E26: Johann Hari - We Have Lost our Connections

Books will change your life, and there are so many that have changed mine. In this episode I chat with journalist and author Johann Hari, most well known for writing the New York Times bestselling book ‘Lost Connections; uncovering the real causes of de... 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.

• 0:08Steven Bartlett?

  Books can change your life. And there are so many books that changed mine. One of those books is called Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions. I've wondered for years why mental health issues are on the rise, why people are lonelier than ever before, why some people hate their jobs, why anxiety is so prevalent amongst young people, and most importantly, what the cure is for all of this. This book helped me to find those unexpected answers. It helped Elon Musk to find those answers. It helped Hillary Clinton to find those answers. And I think it will help you to find those answers too.

• 0:50Steven Bartlett?

  As the CEO of a company, as an entrepreneur, understanding our minds is the key to unlocking it. It's the key to knowing what's important for our minds. It's the key to success, happiness, and fulfillment. I've been obsessed for the last decade with understanding the human mind. I took up psychology classes at age 16, and although my attendance was 30% in school generally, that was the lesson that I never missed. People are the only thing that really exist in our world, and psychology is the key to understanding them. This is why on today's podcast, I travelled to London to the home of Johann Hari, the author of that book, Lost Connections. And I talked to him about everything I've been wondering. He has reached hundreds of millions of people.

• 1:35Steven Bartlett?

  His accolades are too far-reaching for this introduction. Our conversation was inspiring, eye-opening, and life-changing. So without further ado, this is the Diary of a CEO, and I'm Steven Bartlett. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

• 2:07Steven Bartlett?

  So I'm a massive fan of your book and your writing generally. I first discovered your book after listening to you on the Joe Rogan podcast and then I quite aggressively plugged the book to all of my team.

• 2:20Johann Hari?

  Oh, start paying your commission.

• 2:22Steven Bartlett?

  And our happiness teams. And I always get asked across, especially Instagram, especially when I show my bookcase to recommend a book. And your book is the one that I've been plugging a lot lately.

• 2:31Johann Hari?

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:32Steven Bartlett?

  And will continue to do. And for good reason. Lost Connections changed my perspective on mental health and, and why so much of my generation, so many of our employees and our teams globally are reporting to be suffering from some kind of mental health issue. What I wanted to talk to you about today is a number of things. Everything from the impact social media has, the, the role of mental health issues in the business community, but also there are some just fundamental questions that I've had about mental health and some misconceptions I think I've had since day one. But first, why did you write Lost Connections?

• 3:05Johann Hari?

  Yeah, it was a really personal reason for me. When I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor and, and saying that I had this feeling like pain was kind of leaking out of me and I couldn't control it or, or regulate it. I felt very ashamed of it. And I didn't understand what was going on. My doctor told me a story that I now realise was, was really oversimplified. My doctor said, we know why people get into this state. There's a chemical called serotonin in people's brains. Some people are just naturally lacking it or have a chemical imbalance. You're clearly one of them. That's why you feel like this. And all we need to do is give you these drugs and you're going to feel better. So I started taking a drug called Paxil or Seroxap. It depends where marketing are different names.

• 3:49Johann Hari?

  And I started taking it. I felt a whole lot better really quickly. A couple of months I felt great. And then this feeling of pain started to kind of bleed back through. So I remember going back to the doctor. Doctor said, clearly I didn't give you a high enough dose. He gave me a high dose. Again, I felt better again, faster this time feeling came back. And I was really in this cycle of. Taking more and more and getting shorter and shorter periods of relief. And then for 13 years I was taking the maximum dose you're allowed to take, at the end of which I was still really depressed. And I thought, well, something's not right here, right?

• 4:19Steven Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 4:20Johann Hari?

  So I wanted to understand what was going on because I was doing everything that I was told to do according to the story that I've been given by my doctor and that the story that's told by the wider culture at the moment, or at that time certainly. And I decided I wanted to just go, I ended up going on a big journey. It was over 40,000 miles. I wanted to sit with the, the leading experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety, and people who were trying treatments, different ways of responding to this problem. And, and I guess the core of it was this kind of mystery that I wanted to understand, which is, I'm 40 years old in a few months. Every single year that I've been alive, depression and anxiety, and people reporting depression and anxiety have increased across the Western world. And I was thinking, well, if it was just a problem in our brains,

• 5:02Johann Hari?

  why would it be going up so much? And so I wanted to sit with people and I learned lots of things, but the, the core of what I learned is that there's, that there's scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety. Some of them are indeed biological. They're not, it's not a chemical imbalance in your brain, but there are real things that happen in your brain and your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems. But most of them are factors in the way we're living. And once you understand those factors that are causing depression and anxiety to rise, it opens up a very different set of solutions, ones that I also saw being tried over the world, some of which have remarkable results.

• 5:34Steven Bartlett?

  So is it definitely true then that mental health issues are on the rise? And is broadly across the, the sort of Western world?

• 5:42Johann Hari?

  So there's a debate about this. What we definitely know is more people are reporting these problems, right? So significantly more people are saying they're depressed and anxious. So there's several things going on. It's a little bit complicated. Partly what's happening is there's been a big decline in stigma about people talking about mental health problems.

• 5:58Steven Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 5:58Johann Hari?

  That's a great thing. And that means more people are likely to talk about it. So I think, for example, my grandmother, right? My grandmother, when I look back and I talk to people who, my grandmother sadly died, but if I talk to people who knew her, there were periods in her life when she was very clearly depressed and would never have shown up on any depression statistics because she wouldn't have dreamed of going to the doctor. It was a thing that she would have been very ashamed of, much more so than today. So partly there would be, we'd expect there to be an increase in the figures just because there's been a decline in stigma and more people coming forward. That's part of what's going on. But I think there's other things that are going on that can show us that there is an actual increase, not just a reported increase. So let's look at, I'll talk about one of the examples, one of the nine causes of depression, anxiety, I write about lost connections.

• 6:40Johann Hari?

  So we are the loneliest society there's ever been. There's a study that asked Americans, how many close friends could you turn to in a crisis? And when they started doing this years ago, the most common answer was five. Today, the most common answer, not the average, but the most common answer is none. There are more people who have nobody to turn to than any other option, right? What is life like when you have no one to turn to? And I learned a lot about this from an amazing man called Professor John Cassioppo, who was the leading expert in the world about loneliness at the University of Chicago. And he showed, he was saying to me, why are we alive, right? Everyone listening to your show, why do we exist? One of the key reasons is because our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't faster than the animals they took down. They weren't bigger than the animals they took down in a lot of cases.

• 7:25Johann Hari?

  But they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating. That's our superpower as a species, right? Just like bees evolved to need a hive, humans evolved to need a tribe. And we are the first humans ever to try to live without a tribe. And Professor Cassioppo proved two things. One is that human beings separated from tribes, lonely humans, become depressed and anxious, or much more likely to become depressed and anxious. Not every single person, but it massively increases. Just like if you ever separate a bee from its hive, if you ever see a bee separated from, it goes crazy, right? Yeah. And he also, we also have a huge amount of evidence that has been a really big increase in loneliness. And I can go through the evidence you want, but there's extremely strong evidence that that's happened.

• 8:08Johann Hari?

  And so I think that tells us, given that we know loneliness causes depression, and given that we know loneliness has massively increased, it seems reasonable to me to assume therefore depression has increased. Now, there are other causes of depression, anxiety, the nine that I could find scientifically, some have remained the same. Some have, one of them has probably slightly fallen and we can talk about that later, but most of them have risen. And so I think that's, that's a big part of what's, what's going on. And that's why I think it's fair to conclude it is actually increasing.

• 8:35Steven Bartlett?

