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Feb. 12, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience

02:32:15

Joe Rogan Experience #1077 - Johann Hari

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Speaker	Time	Text
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Tryce Johan Hari, I got it right.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		You said it right.
		You are literally the first person to ever say my name.
		I was saying to your friend that I once waited for six hours with a broken arm in an emergency room because they were calling for Joanna Hairy to come forward.
		So anyone who gets my name better than that is fine by me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Didn't you just assume that was you when you heard Joanna Hairy?
unidentified		To be fair, I had a broken arm and I was lying there like weeping and being like, fuck, someone help me.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		In my normal mind, I would have done.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What went down with your arm?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I fell.
		And tragically, no glamorous story to it.
		I fell down a staircase.
		I wasn't even drunk.
		I wasn't even fucked on anything.
		I just fell down the stairs, right?
		I wasn't even a victim of domestic violence.
		No surrounding narrative that would make that an interesting story, sadly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So give me your, if you had like a one-paragraph take on depression.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What is your take on depression?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So this is why I wrote this book, Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and Anxiety and the Real Solutions.
		I wanted to understand why does depression and anxiety seem to be rising so much?
		It's very personal to me.
		When I was a teenager, I'd gone to my doctor.
		I'd explained that I was in this deep sense of pain.
		And all my doctor did was tell me a biological story.
		He just said, basically, your brain's broken.
		And all he did was give me drugs, right?
		And drugs play a role in treating people.
		I was still depressed all that time I was taking these drugs, right?
		Most of the time.
		And after 13 years of it, I thought, right, I need to understand what's really going on here.
		So I ended up going on this big, long journey over 40,000 miles, interviewing the leading experts in the world on what causes depression and anxiety and what solves them.
		And what I discovered...
		We've told a ridiculously simplistic story to people about what depression is and how to solve it.
		Until I was a teenager and I went to my doctor, I thought depression was all in my head, meaning you're just being weak, you're being a pussy, basically.
		And then the next 13 years, I thought it was all in my head, meaning, you know, it's a chemical imbalance in your brain.
		What I discovered is the overwhelming evidence from the World Health Organization leading medical body in the world and loads of other places is there are real biological factors that can make you more sensitive to this stuff.
		But the causes of depression and anxiety are overwhelmingly in the way we're living.
		There are these nine causes of depression and anxiety for which I could find scientific evidence, seven of which are in the way we're living, and some of which are rising, which explains this kind of epidemic.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that opens up a whole different way of finding solutions Now when you were young and you were experiencing depression, how would you categorize it?
		Like what how would you describe it if you had to describe it to someone who didn't understand depression?
		Try to keep this about a fist away from your face.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think depression is despair spreading.
		Everyone has moments of hopelessness in their lives, right?
		It's that spreading further.
		But I think one of the things I learned is a deeper way of thinking about this, which is everyone listening to this, everyone watching this knows that they have natural physical needs, right?
		You need food, you need water, You need clean air, you need warmth.
		If I took those things away from you, you would be in real trouble real 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 and purpose.
		You've got to feel that people see you and value you.
		You've got to feel that you've got autonomy.
		You've got to feel that you've got a future that makes sense.
		And our culture is good at lots of things.
		I'm glad to be alive today.
		But our culture has been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs for lots of people.
		And that is the key reason.
		It's not the only one, but it's the key reason why we have this rising depression and anxiety epidemic.
		That can sound a bit weird in the abstract, so I can give you some specific examples if you want.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, sure.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So I'll give you one example.
		I noticed that lots of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work, right?
		I started to think, what's going on here?
		So I started to look for evidence about how people feel about their work.
		Best research on this was done by Gallup, the opinion poll company.
		Massive detailed study, took a couple of years.
		They found the figures for how people feel about work in the US and other comparable countries.
		What they found is 13% of us, 1-3%, basically like our work.
		Most of the time we get energy from it.
		63% of us are what they call sleep working.
		So don't like their work, don't hate their work, they're just kind of enduring it.
		And 24% of people fucking hate their work, right?
		Fear it and dread it.
		So I was quite struck by that when I looked at it.
		That means 87% of people...
		Don't like the thing they're doing most of the time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's incredible.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		It's striking.
		And bear in mind, this thing that we don't like has spread over even more of our lives, right?
		Average person answers their first email at 7.48am and leaves work at 7.15pm.
		So this is most of our waking lives we're doing something we don't like.
		I start to think, could there be some connection between that and this epidemic of All sorts of forms of despair, anxiety, depression, addiction.
		So I started to look for scientists who'd studied this.
		I discovered an amazing Australian social scientist called Professor Michael Marmot, who I got to know, who discovered the key to what causes depression at work, right?
		There's several aspects to this.
		I can tell you the story of how he discovered it, if you want, because I think it's an amazing story.
		But the core of it is, if you go to work, And you are controlled, so you feel you have low or no control, you are radically more likely to become depressed.
		You're even more likely to have a stress-related heart attack.
		And I think the reason is clear, although I'm a bit further than Professor Marmot does.
		Human beings need to feel our lives have meaning, right?
		And if you're controlled all the time, you don't feel like your life has meaning.
		It disrupts your ability to create meaning out of your work.
		And it makes you feel like shit, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That makes sense.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And one of the things that was really important to me in everything I was learning in the research for Lost Connections was, it required this kind of shift in my mind, because what I was basically told by my doctor is, your pain is a malfunction, right?
		He said, you know, we know what causes depression, it's just some people naturally have low levels of serotonin in their brains.
		You know, you're clearly one of them.
		That's what's going on here.
		And one thing that was really striking speaking to the leading experts in the world is that story is just not true.
		There are real biological factors.
		There are real things that happen in your brain, obviously.
		But actually, Professor Andrew Scull at Princeton University says it's deeply misleading and unscientific to say depression is just caused by low serotonin, right?
		This is just not true.
		But one thing that was so important to me, looking at these nine real causes of depression and anxiety, was realising, actually, our pain makes sense, right?
		If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you've been told, basically, that you're a bit crazy, there's something not working.
		But actually, you're not a machine with broken parts, right?
		You're a human being with unmet needs.
		And that requires a very different set of responses.
		So you think about, I start to think, well...
		Let's think about that problem with work, right?
		Most people feel they've got no control at work or low control and it's making them feel terrible.
		They're not wrong to feel that, right?
		They've got a need as human beings and it's not being met.
		How can we deal with this?
		And I learned there's a really interesting strategy to deal with this.
		Now, this is something some people will be able to do as individuals, but it's something we can actually change as a society so far more people could do it.
		I went to Baltimore and I interviewed a woman called Meredith Keough, a young woman.
		Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night, just fucking sick with anxiety, right?
		She had an office job.
		It wasn't the worst office job in the world, right?
		She wasn't being bullied.
		She wasn't being harassed.
		But she just couldn't bear the thought the next 40 years of her life were going to be this, right?
		And one day with her husband, Josh, she did this quite bold thing.
		Josh was a working class guy from Baltimore.
		Since he was a teenager, he'd worked in bike stores.
		And, you know, working in a bike store, your viewers will know it's insecure work.
		It's controlled.
		You do what your boss tells you.
		You don't even get vacations unless the boss, you know, is nice to you.
		And Josh and his colleagues in the store, they didn't hate their boss.
		He wasn't a particularly bad boss as far as bosses go.
		They quite liked him as a person.
		But one day they just asked, What does our boss actually do, right?
		We fix all the bikes, and he seems to make all the money.
		What's going on here?
		They decided to do an experiment.
		They set up a different bike store, a rival bike store, it's called Baltimore Bicycle Works, and it works on a different principle.
		So most people listening to this will work in corporations, right?
		Top down, you do what the boss says, it's modelled like an army.
		That is a very recent human invention, right?
		It comes along in the late 19th century.
		What they did was try a different model.
		They're called democratic cooperatives.
		So at Baltimore Bicycle Works, they take all the big decisions together about their work, they vote.
		They share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks, so no one just gets stuck with all the shitty tasks.
		They share the profits, obviously.
		So they control their environment together.
		They're like a little tribe that control their environment instead of an army with one guy at the top controlling it.
		And one thing that was so fascinating spending time with them, which is totally in finding with Professor Michael Marmot's research about what causes depression at work, It's how many of them talked about having been really depressed and anxious when they were working in this controlled way.
		And their depression and anxiety had largely gone, still had bad days of course, but that kind of nagging depression and anxiety had gone away in this different environment.
		And as Josh said to me, There's no reason why any business should work in this top-down, controlled way that makes people depressed.
		It's not even more efficient.
		A study at Cornell University found that democratic businesses grow four times faster than top-down businesses.
		And I think what this opens up is a different way of thinking about depression.
		As we've said, to depressed and anxious people, the job of fixing this is basically on you, buddy, right?
		Maybe if you're lucky, your family.
		Maybe if you're lucky, your doctor.
	But actually, once you begin to realize that the reasons why people are depressed and anxious make sense, this is just one of many reasons why people are depressed and anxious, and also one of the things that's fueling the addiction crisis, which you can talk about if you want.
	Once you realize it makes sense, you suddenly realize what you've got to do is deal with the problem in the world as well as the problem just in the individual's skull.
	Do you see what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so you're focusing on work environments, right?
		And there's many reasons, as you were saying, for people being depressed.
		When you talk about work environments, have you researched people who are independent, people who work for themselves, people who make things or make furniture or what have you?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and that was one of the things as well at Baltimore Bicycle Excess.
		Most people are so removed from their work, right?
		From the outcome of their work.
		To give you an example of a guy I interviewed a lot, a guy called Joe.
		He works in Philly and he worked when I met him in a paint store, right?
		And Joe's job was to turn up at whatever it was, 8.30 in the morning, Stay there all day until 7pm and just take your order for paint.
		And then when you ask for a specific shade, his job was to put it in a machine that shook it, right?
		And then just give you the paint.
		That's it.
		That was his whole life, week after week, year after year.
		And Joe was acutely depressed.
		And Joe felt really guilty about telling me how depressed he was, right?
		He kept saying, look, I know how lucky I am.
		I know how lucky I am.
		But he felt like shit.
		And I remember him saying to me, look, I know people need paint, right?
		It's not, I know that I have some function here in the economy.
		Don't think you put it quite like that.
		But this is not giving me any sense of meaning.
		But one of the real mysteries to me about Joe, and for that I had to learn about one of the other causes of depression and anxiety, and solutions to that, was...
		So Joe, a lot of people, some of my relatives who do work like that, They're basically, the margin for them to change their lives is really narrow, right?
		Like one of my closest relatives is a struggling single mom.
		You know, she works every hour she can, she gets home at the end of the day, collapses, right?
		The idea of saying to her, your job now is to democratise your workplace is ridiculous, right?
		She can't do that.
		That's why most of Lost Connections is about how we can change the culture to free people up to make the changes they need to make.
		Although there are things individuals can do that I go through in the book.
		But the...
		A lot of people...
unidentified		How do I put it?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		We live in such an individualistic culture that people think what you're saying is you need to do it yourself.
		But Joe was in an unusual position in that Joe loved fishing, right?
		He'd fished in, I think, 20 of the 50 states.
		And he'd recently been to Florida.
		And he said, you know, when I was in Florida...
		I realised I could just quit this job.
		I could go and live as a fisherman in Florida.
		I'd make less money, but I'd be much happier, right?
		And somehow I knew as I was talking to Joe, and I followed up with him over the years that followed, I knew he wasn't going to go to Florida, right?
		How did you know?
		It's just the way he said it, it was a wistful longing, not a...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A whimsical idea, not something based on a real possibility.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		That's a really good way of putting it, but I remember the last time I saw him, and he walked off, and I felt like a complete dick for doing this, but I shouted after him because I felt it so strongly.
		Joe, go to Florida!
		Right?
		And one of the things that really troubled me was, why are so...
		So, a lot of people are trapped in the way our culture works, which is why we've got to change the culture.
		And I talk about specific, concrete things that have been tried in other countries that have freed people up and have reduced depressions.
		I'm sure we'll get to that.
		But if you think about an individual like Joe, what's going on there?
		And one of the things I learned from this amazing Professor Tim Kasser in Illinois, at Knox College in Illinois, is I think one of the things...
		This is one of the hardest causes of depression to learn about, because I realised how much it played out in my own life as well.
		So...
		Just like we all know, junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right?
		Something similar has happened with our minds.
		The kind of junk values have taken over our minds.
		When I started learning about this, I kept remembering.
		So I ate nothing but junk food for like 10 years from my 20s, basically.
		And I remember one day, it makes this story even sadder that it was Christmas Eve in 2009. At lunchtime, I went to my local KFC and I said my order, which I won't even repeat to you because it was so disgusting.
		And the guy behind the counter said, oh, Johan, we're so glad you're here.
		I was like, okay.
		And he said, wait a minute, wait a minute.
		And he went back and he came out and the whole staff had bought a fucking massive Christmas card for me and they'd written in it, to our best customer.
		And my heart, it's like sang because I was looking at this and I suddenly realised this wasn't even the fried chicken shop I went to the most, right?
		So I was at an extreme end of the junk food spectrum, right?
		I'm not anymore, though I've relapsed a bit lately.
		So we all know how that works, right?
		Junk food appeals to the part of us that evolved to want nutrients, but it tricks that.
		It's not actually a part of you that wants nutrients.
		It actually makes you sick, right?
		And what Professor Kasser found is that there's similar things happen in our minds.
		Weirdly, so for thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about, you know, money and status and showing off, you're going to feel like shit, right?
		But it's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that's the gist of what he said, right?
		But weirdly, no one had actually scientifically investigated this until Professor Kasser 25 years ago.
		So he knew that basically, to put it crudely, there's two kinds of motives that human beings have, right?
		You've got them, I've got them, Jamie's got them, everyone's got them, right?
		The first set of motives, imagine if you play the piano, right?
		I'm totally unmusical, but imagine if you play the piano.
		If you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it gives you joy, that's called an intrinsic motive to play the piano, right?
		You're not doing it to get anything out of it, you're just doing it because you love it, right?
		The experience is the point.
		Now imagine you play the piano in a dive bar, you know, to pay the rent and you don't like it, right?
		Or you play the piano because your parents really want you to be a piano maestro.
		I don't know, there's a woman who's really into pianists, so you learn the piano to impress her.
		That would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano, right?
		You're not doing it for the thing itself.
		You're doing it to get something out of it, right?
		And what Professor Kasser discovered, loads of really important things about this, but there's a few.
		We're all a mixture of these things, but we move throughout our lives.
		And what he discovered is...
		The more you are driven by extrinsic values, the more your life is guided by how you look to the outside, by, you know, what you're trying to get out of life rather than enjoying it, the more you will become depressed and anxious by quite a large margin.
		There's loads of studies that show this.
		And also he found that we have become much more obsessed with, much more driven by these values over the last 30 years for all sorts of reasons, partly because From the minute we're born, we're immersed in a machine that tells us life is about consumption, right?
		About externally consuming things.
		More 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own last name, right?
		So there's this machine constantly geared towards getting us to think extrinsic.
		Imagine an advert that said to you, you know, Joe, you look great today.
		You smell great.
		You're doing fine, right?
		You don't need to buy anything today.
		That would, from the perspective of the advertising industry, be the worst thing.
		Worst advert ever, right?
		It wouldn't make you want to buy anything.
		So, this movement towards these kind of junk values, and he shows lots of reasons why these junk values make us feel like shit.
		One is, it just corrodes the quality of your relationships, right?
		If your wife, if you think your wife loves you, not because you're you, but because you're rich, because you look good or for some other reason, then think about the insecurity that enters into that relationship.
	You know, oh right, if you suddenly got fat or if you suddenly lost all your money, it's over.
	It creates that sand of insecurity enters all your relationships.
	The more you're extrinsically motivated, the more insecure your relationships will be and the worse you'll feel.
	Or another example would be...
	Something that really makes human beings feel good are what are called flow states, right?
	There are moments when you're doing something you love.
	For me, it's writing.
	For you, I'm sure it's partly broadcasting, partly working out.
	As you can see, it's not working out for me.
	Where you just get into the zone and time seems to collapse and you're in that moment, right?
	But what thinking extrinsically, what being dominated by these junk values does, is it jolts you out of the intrinsic value.
	So imagine, go back to the piano example.
	If you're playing the piano just because you love it, and then suddenly you think, am I the best piano player in Los Angeles today, right?
	How are these people in this room thinking about my piano playing?
	How much am I going to be paid for this piano playing?
	You can see how that would jolt you out of the flow state, right?
	People who, the more we're driven by extrinsic values, the less we get into flow states and the worse we feel.
	There's lots of other reasons as well I can talk about.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well that completely makes sense, that relying constantly on other people's approval and recognition and love in order for you to be satisfied and happy is not a good recipe for getting by in this life smoothly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When you were young and you were experiencing depression, as you called it, what was the root cause of it?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So in my case it was, I mean there were a few things going on, and this is quite difficult for me to talk about, but One of the people I got to know for Lost Connections is this amazing guy called Dr. Vincent Felitti in San Diego.
		And if you don't mind, I'll tell you his story first.
		I'll tell you what it made me realize about myself and actually why I was very resistant to this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You were very resistant to this?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Very resistant to this insight that he had and really did not want to absorb it.
		So he actually made this discovery, and this can sound like I'm talking about a whole other subject, but trust me, it gets to depression.
