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Jan. 31, 2018 - Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes
39:10
Get Off My Lawn #74 | Fed Up
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in baltimore where they were giving people psychedelic drugs to see if that would work and i learned loads of things but i think you've gone to the part that's been to my surprise most controversial because i think in a way it's the most banal part of the book so one of the things i learned is uh it's simply not true that depression is caused by a spontaneous chemical imbalance in people's brains um that's not my doctor said that to you as a fact.
It wasn't like, here's what I think it might be.
It was just a fact that you were lacking serotonin and we needed to increase the serotonin.
Exactly.
And people all over the world were being told that in the 90s.
They're still being told that now it's shifted to other chemicals mostly, but they're still being told it's due to a spontaneous chemical imbalance in people's brains.
And yeah, it was really striking to me to learn that the leading experts on this say that's just not true, right?
Professor Andrew Scull at Princeton University says it is deeply misleading and unscientific, that's his phrase, to say depression is just by chemical imbalance.
Dr. David Healy, one of the leading experts in Britain, said you can't even say that story was discredited because it was never really credited.
There was never a time when half of the scientists in the field would have told you that.
That what happened, that story was promoted to us because it was the most congenial to the drug company PRs.
Now it's important to say the fact that depression isn't caused by a chemical imbalance, and in fact there are nine causes of it that I write about in the book, for which there is scientific evidence, none of which is a chemical imbalance, doesn't mean there's no value to chemical antidepressants.
And I think this is where some people have kind of willfully misunderstood what I was saying.
So we know the effects of chemical antidepressants.
They can be measured very well.
So depression is measured by something called the Hamilton scale, right?
And I've always felt sorry for whoever Hamilton was because he's only remembered for how miserable he makes everyone.
But anyway, the Hamilton scale goes from zero, where you'd be like dancing around after taking ecstasy, to 51 where you would be acutely suicidal, right?
And to give you a sense of movement on the Hamilton scale, if you improve your sleep patterns, you will move six points up the Hamilton scale, right?
And if your sleep patterns get worse.
12%, a big jump.
Yeah, exactly.
And if your sleep patterns get a lot worse, you would go six points down the Hamilton scale.
The average effect of chemical antidepressants, according to the best research by Professor Irving Kirsch at Harvard University, is they move you 1.8 points on the Hamilton scale, right?
So it's important to say that's an average.
So some people will have less, some people will have more.
Now, that's not nothing, right?
It's important to say that.
That's more than a placebo.
Pretty close.
That's 3.6%.
And sleeping changes 12%.
And with the cow, I'm sure the environment changes 20, 30%.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but that is a crucial detail.
You wrote a book saying antidepressants aren't the be-all and end-all, and this Hamilton scale lists them as a 3.6% increase.
If I'm going to commit suicide, a 3.6% increase, I don't really see that talking me off the bridge.
I think you've read the right thing into it, Gavin, which is 3.6% is worth something when you're in acute pain.
It's not nothing.
It's important to say that.
But it doesn't solve the problem for most people, right?
So my argument is chemical antidepressants should absolutely remain one of the items on the menu.
They have real value.
They also have powerful side effects.
We should discuss.
I'm happy to do that if you want.
But they should never be the only thing on the menu.
They need to be much broader.
And part of that is about redefining what an antidepressant is.
So just to tell that cow story a little bit closer to the way it was told, but just closer to the way it was told to me, is, and this is something that really helped me to think differently about this.
So I spoke to this South African psychiatrist called Derek Sommerfeld.
And he was in Cambodia when chemical antidepressants were first introduced there, and I think it was 2001.
And the Cambodian doctors didn't know what they were, right?
So they asked him, and he explained, and they said, oh, we don't need them.
We've already got antidepressants.
And he said, what do you mean?
He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy or something, right?
So they told him a story.
They told him, like you said, there was a rice farmer in the fields that they knew who one day had stood on a landmine, had his leg blown off.
So they gave him an artificial limb.
He goes back to work in the rice fields, but it's apparently super painful to work underwater with an artificial limb.
