Addiction & Depression: Johann Hari On Lost Connections

Why are we seeing unprecedented rates of depressions? What's behind our current opioid epidemic? And what can be done about it? Journalist and author Johann Hari suggests that everything we think we know about addiction and depression is wrong. Johann has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and many other outlets. He was named ‘Newspaper Journalist of the Year' by Amnesty International UK and his TED Talk, aptly titled “Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong”, was viral hit, with over 25 million views. Pertinent to today's discussion, Johann is the author of Chasing The Scream*, which chronicles his 3-year investigation and research into the war on drugs and the nature of addiction. And his more recent book, Lost Connections* is a compelling deep dive into the nature of depression, its underlying causes and unexpected solutions. As many of you know, addiction and mental health are subjects of great personal importance. Better understanding that nature of these conditions is the motivating force behind this conversation, which is is everything I hoped it would be. This is an incredibly powerful, educational — and at times controversial — exploration into what drives these malignancies, why they are so difficult to overcome, and how a new approach can plot a more hopeful and solution-based course forward. Many see Johann’s ideas as radical. And although I don't entirely agree with everything Johann prescribes, there is great wisdom in much of his findings. If you suffer from addiction or depression, this is a must listen. If you don't, chances are someone you care for does. This conversation can provide the insight and tools for better understanding the struggle — because mental health truly impacts everyone. For the visually inclined, you can watch our entire conversation on YouTube at bit.ly/johannhari416 and the podcast is now available on Spotify. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Johann Hari?

  Once you acknowledge that depression can be largely a response to life, that just challenges the whole system we've built. The system we've built is not designed to talk about context. It's not designed to talk about how do we sit with you and hold you and love you and help you change your life, right? We all live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important in life. Nobody thinks they're gonna lie on their deathbed and think about all the things they bought, right? They will lie on their deathbed and think about moments of love and connection and meaning in their lives. And yet, we've created a culture that is designed to get us to neglect those things. You have a natural human need to seek meaning in your life.

• 1:47Johann Hari?

  And if you're doing something that's controlled by someone else, almost all of your waking hours, that disrupts your ability to create meaning out of it.

• 1:55Rich Roll?

  That's Johann Hari, this week, on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:10Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to the show, to the podcast. Good to have you here. Today, I sit down with journalist Johann Hari. Johann has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and many other outlets. He is also the author of two quite profound books. Chasing the Scream, which chronicles his three-year investigation and research into the war on drugs and the nature of addiction, and his more recent book, Lost Connections, which is a compelling deep dive into the nature of depression and its underlying causes.

• 2:54Rich Roll?

  As many of you know, these two subjects, addiction and depression, mental health in general, are quite important to me personally, and they are the motivating force behind my desire to connect with and share Johann's experience and wisdom with all of you. And this conversation is everything that I hoped it would be. That's coming up in a couple few, but first, let's take care of a little business.

• 3:25Rich Roll?

  Okay, Johann Hari. Mental health, addiction, depression, anxiety. This is a super interesting exploration into the causes, the reasons, the cultural drivers behind these mental conditions, what contributes to their malignancy, what compels so many in this unhealthy direction, and why they are so difficult to overcome. On the subject of addiction, Johann proffers a fairly controversial perspective that everything you think you know about addiction is wrong. It's the subject of his viral TED Talk, which I think has about 25 million views at this

• 4:05Rich Roll?

  point. And although I don't agree with Johann on this point entirely, there's plenty of merit in his perspective on the curative impact of building deeper connections with nature and with each other, basically deeper. Connectivity, more intimacy. And with respect to depression and anxiety, the question really is, why are these things now at epidemic levels? And it's Johann's assertion that it's not entirely, but in large part attributable to the manner in which we live our modern lives, our misplaced values, which prioritize things like money, status, and materialism over, once again,

• 4:48Rich Roll?

  deep human connection, love, intimacy, and purpose. A lot of people see Johann's ideas as relatively radical. I see them, at least many of them, as basic common sense, fueled by an honest desire to really understand the root drivers behind mental and emotional well-being. So we can plot a more helpful and hopeful, solution-based course forward. Again, this is a fascinating conversation, one of particular interest, of course, if you happen to suffer from addiction or depression. But this is something that impacts all of us because chances are there's somebody in your life, somebody that you care for deeply, who does suffer or struggles. So with that being said, here's Johann.

• 5:34Rich Roll?

  Well, delighted to have you here. Thank you for coming up. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. As we just spoke a moment ago, everything that you're about, the work that you do, is definitely right in the sweet spot of the things that I love to talk about. I think the work you're doing is important, and I'm excited to dig into it with you today.

• 5:55Johann Hari?

  Hooray. Love to be with you, Rich. Thanks so much.

• 5:57Rich Roll?

  What are you doing here in LA?

• 5:59Johann Hari?

  Well, I'm here for one reason that I'm not allowed to talk about because it's not been announced yet. So I have to be slightly mysterious. But also, I was here to do, I was at Politicon, you know, the weird political convention that happens here. So I was debating addiction with Chris Christie, the disgusting former governor of New Jersey, and Dr. Drew. So that was, I wouldn't exactly call it fun, but it was intriguing.

• 6:25Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. I'm familiar with Dr. Drew's opinions on addiction, but where does Chris Christie fall?

• 6:31Johann Hari?

  Well, Christie pretends to be, you know, in favor of...

• 6:37Johann Hari?

  Destigmatization, but he got very angry when I asked him. So he keeps saying, you know, I'm against stigma against people with addiction problems. But he's not in favor of changing the laws. And I said, well, the laws criminalize drug use and drug addiction. Yeah, that's the genesis of the stigma. Exactly. Do you, it's at least a significant expression of the stigma. So I kind of said to him, do you see any contradiction there? How do you, how do you reconcile them? And he just did his kind of sub soprano shtick, which does go, buddy, I'm from New Jersey. You don't get to bully me. He just didn't want to have a serious discussion about it. And what about Dr. Drew?

• 7:11Johann Hari?

  Um.

• 7:13Johann Hari?

  Honestly, I just didn't think he understood quite basic things about addiction. He seemed like a fairly nice person, but he didn't really understand. Uh, you know, the debate about the opioid crisis, we were discussing the opioid crisis. The debate about the opioid crisis in the US is so removed from really basic facts about even what addiction is. I'm not critical of people for that. Before I started doing the research for my book, Chasing the Scream, which is about addiction and the drug war, I don't think, I didn't understand many of these basic things as well. Um, I don't think Dr. Drew really, I think both Chris Christie and Dr. Drew were making the mistake, I don't want to overascribe this to Dr. Drew, I think he's a bit more sophisticated than, he's certainly more sophisticated than Chris Christie, but

• 7:58Johann Hari?

  just making a basic mistake about what, why this crisis is happening, right? So if you'd asked me when I started doing the research for Chasing the Scream, whenever it was, eight years ago now, what causes addiction? Let's say heroin addiction, because that played out in people I love. And I would have looked at you like you're an idiot and I would have said, well, obviously heroin causes heroin addiction, right? We've been told this story for a hundred years about addiction that's become totally part of our common sense. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. I didn't understand why then, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family. And um, and so when we, I thought about saying like heroin addiction, obviously I thought,

• 8:38Johann Hari?

  you know, we're sitting here in, in, you know, in, in Los Angeles, we think if, if, if I grabbed the next twenty people to walk past your house and I injected them all with heroin every day for a month, like a villain in a Saw movie, at the end of that month, they'd all be heroin addicts. For a simple reason, there's chemical hooks in heroin that bodies would start to desperately physically need, uh, they'd have this desperate physical craving, they'd be hooked, this is where we get the phrase hooked from, and that's what addiction is, right? That's what I thought had happened in my family, that's what I thought I'd seen happen in front of me. And I, I only learned that, that while there's some truth in that story, it's actually a small part of the story, um, and that there's something much bigger and more important going on. When I went

• 9:21Johann Hari?

  to Vancouver and interviewed this amazing man called Professor Bruce Alexander. So Professor Alexander explained to me, um, this story we've got in our heads, addiction is caused primarily by the chemical hooks in the drug, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the twentieth century. They're really simple experiments, your listeners can try them at home if they feel a little bit sadistic. You take a rat, you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water and 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. So there you go, right? That's our story. But in the seventies, Professor Alexander came along and said, well, hang on a minute. You

• 10:02Johann Hari?

  put the rat alone in an empty cage, which got nothing that makes life meaningful for rats. What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically like paradise for rats, right? They've got loads of friends, they can have loads of sex, they've got loads of cheese and colored balls and wheels, anything that makes life meaningful to rats, it's there in Rat Park. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. But this is the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don't like the drugged water. They almost never use it. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. So you go from almost a hundred percent compulsive use and overdose, when they don't have the things that make life meaningful, to none when they do. There's loads of human examples, we can talk about this, but the, to me, the

• 10:45Johann Hari?

  core lesson of this is the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, important though that is to many people, the opposite of addiction is connection and having your psychological needs met. And and I think we need to understand the opioid crisis in that context, right? It's not a coincidence that the opioid crisis is at its most intense in the place where the non-opioid-based suicide rate is highest, where antidepressant prescriptions are highest. And that tells us something. Despair clusters together, right? There's a leading economist who's called opioid deaths despair deaths. Whereas it seemed to me Dr. Drew and Chris Christie were, Chris Christie exclusively and Dr. Drew way too much, were focusing on the drug itself, right? Now, the drug itself plays a role.

• 11:29Johann Hari?

  There are chemical hooks. They do, they can cause physical dependence. But and neglecting much more so, for example, you know, I think that the core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be. Once you understand that, you can see why the drug war imposing more pain and more punishment on people is such a disaster, right? Because it causes more pain, it makes, actually deepens the addiction. So I was very disturbed by that Chris Christie is a supporter of the drug war. He's in favor of punishment. I mean, he says, oh, we'll, we'll make the prisons nice treatment centers for some people rather than just brutal prisons. But that's still a criminal, you're still criminalizing people, stigmatizing them. And the drug treatment centers he wants to put in the prisons are not so impressive either.

• 12:14Johann Hari?

  And Dr. Drew was still saying things like, well, we need to impose negative consequences. You know, that that can be helpful for some people. That is not helpful. That is, there is nowhere in the world that has reduced addiction through imposing negative consequences. As your friend and mine, Dr. Gabor Maté said, if, it said to me once, if negative consequences stopped addiction, there wouldn't be a single addict anywhere in the world. Because what negative consequences have they not experienced?

• 12:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, listen, I agree with everything that you're saying. Certainly, I think, to be fair to Dr. Drew, he's not going to be on Chris Christie's punitive page. Like, he's, he's been very outspoken about rehabilitation over punitive measures.

• 12:49Johann Hari?

  But he was saying that there should be, he did say that with some of his, I was, this is what surprised me, because I thought the same thing.

• 12:53Rich Roll?

  Well, the negative consequences for your behavior, I think is, I think where, where, where, where he's kind of, the, the space where he's dancing around is, is something that I can relate to, which is, when you, I've heard that, you know, I know about that rat study. And I think it's super informative in terms of getting people to kind of rethink the paradigm. It's very powerful in that regard. But I also think it's, it's more complicated than that. It is indeed certainly true that.

• 13:23Rich Roll?

  The compulsion to use that the addict is coming from a place of of being uncomfortable in their own skin, in their own life, whether that's the result of childhood trauma, or some kind of psychological miswiring, which we can get into. It's a complex, you know, matrix of many factors that I think contribute to somebody becoming an addict versus somebody who's just a casual user, in the case of, you know, your heroin example. And, you know, genetics probably plays a small role in that, some role. But in terms of unpacking that, like, I know for myself, long time sober guy, when, you know, my loved ones fled,

• 14:04Rich Roll?

  that was not, you know, that was not lost on me. Like, that was definitely a motivating factor in me finally reckoning with the damage that I had created and ultimately starting to walk the path towards sobriety. So I think there is some wisdom in in in this idea of not being complicit and, as they say, codependent in an addict's behavior. And I thought one thing that was striking in your your amazing TED Talk, which I loved, was this idea of moving towards the addict as opposed to away from them. This idea that that we should sing love songs, not war songs, with respect to them, that we should bring the addict

• 14:49Rich Roll?

  closer and let them know that we love them. I think that's important. But I also think it's important to use discernment so that the addict understands, like, this is not acceptable, that there is some conditional aspect to the relationship, that if they do X, Y, and Z, that not necessarily that you're retracting your love, but that you can't make yourself available to be a punching bag for that person's errant ways.

• 15:11Johann Hari?

  Yeah, I mean, love doesn't mean, I think you're making important points, love doesn't mean giving someone everything they want in any situation, right? You don't love your children by giving your child candy all the time. And no loving relationship involves just 100% giving the person what they want. And that goes for people with addictions and people without addictions. That's obviously true. And I think one of the reasons why the debate about the war on drugs is so charged is because it runs through the hearts of all of us, right? Everyone, I feel this, even now, after all the research I did for Chasing the Scream, everyone who has someone they love who's got an addiction problem. You know, has a part of them that thinks, God, someone should just stop you. Why are you being so stupid? Why are you being so destructive?

• 15:56Johann Hari?

  And then there's another part that most people have that is compassionate and sees, oh, wait a minute. This is someone trying to deal with a very profound sense of pain. They're anesthetising themselves. Actually, we need to deal with the causes of their pain.

• 16:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because the drug is the solution, not the, it's not the, it's not the cause. It's not the problem itself. The problem is the person you're left with when you take the drugs away.

• 16:19Johann Hari?