		It led to an incredible breakthrough in depression.
		So in the mid-1980s, Dr. Felitti is doing all this research into obesity.
		Basically, Kaiser Permanente, a not-for-profit medical provider down in San Diego, just had a massive fucking problem with obesity, right?
		It was just hugely...
		Growing problem with obesity and they were trying everything and nothing was worth, like giving people nutritional advice, that stage wasn't working, right?
		So they basically said to him, they gave him quite a big budget and they're like, just figure out what the hell is going on here.
		So he went away and he started to work with, I think it was about 350 extremely obese people, right?
		People who weighed more than 400 pounds.
		And he starts doing all sorts of different research with them.
		And one day he just had this kind of almost stupidly simple thought.
		He thought, what if they just literally stopped eating and we gave them the nutrients they need?
		Would they just lose loads of weight and then come down to a healthy weight?
		So they obviously would like massive medical supervision.
		They did this, right?
		People, they just monitor them and they stop eating and they give them loads of vitamins and everything.
		And it worked, right?
		They did, in fact, lose loads of weight.
		But then something happened that no one expected.
		There's a woman I'm going to call Susan to protect her medical confidentiality.
		She'd been over 400 pounds.
		She got down to 138 pounds and everyone's celebrating.
		They think Vincent's like a miracle worker.
		And then one day she freaks the fuck out, starts massively, obsessively eating.
		And very quickly she's back to not quite where she was, but close, right?
		And Vincent sits with Susan and he's like, what happened?
		And she's like, I don't know.
		And he said, well, tell me about the day you cracked, right?
		Turned out something had happened to her that hadn't happened to her in, I think, ever, or certainly in a very long time.
		A man hit on her, right?
		When she'd been hugely overweight, no man had hit on her.
		A man hit on her, and that was the trigger, right?
		And he's like, okay.
		So they talk a lot more.
		He's like, when was it you started to put on weight?
		For her, it was when she was 11. And so he's like, well, what happened when you were 11 that didn't happen when you were 10, that didn't happen when you were 12 or 15?
		And she said, oh, well, that's when my grandfather started raping me.
		And this really stuck with him.
		So he starts talking to the group and he discovered 55% of the extremely overweight people in the group, 50% of people in the group, had put on their weight after being sexually abused, right?
		Which was an extraordinary, far more than the wider population.
		He's like, wait, what's going on here?
		This is really...
		Susan said to him, overweight is overlooked and that's what I wanted to be, right?
		So this thing that had looked like a pathology, right?
		And it is a pathology in one sense.
		Being extremely overweight will kill you.
		It suddenly didn't look like a sign of madness.
		It was actually performing a function that we couldn't see, right?
		It was protecting them from sexual attention.
		But, you know, this is a small group.
		It's a small study.
		So Vincent wanted to get a lot more research on this, and this is where it led to the breakthrough in depression.
		So he set it up with funding from the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, kind of gold-plated organization in this, in the US for this kind of research.
		Everyone who came to Kaiser Permanente in the next, I think it was a year, For anything, whether you broke your leg, you had migraines, you had schizophrenia, anything, got given a questionnaire.
		And it asked about, it had two parts.
		Firstly, it said, did any of these 10 bad things happen to you when you were a kid, right?
		Could be sexual abuse, neglect, that kind of thing.
		And then it says, have you had any of these problems as an adult?
		Obesity, injecting drug use, and at the last minute they added depression, right?
		By luck.
		So, when they got the results back, The CDC were just like, what the fuck is this?
		For every category of childhood trauma you went through, you were radically more likely to become depressed.
		If you had six of those categories, you were 3,100% more likely to have attempted suicide as an adult.
	If you'd had six of them, you were 4,600% more likely to have become an adult injecting drug user, right?
	And...
	There's a debate about why this is, and I'm going beyond what Vincent says now, beyond what the science says, and this brings it back to my experience.
	So I had, when I was a kid, I'd experienced some very extreme acts of violence from an adult in my family.
	You know, my mother had been very ill.
	When I was a kid, my dad was mostly in another country, and I'd experienced these really, really extreme and frightening acts of violence.
	And I... This sounds stupid, but until I went to see Vincent, if you had asked me, do you think that played a role in your depression, I would have said no, right?
	And it makes me realise, one of the reasons why I clung to this very simplistic chemical imbalance theory of depression for so long...
	Because I did not want to give the individual who behaved so appallingly towards me that sense of power over me.
	I didn't want to think about that stuff.
	I wanted to cauterize it.
	I wanted to cut it out of my life.
	I wanted to say, well, okay, that's a bad thing that happens to you.
	But the reason why I stayed with this and the reason why I spent this time with Vincent in San Diego and the reason why I kept going with all these different causes of depression and anxiety is because once you understand what's happened, you can find solutions you otherwise didn't find.
	So there was a second stage of Dr. Felitti's research that to me was so powerful.
	It's one of the reasons why I make myself talk about this now.
	So if you'd indicated on the form that you'd experienced one of these forms of childhood trauma, the next time you went back to your doctor, you weren't called back, But the next time you went to your doctor, your doctor was told to say something to you like, Hi Joe, I see on the form you indicated that you were violently abused when you were a child.
	I'm really sorry that happened to you.
	That should never have happened.
	Would you like to talk about it?
	And quite a lot of people said, thank you, but no, I don't want to talk about that.
	But a lot of people did want to talk about it.
	On average, the conversations lasted five minutes.
	And then the doctor said, I can refer you to a therapist to talk more about this if you want.
	And they were monitored to see what happened.
	The results were kind of incredible.
	There was an enormous fall in depression and anxiety just from the five minute meeting, right?
	And from the, obviously, people who referred to therapy saw an even bigger fall.
	And it seems to be, again, this is going beyond, this bit is going beyond what Vincent said.
	I asked him, I said, no.
	I think partly what happens is, it's related to shame, right?
	If you are a kid and you experience some kind of abuse, you can basically do one of two things, right?
	You can either say, look, I'm fucked here, right?
	I'm like a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine because I can't stop this happening and I've just got to accept it and I'm really vulnerable.
	Or you can say, This must be my fault at some level, right?
	Which is what I did, and of course it's what you're being told anyway by whoever's treating you badly in almost every case.
	And a weird thing is, if you tell yourself it's your fault, Actually, you gain a sort of weird internal power, right?
	You're not the pinball being smacked around the machine.
	You're the person controlling the pinball machine.
	You can change your behaviour, right?
	You can't change the other person's behaviour.
	So you kind of develop this kind of shame.
	And one of the things we know is, and there's plenty of evidence from this, people like Professor Jim Pennebaker have shown it, Shame is a catastrophe for human psychology, right?
	We know, for example, openly gay men died two years later than closeted gay men in the AIDS crisis, even when they got medical care at the same time, right?
	Shame destroys you, it makes you sick.
	And what Vincent found was this model of releasing your shame, which led to this significant...
	I remember one of the letters he got was from an old woman, I think she was in her 80s, who'd been sexually abused when she was a kid.
	And she said, thank you for asking.
	I thought I'd die and no one would ever know.
	And you can see how that release of shame would have a transformative effect on people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		So, for you, you had this traumatic experience of violence when you were young.
		You were depressed.
		You were trying to figure out what the source of this was, whether it was some sort of a chemical imbalance in your brain.
		Now, when they say chemical imbalance is in the brain, are they capable of measuring the level of serotonin in your brain?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		So there's a huge debate about this.
		You can, for example, do autopsies.
		There's a big debate about...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But that's when someone's dead?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		But there's a big debate about...
		So there seems to be most scientists agree, not all of them, and there are some people who dissent from this, but most scientists agree low serotonin correlates with depression, right?
		But it's not the same thing.
		In the same way, stretch marks correlate with obesity, but they're not the cause of obesity, they're the product of it.
		So there are real brain changes that happen, which I write about in Lost Connections, and important to say that, that I don't think they should be described as chemical imbalances.
		But one of the things that was really shocking to me was one of the British experts on this, Dr. David Healy, said to me, you can't even say the idea that depression causes serotonin, you can't even say that that theory is discredited, because it was never credited.
		There was never a time when half of the scientists in the field believed that, right?
		The reason that story got sold to me and most people listening to this in the 90s is because it worked really well for the drug companies, right?
		Because what it makes it sound like, if you've just got a chemical imbalance, the solution is just to give you chemicals.
		Now, it's important to say chemical antidepressants do play a role.
		We can measure that.
		And there's a slightly nuanced point to make about this, which is, so depression is measured by something called the Hamilton scale, right?
		I've always felt sorry for whoever Hamilton was, that the only way we remember him is by how fucking miserable we are.
		But anyway...
		So the Hamilton scale goes from 1, where you are, you know, dancing around in ecstasy or on ecstasy, to 51, when you would be acutely suicidal, right?
		And to give you a sense of what movement on the Hamilton scale looks like, if you move six points on the Hamilton scale, sorry, if your sleep patterns get better, you'll gain six points on the Hamilton scale.
		And if your sleep patterns deteriorate, say you have a baby who's crying all the time, you'll generally lose six points on the Hamilton scale, right?
		So, Professor Irving Kirsch at Harvard Medical School did the best research on this, and what he found is, on average, chemical antidepressants move people 1.8 points on the Hamilton scale, right?
		About a third of what improving your sleep patterns does.
		It's important to say that's an average, so some people do get more than that, some people get less.
		And you can see 1.8 points It's not nothing, right?
		If you're acutely suicidal, 1.8 points can take the edge off.
		There's real value in giving people that relief.
		But it is not solving the problem for most people.
		I thought I was, you know, weird for being on antidepressants for so long and remaining depressed.
		Turns out I was totally typical.
		According to Dr. Steve Allardy, who's a professor of psychology, who's done a lot of work on this, between 65 and 80% of people taking chemical antidepressants become depressed again.
		So you can see that's not 100%, there is some value.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, isn't that what a bilify is for, right?
		A bilify is the idea that your antidepressant is not enough, so you take a bilify on top of your antidepressant, which is supposed to help you even further.
		And it's one of the most prescribed medications in the country, and it's an anti-psychotic, which is terrifying.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		The doling out...
		I mean, one in five Americans will take a psychiatric drug in their lifetime, right?
		It's a sign of a...
		A cultural madness that we're doing this right where the now this is not to say that I want to stress again There is a real value in these drugs.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There is some value to them There's some value to them, but they're most certainly over prescribed and there's most certainly actual Methods that you could use to improve your life without any sort of chemical intervention that are readily available to everybody like exercise and diet and But those things aren't stressed when you go to a doctor.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The first thing the doctor doesn't say is, listen, what we need to do is get you to start running and get you to start eating really healthy, and then let's talk about antidepressants.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		You're totally right.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		There's a $10 billion industry in that doctor giving you drugs.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a crazy number you just said.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		$10 billion.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		So this is why, although there is a real value for those drugs, why this is the first primary and for most people only option that's ever offered.
		And one of the things that really helped me change, think about this differently, and it fits exactly what you're saying, Joe, is I went to interview this South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield.
		And Derek happened to be in Cambodia when chemical antidepressants were first introduced, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's where they were introduced?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		No, no, he was just there when they were first introduced in Cambodia.
		I thought that would have been one of the last countries in the world they made their way to.
		And the Cambodian doctors didn't know what they were, right?
		So they're like, what is this?
		And he explained.
		And they said, 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 like herbal remedy or something.
		Instead they told him a story.
		There was a farmer in their community who one day, he worked in the rice fields, who one day had stood on a landmine and got his leg blown off.
		So they gave him an artificial limb and he went back to work in the rice fields.
		But apparently it's super painful to work in water when your leg's been, you know, when you've got an artificial limb and your leg's been blown off.
		And I'm guessing it's pretty traumatic because he's in the fields where he's been blown up.
		He starts to cry all day, doesn't want to get out of bed.
		Classic depression, right?
		They said to Derek, we gave him an antidepressant.
		He said, what was it?
		They explained.
		They went and sat with him.
		They listened to him.
		They realised that his pain made sense.
		They realised that it actually made perfect sense that he felt so bad.
		They figured if they bought him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer.
		He wouldn't be in these fields where he was being fucked up.
		So they bought him a cow.
		Within a couple of weeks, he stopped crying.
		They said to Derek, so you see, Doctor, that cow was an antidepressant.
		That's what you mean, right?
		Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, we've been propagandized to, that sounds like a bad joke, right?
		I went to my doctor for an antidepressant and he gave me a cow.
		If you understand what all these experts who I met have been, and interviewed extensively, have been trying to tell us, if you understand what the World Health Organization has been trying to tell us, those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively what they knew through the science, which is our pain makes sense, right?
		You're not crazy to feel like shit.
		You've got unmet needs, and what you need is help to get your needs met.
		Now, some of the things you're talking about are Really good examples.
		Exercise, diet.
		Some of them are these bigger interventions.
		So one of the heroes of Lost Connections is this doctor I got to know called Sam Everington, who is based in East London, actually near where I lived for a long time.
		Very poor part of East London, and sadly he was never my doctor.
		But Sam was really uncomfortable because he's a general practitioner, he's a general doctor.
		Loads of people were coming to him with depression and anxiety, right?
		And he'd been told in his medical training, even though he knew the science was much more complicated than this, to just say to people, you know, you've just got a chemical imbalance in your brain and just drug them, right?
		And Sam thought, like me, he's not opposed to the drugs, he does give them out to some people, but he just thought...
		This is not right.
		This isn't dealing with the reason they feel so shit, right?
		So he tried a different approach.
		He noticed that one of the factors that was making them depressed and anxious was how profoundly lonely they were.
		It's a study that asks, obviously this is in Britain, but figures are similar to Britain by giving American examples, a study that asks Americans, how many close friends do you have who you could call on in a crisis?
		When they started doing the study years ago, the most common answer was five.
		Today, the most common answer is none.
		Right?
		It's not the average, but more people say none than any other option.
		So you think about that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		More people in America?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, more people in the United States have nobody to turn to when there's a crisis than any other option, right?
		So you think about what life must be like when you're alone.
		That is not the species we are.
		The reason why you and I are sitting here, Joe, in LA, the reason why we're alive is because our ancestors in Africa On the savannahs of Africa were unbelievably good at one thing, right?
		They weren't bigger than the animals they took down, but they were much better at cooperating than the animals they took down.
		We exist because our ancestors formed into tribes.
		Every instinct we have is to live in a tribe, right?
		Bees need a hive, humans need a tribe.
		We are the first humans ever to try to disband our tribes, right?
		No one's ever done that before in human history.
		And it's quite rightly...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, what do you...
		Let me stop you there because we're getting...
		Deep in the weeds here.
		What do you say to someone who is happy with what they do?
		Lives a fulfilled life, exercises, and is still depressed.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I thought a lot about this.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Remind me to come back to the thing about East London.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I know this is an issue with a lot of people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I know people that worship at the altar of science and modern medicine that firmly believe that all depression is because of some sort of chemical imbalance in the brain and anything that debates that or anything that disputes that notion pisses them off.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, I understand that.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And I would have been like that for many years.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you get that?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Do I get some people responding that way?
		Sure, of course, of course.
		So the World Health Organization is the leading medical body in the world, right?
		They did a study of all the best evidence and they explained very clearly that Mental health is a social indicator, right?
		It has social causes, it needs social solutions as well as individual solutions.
		The science on this is overwhelming.
		You won't get many scientists who say, in fact, you struggle to find any scientists who say depression is purely a biological phenomenon, right?
		Pretty much everyone agrees there's some social and psychological component.
		It's a weird disconnect between what the scientists know and what the public is told, right?
		I don't know anyone who went to their doctor who, apart from this wonderful doctor in East London who we can talk about, Who went with depression and anxiety and was told anything other than a biological story.
		I mean, they may be asked, you know, some of them were asked about childhood, you know, what was your childhood like and referred to a therapist.
		But no one was told about these wider social causes.
		No one was told, like, do you feel controlled at work?
		Well, okay, it's a fact.
		That could be making you depressed.
		But in terms of the people who are depressed but don't...
		Because this was a real mystery to me.
		I knew people, I thought, but this guy's got everything and he feels still depressed.
		What's going on here?
		And I think there's two things to say about that.
		One is, I started to, for various reasons, for research, for something else, I was reading some, like, feminist texts from the early 60s, right?
		And a really common thing that happened in the early 60s is women would go to their doctor and they'd say, Doctor, there's something really wrong with my nerves.
		People talked about it in terms of nerves then, we don't do that anymore.
		There's something really wrong with my nerves because I've got everything a woman could possibly want.
		I've got a husband who doesn't beat me, I've got a car, I've got a washing machine, I've got two kids, but I feel like shit, right?
		And the doctor would go, you're right, and give her Valiant.
		Now, if we could travel back in time and speak to those women, what we'd say is, right, you've got everything you could possibly want by the standards of the culture, But standards of the culture are just wrong, right?
		As a woman, as a human being, you need more than just a washing machine and a car, right?
		You need a fulfilling life, you need to have meaning and purpose.
		And a very similar thing I think is happening today.
		So for example, when I speak to people who say, I've got everything I could want, but I feel like shit.
		So tell me about your life.
		Very often they're working really hard in prestigious jobs, That they don't like, they don't enjoy hour by hour, to buy things that don't give them pleasure.
		It comes back to this hijacking by junk values that we're talking about that Professor Tim Kasser discovered.
