Johann Hari - Everything You Think You Know About Meaning & Happiness Is Wrong

This podcast is a real treat and a podcast that you cannot miss! Johann has come back and what honour it was to record. He has to be my all-time favourite guest ever! His book ‘Lost Connections’ had such a positive, transformative impact on my life and truly changed my perspective on how I viewed depression & addiction. I am sure that the information shared today will be valuable and important topics that our society needs to hear. Johann is a very successful and inspirational British-Swiss writer and journalist with 2 books hitting The New York Times best sellers list. Born in Glasgow Scotland then relocated to London when he was young, Johann experienced some childhood trauma having suffered from being physically abused as child and his mother suffering from an illness. Starting his career as a journalist he won many awards such as Journalist of the year and was named by the Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people. Johann then went to onto being an author writing the worldwide known “Lost Connections” and “Chasing the Scream”. He also released a TED talk back in 2015 “Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong” which has now over 17 million views. This honest conversation lasted around 2 hours and we even went on into the evening off air. I genuinely think that this might be the most important podcast you choose to ignore. I’m not giving much away, but you will thank me after. Follow Johann: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/johann.hari Twitter - https://twitter.com/johannhari101 Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Johann Hari?

  The most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we feel so bad in the first place. We need to stop asking what's wrong with you and start asking what happened to you. If you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're going to feel like shit. It's not like I'm explaining quantum physics, right? And we've all had that experience where you crave a consumer object, you build up to it, you get it, you get home and you just feel flat. Is it's not the trauma that destroys you, it's the shame about the trauma. And giving people ways to release that shame is an antidepressant. God, change is really possible.

• 0:49Steven Bartlett?

  Today, we have a real treat for you. This guest today, Johann Hari, is one of my all time favorite ever podcast guests ever. And I'm not saying that to blow smoke up his arse. When I had the conversation with him and when I started reading his books many years ago, I can quite honestly say that no book I've ever read in my life has had more of a positive impact, a more transformative impact on the topics that matter most to my fulfillment and happiness than the work that Johann has done. He is a comedian on one hand, he's an incredible storyteller. He spends a decade writing his books. So you know the information he's going to share with you today is both profound, it

• 1:32Steven Bartlett?

  is evidence backed, and it is compelling, true, important, and everything that our society at this point in time needs to hear. This could well be the most important podcast I've ever recorded. If you asked me if there was one podcast that I wish the world got to hear, it's definitely this one, above all of the other podcasts I've ever recorded. This is the conversation. So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

• 2:12Steven Bartlett?

  Johan, it's a real pleasure to have you back on the podcast. You are one of my all time favourite guests, top three. I don't know the order, but you're definitely up there.

• 2:19Johann Hari?

  Who are these other two?

• 2:20Steven Bartlett?

  I don't actually know.

• 2:21Johann Hari?

  I'm really pleased that everyone will know that I have not bribed you since you don't need the money.

• 2:24Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly, there you go.

• 2:26Johann Hari?

  This is offensive, I'm very happy.

• 2:27Steven Bartlett?

  But no, I mean that. And not just because of the conversation we had, but because you changed my fundamental beliefs around depression, mental health, the importance of human connection and everything in between. And that had a really fundamental positive impact on my life. It's also, you feature heavily in my book. I talk about you on this podcast all the time. So, you know, the amount of times I've plugged, so really what I brought you here today was to get the royalties from all the... No, but no, but I do. I talk about you on this podcast all the time, so.

• 2:58Johann Hari?

  Give you an old bag of crisps and that's all you're getting.

• 3:01Steven Bartlett?

  That's why I wanted to get in the podcast, because, you know, you changed my life. And I'm not saying that to blow smoke up your arse, I genuinely mean that, with your book, Lost Connections. So, the first question I have is like completely off track, but I've just finished writing my book, published it, it's all great and everything. You're, you're on to your third, fourth book now? Yeah?

• 3:21Johann Hari?

  Yeah.

• 3:22Steven Bartlett?

  Talk to me about why you like writing books. What is it about writing books? Why are you doing that?

• 3:28Johann Hari?

  Oh, for me, I write books because there's a question I want to answer for myself that I don't know the answer to at the start. So, with Lost Connections, I wanted to, there would, for me, there's always a core mystery that I want to understand, right? So, with Lost Connections, the core mystery was two really simple things. When I, when the book came out, I was 40. All throughout my lifetime, depression and anxiety have increased in Britain, the US, across the world. I wanted to understand why, right? Why is it that with each year that passes, more and more of us are finding it harder to get through the day? I wanted to understand it for a personal reason, which is that I had been really depressed myself. I had done everything I was told to do by my doctors and I remained depressed. Or chasing the scream. But before that, I had a kind of core question, which was...

• 4:14Johann Hari?

  You know, we had a lot of addiction in my family. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I wanted to understand, well, what causes addiction and what can we actually do about it? I want to understand a personal level, but also at a social level, what we could do about it. So for me, I always start with a core question. So a book I've been working on for the last 10 years that I'm sort of writing at the moment about something, I have to be careful what I say about it, but a series of crimes that have been happening in Las Vegas. For me, there's always a core question, a mystery. And then I'm like, okay, I want to take the reader on a journey as I try to unsolve this mystery, I try to solve this mystery for myself, right? So all of

• 4:59Johann Hari?

  my books are long journeys where I, you know, for both books, I traveled more than 30,000 miles, went to a crazy mixture of people. And for me, the best journeys are not where you find yourself. And it goes, oh, you go on a journey to find yourself. To me, the best journeys are where you find other people, right? So I think about the crazy mixture of people that I've got to know for these books, who I love, who are still, you know, important people to me from, you know, for the addiction book, I think about Chino Hardin, who's a trans crack dealer in Brooklyn, who's one of the smartest people I've ever met. Rossario Reto, hitman of the deadliest Mexican drug cartel. He's unfortunately not one of the smartest people I've ever met. But, you know, or for Lost Connections, you know, I think about these, people will probably talk about these people in Berlin

• 5:40Johann Hari?

  who transformed, who starting from a position of terrible depression, transformed their city and their country. I think about this couple, homeless couple I know very well in Vegas. So for me, it's always about finding people and solving mysteries. And I write to figure out, to try to understand the world and to figure out what we can do about the world, you know? So for me, I would, I can't imagine writing a book where I felt I knew in advance. Of course, I've got ideas when I start, right? I don't start as a blank slate. But I can't imagine writing a book. Where I felt I knew in advance, I was standing above the reader and going, well, reader, you know, I mean, there are books that do that, you know, if you've been in,

• 6:21Johann Hari?

  I'm a journalist, I'm not an expert, right? So if you've been an expert for 30 years on, I just read a fantastic book about octopuses, right? If you, a guy spent 30 years studying octopuses, you know, he's a shit ton about octopuses, I'm very happy for him to stand above me and say, let me tell you a lot of crazy shit about octopuses, and it is crazy shit, right? But that's great, it's called Other Minds, I really recommend that book. But I'm not that, I'm not an expert. So for me, it's about the journey, come on the journey with me, come to all these different places, come with me to a favela in Rio, come with me to the Killing Fields in Mexico, come with me to a gulag in Vietnam, let's go on the journey, let's figure out what the fuck's going on.

• 6:58Steven Bartlett?

  And of all the books, and this is, I know, I can probably guess the response here, they'll all like, oh, choose your favorite kid, which one?

• 7:04Johann Hari?

  Oh, Chasing Scream, I have a really easy answer to that, because, only because, so Chasing Scream is a book I wrote about the addiction and the war on drugs. And it's because it's the book that I, it sounds self-aggrandizing and wanky, but it's the book that I've seen do the most good in the world. It's a place where I've been to so many places where people have used that book and the things that, to me, the happiest moment in any book, in the whole process of writing, is when, so I track down people I think are really interesting and important. So to give an example, there's a guy in Vancouver called Professor Bruce Alexander, one of the most amazing human beings alive, who did a really important experiment that's

• 7:47Johann Hari?

  transformed how we think about addiction, called Rat Park, I suspect we'll talk about it. And Bruce, you know, that experiment was known before my book and before my TED Talks and stuff, but as Bruce says, you know, it got a huge boost from that. And, and, and that evidence is now used, was used in Norway, where they're just on the brink of decriminalizing all drugs, in all sorts of places in Mexico, I remember having a surreal conversation with some Mexican politicians about it, in all sorts of different places. And to me, the most exciting moment is when the people I've written about, Get in touch with me and say, oh, people are contacting me.

• 8:22Steven Bartlett?

  Because of your.

• 8:23Johann Hari?

  Because they've read about me.

• 8:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 8:24Johann Hari?

  And it's that moment where you feel that you've been a conduit between someone who's doing something really important and people who needed to know it. And to me, that's like the blissful feeling, you know? So Chasing the Scream, Just Because, um, that's, that's what, that's the book I've seen do the most work in the world. You know what I mean?

• 8:42Steven Bartlett?

  So let's talk about Rat Park. I, I read about this study numerous times, but I think it's, you know, and you've probably talked about it before, but I think it's so important and foundational for so many reasons and, and speaks, actually speaks a lot to lost connections as well in many respects, um, that I would love you to tell the story of Rat Park and exactly what it, what it is.

• 9:02Johann Hari?

  You know, Rat Park was for me, I found it very challenging when I learned about Rat Park because I realized that all my life I've been misunderstanding some of the things I was seeing right in front of me. So like I said, we had addiction in my family. We still have addiction in my family. It's very difficult.

• 9:18Johann Hari?

  And when I started doing the research for Chasing the Scream, God, 10, 10 years ago, exactly 10 years ago, almost, I am. If you'd asked me, let's say heroin addiction, because that was close to me. If you'd said to me, Johann, what causes heroin addiction? I would have looked at you like you were thick and I would have said, well, Stephen, the clue's in the name, right?

• 9:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 9:33Johann Hari?

  Obviously heroin causes heroin addiction, right? We've been told this story for a hundred years. It's become totally part of our common sense. It was definitely part of mine. So we think, we're sitting here in East London. We think if we kidnapped the next 20 people to walk past your flat in East London and like a villain in a Saw movie, we injected them all with heroin every day for a month. At the end of that month, they'd all be heroin addicts for a simple reason. There's chemical hooks in heroin that as you use it, your body starts to crave. You want more and more of them. And so at the end of that month, people would have this tremendous physical hunger for the chemical hooks, right? It's why we call it being hooked. And that's, that's the story we have in our heads. Now, that story is not completely

• 10:14Johann Hari?

  wrong. Turns out it's a very small part of a much bigger picture. And the first thing that, I remember the first thing that alerted me to that was that in my research, I was interviewing doctors and experts. And it was explained to me, right? Here in Britain, if you or me step out into the street and we get hit, you get hit by a truck, right? God forbid, terrible loss to the world. You would be taken to hospital. And if you say you broke your hip, you'd be given a lot of a drug called diamorphine, right? Diamorphine is heroin. It's much better than the shit you buy just up the road from here on the street because it's medically pure heroin, right? And anyone watching this, if you're British and your nan's had a hip replacement operation, your nan's taken a lot of heroin,

• 10:57Johann Hari?

  right? Now, if what we think about addiction is right, that it's caused primarily or entirely by exposure to the chemical hooks, what should be happening to all these people in British hospitals who've been given a lot of powerful heroin? Some of them should be leaving and trying to score on the streets. You should be meeting people in NA meetings who say, well, you know, I started, I had a hip replacement. This has been studied very carefully. It never happens, right? And I remember when I learned that, I was just thinking, the first person who told me that was Dr. Gabriel Marte. And I remember thinking, saying to him, Gabriel, that can't be right. How could you have a situation where you've got someone in a hospital bed, they're using a shit ton of really powerful heroin, they don't become

• 11:39Johann Hari?

  addicted, and you've got someone in the alleyway outside who, you know, is shooting up actually a weaker, shittier form of the drug, and they, and they do become addicted? How could that be? And I only began to understand it when I went to Vancouver and interviewed Professor Alexander, Professor Bruce Alexander. So Bruce explained to me, this story we've got in our heads, that addiction is caused primarily or totally by the chemical hooks, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple experiments.

• 12:09Johann Hari?

  Your viewers can try them at home if they're feeling a little bit sadistic and bored in Covid times, right? It's not heroin, is it? No, they don't have to try it. You take a rat, you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water, the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself quite quickly within a week or two, right? So there you go. That's, that's our story. That's, that's how we think it works. But in the seventies, Professor Alexander was working, well, I met him on the downtown east side of Vancouver, which has a lot of, he's working with a lot of people with very bad addiction problems. And he starts to look at these experiments and he says, well, hang on a minute. You put the rat alone in an empty cage.

• 12:52Johann Hari?

  It's got nothing that makes life worth living for rats. All it's got is the drugs. What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats, right? They've got loads of friends, they've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of coloured balls, they can have loads of sex. Everything that makes life worth living for rats is there in Rat Park. And they've got both the water bottles, the drugged water and the normal water. This is the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They don't use it very much. None of them use it compulsively. None of them overdose. So you go from almost a hundred percent compulsive use and overdose when rats don't have the things that make life worth living, to no compulsive use and overdose when they do have the things that make life worth living.

