Re-Air: The Truth About Depression, GLP-1s and ADHD & Why Our Biology Is Not To Blame | Johann Hari

In honor of World Mental Health Day, we’re revisiting our second episode with New York Times best-selling author Johann Hari (Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, Chasing the Scream, Magic Pill). He gave us a powerful breakdown of the real causes behind depression, anxiety, and the global attention crisis. Is Big Pharma healing us or profiting from keeping us sick? Johann reveals why only two of the nine causes of depression are biological, exposing how Big Pharma, social media addiction, and modern lifestyle traps are fueling mental health issues. He dives into the rise of GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic) and society’s toxic beauty obsession, while uncovering the overlooked role of sleep, community, and social connection in healing. Johann shares his personal experience with antidepressants, and explores how childhood shame and trauma drive addiction, weight gain, and despair. You’ll learn why even pets are being diagnosed with ADHD, what Silicon Valley insiders confessed about attention-hacking technology, and how our loss of focus is sabotaging relationships, careers, and democracy itself. If you’re ready to challenge the myths of mental health, regain your focus, and take back control of your mind, don’t miss this eye-opening conversation with Johann Hari. Go to https://helixsleep.com/breakdown to receive 20% off your Helix mattress. Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0Visithttps://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN http://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN and for a limited time, get a free Immune Support Bundle, including a bottle of Omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of Vitamin D3K2, with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. Find the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at Quince. Go to https://www.quince.com/breakdown for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Upgrade your kitchen with Our Place today. Visit fromourplace.com/BREAK http://fromourplace.com/BREAK and use code BREAK for 10% off sitewide. Kava Haven: All the Buzz, None of the Booze — get 15% off your first order at http://kavahaven.com/breakerGo to https://alyahealth.com/s/breakerand use code BREAKER for 20% off your first order. Use code BREAKER at https://jonesroadbeauty.com to get a Free Gift with your first purchase! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:06Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our breakdown. Today, in honor of World Mental Health Day, we're going to revisit the second episode that we did with bestselling author Johann Hari. He gave us a really, really powerful breakdown of causes of depression, anxiety, and also the global attention crisis. We thought this was perfect for World Mental Health Day.

• 0:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Johann reveals why only two of the nine causes of depression are biological, exposing how Big Pharma, social media addiction, and the modern lifestyle are traps that are fueling our mental health crisis.

• 0:40Mayim Bialik?

  We also do a deep dive into the rise of GLP-1s. He was really one of the first people I saw talking about this. And he talks about our toxic beauty obsession, the overlooked role of sleep, community, social connection in how we heal, how we manage our resources surrounding what our bodies look like and how they function. Johann's going to talk about his experience with antidepressants, the global journey he went on to learn more about them all over the world. And he also talks about his weight gain, his eating patterns, and how he believes Ozempic saved his life.

• 1:18Jonathan Cohen?

  We also explore why even pets are being diagnosed with ADHD and what Silicon Valley insiders confess about attention hacking technology that they know is impacting people.

• 1:30Mayim Bialik?

  This is really the perfect conversation to re-air, we think, in honor of World Mental Health Day. It's talking about essentially everything, about what we can do to change our mental health and to point us in the right direction.

• 1:42Jonathan Cohen?

  If you haven't already, check us out on Substack, Mayim Bialik's Breakdown on Substack, where you can get exclusive content, not available anywhere else, as well as lives with Mayim and I breaking down our episodes.

• 1:54Mayim Bialik?

  And now, we hope you enjoy this particular episode with Johann Hari.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Hey, guys, I'm Hoda Kotb. Look, I know how busy life can get. And sometimes, we all just need a moment to pause and connect. Well, that's what my podcast, Making Space, is all about. Real conversations with people who've learned how to live with purpose and heart. Think authors, thought leaders, actors, performers. And every time, I walk away with something that changes how I see the world. And I think you will, too. Join me for Making Space every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Break it down.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  I'm ridiculously happy to be here.

• 2:33Mayim Bialik?

  We're so excited to have you in person. And if you didn't hear our first episode, we recommend that people listen to it.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Mainly because it was the peak moment of my life and my existence on the planet Earth.

• 2:44Mayim Bialik?

  So tell us what was so special for you about your first time with us.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  You know why, and I'll begin to cry. You say it, because I'll cry.

• 2:51Mayim Bialik?

  Deep in left field, this one came out. Johann is a huge Beaches fan.

• 2:56Jonathan Cohen?

  Deep cut.

• 2:57Mayim Bialik?

  It was very deep cut. When I was 12, I played the young Bette Midler in the movie Beaches.

• 3:01Jonathan Cohen?

  You're still playing her.

• 3:03Mayim Bialik?

  It was not my first role, but it was the thing that led to, really, the entirety of my life and career as we know it. It was after that that I did Blossom. But yeah, you were a huge Beaches fan.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  I literally know, I almost literally know it by heart, the script.

• 3:19Mayim Bialik?

  How many times have you seen Beaches?

• 3:20Speaker 04

  So between the ages of 12 and 15, I think I watched it with my best friend twice a week, every single week.

• 3:31Mayim Bialik?

  Why would you do that to yourself? It's very sad.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  And it's tragic. And weirdly, I realized that I profoundly misunderstood the plot of Beaches. Because then I didn't watch it for many, many years, until maybe...

• 3:43Mayim Bialik?

  Most people think Barbara Hershey's character had cancer. She did not.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  No, she has, oh, I know the name of it.

• 3:48Mayim Bialik?

  I'm sure you do.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  What's it called? It's a brain disease.

• 3:51Mayim Bialik?

  No, she had a heart, it was a heart thing.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Cardio myopathy is the name of it.

• 3:56Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Yes, the Barbara Hershey character has.

• 3:58Mayim Bialik?

  But why did you miss the plot of the whole movie?

• 4:00Speaker 04

  So I was raised in a family where there was a lot of addiction and insanity and a lot of narcissism. And I now realize that the arc of Beaches is that C.C. Bloom, your character, Bette Midler's character, is very narcissistic at the start.

• 4:14Mayim Bialik?

  Enough about me, what do you think about me?

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Exactly. And the movie is partly the story of C.C. Bloom overcoming her narcissism through this friendship with Hillary, right? I just thought she was admirable right from the start. Because I was raised in a environment with so much narcissism. I was like, wow, she's great. And then I was like, oh, no way.

• 4:31Mayim Bialik?

  She just sucks up all the energy in the room. I don't have to do anything.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  It's like, well, she's a terrible person at the start of the movie, and I'd completely missed it. So yeah, it was fascinating when I re-watched it as in a doll. And when, actually, weirdly, my best friend was very, very unwell, and we thought she might die. Fortunately, she didn't. So it was like, oh, my God, my life is turned into the film Beaches. How has this happened to me? So that's when I re-watched it. I got very emotional and realized I misunderstood it. And then we reenacted the iconic final moment.

• 5:02Mayim Bialik?

  Yes, we did.

• 5:02Jonathan Cohen?

  Just to clarify, in the first episode, there is a reenactment where both of you are singing. So if people need to see that, that's where you find it.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  So what we're going to do in this one, my understanding is I have brought the script. We're going to do the entire movie from the beginning.

• 5:15Mayim Bialik?

  No, but I was going to say...

• 5:15Speaker 04

  You'll be the man we fight over.

• 5:17Mayim Bialik?

  As a nod to another layer of the movie and what, honestly, what a lot of your work and life is about, is like, what's that other layer? In the flashback scenes, which I am a part of, we see a dynamic between her and her mother, who's this very, kind of larger-than-life personality, who's really inserting herself into a lot of aspects of this child's life. So we also see some of the psychopathology, right? I mean, not to get too deep.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  No, yeah, Lenore, that's the name of the mother, isn't she?

• 5:47Mayim Bialik?

  Leona.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  Leona, that's it.

• 5:48Mayim Bialik?

  Which is...

• 5:49Jonathan Cohen?

  It's my grandmother's name.

• 5:50Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, grandmother's name. Played by Laney Kazan.

• 5:54Jonathan Cohen?

  That's my mother's name.

• 5:55Mayim Bialik?

  And Laney is his mother's name. I know, isn't that funny?

• 5:58Speaker 04

  Earring.

• 5:59Mayim Bialik?

  We talked with you kind of at the beginning of, I'd say, the early beginnings of an Ozempic revolution. At that time, I think it was still new to talk about. And we've now shifted, I just want to touch on this briefly because it was what we talked about last time. We've shifted into what many people are saying is just the death of the body positivity movement with sort of, I mean, even when we spoke to you, I was like, oh, I'm hearing so many people. Now, it's like, in L.A., you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting seven people.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  And the dead cat will also be on Ozempic. Because it was being a bit fat-shamed on Instagram, yeah.

• 6:38Mayim Bialik?