		So what you've got is, because we've been told a totally misleading story about what makes us satisfied and happy as human beings, I think this comes up again and again in the interviews you do.
		Because we've been taught in different ways, because we've been told a misleading story about that, we live our lives according to the wrong script.
		We feel like shit, and rather than question the script, we think there must be something wrong with us biologically.
		Now, there are biological contributions, it's important to say that, but one of the things that really blew my mind on this was...
		I interviewed this amazing social scientist called Dr. Brett Ford in Berkeley.
		She did this research, it's kind of simple research.
		It just asked...
		If you consciously decided you were going to spend more hours a day trying to make yourself happier, would you actually become happier, right?
		And they did this research, she didn't do it alone obviously with her colleagues, in the United States, Japan, Russia and Taiwan.
		And what they found was, in the US, if you try to make yourself happier consciously, you do not become happier.
		In the other countries, if you try to make yourself happier, you do become happier.
		And they were like, what's going on?
		So they did more research, and what they discovered was, in the US, and obviously I spend a lot of my time here, but in Britain as well, if you try to make yourself happier, You try to do something generally for yourself.
		You buy something for yourself.
		You big yourself up.
		You try to get a promotion.
		In the other countries, generally, if you try to make yourself happier, you do something for someone else, right?
		You try to help your friends, your family, your community.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wait a minute.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What countries?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		It's Japan, Russia, and China.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		It's most of the rest of the world.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They stress this?
		That this is a part of their culture?
		That if you want to be happy, you do something for someone else?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		It's so implicit in the culture that they live collectively, that it's not even...
		Just like we wouldn't even...
		If you said, do you think happiness is an individualistic thing, we'd be like, what are you even talking about?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Isn't that sort of an extrinsic idea as well?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The idea that you're going to be happy by trying to make other people happy?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is the thing.
		So intrinsic values are not about just internal to yourself.
		They're things that you value.
		So your intrinsic value could be spending time with your kids, right?
		That was probably most people's strongest intrinsic value, if they're parents, is being with their kids, bonding with their kids, loving their kids.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But my point is, if your goal is to get happy, and the way you've chosen to get happy is, I'm going to get happy by making other people happy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That seems very strange.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I don't think so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		If you think about where humans are going...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But shouldn't you just make other people happy because you love them?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		But that is a way.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Loving people and being present with them is a way of...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But not as, like, a specific...
		With a specific goal of making yourself happy.
		That seems...
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		That's not why they do it.
		It's not like...
		When they were told, make yourself happy, they had an implicit script in their culture, which was like, oh right, if I want to make myself happy, I'll spend time with other people, I'll do things with other people.
		But if you think about it in terms of human evolution, it makes total sense, right?
		Think about our ancestors, where they evolved, If our ancestors had been individualists who were out to big up themselves as individuals, we wouldn't be having this conversation, right?
		So it makes sense that we evolved as a species with instincts that are...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, there's no argument there.
		The question is the motivation.
		Of trying to get happy by helping other people.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		It's so implicit in the culture for most people in, say, China, that they wouldn't even articulate it that way.
		It's only if you force them to say, look, try to make yourself happier, that the script becomes obvious.
		It's implicit.
		But this script that we have, this idea that the way you make yourself happier is as an individual, you know, just doing something for yourself.
		And how you look to other people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Let's stop there, because there is not one script in this country of how to make yourself happy.
		I think that's sort of disingenuous, this idea that the only way to make yourself happy is to do that.
		That's not what people are trying to do.
		What people are trying to do is be successful.
		And I don't think they necessarily equate success with happiness, but what they do equate success with is an alleviation of debt, an alleviation of problems, an alleviation of a lot of the issues that people face.
		And they think of that as, if you look at the problems that you have when you're growing up, especially if you grow up in a poor family, one of the main problems that you face is you're worried about paying your bills.
		So you say, someday I'm going to get to a point where that is no longer an issue.
		I'm going to make it.
		I'm going to be successful.
		They're not doing it thinking this is going to make me happy.
		I very rarely see that, which is one of the reasons why people, even people's parents, and this freaks me the fuck out, will tell them to not pursue their dreams, but instead to pursue something that's more likely to happen.
		Like, don't pursue your dream of becoming an actor or a singer or whatever it is.
		Instead, pursue your dream of being the foreman at the company you work at because that's attainable.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think you're totally right, and I think there's a lot of evidence that you're right, that the financial anxiety is a massive driver of depression and anxiety, obviously.
		There's an interesting study that found people who have an income from property are ten times less likely to develop an anxiety disorder than people who don't.
		And there was a really interesting experiment in how we can respond to that.
		It's one that President Obama said late in his term he thinks would have to happen across the country in the next 20 years for various reasons.
		So in Canada in the 70s, the Canadian government chose a town at random.
		It seems to genuinely have been random.
		It's a town called Dauphin.
		Anyone who knows Canada, it's about four hours out of Winnipeg.
		And they said to a big group of people in this town, We're going to give you guys, for the foreseeable future, we're going to give all of you a guaranteed basic income.
		We're going to give you the equivalent of, in today's money, $15,000, right?
		There's nothing you can do that means we'll take it away from you, and there's nothing you have to do in return for it.
		We're just citizens of our country.
		We want you to have a good life, right?
		It was partly because they had a kind of welfare system, but a lot of people were falling through the cracks, and they wanted to do a little experiment to see if this worked better.
		And this was studied very carefully by a woman I interviewed called Dr. Evelyn Forgey.
		To see what happened.
		Loads of interesting things happened.
		People spent more time with their kids.
		Very few people quit work, but a lot of people turned down shitty jobs.
		So actual overall work standards improved because employers had to attract people with better standards.
		But for me, the most interesting thing is there was a huge fall in depression and anxiety, right?
		Depression and anxiety that were so severe people had to be hospitalized fell by nine percent, which is remarkable in just three years.
		And then the program ended.
		Dr. Forge said to me, I thought so much about that, that I'd learned about the cow.
		Dr. Forge said, You know, that's an antidepressant, right?
		We should expand our idea of an antidepressant to be anything that reduces depression.
		That should include pills, but also...
		So you're totally right.
		I mean, look, I grew up...
		My dad's a bus driver.
		My mum worked in a shelter.
		My grandmother cleaned toilets.
		Financial anxiety is a massive driver of the despair.
		I mean, more than half of all Americans have not, because of the incredible financial pressure they've been put under, Do doctors still say that?
		All the time.
		My nephew's best friend just literally a couple of weeks ago went to the doctor and was told, yeah, you've got a dopamine imbalance.
		The doctor said it's migrating Was this in England or in the United States?
		This was in England, but I get contacted constantly by people who are being told they've got chemical imbalances in their brains.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are they just as likely to prescribe antidepressants in England as they are American?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		It's slightly lower, but it's still exceptionally high.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's that narrative that an antidepressant must be in some sort of a pill form.
		And even the expression antidepressant, an antidepressant, it's a very confusing thing that we've sort of adopted very quickly in this country.
		And it's relatively recent, you know, over the last 60, 70 years.
		And the people that have antidepressants in their body, that take them all the time and swear by them, Boy, if you try to tell them in any way that there's a better option, they get extremely defensive.
		I have a friend, she's very smart, and she's one of the people that will Very aggressively debate this idea that it's anything but a chemical imbalance.
		But she doesn't take care of her body.
		She doesn't exercise all the time.
		She's slightly overweight.
		She doesn't eat the best foods.
		You know, it's a weird thing.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Well, and she's living in a society and culture that has all these forces that are rising that make people feel terrible, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And so a big thing for me is, when I'm talking to this, because I've had some of that reaction as well, not too much, but I've had some of that reaction as well.
		First thing for me, I always say is, I want to expand the menu of options.
		I don't want to take anything off the table, right?
		It's not about...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You say that, and I think you're probably being pretty honest, but you really do want to.
		You want to eliminate...
		But just by the standard of improvement, You do probably want to take most people off of antidepressants, don't you?
		Wouldn't you rather they have a better choice?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I would draw an analogy.
		Obesity has massively risen in the Western world.
		It hasn't risen because people suddenly became greedy and lazy.
		It's risen because our food system is terrible, the food supply system is terrible, and we've built cities that people can't walk and bicycle around, right?
		And they're really stressed all the time, and they get home from work exhausted, so they don't have time to exercise, a lot of them.
		In that context, some people will do stomach stapling, liposuction, that kind of thing, right?
		I'm not against that, but if we change the society in the way that I would want to with obesity so that people could walk and cycle and, you know, they had access to healthy food, far fewer people would need stomach stapling or liposuction, right?
		So I would draw, it's not a perfect analogy, but I'd say, if the social changes that I want to happen, happen, if we follow the places that have succeeded in reducing depression and anxiety, Over time, you would see fewer people feeling they needed chemical antidepressants.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I would stop you with a couple of things.
		First of all, I don't think it's access to healthy food.
		I think most people have access to healthy food.
		They choose not to eat it.
		They choose to eat refined carbohydrates, high sugar foods, fast food.
		Those are the things that are getting people fat.
		And I don't think that salad is so outside of the reach of the normal person.
		I just don't agree with that.
		I just think they make unhealthy choices.
		That's much more...
		And they get addicted to refined carbohydrates.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I understand what you're saying, and I think there's some truth in it.
		But I think people make choices in a context, right?
		So, for example, you know...
		One of my relatives who's very overweight, you know, she's constantly fucking stressed because she's trying to hold together so much and one of the few reliefs and pleasures she has is to eat too much, right?
		And to eat pretty shitty food, right?
		I'm not critical of her for that.
		What I want is to help her change her life and change the society in which we live so she's not got that constant stress.
		Do you know what I mean?
		I mean, I think of this in relation to addiction and you tweeted once a TED talk I gave, everything you think you know about Addiction is wrong, which I'm grateful, thank you, which is partly taken from my previous book, Chasing the Scream, which is about addiction, and I think about what you're saying in relation to that context.
		So, we had a lot of addiction in my family, and, you know, one of the things that really changed my mind about this, and I think it really relates to what you're saying about food, is most people think, you know, addiction, I say drug addiction, I say heroin addiction, right, which is something very close to me.
		Most people think heroin addiction, if you said what causes heroin addiction, they'd say, Dar, heroin causes heroin addiction, right?
		We've been told this story for a really long time that, you know, if we kidnapped someone off the street, we injected them with heroin every day for 20 days, at the end of that they'd have this desperate physical hunger for the chemical hooks in heroin, their body would desperately need it, and that's why they would be addicted, right?
		The first thing that alerted me about something not right about that is when it was explained to me in Britain, If you get hit by a truck and, you know, you break your hip and you're taken to hospital, you'll be given loads of a drug called diamorphine, right, for the pain.
		Diamorphine is heroin.
		It's much better than street heroin because it's medically pure, right?
		If anyone listening to this has a British grandmother who had a hip replacement operation, your grandmother's taken a lot of heroin, right?
		If what we've been told about the chemical hooks is right, what should be happening to all these people in hospital?
		Loads of them should be becoming addicted.
		It doesn't happen in Britain with people who are given diamorphine.
		So it's like, well, wait, what's going on?
		I only began to understand it when I went to Vancouver and interviewed this incredible professor there called Bruce Alexander who did this experiment.
		It's changed how we think about addiction and I think it's very relevant to what you're saying about food.
		So this theory, the chemical hooks theory of addiction, and chemical hooks are real, they're just a small part of it.
		The chemical hooks theory of addiction comes from a series of experiments that were done years ago They're really simple.
		You take a rat, you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles.
		One is just water, the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine.
		If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always die quite quickly, right, within, I think, is a week.
		So there you go.
		You might remember this famous advertisement from the 80s.
		So there you go, right?
		That's our story.
		But in the 70s, Professor Alexander came along and said, well, hang on a minute.
		You put the rat alone in an empty cage where it's got nothing to do except use these drugs.
		What would happen if we did this differently?
		So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically like heaven for rats, right?
		They've got loads of friends.
		They can fuck all the time.
		They've got grain they like and coloured balls.
		And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water.
		But the fascinating thing is in Rat Park, they don't like the drugged water that much.
		None of them used it, they do use it, but none of them used it compulsively and none of them ever overdosed.
		So when they're deprived of the things that make life meaningful, they turn obsessively to the drug.
		When they've got the things that make life meaningful for rats, they don't.
		The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection.
		I think you can see a similar principle playing out with food, right?
		Of course there's some margin to the individual, I don't want to say that we're not entirely the product of our environment.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Very far away from this woman, these people that were on this diamorphine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So why are you saying that they don't get addicted to it?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Because they go back to their lives that are meaningful.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		There's a human example that happened at the same time as Rat Park, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why are their lives particularly meaningful in relationship to the lives we're talking about here?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So I think you can see in an example, a good example that was happening at the same time as Rat Park, an experiment at the Vietnam War, right?
		Huge numbers of American troops in Vietnam, about 40% used heroin, right?
		And if you look at the reports from the time, they were shitting themselves because they were like, my God, when the war ends, we're going to have all these heroin addicts on the streets of the United States.
		They're going to come home because they believe the chemical hooks theory.
		It's a really good study in the Archives of General Psychiatry by Professor Lee Robbins that followed these guys home, a select group of them.
		And what it found was 95% of them just stopped, right?
		Didn't go into some catastrophic withdrawal.
		Some of them did experience some physical discomfort, but they didn't, you know, they didn't...
		Now, if you believe the old theory of addiction that you're taken over by the chemical hooks, that makes no sense, right?
		But they've been exposed to all the same chemical hooks as any homeless street addicted person living on the streets.
		But if you understand this different way of thinking, it makes perfect sense.
		If you took you and me now, and put us in a hellish, pestilential jungle, where we don't want to be, we could die at any moment, we'd be made to kill people, you would definitely survive longer than me, but we would both find heroin a lot more appealing than we do now, right?
		And then when we come back to our lives when we have meaning and purpose, We would find heroin a lot less appealing.
		The core of addiction is not wanting to be present in your life, because your life is too painful a place to be.
		So when an intervention happens that reduces the amount of pain in your life, you're going to be less addicted.
		There's a very challenging line, Marianne Faithfull, you know, the British Rocks.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to stop you right there, because there is a giant issue, though, with people taking pain pills after operations that weren't on pain pills before, and then they get addicted to them.
		So do you think that's because of lack of meaning in their life, or is it because there is an absolute real chemical hook?
		Like, I have a good friend who had his nose broken, and they fixed his nose, and he got on some, I think it was Oxycontin afterwards, they prescribed it to him, and then four months later, he's taking it every day, all day.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So there's a few things to say about that.
		Firstly, chemical hooks are real, but they're a small part of the picture.
		We know how much they are, so there's experiments that measure this.
		So lots of people will have taken, in fact, some people listening to this will be taking part in this experiment now, When nicotine patches were invented in the late 80s and they become marketed in the early 90s, there's this huge wave of optimism, right?
		Because the chemical hook in cigarettes is nicotine, right?
		Nicotine patches give you the chemical hook you're addicted to.
		And so there was this huge wave, they're like, oh great, we're going to give people the chem, because addiction is caused by chemical hooks, we're going to give them the chemical hook, they'll stop wanting these filthy smoke.
		Smoking's gonna end, right?
		In fact, what happened is 17% of people, according to the US Surgeon General's report, when they use nicotine patches and they're motivated to stop smoking, right?
		Really important to say, 17% is not no one.
unidentified		It's a big number.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Big number that has saved hundreds of thousands of people's lives at a conservative estimate.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		But it still leaves 83% where something else is going on, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But isn't that because of the delivery method?
		The delivery method of cigarettes is incredibly satisfying.
		You take a hit, you get it right into your system, and boom, you get that nicotine.
		The patch is transdermal, it's very slow, it's not the same feeling.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there are experiments that show there is pleasure that comes from the delivery method, but it's also about self-soothing, it's about anxiety, it's about boredom.
		And this is very important to relate to the opioid crisis.
		So one in 130 opioid prescriptions result in an addiction, right?
		So it's a small number, but a catastrophic and devastating number, and I've reported from the places that have been most affected by this, like Keene in New Hampshire.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's one in what?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		One in 130 of the users become addicted.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's it?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's a relatively small proportion.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Now, because so many people in the country...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That seems wrong.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I can send you the study.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		That's the best study we've got.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that's in the United States or in the UK? Yeah, in the United States.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		That's one in 130 prescriptions, but bear in mind, some people get more.
		But one of the things that's really important to understand about that is the context in which this is happening, right?
		In Britain in the 80s, and this totally relates to what I write about in Lost Connections about depression as well as in Chasing the Scream about addiction.
		In Britain in the 18th century, there was this thing that happened called the gin craze, right?
		So huge numbers of people are driven out of the countryside into these disgusting urban slums where, you know, they're living in this awful...
		they've lost everything that made life meaningful to them, right?
		And what happened was an outbreak of mass alcoholism.
		Huge outbreak.
		It's called the Gin Craze.
		There's famous paintings of, like, a woman drinking a bottle of gin while her baby falls out a window, that kind of thing, right?
		And it really happened.
		And at the time, what people said is, look at this evil drug gin.
		Look at what it's done to people.
		If only we could get rid of these evil people selling this evil drug gin, this problem would go away.
		Now, when we look back at it, we know that it can't have been because of gin, because...
		We could both have gin in these glasses now.
		Anyone in Britain can go and buy gin at any point, pretty much, if they're an adult.
		And we don't have...