  I think it's not just the person you're left with, it's the environment, the cage you're left with. I mean, there's a very challenging line in Marianne Faithfull's memoir, you know, the great British rock star. She says at one point, something like, so she had heroin addiction in the sixties when she was homeless. She said, heroin saved my life because if it wasn't for heroin, I would have killed myself at that point. That's a very challenging thing to hear for a lot of people. It was challenging for me when I read it. Now, obviously, Marianne Faithfull is not saying heroin is a good solution to despair. But I do think it's very important to understand why, but let's think about the opioid crisis, right? Why is this happening? Why, why are so many vectors of despair? I mean, so think of when you-

• 17:02Rich Roll?

  It's serving a need that is so profound that it outweighs the negative ramifications of the behaviour.

• 17:08Johann Hari?

  That's a really good way of putting it. Everyone listening to your, to your show knows that they have natural physical needs, right? Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast. But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. 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. Our culture's good at lots of things. I'm glad to be alive today. I love dentistry, I love gay marriage, all range of things. But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep, underlying psychological needs. And this is manifesting in- Just an enormous range of problems, right?

• 17:52Johann Hari?

  Think about, and this is about the subject of more recent, but lost connections. You know, one in three middle aged women in the United States at any given time is taking a chemical antidepressant. Even more are depressed and not taking drugs. And the suicide rate combined with opioid deaths is now so high that white male life expectancy has fallen for the first time in the entire peacetime history of the United States. You know, teenage girls, according to Professor Joe Twenge, who's done really good research on this, now have the same anxiety, and the average American teenage girl now has the same average anxiety level as a mental patient had in the 1950s, right? So we've got this whole vector of despair, th- these different forms of despair. I would argue the political situation we're in is a manifestation of profound despair

• 18:37Johann Hari?

  and anger. And we need to understand why this is happening. And at the moment, I think we're being offered stories that are too simplistic. So when it comes to the opioid crisis, we're being offered a story that's not false, the drug companies did do terrible things, and that they do bear some responsibility, I'm in favour of the criminal prosecution of Purdue and various other things for mis-selling their drugs. But that's not the core of why this is happening, right? That if we think, a better analogy to help us to understand it, if you think about something that happened in, in Britain in the 18th, obviously I'm British, uh, Britain in the 18th century. So at that time, huge numbers of people were driven out of the countryside into these disgusting urban slums in places like London and Manchester.

• 19:22Johann Hari?

  They lost everything that had made life meaningful to them. And they're suddenly totally disorientated in this place they don't understand. And there was a huge outbreak of alcoholism, it was known as the gin craze, and it really did happen, right? There's a famous painting from the time, it's called Gin Lane, of a mother downing a bottle of gin while her baby falls over some steps, right? And there really was, this crisis really did happen. And if you look at what people said at the time, what they said is, look at this evil drug gin, look at what it's done to us. If only we could get rid of this evil drug gin, we wouldn't have this problem. Now, when we look back, we know it can't be gin that caused it. Because anyone in Britain who's over the age of eighteen can go and buy gin. It's easier to get gin now than it was then.

• 20:04Johann Hari?

  And while we still have some alcoholism, of course, we don't have mass alcoholism in the streets. We don't have babies falling out of windows. What changed? What changed is not the availability of the drug. What changed is the amount of despair and pain in the society. If you want to understand why people are turning to painkillers in such enormous numbers, we have to understand why they're in such pain, right? I mean, people on the faculty at Harvard have much easier access to opiate-based painkillers than people in West Virginia who disproportionately don't have don't have medical insurance. And yet, West Virginia has a drastically higher level of opioid addiction than the faculty at Harvard. What's going on? It's not access to the drug, right? It's terrible, terrible, deep pain. We've created a culture which, for many people,

• 20:47Johann Hari?

  it's not bearable to be present in, right? So you think about one false narrative is the, or false is the wrong word. One limited narrative is the opioid crisis is simply the result of opioids, and if only we got rid of the opioids, we'd all be okay again. When in fact, what would happen is, think about Marianne Faithfull's quote, or what you're saying, there would just, it would be in some ways better, fewer people would overdose. But there would be profound despair, right? Or think about depression. So when I was a teenager, I went to my doctor and I explained that I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me and I couldn't control it, I couldn't regulate it. And my doctor told me a story that, again, I now realise was was really oversimplified. My doctor said, well, we know why people feel this way.

• 21:31Johann Hari?

  There's a chemical called serotonin in people's brains. Some people are just naturally lacking it. You're clearly one of them. All you need to do is take this drug, in this case, he gave me an antidepressant called Paxil, you're gonna feel, you're gonna be fine, right? So I started taking this antidepressant. I felt significantly better for a few months, real boost. And then this feeling of pain started to come back, so I went back to my doctor. Again, I felt better. Again, this feeling of pain came back. And I was really locked in this cycle of taking higher and higher doses, until for thirteen years I was taking the maximum dose, at the end of which I was still profoundly depressed. And I really felt haunted by these two mysteries. One is really related to what we're talking about.

• 22:16Johann Hari?

  You know, I'm nearly forty. Every year that I've been alive, depression and anxiety have increased in the United States and across the Western world. I wonder why, right? If it was just a problem inside our brains, which I think is simplistic in the way the Chemical Hook story is simplistic about drugs, if it was just a problem in our brains, why would it be rising so much? It can't just be that all our brains start to malfunction at the same time. There must be something deeper, deeper going on.

• 22:46Johann Hari?

  And so I ended up going on this big journey all over the world for Lost Connections, as you know, and I learned that there's kind of scientific evidence for nine causes of depression and anxiety, two of which are biological, but most of which are factors in the way we live now.

• 22:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting that the work that you've done in addiction and in that that first book really boils down to an assessment of how we're living culturally. This this lack of connectivity that we have that is fueling in large part this increase in in substance addiction across the board. And then how you've now extended that to look at mental disorders, specifically depression and anxiety. And it's it's really the same thing. And in order to really kind of understand this as we begin to, you know, look at these nine reasons, which we're going to get into, we have to look, we have to like step back and look at society.

• 23:41Rich Roll?

  You know, it's it's like to echo Henry David Thoreau. You know, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. And it's more true now than than ever. People are more disconnected from their fellow man. I know you have that statistic where, I don't know how long ago it was, that if you ask somebody, how many good friends do you have? That would come to your eight. It was somewhere in the in the range of five. And now for a lot of people, it's zero.

• 24:06Johann Hari?

  The most common answer now, when you ask people, how many close friends do you have you could turn to in a crisis? Is none, right? So there's been this enormous, and this is one of many pieces of evidence shows. There's been, we are the loneliest society there's ever been, right? There's been this. Enormous explosion in loneliness.

• 24:23Rich Roll?

  Ironic, given the connectivity that the devices we all carry around in our back pocket, you know, provide us with, but it's elusive, illusory compared to real connectivity with another human being. And I think laid on top of this is a system, a cultural priority, that this engine that is driving us to distance ourselves further and further away from each other, because the mandate is to succeed, to get as much as you can for yourself, to live this life of luxury, of convenience. And we have lost sight of what it is that truly makes us human in the most beautiful way, which is our relationship with each

• 25:06Rich Roll?

  other, with our families, the networks that we create, the connectivity, the cooperation that allowed this species that, you know, if you ask Yuval Noah Harari, should have never survived, yet we were able to do so simply because of this genetic predisposition that we have to be connected with each other. And that's what we've lost. And I think we're now seeing on a mass epidemic scale, the results of what happens when the human being is removed from that basic requirement that we have in order to feel contented, fulfilled, purposeful, engaged with life, and a sense that the lives that we're pursuing have meaning.

• 25:47Rich Roll?

  It is a crisis of consciousness. It's a spiritual crisis as much as anything else. And it really boils down to the way that we've structured the society in which we live.

• 25:58Johann Hari?

  I think there's a lot of things in what you just said that are totally right. So I learned a lot about this from a man called Professor John Cassioppo, who sadly just died, but he was the leading expert on loneliness in the world. He was at the University of Chicago. And he explained a few things to me that were really important, the touch on what you said. So he talked about, he said, I remember him saying to me, why are we alive? Why do we exist? One key reason is that our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They usually were not faster than the animals they tracked down, they usually weren't bigger than the animals they tracked down. What they were was much better at banding together into groups and cooperating.

• 26:36Johann Hari?

  So just like bees evolved to need a hive, humans evolved to need a tribe. In fact, humans who had wandered off on their own would have died out, right? A species inclined to do that would not have continued to exist. And actually, if you think about those circumstances, if you were separated from the tribe in the circumstances where we evolved, you would be depressed and anxious for a really good reason. You were probably about to die. Those are the instincts we have, right? If you separate a bee from its hive, it will go crazy. Look at it, it will lose its mind, right? It will panic, it will freak out, it will be profoundly distressed and eventually it will just give up. In a similar way, we are the first humans to ever try to disband our tribes, to try to live alone.

• 27:18Johann Hari?

  And this is a disaster for us, a real disaster. And one of the things I wanted to think about is, given that there's overwhelming evidence that is a cause of depression, what is the antidepressant for that, right? And I learned, one of the heroes in my book Lost Connections is this amazing man called Dr. Sam Everington, who's a doctor in East London, a poor part of East London where I lived for a long time. And Sam was really uncomfortable because like me, he thinks there's some role for chemical antidepressants. But he was just very conscious of two things. Firstly, most of the people he was giving chemical antidepressants to were becoming depressed again. It was giving a bit of relief.

• 27:58Johann Hari?

  And secondly, they were depressed for perfectly good reasons. So, you know, one of the nine causes that we're talking about here is lost connection, sorry, is loneliness. So one day he decided to pioneer a different approach. A woman came to see him, who I got to know quite well, called Lisa Cunningham. And Lisa had been shut away in her home with just crippling depression and anxiety for seven years. And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'm going to carry on giving you this drug. I'm also going to prescribe something else. 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's just kind of scrubland. And Sam said to Lisa, what I'd like you to do is come and turn out a couple of times a week. I'm going to come too because I've been quite anxious. And with a group of other depressed and anxious people,

• 28:40Johann Hari?

  we're going to turn Dogshit Alley into something nice, right? The first time the group met, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety.

• 28:49Johann Hari?

  They decided this group that they were gonna learn gardening, right? They were inner-city, East London people like me, they didn't know anything about gardening, right? They started to get their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. But even more important things started to happen. They began to, oh, by the way, I should say about that, that there's loads of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a really powerful antidepressant.

• 29:09Rich Roll?

  Connection with nature and connection with others.

• 29:11Johann Hari?

  Exactly. They started to form a tribe. They started to form a group. They started to care about each other. They started to solve each other's problems. They started to notice if one of them didn't show up and go and check on them. The way Lisa put it to me, 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 an obvious reason. It was dealing with some of the reasons why they were depressed and anxious in the first place. This is something I saw all over the world, from Sao Paulo to Sydney to San Francisco. The best strategies for dealing with this epidemic of despair, this depression, this anxiety, this addiction are the ones that deal with the reasons why we feel like this in the first place.

• 29:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting that I feel like we're seeing this trend of people like yourself that are coming out and looking at problems that we're experiencing as a culture, as human beings, that we have traditionally treated in a certain way, and that way being kind of part and parcel of the gestalt of the scientific method, producing less and less beneficial results. And then now, we're kind of looking in the rearview mirror and saying, hold on, I know we all think this is working, but it's actually not working so well.

• 30:36Rich Roll?

  Why don't we look back through history and see how we've dealt with these problems as a species in the past? And realizing that there's a lot of wisdom there that we've overlooked. We like to think that we've transcended, you know, these primal needs, that we can live in these hermetically sealed environments, that we can drive around in air conditioning and we can, you know, do what we do and be perfectly fine and pop a pill if we feel less than stellar and that's the end of the story. When in fact, in order to really fully redress this, we need to look at it holistically and understand that it's not one thing. It's not...

• 31:16Rich Roll?

  A constant or a variable that we can just tweak, but we need to really reassess how we're fundamentally living in, you know, in every aspect of that.

• 31:27Johann Hari?

  I think that's a really good way of putting it. You know, the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti said, "It's no sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society." And if you are uncomfortable and distressed in a world where Donald Trump is the most powerful person, that's not a sign that you're crazy, that's a sign that you're sane. And I think it's important for us to think about this. So there's extremely strong scientific evidence that there are three kinds of cause of depression and anxiety. And to some degree, they play out in, in fact, all forms of mental and emotional problems. So there's biological causes, like your genes, like real brain changes that happen when you become depressed, that can make it somewhat harder to get out. Those are real, right? There are people who

• 32:09Johann Hari?

  deny them, they are definitely wrong. The evidence is very clear on that. There are psychological causes, which are how you think about yourself. And then there are social causes, which are how we live together. And these are all real. But what we've done is we've largely, as a culture, told a story that focuses exclusively on the biology, right? Think about what my doctor told me, "There's just a problem in your brain." The problem with that, well, the first problem with that is it's not true, right? But the second problem with that is what it tells people is your distress doesn't mean anything. It's like a glitch in a computer program. And someone who really helped me to think a bit differently about this, I went to interview this South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield,

• 32:51Johann Hari?

  who's a wonderful man. And he happened to be in Cambodia in 2001, when they introduced chemical antidepressants for the first time for the people in that country. And the local doctors, the Cambodian doctors, had never heard of these drugs. So they were like, "What are they?" And he explained. And they said, "Oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants." And he said, "What do you mean?" He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy, like St. John's Wort or something. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who one day stood on a landmine and got his leg blown off. He worked in the rice fields. So they gave him an artificial limb and he went back to work in the rice fields after, I forget what it was, some months. But apparently it's very painful to work underwater with an artificial leg. I'm guessing it was traumatic for obvious reasons. The guy started to cry

• 33:36Johann Hari?

  all day, didn't want to get out of bed, developed classic depression. They said to Dr. Summerfield, "Well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant." And he said, "What?" They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realised that his pain made sense. They figured if they bought him 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. With a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone. They said to Dr. Summerfield, "So that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right?" Now, if you've been raised to think about this the way we have, that sounds like a joke. "I went to my doctor for an antidepressant. He gave me a cow." But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organisation, has been trying

• 34:19Johann Hari?

  to tell us for years. 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 what you need is practical love and support from the people around you to get those deeper needs met. It's a very different way of talking about these problems. It explains to people, their pain is a signal. It means something. It evolved for a reason. It's telling you your needs aren't being met. Or some other things, and obviously referenced to a biology.