• 13:38Johann Hari?

  And obviously we are not rats, we're more complicated. But the, the core of this, and there's lots of human evidence that I can talk about. But what, what this taught me and a lot of the other evidence taught me is the core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be. And that actually makes you realise why our approach of punishing people with addiction problems is such a disaster, actually makes the problem worse. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, although that is valuable for some people. The opposite of addiction is connection. And we're living through a great example of that right now. Just, just, I think, two days ago, the government announced massive increase in alcohol related deaths, massive increase in other drug related deaths in Britain and in the United States. Why would that be, right?

• 14:20Johann Hari?

  We, we, I think rightly, in order to suppress the virus, which we had to do, we have had to become more disconnected and that has caused an increase in addiction. Now that tells us something about what was causing addiction all along and what the paths out of addiction are. That was a very long answer.

• 14:36Steven Bartlett?

  Perfect answer. And obviously with the, with that in mind, you know, COVID has accelerated the adoption of remote working, which I, you know, there's been a lot of debate around that, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. My stance is pretty clear. I think it's an awful thing. And I say this because, you know, after reading your book, I understand that connection, organic connection in our lives is, has this like, has been on this sort of macro decline. And one of the like institutions in our lives that has held that together has been the office. So like, most of my friends come from working in a big office. You know, if I think about where 90% of my connection came from the office. And to think, especially as a young person who hasn't built a family or kids, whatever, that that is also now going to move to a screen, I think is a fucking terrible idea,

• 15:21Steven Bartlett?

  to be honest. I wanted to get your, your thoughts on that because I think, I, I don't, I think people think of the convenience factors, but we thought of the convenience factors when we, we created social media and dating apps and all these other things. But the unintended consequences of the convenience tends to be, you know, stripping us of connection once again. And like, what do we have left? Like, everything else is on a screen now. So if you take away work from me, I'm like, I probably wouldn't see anybody. Like porn, you know, I can do that online now. Dating, swipe, swipe, swipe. So it feels like, you know, the last institution of connection is being, is at war.

• 15:57Johann Hari?

  I think that's really interesting. I think there's a, there's two things I was thinking about as you talked about that, Stephen. One is what a lot of us get out the web, the relationship between social media and social life is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex. And you mentioned porn, because I'm not anti porn. Porn's going to make a basic itch, right? But no one, you know, spends an hour looking at porn and feels like satisfied and seen.

• 16:24Steven Bartlett?

  Speak for yourself.

• 16:26Johann Hari?

  Not, not the way you do after you've had sex, right? Unless you're having very bad sex, Stephen.

• 16:30Steven Bartlett?

  I've got a virtual reality headset.

• 16:33Johann Hari?

  There's definitely a satisfaction to looking at porn, but there's not, it's not as satisfying as sex, right? Yeah, of course not. Unless something's gone very wrong. I promise you, I promise. And we can talk about that when the cameras are off, you know, I'm very happy to have that conversation. But in a similar sort of way, you know, it's not that, that these, a lot of these technologies are attempts, our unhealthy relationship with the technology itself is neutral. A lot of our relationships with these technologies are attempts to fill holes in the way we're living. I feel holes, it sounds a bit unfortunate, can we be talking about porn, but you know what I mean? And the, and even if you just think about when the internet arrived, right? So internet arrived for most of us, the early 2000s or 1999, I got my first email address in 2000.

• 17:17Johann Hari?

  And a lot of the things that we're talking about had already been going, rising for a long time. Big increase in loneliness before that. And what happens is, the internet arrives and it looks a lot like the things we've lost, right? You've lost friends, here's Facebook friends, you've lost status in the economy, here's some status updates. But they're not the things we've lost. It's like giving porn to a sex-starved man in prison or something. It's not the thing you've lost, right? I mean, it'll meet a certain basic itch, but it's not the thing you've lost. And if interacting through screens met our basic needs as human beings, we would all be very happy zooming all the time, right? Sitting on Zoom would be as good as sitting in the office, right? You know, and people often say to me, why do you travel to so many places to do all these interviews? Why don't you just talk to them on Skype or Zoom?

• 18:01Johann Hari?

  And I always say, because you get 10% of the experience through a screen. People don't open up to you, they don't feel they've met you. I wouldn't remember, all these people I'm describing to you, I can picture them so vividly. People I've interviewed on Zoom, I can never remember even what they look like, right? So these forms of interaction, they've got a place, you know, look, it's better to have Zoom in a time of a plague than, than nothing, which would have been the alternative in, in the context of COVID. But it's not, it doesn't revolve to interact, to look into each other's eyes, to see each other, to interact in three dimensions. We did not evolve to interact through screens, it doesn't meet our deeper needs.

• 18:38Steven Bartlett?

  That is why I've never done this podcast over Zoom despite the temptation. Yeah. So we started doing it and we started, we upped everything in December and really started going for it. Built the team and all these things. And that's obviously in the middle of the pandemic. There's flight restrictions, no one can fly in. And we've got the most amazing guests in the world that want to come on via Zoom. And I just said, I do this because I enjoy it, right? That's like the fundamental reason. That's the reason why I'll keep doing it for the next 10 years. And I would not enjoy doing it over Zoom. It would become like a job to me because I like meeting people. And obviously the, the conversation we have now, you can feel the emotion, you can, you can hear the, you know, you can see it in my eyes. And you can see at certain points, you know, you can feel what I'm thinking.

• 19:21Steven Bartlett?

  And that unlocks, for a podcast that's meant to be a little bit more deeper, it unlocks that depth. We've had, you know, tears and we've had all sorts and I formed real friendships from it. So many, pretty much all of my guests, I feel like I'm friends with it straight after because of the vulnerability. So I just, I just made a rule that I would not do anything over Zoom. And when people ask me to go on their podcast over Zoom, the answer is the same. I don't want to do it. And I, with my team, my office is actually downstairs. So we come in every day.

• 19:48Johann Hari?

  There was one thing about work, I think everything you said is totally true. So there's one thing about work I would say, which is a slightly different point, but relates to remote working, which is so. And we can talk about this in more detail if you want, but just for the purposes of this part of the conversation, there's a lot of evidence that lacking control over your work makes you depressed, right? I'm sure we could talk about that more.

• 20:11Johann Hari?

  One thing that people do benefit from, I think, from Zoom, not actually funny, interestingly, not so much in COVID times is evidence. People are working more hours under COVID than they were normally, partly because Zoom meetings take so damn long. But some people, I think, as we come out of this, which we will, as we come out of COVID, the pandemic.

• 20:34Johann Hari?

  Some people, I think, would like to have more leeway about when they are in the office.

• 20:39Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:40Johann Hari?

  And would like to, and I think it's interesting, when you look at the research on this, it's not so much the ratio, is it 20% at home, it's whether you can choose.

• 20:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 20:50Johann Hari?

  It's the amount of agency you have.

• 20:52Steven Bartlett?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:52Johann Hari?

  Um, so in that sense, I think that's where, and of course, we didn't have any choice about COVID, but the, that's the bit where I would say, don't, we'll probably have some value going forward.

• 21:02Steven Bartlett?

  A hundred percent agree. I, I, I actually wrote about motivation, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. And one of the big factors is of people feeling motivated in work is, as you say, autonomy, feeling like you have control of your work. And, and that's the, that's also the balance that I've always tried to create at my companies, which is one where you can book as much time off as you need without having to put like tell a computer and ask it for approval. And there is no bitchiness. There is no one that's going to look at you the next day and be like, oh, you've had a couple of days off. And giving people the same level of freedom that I've always had has been super important. But at the same time, like I'm, I've been super clear, even though it's an unpopular narrative right now, I think

• 21:44Steven Bartlett?

  this remote working future where, you know, these companies are coming out and doing all their virtue signaling, you know, whatever, I think it's a load of nonsense. And I think they're actually harming people by supporting the idea that we're going to all, especially younger people, live our lives through screens. And I think that people are going to figure this out. I actually think people have overestimated the stickiness of remote, remote working. Because the narrative is companies that offer remote working will attract all the staff, all the good talent. So you're going to have to do it. But I actually think companies that are able to offer community and much more than work, which is for me is what a good job is, much what's the, it's the friends you make, the experiences you have, the challenges you're driving towards together, the worthwhile, it's like the worthwhile striving for a challenge with a group of people

• 22:29Steven Bartlett?

  you love. For me, that's like become my.

• 22:31Johann Hari?

  My, the reason for, for why I live, I, I, I managed to get it down to those three things, which is people I love, worthwhile, challenge, right? And I don't know how that links into your work, but that's, I think, the most foundational I've managed to get with like, my reason to live is like, or at least my reason to work. So if I think what you've gone to a really important, um, one of the most important things that relates to depression and anxiety in your own life, which is meaning, right? So there's all this, I mean, it's funny, exactly a year, a little bit more than a year ago, a year and a month ago, I was in Moscow. It was the last thing I did before I got COVID. It was grim. I interviewed this fascinating Russian psychologist called Dimitri Leonтьev.

• 23:15Johann Hari?

  And his, um, so his dad had actually been a super famous, uh, so his grandfather had been an incredibly famous psychologist, but he's a very distinguished psychologist as well. And, um, I remember him saying like, um, British and American people, British and American philosophy, if you go back, is very often about happiness, the belief that you should try to make yourself happy, right? Obviously it's in constitution, the pursuit of happiness, right? And he said, when Russians hear that, we just laugh, right? That's a child's game, trying to chase happiness, that's a child's philosophy. So you can't, you don't have that much say about whether happiness will come and go. He said, what life is about is not happiness, but meaning, right? The pursuit of meaning. And actually, when you've got meaning in your life, you can tolerate a lot of unhappiness.

• 23:57Steven Bartlett?

  So true.

• 23:57Johann Hari?

  And you even think about something as simple as a dentist, what would be a good example, a dentist's drill, right? So if I now took out a drill, opened your mouth and, you know, jabbed it into your teeth and it was agony, because that would have no meaning in the context between us, it would be, it would literally be torture, it would cause you terrible suffering and you'd be traumatized for ages. But you've been to the dentist and they've done that, right? And it didn't traumatize you, most likely some people did get traumatized at the dentist, but that's a different story, it's rare. Um, why? Cause it had a meaning, right? You could tolerate the pain because there was, because it was for a purpose. Oh, right. If I don't tolerate this pain, my teeth are gonna get fucked up, right? Um, it's worthwhile. And I think there's one of the things that's a big. A big driver of depression and anxiety, it was one of the, actually, it was one of

• 24:40Johann Hari?

  the two hardest causes of depression and anxiety that I wrote about in Lost Connections for me to, it was the one, the one that was most chat, one of the two that was most challenging for me, was this crisis of me, Nick. So for thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're going to feel like shit, right? It's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that is basically what he said, right? But weirdly, nobody had ever scientifically, I'm looking to, is this true? How do we know? No one had actually scientifically investigated this until an amazing man I got to know, named Professor Tim Casser, who did an incredible amount of, spent 35 years researching these questions. He discovered loads of things, but I think for what we're talking about,

• 25:19Johann Hari?

  there's two in particular. Firstly, he discovered, exactly as the philosophers warned, if you think life is about money and status and showing off, all the values you get from advertising, Instagram, everything like them, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by a significant amount. And secondly, he discovered, as a society, as a culture, we have become much more driven by these junk values, right? They've been rising all throughout my lifetime, your lifetime. And I was trying to think about, well, why is that, right? And there's many reasons that I go through, but why does that make us feel so bad? A key reason, I think, is just, it trains us to look for happiness in all the wrong places,

• 26:03Johann Hari?

  right? You know, your technical crew know, everyone knows, everyone watching this knows, you're not going to lie on your deathbed and think about all the likes you've got on Instagram, right? You're going to think about moments of love and meaning and connection. But, but as Professor Casser put it to me, we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life, right? We live in a machine where we are bombarded, more 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own last name, right? So from the moment you're born, you are trained to think, if you don't feel good, there's a solution for that. Work harder, buy shit, display it on Instagram to make people go, OMG, so jealous, right? That is the script in our society.

• 26:46Johann Hari?

  And it's, it's like KFC for the soul, right? You're not going to find happiness there. But the more meaningful values are lying just beneath the surface, right? Nothing I just said, I mean, it's almost like a Hallmark card at the level of banality, everyone knows that at some level, and yet we don't live by it. And this is true of a lot of things I learned from Lost Connections. It's not like I'm explaining quantum physics, right? It's not like I'm, not that I could do that. It's not like I'm explaining Noam Chomsky's linguistics or something. These are things at some level we all know, but we live in a machine, like Professor Cassa put it. We live in a machine that has taught us to neglect, to mistrust our own instincts about what will give us a good life and to, and to pursue, um, other things instead. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense?

• 27:29Steven Bartlett?