		I mean, there's still some alcoholism, of course, but we don't have...
unidentified		I understand what you're saying.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There was some despair, and that was what's causing...
unidentified		So, yeah.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		What changed is not the availability of the drug.
		What changed is the amount of pain in the society.
		And that is the key factor that's playing out here with opioids, right?
		It's not the only factor.
		Chemical hooks are real.
		But, you know, I remember interviewing a guy who was...
		Absolutely adamant that, you know, he'd become medically addicted.
		It was an accidental.
		Chemical hooks had taken him over.
		He'd been a college athlete, right?
		And he was in a...
		I think he was about 21. He was in a terrible car accident.
		And they gave him loads of opioids and he became addicted.
		But then I said, well, tell me about what else was going on.
		Turned out he couldn't be a college athlete anymore.
		His whole life had been built around being an athlete.
		And because of his injuries, he couldn't become an athlete anymore.
		And I said, well, do you think it might have been related also to the despair around that?
		It doesn't take long for people...
		I think part of the problem is because we've got such stigma about depression, anxiety, addiction, people will latch onto the biological explanation, whether it's the chemical imbalance theory, the chemical hooks theory, As their path out of stigma, whereas to me, you shouldn't be stigmatised in any fucking circumstance, whether it's because you're in pain, psychological pain, physical pain.
		Do you see the point I'm making?
		I think one of the reasons why we're so committed to these, and it's not even a good way out of stigma, I can explain to you how, if you want this for interesting evidence about that, but do you see the point I'm making, Joe?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I do see the point that you're making that people with lives that are unsatisfying or unfulfilling or there's some sort of a major issue in there like the athlete that's no longer going to be able to be an athlete, that that's going to make these drugs more enticing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But I know too many people that have had, like, real issues getting off of them.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Like, physical issues.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Painful withdrawals.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And most people, I mean, you're talking about the same people that have a hard time not eating shitty food, right?
		People that have a hard time getting disciplined enough to go to the gym.
		These are the same kind of people we're talking about.
		They're going to have a massive problem if you give them pills and those pills create a chemical hook, even if it's a chemical hook that you or I or a disciplined person would be able to get, like Dr. Carl Hart famously called it, he said, it's like getting over the flu.
		He goes, that's what heroin's like.
		Everyone wants to pretend that you're gonna die.
		He goes, no, you feel like shit for a little while, and then you're fine.
		He goes, it's not the thing that everybody makes it out to be.
		Withdrawals are not the thing that everybody makes it out to be.
		But if you have the average person, and you give them pills, and those pills can keep them from getting the flu, they're gonna keep taking those pills.
		And if they stop taking those pills, they get the flu.
		People are comfort junkies.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think that's too simplistic.
		I think there's some truth in what you're saying.
		So I think the key thing that happens, so I think Dr. Hart, who's a friend of mine, is totally right, but the physical withdrawal is, you know, a flu is not a nice thing, but it's not the most onerous thing in the world.
		But the thing that's really devastating is the resumption of the psychological pain that you were anaesthetising with the drug, right?
unidentified		Right.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		If you want to understand why people are taking so many painkillers, we've got to understand why they're in so much pain.
		And that comes back to the nine causes of depression and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connections, and then the kind of seven solutions to this problem that I offer.
		So, again, that's about if you're...
		So, let's say, Joe, right?
		Joe in the paint store, who I was talking about, who's, you know, who has this job he can't bear, has very little meaning in his life, feels his life is just slipping through his fingers.
		He took Oxy for quite a long time.
		He actually contacted me because of my book.
		And my TED talk, and he thought he was telling me a story about addiction, right?
		But the truth is, when he took Oxy, he was numbed.
		It made him as numb as the work itself.
		And then when he stopped, he was acutely depressed and felt like shit.
		So I think the challenge is, if you are coming off of this drug into a society of profoundly lonely and isolated people who are financially insecure, Who've been told that life is about money and status, who think life is about screaming at each other through screens, a lot of those people are going to feel like shit.
		And it's not because they're individually weak, right?
		Maybe individual weaknesses, of course, we all have flaws.
		Every human being has flaws.
		But I think it's much more...
		Because the fact that it's risen so much tells you that it's a response to social changes, right?
		Just like the fact that obesity has risen so much tells us...
		Now, there, of course, individual agency.
		I don't want to infantilise anyone.
		There are things individuals can do, obviously, and I talk about them a lot in Lost Connections.
		But I think the fact that it's a social transformation does tell you something.
		There's a good illustration of this, a kind of weird thing that was discovered about depression in the 70s.
		That was so inconvenient that psychiatrists tried to brush it under the carpet.
		So in the 70s, the American Psychiatric Association, for the first time, wanted to standardize how depression is diagnosed across the US. Because up to then, doctors were just using their own judgment about what it even was, right?
		So they drew up a list of 10 symptoms, kind of obvious things like feeling worthless, crying a lot, you know, you could guess what they were.
		And they send this out to doctors all over the US, and they use it.
		But within a couple of months, doctors start to come back and go, look, we've got a real problem here.
		Because if we just use this checklist, we should be diagnosing every grieving person as mentally ill, because these are the symptoms of grief, right?
		Everyone, when you lose someone, wants to cry a lot, has persistent feelings of sadness, that kind of thing.
		So what do we do?
		So the psychiatrists regrouped and they were like, okay, we'll create something.
		It was called the grief exception, which basically said, use this checklist to diagnose depression unless the person has lost someone they love in the last year, in which case none of this counts.
		So they start using that.
		But over the next few years that followed, there's this really awkward debate because they're like, wait a minute, we're being told to tell our patients that depression is just a brain disease that you can just identify from a checklist.
		Unless there's one situation in life where it's perfectly legitimate to react this way, but if that begs the question...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What about all the other different things in your life?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Why not if you're made homeless?
		Why not if you're stuck in a shitty job you hate?
		Why not if you're really lonely?
		The minute you admit all that, you have to admit context.
		And that was so inconvenient, they just got rid of the grief exception.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a fascinating fact.
		And that seems to be a huge issue.
		That seems to be one of the primary reasons why people today, I mean if you stop and ask the average person today who's not feeling well, I guarantee you they're going to be able to come up with at least one or two of those things on the list.
		That are factors.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		You're totally right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Whether it's a job, financial stress, relationship stress, loneliness, friendship issues, or death in the family, or losing someone they love.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But the fact that losing someone they love, like, we'll count that.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		That's the one thing we'll count, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That seems very preposterous.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And the woman who did the most research on this, one of the best people I got to know for Lost Connections, a woman called Dr. Joanne Cassiotores, an amazing person.
		She lost her baby in childbirth.
		Her baby was called Cheyenne.
		And she became an expert on this.
		And she said, you know, she talks about the craziness of this.
		It just shows we don't understand pain in this society.
		She put it to me, grief isn't a pathology, right?
		She's done this research that shows, I think the figure is, 32% of grieving parents are diagnosed and drugged in the first 48 hours after their child dies.
		And she said, this is a sickness, right?
		Grief is not a pathology.
		We grieve because we've loved someone, right?
		It's not a malfunction.
		It's not a sign of madness.
		It's a sign that you loved the person.
		And in a way, I'm going beyond what she says now, but, you know, I think one of the things, the fact that depression and grief have the same symptoms is really significant.
		Because I think depression is grief for your own life not going how it should, right?
		It's grief for your own needs not being met.
		Now when someone we love dies, all we can do is hold the survivors and love them, right?
		But with...
		With your own needs not being met.
		I mean, a really interesting example of something you've covered brilliantly on the show, Joe, about psychedelics, some of the research around psychedelics, which taught me a lot about how we might think about this differently.
		So, as you know, you know better than anyone.
		Until the mid-60s, loads of research was done giving LSD to...
		People with depression, alcoholism, various problems.
		They weren't done to the standards we want to do scientific experiments now, but they found really promising results, and then Nixon shuts the whole thing down, right?
		In the last six years, there's been a huge reawakening of this.
		I went and interviewed for Lost Connections, the teams that have worked on this, in Here in LA, at UCLA, at NYU, at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, in London at UCL, in Sao Paulo, and in Norway.
		And loads of fascinating things.
		I'm a fan about this, but there's one that I think really relates to our conversation powerfully.
		Well, loads of things, but I'll talk about one.
		So there was a sub-finding of one of the studies that I became obsessed with.
		They did this research at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, some of the leading scientists in the world, where they gave psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms, To chronic long-term smokers who tried everything to stop smoking and had not succeeded.
		I thought about my mother a lot because my mother is a chain smoker.
		There's a photograph of me and her when I'm six months old.
		She's breastfeeding me, smoking and resting the ashtray on my stomach.
		Oh my god.
		And so they take people like my mother, right?
		When I showed her that picture, she said, you were a fucking difficult baby.
		I needed that cigarette.
unidentified		Oh, Jesus Christ.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Isn't it funny how they try to blame you?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I was a fucking baby.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		It's okay.
		She's a good person.
		So they take these people, chronic long-term smokers, and they gave them three doses of psilocybin over, I think it was six months.
		So two-month intervals, I think.
		And what they found was extraordinary.
		80% of them stopped smoking, right?
		And it still remained not smoking more than two years later.
		Incredible.
		Think about we were comparing it to 17% with nicotine patches.
		And they were like, what's going on?
		So they did all this research in this.
		And what we've got to be careful with psychedelics is to not talk about it the way we were misleadingly told about antidepressants, chemical antidepressants in the 90s, which is, oh, it flips a chemical switch in your brain.
		Clearly, a chemical process happens in the brain.
		But what they found, I think the most important thing, and a lesson for people who don't want to use psychedelics as well, is...
		Sub-finding.
		So, if you take psilocybin, most people will have a kind of spiritual experience, right?
		Some people will have a super intense spiritual experience, some people have a mild one, and a minority will have no spiritual experience.
		It turns out the positive effects, like a reduction in depression, addiction, correlate exactly With the intensity of the spiritual experience.
		So if you have no spiritual experience, you don't have...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But isn't this dose dependent?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		No, this is across doses.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		They gave them three varying doses.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What were the doses?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I can't remember, but it's in the book.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's pretty significant, though.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a very important factor.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so across the three...
		So you were given it three times, and you were always given three different doses.
		So obviously you would have a more...
		Most people have much more intense experience with the strongest dose.
		But the key thing, I think, about that finding is Is that, as one of the experts put it to me, it's not that it's a chemical process, it's a learning experience.
		What it does is it gives you an experience of what it can feel like to be deeply connected, to feel deeply connected to the people around you, to the natural world, incredible, strong natural antidepressant that we can talk about if you want.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Have you had psychedelic experiences?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		When I was a teenager, I bought some and I think they were a drug dealer in Camden Town Market.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I'm holding off because I've got to go to the Amazon rainforest later this year and I want to use ayahuasca for the first time in the Amazon.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you've never had?
		No.
		I'm getting that from the way you're describing this.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		That's interesting.
		I interviewed huge numbers of people who had.
		Tell me what you're getting.
		That's interesting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, what it is is a dissolving of the ego.
		That's a general factor that almost everybody reports.
		It also releases you from deeply ingrained patterns of behavior and thinking.
unidentified		Exactly.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And highlights them.
		So as much as it is a spiritual experience, it's also a dissolving of the self.
		And the way we define ourselves is oftentimes very limiting.
		You have this...
		This is the way I describe it.
		And this is the way I describe very powerful psychedelic experiences.
		It's like...
		Do you remember the old Windows thing?
		Control-Alt-Delete.
		That's how you'd reboot.
		It's like Control-Alt-Delete for your brain, and your brain reboots with a fresh new desktop.
		There's nothing on it except one folder, and that one folder is titled My Old Bullshit.
		And you have two choices.
		You can either start fresh and try to re-examine the world with fresh eyes, or What's more convenient is you slowly slip into the my old bullshit folder and start opening it up and repeating patterns and lighting that cigarette up when you really shouldn't, having that drink when you probably shouldn't do that either.
		And those things are common because it's comforting.
		It's comforting for people to repeat patterns that they're familiar with.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think there's a few things in that.
		You're totally right and the scientific evidence is overwhelming.
		In fact, at UCL, at the University College London, Professor David Nutt did all this research that shows One of the things that happens in your brain when you take psychedelics is the part of the brain that relates to ego just doesn't function, right?
		I remember one of the most moving interviews I did was a guy called Mark, who was in one of the studies in Baltimore, who was a very shy, reserved, shut down guy.
		When he was 10, his dad had died and no one had talked to him about his dad's death.
		His mother was just totally devastated and no one had talked to him about it.
		And he'd always been very shut down and he takes this psilocybin and he had this really intense experience where he thinks he's in space and he believed he met his father and his father apologized for leaving him and then he reached into Mark and he pulled out these walls and he said, I want to thank these walls.
		They've protected my son.
		They've done a good job, but you can let them go now.
		And after that, Mark really changed how he lived.
		He actually went and, as you say, was able to sustain that insight.
		He went and learned a lot of meditation.
		I think you're absolutely right.
		It's about dissolving of the ego.
		And what an experience of egolessness can do is...
		Almost point a direction on a compass, right?
		But there's another aspect that emerged in that, which I think is one of the slight differences between us, although I think there's a lot in what you're saying.
		So in London, they did this research with chronically depressed people.
		And Robin Carhart Harris, who led that study, said to me, you know, there's one woman, chronically depressed, she takes the psilocybin, she gets everything you're saying, the dissolution of ego, the need for all the things you're talking about.
		And then she goes back to her job in a shitty seaside town where you just can't live compatible with those insights, right?
		She just couldn't.
		And so her depression came back.
		So to me, where individuals can change their lives, obviously they should, right?
		And we would totally agree on that.
		And a lot of people do have more margin to change their lives than they think.
		And we're in total agreement on that.
		And I think you would probably agree that there are some people who are, you know, through no fault of their own, like a lot of my relatives, Fucking stuck right and then very few people have no margin of change But a lot of people have such a small margin of change that that margin will not carry them out of depression or anxiety or addiction and that's why We need the widest what the World Health Organization says you need social solutions as well as individual solutions We need to change the way the society works in all sorts of ways That reduce
		the things that are causing this pain in the first place.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes changing the way society works though is a grand in Entangled, gigantic undertaking.
		Whereas changing your own life is not.
		Changing your own life is difficult.
		It can be very difficult for a lot of people, but it's far easier than changing society.
		So this woman who you're telling me Has this psychedelic experience, experiences this dissolving of ego, this beautiful spiritual awakening, but then goes back to her job.
		That's like opening up the folder of my old bullshit.
		It's the same thing.
		She's going back to the same patterns.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would say she's being forced into that folder because what's she going to do?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, what she's going to do is what a lot of people do.
		I mean, a lot of people change their lives.
		I mean, it's not impossible to do.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I don't know if this woman had kids.
		I didn't ask if the woman had kids.
		You can't imagine people being stuck.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It makes it very difficult.
		It makes it very difficult, but she's not in jail.
		She's not a prisoner.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		But I think, actually, and this might sound strange, in some ways I think changing the society is easier than isolated individuals changing themselves.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I'll give you an example.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How is that possible?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll give you an example.
		I'm gay, right?
		If I think about the incredible transformation I've seen in my life, so I tell the story in Lost Connections about my friend Andrew Sullivan, right?
		1994, Andrew was diagnosed with HIV. His first thought was, I deserve this.
		He'd been raised in such a homophobic world.
		He thought, you know what, I deserve to have this...
		Illness that's going to kill me.
		He was watching his friends die all around him.
		He thought he was about to die.
		This was before protease inhibitors.
		And he goes to Provincetown, a little town in Cape Cod, to do what he thought would be the last thing he would ever do, right?
		And he wrote a book about a crazy utopian idea that he thought, this is never going to happen.
		I'm never going to live to see this, but maybe generations from now this will happen.
		It was the first book ever arguing for gay marriage, right?
		And if I get depressed about this, I try to imagine going back in time and saying to Andrew, OK, I've got some good news.
		25 years from now, you're going to be alive, but that's not the good news.
		The Supreme Court of the United States is going to quote this book in their ruling, making it mandatory for all states in the United States to introduce gay marriage.
		And the next day you'll be invited to the White House, which will be lit up in the colours of the rainbow flag, to celebrate with the president.
		And by the way, that president is going to be black.
		Right?
		That would have sounded like ridiculous science fiction.
		Now imagine saying to gay people 50 years ago, you're not going to change the society.
		That's way too hard.
		What you can do is focus on changing yourself.
		Actually, gay people would be really fucking miserable if that's what they'd done, right?
		If that's how it was, my life would be immeasurably worse if gay people had just said, you know what, it's so hard to change society, let's change ourselves.
		We would have remained trapped in shitty, awful institutions and systems that kept us down.
		I actually think, if I think about most of the people I know who are depressed, to be honest, their margin for individual change is limited, but banding together their margin for change is huge, right?
		Think about what we're talking about, universal basic income, for example, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We're going to another subject here.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think it's very related to that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Keep going then.
		Because you keep going on one to the next to the next.
		I'm trying to stop with one.
		It's far easier to explain to one person, one life, why it's wrong to be homophobic than it is to change all the rednecks and all the ignorant people who don't read and all the people who have deeply ingrained archaic religious ideas about homosexuality.
		It's far easier To educate and illuminate one person.
		And it also can be done with the aid of psychedelics, especially MDMA therapy.