  And I also just recently read an article about the transparency with which celebrities now feel it's sort of their humanitarian responsibility to list all of the plastic surgeries they've had and all the medications they're on. I think it was a Kat Rosenfeld piece from The Free Press. And she was like, is this the new feminism? To be like, you can't look like this, naturally. Here's the way to do it. Here's the money you need, which is exorbitant. But I wonder, from the time that we first spoke about it and when you wrote your book, what have you seen shift in not just the GLP-1, is that what they're called? The GLP-1 world, but sort of our perception

• 7:21Mayim Bialik?

  of thinness, beauty? Are we beautiful at any size? Apparently not.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  So I think there's a quite big division between two different groups of people. There's people who are overweight or obese, for whom I think there's a really strong case for taking these drugs. Not for everyone, there's risks. I go through them in the book. Because sadly, being overweight or obese does significantly increase health harms. You know, I'm 46. I'm two years older than my grandfather ever got to be because he died of a heart attack when he was 44. Loads of the men in my family get fat, have heart attacks, or have other health problems and die young. So there's that group of people. Then there's a group of people who are already a healthy weight, or indeed skinny, who are taking it to be super skinny. And for them, I have absolutely no criticism of those people because women are, and you know, it's much better than me,

• 8:11Speaker 04

  are made to feel like [BLEEP] about their bodies, whatever they do. So this is not coming from a point of criticism. But I would urge that category of people not to do it. Because actually, being super skinny is also bad for your health. And making yourself artificially thin is actually quite dangerous. Not so much now, say, if you were our age. But if you're super thin, you're much greater risk, when you get older, of breaking your bones, a condition called sarcopenia, which means you can't even get out of a chair because you're so physically weak. So I think there's two very different categories. And in a way, that relates to the body positivity movement. Because I thought very deeply about the body positivity movement for the book. And while I was taking it, I think we talked about one of the lowest moments in writing the book,

• 8:55Speaker 04

  was when I had lost a [BLEEP] load of weight. I was feeling really good. And I got a call from my niece. We were FaceTiming. And she was going, oh, you look great. I never knew you had a neck before. And then she said, will you get me some Ozempic? And she was a perfectly healthy weight. And I thought she was kidding, and I laughed. And she looked down, and I realized, oh, [BLEEP]. She means it, right? I'm undoing all these messages. So I think we've got to look at the body positivity movement in all its complexity. Because they make a range of arguments, some of which are unbelievably important. So the most important is, however you look, whatever your body's like, you should be protected from bullying and cruelty. And 42% of women who have a BMI higher than 35

• 9:39Speaker 04

  get insulted every single [BLEEP] day, right? So absolutely, they're right about protecting people from bullying. They're also right that shaming people is completely counterproductive for promoting health, right? Lindy West, the brilliant body positivity activist, says, you know, you don't take good care of a thing you hate. Teaching people to hate their bodies is not a way to help them be healthy. So all of that, I passionately agree with them. There are some parts of the body positivity movement, and it's a relatively small part. That argue that it is not true that obesity increases the risk to your health, but that's a kind of fat phobic myth. I was open minded about that. I looked at the evidence. I, you know, looked at the

• 10:23Speaker 04

  leading science on this. We just have to be honest. That that isn't true. The evidence that obesity increases the risk to your health is one of the most proven facts in the whole of science. Doesn't mean you should bully people. Doesn't mean anyone should be ashamed. It's actually not their fault that we gained weight. It's not, I'm saying this to somebody who's obese most of my adult life. That's the result of industries that have fucked us up from even before birth, because we're exposed to this stuff in utero. So it doesn't give any weight to the people who want to shame them. But so we've got to be honest to the complexity of that. We want a movement that says people should, we want people to love their bodies. We want people to be healthy. We want to be happy.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  We want it to help people be healthy, not shame them. But but we can't pretend that being overweight or obese doesn't harm your health, because unfortunately, on average, it does.

• 11:16Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:25Jonathan Cohen?

  This leads us to the idea of happy, healthy, and the what we're seeing that these drugs have an impact on addictive tendencies. I'm curious to, you know, how that relates to what we're seeing right now, because often, you know, there's an emotional component of eating, there's an emotional component to addiction. Maybe that's where we tie in here.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a lot in that. I mean, there's kind of two halves of what you said there as well. So one of the fascinating things about these drugs is it's becoming increasingly clear that these drugs actually don't work primarily on your gut. They work primarily on your brain. I interviewed the leading neuroscientists who are working on this. We don't actually know how it changes your brain, which is slightly disturbing, but we know it is primarily a brain effect, although there is a gut effect as well. And that opens up some additional risks. It's like a much more intimate thing to have your brain changed than to have your gut changed, if it feels that way to me. But also opens up some potentially positive aspects. So what we do know is lots of people who have been given these drugs are now saying that in addition to losing weight, it's reducing their addictive behaviors. This started with alcohol. We know that people drink a lot

• 16:33Speaker 04

  less alcohol. But then they thought, well, there's calories in alcohol. It might be that it's, that's what's going on there. But actually, so we, there's a lot we don't know, but there's a lot we do know. We do know that when you get, get rats and you get them to heavily use any class of drugs, cocaine, heroin, alcohol, I don't know why I find the idea of rats using cocaine so like hilarious, but it's just like the, you get, you get them to do that, you then give them these GLP-1 agonists, these drugs, they massively reduce the amount of all of the different types of drug they use, which is really eye catching.

• 17:05Mayim Bialik?

  They're like, I'm just not hungry for it.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Just like, I don't want this line anymore. I don't know why we imagined the rats would have like these weird camp like Sex and the City voices, but that is, that is weirdly how I imagined rats like, oh, bitch, no more cocaine for me. We now know anecdotally, lots of humans are saying this. There's now a shitload of scientific studies going on to figure out, okay, is this also going to help with treating addiction compulsive behaviors? We don't know yet. We need the human research. But that, that's kind of exciting. And there was a second bit of what you asked, and I don't want to neglect it. It was you said, oh, about emotional eating, which is really important, because for me, the first six months, I was getting everything I wanted. I lost a shitload of weight. My back pain went away. My neighbor's hot gardener kept hitting on me, like loads of really good things happened. And I did not feel better. If anything, I felt slightly worse.

• 17:53Speaker 04

  I don't want to overstate it, but I felt slightly worse. I was like, this is weird. What's going on here? And then for my magic pill, I did all this research about, why do we eat? And there's scientific evidence for five factors why we eat. The only one of them is the super obvious one that like, you know, feed your body.

• 18:09Mayim Bialik?

  Sustenance.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  Exactly. All the rest are emotional drivers of eating. And for me, so I grew up in a family, like we were saying, where there was a lot of addiction and craziness. I grew up in this environment, and I realized, and I had some awareness of this before the Ozempic, but I realized then, the way I coped with that was by stuffing myself by overeating. You don't have a lot of agency in a family like that when you're a kid, but you can control your eating, right? I could. And when, when I started taking the Ozempic, you can't stuff yourself and overeat when you're on these drugs. You would, you would throw up. And I had a real epiphany about this. I was in a branch of KFC in Vegas. And I was there because I'm writing a book about a series of crimes that are happening there.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  And I had this awful, it was seven months into taking the drugs, and I had an awful day. I was investigating the murder of someone that I knew and really loved. So it was hard. And I went to this branch of KFC that I've been in like a thousand times before. It's the one on West Sahara, if you know Vegas. And it's a really skeezy branch of KFC. And I went in and I did what I would have done before I was taking the drugs. I ordered a bucket of KFC, a big bucket of fried chicken. I had one of the pieces of the fried chicken. And I said, I remember looking at the bucket and thinking, oh, I can't eat this. Right? Like, I couldn't. And I remember Colonel Sanders was on the wall, and it was like he was looking at me going like, what happened to my best customer? Right? And I remember in that moment, just thinking, oh, you're just gonna have to feel bad then. And obviously,

• 19:38Speaker 04

  there are better ways for me to deal with emotional stress that I've subsequently learned than, you know, Colonel Sanders. But one of the things that happens with these drugs, which is really connected to emotional eating and the other, the other factors in eating that I write about, is these drugs massively disrupt your ability to eat the way you did before. That's obviously why they work, which is a very good thing for your health if you were overweight or obese at the start. But that disrupts your emotional relationship with food in ways that can, people really need to know about in advance. And I hope the book kind of helps them prepare for that.

• 20:12Mayim Bialik?

  Well, so, and that's actually sort of what I wanted to focus on today. Like, that's a perfect, it's a perfect bridge, because, you know, besides like this sort of like hand wringing that people do of like, oh, what if you have to be on that medication forever? I'm not interested in that. What I'm interested in is what happens when we are given medications, in many cases, in place of the actual mechanisms of support and transformation that are needed for us to actually feel better. And by feel better, I mean, realize our potential, be in touch with something greater than ourselves, feel like we have purpose, feel like there's a reason for us to be here, feel like we have

• 20:55Mayim Bialik?

  a reason to get up every day. And it's, it's a bit of a common thread, and I happen to have some of your books right here. I felt it a lot in Lost Connections, and obviously Stolen Focus. I think it's, it's a different thread, but it's like the same tapestry. So when I think about our conversation about Ozempic, about these GLP-1 drugs.