  And what is, you know, this podcast is centers around business entrepreneurship and I guess the pursuit of success, generally speaking. But what is it that's causing us to become lonelier as, you know, because entrepreneurs are, you know, known to be incredibly lonely as a, as a group, I guess, a professional group of society. But what's causing us broadly to become lonelier?

• 8:59Johann Hari?

  I think there's a lot of things, but I'll give you an example of one of the other courses that I think might, I think you'd have better insight onto this than me. But I think might play out more in people who are inclined to become, you know, business leaders, not all of them. So everyone listening to this knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right? I don't say it's in any sense of superiority. For most of my twenties, I basically lived on KFC. I had a low point one day when I went to the, my local KFC at the end of Brick Lane. And I remember going, it was, it was the afternoon of Christmas Eve, which makes it even sadder as a story. I remember going in and saying my order, which was so disgusting, I won't even repeat it. And the guy behind the counter said, oh, Johan, I'm really glad you're here. And I was like, and he said, wait a minute. And he went back behind the fryers and came back with every member of staff and a really big Christmas card,

• 9:43Johann Hari?

  which they'd all written to like, to our favorite customer. And part of one of the reasons why my clogged heart sank is because I suddenly thought this isn't even the fried chicken shop I go to the most, right? But, okay, so we know that junk food appeals to the part of us that wants nutrition, but actually doesn't give you nutrition, makes you sick, right? But what's interesting is something very similar has happened with our values. And a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. So there's a extraordinary man called Professor Tim Kasse, who I learned a lot about this. He's, he's in Illinois. He's done incredible work researching this for, for 30 years. And he showed lots of things, but I'll give you an example, one of the things he, he's shown in, I think in a really, really interesting way. So every human being has two kinds of motivation, right?

• 10:28Johann Hari?

  So let's imagine, what would be an example? Imagine you play the piano, right? I'm completely unmusical, but maybe you are.

• 10:33Steven Bartlett?

  No, I'm definitely not.

• 10:35Johann Hari?

  Imagine you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it gives you joy, right? That would be an intro, or you play it with your kids, or you know, you know, as part of the band or whatever. That would be an intrinsic reason to play the piano, right? You're not doing it to get something out of it. You're doing it because that experience is the thing you love. Okay, now imagine you play the piano, not because you love it, but to pay the rent in a, you work in a dive bar, right? Or, I don't know, to impress a woman, maybe there's some piano fetishist out there or something, right? Or maybe because your parents are massively pressuring you, they want you to be a piano maestro, right? That would be, that's not an intrinsic reason to play, you're not doing it for the thing itself. That's called an extrinsic or junk reason to play it. You're doing it to get something else out of the experience

• 11:17Johann Hari?

  because of how it will look to other people or for something else that you'll get further down the line, right? Obviously, all human beings are a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motives. But what Professor Cassa showed is a couple of things. Firstly, as a culture, we have become much more driven by these junk values. We've become much more obsessed with doing things and driven by doing things because of how we'll look to other people in a kind of a cheap way, because of money, because of status, right? Professor Cassa also showed the more you are driven by money and status and the kind of external appearance of how you look to other people, rather than joyful or important experiences with them, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious, right? And I think this is, this is, this is one of the most difficult factors to think about

• 12:01Johann Hari?

  because I could think about how much it played out in my own life. I know you obviously do a lot of work with social media. I think social media drives us so much to be driven by these junk values, right? I think all the time about, I've got three teenage nephews and a teenage niece. I think all, I've got two godchildren who are just on the cusp of starting social media. And about social media drives people to think in terms of these junk values, right? How many likes did I get? What, how, you know, how good do I look in this picture for Instagram, right? The more you are driven in those directions, the more unhappy you will become. And there's a kind of deeper reason for that, which connects a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I write that in, in my book, Lost Connections, which is, everyone listening to your show knows that they have natural physical needs. Obviously, you need food, you need...

• 12:44Johann Hari?

  Need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took them away from you, you'd be screwed really quickly, right? But there's equally strong evidence, all human beings have natural psychological needs, right? You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense and where you're going to be valued. And our culture is good at lots of things. I'm glad to be alive today. I like dentistry. I like gay rights. I all sorts of things. But we've been getting less and less good at dealing with these deep, underlying psychological needs that people have. And it's not the only thing that's going on, but I think it's a really key factor in why the crisis is going up.

• 13:22Steven Bartlett?

  And do you think those junk values are making us lonelier? Because, you know, if you, if you look at social media, there is very,

• 13:30Steven Bartlett?

  there's very few posts on my timeline that talk about doing things for those intrinsic reasons that you described. There's very few people that post, today I went for a walk in the park because I like taking a walk in the park. It'll be, today I went and bought myself a Rolex and because I think that'll improve the sort of in my extrinsic value amongst, you know, that kind of thing.

• 13:53Johann Hari?

  It's a really good example. If you think about how many people are following the script for happiness that we're given by this society, right? So what they do is they work really hard at a job they don't like to buy things that they then show off and display on social media. And they're puzzled that at some level they feel like shit, right? And so what do they do? They work harder. They buy more stuff. They show that off on social media. They still feel like shit. They buy, you know, there's that line that people say in A A N A M, you can never have enough of something that's not quite enough. You know, we're given a script for happiness that doesn't work, right? So there's a really interesting person named, if you called Dr. Brett Ford, who was at Berkeley at the time that interviewed, they did this really interesting research.

• 14:34Johann Hari?

  So what she wanted, what they wanted to figure out her and this part of this team, there were other people who worked on it as well, was a simple question. If you or anyone listening to your show decided you were going to really make an effort to spend more time being happier, would you become happier, right? If you said two hours a day, I'm going to work at being happier, would you become happier? And they did this research in four countries. They did it in the United States, Japan, Russia and Taiwan. And what was first, the results were really weird, which was in the United States, if you tried to make yourself happier, you didn't become happier. But in the other three countries, if you tried to make yourself happy, you did. And they were like, what's going on? How can this be? So they looked in more detail. It turned out in the United States, and I'm pretty sure it's

• 15:17Johann Hari?

  true of Britain as well, if you try to make yourself happier, generally you do something for yourself. You buy something, you amuse yourself, whatever it is, right? In the other countries, generally, of course, there were exceptions on both sides, but generally, if you wanted to make yourself happier in Taiwan, you did something for someone else. Right. You, you, you did something for your friends, your family, your community. So we have an individualistic idea of what happiness is, and they have an instinctively collective idea of what happiness is. Of course, this isn't conscious on the part of anyone. And our story about happiness, our individualistic story, just doesn't work, right? A species of individualists would have died out on the savanna of Africa, right? They wouldn't have been able to cooperate. We wouldn't be the, we, we wouldn't be alive to have

• 15:58Johann Hari?

  this conversation if those had been our instincts. So I think partly about that, and in relation specifically to junk values, I think what junk values do, as Professor Cassa put it to me, is they divert you from the things that are genuinely meaningful about life and get you to focus on things that won't make you happy. I'll give you, this is a bit of a cheap example, but I think it illustrates it well. In 2009, Melania Trump went to speak at NYU. This is before, obviously, Trump was running or anything. Can't imagine why she was there, but anyway. And one of the students asked her, would you have married Donald Trump if he wasn't rich? And she said, do you think he would have married me if I wasn't beautiful, right? Which in one way makes me respect Melania Trump. You think, oh, well, you know the terms of the bargain, right? But think about, now, that's a very

• 16:40Johann Hari?

  good expression of junk values, right? So think about what that means. That means they value each other entirely for external qualities, right? And that means Melania Trump, no, is going through life knowing if one day she got fat or she lost her looks for some other reason, she's out. And Donald Trump knows if he loses his status, his power, she's out of there, right? So you can see how, now, that's a very extreme example. Very few people are like that. But we've all become more like that, right? If you value things and people and life according to these external junk values, you're going to be more insecure because it doesn't meet your needs. Compare that to, for example, and you can describe many things they did, but Barack and Michelle Obama, who I'm sure would say, well, we'd love each other even if we became homeless and we, you know, were burned in a fire or whatever.