I'm imagining it's pretty traumatic because he's been blown up.
And the guy just starts crying all the time, doesn't want to get out of bed, classic depression.
So they said to Derek, well, we gave him an antidepressant.
And he said, what did you do?
And they said, well, they basically described going and sitting with this guy, listening to him, realizing his pain made sense.
And they figured, well, if they bought him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer.
He wouldn't have to go into these fields where it was such a nightmare for him.
So they bought him a cow, and within a few weeks, his depression went away.
And they said to Derek, so you see, doctor, that cow was an antidepressant.
Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that it's due to a chemical imbalance in the brain, for which there was never a scientific consensus, and there certainly isn't now, that just sounds like a joke, right?
But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what has subsequently been discovered by a huge number of scientists.
It's now the position of the World Health Organization, the leading medical body in the world, which is if you're depressed and anxious, your pain makes sense, right?
You're not crazy, you're not biologically broken, you're not a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs, right?
Everyone listening to this knows you have innate physical needs, right?
You need food and water and shelter and clean air.
And if I took that away from you, you would be really f ⁇ ed up really fast, right?
There's equally strong evidence that human beings have natural psychological needs, right?
You've got to feel you belong.
You've got to feel your life has meaning.
You've got to feel you have autonomy and freedom.
You've got to feel that people see you and value you.
You've got to feel you've got a future that makes sense to you.
And our culture is good at lots of things.
I'm glad to be alive today.
But our culture has got less good at meeting a lot, not all, but a lot of these underlying psychological needs that people have.
And that is the main reason why we have a rising depression and anxiety epidemic.
Could it be that big pharma has too much of a financial incentive to allow any criticism?
I mean, you're watching Fox News and MSNBC and CNN, and they're taking pot shots at every corporation and everyone in society with, you know, the left is obviously biased to the left, the right's obviously biased to the right.
But one thing you don't see on the news is someone crapping on the family who is responsible for OxyContin.
And you go, there's an opioid epidemic.
Why is no one talking about it?
Then it cuts to the commercial and it says, Valototrex is please talk to your doctor, side effects include.
And you realize these guys aren't discussing big pharma because they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them.
I think there might be something in that.
I wouldn't want to go too far with it, but I think the it's not the only reason why this has happened, but I do think, look, it was established in court.
Elliot Spitzer, when he was the AG of New York State, took a case against the pharmaceutical companies for the way they had massively exaggerated the claims about the benefits of antidepressants.
And it was established in the court beyond doubt they had, and there was a massive payout as a result.
So I think the fact that they exaggerated the claims is really not beyond dispute now.
Now, I just want to stress that doesn't mean there's no value.
But if you want to really think, now, it's important to say to people, we need antidepressants.
If you understand antidepressants as something that reduces depression, right?
We have got a real depression and anxiety crisis.
It is not imaginary.
It's not in people's heads.
It's a really deep form of despair that's spreading across the culture.
And we do need things that deal with that.
Now, I think alongside chemical anti-depressants, we need things that more learn, like the lesson of the cow.
And I'll give you an example of something that, because all this can sound a bit weird and abstract to people if you don't apply it something very direct to them.
So I want to give a very direct example, as Muggle at Lost Connections does.
So I noticed that lots of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and their anxiety focuses around their work.
So I thought, well, let's start looking at the evidence about work.
Gallup did the most detailed study that's ever been done of how people in the United States and Britain think about their work.
And what it found was kind of striking.
13% of us like our work most of the time.
63% of people are what they called sleepwalking through their work, so they don't like it, they don't hate it, they kind of tolerate it.
And 24% of people hate their work, right?
So think about that.
That's 87% of people who don't like the thing they're doing most of the time.
Average person answers their first work email at 7.48 a.m. and clocks off at 7.15 p.m.
This is most of our waking lives and we don't like it, right?
You're almost twice as likely to hate your job as love your job.
And I started to think, well, could there be some relationship between that and the fact that so many people feel like shit, right?
So I started looking into this.