• 34:47Rich Roll?

  Right, or there's some, you know, psychological event that occurred that you haven't really fully processed or worked through. There's some hitch in your operating system that requires redress in one form or another.

• 35:02Johann Hari?

  So I wouldn't say, I wouldn't call it a hitch in operating system. I would say it's a signal.

• 35:05Rich Roll?

  Well, if you're experiencing grief in the loss of a loved one, or something like, like, yes, there are natural reactions that, you know, we've kind of been told we should just get over that kind of stuff, rather than really just embrace them for what they are, because that is, that is what it is to be human, and that's certainly fine. And to stigmatise that, or to kind of pathologise that is certainly wrong. But they're messages, they're wake-up calls that...

• 35:29Johann Hari?

  Yeah, they're signals, exactly, yeah.

• 35:40Rich Roll?

  To go back to the cultural piece, you know, if someone's grieving the loss of a loved one and they're uncomfortable sitting with that grief, we have a system that's set up to help you and say, "You don't need to feel this way. Like, take this pill," right? Because we've gotten to a place where it's almost understood that we never need to feel bored or uncomfortable or ill at ease, right? That we can just medicate all of that. And implicit in that is this idea that we should all be happy all the time.

• 36:21Johann Hari?

  I think people are right to want to be happy and satisfied in their lives. The question is, it's a deeper thing I think you're getting at, which is... So let's think about grief, for example. There was this thing that happened in the 1970s that I think is really revealing. So in the 1970s, the APA, the American Psychiatric Association, who are the, obviously, the main body of psychiatrists in the US and psychologists, decided to do a kind of basic, kind of obvious thing. They decided they were going to standardize how depression was diagnosed across the US. So up to then, doctors were just basically deciding for themselves, oh, what depression meant. So the APA drew up a simple checklist of 10 symptoms, kind of obvious things, crying a lot, you know, you could guess them. There's

• 37:06Johann Hari?

  10 symptoms, there's 10, list of 10 symptoms, and they send it to doctors all over the United States, and they say, "If your patient shows more than five of these 10 symptoms for more than two weeks, diagnose them as mentally ill and do what you can." So they send this out. But within a quite a short period afterwards, psychiatrists start to come back and go, "We've got a bit of a problem here. If we use this checklist in the way you're telling us to..." We're going to have to diagnose every grieving person in the United States as depressed because these are also the symptoms of grief. And the APA got together and they said, well, that's not what we meant, clearly we didn't intend that. So they invented something that became known as the grief loophole, where they said, okay, if your patients come to you and they've got more than five of these 10 symptoms for more

• 37:49Johann Hari?

  than two weeks, diagnose them as mentally ill, unless someone they love has died in the last year, in which case it doesn't count.

• 37:55Rich Roll?

  That's the only exception.

• 37:56Johann Hari?

  They're not crazy. Well, exactly. They started doing this. But this began to beg the question, hang on a minute, why is someone you love dying? What we're saying, what we're meant to tell doctors, meant to tell people is, so if you feel this way, it's just a problem in your brain that just needs to be drugged into submission. Except there is one circumstance in life where it's an understandable response. Well, why is that the only circumstance? Why if my mother dies, I'm allowed to feel like that, but not if I lose my job? Why not if I become homeless? Why not if I'm stuck in a job I hate for the next 40 years, right? But what that does is, a wonderful woman called Dr. Joanne Cassiatore, who's the leading expert on traumatic grief in the United States, has

• 38:34Johann Hari?

  redone amazing work on this, asking, well, once you acknowledge that depression can be largely a response to life, that just challenges the whole system we've built. The system we've built is not designed to talk about context. It's not designed to talk about how do we sit with you and hold you and love you and help you change your life, right? As she puts it, we just don't understand pain in this culture. We've developed a bizarre way of talking about pain. It's so bizarre that I did an interview recently on a radio show, where I was talking about, we were talking before, in a similar way to the way we were talking before, about loneliness causing depression. And the interviewer said to me, well, this is an extremely controversial theory.

• 39:15Johann Hari?

  And I thought, how did we get to the point where it was regarded as controversial to point out the most banal and obvious thing, which is, if you're lonely, you're going to be much more likely to be acutely unhappy? So I think the grief exception debate reveals something really deep about how we have misunderstood pain. And so Joanne, Dr. Cassiatore, who'd be a great person for you to talk to and give an intro to her, she's an extraordinary woman, her baby died during birth, her daughter Cheyenne.

• 39:46Johann Hari?

  And she was devastated and she was horrified to be um to see how many other grieving parents were very rapidly being diagnosed as mentally ill and and and drugged, right? Because the APA was so uncomfortable with this debate about the grief loophole, they just got rid of it, doesn't exist anymore, right? So now you can be diagnosed almost immediately after your child dies. In fact, nine percent of um parents who lose a baby in the United States are diagnosed and drugged in the first forty eight hours, right? And as Dr. Cassiopeia puts it, we grieve because we've loved, right? Grief is a testament to our love. It's not a glitch, it's not a pathology, it's a profound form of love.

• 40:29Johann Hari?

  If someone you love dies, it is natural and necessary to grieve. If you interrupt that process, if you pathologize the pain, if you say, you know, it's a sign of good. So for example, one of Joanne's clients, she now treats people with trauma who've gone through terrible traumatic grief, you know, one of her parent, one of the parents she worked with um mentioned to a psychiatrist that she, when she would lie there at night, she would sometimes hear her son's voice talking to her, not in a distressing way, in fact soothed her, entirely natural form of grieving. She was diagnosed as psychotic and prescribed loads of antipsychotics. You can see what a, ironically, what a crazy system that is that's telling us we're crazy for having perfectly natural human responses.

• 41:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting that somebody would say that that these ideas are controversial. I mean, there there is a little controversy around your book, and I read a couple of those articles, trying to understand what exactly that controversy is. And it seems to me to be a misreading of what you actually say in the book. It's it's this perspective that you're saying, everything we know about um SSRIs and and and these these drugs that we're over prescribing to people um is wrong, uh we shouldn't be doing this at all, and here's the real reason, when in fact you're saying, listen, let's

• 41:55Rich Roll?

  look at these SSRIs, let's look at these drugs, let's look at the system and the history behind how we got to this point, so that we can fully understand um.

• 42:07Rich Roll?

  The context of the world that we're talking about, and nowhere in the book do you say these things should be gotten rid of. You say, "Look, if this is working for you, you should do it. I've been on and off them, and for certain people, they do work." And you're also not saying that any of these ideas are new or your own, or that they aren't already part of the literature and the protocols that a lot of, you know, well-intentioned psychologists and psychiatrists are putting into practice with their patients. It's just that it's not enough, right? It's, it's, you're zeroing in on the scenario in which, the overplayed

• 42:47Rich Roll?

  scenario in which the person goes to their shrink or doctor, and because of the healthcare system that we have, they have 15 minutes to diagnose this person and prescribe them something. And more often than not, people leave those appointments with, with a script that they go and they fill, and that's the end of the story. There isn't that aftercare. There isn't the functional medicine, you know, sort of rubric established that gives the well-intentioned medical practitioner the time and the bandwidth to really have the kind of conversations that are required in order to provide the person with the optimal care that they need.

• 43:25Johann Hari?

  So I think there's loads of things in what you said. I think you're right that, I mean, so the, the people who responded to the book in the way that you mentioned, I mean, they, to be fair to them, they admit they hadn't read it, so.

• 43:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there was a bunch of people who, they were like, they got little snippets of it or whatever, and were writing reviews.

• 43:41Johann Hari?

  Yeah, so it's not even a misreading, it's a non-reading. But the, but no, I think in terms of, but I do understand why some people, when they hear some of these things, find it deeply challenging, because I found it really challenging, right? For 13 years, I was very committed to the idea that my depression was just a problem with my brain chemistry, and I found that relieving in all sorts of ways I'm happy to talk about. But I think there's a few things in what you said that are worth bringing up. So, one is, you're absolutely right, I'm not against chemical antidepressants, I just think we need to have a nuanced conversation about them. So the two most important facts about chemical antidepressants that I learned from the leading scientists in the world who've studied this are...

• 44:23Johann Hari?

  One is, so depression is generally measured by something called the Hamilton scale. I've always felt really sorry for whoever Hamilton was that we only remember him by how miserable we are, but anyway.

• 44:31Rich Roll?

  This is the one to fifty one thing.

• 44:33Johann Hari?

  Yeah, so it goes from one where you would be dancing around in ecstasy or maybe on ecstasy to fifty one where you would be acutely suicidal. And to give you a sense of movement on the Hamilton scale, if you improve your sleep patterns, you'll generally gain six points on the Hamilton scale. And if you, your sleep patterns deteriorate, you'll generally go six points the other way.

• 44:52Rich Roll?

  I can definitely validate that.

• 44:54Johann Hari?

  Yeah, you've had children, so I could, yeah. But, so according to the leading expert at Harvard Medical School who's looked at the data, all the data, including the data the drug companies didn't publish, but he managed to get hold of. On average, over time, chemical antidepressants will move people one point eight points on the Hamilton scale. It's important to say a few things. Firstly, that's an average. So I initially got much more than that. Over time, I got less. It's important to say one point eight points isn't nothing, right? That's a real effect.

• 45:22Rich Roll?

  A good night of sleep gets you six points.

• 45:25Johann Hari?

  Yeah, I mean, some people will get more than that, but I think that that fits also with the, and by the way, some people say he slightly underestimates the effect in looking at the same data. They say it's three points on the Hamilton scale, but no one says it's more than three points. Or so more than half of improving your sleep patterns. But that fits with, I think, the even more important piece of research, which is that the only good long-term research we have on the effects of chemical antidepressants when it comes to depression, is something called the STAR-D trial. It's really simple. They follow, people go to their doctor, they say, I'm depressed. And they follow, the, the study follows them over two years to see, or eighteen months to two years, to see, well, do they stop being depressed? What it found is the vast majority of people taking chemical antidepressants do become depressed again.

• 46:09Johann Hari?

  Now, that doesn't mean they don't get some relief. They do get some relief, a lot of them. But what we can see is it's not solving the problem. And in a way, I think this is a rather banal insight.

• 46:17Rich Roll?

  It actually, in certain cases, can prevent you from solving the actual problem because you think that you've solved it, when actually you're just treating a symptom without actually getting at the rationale, the reason behind what's driving the depressive emotions.

• 46:31Johann Hari?

  I think that's, I think there's several things going on there. I think you're right to raise that. So one is, some people benefit and get a benefit which outweighs the side effects. It's true of some of my closest relatives. Some people get a benefit and enormous side effects. Like a lot of people, I gained a huge amount of weight. Seventy percent of men, it affects their sexual functioning, all sorts of problems. So some people gain a benefit, but the side effects outweigh the benefit. Some people don't get a benefit and get horrendous side effects. But I think you've gone to the, I think in a way, the more important thing, which is, if you are told a story that your depression is simply a biological problem and can only be treated with drugs, it comes back to what we were saying, that just tells people there's no meaning to their pain.

• 47:13Johann Hari?

  It actually cuts them off from finding the causes of their pain in their life, and it cuts us off as a society. But I would just say, just a second thought about what you said before, and it's worth saying, this is not my view, this is the view of the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organisation. But when you said, you know, so part of the problem is that your doctors only have fifteen minutes and so on, it's actually seven minutes now is the average. But the, that's true, and it's an even deeper thing. If we think about road accidents, right, car accidents, it's still the single biggest cause of death, although opioids are coming up close behind it in our society.

• 47:49Johann Hari?

  When you think about how do we prevent road accidents, right, or deaths in car crashes, one of the things we do is we have doctors in emergency rooms, and they do heroic jobs when someone's already been horrifically mauled. And the doctors are heroes and they're amazing, but they are not the people who save the most lives, right? What do we do? As a society, we have driving tests, so we make sure you can drive before you get onto the road. We have speed limits, we have seat belts, we have airbags, we send the cops out to chase down people driving chaotically to see if they're DUIs or drug driving.

• 48:22Rich Roll?

  Environmental controls.

• 48:23Johann Hari?

  Exactly. Precisely because it's a social problem, we have an enormous social response, of which one part, which is amazing and heroic, is the biomedical response of doctors patching you back together. But that's one thing on a big, long list, right? And in the same way, the evidence is overwhelming that depression and anxiety have huge social and psychological causes alongside the biological causes, right? Very few people will dispute that, although it's rarely explained to the public. And that needs a social response, right? So there are lots of things that the evidence shows very clearly can reduce this epidemic that are much earlier down the chain, if you like, than by the time the person becomes acutely depressed and goes to the doctor.

• 49:08Johann Hari?

  So I'll give you an example. I noticed that lots of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work. So I started to to think, oh, are the people I know unusual? I start to look at the evidence for this. So Gallup did the best research, enormous study, three year study, that figured out how do people feel about their jobs in the United States? What they found was thirteen percent of us like our jobs most of the time, one three percent. Sixty-three percent of people.

• 49:37Rich Roll?