• 17:23Johann Hari?

  You can see how that model of a relationship and that way of being in the world would make you feel more secure, more contented. So and we've all become more like the Trumps, right? Trump is an expression of these. He's the extreme expression, don't get me wrong. Very few of us are actually like Donald Trump. But you see the point I'm making there?

• 17:41Steven Bartlett?

  Hundred percent. And you know, so I want you to give me some advice then, based on the journey that I've I've taken as an entrepreneur and what my what my values were and how they've changed, about what the decisions I should make in the future, based on what you've just said. So when I was 18 years old, I came from a family that didn't have anything, right? So my my parents are bankrupt. We didn't have nice things at all. We didn't have Christmas and birthdays. So at 18, I wrote in my diary, which I've shared publicly a number of times, that the things I wanted to achieve before I was 25 were these following four things. I wanted to be a millionaire before I was 25. I wanted to have a Range Rover to be my first car. I wanted to work on my body image and I wanted to to to get a girlfriend, whatever.

• 18:24Steven Bartlett?

  But so interestingly, at 20, before 25, there were multiple offers for people to buy my company. And those figure, those, those are in, you know, the tens of millions in terms of figures or whatever. So in those moments, 18 year old Steve showed up to almost collect upon the the things that he thought he wanted. But by 24, 25, and I literally went on AutoTrader and looked at cars. And then I went on Rightmove that night and looked at houses that I would buy. And just by looking at those things, I felt a tremendous sense of almost emptiness and and and fear at the thought that if I bought that Lamborghini Aventador or that house,

• 19:06Steven Bartlett?

  I would, I would actually be losing something. I would, I'd feel emptier because, you know, that the idea of hedonistic adaptation, where you just keep chasing pleasure, what, what next? And so I've, in many respects, almost been a little bit confused as to why I'm doing what I'm doing, because my values and what I thought my motivations were originally are now almost scare me. So.

• 19:31Johann Hari?

  That's so, I find that so moving, because what you did is you allowed yourself to feel the emptiness of that system, right? And what's striking to me, I mean, you will have met, you know, like you, I came from a, you know, working class background.

• 19:48Johann Hari?

  And we're both in the unusual position there where we get to meet like really rich people, right? And one thing that strikes me so powerfully is I have almost, I can think of two exceptions. Every single extremely rich person I've met has been such a miserable person, deeply, deeply unhappy. I don't mean, oh, a bit unhappy considering that they're really rich. I mean, like achingly unhappy, right? Um, I can think of, yeah, two exceptions.

• 20:15Steven Bartlett?

  I've just got goosebumps then because like, that's literally, um, part of the reason why I felt so empty when I looked at those things was because I real, I, I almost imagined in my head the person I had become and I knew that person and they aren't happy. In fact, they've told me they're not happy. The, the person that has the car that I wanted to buy is miserable and they've, they've literally said to me, quote, I will never be happy because I'm always chasing and I'm never satisfied because I'm always chasing the next thing and therefore I'll never be happy. And so for a sec, you know, when I looked at that car, it made me think, fuck, I don't want to be that person.

• 20:49Johann Hari?

  Yeah. And it's a really weird thing, isn't it? Because on the one hand, you know, I look at all this science and the science shows something very clearly. But the thing the science shows us is something that at some level we all know, right? It's almost a banal cliche to say, no one listening to this program is going to lie on their deathbed and think about all the things they bought, right? You are not going to sit on your deathbed and think, what a great life I had. I had two Range Rovers, right? Um, you will think about moments of love and connection and meaning in your life. And yet the way Professor Cassa put it to me is we've designed a machine. We all live in a machine that's designed to get us to neglect the things that are actually important in life.

• 21:27Johann Hari?

  And what I find really moving in what you said is early enough in life, you clocked, wait, this story I've been told, which we sing like a kind of karaoke song, right? Um, the lines have been laid out for us. What do you do? Uh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? And I think the journey from Janis Joplin singing that ironically to that actually being in a Mercedes Benz advert is so revealing. Um, you saw when I'm singing this song and I feel like shit, right? So we've got to think about firstly, how is that story constructed? And there's lots of research about advertising and I can talk to you about that if you want, but I mean, there's a really simple little experiment that I think really shows this beautifully. It was done in, uh, 1978. They get a bunch of five year olds and they split them into two groups.

• 22:11Johann Hari?

  And one half of the group is shown an advert for whatever the equivalent to Dora the Explorer was in nineteen seventy eight, I can't remember what it was now. And the other group of kids is shown no adverts at all. And then at the end of it, they say to all the kids, okay, kids, you've got a choice now. You can either play with a really nice boy who doesn't have the toy that was in the advert, or you can play with a nasty boy who's got the toy. The kids who've seen just that one advert mostly choose to play with the nasty boy who's got the toy. And the kids who haven't seen the advert mostly choose the nice boy who doesn't have the toy, right? So think about that. One advert primed those kids to choose an inanimate lump of plastic over the possibility of meaningful connection fun, right? Everyone listening to this has seen more than one advert a day, right?

• 22:55Johann Hari?

  So you start thinking of where that tells you Melania Trump's journey, right? To use a kind of, I don't mean to be snide about her because I think she's got a rough enough life as is, but you know, you know what I mean? So that's how one, and it's not, of course, advertising is not the only thing that's going on. Lots of things are going on, but that's, and we police this ourselves. It's a kind of value system created by an extreme kind of neoliberal capitalism that we, that we then becomes the kind of logic of the society, the logic of all of us, right? I think about it, I, when I was a kid, I really craved Nike trainers. You could not have had a children, a child who was further from playing basketball like Michael Jordan than me, right? And yet, why did I want that? It was solely because what, how do we get out of this? And there's lots of things about this. I think we should much more tightly regulate advertising, all sorts of things. But, and I went to places like Sao Paulo where they just banned outdoor advertising

• 23:40Johann Hari?

  to see if it would improve people's mental health, and it did. But to me, there's a more interesting part of this, or as interesting. And so it's a really interesting guy called Nathan Dungan, who with Professor Cassa did this really interesting experiment. So Nathan Dungan was a financial advisor in Minneapolis and he was contacted by a bunch of kind of middle class schools, so not like poor kids, not rich kids. And the schools were like, we've got a big problem. These kids are really freaking out if, if their parents don't buy them like brand sneakers or whatever. They're getting really genuinely distressed if they don't get these designer labels. Can you come in and talk to them about budgeting, right? So that's what Nathan Dungan would do, would advise adults on budgeting. So he comes in and he starts talking to the kids. About budgeting and very quickly clocks, this is going to get me nowhere, right?

• 24:26Johann Hari?

  This is not a budgeting issue. This is like a values issue. So they did this experiment that was set up a monitor by Professor Casa. It was really interesting. The kids came in with their parents and I think it was once a fortnight for I think four months. And I might be getting some of the figures there wrong, but they come in and they just meet. And it started by saying, I think the first session was, I want you just to write down the things you've got to have. Right. And of course, people would, some people would name like, we've got to have a house, but quite quickly they would talk about things they feel they've got to have. You know, that were not those things like designer sneakers would come up quite quickly for the teenagers. And Nathan would say to them, well, can you write down what you would have if you had those sneakers?

• 25:08Johann Hari?