I discovered an Australian social scientist called Michael Marmot had done incredible research on this in the 1970s.
I got to know him.
So I can tell you how if you want, but just to give you the headline, he discovered the key factor in work that makes people depressed.
The key factor is if you feel controlled at work.
If you go into work and you feel you can't use your mind, you can't use your creativity, you're just doing what you're told, and you're like the equivalent of on a kind of conveyor belt, right?
The more you feel controlled, the more likely you are to become depressed.
Actually, the more you feel controlled, the more likely you are to have a stress-related heart attack as well.
Now, we all know that when we think about other societies, right?
It's one of the reasons why we know people in the Soviet Union were the most miserable people you can ever imagine, because they were controlled all the time, right?
I want to get that.
Oh, yeah, please.
And I actually misunderstood what Michael Marmot was saying when I first met him.
Because I thought he was saying, okay, so some people are going to get to have fancy jobs like you and me do, and then everyone else is going to be condemned to be miserable because there are going to be jobs, like, you know, my dad was a bus driver, my brother's a delivery guy, my sister's a nurse.
Is he just saying, but I kept going back to him, and it was only quite a while into it, I realized I was completely misunderstanding what he was saying.
It's not the work that makes you depressed.
It's being controlled at work.
And that can be changed.
So I went to Baltimore, met this woman called Meredith Keogh, who's part of this movement that's a really interesting experiment in how we do this differently.
So Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night, just sick with anxiety, right?
She had an office job.
It wasn't the worst office job in the world.
She wasn't being, you know, harassed or bullied.
But she couldn't bear the thought that her next 40 years of her life were going to be this, right?
You know, for so much of her waking life.
And one day with her husband, Josh, they did this quite bold thing.
Josh had worked in bike stores since he was a teenager.
And working in a bike store is obviously controlled.
It's pretty insecure work.
It's low-paid as well.
One day, Josh and his friends in the bike store had asked themselves, what does our boss actually do?
They lied to their boss.
He wasn't a bad guy.
But they thought, well, we fix all the bikes.
We do most of it.
They didn't actually like this experience of being controlled.
So they decided to set up a business that runs in a different way.
It's a democratic cooperative.
It's called Baltimore Bicycle Works.
And the way it works is they don't have a boss.
They take all the big decisions together.
They vote.
They review each other's work.
They share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks.
So, you know, no one gets stuck with all the shitty tasks.
And they share the profits.
And one of the things that was so fascinating going there, it's a really successful business, and speaking to them, which is completely compatible with what Professor Michael Marmot found, is how many of them talked about having been depressed and anxious before in their previous controlled work and not being depressed and anxious now.
And it's important to say, they fixed bikes before, they fixed bikes now.
It's not like they left their jobs and became Beyoncé's backing singers.
But what had changed was not the work, it was whether they were controlled in a kind of humiliating way at their work.
And as Josh put it to me, there's no reason why any business should work this way, should work in this depressing, controlled-down way, right?
How many people do you know who would feel better if they knew that tomorrow they were going into a workplace where they set the priorities with their colleagues, where the boss was accountable to them, where the boss was elected if there has to be a boss?
Now, I would say that is an antidepressant, right?
That's dealing with the reason why people are depressed.
It's a big antidepressant.
It's not like a pill, but I think it's part of the shift we've got to make.
I have a bone to pick with you, Johan.
And as a gay man, you'll appreciate it because it's a big bone.
Exactly.
I like a bone.
Big, big, gigantic bone.
Just trying to browse me to distract me more.
I'm trying to disarm you with lust.
In this story with the Baltimore Bike Club, there seems to be an underpinning of sort of a socialist Collective.
We need a socialist collective.
And that rubs me the wrong way as a free market capitalist because I honestly believe, I agree with you, that you need to be empowered to be happy.
And I honestly believe that that happens more in capitalism than any other system.
And by you focusing on like an American bike shop, where, by the way, this guy had amassed all these bicycle mechanics, and then they leave.
I mean, we have non-competes to avoid this ripoff, and they start their own.