• 21:22Mayim Bialik?

  I can't help but then think about the number of people I know who are on an SSRI, an SNRI, any number of medications to make them stop feeling bad. And as an extension, this diagnosis, right, of ADHD gets thrown in there. Well, maybe we need a stimulant, right? Maybe we need Adderall. And now we have this other wave, which I don't know what your next book will be, of neurodivergence. And you have this sort of like Venn diagram of anxiety, ADHD, and neurodivergence. Some people are all of them. Some people are one of them. But we're kind of playing this like pinball of medication with symptoms.

• 22:08Mayim Bialik?

  And it feels like a very similar conversation in terms of, oh, you're feeling these symptoms. Psychiatry has the answer. They've got the answer. We will give you the pill that closes the channel, right? That releases the hormone that makes you feel that way and act this way. And when you take these medications, it's very hard to work on the things to actually heal. Because in many cases, you don't have the motivation because like everything's fine, right?

• 22:36Jonathan Cohen?

  There seems to be in these, all these different diagnoses of, I don't, I can't focus. I'm feeling depressed. I'm overeating. An undercurrent of emotional distress under all of this. And it seems as though while this diagnosis and the approach to fixing it is changing through a different medication, everyone is just trying to distract themselves or distracted or unable to focus or feeling badly or disconnected in some way, which you cover in all of your books. So maybe we can sort of a little bit of a lay of the land of where society, and I know that's a broad umbrella, finds themselves. But this really is almost like a gut check of where we are right now.

• 23:22Speaker 04

  For me, this was a really personal journey because, you know, it's partly what my book, Lost Connections, which is about depression and anxiety is about. When I was a kid, I remember going to my doctor when I was a teenager and saying that I had this feeling like pain was kind of leaking out of me and I couldn't control it. I didn't understand it. And my doctor, who was a super nice person, said, oh, we know why you're like this. Some people are just lacking a chemical in their brain called serotonin. You're clearly one of them. All we need to do is give you this drug. You'll be fine. So I started taking an antidepressant called Paxil. And I felt much better. And then this feeling of pain came back over the next few months. I went back. I was given a higher dose. Again, I felt better. Again, the feeling of pain came back. And I was taking higher and higher doses

• 24:04Speaker 04

  until for 13 years, I took the maximum possible dose and still felt like [BLEEP]. And I was like, well, what's going on here? Because according to this story that we're told in our culture, I'm doing everything right. And yet I still feel like this. And I look around me and I'm surrounded by people in the same situation. So I ended up going on this big journey for the book all over the world. I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts. I think I was about to turn 40 when the book was finished. You know, every single year that I've been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in this country, in Britain, where I'm from, as you can tell from my weird Downton Abbey accent. And in fact, across the Western world. And I was like, well, human biology doesn't evolve that quickly. What, something's going on here? So there are definitely biological contributions. And I'm sure we'll unpack some of them.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  And absolutely the distress that people are experiencing is real. And I want to stress that because a lot of people, and certainly me, when you hear the story being widened, I experienced that at first, people saying, you're saying what I was told isn't real or what I'm feeling isn't real. That is not what the people offering a wider perspective is saying. It took me a while to absorb that. So there's a lot that underpins the various things that we're going to talk about. And I actually go through in the book, there's scientific evidence for nine factors that, that cause depression and anxiety. Only two of them are in our biology. And what unites the rest of them broadly is, the way I would put it is everyone listening, everyone watching knows

• 25:33Speaker 04

  that you have natural physical needs. 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 have a future that makes sense. And this culture we built is good at lots of things. I'm glad to be alive today. But we have been getting less and less good at meeting these deep, underlying psychological needs for a very long time now.

• 26:10Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and on Maslow's kind of hierarchy of needs pyramid, right? Like you go for the first things first. Do I have enough food? Do I have enough shelter? In many cases, people see these things as a luxury, right? Romantic love in my family is a luxury, right? You were just arranged like you were, and for most of human history, right? So there's also, there's been this evolution, right? Of an understanding of these needs in a, in increasingly complex world that we're trying to fit them into.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was a moment I had a real epiphany about this. Really shifted my perspective and shifted actually my own life. I went to interview this South African psychiatrist called Dr. Derek Summerfield, a great guy. And he told me this story. He happened to be in Cambodia in 2001 when they first introduced chemical antidepressants in Cambodia. They'd never had them before in that country. And the local doctors hadn't heard of them. So they said to him, he wasn't there to study this. He was there working on something else. But they were like, what are antidepressants? And he explained, and they said to him, oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants. And he was like, what do you mean? He thought they were going to tell him about some kind of like herbal remedy, like St. John's Wort or something. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  And one day he stood on a landmine and it got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial limb. And after a while, he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently, it's super painful to work underwater when you've got an artificial limb. And I'm guessing it's pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where you got blown up. The guy started to cry a lot. After a while, he refused to get out of bed. He developed what we would call kind of classic depression. That's when the Cambodians said to Dr. Summerfield, well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant. And he said, what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense. You only had to listen to this guy for five minutes to see why he was so distressed. One of them figured, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone. It never came back. They said to Dr. Summerfield, so you see, Dr., that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right? Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that it's entirely or primarily a biological malfunction in your brain, that sounds like a weird joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant. She gave me a cow. But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the whole world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years now. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not primarily a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is practical love and help

• 28:50Speaker 04

  to get those deeper needs met. So the question we need to be asking with every depressed and anxious person is, what's the cow for the problems that are facing you? What are your unmet needs? How can we together help you to get those needs met? And when I went to places that have built their response around depression around that, and I can talk about them, they have incredible results.

• 29:10Jonathan Cohen?

  So the nefarious part here, because I completely agree with everything you're saying in terms of unmet need, is that our systems seem to be increasingly designed to not meet and actually keep people in a state of suffering. So if you think about amount of GDP spent on public spaces, it's plummeted to like 0.2% versus what it used to be at over 3% of public spaces. Incentive structures on building apartments to keep people as separated as possible with no communal spaces to maximize square footage is designed to keep people in little boxes. The way that the economy is set up is the same.

• 29:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Our tech platforms are designed to keep people siloed in algorithms, increasing enrage to drive engagement. There seems to be more and more obstacles to even considering what it means to have emotional needs as the core, which, you know, I can go into why and we can unpack that. But it feels harder and harder to even start to look at people to say they have needs, let alone thinking of the systems of our economy that thrive on us being broken.

• 30:24Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and also the healthcare system, which is not designed to actually, you know, provide more than 15 minutes of care for most, you know, for most people who are being run through a system.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  There's a person I spoke to with that insight. Some people will hear that and think, struggle with it. There's a woman who really helped me to grasp that core point you're making. You should have her on, by the way. Amazing person. She's called Dr. Joanne Casiatorre. So Joanne must be 24 or five years ago now. She gave birth to a daughter called Cheyenne, who died during childbirth. And almost immediately, the doctors

• 31:03Speaker 04

  Offered her antidepressants and drugs. And she said, but I'm, I'm not depressed. My, my baby died. Like, I should feel sad.

• 31:12Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 31:12Jonathan Cohen?

  You should be destroyed.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  In fact, grief is a form of love, right? We, if you tell me that your neighbor died yesterday, I'll feel sad in a sort of vague way, but I won't feel sad the way you tell me my neighbor died because I know my neighbor and I care about them, right? And grief is a form of love and.

• 31:29Mayim Bialik?

  It's also a form of healing.

• 31:30Speaker 04

  Exactly. An absolutely necessary and essential psychological process. Indeed, one of the ways we would know someone was a psychopath was if they did not grieve for someone they loved, right? So she said, this is, this is, she found this bizarre. Anyway, she then began to research this, like, obviously later. She discovered, I forget the figure, it's in the book, but if I remember rightly, a majority of people whose children die are drugged almost immediately in this country, right? And she began to think, well, A, this may interfere with the grieving process, but B, it's a profound misunderstanding of what being human is, right? So she then began to research this and discovered this really interesting thing that I think leads to an insight about, about, about what you're asking. So she looked at the history of this. It's really interesting. Back in the sixties and fifties and sixties, when they were first formulating the DSM,

• 32:15Speaker 04

  the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, up to then, there was no agreed definition of depression in this country, right? Doctors would just use the term meaning different things. So quite sensibly, they came up with a definition. And it was a panel psychiatrist and they basically came up with a checklist. I think it was, if I'm rightly, 10 things. And they said, if your patient has more than five of these 10 symptoms for more than two weeks, they're depressed, do what you can tell them, right? And it was obvious things like crying all the time or a lot, you know, feeling hopeless, kind of things you would guess. So they send this out, psychiatrists all over the country start using it. But then the doctors come back after a while and go, oh, we've, we've got a bit of a problem here.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  If we use this definition of depression, we're going to have to diagnose every grieving person in this country as depressed because these are the symptoms of grief, right? And they were like, oh, shit, that's not what we meant. So they created what was called the grief loophole or the grief exception, where it said, if someone they love died, then it's normal, but if it's not, then they're depressed. But that began to beg the question, well, why is someone you love dying the only situation in life where you're allowed to feel like, shit? What if you've lost your job? What if you're homeless? As Dr. Cassiatori put it to me, the minute you start asking those questions, you have to let context in. And this is not a system designed for context. This is a system based on a very different model. It's based on the model of tropical diseases. If you've got malaria, you go to the doctor, you don't want the doctors to go, what was your mother like? Tell me about your childhood.