  Right. And quite quickly, the kids would say, well, I would feel I was valued by the group. I would feel I had status. People would be impressed by me. And the minute you say it out loud, it doesn't take long for people to go, oh, why do I think I need sneakers to be respected by the group? Right. And they go, well, where does this come from? And they would look at advertising, they would critically look at advertising, but then the next stages I think were really interesting. It starts, okay, once they kind of deconstructed the junk values and well, this thing you think you want is actually just a meaningless lump of plastic. It doesn't signify anything. How could we actually get you the things you want? What do you actually think is important in your life? And as the weeks went on, they would build, they would basically figure out what they actually valued and try to figure out ways to do that more.

• 25:52Johann Hari?

  How to, both the adults and the teenagers. And they'd report back the next time, well, actually I did this, I did that. And what was fascinating was, this is quite a small intervention, right? It's, you know, once a fortnight for four months. It led to a really significant fall in junk values, right? Which we know leads to a decline in depression and anxiety. And I think I tell you something really interesting, because people are so hungry to have these conversations. Right. It's, this is not like explaining quantum physics to people. When I think about the nine causes of depression and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connections and then the solution. So Nathan's program and this kind of, it's almost like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for consumerism, right? And for junk values, that's one of the solutions that I write about. These are.

• 26:38Johann Hari?

  It doesn't take long to explain them to people for them to just intuitively get it, right? It says there's something wrong in what we've been doing and this is part of the solution. But as I say, we live in a machine that's designed to get us to divert from that. But that machine was created by humans and humans can dismantle it, right? We don't have to live in a machine that makes us feel like shit. You know, we can dismantle it.

• 26:58Steven Bartlett?

  So a question I get asked a lot is, obviously because I work in the industry of social media, should we cancel social media, turn it off in order to protect the future generations and to maintain our value system, I guess?

• 27:10Johann Hari?

  Yeah, so I was really interested in thinking about this. So I went to, I was trying to figure it out. So I went to the first ever, one of the places that really helped me think about this, I went to the first ever internet rehab centre in the world. It's in Spokane, just outside Spokane in Washington State. I had this, I remember arriving, it's a clearing in the woods, stepping out the car and absolutely instinctively glancing at my phone and being really pissed off I couldn't check social media. I was like, oh wait, you're in the right place, right? And I think the answer there is, one of the things I learned there from looking at a lot of the evidence on this is that the answer is a bit complicated. It's not like a yay social media or a boo social media answer. So they get all kinds of people at this internet rehab centre, but the woman who runs it, Dr.

• 27:52Johann Hari?

  Hilary Cash, explained to me, they disproportionately get young men who've become obsessed with multiplayer online role playing games like World of Warcraft and Fortnite, although Fortnite didn't exist then, I'm sure it isn't a big issue for them now. And she said to me, and I was speaking to a lot of the young men there, she said to me, you've got to ask yourself, what are these young men getting out of these games? Because they're getting something, right? They're getting the things that young men used to get from the culture but no longer get. They get a sense of a tribe, right? That they're part of a group. They get a sense that they're good at something and they're getting better at something. They get a sense they can physically roam around. The average British child now spends less

• 28:34Johann Hari?

  time outdoors than the average maximum security prisoner, because by law, a maximum security prisoner has to have 70 minutes a day. At least they get a sense they're fucking moving around, right? Because it's what we're doing in these games.

• 28:47Johann Hari?

  They're getting a sense that people see them and value them. But of course, what they're getting is really like a parody of those things, right? I think the relationship between social media and social life, a lot of the time, is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex, right? I'm not opposed to porn, but if your whole sex life consisted of looking at porn, you'd be going around pissed off and irritated the whole time, because we didn't evolve to wank over screens, we evolved to have sex, right? And no one feels deeply satisfied after an hour wanking over porn in the way they do after sex, if it goes right, at least, right? In a similar way, we didn't evolve to interact through screens, right? But you've got to think about

• 29:28Johann Hari?

  the moment when the internet arrives, which tells us to see it's more complicated than just, oh, the internet did this to us, right? Because if you look at the most people, the internet arrives in the late 90s, the early 2000s, I think I sent my first email in the year 2000. And a lot of the factors that caused depression and anxiety had already massively increased by then. There was already been a huge increase in loneliness, there'd already been a huge fall in people interacting with the natural world, all sorts of things. There's been a big increase in people feeling humiliated by inequality. And what happens is the internet comes along and it looks a lot like the things we've lost, right? Sure. You've lost friends, well, here's some Facebook friends. You've lost status, here's

• 30:12Johann Hari?

  some status updates. So in a sense, like all addictive behaviour, it's an attempt to fill a hole that's been left, right? So the simplicity thing to do is to say, well, just shun the social media, get rid of it. But the more complex, and I do think social media can make these things worse, I think it encourages people towards junk values, as we've talked about, and so on. For many people, it makes things worse, not everyone. But I think if you just, it's a bit like with something, I wrote another book about chasing the screen. If you think about addiction, let's say heroin addiction, with someone who's got heroin addiction, if you simply take away the heroin and don't do anything to make their lives better, they're still going to, they're going to be just suicidally depressed, right? Because they're anesthetising themselves with the drug, and then the thing they're anesthetising themselves

• 30:55Johann Hari?

  against reemerges. It's why good addiction responses to addiction aren't about just taking away the drug, they're about, although that may be necessary for some people, and is necessary for some people, it's much more about helping the person to rebuild their life and rebuild their connections and so on. But

• 31:14Johann Hari?

  In a similar way, if we want to understand why we're so addicted to social media, we've got to understand these deeper factors, right? The social media addiction is a symptom of the disconnection of the society. Now, it's a symptom that can make the problem worse and is making the problem worse for a lot of people. So a good rule of thumb was Professor John Cassioppo, that amazing expert on loneliness that I was talking about, who sadly just died, said a really useful thing to me. He said, after doing loads of research on this, he said, if social media is a waystation to meeting people offline, then it's a good thing.

• 31:48Steven Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 31:49Johann Hari?

  If it's the last stop on the line, something's gone wrong. And I think that's a good kind of rule of thumb.

• 31:54Steven Bartlett?

  I love that. So here's the thing. Because I've publicly criticised social media for all of the reasons you've just described there, people often call me a hypocrite because it's ultimately how we make our money, right? As a business like Social Chain, that's not looking to make the world a worse place because we existed. And I do like your answer there because it kind of offers us hope that we could play a big role in helping to fulfil or to plug the gap in other ways that social media, as you've said, is filling for people. Do you think Social Chain's approach then should be to invest in offline socialising and connectivity in our society?

• 32:39Steven Bartlett?

  Would that be the way we almost go like social media neutral as a company, if you know what I mean?

• 32:44Johann Hari?

  I like that comment. I never heard of it that way. That's interesting. Well, I would say a couple of things about that. So firstly, everyone alive is a hypocrite. If the only people who can argue for social change are perfectly pure people, then there will be no argument for social change ever, right? Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most admirable people ever, killed his wife. Nelson Mandela, one of the most admirable people ever, beat his wife. Everyone is morally flawed and everyone is a hypocrite in some respect. And generally, I think the charges of hypocrisy, well, of course, there are some, you know, I don't know, this is gross hypocrisy, I don't know.

• 33:17Johann Hari?