  Of course it makes fucking sense to me. Of course it makes sense to me.

• 27:32Johann Hari?

  Do you feel, but I really feel the reason it was challenging is because I could see how much of my own life was driven by these drunk guys. I was never a materialistic person. I was never, I was once nominated for an award as the worst dressed gay man in Britain. So I was never like a kind of material. No, I was beaten by David Furnish, who I've always thought was very well dressed. So that shows how much I know. But, you know, I, I, I, a big part, not, it was never like, I was never like Trump. It was never a hundred percent, but a big part of my life was driven by trying to think about how people perceive me, managing people's expectations.

• 28:12Steven Bartlett?

  Does it still?

• 28:14Johann Hari?

  Yeah, of course it's still a part of my character, but it's a radically smaller part of my personality than it was, uh, 15 years ago.

• 28:21Steven Bartlett?

  Cause I was thinking, as you're saying that, I was just thinking, I was thinking this is also true. But again, the question posed in my mind was, how would I get out of the machine? When so much of the things I enjoy keep me within the machine. So, you know, I could, I could abscond and go to Bali and go and live on a beach and just, you surround myself with a couple of friends and you give up my Louis Vuitton shoes. I don't, I don't have Louis Vuitton shoes, but you get what I mean. Give up my Lamborghini, which I also don't have. And I could, I could escape, but much of the joy of my life comes from doing things like this, having conversations with people like you, which means that I have to live in London and then to promote this, I'm going to have to use Instagram and social media. And then I'm going to get a little pat on the back from the algorithm, if it's good or bad.

• 29:02Steven Bartlett?

  And, and so in the pursuit of some of my intrinsic joy and goals, I, I'd have played with this a lot. I, I, I'm, I'm putting myself in the machine and I can't see another way to live. The best, so I say to myself, the best you could probably do, Steve, is live within the machine, but just live much more consciously. Know that you're in the machine. And it's the minute that you don't know you're in the machine, that the machine becomes your puppet master. And then I'll start fucking buying Louis Vuitton again.

• 29:29Johann Hari?

  So it's funny, it's funny you're saying Louis Vuitton, because I once at a party met Calvin Klein. And until that moment, I thought Calvin Klein was a fictional character.

• 29:37Steven Bartlett?

  That Ronald McDonald.

• 29:38Johann Hari?

  So someone said, oh, this is Calvin Klein. I almost said, I like the clothes. And then I was like, oh, right. It was like suddenly meeting Ronald McDonald or something.

• 29:48Steven Bartlett?

  Just a pie am gap.

• 29:49Johann Hari?

  Yeah, I think he thought I was an actor. I knew like, oh, really? Well, I'm Colonel Sanders. Exactly. I think he thought I was an absolute twat. But, but no, the, the, so I think Tim Kastner discovered two answers to your question. Actually, lots of answers, but it's two specific things that he discovered that I think really helped answer your question. So, and they operate at different levels. So what can we do about the fact we live in the machine? There's two things. There's one thing that's going to sound very big and is very big, which is we can dismantle the machine. The machine was created by human beings and it can be dismantled. And again, I went to places that have started that. Sao Paulo in Brazil. City was full of advertising. It was doing people's heads in. They banned outdoor advertising. People felt much better. Do you remember the campaign that happened here? When was it?

• 30:34Johann Hari?

  It's in the books. It must have been at least four years ago, five years ago, maybe. There was a campaign on the tube.

• 30:39Steven Bartlett?

  Skinny T.

• 30:40Johann Hari?

  No, this was the, yeah, exactly. So for who don't remember, there were, it was a picture of super ripped guy and a super lean woman. And it said, are you beach body ready? Right? And it was an advert for some, I'm so out of touch with, sorry.

• 30:57Steven Bartlett?

  I know the company, but I don't want to plug them.

• 30:59Johann Hari?

  Okay, don't plug these fuckers.

• 31:02Johann Hari?

  So what was it? A protein shake?

• 31:03Steven Bartlett?

  It was like a protein, a powder.

• 31:05Johann Hari?

  Right, right, right. You see, I'm so unhealthy. I don't even know what that powder would, conceive of what you would do with that powder. Except snort it, which I assume is not what you did. But anyway, and City can't just ban it. Just said, you know what? It makes people feel like shit. It's got an insidious vile message, which is if you don't look like these people, i.e. if you're like 99.99% of the population, you're not fit to go to the beach. Just ban it. There was a campaign to vandalize that poster, which people vandalized it just with the slogan, advertising shits in your head. So that was a great slogan. So you can do a political thing. We don't have to allow all this stuff, right? And we can build up to that in all sorts of ways, smaller steps. And one is a more personal one. And that's something I now do. I have a group of friends. We talk, you know, once every couple

• 31:48Johann Hari?

  of weeks, we talk about, okay, what are the times where we've been tempted by bullshit? You know, like, uh, we had the conversation the other day and one of my friends said, you know, oh, she'd got retweeted by some famous person and it lifted her mood for five minutes. And then she was like, I need more, I need more, I need more. And then we're like, okay, but did you write that day? She's writer. She said, no, no, it distracted me. I didn't write. And we're like, okay, but, and of course you only had to say it to her. She goes, oh yeah, that's the thing that gives my life meaning. That's the moments when I feel flow, not the sugar high of, you know, um, I've tried to remember who it was. It was someone really famous. I've tried to remember who it was. Um, uh, so just having these, so I would say, and, and those things are complimentary, by the way, when we have those conversations with the, among ourselves, it makes us feel

• 32:30Johann Hari?

  more powerful to take on the aspects of the machine that are fucking us up as well.

• 32:34Steven Bartlett?

  What you've described is like a counterbalance, right? Because you've got the machine whispering in your ear every day. Every time you log on social media, walk down the street, look at the internet, look at a newspaper, and it's saying, buy Louis Vuitton, motherfucker. And then what you've described there is just by having someone, um, in your ear once in a while going, don't buy Louis Vuitton, live your life, or, you know, intrinsic, your intrinsic values, you know, things that actually matter. It acts as a bit of a counterbalance. And it's so true because I know this stuff, right? Done a lot of reading about it. Your book really helped me understand it. Lots of other books I've, you know, you, you talked about, um, Professor Tim Casser, read his writings after you wrote about it in your book. I know this stuff, yet.

• 33:19Steven Bartlett?

  Once every quarter, I'll pop up in the WhatsApp group with Dom and Sophie and I'll go, what about a Lamborghini? And they'll, and they'll, they'll respond to me. I mean, Dom goes, fucking get it, because he's a, he's a, he's a bad egg, but, um,

• 33:34Johann Hari?

  You monster.

• 33:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. He's like, you might as well know. But, um, but my, all it takes is one of my good friends to go to me, but why do you need that? And I go, yeah, of course you're right.

• 33:43Johann Hari?

  But this is what Tim Casser puts in really well. I remember him saying it to me. We all have a need intrinsic values, but intrinsic values are very fragile. Yeah. And they can be very easily hijacked by signaling around us, which is why, you're right, we need to counterbalance it. We also need to actually get less of this bullshit pumped at us, right? And that's a social thing that we can fight for, right? There's all sorts of, there are countries that regulate these things. Sao Paulo banned outdoor advertising. There's all sorts of things we can do. We, but also it's not just that we're bombarded with the advertising externally. We then police that among ourselves, right?

• 34:24Johann Hari?

  When I remember when I was a kid and people were obsessed with Nike sneakers and I was a kind of fat kid who sat in the corner reading. I didn't give a shit about basketball and yet I wanted these things, right? You think, why did I? And it wasn't, it partly was exposure to advertising, but actually it was more the way we police it among ourselves. So once you set and train those values, people then police them themselves. So that's about how do we undo that? And it's partly about saying to people, how does this really make you feel, right? Very, occasionally you will meet an extremely materialistic person who will tell you, Donald Trump would be a good example, right? Who will tell you, this makes me feel good. And yet you look at them and you see that they are achingly unhappy, right?

• 35:07Johann Hari?

  Achy, I've rarely seen a more unhappy person than Donald Trump. So you can see, one of the dangers of these values is, one of the reasons it makes us, they make us feel so bad, is that those values can then pollute your relationships. When you measure it scientifically, people have high levels of junk value, what are called extrinsic values is the scientific term. People have high levels of extrinsic values, junk values, have less successful relationships that break up more often. Because relationships where you value the other person for very superficial, external things like, you know, do other men feel jealous when they see me with this person? Those aren't good relationships, right?

• 35:47Steven Bartlett?

  I've been in so many of them.

• 35:50Johann Hari?

  You were nodding very, I thought.

• 35:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's just so. Yeah, no, it is. And you talked about how, you know, there's the fear. One of the reasons why people are less happy in these relationships is the fear that this person would leave if I lost my money or my looks, whatever. And then you alluded to the point that I was thinking most about, which is you formed your connection with them based on something basically extrinsic, something superficial. So you have these like surface level connections and then your life with that person, you don't, your psychological needs don't get met because you don't have the, you know, in my case, like an intellectual connection with them, you can't talk about the things you want to talk about. You haven't formed that basis on a deeper level. But then I just wanted to, this is if this was a confession box, here's what I would say.

• 36:31Steven Bartlett?

  In the same way that as a young 28 year old guy who's been successful, um, uh, you know, I guess that word in my ear that just says buy a Lamborghini, like a little Kermit every three months. I also get in the same ear from the same little fucking evil Kermit says to me, there's that hot girl who's completely, I don't know, I don't want to get cancelled because I've got some stuff coming up in the media. But there's that hot girl who has made herself look beautiful on the outside.

• 37:04Johann Hari?

  I think there's a distinction, Stephen, right? Like, there's nothing wrong with sexual attraction if one of people. We don't want to counterpose a world of junk values versus puritanism and joyless. Do you know what I mean?

• 37:14Steven Bartlett?

  It's like.

• 37:15Johann Hari?

  Sexual attraction is one of the great joys of life.

• 37:17Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I was just trying to, I don't want to, I don't want to say it in, in the words. There is that person who offers nothing more than just, they look good. They offer nothing more. And the same, it says, go on, Steve, go for it. And every time I've gone for it, it doesn't take me very long to be miserable in that situation. And then on the other hand, I've got these other, this other person in my life who is the antithesis of that, who is all substance. And something in my life tries to sway me back to the junk people.

• 37:52Johann Hari?

  But I think there's a thing about, in several ways, I think, I think what you just said is really important. Because it's not like there's this category of saintly benign human beings who are immune to all these temptations. And, you know, we need to be more like that. Every human being is a conflict of intrinsic and extrinsic values and extrinsic values are. A certain measure of them is healthy, right? Desire for external success is nothing to be ashamed of. Finding people hot and wanting to have sex with hot people is perfectly, is something we all have, right?

• 38:21Steven Bartlett?

  At the expense of a meaningful relationship.

• 38:25Johann Hari?

  It's like a balanced diet, isn't it? You wanna have, um, you want these, you want these things to exist in a balance with all your other motivations. But, but I don't think, what definitely doesn't work is, cause I tried this myself. I remember being quite cut off from my own, um, status seeking behaviour and sort of not owning it. And I think actually, when you just acknowledge, oh yeah, this is part of me. This is a part, this will always be a part of me. There are some pleasures to be found there. It's not, it's not barren, right? Um, but you always want that to be one part of a much bigger picture.

• 39:08Johann Hari?

  Then you can have a healthy conversation with yourself and with other people about these aspects of yourself. That's very different to, and especially if you live in a society and culture that is all about getting you to be that one thing. And, you know, presenting as images of success. I mean, you and I have both met lots of rich people and I've got to say, they are the most miserable bastards. Or you're one of the very few cheerful rich people I know, right? That, that if I think about, so there's a handful who are happy and they're almost always, uh, I've tried to think of, I can, well, one person who inherited it. So I don't count that. Um, some artistic people, like a few people who pursued their artistic dream, like Elton John and became really rich.

• 39:52Johann Hari?

  He's happy after a fucking rocky journey, as everyone knows.

• 39:57Steven Bartlett?

  And the machine that's fucking us all up, do you believe that because it's making us all care? It's conditioning us to care more about extrinsic values and these like, you know, all this nonsense. Do you think it's, it's hindering our chances of forming meaningful romantic connections? I, for just from what I, I've grown up in this Instagram era where it looks like everybody's getting prettier on the outside and everyone's getting uglier on the inside. Because Instagram and the machine have told us that this is what society values. How big is your X? How white is your Y? How perfect is your? Hair, you know, so it feels like life has gone, okay, the game, everybody get in, get in, everybody get in. Okay, you're gonna, this is how you win. You'll get the most points in

• 40:40Steven Bartlett?

  life if you have the best hair, the best eyes, the best boobs, you know, biggest six pack chest. That is the game. Do you understand? Everyone's going, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. And if you see someone that has that as well, pat them on the back and we go, okay, cool, cool. And we've had 10 years of this Black Mirror experiment. So all of our values have gone, you know, extrinsic and junk values. And I think we're struggling to form meaningful connections because that didn't, the machine told us that that didn't matter.