• 33:41Speaker 04

  Don't give a shit. They give you a little test, they figure out if you've got malaria, they give you the treatment for malaria, right?

• 33:45Mayim Bialik?

  And you don't have malaria.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Exactly. There's a pathogen that you identify. It's a technique, malaria is a, you might think of it as a malfunction in your body that you can get rid of, right? Human pain is not a malfunction. Human pain is a signal. It's telling you something really, really important. It doesn't mean it's a good thing. It's terribly painful to experience it. It's agony. It's the worst thing I've ever experienced to be depressed, but it's telling you something really important. And if we treat it as a malfunction, I want to stress, this is not the intention of any of the doctors who do it at all, who are good people. But what you're saying to people unintentionally is, your pain is just a, like a bit of malfunction in code. It doesn't mean anything. It's not, think about when I was a kid, what I needed to be told by my doctor was, tell me about your life. Oh, wow.

• 34:31Speaker 04

  Your earliest memory is trying to wake up one of your relatives and not being able to because they were so severely addicted. Oh, well, you grew up in an environment where you were violently attacked throughout your childhood by adults. Oh, there's nothing wrong with you. There was something wrong with your environment and what you need is help to release the shame around that environment. But because I was told a very different story, again, with very good intentions, and I'm not saying the drugs didn't help me a little bit for a while, they did, along with the side effects. What that did is it gave me, and the way I came to think of it, is it gave me an inaccurate map of my pain. And if you don't have an accurate map, like we're sitting here in Studio City, if I didn't have, I mean, I've got Google Maps, actually, Uber took me here, but like, if that Uber

• 35:13Speaker 04

  driver didn't have a map of this city that was accurate, if she'd taken me to Santa Monica, you know, we wouldn't be having this conversation. And in a way, what I feel like is we're being given these maps that don't take us to the destination we need to get to. They may help, right? I don't have anything against chemical antidepressants. There are benefits and side effects, as with all complicated things. But telling people a purely biological story about their distress, that's, it isn't true. Every medical textbook will tell you that is not, there is, it is not correct to say that the causes of depression are purely biological, although your biology can contribute to it. But then crucially, it leads us to miss the bigger solutions, the cows that are, that are waiting for all of us, right?

• 35:53Mayim Bialik?

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• 37:23Mayim Bialik?

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• 37:29Jonathan Cohen?

  100% agree with you. We just released an episode on the biology of trauma, on how those experiences that you're talking about cause stress in the body over time when continued and for prolonged periods can cause quote unquote trauma, although that's a definitional phrase. And what we see is that those long extended periods of time actually impact a person on a cellular level, reducing their ability to produce basic energy, reducing their ability for their, uh, systems of their body to function properly, which then has an impact on their psychological state because they're not producing the fundamental energy that they need to exist and run the systems of their body.

• 38:11Jonathan Cohen?

  And, you know, medical doctors are telling this story differently, but very, very few because there's, are no tools to, to intervene and navigate this.

• 38:21Speaker 04

  But that's the second bit. So it was really important. You've told half of a really important story there, right? Untreated trauma can really fuck you, right? And a lot of depression and anxiety and indeed attention problems can be, um, the result of that untreated trauma. But so for a long time, I backed away from looking into this because I heard the bit that you just said, and I thought, oh, so it's just saying I'm fucked then, right? You're just broken. And what's really important is we do have tools to deal with the second part. There's a guy who made an incredible breakthrough about this, an absolute hero, one of the most amazing people I've ever met, actually. A man called Dr. Vincent Felitti. If it's okay, I'll just tell you the story, you've probably heard of him. He, um, he's famous for he discovered what called the adverse childhood experiences study.

• 39:01Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  So the, we, we, the story of how he discovered this, for a minute, when I tell it to you, for about two minutes, you're going to think, what the fuck is he talking about? This has nothing to do with what he just said. But it led to the breakthrough and I don't think you can understand it as well if you don't understand the story. So in the early 1980s, Kaiser Permanente, the big not-for-profit medical provider here in California, one of them, oh, uh, they, they, they had a problem, which is that obesity had, was really rapidly rising. It was actually incredibly low by today's standards, but it was rising. They would give people diet plans, they would even give people personal trainers sometimes. It just wasn't solving the problem. So they approached this guy, Dr. Vincent Felitti, and said to him, will you just do blue skies research and figure out what would actually reduce obesity? And he's like, okay. And he's like, shit, what can I do?

• 39:45Speaker 04

  So he started to work with 200 severely obese people, people who weighed more than 300 pounds, who tried everything. And he's like, well, what can I do? He had an idea that sounds and actually is kind of dumb. He said, what would happen if severely obese people literally stopped eating and we gave them like, you know, vitamin C shots that didn't get scurvy or whatever? Would they just burn through the fat supplies in their body and lose weight? So obviously with a shit ton of medical supervision, they tried it. And incredibly, at first, it worked. There's a woman who I'm going to call Susan, not her real name, who went from being, I think it was more than 350 pounds to 138 pounds. It was extraordinary. You know, her family were ringing Dr. Felitti saying, you saved her life.

• 40:27Speaker 04

  And then one day, something happened that no one expected. Susan cracked, she went to KFC, actually, I don't think it was KFC, it's me projecting, some fast food place, started overeating and quickly went back to her being overweight, not where she was, but a, and Dr. Felitti called her in and he said, Susan, what happened? And she looked down, felt really ashamed, said, I don't know. He said, well, tell me about the day you cracked. Anything in particular happen that day? Turned out something happened that day that had never happened to her. She was in a bar and a man hit on her, not in a nasty way, in a nice way. And she suddenly felt really freaked out and went and started eating.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  That was when Dr. Felitti said to her, a question he'd never thought to ask his patients. He said, Susan, when did you start to gain your weight? In her case, it was when she was 11. He said, well, did anything happen when you were 11 that didn't happen when you were nine or when you were 12? Anything in particular happen that year? And she looked down and she said very softly. Well, that's when my grandfather started to rape me. Dr. Felitti interviewed everyone in the programme. He discovered that 60% of the women in the programme had made their significant weight gain after being sexually abused or assaulted. And he was like, this is weird. What's going on? And Susan put it to him very well. She said, overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be. And he realised this thing that appeared so dysfunctional was performing

• 41:55Speaker 04

  a profoundly protective function for these women, right? Of course, people get sexually assaulted at any size, but you're more likely.

• 42:03Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and also you convince yourself psychologically that if I can't be, quote, attractive the way, you know, our society deems, that might be protective for me.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  Exactly. But the reason this led to this breakthrough with depression, addiction and the other questions was, so Dr. Felitti's had this result in this small group. He's like, but it's a small group. It seems like such an unusual finding that he went to the Centers for Disease Control and got funding to do a much bigger study, which led to this incredible breakthrough. So every single person who came to Kaiser Permanente in San Diego for a whole year, don't matter what for, broken legs, schizophrenia, anything, was given a questionnaire. And the first part said, did any of these bad things happen to you when you were a kid?

• 42:46Mayim Bialik?

  I'd be like, just fix my broken legs.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  Exactly. God damn it. Bring me the fucking morphine. And I had sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, that kind of thing. And the second part asked, initially was just going to ask about your weight, but luckily for us at the last minute, they added, you know, have you had an addiction problem? Suicide attempts, depression? And at first, when they added up the figures, they were like, this just can't be right. Do it all again. But they were correct. For every category of childhood trauma you experienced, you were two to four times more likely to be depressed, anxious or addicted. But when you got into the multiple categories, the figures just went wild. If you'd had six categories of childhood trauma, you were 3,100% more likely to have attempted suicide

• 43:31Speaker 04

  and 4,600% more likely to have an injecting drug problem, which is you very rarely get figures like that.

• 43:37Mayim Bialik?

  And Gabor Maté, you know, confirmed this in his, you know, in his extensive studies of addicts and realised most every addict had been, especially the women, had been sexually abused and grew up in abuse and addiction.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I spent a lot of time with Gabor on the downtown side of Vancouver. And what they discovered next, I think is really important. After the study was over, they had all these people who had indicated in a medical form that they'd experienced sexual abuse or neglect or whatever it was. So their doctors were told, don't call them in. But the next time they come in, say to them something like, I see when you were a child, you were sexually abused. I'm really sorry that happened to you. That should never have happened. Would you like to talk about it? And 40% of people said, I don't want to talk about it. But 60% of people did want to talk about it. And they wanted to talk about it on average for five minutes. And then it was randomly assigned. Some of them were told, you can come back and have to see a therapist.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  What's incredible is just those five minutes of an authority figure saying, that should never have happened to you. I'm so sorry. You should have been protected. That alone led to a significant decline in depression and anxiety.