  That's actually pretty high, that's higher than I would have thought.

• 49:40Johann Hari?

  You're pessimist, oh my god. Sixty-three percent of what they called sleepworking, you don't like it, you don't hate it, you just kind of get through the day, and twenty-four percent of people hate and fear their jobs. It was quite a shock when I saw that. That means eighty-seven percent of people don't like the thing they're doing most of their waking lives.

• 49:59Rich Roll?

  And jobs, you know, most jobs these days are not nine to five. They're, you know, from the minute you wake up in the morning and check your phone to the last, you know, check on the phone before you go to bed and constantly, we're, you know, we're all on call twenty-four seven. If you don't like what you do, I can't, it's academic that this is going to lead to psychological issues.

• 50:23Johann Hari?

  Well, I think that's right, and I started to look for the evidence. Is there any evidence about depression at work? I discovered this amazing man, Australian social scientist I went to go and see called Professor Michael Marmot, who who made a real breakthrough about this in the nineteen seventies. So he discovered the key factor, not the only one, but the key factor that causes depression at work. If you go to work tomorrow and you are controlled, so you have low or no control over your work, you are much more likely to become depressed and anxious. And at first, when I was looking at this evidence and I went to interview Professor Marmot a few times. I kept misunderstanding it. So I thought the lesson of this was, okay, you've got this elite thirteen percent at the top who get to have nice jobs where they control it and they're going to be fine.

• 51:06Johann Hari?

  And then you've got everyone else who's condemned to this shitty life. And I thought, wow, my brother's an Uber driver, my dad was a bus driver, my grandmother's job was to clean toilets. Are we saying that like, these people I love are condemned? And Professor Marmot kept explaining, it's not the work that makes you depressed, it's a lack of control over the work. And there's something we can do about that, which I think is the equivalent of your seatbags and your DUI arrests, right? So I, I went to Baltimore and went to interview a wonderful person called Meredith Keough. And Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night, just sick with anxiety. And she had an office job. She would tell you it wasn't the worst office job in the world. She wasn't being bullied or harassed or anything. But it was monotonous, low control. She couldn't bear the thought this was going to be the next forty years of her life.

• 51:51Johann Hari?

  So one day with her husband Josh, Meredith did this quite bold thing. And at first when people hear this, they think I'm going to think I'm saying, you should do this too. And you're going to think, I can't do that. And it's true, most people can't. It leads to a different insight. So Josh worked in a bike store i- in Baltimore. And, you know, and he'd done it since he was a teenager. And as you can imagine, that's insecure work, it's controlled, where you don't even have any vacation, paid vacation. Or paid sick pay unless your boss happens to be generous. And, and one day Josh and his colleagues were in their bike store. And they just asked themselves, what does our boss actually do? They liked their boss, he wasn't a terrible guy, but they were like, we seem to fix all the bikes and he seems to make all the money. And could, could this, could this work out differently here?

• 52:36Johann Hari?

  And they decided they were going to set up a bike store of their own that worked on a different principle. So the place they'd worked before was a corporation, right? Most people listening to your show work in corporations, you know how it works. You've got a boss at the top who's like the dictator. And we're all the little serfs and sometimes the dictator chooses to be nice and sometimes they don't, but you don't have much say over that. Josh and his friends and colleagues and Meredith decided they were going to set up a bike store that works on a different principle, an older American principle. It's a democratic cooperative. They don't have a boss. They take the decisions about the business together by voting. In practice, they agree almost all the time, but they vote once every couple of weeks. And they share the profits, obviously. They share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks, so no one gets stuck with the shitty tasks.

• 53:18Johann Hari?

  And, and one of the things that was fascinating, spending time with them at Baltimore Bicycle Works, which is their store. Is how many of them talked about having been depressed and anxious in this previous way of working, but were not depressed and anxious in this different way of working. And it totally fits with what Professor Marmot taught me. It's not like they quit their jobs fixing bikes and went off to become Beyonce's backing singers, right? They fixed bikes before, they fix bikes now. The difference is now they've got control over their work. And when you control your work, you can create meaning out of it, right? If you have an idea, you can try to persuade the people around you, you can try to put it into practice. You don't feel humiliated, you don't feel subordinated. There's no reason why we should be structuring our society so most of us are spending time

• 54:03Johann Hari?

  in institutions that make us feel like shit, right?

• 54:07Rich Roll?

  It's a sense of agency.

• 54:09Johann Hari?

  Exactly.

• 54:10Rich Roll?

  Right? It's, I mean, it's multifaceted because you have ownership, you have decision-making control, you have some, you know, sense of decision-making power over your hours, I would imagine. There's a whole variety of things that get played into that, but fundamentally, it's about agency over your life. And when people lack that, whether it's in their job or other areas of their life, that's gonna lead to a sense of disempowerment that I think will quickly, you know, cascade into despair.

• 54:37Johann Hari?

  You have, and that's a really good way to put it, you have a natural human need to seek meaning in your life. And if you're doing something that's controlled by someone else, almost all of your waking hours, that disrupts your ability to create meaning out of it, right?

• 54:53Rich Roll?

  I think the idea of meaning gets confused, like, if you say, "Well, does your life have meaning?" Or, "What is the, you know, are you living a meaningful life?" That can get misconstrued into, you know, this idea that you're on a grand quest to answer some universal question or something like that, but I think at its core...

• 55:13Johann Hari?

  Your Frodo.

• 55:14Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? Yeah, like, you're searching for the ring, or, you know, like, you're trying to find God, but it's really just, I think, some sense of control and purposefulness on a very basic level that so many of us, so many of us lack. And as, you know, cities become larger and all these, what you're seeing is the, the...

• 55:39Rich Roll?

  The acceleration of specialization in all of these fields where now jobs become so regimented into performing these very, you know, very specific tasks. You see it in medicine. It used to be the family doctor who paid house calls. Now every doctor has a very specific specialty that allows them to be very good at that one thing, but they, they lack a general understanding or not. Like we lose sight of the bigger picture. And I think when, you know, we're being funneled in that direction of greater and greater specificity, with that comes a loss of that level of agency as well.

• 56:16Johann Hari?

  This is one of the causes of depression and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connections that I found quite challenging, actually. So, everyone knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick. But there's equally strong evidence that our kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick.

• 56:37Rich Roll?

  No question about it.

• 56:38Johann Hari?

  Yeah, for thousands of years philosophers have said, you know, from Confucius to Socrates on down, if you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're gonna feel like shit, right? That's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that is the gist of what he said.

• 56:53Rich Roll?

  We all think we're gonna be the exemption to that rule, though.

• 56:56Johann Hari?

  Well, this is...

• 56:57Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 56:58Johann Hari?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Rich Roll?

  We're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it, but...

• 57:00Johann Hari?

  Well, this is what was fascinating, because although people have thought that for a long time, no one had actually scientifically investigated it until I got, until an incredible man I got to know called Professor Tim Kasse, who's at Knox College in Illinois, started to do amazing research into this. Professor Kasse discovered some really important things. One of the things he discovered is, the more you think life is about money and status and showing off, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious, because that's not a way of living that meets your deeper needs. He also found, as a society, as a culture, we've become much more driven by these junk values. They've really begun to dominate the culture over time. And it's making us feel terrible. There's a little experiment, this wasn't done by Professor

• 57:43Johann Hari?

  Casser, it was done just before he started his work, but I think it's kind of a revealing one. It's done in nineteen seventy eight. It's very simple. They got a bunch of five year olds and they split them into two groups. And the first group was shown an advertisement, two advertisements, for a specific toy, whatever the equivalent of Dora the Explorer or the Tally Tubbies was in nineteen seventy eight. Second group was shown no advertisements. Then they say to all the kids, okay, kids, you've got a choice now. You can either play with a nice boy who doesn't have the toy that was in the ad, or you can play with a nasty boy who's got the toy that was in the ad. The kids who have not seen the advert choose the nice boy. The kids who haven't, sorry, the kids who haven't seen the advert choose the nice boy. The kids who have seen the advertisement choose the nasty boy who's

• 58:27Johann Hari?

  got the toy. Just two advertisements primed those kids to choose an inanimate lump of plastic over the possibility of connection and fun and friendship, right? Everyone sees more than two adverts a day, right? We're just bombarded with it.

• 58:41Rich Roll?

  Oh my goodness. I mean, I don't know what the number is, but it's gotta be in the hundreds, if not thousands, every single day, depending upon where you live and your media habits.

• 58:50Johann Hari?

  Well, as Professor Casser put it to me, you know, we, we are, we, we all live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important in life, right? Nobody listening to your show thinks they're gonna lie on their deathbed and think about all the things they bought, right? They will lie on their deathbed and think about moments of love and connection and meaning in their lives. And yet, we've created a culture that is designed to get us to neglect those things. And Professor Casser proposes two kinds of solutions to this. So one is, we need to just get these contaminants out of the environment, right? Analogous to getting rid of environmental contaminants, you know? So I went to Sao Paulo in Brazil, where they just banned outdoor advertising, right?

• 59:33Johann Hari?

  And that's one thing we can do. We should much more tightly regulate advertising. Advertising is the ultimate frenemy, right? Imagine an advert that said to you, hey, Rich, you look great today. You smell great. You're doing fine. You don't need anything more. Save your money. That would be the worst advert ever, right? From the perspective of the advertising industry. Advertising, only advertising industry talks about this openly in their documents. It's about creating manufactured wants, manufactured needs, creating feelings of inadequacy that they then have to keep selling the solution to over and over again. There was a kind of example a few years ago that was a nice, illustrative, rare moment when people pushed back where a cosmetics company started to sell a product.

• 1:00:16Johann Hari?

  They said, are you embarrassed by how wrinkly and disgusting your armpits are? Compassionately, we've created this beautiful solution. Of course, no one was worried about how their armpits look because no sane person thinks about that, right? Of course, what it subtly saying is you're like the ultimate frenemy. Oh, babe, I really care about you. I'm on your side. Just so you know, people are kind of saying your armpits look gross. You can see how it works, right? That was a moment when people really kicked back. There was another good moment in London, I guess, two years ago now, where a company that did, I think there were protein shakes, launched a huge ad campaign all over the London subway system that said, are you beach body ready? And had a picture of an impossibly buffed man or woman, right?

• 1:00:58Johann Hari?

  The implication being if you don't look like these people, you're not ready and you'd better start drinking our protein shakes, right? And there was a huge backlash. You get people vandalized it and in the end they took them down from the subway system. I think the mayor, actually Mayor London Sidik Khan, actually banned them. Because of course we could see the, occasionally they go too far and we see the implicit message, right? But most of the time we're just soaking this up. So part of the solution is get the contaminants out of the environment. Just get rid of most advertising, extremely tightly regulate what remains. But Professor. How likely is that? A lot more likely than gay marriage seemed fifty years ago. You think, wow. You know, a lot more likely than a black president seemed fifty years ago. A lot more likely than President Trump seemed five years ago, right?

• 1:01:39Johann Hari?

  It could go either way, but the, um, we're all the beneficiaries of things that seem completely impossible, right? I mean, my grandmothers were not allowed to have a bank account once they got married, right? Of their own, and that's not so long ago, right? The weekend was a crazy radical idea when American trade unionists proposed it for the first time. Now we take it for granted, you know? So, um, we're all the beneficiaries of impossible seeming things that people fought for and didn't give up and demanded. Um, but Professor Cassa also said there's another, another set of solutions, which are actually more immediately achievable, which are about how we inculcate these, these more meaningful values in ourselves. So he did this interesting experiment with a guy called Nathan Dungan, who I interviewed.

• 1:02:25Johann Hari?

  So Nathan was a, it came back in a kind of slightly funny way. Nathan was a financial advisor in Minneapolis to adults, help them do budgeting, things like that. And one day he got contacted by this school in a middle-class neighborhood, not particularly fancy neighborhood, saying, look, we've got a problem. The kids in their school were demanding really expensive consumer objects like Nike sneakers, and they were getting extremely distressed when they didn't get them. And it was freaking out the school, it was freaking out the parents, they're like, what can we do? And they asked him to come in and do what he did, which was give budgeting advice. So he comes in to advise the kids on budgeting and quite quickly realizes this ain't a budgeting issue, right? There's something deeper going on here.

• 1:03:09Johann Hari?

  So he starts to work with the, he did this interesting experiment, there was then monitored, so set up with Professor Cassa that was monitored. So what they did is they would get teenagers and their parents to come, they would meet in groups. Uh, I think it was once a fortnight for six months, something like that. And at first, the first, the very first session, the teenagers and parents had to write down what they thought they had to have, right? And of course, people would initially say food and shelter and perfectly sensible things. And quite quickly, the teenagers would say, I gotta have, you know, whatever the latest designer object was. And, and then they would say, tell me what you would feel if you got those objects, if you got that thing. And quite quickly, the teenager, quite quickly, it was clearly not about.

• 1:03:55Johann Hari?

  An inherent property of the consumer object. So for example, when I was a teenager, I remember craving Nike sneakers. You could not have had a child who was further away from playing basketball like Michael Jordan than me, right? Uh, why did I want it? You know, why did these kids want it? They would say things like, well, I would feel accepted by the group.

• 1:04:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's social acceptance. It's where you fall in the social pecking order. And I think at that age, uh, the social dynamics are, are, feel like life and death. It's very acute at that age.

• 1:04:24Johann Hari?

  And it didn't take long for the kids to articulate what you're saying. For them to go, huh, why do I think that? Right? It, it, they didn't need much prompting as the sessions went on. To where did you get the idea that you will have value as an individual if you have this lump of shitty?

• 1:04:42Rich Roll?

  Like from the eight thousand commercials and billboards that I've seen in the last 24 hours.