And it looks like a utopia at first glance.
But I think big business is, in its ideal form, and that's usually what it is, or I shouldn't say usually, but that's often what it is, is a self-empowerment.
And we talked about this before, Frank Mars, he has a big banner at Mars Bars.
It says, make your own decisions.
If the axe falls, the axe falls hard.
So I feel like when you're going into corporate America and saying, oh, it's the corporate system, I feel like you're looking at supermodels and you're saying, a lot of these supermodels look like crap because they let their bangs get sweaty and they get matted to their forehead.
And I'm sitting here going, yeah, but they're supermodels.
Like, there's a lot of uglier people out there.
And the reason I bring this up is to say, I think Brits are more depressed.
I think Canadians are more depressed than Americans.
And I think it's because they have a more socialist system.
And one more thing.
The proof of that is with Brits, the sentence, it's in all the Mike Lee movies where he says, well, do you want to be middle class?
And the working class says, oh, I was manu when I was a kid.
My dad was manu.
My grandpa was a coal miner.
I'm proud to be.
And they have this sedentary lack of ambition.
And I think that, with also the rain, makes them more depressed.
Look at how addicted they got to MDMA.
I think there's a few things to separate out there.
So one is a system where 87% of people don't like the thing they're doing most of the time cannot be described as a free system.
Now, it can be freer than other systems.
It's much freer than the Soviet Union, for example, which was a dungeon.
But wait, where was that 87%?
What country was that?
It was in the United States.
So what is it in Canada and what is it in Britain?
I think it was pretty similar.
I can't remember the figures off the top of my head, but it was pretty similar.
The attitude towards work is pretty similar across the Western world.
I think there was kind of mild, but I haven't looked at it in a while, so I don't want to get it wrong, but I don't think there was a huge variation.
I think the important thing to say about that is you're absolutely right to put a very high premium on freedom, but I think you're putting the locus of freedom on the wrong institution.
The locus of freedom should be on the individual and the group, not on the corporation, right?
Freedom for corporations is what we have now, and particularly in the United States where there are basically no labor unions.
And actually, that's created a system where you have 87% of people not liking the thing they're doing most of the time.
But it's important to also say, democratic cooperatives are part of market competition, right?
I believe, I'm not a communist, right?
I think there should be market competition.
I don't think it should be everything in the economy.
I'm a social democrat.
I think there should be state provision of certain things.
We probably disagree on the ratio that should be provided by the state.
But I believe very strongly that market competition should exist.
But the question is, what should the market competition be between?
Should it be between this institution, between corporations, which happen to make people really miserable and unhappy?
Or should it be between democratic cooperatives, which are a different form of providing market competition?
Democratic cooperatives are cute and they're fun for a little soup shop or a cafe, but when you're trying to sequence the genome and accrue data of an entire nation's DNA, you need big corporations for better or for worse.
Cornell University did a really good study of this that found that the more democratic an institution was, the faster it grew.
Actually, the more democratic corporations they looked at grew four times faster than the kind of top-down ones.
I agree.
That sounds reasonable.
People are much more committed to democratic institutions.
I mean, you know, for such obvious reasons, it hardly needs to be said.
People at Baltimore Bicycle Works are much more motivated than they were in their previous store.
And I think this comes back to this question about underlying needs and how they cause depression, right?
I don't think the isolated, and this is something where we probably would disagree, I want to say it as fairly as I can because I don't want to mischaracterize anything.
I don't, so systems, how would I put it?
Our societies are the loneliest societies that have ever existed.
This can be measured.
It's been measured by Professor John Cassiopo.
Wait a minute.
Our societies, meaning what, Western societies?
Yeah, yeah, particularly the United States and Britain.
More than Indonesia, more than Rwanda?
Well, certainly more than in Rwanda, where they live in a highly communal way.
But if you look at Professor John Cassioppo, who's done this research, he's proven that loneliness causes depression and anxiety.
I can tell you how if you want.
And there's very strong evidence that loneliness has massively increased in the last, well, over the last 50 years in particular.