		That's one of the things that MAPS is doing right now with MDMA therapy.
		And they're involved in a bunch of clinical trials right now, helping people with all sorts of traumatic stress experiences, soldiers, people that experience physical violence.
		It's all these people that are, it's helping them alleviate a lot of the problems of their life.
		There's patterns that people are, that they have in their mind that they can release.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You can release and you can be educated and you can understand, you can change and grow as an individual.
		It's far easier to do that with one person, for one person to change their life, than to change the entire culture.
		I do agree that there have been great strides in this country when it comes to discrimination, when it comes to racism, when it comes to so many different ideas.
		I think that's Connected to the exchange of ideas that we're experiencing now because of the internet.
		I think because of the fact that there's so many different arguments back and forth and there's so many different ways to approach things that people are being forced to change their opinions.
		Even more religious people today are more open to homosexuality than they have been in the past.
		I really believe that is a factor of all the information that's available and the amount of communication.
		The amount of gay people that people know from television, from news programs, from all these different talk shows where they get a different sense of, you know, you see Ellen every day.
		Well, gay people can't be evil.
		Ellen's so nice.
unidentified		You know what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's a lot of that.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think you're totally right.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		But I think that shows that the first thing you said is too simplistic.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What thing is that?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		The division between...
		I think the last point you made is...
		Totally on the money.
		But what's too simplistic?
		I think you were saying that the division is the idea that it's easier to persuade individuals than persuade the society.
		You persuade the society by persuading individuals.
		You just persuade lots of individuals and they band together.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you do it one at a time.
		Sure.
		Okay, I think we're splitting hairs here.
		Because I think, obviously, if you change every individual, you change society.
		But it's far easier to change one person than it is to change 350 million.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		But that's obviously true.
		But you change 350 million by changing one person and one person...
		Yes.
		Banding together.
		Yes.
		But you also, one of the ways that you change that one person is by banding together in a group, right?
		So gay people, for example, would be a good example, but there are many, many good examples.
		But what you're saying about individual psychology, it's important to say you're right about that.
		So there's a very broad scientific agreement.
		There are three kinds of cause of depression and anxiety and most mental health, in fact, all mental health problems.
		The ratio varies.
		So there's biological causes, which we talked about.
		Your genes, for example, can make you more sensitive to these things.
		There's psychological causes, which are the things you're talking about, which are very real and important.
		And there's social causes, so that, you know, a lot of the other things we've talked about.
		And I think in a way, you don't need to play them off against each other.
		They're all real, right?
		And you want to deal with all of them.
		I wouldn't want to get into an argument with you where it's like you're saying we should deal with the psychological factor and I'm saying we should deal with the social factor.
		You're totally right.
		We should deal with both.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think we should deal with both.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Certainly.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Do you know what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		But I think that the idea that So, like, think of what you're saying in terms of people living unfulfilled lives, living in jobs or working in jobs that they don't enjoy, where they're being controlled by a boss.
		It's far easier for one person to choose to change the path of their life than to try to restructure society where that doesn't exist anymore.
		I agree.
		Because CEOs, like, this is intent.
		There's...
		I mean, obviously that was a huge factor in the 2016 election.
		It was one of the things that was talked about is wealth inequality.
		Well, there's no greater version of wealth inequality than the difference between the CEO of a massive company and its lowest worker.
		I mean, it literally is like a king and a peasant.
		It's a very strange sort of a structure.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And very recently has it become like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes, yes.
		It's so common.
		I mean, it's ingrained.
		I mean, how many corporations are there that operate like that, top-down?
		I mean, it's gigantic.
		And to change that, I think, would be far more difficult than to change an individual's path.
		And to tell this one person, hey, man, what do you really want to do?
		Do you really like making pottery?
		Well, then you should try to make pottery for a living, because this working for Dow Chemicals, you're not going to ever feel fulfilled.
		You're always going to have that same anxiety on Sunday night before you go to bed.
		You're always going to feel like shit.
		While you're at work, you're always going to be numb.
		You're going to be probably listening to a podcast like this while you're working, just to try to pass the time.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think you're right.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And totally, if you can do it, if you've got that margin for change, 100% my advice to you is to say in Lost Collections.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why wouldn't you be able to do it eventually?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You might not be able to do it right now, but if you plan for it, why wouldn't you be able to do it?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think about one of my closest relatives, right?
		She's very depressed.
		She's got two young kids.
		She's working really hard.
		She's in a shitty town.
		She has very controlled work.
		I'm trying to think, I've desperately tried to think of the margins of change that I can help her facilitate in her life, right?
		And I've really struggled.
		I mean, it's an environment where most people are depressed, most people are obese.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is in England?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, but I mean it could just as easily be many places spent a lot of time in the US. In fact, I think there's more people with this problem in the US. You know, now, That's a tough case.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a very tough case.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think we're essentially agreeing.
		Anyone who has any margin of change, I go through in Lost Connections, the seven ways you can change your life that the science shows will reduce your depression and anxiety, very likely, right?
		If you've got that margin, do it.
		I think the only disagreement between us is I think you're more...
		You think more can be done by individual will alone than I do probably.
		And I would say, but that's not disempowering in the sense that I would say the most powerful, individually empowering thing you can do is band together with other people like you and fight for something better, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Work together.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		towards improving yourselves.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Get together with the people in your community and making some sort of a bond.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Totally.
		And one of the most moving things I learned about for the book was this incredible protest movement in Berlin that I can tell you about if you want, that transformed really is one of the places where so much of what I learned from these scientists really fell into place with me.
		And it was where very isolated people came together and just said, you know what?
		We're not going to take this anymore and fought for something better.
		I can explain that it's a longer story, but if you want me to tell it, I will.
		So I think you're right.
		So you were saying, you know, what do you like to do?
		And you said pottery is an example.
		That's a good example.
		But I would also say it may be that what you like to do, and actually because we're a social species, this is what most we like to do, is get together with the people around you and fight for something better.
		And I think you're totally right about how this played out in the...
		Dynamics around the election, I remember, so it really haunted me.
		I was with some people who were doing some get out the vote work in Cleveland.
		And I don't know if you know Cleveland.
		I mean, it's like Detroit without the poetry of the ruins, right?
		I mean, it's shocking.
		And we were on this street in an area called Slavic City.
		Don't know why it's not Slavic.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When you say that, I mean, there's great parts of Cleveland.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Cleveland is an uprising right now.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I was just there.
		Sorry to be quiet, I mean the area that I was in.
		It was this area of West Cleveland called Slavic City.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They'll kick your ass, dude.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They get mad.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		They love Cleveland.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Clearly not the whole of Cleveland is like this, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's a dude who had a t-shirt at one of my shows that I put on my Instagram.
		It said, Cleveland or death.
		They're fucking serious about Cleveland.
		They have the heavyweight champion of the world, Stipe Miocic.
		He lives in Cleveland.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So this street is one of those, which is clearly not representative of all of Cleveland, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, you can find a place like that in LA. I'll take you to Skid Row right now.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Sure, sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Or we could just go to Beverly Hills.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Your choice.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know what I'm saying?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		No, no, I understand.
		But just about this street, there was this...
		We're going down the street, a third of the houses have been demolished, a third were abandoned, a third still have people living in them, some of them literally behind barbed wire, right?
unidentified		Sounds like a children's math problem.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		15 people live in this place, and they do heroin.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		If they walk to the end of the street, how long does it take?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're on OxyContin.
		15 people live in that place, they're on antidepressants.
		Who's happier?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		We knocked on one door and there was a woman who, from looking at her, I would have guessed was 60, right?
		She was actually the same age as me.
		I was 37 at the time.
		And she was very articulate.
		She knew a lot.
		She was really fucking angry.
		She was raging.
		And she made this verbal slip that's really stayed with me.
		I thought about it while you were speaking earlier.
		She's talking about what the area used to be like for her parents and grandparents, right?
		And she meant to say, when I was young, what she actually said is when I was alive.
		I was like, that's how she feels, right?
		She feels like she has died.
		And it made me think about this, this other research I was thinking about as you were saying this, I think relates to the individual versus collective debate that we've kind of been touching on.
		So, Native American groups in Canada, they call them First Nations groups, have really high suicide rates, right?
		And this professor I got to interview, Professor Michael Chandler, did this really big research on this, because what he realised is that 196 First Nations groups in Canada, some of them have really high suicide and some have none, right?
		And he's like, why is that?
		So he spent 10 years researching this, discovered loads of things.
		But one of the things he discovered was some of these groups have basically been able to fight to regain control of their community, right?
		They've rebuilt their language, they've rebuilt their control of the schools and, you know, whatever.
		And some have just been so kept down that they haven't been able to do that.
		Suicide rate correlates really tightly with the amount of control they were able to regain over their community.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And the amount of meaning that you find in your life.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think it's about meaning.
		It's about having a story about who you are.
		It's about having social connections around you so you're not alone.
		You're part of something bigger than yourself.
unidentified		Community pride.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		I thought about that when you were saying, you know, what do you like to do?
		What should you do?
		If someone's listening to this and they're lonely and isolated, you know, because we're such a fractured society and because we find it so difficult to be present with each other, right?
		The constant distraction and refracting everything through screens, which makes us feel like, shit, I can talk about some of that if you want.
		Actually, that initial step is quite hard because we're so broken up, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Listen, it's not just the initial step.
		It's you've gone too far in one direction.
		Like, say, look at it this way.
		If we all start at this neutral point, right, and someone like Jamie...
		Does what he wants to do and finds a good path and starts going in that direction and keeps improving his life and then eventually is a happy human being as an adult.
		Or you have someone who goes the wrong way.
		They get addicted to food and cigarettes and drugs and antidepressants and they get into bad relationships and then they have...
		Children that they have to take care of and they have a job that they hate and then they find themselves at 37 years old looking like they're 65 trying to figure out how to get back.
		Well, they've got to find a way to not just move ahead, but to get back to that neutral point.
		So they have to go back in time over all the shit they fucked up and they have a far longer path.
		So it's not an impossible path, but it's a far longer path.
		If you all If everyone's going in a direction and that direction is 25 miles away, but you go 37 miles backwards, you have to go 37 miles forward and then the additional 25 miles.
		That's the problem with people.
		They look at the daunting nature of that task and it's very intimidating to them.
		And they don't feel like they can make it.
		They don't feel like they can.
		There is satisfaction and hope and happiness in moving towards a positive direction.
		And that's what people have to realize.
		It's not about a goal.
		It's about the journey being a positive journey and the feeling that you get of improving your life incrementally on a daily basis.
		And it's also the mindset that you carry with you on that journey.
		You can't look at yourself and go, God, why am I not successful yet?
		Why am I not rich?
		Why am I not this?
		Why am I not that?
		You have to say, I am better than I was yesterday, tomorrow I will be better than I am today, and I am on the right path.
		And there is a lot of deep satisfaction and happiness in being on the right path.
		Now, if you're a person who wants to be an author, but instead you're an accountant, every day you spend not feeding that idea that you can be an author is gonna chew away at you, it's gonna chip away at you, and it's gonna move you away from that neutral point many, many miles.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I totally agree with you.
		I totally agree with you.
		And I think that the, that thing about when people realise they have agency, that's one of the most, because especially, and it goes back to what we were saying about work, if you are spending nine hours a day being controlled, one of the things you do to get through that is a process of internal deadening, right?
		I remember talking to Joe, the guy in the paint store, who would say, you know, I would just go home, and initially it was alcohol and then later Oxy, He would just want to numb himself, right?
		Because there's an internal deadening you have to do to get through that, which is why I think one of the key aspects that I talk about in Lost Connections is this transformation of work.
		If the thing that most people are doing most of the time is making 87% of us, we don't like it at best, You've got to go to the heart of that, right?
		And, you know, we're talking about margins of change.
		People who set up that bike store in Baltimore, they were working class people, you know, who had not had fancy educations.
		They set up a democratic cooperative, right?
		They transformed their lives.
		So they were a good example of people who appeared to have a relatively limited margin.
		They were low wage workers in a low wage industry.
		Who, you know, have made this transition.
		So I'm certainly not saying that people can't make these transitions.
		Even in difficult circumstances, they absolutely can.
		I just think, yeah, I think, I'll think about the farmer in the field in Cambodia, right?
		Whose leg's been blown off and he's in this field and it's agony.
		He needed to change his life, but he also needed someone to buy him a cow, right?
		He couldn't have bought that cow on his own.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In that situation, yes.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So I think he would be an illustration, or the rats in Rat Park, right?
		If you're in that isolated cage, I mean, it's not a great example because, you know, the rat can't leave the cage, whereas you could argue.
		But you see the point I'm making?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I do.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		You could attribute it just to individual...
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I know this is not what you're doing, but I think some people attribute this just to It's definitely not what you're saying, but just to individual weakness or individual failing, when I think that individual psychology is a significant component alongside other components.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't think of it that way at all.
		I think of it as poor choices.
		I don't think of it as individual failing.
		I've made many, many poor choices in my life.
		Here's one of the big ones you could tell people.
		Because there's a lot of people that are listening to this at various stages of their life.
		If you're young and you have an open future, you don't have massive obligations and debt and all the different things that become a real hindrance as you get older, move towards a direction that is attractive to you.
		Do not move towards a direction that is safe.
		Don't do it.
		Because if you do do that, if you just take that safe job, and then there's a lot of people that, well, not a lot of people can do that.
		That is a bullshit, stupid way to think and that will fuck you.
		That way to think will fuck you.
		You can do what you do.
		What you choose to do, you can get better at things.
		What you choose to do, you can move forward and try to figure out a way to carve a path through that life.
		And it's not going to be easy, but nothing worth doing is easy.
		But this idea that if you want to just do construction, if that's appealing to you, you'd like to just be a laborer.
		Look, there's a need for that in society if it doesn't bother you.
		But find out what bothers you and find out what you enjoy.
		If you're a laborer and you really want to be a songwriter, well, you better fucking chase that songwriting shit.
		You better do it.
		Because if you don't do it, you don't want to be a 60-year-old man sitting around just depressed and crying.
		And then maybe you call your friend up who does do that for a living and he's having a great time and he just released his new album and you both started out together in high school and now here you are at different stages of your life and you haven't pursued your interest.
		You haven't pursued your passion.
		You haven't pursued what you really want to do.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I would endorse every word you just said.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I would just add a layer Alongside it which is and we should change our society so fewer people get trapped and more people at the moment A lot of people feel we want to be giving people trampolines up, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think universal basic income is probably a way that that's going to start happening.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think that That can help a lot of people where your basic needs, your food is taken care of.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And I think President Obama talked about this towards the end of his term, partly because he said, look, actually, I don't want to attribute this to him.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I can't remember if he said it made this point in this way, but he was interviewed at Wired Magazine, and he said he thinks this will have to happen in the next 20 years, partly because of the extraordinary disruption that's coming to the economy through, you know, robotization.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Or automation.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Elon Musk said that recently as well.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, I think Elon Musk is saying it for a slightly different motive in that he knows the pitchforks are going to come for people like him and Mark Zuckerberg.
		The anger is going to be directed at Silicon Valley if there isn't a universal basic income.
		I'm sure they have genuine concern for people as well.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you think that's really why he's saying that?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Maybe I'm just more cynical.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because they just make so much money.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Well, I can't remember who said this.
		Someone said, you know, the path the economy's on, there's going to be seven tech billionaires and everyone else employed to give them massages, right?
		And I think there's something going on here, which is I think they know at some level if they don't start providing some, if the society doesn't start providing some baseline of security.
		Look, I forget the figure.
		I think three million people in the United States make a living through driving.
		Mm-hmm.
		That's not going to exist in 10 years from now, probably, right?
		Self-driving cars are likely to just, that's going to be gone, right?
		Now that's an extraordinary disruption to the economy.
		Those are mostly men.
		They're mostly men with low educational attainments for various reasons, a lot of which are not their fault.
		And, you know, that's devastating, right?
		So I think you're right that a universal basic income is one of the important strategies that can kind of deal with that.
		But I think this comes back to, I think you're going back to a thing that is a kind of recurring theme in this conversation, which is, you know, for both my books, for Chasing the Scream and for Lost Connections, looking at addiction and depression and anxiety, Both of them required me to go all over the world and just look at really different places that do things really differently.
		And there were some things that just recurred for both, right?
		I'll give you an example with addiction.
		The places that have most reduced addiction have not been the places that have said, I'm not attributing this to you very clearly, you're not saying this, but the places that have said, this is a problem for the individual and the individual needs to fucking sort themselves out, have a massive and growing addiction crisis.
		The problem gets worse and worse.
		The places that I went to where they said, actually, this is a collective problem, we need a collective solution, We're very different.
		So Portugal, for example, in the year 2000, had one of the worst drug problems in the world, right?
		1% of the population was addicted to heroin.
		It was incredible.
		Every year the problem got worse as they tried the American way more and more, arrested more people, imprisoned more people.
		And one day the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they were like, look, we can't go on like this, right?
		We can't have ever more people in our country being addicted to heroin.
		What are we going to do?
		So they did this quite bold thing.
		They set up a panel led by an amazing man I got to know, Dr. Hua Gu Lao, and they said to this panel, you guys go away, figure out what would actually solve this, and we've agreed in advance we'll do whatever you recommend, right?
		So they'd be like if Trump and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi agreed, everyone would abide by finding on this.