• 1:04:47Johann Hari?

  Exactly. So they would firstly, what they did was work on seeing, well, where did those junk values come from? They would look at the ads. Everyone likes to think they're smarter than the ad. And everyone began to realize, oh shit, the ad got me, right? But then they did it, what I thought was the more interesting bit. They began to say, okay, well, set that stuff aside. What do you actually value? What do you think is actually important in life? And they started writing about that. They started discussing it in groups. We don't really have those conversations very often in our culture. Certainly much less than we have conversations about shopping. Um, and they started talking about what they actually thought was important, what actually gave them joy in their life. Some of them talked about playing music, some of them talked about just love. There were a whole range of things, I'm talking about being in the natural world.

• 1:05:29Johann Hari?

  And they start to about, well, how could you build more of that stuff into your life and less of the junk? And they started to do it. And this was monitored over time. And what it found was just this intervention and meeting once a fortnight led to a really significant shift in people's values. What this tells us, Professor Cassar argues, I think persuasively, is these insights are just below the surface, right? And this is not like explaining quantum physics or complex linguistics or something.

• 1:05:56Johann Hari?

  In some ways, these are almost banal insights. And yet, the reason they have to be stated and argued for is because we created a culture that's all about getting us to not see them. It's a machine that, in fact, faces real challenges if we stop buying crap, right? The problem is if we carry on buying the crap and thinking that's what life is about, we have the crisis, not that system. So I think it's about, and you can see again, and we touched on a few of the causes, obviously, that I talk about in Lost Connections, but you can see again, this is a very different story than telling someone there's just a chemical missing in your brain and all you need to do is drug yourself, right? It leads to a different set of attempted solutions.

• 1:06:39Johann Hari?

  And I believe very strongly in antidepressants, in the sense that people are really depressed. They're not making it up, they're not imagining it. They are terribly depressed and anxious. They need solutions to that, but what I argue is we need to expand our concept of what antidepressants are. For some people, one of the things on the menu should remain chemical antidepressants. They have value. But we need a much broader range of antidepressants on the cow model, right? That group that Nathan and Professor Cassa led, where they got people to talk about their values and it shifted their values over time, that's an antidepressant. That gardening programme in East London, that was an antidepressant. Obviously, the last third of the book is about these different kinds of antidepressants. They are just as real and just as important easily as the kind of chemical solutions,

• 1:07:23Johann Hari?

  because they're tending to some of the other causes.

• 1:07:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think we're seeing some interesting cultural movements at the moment that are kind of incarnations of what you're talking about. I mean, this whole minimalism thing that a lot of young people are super, you know, all about and keen on, that didn't really exist even, I don't know, five or 10 years ago. Now there's movies about it, there's movements, there's YouTube channels, there's people with podcasts about this, who are basically speaking to Gen Z and saying, listen, everything that you see all around you every single day is promising you a lie. The answers that you seek will not be found, you know, in these, in this material way.

• 1:08:09Rich Roll?

  And in truth, that which we seek the most will be found through connectivity, through getting back to nature, to these things that you're talking about. And it requires... Like a material shedding as much as it does kind of a psychological rebooting of your software to really understand that you need to look at the world through a different pair of glasses.

• 1:08:33Johann Hari?

  I think that's true, and I think it's interesting that this is playing out with teenagers so much because the figures for teenage distress are really shocking.

• 1:08:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, what are they? They're super high.

• 1:08:47Johann Hari?

  They're exceptionally high. There's a varying, part of the problem is it's difficult to measure distress over time because some of the figures that show astronomical increases, I think are slightly misleading because there's been a decline in stigma of talking about it. So that would mean that more people, for example, my grandmother, I'm sure from having discussed this with her while she was alive, was terribly depressed in her 30s and 40s. If anyone had ever asked her, are you depressed? She would have said no, and she would never have dreamed of going to the doctor. So there's been, whereas it would, you know, if, you know, a relative of mine the same age now, they would say yes, and they would get help, they would go to the doctor for help. So I think the kind of stratospheric figures for increase

• 1:09:28Johann Hari?

  are misleading, but I do think there's good evidence there has been a significant increase. We know teenage suicide, for example, has gone up, which is obviously a very relatively easy way of measuring extreme distress. But I want to think about, obviously, one of the factors we think about when we talk about teenagers is social media and so on. I want to think about this. One of the places that really helped me to understand it is I went to the first ever internet rehab center in the United States.

• 1:09:51Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. There's something like that exists. I'm glad it does. It should exist.

• 1:09:55Johann Hari?

  It's in Spokane, it's just outside Spokane in Washington. And I remember when I arrived there, I remember getting out of the car and absolutely instinctively looking at my phone and being really pissed off that there was no reception for me to check my email. And I was like,

• 1:10:10Rich Roll?

  Oh, right. You're in the right place.

• 1:10:11Johann Hari?

  Where are you? Exactly. What is this place? And I'm going in there.

• 1:10:15Rich Roll?

  No Wi-Fi.

• 1:10:16Johann Hari?

  It was hell. What can I say? But I remember going in there and talking to these, so they get also, it's a place called Restart Washington. They get all kinds of people at Restart Washington, but they disproportionately get young men who become obsessed with these multiplayer role play games like World of Warcraft or Fortnite. Although Fortnite didn't exist at the time that I was there, it's become an issue for them since, I'm sure.

• 1:10:38Johann Hari?

  And speaking of these young men, I was kind of, I felt like I was getting this kind of insight. And then I spoke to Dr. Hilary Cash, who runs, co-runs the place. It was a great person, and she really helped me to understand it. So she said to me something like, you've got to ask yourself, what are these young men getting out of these games? They're getting the things they used to get from the culture, but they no longer get. Um, so what do they get? They get a sense of tribe and identity. They get a sense of status and a way they can gain status, that they can feel they're good at something. And they get a sense they're physically roaming around. The average child in Britain now spends less time outdoors than the average maximum security prisoner.

• 1:11:21Johann Hari?

  Because by law, a maximum security prisoner has to have seventy minutes a day. And most of our kids don't get that. Um, but what they're getting is like a kind of parody of those things, right? I began to think, as I was speaking to her and the young men there, the relationship between social media and social life is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex, right? I'm not anti-porn. But if your entire sex life consists of looking at porn, you're going to be going around pissed off and irritated the whole time because you didn't evolve to masturbate over a screen, you evolved to have sex. In the same way, um, there's a place for screen-based interaction, of course, I'm not some weird luddite. But that's not what we evolved to have.

• 1:12:01Johann Hari?

  If you and I were having this conversation over Skype, I wouldn't feel you were hearing me and you wouldn't feel you were hearing the other way around, in the way that we feel we're hearing and seeing each other now, right? Um, and that led me to think about, well, you've got to think about, when did the internet arrive, right? Because you can get into a simplistic dialogue where you say, this is just the internet's for, the internet's this horror show. But if you think about it and you look at the evidence on this, the internet arrived for most of us in the late nineties, the early two thousands. I sent my first email in the year two thousand. And a lot, not all, but a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connections

• 1:12:44Johann Hari?

  had actually already been supercharged by that point. So we've talked about a couple of the loneliness, meaningless work, um.

• 1:12:53Johann Hari?

  But adjunct values. 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 a whole range of Facebook friends, you've lost status, do as many status updates as you want, right? But again, it's like a parody of the thing we've lost. And the expert on loneliness, Professor John Cassioppo, said to me, gave me a good kind of rule of thumb, which is, if you're turning to the internet as a waystation to meet people offline, great. If it's the last destination on the line, generally, something's gone wrong.

• 1:13:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's a tricky thing, because this is the lexicon. You know, this is how more and more people are communicating. And the solution isn't to completely put the phone away and never use it and become a Luddite. But these devices are specifically designed to create that addictive response. I mean, I think this is a perfect example of where the work that you've done in addiction and depression dovetail directly into each other. Because you have a highly addictive device in the hands of an undeveloped young mind

• 1:14:10Rich Roll?

  with apps on it that are specifically created to create that, you know, serotonin response that makes it almost impossible for that kid to put that phone away. So, short of completely putting it away, how do we, as a parent, like, this is something I think about all the time, like, how do we create structures around it to foster a healthy relationship with the best of what it can do, which is, you know, like, they communicate with their friends and they see their friends at school, so there is that offline component to it. But it very easily, if left unchecked, can devolve, and I think it does and has with

• 1:14:54Rich Roll?

  thousands, if not millions, of teenagers, into a compulsive behavior pattern that is truly an addiction, that, you know, leads these young people to a very, very dark place. And it's not necessarily just young people.

• 1:15:10Johann Hari?

  I think that's true, and I think we've also got to look at, a bit like going back to Rat Park. That addiction occurs in a context, right? And I think it's worth explaining to people, the way we are raising our children is deeply weird and has never been tried by any group of human beings before. We have no idea the long term implications of this. But I don't mean just with our phones. If you think about the nuclear family, right? Where the child remains indoors with two adults, or if they're lucky, or one adult if they're not. And that's not a model of childrearing that's ever been tried by human beings, right? Human beings have always been raised by villages, by groups, by tribes, right? It's a very recent thing that we would imprison our children in the home and get them, try to get them to get all their emotional, or most of their emotional needs from just

• 1:15:52Johann Hari?

  one or two adults, who by the way are working fifty hours a week, or whatever it is. And so we've got this, I think the cellphone addiction occurs rather like the heroin addiction in the rats occurred in the circumstances of isolation and imprisonment. The cellphone addiction is an unmet psychological needs. The cellphone addiction is happening in a context where the children's basic needs are not being met. There's a wonderful guy called Professor Peter Gray, who I was speaking to about this recently in Boston. So just, children have a need to run around. They have a need to play. And unsupervised play, there's a lot of evidence, unsupervised play is an absolutely essential

• 1:16:36Johann Hari?

  part of child development. There's been, I think the figure is something like a twenty percent decline at least in unsupervised play in the last ten years, right? Parents are afraid to let their kids go outside at all. Yeah, or when they do play, they've got to be constantly referencing back to, you know, the adult for, what do I do now? What do I do now? Or it's all super organized. Exactly. You go from structured event to a structured event. Exactly. That's, and that's good for children in some, of course, as part of a balanced diet, that's a healthy thing. But if that's most of what the kid is getting, they're not able to develop in a healthy way. And so you've got this context of a very weird form of toxic childhood and weird childrearing, often tragically motivated by love, right? Not motivated by a desire to hurt the child, quite the opposite, a desire to protect the child.

• 1:17:24Johann Hari?

  That has led to, uh, so in that context, the, if the one thing that gives you any sense of relief or pleasure is the phone, Fortnite, whatever it is, you're gonna, it's not to dispute, there are things about the game, these games are designed by some of the cleverest people in the world to keep you hooked, uh, the point you're making is absolutely right. But like all addiction, you need to look at the object of the addiction and then the context in which the addiction occurs. And I think both those things are really important. And the factors that are causing depression and anxiety in adults through unmet needs are even more heartbreaking when you see them playing out in children. And we're doing the same over-biologisation. I think one of the great scandals in this country is thirty

• 1:18:09Johann Hari?

  percent of children in the foster care system are being given at least one psychiatric drug. I mean, think about that. It is not that thirty percent of children in the foster care system happen to have defective brains, right? These are profoundly distressed children. And as a culture, what are we doing? Rather than dealing with their distress, loving them, caring for them, looking after them, we're drugging them into submission. That's thirty percent, by the way, at any given time. So it's actually gonna be more over, over the span of their time in foster care. That's an obscenity. One in ten American, thirteen year old American boys has been given a stimulant drug at any time. You don't tell me that one in ten American boys has some kind of defective, broken, diseased brain. This is bullshit, right? These are kids who, who need to, you know, need love, they need to have

• 1:18:54Johann Hari?

  their needs met, they need to run around, they need to play. There's all sorts of things going on here that are being boiled down in this extraordinarily simplistic way to, you know, a brain disease that needs to be drugged. Not to say that some of them don't have some problems in their brains, of course they do. But this is a, we've ended up with a grossly simplistic narrative about our distress from childhood, where they're drugged into submission, to when you're in an old people's home and half of them are given antipsychotics to shut them up, you know, right the way through their lives. This is not a sensible way. We need to think in a much deeper, more honest, more loving and complex way about our distress. We need to listen to the signals that it's giving us.

• 1:19:42Rich Roll?

  What are the statistics on the diagnosis of ADHD with kids?

• 1:19:49Johann Hari?

  I haven't written about this, I don't want to, I don't want to, oh, it's, I know, it's enormously.

• 1:19:53Rich Roll?

  It's super high, right. And I often wonder, like, are we over diagnosing these people? Certainly, we're over medicating them. And we've thought, we've created this syndrome or disease. And, look, I'm not a doctor, I'm not going to say it doesn't exist. But there is an argument that, you know, a hyperactive kid, or a slightly active kid, who has trouble sitting in a classroom and focusing, there's an argument to be made that that's perfectly normal.

• 1:20:24Johann Hari?

  Well, and in fact-

• 1:20:25Rich Roll?

  A child of that age, and to pathologize that, and say, "We need to medicate this kid because he can't pay attention," I think is really problematic.

• 1:20:33Johann Hari?

  Well, you get rid of recess and gym, and kids can't sit still, and you go, "Oh, what a mysterious thing, these children have developed brain diseases." How, what a funny coincidence, right? It's not to say there aren't some children who, for a complex range of reasons, genuinely have problems focusing and need help.

• 1:20:50Rich Roll?

  Certainly, there are, yeah.

• 1:20:51Johann Hari?