• 44:45Mayim Bialik?

  Somebody cared.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  Exactly. Well, what this shows is it's partly about someone caring and it's partly about shame. What we know is, there's a brilliant scientist here in LA who did a lot of research. If you look at the AIDS crisis, closeted gay men died on average two years earlier than openly gay men, even when they got healthcare at the same stage of the disease, because shame fucks you. It's not the trauma that fucks you. It's the shame about the trauma. And giving people a way to release that shame is an antidepressant. It's a cow, right? The way I think of it is, anything that reduces depression should be regarded as an antidepressant. For some people, that would be chemical antidepressants, but there needs to be a much wider menu of options. Precisely because the causes are much wider than just in your biology, although there are some in your biology,

• 45:29Speaker 04

  the solutions need to be much wider. So one of them is releasing people from shame. But there's, I go through, you know, more than 20 in the book, ways we can do this. But it's about, you've got to honour the complexity of the problem and its causes in order to find the solution. What we've been doing is with often good intentions, telling people an insanely oversimplified story about their pain and their distress. And that has led us to trap people and prevent us from seeing these wider solutions that are all around us.

• 45:58Mayim Bialik?

  That really hits it right on the head. People want a simple story. They want one thing to be wrong that involves one medication to fix it. What is it about this nuance that we're not able to capture right now?

• 46:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's not the thought that when you're in pain, you want, you know, you want to pull a lever and make it stop, right? And they're absolutely right to want that. And that's what I wanted. And some people get relief from the drugs, some people don't. Sadly, over time, the only long-term study of chemical antidepressants shows most people taking them do become depressed again, but that's not everyone, right? So it's, when you're in pain, you want it just to stop, right? And any tool that makes it stop is fine by me. And people should seek out the solutions they can. But the problem with this simplistic story, so there's lots of reasons for this simplistic story. Obviously, one is Big Pharma. There are many good things that Big Pharma has done for us.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  I'm pro-drug across the whole category of many drugs. We live much longer lives because of the breakthroughs in scientific medicine, some of which, many of which come from Big Pharma. You know, it's a more than a billion dollar industry to drug people for depression. And obviously, they're invested in promoting the simplest possible story that means that people turn primarily to the drugs.

• 47:20Mayim Bialik?

  But here's my question. Do they know that they don't work? And they're still making those advertisements so that I watch them and say, I want that life. I want to run through the water. They're always running through the water. I want to run through the water. I want that drug. I mean, I know it's like, sounds like I'm a five-year-old asking it. But am I supposed to operate in the world with an understanding that there's an enormously, you know, profit-heavy portion of our existence that knows that things don't work or hides the adverse effects so that we will just buy them like candy?

• 47:52Speaker 04

  So with chemical antidepressants, it's not that they don't work. It's that they have a limited effect, right? So they're oversold, not that there's no effect. So there's lots of studies of this. For example, there's something, there's a way of measuring depression called the Hamilton scale. I've always felt really sorry for whoever the hell Hamilton was, that we only remember him by measuring how miserable we all are.

• 48:09Mayim Bialik?

  He's not Alexander Hamilton.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  It's definitely not.

• 48:11Mayim Bialik?

  He got a whole different story.

• 48:11Speaker 04

  Alexander Hamilton. We should do a Hamilton scale musical. Where just people on stage just hanging themselves slowly. But they are going to take their shot. Is that too distasteful?

• 48:21Mayim Bialik?

  Just do it. Wait. Just do it. Okay, sorry.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  We're going to, we're going to improv Hamilton scale musical at the end of this episode.

• 48:27Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, go ahead. Sorry.

• 48:28Speaker 04

  But the Hamilton scale, so it goes from one to 51. I think one is where you are suicidal and 51 is where you're dancing around in ecstasy. Maybe on ecstasy, whatever it is, right? So to give you a sense of movement on the Hamilton scale, if you improve your sleep patterns, you generally will move six points up the Hamilton scale. On average, when you take chemical antidepressants, you move up two points on the Hamilton scale. Right? So it's about a third of improving your sleep. Now, it's important to say that's an average. For some people, it's much more. For some people, it's less. For me, initially, it was much more than it was less. So that gives you a sense, though, that saying to people, this is the answer, the solution. Most people, it will help a little bit at first.

• 49:12Speaker 04

  Some people, it will massively help. But some people, it will help a little bit. But some people, it doesn't help and indeed harms. But the, telling people that's the answer, that's all you need to know, this is the end of the story. Now, do they know this? It's very interesting. That story, I was told by my doctor, that depression is just caused by a lack of a chemical called serotonin. That was never a scientific theory. That's a story that was invented by the PR departments of the drug companies, right? There isn't even any evidence that people with depression have lower serotonin than everyone else.

• 49:42Mayim Bialik?

  That's right. That's the, I was just reading.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  Which is like a complete head fuck, right? And one of the things I find slightly gaslighty is a lot of the doctors who said that before, a lot of the people who promoted that theory now go, oh, we never said that, right? Even though polling shows most people still believe that, that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin.

• 49:58Mayim Bialik?

  You don't have enough serotonin, so we'll give you this drug and then you'll have enough.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  And again, stressing, there's real value in the drugs for some people, anyone who's taking these drugs.

• 50:06Mayim Bialik?

  There's also real value in placebo.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure, sure. And some element of this is placebo and some of it may be beyond that. And I believe it's more effective than a pure placebo, although that may be because people figure out that they're not on a placebo. And anyone who's taking these drugs, if they're helping with your depression, my advice is to carry on taking them. If they're not helping, absolutely do not stop abruptly. You can have terrible withdrawal. Go to your doctor, discuss it very carefully with your doctor, you know, do not just stop, right? If you're listening to us and think, oh, well, it's not working for us, it can be really quite dangerous to just abruptly stop. So go and have a conversation with your doctor. But what we need to do, a lot of people were listening and going, okay, I get all of this, but I don't have any better options on the table. So what we need to do is help people to put better options on the table.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  To give you an example of an amazing additional option that to me was really transformative. So one of the heroes of my book about this, Lost Connections, is an amazing doctor called Sam Everington. And Sam is a doctor in a poor part of East London where I lived for a long time. Though sadly, he never got to be my doctor. And Sam had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety. And like me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants, but he could see that most of the people he gave the chemical antidepressants to. Took the edge off, but they were still pretty depressed. So one day he began to pioneer a different approach now spreading all over Europe. A woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham, who I also got to know,

• 51:33Speaker 04

  who'd been shot away with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years. And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs. But I'm also going to prescribe something else. I'm going to prescribe for you to come here to the doctor's offices a couple of times a week to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people, not to talk about how you feel. Do that if you want, but that's not the point of it. I want you guys to meet and find something meaningful to do together. The first time the group met, Lisa literally started vomiting with anxiety because she was so overwhelmed being around people. But the group started, people rubbed her back, the group started talking. They were like, what could we do? There was an area behind the doctor's offices that was known as dog alley. It was where dogs were going. They were like, hey, we could turn dog alley into a garden, right?

• 52:18Speaker 04

  But these are inner city, East London people like me, they knew nothing about gardening. So they start to watch clips on YouTube, they started to go and get books out of the library. They started to get their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. And, you know, there's a lot of evidence that exposure to nature is a really powerful antidepressant. But they started to do something even more important. They started to form a tribe, they started to form a group, they started to care about each other. If one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking for them, be like, hey, are you okay? Do you need some help? The way Lisa put it to me was as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom. There was a small study in Norway of a very similar program, found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants in reducing depression and anxiety.

• 53:03Speaker 04

  For me, this approach is called social prescribing, right? It's where we are the loneliest society in human history. Forty-two percent of Americans agree with this statement. No one knows me well, and that was before the pandemic, right? One of the first things that should happen when you come and you explain that you're depressed is, oh, are you lonely? You're lonely? Great, we got a, we got a prescription for that.

• 53:28Mayim Bialik?

  We've got a lonely hearts club.

• 53:29Speaker 04

  Exactly, we've got a prescription for that, right? And then we should go down the list of the other nine factors that have been proven scientifically to contribute to depression and anxiety, the other eight, sorry, that's one of the nine. We go down that list, we have to have a broad menu of options, right? But this should be the first step. It costs nothing to prescribe people to a gardening program, it's free.

• 53:49Jonathan Cohen?

  It costs nothing, the incentive structure doesn't provide options for that because it's not profitable. So the people who are supposedly in charge of the forefront of the most advanced medical system in the world are failing because it doesn't pay them to send people to a community group, to a walking group, to going out in nature, you know, as much, whatever you say about Canadians, they prescribe.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll give them that.

• 54:19Jonathan Cohen?