  Evangelical Christian preacher who's preaching that gay people are terrible while, you know, fucking a rebel or something. Okay. You can see even there, I think that's more that the person is actually at war with something in themselves than that they're just being a hypocrite in a kind of cheap way. But, you know, I think charges of hypocrisy are generally not very helpful and don't get us anywhere, right? The question is, do we agree this is a bad thing? How do we change together? Right? And do we agree there's a problem here? And how do we move forward? And there is a problem here. I think pretty much everyone can see that. So in terms of the changes we can advocate, I'll give you an example of a really interesting one that really moved me and might be worth

• 33:59Johann Hari?

  you thinking about in some ways. So one of the heroes of Lost Connections is this amazing doctor called Sam Everington. He's a doctor in the East End where I used to live for a long time. And Sam was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety. Unlike me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants. He thinks they have a real but limited role. But he could just see most of the people he was giving these drugs to remain depressed, right? It was taking the edge off for some of them for sure, but they were still depressed. So one day he decided to try this different approach. A woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham, who had been shut away in her home for almost seven years with just crippling depression and anxiety. Got to

• 34:44Johann Hari?

  know Lisa quite well. And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs, but I'm also going to give you something else. I'm going to prescribe something else. I'm going to prescribe for you to take part in a group. There was an area behind the doctor's surgery that was known as Dogshit Alley, which gives you a sense of what it was like. It was like scrubland, basically. And Sam said to Lisa, what I'd like you to do is come and turn out a couple of times a week. I'll come and support you. Sam himself had had quite a lot of anxiety. And he said, with a group of other depressed and anxious people, we're going to turn Dogshit Alley into something nice, right? First time the group met, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety. But they decided to do, they decided they were going to learn gardening. These were inner-city East London people.

• 35:27Johann Hari?

  They didn't know anything about gardening, right? They said we're going to learn gardening. They'd teach it to get teachers themselves together. And

• 35:37Johann Hari?

  What's interesting is they started to kind of get their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. There's a lot of evidence that disconnection from the natural world is a is a big cause of depression and actually interacting with the natural world is a really strong antidepressant. But something else happened that I think was as important, which is they started to form a group, they started to form a tribe, they started to care about each other, they started to do what human beings do when we solve a tribe, they started to solve each other's problems, right? They started to notice if someone wasn't there.

• 36:08Johann Hari?

  And I remember, so as the weeks and the months went on, I remember Lisa saying to me, you know, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom. There was a study in Norway of a very similar program that found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants. I think for kind of obvious reason, right, is dealing with some of the reasons why they felt so terrible in the first place. And this is something I saw all over the world. The best solutions to depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we're in this distress in the first place. And I kept seeing this in so many places, this

• 36:44Johann Hari?

  capacity for reconnection that is just beneath the surface. I'll tell you a story of, you know, obviously I learned a huge amount from my book from scientists and doctors, but I actually think of a place that taught me the most, a place where there are no scientists and no doctors.

• 36:59Johann Hari?

  So in the the summer of 2011, on a big housing project in in Berlin, a woman called Nuri Chengis climbed out of her wheelchair and put a sign in her window. She lives on the ground floor. She was a woman in her early 60s and the sign said something like, I've got a notice I'm going to be evicted next Thursday, so on Wednesday night I'm going to kill myself. And this is a big housing project in a very poor part of Berlin, it's called Coty, where basically, because it was such a kind of slum area, it only you only really had three groups who lived there. There were recent Muslim immigrants like this woman, Nuri, there were

• 37:39Johann Hari?

  Punk squatters and there were gay men. And as you can imagine, these three groups would look at each other with a lot of, you know, mutual incomprehension. No one really knew anyone on this, this housing project, like council estate anywhere in Britain. Most people didn't know each other. No one knew, hardly anyone knew Nuriya, but they saw this sign in her window and they started to knock on her door. And they said, do you need any help? And Nuriya said, fuck you, I don't want any help and shut the door in their faces. And the people who lived nearby just stood outside and they started just talking, people who'd never spoken before. And, and they were all pissed off because their rents were going up as well and lots of people were being evicted in Coty. And so they felt like this was coming for them too. And one of them had an idea, you might remember this was the summer of the revolution in Egypt. I've been watching this on the news and one of them had an idea. There's a big thoroughfare that goes into centre of Berlin that runs through Coty.

• 38:24Johann Hari?

  And one of them had this thought, he said, you know, on Saturday, if we just block the road for a day and we all go and protest and we will Nuriya out, probably the media will come, there'll be a bit of a fuss, they'll probably let us stay in a flat, maybe there'll actually be a bit of pressure to keep our rents down. So they decided to do it. They blocked the road on Saturday, they go to knock on Nuriya's door and she's like, well, I'm going to kill myself anyway. I might as well let them wheel myself and wheel them, wheel me into the middle of the street. They will Nuriya out, the media does come, quite a lot of the neighbours protest, quite a big thing, gets a bit of coverage in Berlin that day. Nuriya's interviewed, a bit bemused to be interviewed, but she's interviewed. And then it gets to the end of the day and the police say, okay, you've had your fun, take it down. And the people who lived there said, well, hang on, you haven't told Nuriya she gets

• 39:06Johann Hari?

  to stay and we want a rent freeze for all of us, for this whole housing project. So when we've got that, we'll take, we'll take this blocking down, blockade in the road down. But of course, they knew the minute they left, the police would just tear it down anyway, right? So one of them, one of my favourite people at Coty, a woman called Tanya Gartner, she's one of the punk squatters, she wears tiny miniskirts even in Berlin winters, she's hardcore. Tanya had an idea. In her flat, she had a klaxon, you know, those things that make loud noises at football matches. And she went and got it and she said, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to drop a timetable to man this barricade.

• 39:38Johann Hari?

  And we can man it 24 hours a day. And if the police come at any point to take it down, before we got the rent freeze, before Noor is told she can stay, let off the klaxon and we'll all come and we'll all stop them. So people start signing up, people who would never have met, right? Completely random mixes of people. So Tanya, in her tiny miniskirt, was paired, I think she did the Thursday night shift with Noor, who's a very religious Muslim in her headscarf, right? And first few night shifts they had were super awkward. They're sitting there like, we've got nothing in common. What are we going to talk about? They just look away from each other. Tanya kind of taps away on her laptop. But as the nights went on, they discovered they had something really important in common. Noor

• 40:20Johann Hari?

  had told Tanya she'd never, something she'd never told anyone. So Noor had come to Berlin when she was 17, from a village in Turkey with her two young children, their babies, and her job was to raise enough money to send back home for her husband so he could come. And after she'd been in Berlin for a year, she got word from home that her husband had died. And she told Tanya something she'd always been ashamed of. She'd always told people that her husband had died of a heart attack. Actually, he died of tuberculosis, which was seen as like a disease of poverty. And that's when Tanya told Noor something she didn't talk about very much. She had come to Coty when she was 15. She'd been thrown out by a middle-class family. She'd come, she'd lived in a punk squat, she'd actually got pregnant not long after she arrived. They both realised they had been children alone in this place with children of their own. They realised they had something incredibly powerful in common. There were these pairings happening all over Coty where

• 41:05Johann Hari?

  people were realising this. There was a young lad called Mehmet. I kept being told he had ADHD, they were going to throw him out of school. He got paired with this grumpy old white German guy who, who said that he hated direct action because he loved Stalin, but in this rare case, he would make an exception. And he started helping Mehmet with his homework. Mehmet started doing much better at school. Directly opposite this, this housing project in Coty, there's a gay club called Zudblock that opened, I think, four years before. It's run by a person I love called Rickard Strauss. And, you know, it's a pretty uncompromising gay club. It gives you a sense, the previous place Rickard owned was called Café Anal, right? And, and I always thought you want to have a sandwich from Café Anal. But anyway. And when they'd opened this club, you know, you can imagine there's a lot of very religious Muslims there.

• 41:49Johann Hari?