  But this connects to another thing, that it was the hardest cause of depression and anxiety for me to write about. And it has a manifestation in, very related to what you're, what you're saying. So, if I tell you the story of how it was discovered, for a minute, you're going to think, "Why is he telling me this? What's it got to do with anything?" But I think it's only possible to really understand it if you tell the story.

• 1:21:10Rich Roll?

  We got time.

• 1:21:11Johann Hari?

  So, not so far from here, in San Diego, in the mid 1980s, a doctor called Dr. Vincent Felitti was given a quite difficult task. He was approached by Kaiser Permanente, the big not-for-profit medical provider in San Diego and here in California. And they said to him, "Look, we've got a big problem. Every year, obesity is rising, and everything we're trying, like giving people diet advice, all that stuff, none of it's working. What can we do?" So they gave him quite a big budget and they said, look, just do blue skies research, figure out what the hell we can do. So Dr. Fellidi started to work with um two hundred and fifty extremely obese people, people who weighed more than four hundred pounds.

• 1:21:52Johann Hari?

  And one day he's interviewing one of them and he has this idea, which seems like an in some, I mean, it actually is a kind of dumb idea. Uh he he asked himself, what would happen if really obese people literally just stopped eating and we gave them like vitamin C shots so they didn't get scurvy and all of those things? Would they just burn through the fat stores in their body and get down to a normal weight? So obviously with a huge amount of medical supervision, they start doing this. And in one sense, it worked. So there's a woman who I'm going to call Susan to protect her medical confidentiality, who went down from being more than a uh more than four hundred pounds to a hundred and thirty eight pounds. Incredible, right? Her family are telling Dr. Fellidi, he saved her life. She's rejoicing, he's rejoicing. And then one day, something happened they

• 1:22:36Johann Hari?

  didn't expect. Susan cracked. She starts obsessively eating at KFC or wherever it was. And quite soon, she's back at a dangerous weight. And she comes in to see Dr. Fellidi calls her in and he says, Susan, what happened? And she looks down, she's really ashamed. She says, I don't know, I don't know. And after a while, he said, well, tell me about the day you cracked. What happened that day? It turns out something had happened that day that had never happened to Susan. She'd been in a bar and a man had hit on her, not in like a predatory or awful way, but um expressed sexual interest in her. She felt really frightened. She went and started eating. Dr. Fellidi thought this was interesting.

• 1:23:16Johann Hari?

  He said to her, when did you start to put on weight? In her case, it was when she was eleven. He said, did anything happen when you were eleven that didn't happen when you were five or nine or fourteen, anything that year? And she looked down and she said, yeah, that's when my grandfather started to rape me.

• 1:23:34Johann Hari?

  He started to interview everyone in the program. He discovered that fifty-five percent of them had put on their extreme weight in the aftermath of being sexually abused. He was really puzzled by this, like, what's going on here? Susan explained it to him. She said, overweight is overlooked, and that's what I want to be. He realized this thing that seems pathological, and of course is bad for you, obesity, was performing a function, right? It had a rational function. It was protecting them from sexual.

• 1:23:58Rich Roll?

  It was her defense mechanism for dealing with unhealed childhood trauma. You know, it makes perfect sense. It's very much in the vein of what Gabor Maté talks about. Unhealed childhood trauma fueling addiction or unhealthy behavior patterns. It's so interesting that all it took was this person asking the right questions to get to the bottom of what was fueling this entire problem for this woman.

• 1:24:24Johann Hari?

  It's interesting because this was a relatively small study. So Dr. Felidi, it's hard to draw conclusions from a group of two hundred and fifty people. So Dr. Felidi went to the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, the main body that funds medical research in the United States. And he got a huge amount of funding to do this, to do a massive study. So everyone who came to San Diego, everyone in San Diego who came for medical care for an entire year was given, it didn't matter what for, headaches, broken legs, schizophrenia, anything, was given a questionnaire. It had two parts. First part said, did any of these bad things happen to you when you were a kid?

• 1:25:06Johann Hari?

  Things like sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect. The second part asked, have you had any of these problems as an adult? Things like obesity, addiction, suicide attempts, depression. And at first, when they calculated it out, the CDC thought they'd made a mistake because the figures were so extreme. For every category of childhood trauma you experienced, you were two to four times more likely to become depressed and anxious. But it was when you got into the multiple categories, the figures just exploded. If you'd had six categories of childhood trauma, you were three thousand one hundred percent more likely to have attempted suicide and four thousand six hundred percent to have an addiction problem. I mean, you just don't get figures like that very often.

• 1:25:51Johann Hari?

  And it's funny, I remember the first day, first time I interviewed Dr. Felidi, I went to see him in, down in San Diego.

• 1:26:01Johann Hari?

  And he's a wonderful, wonderful man. And if you met him, you would really admire him. And I remember leaving and like shaking with anger, being so angry, I actually thought I might hit him, which is really, I was like, why am I reacting this way? This is so weird. And I had experienced as a child, some very extreme acts from an adult in my life.

• 1:26:24Johann Hari?

  And I remember thinking that day, you know, I'd never thought about that in relation to my depression, which seems ludicrous now, looking back at it.

• 1:26:31Rich Roll?

  Was it a repressed memory or just something?

• 1:26:33Johann Hari?

  No, no, no, it's something I'd always remembered. I just never.

• 1:26:35Rich Roll?

  Dismissive of or?

• 1:26:36Johann Hari?

  Yeah, it was, I mean, so I was dismissive of it. It's just, it was in one silo in my head, you know, under stuff that happened then. And I didn't really think of it as related to the silo that was about depression and anxiety and why I might feel that way. I think it's one of the reasons actually why I clung to this very simplistic story my doctor told me about serotonin for so long.

• 1:26:56Rich Roll?

  Because then you don't really have to go look at that.

• 1:26:59Johann Hari?

  Yeah, I didn't want to, exactly. I didn't want to think about, I didn't want to give this individual power over me now. I didn't want to think about these things. But one of the reasons I'm glad that I did stay with this insight and I did go and see Dr. Galiati again, was because of what he discovered next, right? So, once they'd done this study and people all over San Diego, a lot of them had indicated they'd experienced childhood trauma. Their doctor was told, don't call them back, but next time they come in, say to them something like this. I see that when you were a child, you were sexually abused or whatever the nature of the abuse was. I'm really sorry that happened to you. That should never have happened. Would you like to talk about it? Forty percent of people said, I don't want to talk about it, but sixty percent of people did want to talk about it.

• 1:27:42Johann Hari?

  And they want to talk about it on average for five minutes. What was extraordinary was just those five minutes of an authoritative figure saying, I'm so sorry, that should never have happened. That alone led to a significant fall in depression and anxiety. And then it was randomly, some of them were randomly assigned to a therapist to talk about it more. And they had an even bigger fall. And the reason is, I think, it fits with a much wider body of research into shame. There's a guy called Professor James Pennebaker at Florida State University has done interesting work on this. So. We know that shame destroys you, right, physically, mentally destroys you. During the AIDS crisis, openly gay men died on average two years later than closeted gay men, even when they got healthcare at the same time, right?

• 1:28:27Johann Hari?

  Shame is desperately physically destructive and mentally destructive. And those things, of course, are not entirely separate, as you've done lots of work on. And giving people a way to release their shame

• 1:28:43Johann Hari?

  is profoundly physically healing and mentally healing. It in fact should be regarded as an antidepressant. And you know, it was after, one of the other scientists who worked on that programme, a man called Dr Robert Ander, said to me it had made him realise, when we see someone who's behaving with an apparent pathology, whether it's obesity, addiction, depression, we need to stop asking what's wrong with you and start asking what happened to you.

• 1:29:11Johann Hari?

  And

• 1:29:14Johann Hari?

  I think it was that,

• 1:29:17Johann Hari?

  more than any other that causes a depression or anxiety, that I learned about, although the other eight are really important, that made me realise

• 1:29:27Johann Hari?

  how mistaken what my doctor did was when I was a teenager, right? So I'd gone to my doctor, I'd been profoundly distressed. I'm not sure, I suspect if the doctor had said to me, has anything happened to you that made you feel this way? I would not have been able to talk about it anyway, so I don't want to be simplistic about this.

• 1:29:47Johann Hari?

  But the fact that I was given a story, I was given a story that diverted me from these real causes. That wasn't the only cause of my depression, but I think it was really significant. The story I was told diverted me from that story. Now, with my complicity, for sure.

• 1:30:06Johann Hari?

  And I think I would have been able to deal with my depression much earlier had I been told a more truthful, complex and nuanced story and given a more complex menu of options for how to respond to it. And that's not a criticism of that individual doctor who had seven minutes to see each patient. Is, and I'm sure was saying what he honestly thought was true.

• 1:30:31Johann Hari?

  But it is a criticism of a society that's put us in this position that's responding to distressed children and distressed adults with this remarkably simplistic story that we know isn't right.

• 1:30:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, there is, I mean, there are plenty of, like, what would have happened had you been directed to therapy instead, right? And told, listen, you're gonna get, you know, six one-hour sessions and you can sit there and not answer any of the questions, but you're gonna have to show up for them. Like, if your parent or somebody in your family had said, look, we can see you're suffering, like, let's try this, perhaps that would have led you in a different direction.

• 1:31:11Johann Hari?

  I think part of the problem is that most of the therapy that people are assigned to is cognitive behavioral therapy, right? Which does have some value, so people might not know, cognitive behavioral therapy descends from the ideas of a psychologist called Aaron Beck, who basically argued, I'm slightly caricaturing him, but I think most of his followers slightly caricature him as well, that, that, um, most of our problems, certainly depression, come from defective thought patterns, right? There's some truth in this, this is not untrue, right? We all know people, for example, I saw someone, I'm not gonna say too many details about this, but I recently here in LA, saw an old friend whose life is going great and is miserable as hell and just is one of those people who just looks at all their benefits in life,

• 1:31:54Johann Hari?

  where they're kind of looking for the worst in everything, right?

• 1:31:57Rich Roll?

  Welcome to Los Angeles.

• 1:31:58Johann Hari?

  Exactly. That's true, that's true. But the, uh, it's true, actually, all my British friends here, with one exception, I like that, but the, um, that is poor cognitive skills, right? Partly, and there's lots of other things going on in that individual's life, obviously, I don't wanna be simplistic, but that person has poor cognitive skills, they, they, their thought patterns tend them to look for the worst, and I believe this individual would benefit from CBT, so I'm not saying there's no role for CBT.

• 1:32:24Johann Hari?

  But I also think CBT is really limited, right? Now, there are lots of CBT practitioners who go beyond the limits of CBT and are actually complex and so on, but it's limited because this explanation of human distress is really limited. And think about that farmer in the field in Cambodia, you know, who's having to, you know, with an artificial leg, is having to work in the rice fields, right? Now, the CBT treatment for him would be to say, we've got to help you. About your mom. No, it wouldn't even be, let's talk about your mother. That's the Freudian thing, right? It'd be even worse than that. That maybe, it would bring up trauma about his mother. What they would say is, we've got to think about the thought patterns that

• 1:33:06Johann Hari?

  are lead, I mean, if they were to adhere strictly to the simplistic edicts of this, I suspect most CBT practitioners would be more sophisticated, but it would be to say, let's think about how we can alter your thought patterns and your habits of mind so you will be less distressed, right? That guy didn't need CBT. That guy needed a cow. He needed a practical intervention to change his environment, right? There are some people who will benefit from CBT. I'm in favor of it for some people. I in fact recommended it to my friend. But that's not most of what's going on, right? It's not attending to most of what's going on, which is why the evidence shows, rather like with chemical antidepressants, to most

• 1:33:47Johann Hari?

  people, CBT has a real effect that diminishes quite rapidly over time, right? So I think part of the problem is we, there's a reason, by the way, why CBT is very popular with neoliberal governments, whether it's in Britain massively championed by David Cameron, in Florida, Governor Rick Scott, there's a whole range of places that champion it because it's basically a kind of, get back to work, right? Come on now, come on now. Enough of this silly thinking. We're going to get you back to work. I mean, that's, again, I'm caricaturing, but there is an aspect of it that's like that, right? Rather than, say, Joanne Cassia Torre, who's the amazing woman who did that work on grief, which is about, you know, you're not wrong to feel terrible. Your thought patterns, for many people, you're not wrong to be angry and distressed and hostile. In fact, you should

• 1:34:31Johann Hari?

  be angry, distressed and hostile in this situation. Let's use that anger and hostility to change your environment. And I think the most important places I saw were places where they had. They acted on those insights, which is not to say CPT doesn't have some useful insights.

• 1:34:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I love the idea of how powerful it can be to change your environment. And when I look at, you know, like we go through the causes that you talk about in your book that are contributing to this epidemic of anxiety and depression. And they all kind of fall under this, you know, rubric of disconnection and the solutions are all about reconnection. And when I look, when I hear you talking about, you know, changing your environment to make the environment more conducive to the solution, it reminds me of the work that Dan Buettner has done with blue zones. Do you know?

• 1:35:25Johann Hari?

  I don't know about this. Tell me about it.

• 1:35:26Rich Roll?

  So Dan is an amazing guy and he spent many years traveling all over the world to find the people, the cultures that live the longest, the highest concentration per capita of centenarians. He found these, I don't know, there's six or nine of them or something like that. They're called blue zones. They're in places that have been sort of removed from modern progress, for lack of a better phrase, like Icaria and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. There's various pockets around the world and there's one in just outside of Los Angeles

• 1:36:07Rich Roll?

  with the Seventh Day Adventist faith community. And it's super interesting what he's discovered and then he kind of.