  They'll give a prescription to go out in nature. Now, it would be much better if they went out in nature in a group, on a hiking group. As you, as you say, because these studies exist, yet they have failed to be implemented into the larger healthcare system. So what is the incentive? To keep people sick or to find the best possible treatment? Whether that be in a pharma option or in a combination of both where you're getting a social connection? And this is where it begins to be hard to not see that there is a incentive in keeping people sick.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  So it's a failure at two levels. You're right that there's a failure in the medical system, but that failure is happening because of a failure at a higher level, which is a failure of the political system, right? The political system is bought and owned by the health insurance companies. Literally, you know, you look at the first day of the Obamacare negotiations is both parties. They're literally funding the Republican and Democratic side, the same, the same sides because they want the politicians to work for them, right? So this is a system built entirely around profit and entirely around these dysfunctional incentives. Where, yeah, a better solution that doesn't cost anything will not be considered compared to a worse solution that makes profit, right? So I say that's the overarching system. And you know, the answer to that is a political solution. Don't tolerate it, right?

• 55:40Speaker 04

  I completely agree with Bernie Sanders and that part, I don't agree with him on everything, but I absolutely, this is a hundred percent right. That I'm constantly amazed that Americans don't burn down the system of healthcare in this country. It is an outrage. So obviously I live half the year in Britain, half the year in this country. Even think about, we were mentioning Ozempic. When I buy the Ozempic in, in London, it's like a hundred and fifty pounds a month. So that's about, what, about $200? Here it's $800, right? You are constantly being ripped off. So unbelievably rich people can be even richer. It's why you get this, I was, I was very disturbed by the rage around Luigi Mangione because the support for him I found very frightening. In a democracy, we do not murder our, the people, our political opponents,

• 56:24Speaker 04

  and we do not celebrate murder. And it's awful and appalling, and that was still a human being. But it's a symptom of the crisis of democracy that everyone is being fucked over. And in a functional democracy, the democracy offers the solution, right? The democracy goes, you are being fucked over. And this is happening with depression, it's happening with attention problems, it's happening with fucking giving insulin to diabetics, it's happening across the board, right? You have to go, okay, the answer to that is a democratic solution where politicians compete to offer better solutions. But if they're all bought and owned by the, by the pharma companies and by the healthcare companies, that they have a lock on the political system. And the way you break that is you just, you elect politicians who will challenge that break on the lock, right?

• 57:08Jonathan Cohen?

  Because how many times are we going to have a study that proves that five minutes with a doctor can change the course of someone's life? How many studies do we need to prove again, oh, it's in Norway, oh, it's in Sweden, oh, they're showing here and here, but it just stays in these little pockets and people hear about them on podcasts and they then don't really go anywhere. It's maddening.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  With all of those, there are very powerful vested interests who benefit from the system being as it is and all of us getting sicker. It's not that they want us to be sick, that that's going too far. It's just that they profit from our sickness and therefore the system is built around it. And, and it can feel overwhelming, you can hear that. I can sense people hearing what you just said and going, we're never going to challenge that. And when I hear that, I think about two things. I think about a friend of mine who I just spent a load of time with called Andrew Sullivan, a lot of your listeners and viewers will know his work. He's an amazing writer. So in 1993, Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive at the height of the AIDS crisis.

• 58:11Speaker 04

  He'd just watched his best friend Patrick die. As far as he was concerned, there was no hope in sight. He thought, well, I've got a few years to live, what am I going to do? So he quit his job, he was the editor of The New Republic, and he went to Provincetown in Cape Cod to do one last thing before he died. He decided to write a book about a crazy, wild, utopian idea that nobody had ever written a book about before. And he's like, well, I'll never live to see this idea put into place. No one alive today will ever live to see it, but maybe somewhere down the line, someone's going to find my book and find this idea. The idea that he wrote the first ever book about was gay marriage. And when I get depressed, I try to imagine going back in time to, to, to that year

• 58:54Speaker 04

  when Andrew's writing Virtually Normal, that book. Saying to him, okay, you're not going to believe me, but 23 years, I think it is from now, A, you'll be alive, that would have fucking blown his mind. B, you'll be married to a really hot man because that'll be legal. And I'll be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States quotes this book, when it makes it mandatory for every state in this country to introduce gay marriage rights. And the next day, you'll be invited to our White House lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you and so many other people have achieved. And to have dinner with the president, oh, and by the way, that president, he's going to be black, right? That would have sounded like the most absurd science fiction, right? It happened. Why did it happen? It happened because gay people went and blew anything up?

• 59:39Speaker 04

  It didn't happen because we raged at people or cancelled them? It happened because we appealed to people in a spirit of love and lots of very brave gay people spoke out and lots of very brave, straight people opened their hearts and sided with us. And, you know, you think about how unlikely that is. You've got 2,000 years of gay people being imprisoned, burned, murdered. And in the space of a very short period of time, I don't want to underestimate, we've still got challenges, but that comes crashing down, right? To the point where even current, really right wing Republicans are not trying to reverse, give the gay marriage ruling, right? I think a lot about my grandmothers, I really love my grandmothers. I was raised by one of my grandmothers because the addiction in my family.

• 1:00:21Speaker 04

  And I'm 46. When I was 46 years old, I think about my grandmother's life. So one of them was a Swiss peasant woman living in a wooden hut on the side of a mountain. And the other one was a working class Scottish woman living in really tough circumstances. Her husband had just died, which is the age I am now.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  I think about what their lives were like. Legally, they were not allowed to have bank accounts in their own names, right? It was, it, it was legal for them to be raped by their husbands, as it was legal in every country in the world for a man to rape his wife. My Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote, right? My grandmother's lives were permanently disfigured by that misogyny, right? My grandmother, my Swiss grandmother, she loved to paint and draw. And she was told to shut the [bleep] up and get into the kitchen, right? And by the time I knew her, she, she broke her heart to draw because it made her think about the life she could have had, right?

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  Now, even the most crazy, way out misogynist is not saying women shouldn't be allowed to have bank accounts and it should be legal to rape them. I mean, maybe there's someone out there, we're probably getting there, but like, no one in, you know, if any Republican congressman said such a thing, they would have to resign, right? How did that happen? You've got, again, thousands of years where men controlled essentially every institution of power. And then groups of women just said, we're not [bleep] taking it anymore. No, you can't do that to us, right? And it took an enormous fight, and obviously we, this fight continues, and I'm very conscious that I'm a man looking at you mansplaining this, which is extremely irritating.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  But, so, in not, however powerful the healthcare companies are, and they are really powerful, they are not a tenth as powerful as men were in the year my grandmothers were my age. They're not a tenth as powerful as homophobia was for the whole of [bleep] human civilization, pretty much, right? Hugely powerful concentrated interests can be taken down when enough people challenge them. And we've got to level with people about how big the challenge is. The factors causing depression and anxiety and our attention problems are really [bleep] big. Let's be honest with people. It's not a matter of do five minutes on a meditation app or just swallow one pill, although pills can help, meditation helps, apps can help. There are really big things, but we need to listen to the signal and honour the signal

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  that we're being told and, and act on it, even if that requires us to do big things.

• 1:02:51Mayim Bialik?

  The more people I know with young children in schools, the more I'm hearing about conversations about ADD and ADHD. My kids were home schooled, and I would say if you took all the homeschoolers in our community, I'm sure all of them would meet a diagnosis, you know, by standardised school, you know, measures. In many cases, in many cities, schools are essentially maximising the number of young people who are on medication for ADD. And it makes for a more efficient school day, it makes for class management. In many cases, you know, the statistics of boys and female teachers is not one to be

• 1:03:33Mayim Bialik?

  ignored, meaning the, the distribution of men versus women who are in boys' lives has really shifted in the last, I don't know, half century or so. People medicating their kids for days when it's important, but they can be themselves on the weekend and all summer. But that fundamentally, to fit into this society, young people in particular are being encouraged, and parents are being encouraged to medicate children, and in many cases, adults are saying, oh, I have it too. I can be much more productive if I'm on Adderall. What is going on?

• 1:04:10Speaker 04

  So the reason I wrote my book Stolen Focus about this is that I could feel my own attention was getting worse, right? With every year that passed, things that required deep focus that are so important to me, reading books, watching movies, having long conversations, were just getting harder. It was like trying to run up a down escalator. Do you know what I mean? I could still do it, but like, it was getting harder. And I could see that happening to pretty much everyone around me, and I was particularly worried about the young people in my life. And I had this real epiphany about this. I've got a godson, and when, when he was a little boy, when he was nine, he developed this brief and unbelievably cute obsession with Elvis Presley.

• 1:04:52Speaker 04

  And the reason it was so adorable is that he seemed to genuinely not know that impersonating Elvis was a kind of cheesy cliche. So I think he was the last person ever to do a totally sincere version of Joe Houserock. It was super [bleep] cute. And every night when I would tuck him into bed, I would tell him the story of Elvis's life over and over again. Obviously, I skipped the bit where he [bleep] himself to death on the toilet. And, and one day I mentioned Graceland where he lived, that people go and live, people go and visit Graceland, and his whole face lit up. And he said, "Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?" And I was like, "Yeah, definitely, the way you do with nine-year-olds, because next week he'll want to go to like the North Pole or something." He's like, "No, do you really swear one day you'll take me to Graceland?" And I said, "I absolutely promise."