• 41:10Johann Hari?

  You know, it's funny, after the book came out, a group of people I did not expect to, so I was absolutely inundated on, it was particularly after my TED Talk about it came out, inundated on Instagram by massive Instagram, um, stars, we call it stars, yeah, influence is this word.

• 41:30Steven Bartlett?

  It's so good that you don't know that word.

• 41:34Johann Hari?

  Like really, people with some of the biggest Instagram followings in the world messaging me saying, you're so right, I feel like, and I remember getting a message, I won't say who it was, but from someone who was a big Instagram influencer messaging me saying, I'm so depressed, I don't want to get out of bed in the morning, my life is terrible. I didn't know who this person was, so I clicked on their Instagram page and literally five minutes before sending me that message and five minutes after, she had done a kind of glowing, my life is, you know, I can't remember the words, but you know, a kind of my life is so great, bragging. And, and, and I really, yes, but the thing I would say that is so important about this,

• 42:18Johann Hari?

  it's a funny thing to say, I know it might sound odd, but the widespread nature of our depression, anxiety and addiction crises, in one sense, although terribly painful and horrible and excruciating, and I've been there. Is a positive thing because the system is not working for more and more people. And it becomes harder to defend this system and these values when it makes everyone feel like shit. Right. At some point you have to go, you know what? This ain't fucking working for us. So think about where we are. I lived here, as I said, for 10 years, right? Just not far from here. So Tower Hamlets, you know, I mean, Tower Hamlets has some of the, I think,

• 42:58Johann Hari?

  if I remember rightly, when I lived here, it was, I think it was the constituency in England that had the highest level of poverty. Right. Um. So there's a lot of distress in Tower Hamlets, right? I mean, and by the way, you can be distressed and not be poor. A lot of this distress is happening in middle class and wealthy areas. But think about where we are. Look for signs of distress, connect with the people who are distressed, fight together with them for something better. And of course, that has to be something people do. I can't tell people what the signs of distress around them are. And they'll be different in, you know, um, a coastal village in Kent to, you know, Glasgow, where my mum's from, to the Isle of Skye. Different, there'll be certain shared factors, but look for the signs of distress. I mean, you're spoiled for signs of distress. They're all fucking around us, right?

• 43:42Johann Hari?

  I mean, you think about, um, the number of people who drank themselves to death in Britain last year and how much that went up, as we said. And then meet them where they are because God, change is really possible, right? And I think about that in my own life, you know, I'm gay, right? I didn't hear the concept of gay marriage till I was 20 and my friend Andrew Sullivan wrote the first book advocating it, right? Literally, I did. It never crossed my mind. I remember the first person I was ever in love with when I was 16.

• 44:12Johann Hari?

  I never had a sense of a future. Didn't even occur to me that we could get married. It never even entered my head, right? Um, you think about the scale of that transformation. I remember just before Covid, I was on the tube. And there were these two girls who can't have been more than 16 and they were making out. And I was staring at them and I think they thought I was like an elderly parent and I had to go, oh, no, no, I'm gay. I'm just really, this is really moved. This could never have happened when I was your age. Like I said, they just thought I was like a mental person, but the, the, how did that happen, right? It happened because ordinary people.

• 44:47Johann Hari?

  Came out, they appealed to other people around them, lots of heterosexual people saw that it was pointless to be cruel to gay people and they could be loving and accepting instead. And that change happened, you basically got 2000 years of gay people being horrifically persecuted and then like 70 years of this, from less than 70 years, 60 years, from send them to prison to yay, they can get married, right? So absolutely change. When we talk about things like, oh, you know, we're trapped in this machine that's making us depressed, right? That can sound like such a big thing, right? We had 2000 years of homophobia, right? And I'm not saying we've completely overcome it, obviously,

• 45:31Johann Hari?

  but there's stunning progress, right? The things we're talking about are much more recent inventions than homophobia, right? Like infinitely more recent. And homophobia, terrible though it was, only ever affected a small part of the population. The things we're talking about, fuck, they don't make everyone depressed, but they make everyone less happy than they could be. So these are, you know, these are absolutely things that can be challenged. They can be challenged in individuals' lives and we can deal with them at the political level as well. It requires a transformation in consciousness, which is happening. I mean, we can talk about addiction if you want, and places that solved, that made extraordinary changes in that and massively reduced their addiction deaths

• 46:15Johann Hari?

  that I went to. But we need to understand this differently and we need to listen to our pain. We need to stop insulting our depression, anxiety and addictions by saying they're a sign of weakness or madness or purely biological, although there are some biological contributions, and start listening to them. Listen to the signal as a society and as a culture, because it is telling us where we need to go and what we need to do.

• 46:42Steven Bartlett?

  Let me talk about you.

• 46:44Johann Hari?

  Okay.

• 46:45Steven Bartlett?

  And your connections.

• 46:46Johann Hari?

  Yeah.

• 46:46Steven Bartlett?

  And your romantic connections, your friendships and all of those things. Sometimes I find it fascinating that obviously since you know, people can know a lot of stuff, but applying it to oneself is challenging. I've, you know, some of my, my favorite guests that I've sat here with, I'm thinking about Jamal Crayshi, who I sat here with, who's like a, you know, you, one could call him like a motivational

• 47:06Steven Bartlett?

  coach, you know, probably doesn't quite characterize who he is, but my last question to him was, are you good at taking your own advice? He went, absolutely fucking not. He was like, I'm the least motivated motivational coach in the world. So my, my question to you is, how are you doing with your connections in your life and your mental health and all of these questions?

• 47:24Johann Hari?

  I think people are often most articulate about the things they most struggle with. Right? So, and it's interesting because sometimes that's presented as hypocrisy. I'll give you an example, there's a left wing, I won't say who, but there's a left wing politician I know who is incredibly articulate about greed and how terrible it is and is incredibly greedy. Right? Now you could look at that and go, that's hypocrisy. And of course, at one level, a kind of boring, the obvious level it is. But to me, what's much more interesting is that is a person who's internally struggling against his own flaw. Right? That is a person who has this force within him and is genuinely trying, is so articulate because he's wrestling with it all the time.

• 48:05Johann Hari?

  And so I think, um, in a sense, taking your own advice is sort of like the fact that you needed to articulate the advice suggests that internal struggle. Do you know what I mean?

• 48:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Johann Hari?

  I think about, um, E M Forster, one of my favorite writers who famously said, only connect, who was someone who really struggled with connection, um, partly because he was a gay man of a much earlier generation who, uh, well, his connections, his loving romantic connections were a crime. Right? So he was really, and there were other ways in which he struggled with, with connection as well. So in terms of myself, um, I was always very lucky with friendships. All my life I've had amazing friendships. For me, um, you know, I said before, there were two causes of, two causes, out of the nine causes of depression, anxiety, I write about in the book, there were two that I struggled with a lot.

• 48:59Johann Hari?

  And this, so one was junk values, the other.

• 49:03Johann Hari?

  This was a hard journey for me in the book. I learned about this through a story of a scientist discovered it, who I met. And she explained, I think people can understand it better if they know the story, even though for like a minute, you're going to think, what the fuck has this got to do with what he just said, but just bear with me. So in the mid 1980s, there was a doctor called Vincent Filitti, who was approached, he was in San Diego in California, and he was approached by Kaiser Permanente, who are one of the big not-for-profit medical providers in California. And they came to him and were like, we've got a problem. And we need your help. And the problem was obesity.

• 49:46Johann Hari?

  Obesity was massive rising, it's hugely exploded since then, but it was rising and rising. And they were like, look, nothing we're doing is working. We give people diet advice, we talk to them about nutrition, we even give some of them personal trainers, nothing is working. And so they just gave him a quite big budget and said, just do blue skies research, work with really obese people, just figure out what the hell we can do. So Dr. Filitti starts working with 250 severely obese people, people who weighed more than 400 pounds, so people who were really, you know, in terrible danger. And he's working on this thing, he's interviewing them, he's thinking, what can I do? And one day, he's talking to one of them, and he has an idea, which sounds like it actually is a quite stupid idea.

• 50:29Johann Hari?

  He said, what would happen if really obese people literally stopped eating? And we gave them like, I don't know, vitamin C shots so they didn't get scurvy, we gave them like vitamin shots, would they just burn through the fat supplies in their body and get down to a normal weight? So with a shit ton of medical supervision, they try it. And incredibly, at first, it worked. There's a woman, I'll call her Susan, that's not her real name, who went down from being more than 400 pounds to 138 pounds, it's amazing, right? And people are like, how can this be? What's going on? And her family are like, you've saved her life. And then one day, something happened they didn't expect, Susan cracked, she went to

• 51:10Johann Hari?

  KFC, actually it wasn't KFC, that's me projecting, whatever it was, some fast food place, she starts obsessively eating, and pretty soon, she's back at a dangerous weight. Not where she'd been, but a dangerous weight. And Dr. Filitti called her in, he's like, Susan, what happened? She said, I don't know, I don't know.

• 51:30Johann Hari?

  And he's kind of dumbfounded and he says, well, tell me about the day that you cracked. What, did anything happen that day? It turned out something had happened that day that had never happened to Susan. She was in a bar and a man came up to her and hit on her, not in a nasty predatory way, in a nice way. And she felt really freaked out and she goes and she starts eating. It feels like, huh, well, what's the significant, could this be significant? And then he said to her, saying he'd never asked his patients before, he said, Susan, when did you start to put on your weight? In her case, it was when she was 11.

• 52:00Johann Hari?

  And he said to her, well, did anything happen that year that didn't happen any other year? Anything when you were 11? She said, she looked down, she said, yeah, that's when my grandfather started to rape me.

• 52:13Johann Hari?

  Dr. Philitti interviewed everyone in the program and he discovered that more than 60% of them are put on their extreme weight in the aftermath of being sexually abused or assaulted. And he's thinking, huh, what's, what's that about? How, what? And Susan explained it to him really well. She said, overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be. This thing that seems so destructive and of course is bad for you to be severely obese, was performing a positive function for all these people. It was protecting them from sexual attention, right? And, and just feels like, ah, this is, this is kind of interesting.

• 52:51Johann Hari?

  So he, but this is a small group of people, it's 250 people, it's not much, you can't draw big scientific conclusions based on this. So Dr. Philitti goes to the C D S, Centre for Disease Control, who fund a lot of medical research. And he got funding to do a massive study. Everyone who came to Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, so more than 17,000 people, for a whole year, no matter what for, headaches, schizophrenia, broken leg, anything, got given two questionnaires. First part says, did you have any of these bad experiences when you were a kid? Things like sexual abuse, severe neglect, that kind of thing. Second part said,

• 53:30Johann Hari?

  Have you had any of these problems as an adult? It was initially only going to say obesity, but and this is where it comes to our story. At the last minute, they add loads of other things like depression, addiction, suicide attempts. And at first, when they added up the figures, people, they were like, no, there's been a mistake, add it up again. Because the figures were so extreme. For every category of childhood trauma that you experienced, you were two to four times more likely to be depressed, obese and addicted. But when you got into the multiple categories, the figures just went crazy. If you had had six categories of childhood trauma, you were 3,100% more likely to have attempted suicide and 4,600% more likely to have an injecting drug problem. I mean, these are just insane figures. You very rarely get that in science, right?

• 54:15Johann Hari?

  And I remember Dr. Felitti saying to me, like, that, that he, he, he realized it was like there had been a house fire and we had been focusing on dealing with the smoke, not on dealing with the fire, right? Dr. Robert Ander, who's one of the other scientists who worked on it, said to me, he realized when you see things like obesity, depression, addiction, we need to stop asking what's wrong with you and start asking what happened to you. But it's kind of difficult to talk about this, but so Dr. Felitti is a super nice guy, right? If you met him, you'd really like him. When I interviewed him, he was like 81, so this is ages ago. Lovely, good, decent, admirable man.

• 54:59Johann Hari?

  And when I interviewed him in San Diego the first time, I was sitting with him and I was getting angrier and angrier.

• 55:08Johann Hari?

  And I actually ended the interview early because I was getting so angry.

• 55:13Johann Hari?

  And I remember walking to the beach in San Diego, walking around and thinking, what the fuck's this about? Why am I so angry with this lovely old man who's done this amazing research that's helped so many people? And I remember thinking,

• 55:24Johann Hari?