• 1:36:16Johann Hari?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:36:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's super interesting. I'm getting to the more interesting, relevant part for you. But then he then did it again to say, okay, I want to find the happiest people. And there was some overlap between these happiness blue zones and the centenarian blue zones. And then he was able to extract from this experience and all the time that he spent with these people to kind of divine the principles that are contributing to longevity and happiness. And these overlap as well, and they're very similar to yours. Like, it's almost a blueprint here that's emerging if you were to synthesize his work and your work. And so much of it is about connection. And, you know, from his perspective, connection, you know, it's about maintaining households

• 1:37:02Rich Roll?

  with your elders and keeping the extended family around. It's about your faith community. It's about always moving your body gently throughout the day. It's all of these things that we have done historically throughout the ages of human evolution that it's only recently that we've been disconnected from. So I think that's super interesting. And now he has this program where he goes to cities who have high incidences of obesity and, you know, lots of unhealthy people. And, you know, insurance companies that, you know, corporations that are paying high premiums, they want to get their premiums down. And he helps consult with governments and corporations to create systems and structures

• 1:37:46Rich Roll?

  that will contribute to a healthier population that will live longer. And ultimately, you know, through this experience, he will say to you, "Look, you can give people, you can have them read self-help books, you can give them this diet or that diet, or tell them they need to do this, that, or the other thing." But ultimately, for the most part, like, these things don't really work, or they don't stick over the long haul. What does work is when you change the environment to make the environment conducive to the healthy choice. Whether that healthy choice is emotional, mental, physical, nutrition-related, whatever it is, the healthy choice has to be at arm's reach. So you have to create bike paths and make bikes available, you know, make it easy for

• 1:38:30Rich Roll?

  people to ride their bikes to work, is a simple example. You need to get the soda machines out of the schools, like, very simple things, so that doing the unhealthy thing becomes harder, right? And when I look at your work and I think about how that applies to depression, anxiety, mental illness, even addiction in certain respects, like, I see a lot of overlap.

• 1:38:53Johann Hari?

  Yeah, I think that's true. There's...

• 1:38:58Johann Hari?

  There's an academic I interviewed called Dr Brett Ford, who did, up in Berkeley, who did this really interesting research, I think is very relevant to what you just said. It's kind of simple, she did it with her colleagues, they did it in four countries. They wanted to figure out, if you decided you were going to spend more time consciously trying to be happier, would you actually become happier? They did this research in the United States, in Taiwan, in Russia and in Japan. What they found at first was really odd. In the United States, if you try consciously to make yourself happier, you do not become happier. In the other countries, if you try to make yourself consciously become happier, you do. And at first they were like, what's going on here? How can that be? What they discovered was, in the United States, if you try to make yourself happier, generally

• 1:39:42Johann Hari?

  what we do is do something for yourself, right? I go shopping, I treat myself, I indulge myself, I eat, whatever it is.

• 1:39:50Rich Roll?

  But it's me, me, me.

• 1:39:51Johann Hari?

  It's an individualistic vision of happiness, exactly. In the other countries, generally, and of course there were exceptions on both sides, but generally, if you try to make yourself happier, you do something for someone else. You're saying for your friends, your family, your community. So while we have an instinctively individualistic idea of happiness, they have an instinctively collective idea of happiness. It turns out our vision of happiness just doesn't work, right? Like we said before, species that thought like that would have died out on the savannas of Africa. And it was striking to me, I spent some time in an Amish village in Indiana, and you know, the Amish are not congenial to me in many ways, right? And yet, I went there because, as you could imagine, right?

• 1:40:30Rich Roll?

  They just, they were not welcoming of you?

• 1:40:32Johann Hari?

  No, they were very nice, but they, you know, look, I'm a left-wing gay atheist, right? And, you know, they're not having any pride parades in the Amish village any time soon, right? And yet, there's always evidence that the Amish have exceptionally low levels of depression and anxiety, as do generally groups who live like them, like the Hutterites. And I could kind of see why, right? They, which is not to say there are not serious problems with the Amish and the way they live, because there are, but it was very striking to me. And I think, you know, as the kids you were talking, obviously I learned a huge amount of the stuff that I talk about in Lost Connections, my other book, Chasing the Scream, from scientists and experts and so on.

• 1:41:14Johann Hari?

  But actually, one of the places that taught me the most about what you're saying is...

• 1:41:20Johann Hari?

  A totally different place. I'll just tell you the story of it if you want because I

• 1:41:24Johann Hari?

  I think about it every day. So in the summer of two thousand and eleven, on a big anonymous housing project in Berlin, a woman called Nuriya Chengis climbed out of her wheelchair and she put a sign in her window. She lived on a ground, lived in a ground floor apartment. And the sign said something like, I got a notice saying I'm going to be evicted from my apartment next Friday, so next Thursday night I'm going to kill myself. Now, this is a kind of housing project in a slightly strange place. It's in the middle of Berlin. And when they threw up the Berlin Wall, they built it very quickly, obviously, this was the bit of West Berlin that kind of jutted into East Berlin, right? When they did the war, so it's like a fang, right? So if the Soviets had invaded, it would have been the frontline. So no one wanted to live there. So the only people who lived there when the

• 1:42:08Johann Hari?

  wall was there were three groups, recent Muslim immigrants like this woman, Nuriya, gay men, and punk squatters, right? And as you can imagine, these three groups looked at each other with some friendship.

• 1:42:20Rich Roll?

  That's a party.

• 1:42:21Johann Hari?

  Well, no one really knew anyone, right? And then the wall came down and suddenly they've got like this prime real estate in the middle of Berlin. So everyone's rent was going up, loads of people were being evicted. Anyway, no one knew this woman. People start to knock on her door and they're like, do you need any help? She said, screw you, I don't want any help, I'm going to kill myself. And outside the apartment, some of the people who lived there didn't know each other, started chatting. And one of them had this idea. There's a big thoroughfare that goes into the centre of Berlin that runs through this project. It's called Coty. I had an idea, if we just block the street for a day, on a Saturday, there'll probably be a fuss, the media will probably come, they'll probably let Nuriya stay in her apartment, maybe there'll be some pressure for us to, you know, our rents

• 1:43:05Johann Hari?

  to be kept down too, and this disaster to stop. So decided to do it. They went and built a barricade in the middle of the road, and Nuriya was like, well, I'm going to kill myself anyway, I may as well let them wheel me out there.

• 1:43:15Rich Roll?

  Doesn't matter.

• 1:43:16Johann Hari?

  They wheel her out there, and the media did come, and they interviewed Nuriya, the other residents, a bit of a fuss. And it gets to the end of the day and the police say, okay, you've had your fun, take it down. But the people who lived in Coty said, well, hang on a minute, you haven't told Nuriya she gets to stay. And actually, we want a rent freeze for our entire block, this whole housing project. So when you give us that... We'll take it down. But of course, they knew the minute they left the barricade, the police would just tear it down. So one of my favourite people at Coty, one of the punk squatters, her name's Tanya Gartner. She wears tiny miniskirts even in Berlin winters. She's hardcore. Tanya had this, in her apartment, she had a klaxon, you know, those things that make a loud noise at football matches. She went and got it. She came down and she said, okay, everyone. What we're gonna do is, we're gonna drop a timetable to man this barricade 24 hours a day.

• 1:44:02Johann Hari?

  Until we get what we want. If the police come to take it down, let off the klaxon and we'll all come down from our apartments and we'll all stop them.

• 1:44:12Johann Hari?

  So people start to sign up to man the barricade, right? Don't know each other. And Tanya, in her tiny little miniskirt, was paired with Nuria in her full hijab, right? And these kind of pairings were happening all over Coty. And first, I think they had, I think they had the Thursday night shift. Tanya and Nuria are like, we've got nothing to talk about, right? What are we gonna talk about? It couldn't be more unlikely. And so they sit there through the night, barely speaking, first few times. As the nights went on, they started to talk. They realised that something incredibly powerful in common. And Nuria told Tanya something she'd never told anyone. So she had come to Berlin when she was 16, from a village in Turkey, with her two young children.

• 1:44:57Johann Hari?

  And she was sent to raise enough money to send back her husband who would come and join her. After she'd been in Berlin for a year, she got word from home that her husband had died. And she told Tanya that she'd always told people that he died of a heart attack. Actually, he died of tuberculosis, which was seen as like a disease of poverty. So when Tanya told Nuria something she didn't talk about very often, she had come to Coty when she was 15. She'd been thrown out by her middle-class family. She'd found her way to a squat. She'd lived there for a little while. She got pregnant. They realised they had both been kind of children with children themselves in this place that they were very, where they'd been very frightened. They realised there's something really powerful in common. These kind of pairings were happening all over Coty. There was a young lad called Mehmet.

• 1:45:39Johann Hari?

  Who kept being, they kept nearly throwing him out of school, they said he had ADHD, he was paired with this grumpy old white guy. He said he didn't believe in direct action because he loves Stalin, but in this case he'd make an exception. They did a shift together, the old white guy started helping Mehmet with his homework, Mehmet started doing a lot better. And directly opposite this, this housing project, there's a gay club called Zoodblock that opened four years before the protest began. And it's run by a guy I love called Rick Kutschstein, who, they're pretty uncompromising, to give you a sense of it. The previous place he owned was called Cafe Anal. Right, so as you can imagine, there's a lot of Muslim immigrants in this, Muslim Germans in this, in this. In this housing project, when they first opened the club, there was a lot of people who were really pissed off.

• 1:46:22Johann Hari?

  In fact, their windows got smashed, but after the protests had been going for a little while. In fact, very early on, the gay club gave all their furniture to the protest, they were like, they gave free drinks, they were like, you know, after a while, they said. You know, you guys should have your meetings in our club, we. But even the lefties at Coty were like, we're not going to get these very religious Muslims to come and, you know. Have their meetings underneath posters for fisting night, right, it's not going to happen, right? But actually it did start, as one of the Muslim women there said to me. We all realised we had to take these small steps to understand each other. After the protests had been going on for about a year, one day, a man arrived at Coty, he was in his early 50s, he was called, he's called Tunkai. And it's clear when you meet Tunkai, he's got some cognitive difficulties, he'd been living homeless.

• 1:47:06Johann Hari?

  But he also has an amazing energy about him, everyone immediately liked him. And after he was there for two or three days, that by this time, they'd actually turned their barricade into a permanent structure in the street. And they, with a roof and everything, and they said, you know, you should start living here, we don't want you to be homeless, he started living there. He became a much-loved part of the Coty protest. Nine months later, one day the police came to inspect, they're becoming inspector every now and then. And Tungki doesn't like it when people argue. He thought the police were arguing. So he went to try to hug one of the officers. They thought he was attacking them, so they they arrested him. That was when it was discovered that Tungki had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital, a psychiatric hospital, often in a padded cell for twenty years. He'd escaped one day, lived on the streets for a few months, and then he found his way to Coty.

• 1:47:51Johann Hari?

  So the police took him back to the psychiatric hospital and he's put back in his cell. At which point, the entire Coty housing project turned into a kind of free Tungki movement, right? They descend on this psychiatric hospital. And the psychiatrists are like, what is this? They've got all these like Muslim women in hijabs, these gay, very camp gay men and these punks, demanding the release of this person they had shut away for twenty years. They don't understand it. But I remember Uli Carthenborn, one of the protesters, saying to them, you know, you don't love him. He doesn't belong with you. We love him. He belongs with us. I remember thinking, you know, how many of us, if someone carted us away, would have hundreds of people descending, saying, no, we love this person, right?

• 1:48:35Johann Hari?

  Anyway, many things happened at Coty.

• 1:48:37Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's like a movie. You know, it's like, that's like a movie you'd see at Sundance or something like that.

• 1:48:41Johann Hari?

  I think they think that I'm slightly crazy to people at Coty because I would turn up every, you know, four or five months, talk to them and just burst this tizzy. I found this so moving. I remember one of them said to me once, Johan, I think maybe you have allergies because my eyes were watering so much. Anyway.

• 1:48:53Rich Roll?

  So did she get to keep her apartment and she didn't commit suicide?

• 1:48:57Johann Hari?

  They got Tungki back. They got, Nuria got to stay in her neighborhood. They got a rent freeze for their entire housing project. And they then launched a referendum initiative to keep rents down across Berlin. Got the largest number of written signatures in the history of the city of Berlin. But the last time I saw Nuria, I remember she said to me, you know, I'm really glad I got to stay in my neighborhood. That's wonderful. I gained so much more than that. You know, she said, you know, I was surrounded by these amazing people all along and I never knew. And I remember, I'm thinking then, you know, one of Nuria's friends, another one of the women who took part in the protests is this woman called Neremın Mankar, who's a Turkish

• 1:49:41Johann Hari?

  German woman, and she said 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 meant to call home is just our four walls. And then this protest began and I started to think of this whole place and all these people as my home. And I realised, talking to her, that in some sense, in this culture, we are homeless. You need to feel you belong. The sense of home we built is not big enough for that sense of belonging. The Bosnian writer Alexander Hayman said, "Home is where people notice when you're not there." Right? Lots of people are homeless in that sense. And I remember thinking so clearly in Koty, think about how distressed these people were.

• 1:50:26Johann Hari?

  Nuria was about to kill herself. Mehmet kept being nearly thrown out of school, they said he had ADHD. Tuncay was shut away in a padded cell. Loads of them were depressed and anxious. These people did not need to be drugged, most of them, they needed to be together. They needed to have a sense of meaning and purpose. They needed a home. And I remember, I remember one time sitting with Tanya outside Zublok, the gay club, and her saying to me, you know, when you're at home and you're in your house and you're all alone and you feel like shit, you think there's something wrong with you. But what we did is we came out of our corner fighting and we realised we were surrounded by people who feel like, felt like this and we realised how strong we could be.

• 1:51:10Johann Hari?

  And to me, it was such an important lesson about...