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years until just so many things had gone wrong. So when he was 15, he dropped out of school. And by the time he was 19, this will sound like an exaggeration, I promise you it's not, he spent literally almost all his waking hours alternating between his iPad, his iPhone, and his laptop. And his life was just this blur of WhatsApp, Snapchat, porn. And it was like he was kind of spinning at the speed of Snapchat. Do you know what I mean? Like, and I remember one day I was sitting on my sofa with him in London, and all day I was trying to get a conversation going, and he was really clever, trying to get a conversation going with him, and I just couldn't. He, he was just...

• 1:06:19Speaker 04

  And to be totally honest with you, I wasn't much better, right? I was staring at my own devices. And I suddenly remembered this moment all these years before, and I said, "Hey, let's go to Graceland." And he looked at me completely blankly, he's like, "What are you talking about?" He didn't remember this Elvis obsession, so I reminded him. And I said, "We can't live like this, this is no way to live. Let's go on a road trip all over the South." But, I thought ahead, you've got to leave your phone in the hotel during the day if we're going to go, because there's no point in us going if you're going to look at your phone the whole time. And he wasn't happy living like this, he's like, "Let's do it." And I think it was literally two weeks, maybe three weeks later, we took off, we went to New Orleans first. And a couple of weeks later, we got to the gates of Graceland. Have you been there?

• 1:07:01Speaker 04

  So it's really worth going, but when you get there, this is even, this was before Covid, now, there's no human being to show you around Graceland. What happens? You arrive, they hand you an iPad, you put in earbuds, and the iPad shows you around. It says, you know, go left, go right. Every room you go in, there's an image of that room on the iPad in front of you, and it tells you a story about it. So we're walking around Graceland, and everyone is just staring at the iPad, and I'm getting a little bit tense, like, "Come on, everyone, you know, you've travelled a long way to be here, look at it." And we got to the jungle room, that was Elvis's favourite room, it's got loads of fake plants in it, they kept it just how it was. And I'll never forget, then there was this middle-aged Canadian couple next to us. And the guy turned to his wife and said, "Honey, this is amazing.

• 1:07:46Speaker 04

  Look, if you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left, and if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right." And I laughed because I thought they were kidding, and I, I watched them, and they were just swiping back and forward.

• 1:07:56Mayim Bialik?

  You could just turn your head.

• 1:07:57Speaker 04

  Well, this is what, I leaned forward and said, "But sir, there's an old-fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning your neck, because you realise we're in the jungle room, you, you don't have to look at it on the internet, it's, it's literally around us in three dimensions." And they looked at me like I was inside or backed out of the room. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it, and he was standing in the corner staring at Snapchat, because from the moment we landed, he just could not stop. He couldn't stop. And I went up to him, I tried to grab the phone out of his hands, never a good idea with teenagers. And I said to him, "Look, I know you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out. You're not present at your own life, you're not showing up in your own existence."

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  And understandably, he stormed off, and I walked around Memphis on my own that day. And I found him that night by the big, we were staying at the Heartbreak Hotel, and he was by this huge guitar-shaped swimming pool, looking at his phone. And I went up to him and I apologised for getting so angry. And he didn't look up, but he said, "I know something's really wrong, and I don't know what it is." And that's when I thought, "Oh, [bleep], we came away to get away from this problem of distraction, but there's nowhere to escape to. It's everywhere, right? It's the air we all breathe." And that's why I went on this big journey for Stolen Focus, where I interviewed, you know, hundreds of the leading experts all over the world on attention. And what I learned is the scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse, and loads of the factors that can harm your attention have been hugely rising in recent years.

• 1:09:24Speaker 04

  Your attention did not collapse, your attention has been stolen from you by really big and powerful forces. And again, we're being told this oversimplified story, which is, "Oh, it's just a biological malfunction." What an, and there is a biological contribution for some people that we can unpack, but what an amazing coincidence that this biological malfunction happens to have blown up at the same time that we're all exposed to technologies that are designed by geniuses to hack and frack our attention. At the same time, we're all exposed to chemicals in our food that have been proven to harm attention. At the same time, go down the list, these 12 factors. We, we've got to understand this in this wider context, rather than just sort of seeing it again as a sort of technical malfunction. You know, even just, I think about one that you said about dads, right?

• 1:10:09Speaker 04

  I interviewed a wonderful man called Dr Sammy Tameemi. He's a doctor in Britain, and he took over a doctor's practice. He noticed about, if I remember rightly, the figures are in the book, about 60 of the kids were being given stimulants for attention problems.

• 1:10:25Speaker 04

  And he said, well, this is a very serious drug. We don't actually know the long term effects of giving children stimulants. There's no long term research on giving these kids, giving these kids these drugs in the long term, which is a staggering fact. He thought, I should, I should do due diligence. I should bring these kids in, see what's going on with them. And he noticed, for example, lots of them, again, he asked that question, Dr. Fleety asked lots of them, he would say, when did your attention problems begin? Lots of them, it's when their dads left the home. But this is interesting. What's, what's going on there? So he decided to phone their dads and say, hi, I'm your son's doctor. And your son really misses you. He's been having a lot of attention, can't really focus when you're not around. Would you be able to come and see him once a week? The dads started getting involved, not

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  all of them, but a lot of them started getting involved again. As the dads got involved again, he found he could take the kids gradually off this medication. Their attention problems did not recur. Now, that's not happening with every kid. There's lots of things that can cause these problems. But again, it helps you to see, when you expand your understanding of what causes the problem, you can expand your sense of what the solutions are in a way that actually serves particularly, we're talking about children here, right? Particularly serves children better. So we've got to understand what's really happening to us. It is not a coincidence that we're all struggling to focus at the same time. That is not a coincidence. I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing the people who designed the stuff that does this to us. But a lot of time speaking to food scientists. You can go down the list.

• 1:11:53Speaker 04

  Look how our schools work. I went to an Amish community called Alcart La Grange. Amazingly, Amish kids don't get ADHD. The phenomenon does not exist.

• 1:12:02Jonathan Cohen?

  Fascinating.

• 1:12:02Speaker 04

  Right? Go and talk to them. Why is that? They would say, well, we have some kids who don't like to sit still. They're the ones who help us hunt and fish and run around. We love those kids, right? We are the first human society ever to try to get children to sit still for eight hours a day. No one's ever tried to do that before because it's such a fucking dumb idea, right? Amazingly, when you, and it's even, you said, you know, we're giving these kids these drugs to improve how they're doing. You know, I know you were sort of paraphrasing how other people speak. Amazingly, and there's lots of research on this, it doesn't even improve their test scores to give them these stimulant drugs.

• 1:12:35Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, I don't even think, yeah. To me, it's about class management. It's about behaviour management. I mean, look, I taught sixth grade Hebrew school when I was in college, and most of my job was behaviour management. And I enjoyed, I enjoyed it very much. I mean, I enjoyed being a teacher. I enjoyed the material. And it was at a very lovely synagogue. But I could tell what was going on in the homes of the kids who had the most trouble focusing. Many came, many came from very, very wealthy families. They weren't getting a lot of attention.

• 1:13:04Speaker 04

  This will sound ridiculous and crazy. You, you won't believe me, but if you look this up, it is really happening. Maybe you will believe me because you live in LA, so you will see it. And there's been an explosion in pets being diagnosed with ADHD.

• 1:13:17Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:17Speaker 04

  So I went to interview the guy who pioneered this, a guy called Professor Nicholas Dodman. Actually, perfectly nice man. And it was so interesting.

• 1:13:27Mayim Bialik?

  Do you like how easily I was like, oh, yeah, I've heard of this. I live in LA and know people.

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're literally feeding Ritalin to your dog right now.

• 1:13:33Mayim Bialik?

  No.

• 1:13:34Jonathan Cohen?

  Are pets supposed to focus?

• 1:13:36Speaker 04

  Well.

• 1:13:36Mayim Bialik?

  This is, well, it's kind of like saying, you know, pets can experience depression. They can experience anxiety, you know, very, I mean, birds are very, very smart. I had one for 12 years. They will pluck their feathers out. They will self mutilate if they're upset. When an animal's depressed, I mean, my, my cat, I came home, I was away for the weekend seeing you. Every single meal was vomited up. Every meal, all over the house. Anxious stomach. My cat has an anxious stomach. And he's very jittery and he's very, like, that's an anxious animal. So.

• 1:14:07Jonathan Cohen?

  But that's different than focusing on his mouth, huh?

• 1:14:09Mayim Bialik?

  No, but, but we're on a spectrum, we're on a spectrum of conversation about chemicals and chemistry. And yeah, you would be able to tell the difference between a dog who cannot, let's say, sit still to focus on eating, to focus on cuddling, like, that has anxious energy, that's always moving, like me.