  So the windows have been smashed. Some people have been really pissed off. The gay club set started giving all their furniture to the protest so they could make it a more permanent barricade. And after a while, they started saying, you guys could have all your meetings in our, in our club if you want, you know, we'll give you free drinks, we'll give you food. And at first, even the lefties at Coty were like, look, we're not going to get these very religious Muslims to come have a meeting underneath posters for like fisting night, right? It's not going to happen. But it did start happening. I remember one of the Muslim women saying to me, we all realized we had to take these steps to get to know each other. After the protest had been going for about a year, one day, um, a guy appeared at Coty called Tunkai, who's, at that time, he was in his early 50s. And Tunkai's clearly got some kind of cognitive difficulties. You can tell when you meet him and he's, he'd been living homeless.

• 42:32Johann Hari?

  But he's got an amazing energy about him. Everyone immediately liked him. And um, he started helping them out. And by this time, they had built a permanent structure in the middle of the street. And, and they started saying, well, we don't want you to be homeless. You should live in this structure, right? So he started living there and he became like a much loved staple of the camp. And after he'd been there for about nine months, one day, um, the police came, they would come and inspect every now and then. And Tunkai doesn't like it when people argue. And he thought the police were arguing, so he, he went to hug one of the officers. And they thought he was attacking them, so they arrested him. That was when it, it was discovered that Tunkai had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital for 20 years, often literally in a padded cell. He'd escaped one day, he lived on the streets for a few months and he's found his way to Coty.

• 43:16Johann Hari?

  And so the police took him back to this psychiatric hospital right the other side of Berlin. At which point, the, the whole of the kind of Coty protest camp turned into a kind of free Tunkai movement, right? They descend on, I remember the psychiatrist just being completely baffled, right? That this person they've had shut away for 20 years, suddenly they've got these women in headscarves, these gay, very camp gay men and these punks demanding his release. I remember Uli, one of them, one of the protesters, Uli saying to the people there, but you don't love him. He doesn't belong with you. We love him. He belongs with us. Anyway, it took him a long time. They got Tunkai back. He's there now. He still lives there. And there were lots of things that happened at Coty. I guess the headline is they got a rent freeze for their entire housing project.

• 43:58Johann Hari?

  They then launched a referendum initiative to keep down rents across the city that got the largest number of signatures in the history of the city of Berlin. But I remember the last time I saw Nuria, talking to her and her saying to me, you know, I'm really glad I got to stay in my neighbourhood, that's great. I gained so much more than that. I was surrounded by these amazing people all along and I never knew. And I remember one of the other, one of the other women, a Turkish German woman called Nariman Mankar, her name is, saying to me, you know, when I grew up in Turkey, I grew up in a village and I called my whole village home. And I came to live in the Western world and I learned that what we're supposed to call home is our four walls, right?

• 44:39Johann Hari?

  And then this whole protest began and I started to think of this whole place and all these people as my home. And I remember thinking, as Nariman taught me that, like, in some sense, in this culture, we are homeless, right? Our sense of belonging isn't big enough to meet our natural human need for a home. There's a Bosnian writer called Alexander Hayman, who said, "Home is where people notice when you're not there." Right? They didn't have people who noticed when they weren't there and then they did, right? And I could see how intoxicating that was. And I kept thinking about these people. And I think they think I'm slightly mad because I would just go back every few months and just like cry because I was so moved by them. But I remember one time, one of the, Sandy saying to me, "I think, Johan, maybe you have allergies."

• 45:19Johann Hari?

  Because my eyes would water so much while I was there. But I remember thinking, it was so clear to me there how much those people did not need to be drugged, they needed to be together, right? I think about how serious the problems were. You know, Nuria was suicidal, Tunca was shut away in a padded cell. And Mehmet was nearly being thrown out of school the whole time. What solved these problems? I remember Tanya saying to me, one time I was sitting with her outside the gay club, Ziblock, and she said to me, "You know, when you feel like shit and you're all alone, you think there's something wrong with you. But what we did is we came out of our corner crying and we started to fight and we realised how strong we were." And the thing to me that's so important about Koti is, I love these people, I think they're the most incredible people. But in some way, they are not exceptional, right?

• 46:05Johann Hari?

  And so these were a random collection of ordinary people like you would find in any street, in any city. What they found was a way to come together. Now, of course, coming together will mean different things for different people and that model won't work everywhere. But like that gardening programme in East London, or like so many other things I write about in Lost Connections, people are so hungry for this coming back together. People can feel how divorced they are, you know. And I guess the key thing I wanted to explain to people after I'd learned so much about this. But the book is, if you're depressed... If you're anxious, you're not crazy, you're not a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs and you are surrounded by other human beings with unmet needs. And the way we get those needs met is by coming together and fighting for something better.

• 46:50Steven Bartlett?

  Amazing. That's really what I took away from your book. I think I had so many misconceptions that had been fed to me by, I guess, other misinformed people. And so, interestingly, I was, I was sat in the office in New York and I was just doing my work. And sometimes when I'm doing my work, I just, I put YouTube videos on and they just cycle through into the night. And your, your video actually came on talking about Lost Connections, your book, and the real reasons. And it, and it, it just seemed to answer so many of the, the questions I had relating to loneliness, relating to our loss, our lack of community, relating to social media and, you know, living behind screens. One of the other things that it really made me think about as an employee

• 47:33Steven Bartlett?

  is the way that our teams are treated at work. And I, I remember, and I'll never forget, the example you gave about the bicycle store and the employees of that bicycle store. You'll tell this very much better than I will. So I don't want to, I don't want to ruin the story. But in essence, when this particular bicycle, bicycle store sort of removed the, the management layer and became sort of self autonomous and, and that sort of gained freedom and operated with, in a more of a democracy than typical companies operate, I believe the financial performance was better. They were all happier and less depressed. What I really wanted to ask you though, is when, as it relates to work and the working environment that we create as entrepreneurs and

• 48:15Steven Bartlett?

  CEOs and managers, what are the things that we should do for our teams in order to ensure that they are happy, engaged and our businesses ultimately succeed?

• 48:28Johann Hari?

  So there's a difficult answer to that, if I'm honest, which is, I would say specifically to CEOs. So just to step back a set there. So one of the reasons I was interested in this is because I noticed that lots of people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work. So let's look at what's the evidence for how people feel about their work. It's a really good study this by Gallup, incredibly detailed study done in loads of countries. And it was just figuring out how do people feel about their work? And the figures are pretty striking. So thirteen percent of us, one, three percent, like our work most of the time. Sixty-three percent are what they call sleep working. You don't like it, you don't hate it, you tolerate it. And twenty-four percent of people fucking hate their jobs and fear them and dread them, right? It's quite striking. That means eighty-seven

• 49:10Johann Hari?

  percent of people don't like the thing they're doing most of their waking life, right? You're almost twice as likely to hate your job as like it. And I started to think, well, could this have some relationship to our mental health problems? So I started looking at, well, who's done research on this? And I learned about and went to meet an incredible Australian social scientist you should interview, actually, because he can give you a lot more detail on this. He is a really remarkable man called Professor Michael Marner, who made a real breakthrough on this in the nineteen seventies. I can tell you how, if you want, but to give you the headline. And he discovered the single biggest factor that makes people depressed at work. If you go to work tomorrow and you have low or no control over your work, you are significantly more likely

• 49:51Johann Hari?

  to become depressed and anxious. It's a very strong correlation between this. If you feel that you're just like a robot on a line, you're just taking or you're like a soldier in an army or taking orders from above, you don't have much choice, you can't use your creativity, you don't have freedom, you are much more likely to become depressed and anxious. And I started thinking, well, well, what's the antidepressant for that, right? And so, as you mentioned, I learned about this, this different model, which actually is much closer to how humans have lived for a long time. And it's actually the the model of the modern corporation. That's a really weird aberration in human history. And so I went into this person, spent a lot of time with this one called Meredith Keo, who Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night, just sick with anxiety.

• 50:35Johann Hari?