• 1:51:16Johann Hari?

  About what's gone wrong. And, you know, the people at Cottee.

• 1:51:22Johann Hari?

  I love those people. They are amazing people. But in one sense, they are not exceptional people, right? They are ordinary people. This was just beneath the surface. It did not take much for them to see how powerful this could be.

• 1:51:37Johann Hari?

  And this is just beneath the surface everywhere. This is, this is, you know, I remember in the run up to the 2016 election, being in, in in West Cleveland with a group of people who were doing get out the vote work, I was following for a different book I'm writing. And we were on one of those streets in West Cleveland where a third of the houses had been demolished, a third had been abandoned, a third still had people living in them. Often behind actual barbed wire. And we knocked on one door and there was a woman. Who I would have guessed when looking at her was 60. I realised she was actually the same, she said she was the same age as me. I was 37 at the time. I was amazed. She'd had a really hard life. She was very articulate, extremely angry, absolutely refusing to vote for Hillary.

• 1:52:21Johann Hari?

  And she made this, this verbal slip that really stayed with me. She, she was talking about the area used to be like for parents and grandparents. And she meant to say when I was young. What she actually said is when I was alive.

• 1:52:36Johann Hari?

  And it really knocked me back. And I remember looking at her street. And all these people hiding behind barbed wire with all these cameras in front of the houses. They have no money, but they've got enough to buy a camera, right? And I thought, the solution to what you need is all around you. And you've been cut off by this culture from seeing it, right? You've literally put barbed wire between you and the people next to you.

• 1:52:59Johann Hari?

  And I thought about Cottee and I thought about what this woman needed.

• 1:53:03Johann Hari?

  And I, and I thought about the

• 1:53:07Johann Hari?

  the sickness in this culture that we've been so.

• 1:53:13Johann Hari?

  We've been driven away from seeing the solution that's right in front of us. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:53:19Rich Roll?

  It's haunting, that story about the woman. But I think that that story about Cati perfectly encapsulates essentially every facet of what you talk about. It's like this amazing drama that plays out that elucidates not only the problem but also the solution and the simplicity of the solution. And we have to wind this down because we've got to get you to Santa Monica, but I want to leave it on a little bit of a solution-oriented, optimistic note. Understanding the cultural drives that are compelling so many of us in this unhealthy

• 1:54:03Rich Roll?

  direction that's contributing to all of these disorders that we're seeing and intellectually understanding that the solution is within arm's reach, it's still so difficult for people to access. And we could tell these stories and you can inspire people, but there's that person who's listening who's like, "You don't understand my pain." Like, that's great, but like, "I've got three kids and I'm super depressed, I can barely get out of bed and I'm just trying to make it through the day. I don't live in an apartment building where we can block off the street and have a protest." So what are some of the things that, like, where can somebody begin to try to build

• 1:54:46Rich Roll?

  community and connection with others, with nature, so that they can find that hopeful thread that they can pull on that will shine some light?

• 1:54:57Johann Hari?

  So I would say two things about that. The first is, one of my closest relatives is a struggling, single mom who works every hour she can to keep her kids in their apartment. And when she gets home, she collapses and is too tired to even watch television most nights. The idea that I would say to her, well, your job now is to democratize your workplace. Fight for a universal basic income. It would be grotesque to say that to her, right? We don't approach most problems like this. We don't, when we have a discussion about car accidents, we don't say, well, we can't solve the problem of car accidents. What do you say to this person who's just been mangled on the, on the I ninety five and is bleeding in the wreckage, right? Well, I'd say, I don't want to talk to that person.

• 1:55:41Johann Hari?

  I mean, I'll call them an ambulance. I very much want to help them. Let's talk about how we can change things, like by having speed limits and seatbags, seatbelts and airbags.

• 1:55:54Johann Hari?

  So it doesn't get to the point where so many people are mangled on the I ninety five, right? So the first thing I would say is, in a sense, I think the, it was totally natural and right question. I wouldn't start at that point. I would say mostly my message to the person I love in, in my family who's in that position is firstly, your pain makes sense. You're not crazy to feel this way. Uh, you have been given a really rough deal. Uh, and I will try to love you and be present with you and help you change your life. Um.

• 1:56:25Johann Hari?

  And I will try to change the culture so you are set free to make more of the changes that you need to make, right? So what the person you're talking about who's trapped in this, look, we live in a culture where huge numbers of people are trapped. Half of Americans have less than five hundred dollars for if a disaster happens, right? Um, through no fault of their own, because that money has been transferred to the rich, right? Um, the, the six heirs to the Walmart fortune who are heirs, they have done nothing to earn that money. And more than, own more and have more money than the bottom one hundred million Americans, right? Where did your money go? What happened, right? Um. So we created a culture where lots of people are trapped. I wanna fight to change the culture so they are no longer trapped.

• 1:57:07Johann Hari?

  Um. I don't wanna give people a false kind of bromide, which is, you know, I go through in the book lots of things people can do. Some of them are coming together and fighting for collective solutions, and some of them are things people can do on their own. Um, there's a particular kind of meditation called loving kindness meditation. There's been proven to really help. I go through other examples. But I don't wanna be misleading about this. I don't think there are very good individualistic solutions. In a society that's falling apart, where Donald Trump is the most powerful person, where people are profoundly lonely, where they've been taught to value the wrong things, where many of the, where the inequality is going off the scale, where they are humiliated and controlled at work. I don't wanna be saying to an individual person, hey, here's my little solution for you.

• 1:57:50Johann Hari?

  It needs a big solution, right? Now, there are smaller things that people can do, even if you're in solitary confinement. In a prison for the rest of your life, there are things you can do, of course. I don't wanna belittle the possibility of individuals to do things. Cause there are individuals they can do, but the most important thing we can do is come together. And that's happening, right? The, the, the, there are amazing struggles and they're not privileged people, right? Think about the fight for fifteen, the fight for a higher minimum wage. And may, you know, um, workers who work in, you know, McDonald's and Burger King and Jack in the Box. You know, coming together to fight for a higher minimum wage, a great example, which gives you more time, which gives you more, more, uh, more of everything, right?

• 1:58:33Johann Hari?

  Um, there's a whole range of campaigns happening. So I would say the single most important thing is. If you possibly can, and I appreciate it's something who can't do this, but if you possibly can, get to a group of people who feel like you. Who can see that they're upset, who can see they've been, that they're wounded and are seeking a solution together. Because partly what I learned at Coty is the, the struggle is the solution, right? The act of coming together and saying, we've been made to feel like this through no fault of our own. And we can fight for a solution together. And sometimes they're long fights, right? I'm gay. Um, the first people to fight for gay rights in the eighteen seventies. That's a long journey from eighteen seventy to, you know, the Supreme Court, uh, decision in twenty, uh, fifteen.

• 1:59:18Johann Hari?

  You know, for granting equal marriage rights, right? That's a long fight.

• 1:59:23Johann Hari?

  The act of coming together and fighting for their own dignity, even in 1870 when they were really early in the fight, and they didn't live to see much progress, other than the dignity that they stood up and said, "The problem here isn't with me," right? That there was a dignity in asserting that, in showing it to other people, in standing with other people. So I would say wherever possible, and there is nowhere in the United States where this is not the case, where you are not surrounded by people who feel in a similar way, find those people, right? We have tools to find those people. Even if all you can do is sit with them for half an hour a week, sit with them if you possibly can. And if you are so wounded you can't do that, okay, then help is on the way. The rest of us are going to understand this problem differently. And if you can't fight

• 2:00:08Johann Hari?

  for yourself, we will try to fight for you. That's powerful.

• 2:00:13Rich Roll?

  It is. No, it's great. You know, I mean, look, we could spend another five hours talking about this stuff, and we could talk about all manner of things that people can do to try to, you know, alleviate some of this pain. But I think that's very great, very practical and powerful advice. I mean, that's, look, essentially, that's how, that's the premise of 12 Step, right, which I'm a member of. And it's, it's all, it's all about getting together with people that share a common dilemma and share a common solution. And the struggle is the solution. It is the community that is created around a shared interest

• 2:00:57Rich Roll?

  that, that is fundamentally, you know, it's, it's not about arriving at a future place. That is, in and of itself, the salve to the wound, I think, and a great place to start. So we gotta let you go.

• 2:01:12Johann Hari?

  I should just say, can my publishers always tell me off if I don't say this? If you would like any more information about the book, if you would like to know where to get the book, the audiobook, if you would like to take a quiz to see how much you know about the causes of depression and anxiety, if you would like to listen to audio of lots of the people we've talked about, what's the other thing they always tell me to say? If you would like to know what a range of people have said about the book, from Elton John to Hillary Clinton to... Um, Tucker Carlson to, um, uh,

• 2:01:42Rich Roll?

  Russell Brand.

• 2:01:43Johann Hari?

  Russell Brand.

• 2:01:45Rich Roll?

  You got great blurbs. I don't know what's going on in your life, but like you got the coolest people to blurb your books. And by the way, I was gonna do all that for you, but continue, please.

• 2:01:55Johann Hari?

  If you want to know any of those things, I always feel like I'm doing stuff like 1950s advert, but here we go. Uh, if you go to www.the lostconnections.com, it's not lostconnections.com because it turns out there's a fucking band called Lost Connections that they want to tell me about when I was, uh, playing the book, uh, although they no longer exist, uh, they seem very good. I listened to one of their songs. Um, yeah, go to www.the lostconnections.com. You can also find out where to follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Although I was asked in an interview recently, they said, what's your Twitter? What's your Facebook? And then they said, what's your Snapchat? And I said, I am a 39 year old man, right? The only 39 year olds on Snapchat are certainly pedophiles, right? So you cannot find me on Snapchat.

• 2:02:32Rich Roll?

  It had its moment, but that moment has passed.

• 2:02:34Johann Hari?

  Exactly.

• 2:02:35Rich Roll?

  Um, and also, uh, Chasing the Scream, which is your book on addiction and chasingthescream.com where you can find.

• 2:02:41Johann Hari?

  Yeah, chasing scream.com and other people said nice things about that as well.

• 2:02:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What I love about both of these websites and your books is that, as you mentioned, you could go to the sites and you literally have all of these inter- audio of all of these interviews that you've done with all of these people that.

• 2:02:57Johann Hari?

  Yeah. So you can listen to the people at Coty, the people at Coty, the audio, you can hear how much choked I get talking to them. Uh, yeah, yeah. You could listen to audio with all the experts and, and all these people. I thought it'd be a good thing to put out there and kind of resource for people.

• 2:03:08Rich Roll?

  And how's the depression now? How you feel? You look happy. You're smiling.

• 2:03:12Johann Hari?

  Yeah, no, I feel I'm not depressed at all. Um, I haven't been for quite some time. Although I am always capable to caveat that, which is that I was in a privileged position that I could change my life. And in a way, what I'm fighting for is for everyone to have the opportunity to do that, rather than just going in a kind of simplistic way. Hey, I did this and you can too. Cause like my closest relative can't do that at the moment, right? But I'm fighting so that we can change the culture so far more people can be set free to make the changes that would release them from depression and anxiety.

• 2:03:37Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, thank you, my friend.

• 2:03:39Johann Hari?

  Hooray. Totally my pleasure.

• 2:03:40Rich Roll?

  How you feel?

• 2:03:41Johann Hari?

  Good. Happy. Yeah, it was great. I really enjoyed that.

• 2:03:43Rich Roll?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:03:44Johann Hari?

  Thank you.

• 2:03:44Rich Roll?

  Uh, come back and talk to me anytime.

• 2:03:46Johann Hari?

  Hooray, I will.

• 2:03:47Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 2:03:47Johann Hari?

  Excellent.

• 2:03:48Rich Roll?

  Delightful. Thanks.

• 2:03:49Johann Hari?

  Thank you.

• 2:03:49Rich Roll?

  All right. Peace.

• 2:03:54Rich Roll?

  Some amazing insights there. I found that quite compelling. I could talk to Johann for hours. I hope you enjoyed it. Please be sure to pick up his latest book, Lost Connections, as well as Chasing the Scream. And also, don't forget to check out his TED Talk, all of which I'll put links in the show notes to on the episode page at richroll.com. Do me a favor, let Johann know how this one landed for you by sharing your thoughts with him directly. You can find him on Twitter @JohannHari101. Plus, don't forget to hit me and DK up with thoughts on his 2019 goals with the hashtag DKgoals. If you're looking for additional nutritional guidance to dial in your health goals for 2019, I can't stress

• 2:04:37Rich Roll?

  enough how helpful our Plant Power Meal Planner can be. Go to meals.richroll.com and there you will find thousands of plant-based recipes, all totally customized based on your personal preferences. With unlimited grocery lists, we have grocery delivery integrated into the system in most metropolitan areas. We have incredible customer support from a team of expert health coaches available to you seven days a week, and it's all for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you would like to support the work that we do here on the podcast, just tell your friends about your favorite episode. Share the show on social media. Hit that subscribe button on

• 2:05:21Rich Roll?

  Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, on Google Podcasts, on Stitcher, wherever you listen to this. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts. That is very helpful. And you can support the show on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo, he's stepping it up, putting more time into the show in a producer role, also audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, lots of behind the scenes stuff. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing the show and editing it for YouTube. Jessica Miranda for graphics, DK for advertiser relationships and other production behind the scenes. And theme music, as always, by Analemma. Thanks

• 2:06:04Rich Roll?

  for the love, you guys. See you back here next week with a highly anticipated episode with the great, the one and only, Killian Journay. Lot of excitement about that one. You're not going to want to miss it. Until then, take care of yourselves, invest in one another. Create and cultivate that connection that we talked about today. Peace. Plants. Namaste.