		So they go away, they look at all the evidence, including Rat Park, loads of the things we've talked about.
		They came back and said, decriminalise all drugs, from cannabis to crack, everything, but, and this is the crucial next step, take all the money we currently spend on fucking people's lives up, on arresting them, shaming them, stigmatising them, imprisoning them.
		And spend it instead on turning their lives around.
		And interestingly, it wasn't really what we think of.
		There was a little bit of residential rehab.
		Most of it was a big program of job creation.
		They set up microloans so people with addiction problems could set up and run small businesses about things they cared about.
		They set up a big program of subsidized work.
		You know, say you used to be a mechanic, they go to a garage, they say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages, right?
		The results in Portugal have been incredible.
		According to the best scientific study published in the British Journal of Criminology, injecting drug use fell by more than 50%.
		Overdose deaths massively fell.
		HIV massively fell.
		One of the things that was so striking there was going around speaking to people.
		I mean, one of the most moving interviews I did for Chasing the Scream was with a guy called Juan Figueroa, who was the top drug cop in Portugal.
		And he led the opposition to the decriminalisation when it first happened, right?
		He said, this is fucking madness.
		We're going to have a massive explosion in drug use.
		It's going to be a nightmare.
		And he said to me, everything I said would happen didn't happen, and everything the other side said would happen did.
		And he talked about how he felt really ashamed that he'd spent 20 years before the decriminalisation fucking people's lives up.
		And I think that goes to the debate that we're talking about, because that was...
		Now, that's individuals changing, right?
		That's very clearly individuals changing, making better choices.
		But then making those better choices in a context, a context where the society, instead of beating them down, is trying to lift them up.
		Do you see what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a very good point.
		It's a very important point.
		And what Portugal has done should be studied by our country, which is now falling right back into the old Nancy Reagan, just say no bullshit days with Jeff Sessions at the helm of catastrophe.
		He's a terrifying person in that regard because he's so ignorant as to what's going on.
		He's so ignorant.
		He's still calling marijuana a gateway drug.
		He's a fool.
		I mean, he really is.
		And the pattern is terrifying because they're trying to call Kratom an opiate right now.
		There's all sorts of resistance to what we know of as safe alternatives to pharmaceutical medications like CBD. That's another one they're demonizing.
		They want to categorize that with heroin and cocaine.
		It's fucking terrifying.
		It's a very, very weird time because there's so much evidence and so much science and so much history when it comes to things like Portugal where it's been successful to decriminalize everything and spend the money on treatment programs.
		But they're ignoring that.
		They're ignoring that because it's convenient.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		You're so right.
		But my concern is it's not...
		Jeff Sessions is...
		You can imagine what I think about Jeff Sessions is disgusting and insane what he's saying.
		But my worry is it's not, well, I'm worried about Jeff Sessions primarily, but my other worry is it's not just Jeff Sessions.
		I actually think even our side, you know, when it comes to the opioid crisis, I think I've been talking about this in quite the wrong way.
		So it made me realise actually how deep this Nancy Reagan script is in the culture, that even liberals, my side of politics, have basically been saying, their story about the pharmaceutical, the opioid crisis is basically...
		Evil drug dealers came along.
		They gave people these drugs.
		They got accidentally hooked.
		In this case, the evil drug dealers are the Big Pharma.
		They got them accidentally hooked.
		And that's why we have this crisis, right?
		Now, as you can tell from my conversation about antidepressants, there's a lot to criticise Big Pharma about.
		I'm very critical of them.
		But that story is just ridiculously simple.
		If that were true, antidepressant prescriptions have been given across the United States, right?
		If that were true, it would not make sense that the opioid prescriptions...
		Opioid addictions are also concentrated in the places where suicide is highest, where depression is highest, where, of course, there's some everywhere, but there's a reason for that, right?
		Angus Dayton, the economist who studied this, described the opioid deaths as despair deaths, right?
		If you go to the places where, as I know you travel around the country, when I go to places that have been most affected by the opioid crisis, What's going on?
		They've been deprived of the things that make life meaningful, so they want to be anaesthetized all the time.
		There's a devastating line, Marianne Faithfull, who was Mick Jagger, who's best known for being Mick Jagger's girlfriend, but it kind of pisses me off because I think she's even better than Mick Jagger.
		What?
		I know, I know, it's controversial.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		She's better than Mick Jagger?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I know, it's controversial.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This fucking conversation's over.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Shut it down, Jamie!
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So, Mariam Faithful had a heroin addiction in the 60s when she was homeless, and she has this very challenging line in her memoir where she says something like, heroin saved my life, because if it wasn't for heroin, I would have killed myself, right?
		And don't misunderstand what I'm saying.
		Heroin is not a good solution to despair.
		If we want it, clearly, for all sorts of very obvious reasons, If we want to understand why there's been this huge increase in opioid use, we have to understand these things that I'm writing about in this connection so that the World Health Organization is explaining this deep kind of despair.
		And my worry is, because you're back to the worry about how our side is getting it wrong, so we've got Jeff Sessions getting it wrong in the most obvious, insane way, right?
		You know, it's just we need to crack down on the Mexicans and that'll stop.
		The United States has spent a trillion dollars On the war on drugs.
		It's done it for a hundred years.
		It's imprisoned more people than any other country in human history.
		And at the end of all that, you guys can't even keep drugs out of your prisons where you pay people to walk around the fucking perimeter the whole time.
		So good luck keeping them out of a country with two, three thousand mile borders.
		That's so ridiculous and so absurd that...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's not just that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's why would you think that you could tell a grown adult what they can and can't do with their body?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
unidentified		But...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's really simple.
unidentified		But...
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I'm pretty sure all of your listeners agree with us, or pretty much all of them agree with us on Jeff Sessions.
		What I think more of them will be tempted by will be the more liberal argument, as a liberal, so I'm not attacking liberals, but the more liberal argument, which is this simplistic, even Bernie Sanders, who I love and would have voted for, Well, I think he's got this wrong, which is that, although I think Bernie Sanders' politics would deal with some of the deeper problems as well, clearly.
		But there's this story that it's about the drug companies.
		We've got to look at the one place that solved an opioid crisis.
		We talked about Portugal, the one other place.
		So Switzerland, I'm a Swiss citizen, and my dad's from there as well as British, obviously.
		Switzerland had a massive heroin problem in the 90s, right?
		Huge.
		Almost as, you know, not quite as bad as what's happening with opioids here, but it was massive.
		And Switzerland got this amazing kick-ass female president called Ruth Dreyfuss who explained to people, look, When you hear the word legalisation, what you picture is anarchy and chaos, right?
		What we have now is anarchy and chaos.
		When you prohibit drugs, what you get is unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown drug users, all in the dark, filled with violence, disease and chaos.
		What she proposed to do is legalise heroin, right?
		And it's important to understand what that doesn't mean.
		Doesn't mean there's like a heroin aisle in the CVS in Switzerland, right?
		So different things can be legalized differently.
		I don't know the rules in LA, but I'm pretty sure you could legally, if you wanted to, own a dog, a monkey, and a lion.
		But I'm pretty sure the rules are different, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't think you can own a monkey or a lion, but you can definitely own a dog.
		If you really wanted to one and you were rich, you could get them in Texas.
		You could do whatever the fuck you want, except you can't have pot in Texas.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Hilarious.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I'm pretty sure in Texas it's licensed, so you could, you know, they're all legal, but they're legal in different ways, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		In a similar way, what Ruth Dreyfuss, the Swiss president, was posing is heroin should be legal, but not in the way that alcohol is legal.
		So the way it works is, if you've got a heroin problem in Switzerland, you're assigned to a clinic.
		I went to the one in Geneva, where the former president now lives across the street, which tells you something.
		You have to go early in the morning for reasons I'll explain.
		You're given your heroin there.
		You can't take it out with you.
		You've got to use it there and then you leave and you go to your job because they do two things and it's the exact opposite of what's being proposed in the US. What's being proposed in the US is stop prescribing And don't give support, right?
		Well, Switzerland is the exact opposite.
		In Switzerland, they'll give you the drug you're addicted to, and then they give you loads of support to figure out why you're in such pain in the first place.
		They help you get housing, they get you subsidized work, they give you loads of therapy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are you aware of a boga?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, of course, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's probably one of the very best ways for people to quit drugs, especially some horrible drug.
		And it's a ruthlessly introspective drug that many, many people have found great success in kicking heroin, cigarettes, alcoholism, getting over past abuse.
		It's a long experience.
		It can last more than 24 hours.
		Totally illegal in the United States, but a lot of people go to Mexico and do it.
		And I've had very good friends that have had problems with pills that went over there and kicked them because of Iboga.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I'll give your producers an intro to Dr. Gabor Marte, who's a friend of mine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Sure, I know who he is.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		He would be a great guest for you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Does he live in England?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		No, he lives in Vancouver, but he comes to LA fairly often.
		Does he?
		You should definitely talk to him.
unidentified		I would love to.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I would really recommend people look at his work.
		But in terms of, just to stay with the last point about Switzerland, because there was something really, I think it relates to Iboga in a way.
		So one of the things that really surprised me in that guy spending time in that clinic, I remember this chief psychiatrist there, Dr. Rita Mangies.
		So they will give you any dose you want, except one that will kill you, and there is never any pressure to cut back, which really surprised me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you could go to this clinic and they'll dose you up with heroin?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		They give you the heroin.
		You have to use it there.
		You can't take it out with you because they don't want people selling it on.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's kind of badass.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		You're monitored by a nurse.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		But the results are really incredible, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So, headline, most important fact is, there have been zero heroin overdose deaths on legal heroin in Switzerland in the 12 years that program has existed.
unidentified		What happened?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How's the ratio of people using to not using?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How's it gone down?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		There's been a really significant fall in heroin use.
		The best research is by Professor Ambrose Uchtenhagen, who's shown there have been no deaths in the legal program and an enormous fall in deaths in the illegal program, and enormous fall in use overall, for various reasons I can talk about.
		But the thing that blew my mind was they give them whatever days they want for as long as they want.
		And I was like, what we're told, so it comes back to chemical hooks, what we're told is they'll just want more and more forever, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		But actually, what happens is almost everyone chooses to cut back over time and stop, right?
		When I went there, I think there were like two people who'd been on the program at the start.
		And I said to Dr. Mangy, who runs it, I don't understand this.
		How is this happening?
		And she looked at me like I was an idiot.
		And she said, well, people's lives get better.
		And as their lives get better, they don't want to be anesthetized so much.
		Which seems almost stupidly obvious, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It goes right back to what you were saying about antidepressants and people's lives.
		Like, the choice that you make and the paths that you take and the people you surround with and the happiness that you feel from your community, that's ultimately what leads to a fulfilling life.
		And if you have all that, why would you fuck it up with heroin?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think you're totally right.
		The whole premise of Lost Connections comes back to something we were saying at the start.
		Human beings have needs, right?
		And if your needs are being met, you don't want to be anesthetized.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think what you said is very important.
		There's psychological needs that are just as valuable and important as physical needs.
		Like, we know we have needs for nutrients.
		We know we have needs for water.
		We have needs, psychological, for all sorts of different things.
		Our communities are incredibly important.
		Love is incredibly important.
		Family is incredibly important.
		I know some people that are older men that have been bachelors their whole lives and they're childless and now they don't have a deep connection with anybody and they get to this very weird, strange place where they're like, is this it?
		Now I'm 70 years old and I've never really had children and I don't know what to do and this is...
		This is my life now.
		All their friends have had families now, and their families, a lot of times the kids are grown up, and it becomes very, very strange.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		You know, I thought about that a lot.
		I interviewed this guy, Professor John Cassioppo at the University of Chicago, who's the leading expert in the world on loneliness.
		And he said this thing to me.
		It's a bit like what the woman in Geneva said.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What a lonely way to live your life, studying loneliness.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		He's actually quite a cheerful person, actually.
		But he had this really interesting, this really simple point.
		But he just said, if you think about the circumstances where we evolved, right?
		If you got separated from the tribe, if you were alone, you were depressed and anxious for a really fucking good reason.
		You were about to be eaten.
		You were in terrible danger.
		If you got injured, no one would help you.
		You would die, right?
		So he showed that...
		So as you know, when we're stressed, we release a hormone called cortisol.
		He showed this really interesting experiment that I wrote back in the book...
		Being acutely lonely is as stressful as being punched in the face by a stranger when it comes to cortisol release, right?
		That's how deeply we are resistant to loneliness, right?
		It's a signal telling you to get back to the tribe.
		That's why we evolved.
		It's a really important signal.
		If humans hadn't had that signal, we wouldn't be here, right?
		And I think you're right.
		So when you look at these men, if you have an isolated...
		There was this woman, so I covered this incredible protest movement that happened in Berlin on a big anonymous housing project where no one knew each other and they came together to protest.
		It was a woman who was about to kill herself because she was about to be evicted and the whole housing project came together to say she should be allowed to stay in her home and they should have a rent freeze.
		And it's an amazing story, I tell it in the book, but there's something one of the women said to me that I never forgot.
		She's called Neriman.
		She'd grown up in Turkey and she'd come to Germany I think when she was 17. She said, when I grew up in Turkey, what I called my home was my village and everyone in it.
		And then I came to live in the Western world and I learned that what you're meant to call home is just your four walls and if you're lucky your family.
		And then this protest began, and we all got to know each other, and this whole place became my home.
		And I think of everywhere here as home now.
		And she realised that we are homeless in some sense in the Western world.
		That us humans have a need for a sense of belonging.
		And our sense of home is too small to meet our sense of home belonging.
		There's a wonderful Bosnian writer called Alexander Heyman, who said, home is where people notice when you're not there.
		Right?
		And a lot of us, like these guys you're talking about, these older guys, who notices if they're not there?
		Probably no one.
		They are in a sense homeless.
		They are spiritually homeless.
		I'm not a religious person.
		I don't mean that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I get what you're saying.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Do you know what I mean?
		And so I think it's about...
		And this comes back to...
		Think about how different that is.
		Everything we're talking about.
		Think about how different our conversation has been.
		To what my doctor told me when I was a teenager.
		And I go in and I say, I'm in real pain and I feel like pain is leaking out of me and I can't control it.
		And he says, you've just got a malfunction in your brain, right?
		One of the worst things about that, there are many things wrong with that.
		Firstly, what he said to me is not true.
		I'm sure he believed it.
		I think he was misinformed.
		I don't think he was deliberately lying to me.
		But what he said was not true.
		But also, to me, the biggest problem with just telling this exclusively biological story about depression and anxiety, there's some real biological factors of course, It cuts us off from having this conversation, right?
		All those people you were talking about who are so insistent, as I was, that their depression is just the result of a chemical imbalance, If you think that, it disconnects you from the source of your pain.
		It tells you you're just biologically broken, and presumably always going to be biologically broken.
		When the conversation we're having, which is a different conversation, it's a difficult conversation, it's a nuanced conversation, it's not simplistic, it's not one problem, one lever to solve it, it's a much deeper and more textured way of thinking, That is the conversation we have to have.
		That's what the best scientists in the world are telling us, the World Health Organization.
		And my worry is we're just being pushed in, like you said, that very good metaphor about driving 37 miles in the wrong direction, right?
		We're just driving in the wrong direction.
		We're driving away from the source of our pain rather than towards it where it can be understood and solved.
		Of course, there's always going to be some pain in human life, but the fact that we have this one in five people taking a psychiatric drug, you know, I think the figure is one in ten 13-year-old boys is taking a stimulant drug to make them focus.
		I think the figure is 30% of old people in retirement homes have been given antipsychotic drugs to shut them the fuck up because they're rebelling against the way they're being treated.
		In between, one in four middle-aged women in the United States is taking a chemical antidepressant at any given time.
unidentified		One in four.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		One in four.
		You're talking about a society that, I mean, the figures about how many children, it's much lower, but it's so much more extreme.
		The number of toddlers who've been given anti-psychotics in the United States is just off the scale, right?
		I think Dr. Sami Tamimi has written about this.
		There's some extraordinary figure, I might be getting the figure slightly wrong, but it's something like a majority of children in foster care in the United States are being given stimulant drugs.
		Basically to shut them up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's a disturbing one, the Ritalin and various stimulants that they give to children.
		What's that about?
		What's the cause of that?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it's related.
		I've researched this much less than the other things we've talked about.
		But it came up a lot in the conversations that I had.
		There are many things going on here.
		One of them is...
		A lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I wrote about, I couldn't help but notice reading all the research, interviewing the scientists, also can lead to decrease in focus and attention.
		So for example, if you are deadened at work and you feel controlled all the time, you have to deaden yourself to get through it, It's harder.
		Attention's a muscle, right?
		It's harder to bring your brain back to focus.
		Like Joe wanted to just go and collapse and watch, you know, watch whatever shit was on The Bachelor or whatever.
		I don't think Joe would have watched The Bachelor, actually.
unidentified		Whatever shit would have been on the TV. Even in his full state of depression, The Bachelor would have been too much.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		That was a line too far.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I can't do it.
unidentified		He was prepared to take Oxy, but not to go to that level of self-harm, right?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Or think about loneliness, right?
		There's really...
		Professor Cassiope was showing this.
		If you are lonely, that triggers what's called hypervigilance, right?
		Again, for a very good reason.
		If you're on your own in the savannas of Africa, you want to be hypervigilant.
		One of the things that was most challenging to me is this evidence that The people with the lowest levels of attention problems and depression and anxiety in the United States are the Amish, right?