  She wasn't, she had an office job, and it wasn't, as she would tell you, it wasn't the worst office job in the world. She wasn't being bullied or harassed or anything. But she just couldn't bear the thought, she was quite young, she was in her twenties, she couldn't bear the thought that this was going to be the rest of her life, right? For forty years. And one day with her husband, Josh, she did this quite bold thing. And for a minute, people listening to this are going to think I'm saying you should do this. And they'll think I can't do this. And it's right, most people can't do this. This is leads to a different insight. So Josh had worked in bike stores since he was a kid, a teenager.

• 51:07Johann Hari?

  And you know, working in bike stores, especially in the US, it's insecure, it's low paid, you get no benefits, you don't even get holiday pay. Um, if you're lucky, the boss might hand it down to you. Um, and one day Josh, with his colleagues in the bike store, just asked themselves, what does our boss actually do? They were like, we seem to fix all the bikes. He seems to make all the money. They liked their boss. He wasn't like a monster or anything, but they were like, I kind of feel like we could do this. So they decided to set up a bike store of their own. It's called Baltimore Bicycle Works. Works on a different principle, right? So most people work in corporations, right? Which is very recent human invention, late 19th century. Um, it's the idea, it's like a corporation is like an army. The boss at the top is the dictator.

• 51:48Johann Hari?

  And sometimes he might be nice to you and give you choices, and sometimes he won't, but we have to do, follow his, and it is mostly his, not her whims, right? Um, they decided to set up their bike store on a different principle. It's a democratic cooperative. So they don't have a boss. Um, they take decisions about the company together by voting, like one couple, once every few weeks. And most of the time they agree, sometimes they don't and they vote. Uh, they share the profits, obviously. They share out the shitty tasks and the good tasks, so no one gets stuck with the shitty tasks. And one thing that was fascinating, and it's titling line by Professor Marmot's work, is how many of them talked about how they've been depressed and anxious before. And we're not depressed and anxious now. And it's important to say, it's not like they quit their jobs fixing bikes and went off to, you know, become Beyonce's backing singers, right?

• 52:33Johann Hari?

  They fixed bikes before, they fix bikes now. The difference is now they've got control over their work, right? So this, if you want your workers to be happy, give them back control over their work. That's one key factor, right? So in a sense, my advice to CEOs is, you shouldn't really exist. But actually, of course, there's a place for management and there's a place for, uh, elected leaders within a, within a, an organisation that are chosen by the workforce because they do something particularly brilliant. And there are such individuals and I applaud them, and they're an important part of the economy. But in a way, to me, asking what would you ask corporate CEOs to do, it's a bit like, and this is probably not a popular answer with your listenership, I apologise to them, but it's a bit like saying if we were in the Middle Ages.

• 53:16Johann Hari?

  You know, there's all these terrible problems. What would you, what would you beg the king to do? Well, I would say we shouldn't have a king. We should get rid of the king and we should have a democracy. Right. And then we can sort out the problems ourselves. So I, I, I wouldn't beg the king for anything. I mean, of course, look, you, you see the point I'm making, right? I'm not, I'm not comparing all CEOs to medieval tyrants, but you see the point I make, right?

• 53:36Steven Bartlett?

  I deeply under, I deeply agree as well. I think that, um, I think the modern CEO should really kind of get out the way and, and let people solve their own problems and arrive at their own decisions. We've, we've tried really, really hard to, to do that. I mean, even this week, as, um, as our teams will tell you, we launched a, a committee within the company where the members of the team decide what happens to the company. So they decide the working hours, they, they decide. And a lot of this is actually inspired by some of the things I read in your book. So I sent your book to our, our like, it's not really even a HR team. We call them the happiness team, right? So it's, we've got a head of happiness and she has a team below her. And so she's created what she calls like the happiness club where members of the team, there's 10 a week, decide what the company does.

• 54:19Steven Bartlett?

  And, you know, what the working hours are, what, what food is in the fridge and, you know, what, what our, our company trips are, et cetera, et cetera. We're really trying to democratize that, I think, because of what I read in your book.

• 54:30Johann Hari?

  Oh, that's really nice. And yeah, I think at some level, we all know this when we apply it to other things, right? About, if you ask most people, why is North Korea a horrific basket case where people are starving to death? And South Korea, one of the most successful economies in the world, when actually you go back to 1953, the division of Korea, they were in the same place, right? They were more or less the same. Well, South Korea is a democracy and North Korea is a dictatorship, right? And in a democracy, South Korea is not a perfect democracy by any means, but in a democracy, you have everyone's brain on the job, right? In a dictatorship, you've got one person's brain on the job. And you think about what happened in Baltimore bicycle works. Of course, people are much more motivated if they are able to use their creativity. You've got everyone's brain on it.

• 55:13Johann Hari?

  You've got the knowledge of everyone. Everyone's trying to think out how to solve the problems rather than one person thinking out how to solve the problems and everyone else trying to tap dance to his tune or her tune. Do you know what I mean?

• 55:25Steven Bartlett?

  A hundred percent.

• 55:26Johann Hari?

  So I think this is, of all the solutions to depression and anxiety that are right about in lost connections, the shift in work, I think, is both the most important and in some ways the hardest, but.

• 55:42Johann Hari?

  I'm aware that when I talk about, and of course, in the book, I talk about things that individuals can do as well. But when I talk about these big structural changes,

• 55:52Johann Hari?

  I'm aware that it can seem daunting, especially to people who are currently depressed and anxious, where you think, if you think about, for example, one of my closest relatives is a struggling single mum, you know, who works every hour she can, she gets home, collapses, can barely watch Coronation Street because she's so tired, right? And they're just saying to her, your job now is to democratize your workplace, to go to a once, do a gardening programme, do a junk, you know, I mean, it would just be an insult to her, right? So I'm aware that we've got, these are structural problems. But one of the reasons why I'm optimistic about the past capacities to change things, even in these dark times, I think especially because of these dark times, because the system is falling apart and we can see it can't hold, is I'm 39 and I'm gay,

• 56:36Johann Hari?

  right? And I have just seen the most incredible changes happen in my lifetime. One of my nephews is just turned 18. And last year, I showed him the things that were on the front pages of British newspapers when I was the age he is now. And he literally said, did people call the police, right? He just couldn't believe it, right? Because there's been such a huge change. Now, if the craziest UKIP local councillor tweeted the things that used to be on the front page of the Sun every day, I mean, he'd have to resign, right? I think a lot about, one of the people I write about in the book is a close friend of mine who I've just spent the summer with actually, this, this, this, this, he did this, was part of this extraordinary thing, right? So 1994, Andrew Sullivan, and some of your listeners will know, he's an amazing writer and journalist.

• 57:21Johann Hari?

  Andrew Sullivan was diagnosed HIV positive, right? Height of the AIDS crisis, people are dying all around us before we got any decent treatment. And he goes to a little place in Cape Coral Provincetown to die. And he decides the last thing he's ever going to do is to write a book about a crazy utopian idea no one's ever written a book about. And he's like, I'm never going to see this happen. No one alive is going to see this happen, but maybe someone somewhere down the line is going to pick up this idea. The book he wrote, the idea he wrote the first of a book about was gay marriage, right? And when I get depressed, I think, oh, fuck, we're up against these big things. I tried to imagine going back in time, I was just with Andrew in Provincetown, going to Andrew in Provincetown in 1994 and saying, hey, you're not going to believe me. 26 years from now, first point, you're going to be alive.

• 58:06Johann Hari?

  Good news, he wouldn't have believed that. Second point, you're going to be married to a man, that'll be legal. Thirdly, the Supreme Court of the United States, when it rules that it's mandatory for every part of the US to introduce gay marriage, will quote this book that you're writing now. And I'll be with you the next day when you get an invitation from the President of the United States to go to a White House that will be lit up in the colours of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you've achieved. Oh, and by the way, that president, he's going to be black, right? That would have sounded like the most ridiculous science fiction you could imagine. Andrew lived to see that happen, right? Now, he also lived to see Donald Trump be the president, so things can go both ways, right?