  So when I was a child, I'd experienced some very extreme things from an adult in my life. And I had, I didn't want to think about that. I didn't want to, I didn't want to think about that in relation to the depression I had experienced. I didn't, I didn't want to give this individual power over me now. But one of the reasons I'm glad that I went back and carried on talking to him is because of what Dr. Felici discovered next, which I think is really relevant to what you're asking. So obviously, they'd, they'd asked all these people who came for healthcare about their childhood trauma. So suddenly, they've got all this data. So they said to people's GPs, don't call them back in. But

• 56:07Johann Hari?

  next time they come in, look at the childhood trauma thing. And if they've experienced childhood trauma, say to them something like this. I see that when you were a child, you were sexually abused, or whatever it was. I'm really sorry that happened. That should never have happened to you. You should have been protected. That was a failing. Would you like to talk about it? And 40% of people did not want to talk about it, but 60% of people did. And they wanted to talk about it on average for five minutes. And then it was randomly assigned. Some of them were told, we can go to a therapist to talk about it more. What they found was, just five minutes of an authority figure saying, I'm so sorry, this should never have happened to you. That alone led to a significant fall in depression and anxiety. And the people who referred to a therapist had an even bigger fall. And

• 56:52Johann Hari?

  what this shows, it fits with a whole load of other evidence from people like Professor Steve Coles at UCLA, Professor James Pennebaker at Florida State University, is it's not the trauma that destroys you, it's the shame about the trauma. And giving people ways to release that shame is an antidepressant. So for me,

• 57:14Johann Hari?

  Learning that, and it's one of the reasons I made myself put it in the book and talk about it, is so very often people who survive abuse as children, internalize the voice of the abuser, right? Almost invariably, the abuser says, you made me do this, you're a bad person, you made me do this, right? And so although of course, there was never any point in my adult life where I thought that was a rational, you know, there was never a point where I would have, if you, you know, if someone had told me they had been abused and told me negative things they'd been told, I would never have thought, yeah, the abuser was right, obviously. I didn't reckon with that internalization in my own life, and I think it meant that

• 57:52Johann Hari?

  a lot of the time, although I always had great friendships with romantic relationships, they would, I would often cauterize them at a certain point because I didn't feel at that time that I deserved to be loved, I didn't feel that I deserved to be treated well. So it would mean that sometimes I would get into relationships with people who didn't treat me well, or sometimes if they did treat me well, I would end it prematurely at the point at which they were treating me well, because I'd internalized so many of these negative and destructive and untrue ideas. And, and the process of thinking that through, obviously I had a therapist as well, the

• 58:33Johann Hari?

  process of thinking that through and releasing that shame made me much more open to, you know, love, you know, because I didn't, it was possible to overcome that. Does that make sense, Stephen? Does that?

• 58:47Steven Bartlett?

  Are you still on that journey?

• 58:49Johann Hari?

  Oh, yeah. And I think anyone who, you know, how would I put it? Yeah, of course, of course.

• 59:01Steven Bartlett?

  And through all of your, your work and your writing, you've, you know, you've highlighted to the world, but also clearly to yourself, the importance of that, of romantic connections.

• 59:10Johann Hari?

  Well, it comes right back to where we started, isn't it? Why do I write? To, to understand, to understand things I didn't understand at the start, to go on a journey, there are things I want to understand.

• 59:22Johann Hari?

  And and sometimes they're big things, right? And sometimes they're very personal things and sometimes they're both. And and then to track down, okay, who who knows a lot about this? Who's found interesting things out about this and go and sit with them? And kind of pester them and keep going back year after year until I feel I understand it. And I feel now I understand it. And it and I've got to say, it's it's quite frustrating. Watching some of the Covid debate at the moment because

• 59:53Johann Hari?

  you know, there's been this big increase in addiction, depression. And a lot of the ways it's taught even by super well meaning, admirable people, as almost everyone in this debate is.

• 1:00:06Johann Hari?

  So many of the ways in which people are encouraged to think they are helping people with the best will in the world and with a good heart often strip these things of meaning. So there's a thing, for example, that very well meaning people will say, which is, oh, depression is just like, you know, depression is a disease like diabetes. You know, you you wouldn't shame someone of having a broken leg. They're absolutely right that depressed anxious people should never be stigmatized. But actually, that that is not the way you remove stigma. You don't remove, I mean, no one ever doubted that leprosy and AIDS were biological phenomena. And you might have noticed there was a damn lot of stigma about them, right?

• 1:00:50Johann Hari?

  Saying something is biological and it's true, there is some biological components. We can talk about that if you want some biological contributions. Your genes can make you more vulnerable to these things, so they do not write your destiny. And but but saying things biological does not, actually, there's some good scientific evidence. It it increases stigma because it makes people think, God, these people are really different to me. They're like a different species. What actually undoes stigma is to say that there are some biological contributions.

• 1:01:15Johann Hari?

  Any of us would feel like this in this situation. Actually, your pain makes sense. There was a moment that really, all this really fell into place for me as well. It was one of the two totally revelatory moments for me in the research for Lost Connections. I went to interview this South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield. And he told me this story about something that had happened to him. So Derek was in Cambodia in 2001. When they first introduced chemical antidepressants for people in Cambodia, they'd never had them in the country before. And the local doctors, the Cambodians, were like, what are they? They didn't know what they were, what are antidepressants? And Derek explained, and they said to him, oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants. And he was like, well, what do you mean?

• 1:01:58Johann Hari?

  He thought they were going to talk about some kind of like herbal remedy, like Junko Beloba or something. Instead, they told him a story. They had a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day he stood on a landmine left over from the war with the Americans and he got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial limb. They're good at that in Cambodia because they've got a lot of landmines. And after a while, several months, the guy goes back to work, right? So he goes back to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's super painful to work underwater when you've got an artificial limb. And I'm guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up. The guy started to cry all day. After a while, he just wouldn't get out of bed. He developed what we would call classic depression, right?

• 1:02:40Johann Hari?

  This is when the Cambodian doctors said, well, you know, that's when we gave him an antidepressant. And Derek said, what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realised that his pain made sense. You only had to talk to him for five minutes to realise why he felt so shit. One of the doctors said, well, we realised if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone, it never came back. They said to Derek, so you see, Doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right? Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that it's primarily

• 1:03:23Johann Hari?

  or entirely a malfunction in your brain, that sounds like a bad joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant, she gave me a cow. But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively from this individual unscientific anecdote is what the leading medical body in the whole world, the World Health Organisation, has been trying to tell us for years, right? Your pain makes sense. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the main a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is practical help and support to get those needs met. So one of the things we have to be asking as a society and culture is, what's the cow for the things that are screwing us up, right? What's the cow for the things that are making us depressed? Instead of seeing depression as a malfunction, we've got to see it as

• 1:04:08Johann Hari?

  a signal that's telling us the person is distressed and has unmet needs and together help them get those needs met. Because what the doctors didn't say is, alright mate, this is your problem, you're on your own, right? Together, they help to solve the problem. We've got to solve the underlying problems for which depression is a signal.

• 1:04:27Steven Bartlett?

  And you said, you tweeted about this, you said, there is good evidence that after Covid, we can reverse our spiralling depression and anxiety crisis. But to do that, we need to radically expand the menu of responses to it.

• 1:04:40Johann Hari?

  Yeah, think about what we were doing. To give one example, just from up the road, social prescribing, right? Every single doctor's surgery should have a social prescribing wing. It should be the first thing that is suggested, certainly for mild and moderate depression, is figure out if the person's lonely and disconnected from the natural world. If they are, suggest them prescribe. And there's a real power in doctors prescribing, not just saying, oh, you might want to think about this, because people feel so disempowered to find each other in such a lonely and atomized society. That's one example. Obviously, the last third of Lost Connections is loads of very practical examples.

• 1:05:13Steven Bartlett?

  And we have to do that in our own lives, right? Like, we can socially prescribe ourselves.

• 1:05:17Johann Hari?

  Yeah, I think there's an authority in doctors doing it. Absolutely, we should be doing it for ourselves, and we should be urging other people to do it. But in a culture that's become so disconnected from understanding our needs, and actually where we've been told a rival story, that has some truth in it. As I stress a lot in the book, I have a chapter about this, there are real biological contributions to depression and anxiety that can make you more sensitive to these problems and can make it harder to get out. But what's happened is... An overly simplified biological story has become the main thing we say about depression. When I went to my doctor and I was a teenager and I was, felt like pain was leaking out of me.

• 1:05:58Johann Hari?

  My doctor, who was a very well meaning decent person, just said, oh, there's something wrong with your brain and all you need to do is drug yourself. Right. And chemical antidepressants gave me a little bit of relief for a while. Also gave me really severe side effects in my case, although not everyone. And ultimately I remained depressed, right? So what that story did, that oversimplified story, which has some truth in it for some people. Well, that oversimplified story did is cut me off for many years, for 13 years, from exploring the deeper causes. If right early on, there's no criticism of my doctor, they're just part of a system, you know, that's not of their own creation. And a lot of doctors want to do better and want to have better options to give people that they haven't been offered them themselves.

• 1:06:40Johann Hari?

  And it cut me off from a deeper, more nuanced story that helped me to find a way out of my depression. So I think one of the things we've got to do is help people to find stories that make sense of their pain. Because that's the way, once you understand why you feel something, you can begin to find your way out of it. But just being lost in a haze of you're just biologically broken, no one is, there are some biological contributions, but no one is broken by their biology. No one is, no one is, there's nobody who with the right support can't find their way out. But with the right support is a crucial clause there that we have to build as a society that we have not built. Right. We just haven't built.

• 1:07:22Steven Bartlett?

  Got me thinking about psychedelics for a number of reasons, because psychedelics, you know, it's been, it's been of a, I think there's a bit of a revolution going on in the, the perception of psychedelics. You know, we had the war and Nixon's like war on drugs in the like 50s or 60s or whatever it was. I wasn't alive then, so excuse my inaccuracy.

• 1:07:39Johann Hari?

  We were lucky you dodged the bullet of Nixon. Not a good thing to be allowed to do. I wasn't there either.

• 1:07:43Steven Bartlett?

  I've not read a ton about him, but I just, I know that he was pivotal in like, you know, slamming the gauntlet down on the, you know, the chance of even researching some of these compounds, psychedelic compounds. But what I've come to learn over the last six months, working in, you know, one of the world's leading sort of psychedelic and non psychedelic mental health companies, which is a tie and spending some time there, is how remarkable the, the stats evidence and findings are for things like psilocybin, which is a compound derived from magic mushrooms, at helping those with treatment resistant depression to overcome their, you know, their, their feelings of depression. And it matches up perfectly to the philosophy and really the, the perspective that your

• 1:08:28Steven Bartlett?

  book gave me on mental health, because it approaches the, the, what's the, the correct word to use, the indication of treatment resistant depression from the stance that something has happened to you and that thing might live in your subconscious, you know, and it's an unlocker of that thing in the same way that therapy might be for some, for some people. But what's your, you know, having written this book and studied depression for so long and anxiety, what do you think of psychedelics?

• 1:08:57Johann Hari?

  So as you know, for the book, I, I was chapter about psychedelics because I, I went and interviewed the leading experts in the world on this. People have been doing the cutting edge research, I interviewed them in Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, at UCLA, here in London at UCL, at NYU and somewhere else, oh, in Brazil. And so I'm strongly in favor of psychedelics for some people. It's a slightly complicated picture in a way that I think helps us to understand what's going on. So think about treatment, you mentioned treatment resistant depression. Some really good research was done on this here in London by David, Professor David Nutt and Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris. They get people who've been depressed for a long time and nothing's helped them and they've tried lots of things and nothing's helped them. And they gave them, if I remember rightly, three doses of psilocybin, the active component of magic mushrooms.

• 1:09:42Johann Hari?

  Might be wrong on the number, but something like that.

• 1:09:46Johann Hari?

  And exactly as you say, huge numbers of them have a, it's amazing, they feel the strong feeling of connection to the natural world, to their own traumas, to everyone around them, as anyone who's used psychedelics, or most people who use psychedelics, experience, a really profound spiritual experience. And that deeply lifts their depression and anxiety. So a taste of connection, this wasn't true for literally everyone, but it was a very high percentage, an intense feeling of meaning and connection helps lift them out of their depression. There's a coder to that, which Robin talks about. So to give you an example, one of the people who told me about, so a woman in the programme who worked in, she

• 1:10:29Johann Hari?

  worked in an office in like a coastal town in Britain, it was quite kind of rundown and grim. She'd been very depressed. She goes, she takes the psilocybin, her depression lifts, she feels deeply connected, and then she goes back to work in the office. And she comes back and is like, I can't go around my office acting like we're all connected, we're all equal, nature is beautiful. I have to live in this disconnected way to exist in my office, right? So over time, her depression comes back because she's had a taste of connection, but then she goes back to live in a disconnected landscape, right? A disconnected emotional landscape. And I think, so what the evidence shows is, the way I think of psychedelics

• 1:11:14Johann Hari?

  is administered in the right way, of course, and that's an important clause. What they can do is give you a taste of how it feels to be connected, to have meaning. But I think of that as like a compass that can point you in the direction you need to travel. Doesn't do the, it gives, I mean, it gives you a flash of what it's like to be at the end of the journey, but then you're back at the start of the journey and you know the, you know the direction in which you need to travel. What it doesn't do is do the journey for you, right? Or not for more than the six or seven hours, you know, you're, you're under the effects of the psychedelic. So.

• 1:11:49Johann Hari?