		And I am an atheist, gay, liberal.
		So the idea of learning something from the Amish was initially challenging to me.
		And I've got to admit, I felt really humbled by going and spending time.
		I went to this village called Elkhart La Grange, which is just outside Fort Wayne in Indiana.
		And, you know, there's still a lot I disagree with about the Amish, don't get me wrong.
		Not least because I just re-watched Witness.
		But, you know, I could see that they've got...
		So there's a very interesting thing about the Amish, as you know, when you turn 16, if you're an Amish, you've You've got to leave and go and live in what they call the English world, our world, right?
		And then you decide whether to come back.
		About 80% decide to come back, 20% don't.
		It's one of the reasons why the Amish is never counted as a cult, because no cult would do that, right?
		No cult's going to tell you to leave for two years and then decide whether to come back.
		In fact, the exact opposite.
		So they have lived in our world.
		They know our world really well.
		And I remember having this very challenging conversation with, what's his name, Lauren Beachy, his name is an Amish guy there, who said, it comes back to the weight conversation we had.
		He said, look, there's loads of things I miss.
		He talked about missing that 70s show.
		He said, I used to love driving in trucks because they obviously don't drive, they don't use electricity off the grid.
		And he said, but you know, if I kept those things, I wouldn't spend time with my family, I wouldn't spend time with my children, I wouldn't know who my neighbours were.
		And he said this very challenging thing.
		He said, you know Weight Watchers?
		And I said, yeah.
		And he said, well, the idea of Weight Watchers is you can only lose weight together as a group, right?
		It helps, or not only, but it helps you to lose weight together as a group, that you would find it harder on your own.
		This is like that.
		And I said, what?
		Are you saying like the Amish is like Weight Watchers for the problems of Western civilization?
		And he's like, yeah, that's what I'm saying.
		And to me, that was so challenging.
		The idea that you've got to give...
		Because it comes back to what we say about junk values.
		In our culture, we're told the solution is always to get more.
		And the idea that the solution is to have less and be present more...
		It's really challenging, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't even think it's about having less.
		It's about what they're doing is...
		Look, think about what the Amish are doing.
		First of all, massive sense of community, right?
		They're very connected.
		They're not using cell phones.
		They're not using email.
		So the community is also based on one-to-one interaction, real social cues, real social interaction, which is critical.
		It's a big part of being a human being, and it's one of the more absent things in modern society.
		Two, physical labor.
		They're involved in a lot of physical labor because they don't use electricity.
		They don't use power tools.
		There's so many things that they don't do.
		So because of their culture, they're making their own homes, right?
		So they have a vested interest in helping each other, working together as a community, and they have a deep sense of satisfaction of constructing each other's homes.
		You construct my home with me.
		I help you build your home.
		They take care of their animals.
		They take care of their crops.
		There's a real connection with where they get their food from, a real connection with where they live, their community, the sense of Just the sense of belonging to something that's bigger than you.
		There's so many factors involved in their happiness that you can kind of see where, yeah, there's a lot of wacky shit with the cult aspects of being an Amish person, but...
		What you get out of it, it's almost like if you had a self-help group that subscribed to all the positive benefits of being Amish, and they just called it, like, re-grounding or something like that, and you just go out there and you become a part of nature.
		I mean, that seems like a co-op.
		That seems like some sort of a farm-based co-op, right?
		Build each other's houses.
		Stay together.
		You don't have to wear sexy clothes.
		Let's just all wear the same shit.
		It's no big deal.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I love how you put that.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And you're right, to the inequality, the richest Amish is as wealthy as the poorest Amish, right?
unidentified		It's the same thing, yeah.
unidentified		But it's not like they're not holding them back.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think that's one of the things that I think about this in relation to attention is so there's this theory that Amish kids don't seem to develop ADHD right and there's been it's been surprisingly understudied.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Maybe they don't have Amish doctors.
		Maybe that's a problem.
		These fucking kids are bouncing off the wall like he's normal!
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I don't think it's that.
		I wondered if it was that and I also wondered if it was like they don't have electronics so then obviously I'm kidding and I think there's an element going on there but actually Yeah.
		and sit in school but so we just let them run around and go fishing and hunting instead right yeah and i suddenly realized all right so there's always going to be now maybe factors making it harder for us to concentrate in the environment i think there are but there's always going to be a natural variation in people who want to sit and focus on one thing compared to people who want to you know run around medically and And that's actually, you can see how as a species it benefits us to have both, right?
		Right.
		But what we do is we try to bash every child into one particular mode of being, which actually is designed to prepare them for shitty deadening work.
		The reason our schools are shitty and deadening, there's a guy called Alfie Cohn who says every school has an official curriculum and a hidden curriculum.
		The official curriculum is like history, geography, whatever.
		And the hidden curriculum is, this is what we're training you to put up with in your life.
		Right?
		And if you've got a society where 87% of people don't like their work, and you're almost twice as likely to hate your job as love your job, part of the job of the school system will be to deaden children so they learn you've got to fucking sit there and shut up and do what you're told, right?
		So that's not a malfunction of the system, that's an unconscious function of the system, right?
		So we've got this system where we're bashing these kids to prepare them for this economic system that's making us feel miserable, To me, the solution is to change the way we work so we don't have to fucking deaden our children, right?
		So that actually our children can be...
		But the Amish who, you know, do what, as you say, it's not like they're doing...
		High-end cognitive labour is probably the fancy way of putting it, right?
		But their kids, to them, having a kid who goes fishing and running around is as valuable, actually, as it may even be more valuable than the kid who sits there reading all day, right?
		And I think there's a real thing about this.
		What that tells us, it comes back to one of the themes that's come up all through our conversation, Joe.
		These things that we're told are pathologies make sense in their contexts, right?
		Depression, we're told it's a pathology.
		Actually, anxiety, we're told it's a pathology.
		Actually, it's largely, not entirely, but largely a response to things going wrong.
		We're told addiction is a pathology.
		It's a response to things happening.
		We're told that obesity is a pathology.
		In some cases, it's a response to things going wrong.
		We're told that kids not wanting to be able to focus is a pathology and adults not being able to focus.
		I think we need to understand that these things have meaning.
		They make sense, right?
		Doesn't mean they're good.
		It's clearly not good to be obese.
		It's clearly not good to be addicted, obviously.
		But if you understand that they make sense, that opens up a totally different way of responding to them.
		Ones that actually fucking work, right?
		The places that...
		If I think about the drug war, right?
		For Chasing the Scream, my book about addiction and the drug war, I went out with a group of women...
		In Arizona, in that prison run by that fucking psychopath Joe Arpaio, who I also interviewed, who Trump pardoned, How the fuck did you pardon that guy?
unidentified		That bothers me deeply.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		It's funny, I can tell you about Joe Alpaio, because in a funny sort of way, I felt very sorry for him.
		But anyway, I went out on this group of, with this group of women who are made to go out on a chain gang wearing t-shirts saying I was a drug addict while members of the public mock them and jeer at them, right?
		And I remember going back to the prison with them.
		It's called Tent City.
		And the women were terrified of something called the hole, which is where you were sent if you fucked up, right?
		And I said to the guards, will you take me to see the hole?
		And I've done a lot of reporting from prisons and guards always don't want to show you the bad things.
		In this one, because it's a fucking pantomime of cruelty, they want you to see it, right?
		So they took me to the hole.
		It was in fact a hole.
		It's a concrete cell, bare concrete cell, with nothing in it, no TV, nothing.
		And I saw this woman in there who was, when, like, she saw my face through that was just so desperate to see a human being who wasn't one of these guards.
		She'd been there for a month.
		And I remember, the audio is actually on the Chasing the Scream website, chasingthescream.com.
		And I remember looking in this cell and thinking, This is the closest you could get to a literal human reenactment of the cages that guaranteed addiction in rats.
		And this is what we're doing, thinking it'll stop this woman from being addicted.
		All the places which had approaches based on punishment and shame towards these things, sometimes people say, oh, punishing people with addiction problems doesn't work.
		That's way too soft on it.
		It makes the problem worse, right?
		Those women go in fucking broken, devastated.
		Then they're even more broken and devastated.
		They go out even more fucking addicted, right?
		So the reason why Portugal and Switzerland have massively falling addiction problems and the United States have massively increasing ones, right?
		So to me...
		Again, the evidence is approaches towards this problem that are based on compassion, connection, love, understanding, seeing that it makes sense, work.
		They're not magic bullets.
		There's still going to be problems in anything we do.
		Approaches based on shame and stigma and rage and just condemning people, they just make the problem worse.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there's no doubt about that.
		And there's also no doubt about what you were speaking about when you started that rant about schools.
		About schools with children, trying to fit them into these very...
		Convenient categories and trying to get them to get comfortable with doing things that they don't want to do.
		That's great if we've resigned ourselves to turning children into work robots.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I love that way of putting it.
		You just said that's brilliant.
		It shouldn't be that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Look, I went through that myself.
		I thought I was a fool.
		When I was in high school, I was like, there's got to be something wrong with me.
		I can't concentrate.
		I can't do it.
		I'm never going to be good at anything.
		I was like, I'm just going to resign myself to be an outcast.
		I'm going to resign myself to be a loser.
		Because I just couldn't sit still in class.
		I couldn't pay attention.
		I didn't want to do the homework.
		I was bored out of my fucking mind.
		And I didn't even realize there was anything that I could do that I would be intellectually curious about.
		I mean, I didn't think that that was a part of my life.
		I didn't think I was a curious person.
		It was just merely because I was being forced to do a bunch of shit that I didn't want to do, and it tainted my idea of learning.
		And when I got out of school, and then when I started reading books just for my own amusement and interest, then I realized, oh, I'm a very curious person.
		I just didn't want to do what they wanted me to do.
		I didn't want to study what they wanted me to study, and I didn't want to be stuck in some room with some person who was under-motivated and really didn't have any understanding of how to deal with children.
		It was the rare person, one out of five, one out of six teachers that would come along that would give you some spark of happiness and love, and you would go like, oh, this class is pretty cool.
		That's a good teacher.
		Like, oh, she's nice.
		You know, he's fun.
		It was rare.
		It was very rare.
		Most of the time, it was a dull grind.
		And I would wake up with nightmares after I had graduated that I had fucked up and didn't get the right amount of credits and I had to go back to school.
		I would have crazy nightmares that I would have to repeat the 12th grade and go back to school because it was soul-sucking.
		And to me it represented the future because the future was going to be more soul-sucking because you're going to be working 40 hours a week plus overtime doing something that you hated and this is what you had to do if you wanted to get by in this life and that is what was presented to me and that's what's presented to a lot of people and if you take that And keep going with it, you eventually become that guy who's in that job, and then you say, well, maybe I'll get some happiness if I get a nice car.
		And so you take out a lease on a nice car, and then now you have this debt that you have to pay.
		So now you have to keep working, and you keep working so you can keep this car.
		Well, I'm gonna get a condo, and then you get a condo, you got more debt.
		Then, well, I'm getting married.
		We're getting married.
		Well, we've got to take out a loan for the marriage because it's real expensive to get married.
		Oh, she wants a big wedding.
		And then you get a big wedding and a big ring.
		And now you're fucking deep, deep in the hole.
		Now you have children.
		Oh, shit.
		And then, you know, you're like, wow, I really don't want to be selling insurance anymore.
		I wish I could have been an artist.
		I wish I could have done this.
		I wish I could have pursued my interests.
		Well, it's kind of too late.
		You're 150 miles away from the neutral point.
		So you've got to go 150 miles back before you can start at zero.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think you put that so well, and I'm just thinking about that.
		This is the heart of my book, Lost Connections, is saying we don't have to have a human culture that deadens people, right?
		We don't have to have a culture where people are controlled, deadened, and isolated.
		That's not how most humans have ever lived.
		The Amish live much closer.
		Far more human beings have lived in the way the Amish lived than have ever lived in the way we lived.
		Now, I don't want to go fully back to the Amish, obviously, But there are lessons we can learn from all these things that we're talking about, about reconnection to meaning and purpose.
		And part of what you're saying is, we live in a landscape that has been constructed not to serve people, but to serve corporations, right?
		This very unusual recent human innovation.
		As I said, imagine if every corporation was converted into a democratic cooperative.
		Imagine everyone listening to this tomorrow knew they were going into work in a place where if there is a boss, he's elected by them, he's accountable to them, where you decide the priorities for your workplace with your colleagues by voting, maybe once every three months, once a year, whatever.
		The boss is accountable to you.
		That's a very different way of living and thinking about the things we do most of the time.
		And that would, again, require a school system that prepared people to be citizens, taking part in a workplace, not, as you put it brilliantly, like robot workers, you know, just passively receiving orders.
		That requires a big systemic change.
		Now, lots of people are making that transition, you know, like the people I talked about in Baltimore Bicycle Works who've made that transition on their own.
		But these are...
		These are big social changes we can make.
		And again, one of the things that's so important is about saying to people, like, it sounds to me like no one said to you, Joe, the fact that you fucking hate this school is a sign that you are more likely to be successful, not less, right?
		The things that will make you a success in your life Are the things that this school is trying to beat out of you, right?
		I presume not literally beat out of you, but mentally beat out of you, right?
		And in a sense, that's what we need to say to a lot of people about a lot of these forms of discomfort.
		It's not a sign of craziness.
		It makes perfect sense you feel this way, and you're right to feel this way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I wonder if that's what's causing all these children to be on Adderall and on...
		You know, all the various stimulants they put kids on, you know, Prozac and all the different things that they do.
		It's literally because they're trapped in this thing and they can't do it.
		They can't do it.
		They can't do it.
		They just can't concentrate.
		And so they give them something.
		And they give them this pill and that pill turns them into a worker robot.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And it's related to a lot of the things we talked about as well.
		Increase in competition, for example.
		So parents are in such an unequal society.
		If you have a society like Norway, where if your kid doesn't do well, they're going to have a good life.
		And if your kid does really well, they're going to have a good life.
		You know, there's less anxiety about, oh, my kid's fallen behind.
		Here, if your kid falls behind, they can have a really fucking terrible life.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but the counter to that is rich kids don't do well at all.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, they're miserable as hell.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, that's a real problem.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a real problem with kids that don't have to do well.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		But I think you've got a society that drugs kids at the bottom to shut up.
		These kids in foster care who are traumatised, not being looked after.
		They're being drugged to just basically make them docile.
		You've got kids at the top who are drugged to make them compete.
		You know, I've got a friend who's a Wall Street banker who put his kid on, I can't remember if it was Adderall or Ritalin, one of the stimulant drugs when he was a young teenager, because he said, but every other fucking kid in the class is on it.
		So if he doesn't go on it, He's falling behind, right?
		So you have, I mean, what a sick culture that's giving their children a cocaine-like drug to make them compete in an unnatural way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And the fucked up part is it works.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, it's interesting.
		So the research on this is interesting.
		I think this is something that's worth pointing out.
		I haven't read about this in my book.
		But actually, there's evidence that kids develop tolerance to it over time, right?
		So actually, initially, it works really, really well.
		And then gradually, you have to give higher and higher doses until eventually, there's a maximum limit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's just cranked out all day.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And then, but then you have this real problem where actually if you then take the kid off it, they will experience really severe withdrawal, right?
		And often what that's misinterpreted is, oh my God, look at what happens to my kid when I take him off it.
		He goes, it's like, no, that's not the baseline of your kid.
		That's your kid in withdrawal from a cocaine-like, remarkable...
		I mean, I had a...
		I've spoken about this before so I think I can say I had a very close relative who had a cocaine addiction and I remember at the height of her cocaine addiction she had a young relative of mine, I'm trying to phrase this ambiguously, who she was drugging with Ritalin, the doctor had given it, because he didn't want to focus because he was traumatised because his mother was a cocaine addict, right?
		And I remember she used to drive into school in the morning, she would snort a line of coke before she went, and then in the car he'd have to swallow his cocaine-like pill.
		And I thought, what a crazy culture that her cocaine use is illegal and would end up with her being criminally punished, and his cocaine-like substances required by the police.
		Not required by the police, sorry, required by the school and mandated by the doctor.
		What a crazy, what a culture that is fucked up about how it thinks about altering itself chemically, about children, about connection, and that my relative was very deprived of the capacity to understand what was happening to her.
		This is the cruelest thing we've done.
		If you just give people these ridiculously simplistic stories about addiction, it's just the chemical hook.
		Or this ridiculously simplistic story about depression, it's just a chemical imbalance.
		It's like we say, you cut them off from understanding the thing that's right in front of them.
		And sometimes I think with both my books, with Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections, at times I thought, do I even need to say this?
		It's so fucking banal, right?
		If you're lonely, if you're insecure, you're going to be depressed.
		But actually...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It does need to be said.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		When you say it to people...
		It's a very unusual position to be in a position where you're saying something that is both unbelievably obvious and really quite radical, right?
		That's a weird...
		I can't think of many...
		Do you know what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's common sense, but it's not common.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to write that down.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That really is what it is.
		It's not a common understanding.
		Now, I want to get in...
		To this with you, what about the criticisms of your work?
		And how have you taken that in?
		Have you debated anyone about your work?
		Because I read quite a few things online that were very critical, and I didn't agree with them.
		I didn't agree with what they were saying, but I wanted to get your take on it.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		So there were a few points that have been made.