• 58:43Johann Hari?

  Don't, I'm not being mindlessly optimistic about this, but when, one of the great lessons, I think, of the incredible transformation and how gay people are seen and treated is if you organise, and this wasn't just gay people by any means, this was lots of heterosexual people who opened their hearts and loved gay people. If you appeal to the people around you in a spirit of love and compassion, and you work really hard and you don't give up, and there were a lot of bumps on the road to the gay marriage decision for sure. You can prevail and you can make incredible changes, right? Changes don't happen by themselves, you have to fight for them, you have to fight really hard, you have to have a long fight, you have to keep at it.

• 59:23Johann Hari?

  But, and you have to do it in a spirit of love and compassion, not a spirit of contempt and rage, and appealing to people's goodness, not their rage and hatred. But those changes can happen. And, and in a way, the fight about the things that are causing depression is in some ways easier. Look, gay people are like 5% of the population, right? We're a very small number of people relatively. Depression and anxiety, one in three middle-aged women in the United States is on antidepressants at any given time, right? The, the, and the factors that are, if you look at the nine factors that causing depression and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connections.

• 1:00:01Johann Hari?

  They're making some people depressed, but they're making most people less happy and more diminished than they could be, right? And obviously, there's lots of the factors that we didn't get to talk about today, but the, the.

• 1:00:13Johann Hari?

  So if we fight to deal with the things that are making some people really depressed and anxious, that will enrich the lives of almost everyone in this society, right? Whereas the fight for gay rights made the lives of gay people better. And, you know, will have made other people feel good that they were no longer being horrible. But, you know, actually, this is a fight that can mobilize far more people because it affects far more people's lives. Now, admittedly, it's a bigger ask, right? It's taking on more powerful forces as well. So I don't want to be naive about it. But I do think these factors that are causing depression and anxiety can be dealt with because, you know, as part of the journey for the book, I went to places that dealt with them, right? I've seen it happen. These are not, this is very little that's abstract in my book.

• 1:00:54Johann Hari?

  It's about people and it's about places that tried things. So I think people should be profoundly optimistic that we can fight and we can prevail and that we don't have to live in a society where more and more people are becoming depressed and anxious. And we don't, and we're experiencing all these symptoms of that distress, whether it's, I think, Brexit and Trump, which I think are disasters, as I'm sure you can guess. But I think they are partly symptoms of this and other things going on, obviously. But these are partly symptoms of that. There's all, I mean, think about what's happening in the US at the moment. You know, I've just spent a lot of time in the places that are most affected by the opiate crisis for stuff that I've been doing as a follow up to my book about addiction, which is called Chasing the Screen. But, you know, male life expectancy has fallen for the first time since the Civil War.

• 1:01:40Johann Hari?

  Overwhelmingly because people are killing themselves, are committing suicide with guns and committing suicide with opiates or anesthetizing them so much that they accidentally kill themselves because they're in such deep pain, right? The symptoms of this distress are all around us and we can just kind of carry on with the same bullshit script. The one that you very smartly saw when you were, you know, before your 25th birthday, you're like, wait a minute, this is not a path to a good and happy life, right? But we can, and the fact that the most powerful person in the world is Donald Trump tells us something really profound, right? And it's not that his voters are stupid or that they're bad people because I don't believe they are. That this man who is so obviously unwell, so

• 1:02:22Johann Hari?

  Obviously sick and deeply unhappy. I don't know, I've ever seen a more unhappy person than Donald Trump. It's a person who can't take satisfaction in anything, who lives in an actual golden tower, married to a really hot woman and is the most powerful person in the world and is achingly unhappy. The fact that the people at the top of the game feel like shit tells you something about the game, right? Anyway, I could go on about this.

• 1:02:45Steven Bartlett?

  No, but you do in your book, so that's kind of a great segue. And will we get a Lost Connections 2 at some point?

• 1:02:51Johann Hari?

  I guess some people write the same book over and over again, and I can't really do that. I get bored. But I'm writing on related themes, which I'm not meant to talk about at the moment. But I should say, can my publishers always tell me off if I don't say this, that the most, if you want any more information about my book, if you want to know where you can get the book or the audiobook, if you go to www.the lost connections and on the website as well, you can go, you can take a quiz to see how much you know about the causes of depression and anxiety. You can listen to audio of loads of the people we've been talking about, loads of the experts. There's amazing people in Berlin, loads of people. And I got asked, you can find out my social media following, but I got asked an interview recently, actually, you know, what's your Twitter, what's your Facebook, what's your Instagram?

• 1:03:34Johann Hari?

  And at the end, they were like, what's your Snapchat? And I was like, I'm a 39 year old man, right? Only 39 year old men on Snapchat are definitely paedophiles, right? That should be just how they detect paedophiles. If you go to men over the age of 35, what is your Snapchat? And if they got one, arrest them immediately. So you cannot follow me on Snapchat, but you can follow me on the other things where I don't look very often because it makes me sad.

• 1:03:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. So on the point of junk, like to conclude, I follow you, I follow you everywhere and.

• 1:04:02Johann Hari?

  Sounds slightly sinister, but.

• 1:04:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I know, you're right.

• 1:04:04Johann Hari?

  I follow you everywhere.

• 1:04:07Steven Bartlett?

  But I, but I read the book and then I told everyone else to read the book around me that I thought was important to my life. And then I downloaded the audiobook as well. And then I watched all of your YouTube videos. So I've, the story of the wonderful South African man that you described.

• 1:04:20Johann Hari?

  Oh, I love him.

• 1:04:21Steven Bartlett?

  I've, I've seen that one as well. And on the point of junk values, I follow you and you're somewhat, one of the people in my timeline that helps make me sort of junk values neutral because I think. Your tweets are very good for my soul and my mind. So I'd encourage everybody to go and follow you, at least on Twitter and definitely buy the book because everybody that I've recommended it to has seen some kind of shift in their perspective for the better, including me.

• 1:04:46Johann Hari?

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:04:47Steven Bartlett?

  You know, I don't shout books out much. I don't, I don't, I actually don't have a lot of time to read a lot of books. So I end up just blink. It's called Blinkist, right? It summarizes a book in 20 minutes, but yours was the first book this year that I've probably almost read twice.

• 1:04:59Johann Hari?

  Oh.

• 1:04:59Steven Bartlett?

  Just to, you know, because I'm on that journey of seeking answers that your book has. So I want to thank you for taking the time to write it.

• 1:05:07Johann Hari?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:05:07Steven Bartlett?

  And I mean that from the bottom of my heart because it definitely has, has and will make the world a better place. And there's not a lot of things that do that. And thank you so much for your time today as well.

• 1:05:16Johann Hari?

  Oh, thank you very much.

• 1:05:17Steven Bartlett?

  I know how busy you must be. So yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate you.

• 1:05:21Johann Hari?

  Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate you as well.

• 1:05:23Steven Bartlett?

  No worries. And as you said, the book is everywhere. So go and buy it.

• 1:05:27Johann Hari?

  Right. Oh, I think I meant to, what's this little spiel that my publisher's talking about? You can also find out, I always feel like I'm doing like one of those shitty 1950s, you know, when they had to read out the sponsors. You can also find out what a range of people thought about the book from Russell Brand to Hillary Clinton to Elton John at the website.

• 1:05:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, again. Addictive.

• 1:05:46Johann Hari?

  That's what I meant to say.

• 1:05:46Steven Bartlett?

  Amazing. Thanks, Johan.