  And this is true of a lot of the, I mean, there's some, I'll come to this in the complexity of the evidence in a minute, but so most people are not going to want to take psychedelics a huge amount of the time, right? I mean, there's some exceptions, Amanda Fielding, I don't know if you've met her. So Amanda, who people don't know, Amanda is kind of amazing, British heiress, who's a great champion of psychedelics, who, I don't want to get it wrong because I didn't write about her, so I didn't, I don't remember the exact number, but I seem to recall her saying she took psychedelics for the whole of 1986, or something just every day, right? So some people will have the means and want to take psychedelics all the time, but that's a very small part of the population, right? So what we know

• 1:12:29Johann Hari?

  works is giving people psychedelics to give them a sense of what it can be like to be connected, and then helping them to integrate into their lives ways they can bring, take that connection forward. So there was a guy I interviewed who was part of the Johns Hopkins study, who had had this very profound experience where he took psychedelics. His dad had died when he was very young. No one had talked to him about his dad's death when he died. It was just kind of silence. And when he died, he had this vision where he saw his dad, he found his dad in a wood, and his dad said to him, you know, you built up these walls to protect yourself, but we can take these walls down now. You're safe. Go and seek, right? Because he'd been cutting himself off for so long from, from things like romantic

• 1:13:14Johann Hari?

  connections. And then when he, when the psychedelics, the effect of the psychedelics, the immediate effect of the psychedelics went away, he then started becoming like a very deep meditator, doing all sorts of things that kind of built in that, that, that sense of connection into his life. So I think that, that to me is the great value of, now there are some people who say they have more enduring effects beyond just that immediate taste of connection and the, my kind of compass metaphor. So the good evidence for that would be the Johns Hopkins study. So the guys at Johns Hopkins did, who are amazing scientists, did a, I always think about this in relation to my mother, because they took really long term smokers. So my, my mother smoked 70 cigarettes a day. And there's an amazing, there's a photo of me and her.

• 1:13:59Steven Bartlett?

  Two at a time.

• 1:14:01Johann Hari?

  She's like a crap. There's a photo of me and her when I'm about six months old that I found a few years ago where she's, she's breastfeeding me, smoking and resting the asteroid on my stomach. And when I showed it to her, she said, my mother's Scottish, when I showed it to her, she said, you were a difficult baby. I needed that cigarette, you fucker. She's repetitive. But so they took people like my mother who are super, super long-term smokers. She's been smoking since she was 14. And they gave them, I think it was three doses of psilocybin over a few months. And 80% of them stopped smoking and a year later, 60% of them were still non-smokers. So there's some evidence of though positive long-term outcomes. It's a quite a small study. So yeah, I think this is a really important.

• 1:14:46Johann Hari?

  I think some people oversell it and say it's the answer, which is not right. But I think it can be a very useful tool. When I talk about with depression, what we've done up to now, for it's basically since the, since the 90s. As with depression, when people present with depression, almost all the time, there is one option on the menu, which is chemical antidepressants, which do give some people some relief.

• 1:15:15Johann Hari?

  We need to radical, that needs to stay on the menu, but we need to radically expand the menu of options. And psychedelics are another great example of something that should totally be, be on the menu, should be available to people in a medical context, and I would argue outside medical contexts as well. I mean, it's part of the argument of my book, Chasing the Scream, about how we need to end the war on drugs and move towards regulated models of access to drugs for all sorts of drugs. So yeah, I think, I think it's really important.

• 1:15:45Steven Bartlett?

  I think we're getting there as well. It's, you know, the public markets and the commercial model and the amount of investment that's going into psychedelics is just staggering. A tie have raised, I think, 400 million in the last 24 months.

• 1:15:58Johann Hari?

  It's another thing where, you know, we're thinking about change when it feels like we're up against it. And we are indeed up against these very powerful forces. What, thinking about cannabis, right?

• 1:16:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Johann Hari?

  When the. Today, George W. Bush becomes president in 2015% of American citizens support legalizing cannabis. Today, it's 70% and because New York just legalized, that hasn't started yet, they've just voted, the legislature voted to legalize. Now, half of all American citizens live in a state where cannabis is legal, right? So you think about how quickly that happened, cannabis being unbelievably demonized from the 1930s to the, to the, to like your lifetime.

• 1:16:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:32Johann Hari?

  Um, and then this huge shift in opinion really quickly because people saw it in practice, right? People saw cannabis legalization in practice, Colorado went first. Um, Mason Tavert, who led that campaign, I interviewed a lot for Chasing the Screen. Just all it takes is one place to breach the dam, two places, Washington State did at the same time. And people are like, oh, is this the thing we were so fucking afraid of? Oh, actually, you know, it's, you know, pretty straightforward.

• 1:16:59Steven Bartlett?

  Does, I feel like social media has played a, played a role in this because we now have this like connected consciousness of like a whole country or the whole planet where we can, we can pick up on an idea, share it. And like virtue signal it, signal it rapidly into existence, into where we all go, yeah, that's right, yeah. Like a whole country can do it. And you think about, if you go back hundreds of years before the advent of the internet. If the king of the land or whatever, the politician had said something, we couldn't sort of get together in the same way and form our own opinion as this like, cause I see like, I think about Twitter as this one brain. And one day it'll say, you know, same sex marriage is great.

• 1:17:42Steven Bartlett?

  And that idea can very quickly become adopted because you can get that idea to like a billion people. And basically vote it into existence using like, you know, likes and retweets and a couple of influencers. And so I, you know.

• 1:17:57Johann Hari?

  So I would have said that a few, I would have said that 10 years ago, what you just said, I would have had that optimistic view. I think the evidence since then has gotten, you're definitely right. One of the good things about social media is where geographical distance feels much more collapsed. And we feel much closer to the whole world.

• 1:18:11Steven Bartlett?

  Ideas are spreading.

• 1:18:12Johann Hari?

  Yeah, and ideas, but if you look at the mechanisms by which those ideas spread. This is not inherent to social media, this is inherent to the current business model of social media. So if you look at my friend Tristan Harris has done, he should totally interview, has done a really important work on this. He was a Google engineer who saw what was happening inside Google and spoke out.

• 1:18:36Johann Hari?

  So if you look at how these ideas spread, so we're tempted to think of it as a neutral playing field, right? So here's a good idea, gay marriage, psychedelics help depression, whatever it might be, enters this level playing field, some people like it, it spreads, it grows, right? Now, sometimes that happens, of course. If you look at, so these business models are premised, the business model of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook is all premised on, you pick up your phone now, you scroll through Twitter, you scroll through Facebook, the longer you are scrolling, the more money Facebook makes, obviously because of both exposure to adverts and because they're learning more about you every time you do anything. So their business model is premised, every time you put down your phone, it's

• 1:19:18Johann Hari?

  a disaster for them, and every time you carry on scrolling, it's great for them. So they've designed very complex algorithms to figure out what keeps you scrolling, what keeps everyone who walks past this building scrolling. And it turns out, because of the quirky human beings, that we can talk about why if you want, things that make you angry will keep you scrolling longer than things that outrage and anger you will keep you scrolling longer than things that make you feel good. If you see something that makes you feel good, it makes you want to go and be out in the real world. If you see something that makes you angry, you want to keep scrolling, you want to express your rage, right? If it's enraging, it's engaging. So although that's not the goal of YouTube and Facebook, they want you to be angry, their algorithms have figured out angering and enraging content

• 1:20:01Johann Hari?

  keeps people scrolling longer. Therefore, although it's not the intention of the designers, the practical effect of these apps is they are designed to make, the algorithms function in such a way, they will feed you things that make you angry and upset. So this thing that you thought was a level playing field, right? Oh, good ideas will prevail, bad ideas will die out, is not right. Actually, in the main, it will select for things that make people angry. So you look at the NYU study, if you look at the figures for the 2016 US presidential election. I think the figure was nineteen out of nineteen out of the twenty most shared stories on Facebook were lies, like actual lies, like the trumpet, Donald Trump was endorsed by the Pope, right?

• 1:20:43Johann Hari?

  Which was not true. In fact, the Pope criticised Donald Trump. And so you see, we're in a, I mean, if you think about Infowars, the disgusting filth, this guy Alex Jones, who is a cynic, cynic, not even a lunatic, a cynic, who says things like, the Sandy Hook massacre didn't happen, their parents were liars, they're crisis actors. So you think about, you know, how many children it was, twenty six, I think, were murdered at school. And he unleashes a mob against these parents whose children have been murdered, where those parents have had to move loads of times because they are hounded by his supporters, threatening to kill their

• 1:21:22Johann Hari?

  surviving children. It's hard for me to imagine a more evil thing. Infowars, in the 2016 election, more Infowars stories were shared on Facebook in the world than the entire New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian and BBC combined. So you think about this landscape that is enraging people. And so it's not, now, you don't have to have a business model like that. Social media doesn't have to work that way, right? You can have all the good things about social media, the collapsing of social distance, the connection of the world. Without that, if you have a different business model, we can talk about that another time. And Tristan talks about that brilliantly. But, so I, I get what you're saying, and I understand,

• 1:22:03Johann Hari?

  there's a truth in what you're saying, which is we can hear ideas more readily. But- There's a cost. Well, it's not sure there's a cost. There'll be a cost in any model. But actually, we're communicating through a poisoned mechanism that doesn't promote the spread of good ideas, that actually promotes the spread of false and hateful ideas. And we've got to fix that as well as-

• 1:22:27Johann Hari?

  Yes, then we can have all the joys of connection without this, you know, Infowars bullshit or other forms of.

• 1:22:33Steven Bartlett?

  I completely agree. And you, you know, I saw you'd written when you went off to write your new book, which we're probably not allowed to talk about on this.

• 1:22:41Johann Hari?

  My publishers will taze me.

• 1:22:43Steven Bartlett?

  That's fine.

• 1:22:43Johann Hari?

  They've told me very specifically.

• 1:22:45Steven Bartlett?

  I'm super excited to read it. It's January next year.

• 1:22:48Johann Hari?

  January next year, yeah.

• 1:22:49Steven Bartlett?

  How exciting.

• 1:22:49Johann Hari?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:50Steven Bartlett?

  Can you, you can say the title, that's on Amazon.

• 1:22:52Johann Hari?

  It's called Stolen Focus.

• 1:22:54Steven Bartlett?

  Nice.

• 1:22:54Johann Hari?

  Okay, I'm not, I'm not saying.

• 1:22:56Steven Bartlett?

  What's the subtitle?

• 1:22:59Johann Hari?

  Now, literally.

• 1:23:00Steven Bartlett?

  Get me guns, boys.

• 1:23:00Johann Hari?

  The British subtitle is why you can't focus and how to think deeply again.

• 1:23:04Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:23:04Johann Hari?

  But my publishers literally were like, I can't do an American accent. Don't say a fucking word. They don't actually swear like that. I've turned them like they're the Sopranos. They're actually like very nice New York.

• 1:23:13Steven Bartlett?

  We won't talk about that. But what I would like to talk about is focus.

• 1:23:18Johann Hari?

  Not edit.

• 1:23:22Steven Bartlett?

  And what are you doing in that process where you're writing, you're writing a new book now? What are you doing? Are you out researching? You're on the internet, you're reading other books, you're speaking to people? What are you doing?

• 1:23:29Johann Hari?

  So I spend a, I spend a long time researching my book. So the book that I'm going to, the book that I'm writing now, which is about, I'm really not meant to talk about because it's about a specific set of crimes that other people haven't written about. And I don't want to, I don't want to set other journalists.

• 1:23:46Steven Bartlett?

  I'm going to write about it.

• 1:23:46Johann Hari?

  But so I've been going there for 10 years and I've been getting to know the people for 10 years. And I've been deeply researching it for 10 years. And there's a thing about,

• 1:23:59Johann Hari?

  when you're trying to understand a subject, whether it's depression or Las Vegas, or I'm writing a biography of Noam Chomsky that I've also been working on for a really long time, and I probably won't write for another 10 years at least. There's a thing about such an important part of my books is people opening up to me.

• 1:24:16Johann Hari?

  And people generally don't open up to you the first time they meet you. You know, they think, who is this person? Why does he want, why does he want to ask me these very personal questions? What's going on here? Generally, people open up to you at the end of the second year. So for me, it's so important. It's incredible privilege and luxury that I get to do this.

• 1:24:35Johann Hari?

  For me, what's so important is this very long span. So I'll spend 10 years writing in in in this moment, since you asked what I'm doing at the moment. So I'm writing about Vegas. So there's a couple, Tommy and Shay, who I knew over many years when he was murdered.

• 1:24:51Johann Hari?

  And what I'm doing at the moment is I've got all the audio I've ever recorded. I've got hundreds of hours of audio with them. I paid to have it all transcribed and I'm just reading through just amounts and amounts of transcripts. They're like, oh, right, that's a scene. That's a moment. Ah, I forgot he said that. You know, this is, that's the time this happened to us. That's the time we were, you know, in Caesar's Palace and then, oh, yeah, and the guy. So it's just going through. So at the moment, I'm in the stage of what I think of as finding out what jigsaw pieces I've got. I'm not even assembling the jigsaw at the moment. I'm just like, oh, right, okay. And, you know, there'll be, I'll read through 100 pages of transcripts and think, oh, we've got nothing that time, you know. And then another time, there are days when you're like, oh, they were so articulate that day, or this crazy thing happened. So at the moment,

• 1:25:36Johann Hari?