So there's a study, for example, that asked the average American, how many close friends do you have or you could call on in a crisis?
And the average answer when they started doing it many years ago was five.
So not the most average, the most common answer when they started doing it five years ago, many years ago was five.
Now, the most common answer is none.
It's not shut.
Yeah.
But wait a minute.
You Brits always do this.
You always take some terrible crap country and say, well, you know, we could learn a lot from them.
I actually had my buddy Penny up in Essex.
He goes, our system is so archaic with mother, father, cousin, uncle.
In Africa, where his brother lives, everything is, there is no mother-father.
The entire nation rules.
And I go, yeah, but they don't have shoes.
So please acknowledge that the West is the best.
Just because there's one worst thing, like our supermodels have matted bangs, doesn't mean that the third world or anywhere in the East can hold a candle to the West.
But Gavin, right?
25 people being on a psychiatric drug in the U.S. suggests something pretty deep has gone wrong.
Now, there are loads of things I love about the United States.
Well, that's also a sign of affluence.
I'm sure people in China and Beijing would love to be on antidepressants.
They can't.
I think there is good evidence that, so we know the more individualistic and lonely a society becomes, the higher its rates of depression become.
We are a very unusual culture now.
There's many good things, great things about our culture where you and I would completely agree.
Well, you're the best.
I think that's too simplistic.
We're really great at lots of things.
I'm a gay man.
I'm really, really glad to be living in the Western world today.
I don't want to throw you off a roof.
I want to buy you a beer.
Yeah, there are loads of things where you and I would agree.
But there are also, I mean, think about how we treat the elderly is absolutely obscene, right?
Everyone in the world is completely stunned.
Everyone else in the world is completely stunned.
I'll give you an example.
We're off at a tangent now.
We're straying from the book, which is brilliant, by the way.
But where do they treat the elderly better?
Literally everywhere.
I mean, look at, if you explain, speak to any immigrant to the United States and ask them about retirement homes and what people in their home country think of retirement homes.
When someone they love becomes old, they look after them.
They don't abandon them in a fucking literally piss and sh ⁇ filled place where I forget the figure, but something like half of elderly people in retirement homes in Britain are drugged with antipsychotics to shut them up, right?
The idea that what we do to elderly people is we shunt them away and then they express their distress.
We drug them with antipsychotics.
That's a valid beef.
I will give you that.
And there's been studies with these centenarians where they say when these grandfathers around their grandkids, not only does it thwart senility and Alzheimer's, but there's cases where they had Alzheimer's or dementia and they were pulled out of it by being around their grandkids.
Yeah, so this comes back to depression in a really good way, actually.
One of the things we know is human beings are social animals.
The reason why you and I are alive is because our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing.
They were really good at cooperating, right?
They weren't bigger than the animals they took down.
They were much better at working together.
Every instinct human beings have is to be part of a tribe.
Just like bees need a hive, humans need a tribe.
We are the first humans ever to try to live without tribes, right?
And if you do.
And very recently, too.
Yeah, very recently.
Professor John Cassioppo, the loneliness expert at the University of Chicago, is an amazing neuroscientist.
You know, explained to me, think about in the circumstances where human beings evolved, if you were separated from the group, you were anxious and depressed for a really fucking good reason.
You were about to die.
That's the instinct we have when we are acutely lonely.
The instinct, he demonstrated that being acutely lonely releases as much stress hormone as being punched in the face by a stranger, right?
That's how stressful it is to be lonely.
And this is a huge driver of our depression and anxiety.
And I was really interested in looking at antidepressants that relate to that.
So this is, and it goes back to your question about Big Pharma in a way as well.
So there's a doctor called Sam Everington in London who was really uncomfortable.
He's a doctor in East London.
He ran a doctor's surgery, co-ran a doctor's surgery, and patients kept coming to him who were depressed and anxious.
And he felt really bad because he'd been told in his medical training, even though he knew the science doesn't say this, to tell them you've got a chemical imbalance in your brain and just drug them.