		There were a few pieces that were written as soon as the book came out by psychiatrists who admitted that, to be fair to them, they hadn't read the book.
		And they were responding to an extract from the book.
		And obviously in an extract, you can't make every point you want to make, right?
		So the book is 100,000...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was the extract?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was the...
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So what they thought I was saying is, even though the piece, I think, very clearly didn't say this, what they thought I was saying is, chemical antidepressants are bad for everyone and people should stop taking them.
		If I had said that, it would be totally right to criticize me.
		That's not my position.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's an easy way to criticize you.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		And my position is, you know, what we said before, chemical antidepressants give you 1.8 points on the Hamilton scale, right?
		That's not nothing.
		It's not much, on average, but it's not nothing.
		Some people, like, for example, one of my relatives, the one that we talked about who is trapped, She takes chemical antidepressants.
		I think she's right to take them, right?
		She's got very limited margin of change.
		She's not experiencing extreme side effects, as lots of people do.
		I think she's right to care.
		For her, 1.8 points on the Hamilton scale is worth having.
		But it's not solving her problem, right?
		It's not solving the problem for the vast majority of people.
		And so I think there's been some criticisms that are He's telling people to stop.
		That's a dangerous and terrible thing to do.
		So my response to that is, read the book, because I don't say that.
		In fact, I say explicitly, you should carry on taking them if for you the benefits outweigh the side effects.
		Another criticism, which I have more sympathy for in that I understand where it's coming from, is it's more like an ideological misunderstanding.
		Like we're saying, we live in such an individualistic culture that if someone comes along, so we basically think there's two ways of thinking about this, right?
		Either your depression, your anxiety, your addiction are due to a biological problem, in which case you deserve love and support, or If you dismantle the biological story, what a lot of people hear is, oh my God, you're saying it's my fault that I'm a fuck-up, that I've got to solve this on my own.
		And lots of people go, well, I can't fucking go and democratise my workplace.
		I can't fucking go and, you know, take a load of ayahuasca and learn.
		They're just saying, what are you talking about?
		And I think because I'm talking in this third category, which is...
		Biology is real, psychology is real, but most of the drivers of this are social, they're in the way we live.
		Because for so long we've been trained to not think in social terms, I think a lot of people just literally don't get what I'm saying, right?
		When I was a kid, Margaret Thatcher said, the Prime Minister at the time said, there's no such thing as society, there's only individuals and their families.
		Now, I never liked Margaret Thatcher, but...
		This debate has made me realise how much I internalised that, right?
		I was depressed for 13 years.
		I'd fucking studied social sciences, right?
		It never even occurred to me there was a societal component to how bad I felt, right?
		So I was kind of like a Thatcherite to my own pain and distress.
		Do you see what I mean?
		And I think we've so, we've so individualised and internalised, we've so internalised this individualism that I think people understand, and again, they were riffing on the extracts, these are not people who read the book, in the main.
		But I think it was kind of understandable for them to be like, fuck you, I can't do that.
		I can see why they're saying that.
		I wouldn't push back on them so hard because they think, well, there are narrow margins and this is why we need to change.
		And people get that if you talk about car accidents, right?
		Individual drivers should drive safely, but we don't just leave car safety up to that.
		We have airbags and seat belts and speed limits, driving tests, we arrest people under DUIs, right?
		If we just took away all those things and just said to individual drivers, hey drivers, do it, and pedestrians, pedestrians take care, drivers take care, we would have far more people dying in car accidents than we do now, right?
		So I accept that there's an individual role, but there's a social role, right?
		The whole society deals with the problem of car accidents.
		And what I'm saying is the whole society should deal with the problem of depression and anxiety.
		We need social changes, like democratising workplaces is one we've talked about a lot, that reduce the reasons why people are so depressed and anxious in the first place.
		But I think in a society that has so devalued the idea of the social...
		I may as well be speaking fucking Swedish for all they could understand.
		Do you see what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I think they're just neglecting to consider the possibility that some of the factors are because of your life.
		And the social aspects, the physical aspects, the exercise, the diet, all those various things.
		There's many, many people that just are neglecting to take those even into consideration.
		I also think people work way too much.
		I don't think that's the way to live your life.
		I think we've got a really bad system and I think this system has existed for so long that we assume that this is the only way to live that you have to do a 40-hour work week.
		I think it's ridiculous.
		I think we should work maybe four days a week and it might be three.
		Maybe people would be more productive if they kicked ass for three days a week and then had a fun time for four.
		Maybe it's like one on, one off, one on, one off, one on, one off.
		Maybe it's like that.
		That's the way we live life.
		Have a fucking work day and have a day where you don't work.
		If you choose to work more because you're trying to pursue something and you're a dedicated person, you have a job, that's one thing.
		I just think this soul-sucking grind of, you know, getting out of college at 21 and grinding until you're 65, and then you look forward to your golden years.
		You're dying, motherfucker.
		There's no golden years.
		That's all horse shit.
		You know, you watch it on Golden Pond too many times.
		You're not going to make it.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Even he was quite fucking miserable on Golden Pond.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Even that, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Bad example.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He hated his daughter.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Maybe The Golden Girls, right?
		It's a really shit film, actually.
		I watched it for the first time when I played recently.
		But I think there's another thing going on.
		There's another thing going on.
		I have to make sure I don't miss my flight, but there's another thing going on, which is...
		What we've done is we've told people the path out of stigma...
		Is to say that the problem is just biological, right?
unidentified		Right.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So we said, people, you should not be criticized for being...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You have an imbalance.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Or even more than that...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's like having a pancreas disease.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We just need to give you a medication.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		We've told people, you should not be judged for your depression, anxiety, addiction, because it's a biological problem.
		Right.
		I entirely agree, obviously, people should not be judged for their anxiety, depression, or addiction.
		But actually, there's a really interesting experiment that showed that this is just a complete...
		This first triggered me on this is I interviewed an amazing neuroscientist called Mark Lewis, who I was talking about this, and I said, you know, I'm worried because he's been explaining a lot of the things we've talked about to me early in my research.
		And I said, you know, I'm worried about this, Mark, because won't this just reintroduce stigma, right, if we're saying it's not just biological?
		And he said, Johan, did anyone ever doubt that leprosy or AIDS were biological problems?
		Right?
		Literally nobody ever doubted that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Zero.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		You might have noticed there was some stigma against leprosy and AIDS. Why do you think saying something is biological removes the stigma around it?
		I thought...
		Again, it's a simple point, but I thought, wow, I'd never thought of that.
		But there was actually this experiment by a woman I interviewed called Professor Sheila Mehta, which looked at this question of stigma.
		So she wanted to figure out which is more de-stigmatising, telling people that mental health problems are caused by your biology or saying they're caused by your life.
		So what they do is, it's a little bit of a complex experiment, but I think it's worth explaining.
		Say you're the guy who's taking part in the experiment.
		They bring you in, and they say, before the experiment begins, we just want you to sit here and fill in a questionnaire, right?
		You don't realise, but this is actually the experiment.
		So you're sitting next to someone else who you don't realise is an actor, and you get chatting, and the actor will run it two ways.
		Sometimes the actor will say, I've got a mental health problem because of my biology.
		And sometimes he'll say, I've got a mental health problem because of bad things that have happened to me.
		Right?
		Then you're told, the experiment's beginning, come through to this room.
		And you're told, you, Joe, have got to teach this other person, the person you don't realise is an actor, a pattern.
		It's like a pattern on a computer.
		We're testing how well people learn patterns.
		And once you've taught it to him, every time he gets it wrong, I want you to push this button.
		And this button will give him a short, sharp, electric shock.
		Right?
		It won't kill him or anything.
		It's not going to fuck him up, but it's uncomfortable.
		Right?
		And they wanted to see would there be a difference in how many electric shocks and how hard you hit the button depending on what you were told.
		What they found was you were significantly more like...
		You zapped the person more and harder if you thought their problem was just due to their biology than if it was due to things that happened to them in their lives.
		And I think that's because...
		I think this is the stuff we're talking about is the path out of stigma.
		Because if what we're saying is there's just this class of people who are biologically different to us, and they have this flaw that you and I don't have, you can see why that leads to stigma, right?
		But if what you're saying is, actually, we're all vulnerable to this stuff, Actually, the things that are making some people depressed, anxious, and addicted are making loads of us just less happy than we could be, less fulfilled than we could be.
		What that does, instead of dividing us into two tribes, it says we're all on a continuum, and actually, the fight that will help these people who are depressed and anxious will also improve your life, right?
		That's, to me, a much more powerful message.
		Instead of the problem being an inexplicable biological malfunction, it's a Response to things that you can see in your life, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's interesting that we've always had the term sadness, right?
		People have always experienced sadness.
		But if you go back and go through ancient literature, you don't see a lot of stories about people suffering from depression.
		That's a relatively new distinction.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		You do get people who talk about melancholia.
		I do think depression has always...
		There's always been acute and extreme unhappiness.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's always been people living unhappy lives, but the state of being depressed as being a clinical, psychological sort of diagnosis, that's relatively recent.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Well, the idea that it's a pathology...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I was thinking about this when you were speaking earlier.
		When we talk about food, there's a thing, as you can tell, obviously I'm British.
		When I first came to the US, I remember the first time someone ever offered me an indigestion pill.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Indigestion pill?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you know, you can buy them in like CVS. Oh, like Pepto-Bismol or something like that?
unidentified		Yeah.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And I remember...
		Just saying, but wait, indigestion is a sign from your body you're eating too fast.
		You don't want to get rid of that signal.
		You'll eat too much.
		You'll hurt yourself, right?
		That's not a malfunction.
		That's a function, right?
		And I remember thinking as well about that, you know, that it comes back to so many things we're saying.
		The feelings that we have of distress are not malfunctions.
		They're telling us something is missing in the environment, in the psychology, in our lives.
		They're not fuck-ups.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're signals that we should listen to.
		They benefit from filling that void.
		Like, if you've got an issue, they've got a pill for it.
		You create that sort of an environment, they're going to constantly be innovating and trying to come up with new pills for new issues and even create ailments, make up ailments, and come up with solutions for those ailments.
		And a lot of those are actually, we've shown this on the podcast many times, those were done by advertising agencies.
		They've actually created names of diseases and issues.
		Just so they can come up with solutions.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		One of the things that was most shocking in the research for Lost Connections was realizing how much of what I had been told was invented, not by scientists, but by drug company PRs.
		So I'll give you an example, two examples, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to go in a second.
		No worries.
		What time is your flight?
		Well, I've got to do one other interview before my flight.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fuck that interview.
unidentified		Sorry.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		There's this...
		So everyone knows, if you think about, I don't know, taking selfies, right?
		You take 30 selfies, you throw away 29, you only use the one that...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Can't do that.
		Don't be a bitch.
		Take a selfie and go with it.
		It's like De Niro in The Deer Hunter.
		One bullet.
unidentified		One bullet.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		You know, you use the one where you look good, right?
		Turns out, in the whole process when antidepressants were first being marketed to us, they basically did that with scientific studies.
		What they did is they They would commission 100 studies.
		90 of them would say, find mixed results or poor results.
		Those all got put in the trash can.
		And only the ones, I mean, there's one study I cite in the book, I think it was, they tested the drug on 247 people, and they only published the results for 27 of them, who you will not find hard to guess, were the 27 for whom it worked.
		So the early results were hugely exaggerated.
		You'll remember that, you know, when antidepressants were first marketed, people are told, you know, it'll make you better than well, right?
		No one says that now.
		You'll notice that stuff's all gone away, right?
		It doesn't happen anymore.
		So there's this huge...
		Actually, Eliot Spitzer did an amazing job when he was Attorney General in New York State of taking the pharmaceutical companies to court because it particularly affected me when I read it because it was the drug that I was given as a teenager.
		It's called Paroxetine or Paxil in the US. The company that manufactures it literally had a leaked memo from them in which they say, this doesn't work for teenagers, but I think the phrase they used was, this would be unacceptable for the commercial profile of paroxetine.
		So they just said that it did.
		And that's the fucking drug I was given, right?
		It's shocking to see the drug that you were given The company involved didn't work for people like you, right?
		And it had very powerful side effects on me.
		I gained a huge amount of weight.
		It has all sorts of side effects.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did it help you at all?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I felt a strong initial boost, and I would say it probably did give me 1.8 points on the Hamilton scale, like what we're talking about.
		Probably gave me a very mild boost, but it didn't solve my problem.
		And the problem is the story I was told about it, that this is the solution because the problem is the chemical imbalance, disconnected me from a much wider program of reconnection in my life that did in fact solve my depression when I embarked on it, right?
		Right.
		So I think the drug companies, It's scandalous what they did.
		It's not that the drugs have no value, they do, but when you read through what they actually did and the way these stories were constructed and the...
		Bullshit, we were told.
		You know, I mean, I remember interviewing a clinical psychologist, Dr. Lucy Johnson, who's a brilliant person, and her just saying, you know, everything you were told is bullshit.
		And me just sitting there and going through, this is what my doctor told me, this is what my doctor told me, this is what my doctor told me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In fact, there's no repercussions, no legal repercussions against those people for doing that.
		It's just stunning.
		You think about insider trading, how devastating the penalties are for that.
		This is far worse.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		One of the scandals is the FDA, how much of it is funded by the drug companies itself, right?
		40% of the budget.
		I mean, imagine if you had a ballgame where one of the teams...
		Paid the referee's wages, right?
		I think you'd find that team would win a lot more often, right?
		So what we think is, oh, there's this dispassionate judge, even the way the rules are constructed.
		So to get a drug, I think the rules have been slightly tightened recently, but when antidepressants were first introduced, to get a drug to market, You only had to demonstrate two studies anywhere that showed any efficacy, right?
		So that means you could commission 3,000 studies and if two of them, it's not that the FDA would take the balance of the research, if you could show two that it worked, that would be enough.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So they would present those studies to the FDA. They didn't have to show them everything they've done.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		It's gotten a bit better now.
		There's now more publication required, which is one of the reasons why so few new chemical antidepressants are coming onto the market, because the rules have been slightly tightened.
		And as a result, where are all the new ones?
		They're not coming on.
		I mean, there are some, but they're far more limited.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Haven't they shown also that rigorous exercise is actually more effective in treating depression than antidepressants?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I think I was going a bit too far, but there's evidence that, well, there's very strong evidence, Dr. Isabel Benke, who you would love.
		I should introduce you to her.
		She's a Chilean primatologist, basically the best person in the world, as far as I'm concerned.
		She's a hardcore Chilean.
		She's currently in some jungle somewhere.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Better than Mick Jagger's ex-wife?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		I mean, I like Marianne Faithful, but Isabel is something else, right?
		So Isabel, I have to make this my last point, but Isabel, so she's demonstrated, she's shown loads of things.
		One of the really interesting things is nature.
		So she's shown that Exercise is a massive, really powerful antidepressant.
		But interestingly, exercise in nature is even more effective.
		And her theory is, and I really like this, she did a lot of work with bonobos, both in zoos and in the wild.
		And she's got really good stories about how bonobos basically bond by lesbian group sex.
		And she shows how they pioneered, how they managed to create vibrators when they were in the zoo.
		It's an amazing story.
		Literally, she would give them buckets and they would find a way to turn it into a vibrator.
		She was in awe of them, right?
		And then have massive lesbian orgies with their vibrators.
unidentified		And it was in a British zoo, so these polite British parrots would be like, Mummy, Mummy, what's happening?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		And they'd be like, nothing, darling, come over here.
		But Isabel's theory is, so animals go crazy in zoos a lot of the time, right?
		Parrots rip out their feathers, horses start obsessively swaying, elephants will grind their tusks down to nothing.
		And she basically argues, this is simplifying her argument, she says there's many things going on here, but that humans are being, animals deprived of their habitat feel like shit, and we are increasingly deprived of our habitat, the habitat we evolved in, right?
		There's lots of evidence that people who live in areas with no green space are much more likely to become depressed than people who don't.
		And people who move from one area without green space to an area with green space become much less depressed, right?
		There's loads of research on this.
		There's such an amazing study, Michigan State Prison, Just by accident, no one designed it this way.
		One part of it looks out over just bare concrete, and one part of it looks out over lovely green space.
		It was just random where you ended up, but the people who looked out over the concrete were 23% more likely to develop mental health problems.
		Right?
		So this thing about, as Isabel says, we are animals that were designed to move through nature.
		If you are not an animal moving through nature, you are not a healthy human being.
		You are not in your habitat.
		You need to be in that habitat at least some of the time, right?
		And, yeah, I mean, she's got...
		Isabel has the best stories ever, so you should...
		you would love her anyway.
		I'm sure I would.
		Both lesbian group sex stories and stories about how you can cure your depression with nature exposure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Johan, thank you very much.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And one more time, the name of your book?
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		So the book is called Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions.
		If you go to the book's website, www.thelostconnections.com, you can find out what loads of people from Hillary Clinton to Tucker Carlson to Elton John have said about the book.
		You can take a quiz to see how much you know about depression and anxiety.
		And the book has a Facebook page.
		It's facebook.com slash thelostconnections.
		And the other book we talked about is Chasing the Scream, which is about addiction.
		You can find out more about that at www.chasingthescream.com.
		Thank you very much.
		I really enjoyed that, Joe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so much.
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		That was fantastic.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Cheers.
unidentified		Hooray!
johann hari ▲ ● ▼		I really enjoyed that, Joe.

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