  I'm assembling the jigsaw pieces. And then probably in two months, I start to put the jigsaw pieces together. So I'll, I'll have some, I'll like index it and I'll be like, all right, okay. So he talked about his childhood in Hawaii, this time, that time, that time. Okay. Then you put all that together and then you go, oh, okay, this is, this is where he described gambling. All right, okay. So you're trying to piece it all together slowly over time. But to do that, you've got to initially immerse yourself in the actual place and go back a lot and build up a huge reservoir of just stuff. And the other thing, and this was hard for me because I was a newspaper journalist for a long time where, you know, everything had to be, you know, you've

• 1:26:21Johann Hari?

  got 24 hours to write it. You don't have time for dead ends. You have to have a high tolerance for dead ends. So for every expert I've quoted to you, I interviewed 10 experts who were decent people and told me nothing I used in the book, right? There's a great, I know absolutely nothing about nature, so this could be bullshit. But there's a metaphor that Thoreau, the American, 19th century American writer, used, where he said, apparently, if you want to find a beehive and you don't know where the beehive is, if you stay in a place and wait for a bee to come along, And catch it in a jar, just keep it there for a couple of minutes. It will fly off in the direction of the hive. So you let it go and you run and it'll be as fast as you will. Then you stand, you follow it as far as you can and then you wait there, you catch another bee, let that one go, follow that.

• 1:27:04Johann Hari?

  And if you do that like thirty times, you'll find the beehive, right? I don't know if that's true, but that's what Thoreau says. And I think of writing as a bit like that. It's like you, you, you start with a subject that's really big. Why are so many people depressed? You look for people who've talked about it in an interesting way. You go and talk to all of them. And then at the end of every interview, you say, who else should I talk to? And you go and talk to all of them. And you say, who else should I talk to? And you get this kind of growing concentric circle until sooner or later, you find the person who, like Vincent Felitti, I interviewed, I can't tell you how many people I interviewed about childhood trauma and depression. Many of whom, you know, were nice people who told me nothing of interest. And I forget who it was. It was a chain. It was a chain through about five people. He said, someone said, you should talk to Vincent Felitti. And I thought, who's he?

• 1:27:49Johann Hari?

  Went to San Diego and they're like, oh, this is, this is the thing, right? And, and some of that can be, sometimes you're lucky. I knew in Chasing the Scream, I wanted to tell the story of a drug dealer. And I remember Chino was the second drug dealer I interviewed. I interviewed a guy in Baltimore. And I remember Chino, uh, first thing he said to me, almost the very first thing was, I was conceived when my mother, who was a crack addict, was raped by my dad, who was an NYPD officer.

• 1:28:17Johann Hari?

  And I was like, tell me more. And I never looked for another drug dealer. I was like, Chino's my person, right? And Chino's an unusually incredible human being in all sorts of ways. He's no longer a drug dealer. He's, um, he, he.

• 1:28:29Steven Bartlett?

  Arrested.

• 1:28:30Johann Hari?

  No, he was arrested. He was in Rikers. But he, uh, he now campaigns to end the war on drugs and actually had to shut down the horrific, Sparford, the horrific youth detention centre that he was detained in. He's a completely incredible person. But, um, yeah, so sometimes you're lucky and you don't have to do the long chain. You just find the right person very early. And sometimes you spend five years finding the right person. But for me, it's a. The fun is the journey, right? The part of the fun, sometimes it's the fun of getting an answer. In Cipoliti, you're like, oh, I now understand childhood trauma and addiction and depression. But yes, it's a long, a long journey, but I, I, I'm really lucky. I just love, sometimes you meet writers who go, it's agony, it's agony.

• 1:29:13Johann Hari?

  And I always want to go, go fucking work in a call centre for a week and come back and tell me how difficult. I'm not saying there aren't challenges in writing, there are, but anyone who is a writer, a professional writer, whose attitude is not every day, thank God, I mean, I this, but metaphorically, thank God, I get to do this job. I'm so lucky. That's got to be your default position. It's a, it's an incredible privilege to get to do it. I know that sounds hashtag blessed and wanky, but like, it really is like a great, um, to get to kind of investigate complicated things and try to find answers and explain them to people who need to know. And there's a lot of people who need to know the answers to these questions. It's, it's a great thing.

• 1:29:55Steven Bartlett?

  But that's clearly why you've written so many great books, because you have a

• 1:30:00Steven Bartlett?

  intrinsic joy for your work, because the lengths you've described there, 10 years, five years, three years, the air miles you must have done to write these books.

• 1:30:10Johann Hari?

  There is a whole part of Greenland that has melted because of my life.

• 1:30:13Steven Bartlett?

  There you go, like, yeah, I, I, I am not going to bullshit. I finished, I wrote my book, um, over the space of a year and a half, but I wouldn't have done what you did. I, I, and, and that speaks to where my intrinsic motivations and joy comes from. I enjoyed the process of writing the book, but the thoroughness that you put into your books is just staggering to me, because I don't share that intrinsic joy for the process, which you clearly do.

• 1:30:41Johann Hari?

  But you have a lot of intrinsic joy for the other things that you do, which are really important.

• 1:30:45Steven Bartlett?

  It's a shame, it's a shame to some degree. I think part of my conditioning, growing up in the social media era where we get instant gratification, made the, the, the thought of, you know, when I've got a instant Instagram story I can do, or this five year book project.

• 1:30:59Johann Hari?

  But that's why I really restrict, I'll give you an example, I won't say his name, but there's someone, a contemporary of mine, a British writer who's now based in the US, who is one of the cleverest people I know, a totally brilliant, I mean, just politically, intellectually, just an outstanding person. And

• 1:31:19Johann Hari?

  Ten years before, if he'd been exactly the same person ten years before, he would have written three brilliant books that changed how people think about the subjects. And I've watched, and it's been really depressing as he just atrophies his energy tweeting all the time. And he's got a huge Twitter following, and I'm not saying that doesn't do any good. It does some good. But and whenever I see him, I, when I'm in the cities, you know, I say, he, you know, I see him and he's just addled. And you know, there's a line, Anne Ginsberg, the poet, said, I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by madness. I feel like I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by Twitter.

• 1:32:00Johann Hari?

  Just fucking, I'm not saying there's no value in it, but atrophying the energy. And I've been there, right, years ago. But and so for me, you're right. A huge part of writing a book is deferred gratification. I've got to interview people for this biography, for example, I'm writing, Noam Chomsky is an incredible person. I interviewed someone two days ago, knowing I'm not going to look at that transcript for seven years, right? And knowing somewhere down the line, I'm going to be glad I did that interview because that person's quite old and they'll be dead if I wait seven years. And, you know, and so you've got to, but it's very hard to defer gratification if you can

• 1:32:41Johann Hari?

  get an immediate hit of, but it's a very shallow hit, right? When I meet people, and I always have a difference, right? Sometimes people come up to me in the street and they go, I follow you on Instagram or whatever. And there's, and it's a very shallow connection. And sometimes people will come up to me and they'll say, I read your book. And they will, even their physical demeanor is different. It's like being approached by someone who is a friend, right? And they will always have some, not always, but most of the time have some much more detailed story. I always feel like, I feel like if someone follows you on Twitter, it's the equivalent of shouting to you across a crowded bar.

• 1:33:18Steven Bartlett?

  Whistling.

• 1:33:19Johann Hari?

  Exactly. Whereas, if you're lucky, whistling, I'm probably slightly throwing the pint at you and glassing you. But the, whereas if someone's read my book, I feel like I've gone on holiday with them, right? The level of kind of intimate, because it takes a long time to read a book, right?

• 1:33:32Steven Bartlett?

  That's deeply personal.

• 1:33:32Johann Hari?

  It's very, and they've been in your head, right?

• 1:33:35Steven Bartlett?

  They've been in your childhood.

• 1:33:36Johann Hari?

  Yeah, they've been, and they've, and they've been on this, if they read my book, it's a really big journey, right? So there's an intimacy to that. So I think it's, it's worth.

• 1:33:47Johann Hari?

  Comes back to what we say about porn, right? You could spend your whole life sitting at home wanking over porn, right? I'm not against porn, right? I look at it myself, but sometimes, but we all know the hard work of having a relationship is ultimately going to be more satisfying than your whole life wanking over porn, right? Speak for yourself. Exactly.

• 1:34:08Johann Hari?

  Very sad story. I'll tell you again, your hands, speak for yourself. Exactly, I did notice all the screens around us with the constantly streaming Pornhub, but the, we won't talk about that, but the, um, but, but, and I feel like a lot of life is on that principle, right? Like, of course you can, to me, the people I know, I think I know who look, who are tweeting all the time, and I know a lot of people with really big Twitter followings. It's not just that, partly it's that atrophying their lives on bullshit, also makes them really fucking unhappy. I know someone, I won't say who, but someone who's got a very big Twitter following, who's got an extra, it's a bit like our Instagram, so we were talking about before, huge Instagram, oh, sorry, huge Twitter following, bumped into in the street a good few years ago now.

• 1:34:53Johann Hari?

  Again, like miserable as shit, right? And made more miserable by, I mean, I was thinking about someone I know, this is not a famous person, but someone I know who uses a, uses a lot of meth and is on Twitter all the time. And genuinely, if you said to me, should this individual quit Twitter or meth first? I would say quit Twitter, it's worse for him, right? I don't mean that as a glib joke, not that meth is so great, but it, it, it, it, it just has such a negative effect on people. The thing I dislike most about it is for me, um, almost everything about being an effective

• 1:35:33Johann Hari?

  person in the world is about being sincere and open-hearted, you know, with humour and comedy and all that stuff, but you want to be sincere and open-hearted. And what I don't like about Twitter, and I feel, again, it's one of the things I feel happening to me as I look at it, is the voice of Twitter, the kind of generic voice, is you are sarcastic, you're cold, you're One-upmanship. A one-upmanship, all of these things that are antithetical to just a good life, right? If you want to succeed on Twitter, if you want to win at Twitter, and I've seen this happen to so many people I know, um, how do you do it?

• 1:36:15Johann Hari?

  Be sassy, be nasty, be maximally judgmental. There's no tweets in going, oh, this person screwed up, but we all screw up sometimes. Let's forgive the person and move on. There's no tweets in that. All the tweets are in kill the person, destroy them, escalating outrage because of the algorithms and because of the way they work. Binary. Exactly. Just it's not a forum. It's a forum that promotes unkindness and aggressive certainty. When almost everything in life that's meaningful comes from kindness, doubt, listening to people. Also encourages people to respond to different. To me, the worst possible way to go through life is to

• 1:36:57Johann Hari?

  and again, this is a big lesson for me. I think about Chasing the Screams, a person is a good example. I could say worst way to go through life is to meet people who are different to you and say that they're terrible and condemn them. Right? To me, that almost all the pleasure in life is encountering people, encountering people who are different and listening to them and think, oh, this person's different to me. That's really interesting. I think about someone, one of the people I most admire in the world is a woman called Christina Dent, who read Chasing the Screams, which is why she got in touch with me. So Christina is an evangelical Christian in Mississippi who's a Republican, right? Pretty different to me. I'm a gay atheist who hates the Republicans, right?

• 1:37:36Johann Hari?

  And Christina, so Christina is very opposed to abortion and she put money where her mouth is. She believes that if you're going to say that women shouldn't have abortions, you've got to help them look after the children that are then produced. So she fosters a lot of children in Mississippi. And if you foster children in Mississippi, you know, most of the kids who get taken away from their parents, their parents have addiction problems. So Christina gets to know lots of women with addiction problems. The mothers of the kids she's fostering. And because Christina is a fundamentally kind and good person. She's just like, she starts thinking, well, why did no one help these mothers years ago? Why are they criminalised? Why are they put in prison and denied access to public housing and all of these things?

• 1:38:21Johann Hari?

  Someone should have helped them. So she starts learning a lot about drug policy. One of the ways was through reading my book, Chasing the Screen. And she set up a group called End It For Good, that is evangelical Christians in Mississippi who are campaigning to end the drug war, right? And I got to know Christina well. She's an amazing person. And I think if I had ever interacted with Christina on Twitter, if I got to know her through Twitter, we would hate each other, right? We would look like diametrically opposed people.

• 1:38:49Johann Hari?

  In fact, she's a friend of mine. I love her. She's a fundament, I mean, really a deeply admirable person, right?

• 1:38:57Johann Hari?

