closest relative can't do that at the moment, right,
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 3: But I'm fighting so that we can change the culture
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 3: so far more people can be set free to make
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 3: the changes that would release them from depression and anxiety.
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 2: All right, well, thank you, my friend, hohoray to me
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 2: my pleasure. How you feel good.
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 3: That?
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 3: Thank you.
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 2: Come back and talk to me anytime.
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: Hurray, I will right, Thanks, all milightful, thanks, thank you
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: all right, peaces, Hello,