Like me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants, but he just thought this is inadequate to the scale of, this is not dealing with the problem in front of me, right?
This is blunting some of the symptoms.
There might be some planes for that.
So he decided to pioneer this different approach.
I'll give you an example of one of his patients who I got to know well, a woman called Lisa Cunningham.
She comes to Sam.
She'd been shut away in her home, crippled with depression and anxiety for seven years.
And Sam said to her, look, I'll carry on giving you these drugs if you want.
I'm also going to prescribe for you to take part in a group.
So there was an area behind the doctor's surgery that they called Dog Sh ⁇ Alley, which gives you a sense of what it was like.
It was a bit of scrub land where dogs used to sh ⁇ .
He said to Lisa, what I'm going to do, we're going to support you.
I want you to come twice a week and you, with a group of other depressed and anxious people, we're going to find a way to turn this alley into something beautiful, right?
First meeting, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety.
She turns up, all these jangly, anxious, depressed, depressed and anxious people, and they start talking over the weeks.
They have something to talk about that's not how shit they feel.
And they started to teach themselves gardening.
They didn't know anything about gardening.
They were inner-city people.
They start to learn gardening over time.
They start to listen to each other's problems.
They start to solve each other's problems because that's what humans do when they get together in groups.
The way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, they began to bloom.
There was a study in Norway.
This approach is called social prescribing.
There was a study in Norway that found it was more than twice as effective on the Hamilton scale for depressed and anxious people as chemical antidepressants.
I think the reason is obvious.
It was dealing with the actual reason why they were depressed in the first place, right?
It's a very different way of thinking about depression and anxiety because what we do is we tell depressed and anxious people, this is a pathology in your brain.
There's something wrong with you.
You're broken.
And what I learned from all these different approaches that are working better is they tell people, you're not broken, you're not crazy.
You've got human needs.
They're not being met.
will help you find ways to get those means net.
Do you see what I mean about that being a different...
By the way, our guests are usually on for five minutes.
This is an unprecedented episode.
Dave, how are we doing for time?
I'm going to say we're at about 40 minutes now.
Okay, well, we're out of time.
I just want to throw one last thing at you.
Sure.
A lot of these things, and I think you're right, the six friends you would call becoming zero is daunting, a shocking statistic.
I blame social media.
I think it's unnatural.
We have all these friends on Facebook that aren't really our friends.
You wouldn't call them if, say, your dad died or something.
You don't know them well enough.
and it seems like the more we adhere to tradition and sort of our caveman values and keep grandpa around, the more we benefit, the less depressed we are.
You ready for the awkward elephant in the room?
Yeah.
Homosexuals don't get married and have kids.
And you said Mormons have a disproportionately high thing, high level of joy.
I've noticed, and I'm not one of them, but young Catholic Christians who get married when they're 20 and just have a brood, they seem to be the happiest people I've met.
So is it possible, and believe me, I think you're born gay.
I don't think it's evil or anything.
But is it possible that gays suffer more depression because for whatever reason, I see them as like albinos.
They were just born a bit different.
For whatever reason, they're sort of from birth knocked off kilter from the cave instincts and it f ⁇ s with their synapses.
Oh, but Gavin, you missed the last 15 years.
Gay people just fought a massive fight so they can get married and have kids.
You missed the boys.
Yes, seven of them.
I mean, it's not, it's very uncommon.
But also, I think what that misses is, so huge numbers of gay people have children, but more importantly, the idea that I want to just say something about social media as well, don't let me forget, but the idea that gay people who don't have children are not involved in the raising of children, I think is crazy.
We are the first people ever to try to raise children in human history as isolated individuals, right?
And isolated couples.
Children have always been raised collectively and communally.
I think one of the reasons why, Because horrible has to have 70 minutes outside or whatever it is, right?
So that's because you've got an isolated parent, not part of a community.
They're fighting to let their children outdoors.
That is very recent.
That was not life for your mother or my mother, right?
That's so recent.
And I think, for example, so I don't have children.