  Often, that kind of connection can't happen through anger-fuelled algorithms. It can only happen, in fact, anger-fuelled algorithms will destroy those connections, right? And so I used to remember, what was it that happened? Something happened with Theresa May, who I'm sure you can guess I was not politically sympathetic to. And I was about to tweet something nasty about her. And I knew it would do well on Twitter. I'm trying to remember what the specific, it wasn't when she resigned, it was before that. I was about to tweet it and I just thought, I don't want to be part of this fucking machine. Don't want to be part of this machine. Even someone who deserves to be criticised, as I believe, you know, powerful people, all powerful people, deserved to have criticism. And I think Theresa May deserved a lot of criticism because I disagree with a lot of things she did.

• 1:39:41Johann Hari?

  But I just thought, what is this adding to the world other than more spite and more anger and more cruelty? There are ways to oppose harmful things that are not cruel and angry. And I just see so many people that I've known for years, you know, senior media people, who I just feel have been poisoned by these ways of interaction. It's made them cruel. And I don't see any superiority. I was cruel when I was heavily using these sites. It's made them cruel and mean and petty and and and worst of all unpersuasive.

• 1:40:17Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:18Johann Hari?

  You know, when I see people, because I could think, I won't name the person, but I could think of someone who's one of the most followed political people on Twitter in Britain.

• 1:40:27Steven Bartlett?

  Boris Johnson.

• 1:40:28Johann Hari?

  No, no, no.

• 1:40:30Steven Bartlett?

  Kirsten.

• 1:40:30Johann Hari?

  I'm not going to go through it, but not a politician, but someone who's a publicly political person, who I knew, God, 15 years ago, who was a thoughtful, interesting person when I met them and is now just curdled with anger. And when I met this person, you could have sat them down with any ordinary British person and they would talk about politics and they would have thought about what he said, you know, they wouldn't always have agreed, but it would have been thoughtful. Now, he could talk to maybe 5% of the British population who would fire up to share the anger he has. And 95% would just be like, what is this? This is just so aggressive and hyperbolic and over the top. And I don't blame this individual. It's not his fault.

• 1:41:15Johann Hari?

  You've got to step away from these things. You, what I don't think you can do is be in the middle of it, be looking at it all the time and not be made cruder and meaner by it. I just don't think you can. I do think we can change the algorithms in ways that would mean that we wouldn't have to be like that. But we're a long way off that, right? So for me.

• 1:41:34Steven Bartlett?

  If someone's listening to this now and I had to ask you the very binary question, should they delete their Twitter, Instagram or not in the?

• 1:41:43Johann Hari?

  So we're always encouraged to think in these, and it is a perfectly good question, but we're always encouraged to think in these deeply individualistic ways, right? It's a bit like, think about global warming, biggest crisis in the world, terrible disaster, right? And we're always encouraged to think, oh, global warming's so bad. Should I personally recycle more? Should I personally buy this and not that? And the truth is, your individual consumer choices make no fucking difference to global warming. What you have no, virtually no power as a consumer. What you have is a huge amount of power as a citizen, right? We've got to, i- i- if we band together as citizens, enough of us, and demand that everyone has to do certain things that are necessary to stop, to, to deal with the climate crisis, then you have power and agency.

• 1:42:28Johann Hari?

  You personally tweaking your individual behaviour, I mean, don't do grossly harmful things. And I, I feel, we mentioned my own flying, that's obviously a harmful thing. I, I never fly just to go on holiday, but I do fly a lot to go, uh, to research my books. And that is a, a big burden, but it's much more meaningful to focus on collective activity. So if people want to think about the harm that Twitter does, the harm that Facebook does, I would say, go to the website of the Centre for Humane Technology, run by my friend Tristan Harris, which is about putting pressure on the, because the truth is, uh, my friend James Williams, who's a former Google engineer, brilliant guy, lives in Moscow. He always says, talking about, you know, should I individually delete these things? It's like thinking the solution to air pollution is should I put on a gas mask?

• 1:43:13Johann Hari?

  Well, all right, if the air pollution's really bad in Beijing, you might want to put on a gas mask. But a much better thing to do is to, you know, as citizens, demand we deal with the sources of air pollution, right? Which can be dealt with. In a similar way, deleting your Twitter may well be a good thing to do. I don't use, I don't ever look at Twitter, almost never. I use, go through Buffer app, but that's the equivalent of me putting on a gas mask. It gives me a very short-term, personal, uh, protection. But if I then go out into a society where people are being made angrier, more politically extreme, having their attention destroyed because they're all on this stuff, me putting on my own fucking gas mask, it's worth doing, I'm glad to protect myself, but it, that's not where we should start thinking about it, right?

• 1:43:56Steven Bartlett?

  But if I'm a selfish bastard and I want to be happier. Should I delete my Instagram and my Facebook and my Twitter? I don't give a fuck about everybody else. This is me being, you know, just pretending. I just want to make sure that my life is more peaceful, less chance of depression, less chance of anxiety. Should I delete Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?

• 1:44:16Johann Hari?

  I mean, I personally would say, you know, I mean, I have it because I'm a crudely because I want to reach people with my messages.

• 1:44:26Johann Hari?

  You know, and there's a mixture of that. Some of that is the kind of benevolent thing. I think these things are important and people need to know about them. Some of that is a more junk values. I want to sell my books, right? But

• 1:44:40Johann Hari?

  I don't feel I could tell an individual, they have to make their own assessment. What do they, what do they get out of it? Maybe they're, you know, promoting their charity or whatever. I don't know. There's all sorts of.

• 1:44:49Steven Bartlett?

  Following Kim Kardashian.

• 1:44:51Johann Hari?

  I mean, what I would say is know that it comes with a huge cost. Now, you can only you can weigh, is the benefit worth this huge cost? And there's some people who, for whom it will be, right? And there's many people for whom it won't be. But I would say the constant focus on individualism, even if you're purely selfish, to me, it's a bit like, okay, imagine we were having this conversation in 1937. And we're really worried about the rise of the Nazis.

• 1:45:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17Johann Hari?

  And people who are worried about the rise of the Nazis, let's imagine they were saying, well, I'm signing a pledge saying, I personally will not invade Poland. Right? That's very nice. I'm glad you're not going to invade Poland, but someone's going to go and have to stop the people who are going to invade Poland. And a similar way, fine, say, I'm not going to participate in these hateful anger filled algorithms. Good, good for you. Just like you shouldn't invade Poland. But someone's going to have to stop the people who are polluting the society and fucking us all up, which doesn't mean shutting down Facebook and Twitter. It means changing their business model, which absolutely can be done. I mean, as James Williams always says, the Google engineer I was talking about. The ax existed for more, I'm going to get this wrong. The ax existed for more than a hundred thousand years before anyone thought to put a handle on it.

• 1:46:03Johann Hari?

  The internet has existed for less than 10,000 days, but we can change these things if we want to. It comes back to so many things we're talking about. People need to know that they have power. You are so much more powerful than you think. As a citizen, incredible changes can happen when enough people persuade the people around them, right? And, and do it in a spirit of love and compassion.

• 1:46:26Steven Bartlett?

  I think that's the perfect way to end this conversation.

• 1:46:29Johann Hari?

  Hooray.

• 1:46:30Steven Bartlett?

  Optimism.

• 1:46:31Johann Hari?

  Exactly. Well, and it's not even like a kind of airy fairy, oh, let's be optimistic.

• 1:46:34Steven Bartlett?

  No, it's true.

• 1:46:35Johann Hari?

  It's very practical. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said, never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.

• 1:46:42Steven Bartlett?

  It reminds me of watching Martin Luther King's last speech, where he said to this huge black congregation on this stage, he said, he was telling, he said to them, you know, you guys get there, you guys get to the mountaintop. He goes, I don't get there with you, but you guys get there. And at that time, you never would have imagined that America could make the progress it's made, as you said, to the point where it's got a black president now. And when he said those words, it sounded like, you know, wishful thinking or whatever. But obviously, the world, to some degree, you know, last couple of years haven't been the best example of that, but we got there.

• 1:47:17Johann Hari?

  Well, progress is possible. There's obviously still a long way to go, as you know, much better than I do on racism and all sorts of other things. But huge amount of progress is possible. And we must never, we've got to never discount the progress that's been made, because that's very disempowering, actually. You know, I remember, even just things as simple as, of course, we've got a huge way to go on gender. But I think about my grandmothers, right? That's not some distant past. I know my grandmothers. I loved my grandmothers. I knew them well, obviously. When they were the age I am now, my grandmothers were not allowed to have bank accounts in their own names. My Swiss grandmother wasn't allowed to have a job outside the home without her husband's written permission. He could legally beat her. He could legally rape her. He didn't, but he could. In fact, it was legal for men to rape their wives everywhere in the world when my grandmothers were the age I am now.

• 1:48:05Johann Hari?

  There were no women leaders. There were no women leaders of companies. There were no women leaders of countries. There were almost no women elected representatives, right? This is not some distant past, right? And I know we've got a lot, and it's very aggravating for women to hear a man like me mansplain this. I get that. And especially because we've still got so much further to go. But you've got to always bear in mind the incredible progress that happened. And how did that happen, right? Women didn't blow anything up. They didn't, you know, tear the society down. They banded together and they fought for something better. I mean, my grandmother, my Swiss grandmother didn't even have the vote when she was 42 years old. Right. And my Scottish grandmother had a fucking hard life. Right.

• 1:48:48Johann Hari?

  Incredible transformations and changes are possible. We need to seize the power that we have because we were talking before, we live in a machine that's designed to get us to neglect what's important about life. We also live in a machine that's designed to make us think we are not powerful. A machine that's designed to make us think we can't change things. Or the only mechanism to change things is to change the way you shop. Right. And there's some value in changing the way you shop. But pick up the power you have. Right. As citizens, we have incredible power. We are all better off because of the power that previous generations have seized. You know, think about, you know, I'm gay, you're black. Think about what the lives just two generations back of gay and black people were in this country.

• 1:49:34Johann Hari?

  They were a lot grimmer than our lives. Right. And so incredible changes are possible. We just need to fight for them.

• 1:49:42Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you. I always say thank you to my guests at the end of the podcast for various reasons. But obviously, and I know this probably makes you feel uncomfortable because I just repeatedly blow smoke up your ass, but the, you know.

• 1:49:52Johann Hari?

  You can literally blow smoke up my arse if you want.

• 1:49:54Steven Bartlett?

  Not with the cameras. But the effort you go to, to put this work together is just like outstanding. Right. And there's so much, as we've discussed, there's so much like, there's such a lack of patience and the superficial nature to the society we live in. And people want instant gratification, but the delaying of the gratification and doing the hard work, I just, you know, it's just a tremendous service that you're doing to our society at a time that needs it the most. And especially the topics in which you're sticking your finger into and poking to understand our topics that are at the very heart of much of our sort of social problems and would also present much of the opportunity. If we find the right answer. So thank you. You've taught me a ton. I can't wait for your new book.

• 1:50:38Johann Hari?

  Right.

• 1:50:39Steven Bartlett?

  When people ask me at any point in my life, they ask me to recommend a book, I always say Lost Connections because it was that transformative. And yeah, and what's your Twitter handle?

• 1:50:48Johann Hari?

  What's my Snapchat? My publishers give me this fucking horrendous blurb.

• 1:50:52Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, please, knock it out.

• 1:50:53Johann Hari?

  But I meant to say, if anyone wants to know where to get the audiobook or the book, then go to, for the depression book, www.the lostconnections.com, because it turned out there was a fucking band called Lost Connections.

• 1:51:04Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 1:51:05Johann Hari?

  Really late in the day. A Canadian band, who knew? And the

• 1:51:09Steven Bartlett?

  They should have dropped a book.

• 1:51:11Johann Hari?

  Damn them. And the addiction book is chasing the scream as in ah.com. And they, on those websites, you can find out where to follow me everywhere except Snapchat, because I'm strongly opposed to it. So

• 1:51:25Steven Bartlett?

  And your new book's coming soon.

• 1:51:26Johann Hari?

  And soon, yeah.

• 1:51:27Steven Bartlett?

  I can't wait. Fuck me, that's gonna be amazing.

• 1:51:28Johann Hari?

  And people can also watch the film adaptation of Chasing the Scream, which I meant to plug, the Oscar nominated film adaptation, which is called The United States versus Billie Holiday and is

• 1:51:37Steven Bartlett?

  Where do we get it?

• 1:51:38Johann Hari?

  In Britain on Sky Cinema, in the US on Hulu. And you should interview Andra, who played Billie Holiday, who is beyond a goddess and a fucking incredible

• 1:51:48Steven Bartlett?

  We shall email her.

• 1:51:49Johann Hari?

  Law her. I'll give you an intro. She was nominated for the Oscar, did not get it. I am the true victim of COVID because I would have been in the Oscar ceremony as one of the producers and I was gutted that didn't happen. Anyway.

• 1:52:00Steven Bartlett?

  Look, plenty of time, plenty of time there for that to happen.

• 1:52:03Johann Hari?

  Exactly. No one suffered in COVID more than me.

• 1:52:07Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much, Anne.

• 1:52:08Johann Hari?

  Cheers, Stephen. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.