I'm not gonna have children, so I'm presumably part of Well, I think the norm is massively shifting, actually.
I think among my gay friends as part of it.
This is the only thing that you haven't been scientifically sound about and you're being more emotional.
But what I would say is, I absolutely am involved in the raising of children, right?
I've got three nephews and a niece who I'm incredibly close to.
I speak to every day.
I'm massively involved in their lives.
My friend whose husband died in terrible circumstances, I'm incredibly close to her children.
There's this lovely, Robert Putnam has this nice, political scientist, noticed this shift.
In the 1950s, if you look at the phrase, our kids, when people talked about our kids, what they meant was the country's children.
That phrase meant everyone's children.
Now, the phrase, our kids, means your biological children, my biological children, right?
And I think we need to go back to this idea of thinking about everyone's kids.
Can I tell you one last thing about social media, which I think you find interesting because you mentioned that I totally.
So this really fascinated me.
I went to, I wanted to understand exactly what you were saying about.
Is it about social media?
I went to the first ever internet rehab center.
It's in Washington State.
It's called Restart Washington.
And after a bit, first thing I did when I was there, I realized what a prick I'd become.
I arrived there.
It's in the woods in the middle of nowhere.
I arrived there.
The first thing I did was look at my phone and feel really pissed off that I didn't have cell phone reception yet.
I think that might be the crux of this whole book.
I'm addicted too.
These things are separating us from each other, and they're turning us into these isolated, depressed people, and then we're medicating and getting back on our fucking phones.
I think you're onto something, but I think it's a bit more complicated than that.
And I learned this there.
So the woman who runs this rehab center is called Hilary Cash, amazing person, doctor.
And I spent a lot of time there with her and with these patients there.
And one of the things I thought was so interesting that emerged from kind of talking to her and thinking about it, you've got to think at the moment in history the internet arrives, right?
So it starts, comes along the late 90s, early 2000s for most of us, right?
And what's interesting is a lot of the trends we're talking about, like massive increase in loneliness, for example, had already massively been in place for several decades before.
They've been rising and rising and rising.
But what happens is the internet arrives in the middle of this disconnection and it looks like the things we've lost, right?
It gives you Facebook friends in place of.
Right, like porn does.
Porn gives you all these women that want to have sex with you.
Facebook gives you all these friends that want to hang out with you.
Instagram gives you this colorful life that you're not having.
It's so interesting you said that because that was exactly the analogy I started to think of.
That the relationship between social media and social life is like the relationship between porn and sex, right?
I'm not anti-porn.
I look at it sometimes.
But if all of your sex life was porn, you would be constantly frustrated and angry because your deeper needs would not be being met.
In the same way, social media does not meet your deeper needs, right?
In the same way, you know, you spend an hour looking at porn, you don't feel sated and valued the way you do after sex, right?
You spend an hour on Facebook, you don't feel like you've been seen and heard and you've seen and heard someone else that you do if you sit with someone for an hour.
And I think, so partly.
Go ahead.
We're playing the music at the Academy Awards.
Well, people can read the fucking book then.
Anyone who wants any more information about it can go to www.thelostconnections.com where they can figure out where to buy the book, the audio book.
They can hear what loads of people have said about it.
We'll have the URL at the bottom of the screen.
Congratulations on being the only guest in the history of the show that dominated the entire show.
This is the first.
I really enjoyed talking to you despite the fact that you missed the whole of Gay History for the last 15 years.
It was a real pleasure, Devin.
Thanks, buddy.
Let's make you a regular on the show.
I'd love to have you back.
I'd love that.
Cheers, Gavin.
I really appreciate it.
Cheers, Johan.
So speaking quite simply, Johan never said don't take antidepressants.
He said they only represent 1.8 on the scale of happiness.
That's 3.6% improvement of your life.
Why don't you change your environment?
That has a much bigger chance to improve your life.
I love this Subject because no one talks about the dangers of pharmaceuticals because they want ads from big pharma.
We don't have ads from big pharma, so we can dish on the trouble with drugs.
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