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  Exactly. But what was so fascinating, right? So exactly as you say, before I went to interview him, I thought he would say, he would give an explanation for sort of animal ADHD that was like the kind of explanation you would get from a doctor about your child. There's something biologically wrong here. We need, and the drug is a biological solution to a biological problem, which is what most parents are basically told, right? To huge his credit, he didn't say that. He described, for example, dogs are meant to run for about six hours a day. Dogs are pack animals. They're not meant to be on their own. But most pet dogs get a tiny fraction of that, walking every day, and they're left alone for a lot of the day.

• 1:15:01Mayim Bialik?

  And usually while they're being walked, this is one of my pet peeves, their owner's on the phone. They're not even giving them attention while they're walking their dog.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:15:09Mayim Bialik?

  Really bothers me.

• 1:15:10Speaker 04

  So the dogs act up, right? Because they have unmet needs and they're acting up. And he said, and I said, so when you give them Ritalin, does that solve the problem? He said, no, of course not. It just makes them more manageable, right?

• 1:15:23Mayim Bialik?

  It's the same thing with humans. You've just described the problem with humans.

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  Exactly. The analogy.

• 1:15:27Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, if you believe your own book. You've just described the problem with humans.

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  Well, I was so struck with that. And I remember, he would describe times when there were dogs with ADHD who would chase their own tails obsessively, running around. And then they were, because they lived in tiny apartments, and then they were sent to live on a farm. And amazingly enough, their ADHD disappeared, right? Now, it's important to stress again, there is some biological spectrum with attention. There are some people who biologically are less inclined to pay attention. By the way, those people are hugely fucking valuable. We want them in the human tribe. We need them. But the environment we're living in is driving all of us to struggle much more with attention and focus. Think about the obvious one, which everyone will be thinking about, which is technology, right? One of the things that most struck me, so I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley. And

• 1:16:11Speaker 04

  when I spoke to the people who invented this world we live in, the thing that most struck me is how sick with guilt they feel about what they've done. They know what they've done, right? Give you an example, there's an amazing guy called James William. So James worked at the heart of Google, was very uncomfortable with a lot of what was going on. And one day, he was speaking to an audience of tech designers who literally are the people who design the stuff your kids are using today. And he said to them, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, please put up your hand. And nobody put up their hand. And he's like, I can't do this anymore. And he quit and became this really important philosopher of attention at Oxford University. But the people who

• 1:16:53Speaker 04

  designed this machinery kept explaining to me why it's having this effect on us and how we can fix it, right? So they explained, if you, now, if you open TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, which I refuse to call X, Instagram, whatever, right? And you begin to scroll, they make money out of you immediately in these two ways. The first way is really obvious. You see advertising. Okay, we all know how that works. The second way is much more important. Everything you ever do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and what makes you tick. What makes you happy? What makes you angry? What makes you horny? What makes you sad? And it knows, if you've been using them for a while, it knows.

• 1:17:37Mayim Bialik?

  For me, they're all the same thing.

• 1:17:38Speaker 04

  And it's his beard. The, you know, it knows far more about this, about you than your neighbours, because your neighbours aren't reading your so-called private messages at 3am, right? It knows a huge amount. So let's say you've ever indicated on any of these apps that you like, I don't know, Bette Midler, Donald Trump, and you've told that you just bought some nappies, right? Diapers. Okay, so it's going to figure out, if you like Bette Midler and you're a man, you're probably gay. No disrespect to any straight men who like Bette Midler. I don't actually believe you, but okay. You like Donald Trump, you're probably conservative or right wing. And you just bought some diapers, you've got a baby, right? It knows all this stuff about you, right? And, and it's learning

• 1:18:18Speaker 04

  that for lots of reasons, but the most important is to figure out what to show you next to keep you scrolling. Because every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money, because you see ads. The longer you scroll, the more money they make. Every time your kid opens the app and begins to scroll, they begin to make money. The longer your kid scrolls, the more money they make. Every time you or your kid close the app, their revenue stream disappears. That's a disaster for them. So all this genius in AI, or this Silicon Valley genius with the algorithms and the AI, is geared towards one thing and one thing only, figuring out how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. That's it. That's all they care about. Head

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  of KFC, I'm sure is a very nice person, but all he or she cares about is how often did you go to KFC this week and how big was the bucket you bought? And if you become obese and get diabetes, that's not their problem. In exactly the same way, all these companies care about is how much of your attention are we monopolizing? The more, the better. It is a machinery, as my friend Tristan Harris puts it, designed to frack and hack your attention. Not because they're evil Bond villains. They're not. Purely and simply because of this incentive structure, the longer you scroll, the more money they make, right?

• 1:19:33Mayim Bialik?

  So then when you talk about content, you get to layer on this other level of our favourite word, shame. If you layer content with body positivity challenges, right? If you layer that algorithm, right? Especially for young people, for young women, with all of these other components, you then get a shame generator.

• 1:19:56Speaker 04

  And the reason that's so important, I'm so glad you said that, because there's an even deeper dynamic to this, which is catastrophic at both an individual and a societal level, which is actually the biggest reason why we need to act on this. So the way I put it is, picture two teenage girls go to the same party and go home on the same bus. And they both open TikTok. And one of them does a video going, we had such a great night. We danced to Taylor Swift, loved it. The algorithm is constantly scanning for the kind of words you use. It's going to put that video into a few people's feeds. Okay, now imagine the other girl opens it and goes, Karen was a fucking skank at that party. I don't know if teenagers still stay skank. If they don't, they absolutely should.

• 1:20:36Mayim Bialik?

  They have other words that don't.

• 1:20:37Speaker 04

  We need to rehabilitate the word skank, but Karen was a fucking skank at that party. Her boyfriend's a prick, just angrily denounces everyone, right? It'll put that video into far more people's feeds for a very simple reason. There's a quirk of human psychology, which you know about called negativity bias, right? Human beings evolved to stare longer at things that make us angry and upset than we did at things that make us feel good. If you ever saw a car crash on the highway, you know what I mean? You stared longer at the mangled car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. This is very deep in human nature. Ten week old babies stare longer at angry faces than smiling faces. And, you know, you can see why we would have evolved like that. Our ancestors who didn't look out for the angry face got eaten, right? I mean, it's a slightly crude way of putting it, but you know what I mean, right?

• 1:21:21Speaker 04

  So that's always been part of our psychology. But when it combines with technologies that intimately learn your wants and likes and angers and hatreds, it has a catastrophic effect, right? It's one of the things that's supercharging antisemitism at the moment because rage-based content, but it's supercharging anti-democratic forces across the world, right? Imagine a culture, think about TikTok. The nice girl is muffled, the nasty girl is given, is supercharged, right? Now imagine that happening to a whole country where the nice people, the decent people, the people who don't hate each other, want to find ways forward, want to find empathy,

• 1:22:03Speaker 04

  they're muffled and the meanest, angriest, most hateful people are pushed to the front and dominate the conversation, except you don't have to imagine that because we see in countries as different as the United States, Britain, Burma, Brazil, attention is being fucked across the board by these forces, but democracy is how we pay attention together. You cannot have democracy in an environment where people are constantly being primed for hours every day to nihilistically hate their fellow citizens. So we need to deal with these underlying forces and I can talk about how, absolutely urgently for our kids, because they're really struggling, for us, because we're struggling, for our work, because our work is struggling, and for our democracies.

• 1:22:44Jonathan Cohen?

  This is where it does feel like there is ill intent. Because there is research and there has been, it's been revealed that there were studies at these large platforms that knew that they were causing increase in suicidality, increase in bodily harm, especially amongst young women, increase in depression. And yet they chose to continue to make them as sticky and as intense to drive attention as possible. So yes, do they have a requirement to their bottom line? Okay, but at what cost? And is, is there no safeguards? You, I don't think you can regulate safeguards into these organizations.

• 1:23:28Jonathan Cohen?

  They, they should be held responsible in the court of public opinion as well.

• 1:23:33Speaker 04

  Picture a factory that's pumping pollution into a river and downstream, it's giving people cancer, right? Does the factory want to give people cancer? Obviously not, they're not psychopaths. But once they know they're doing it, do they bear moral responsibility? Or even before they do it, if there was a risk that happened, do they bear moral responsibility? Absolutely. So absolutely people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have moral responsibility for this. Did they want to create a machinery that supercharges anti-democratic forces and antisemitism? Of course, Mark Zuckerberg's own family fled genocidal antisemitism and he is the individual in the world now who is most responsible for supercharging genocidal antisemitism. Is that his intention? Of course not. But is he knowingly doing it now? Yes. And you look at a guy called like Guillaume Chasselot.

• 1:24:18Speaker 04

  So Guillaume Chasselot is, he worked at YouTube for a long time and he was the person who blew the whistle that basically because the recommend, YouTube recommendation videos, you watch a video about, a documentary about the Holocaust, it's a factual and accurate documentary about the Holocaust. It wants to recommend other videos, but it wants to keep you engaged. So it'll recommend escalating the angry videos. So he showed from the inside that it created a chain where if you watched a factual documentary about the Holocaust within a chain of six videos, it would always lead you to Holocaust denial, right? Now, to be fair to YouTube, they have, they have changed that.

• 1:25:00Mayim Bialik?

  You're gonna say, to be fair to Holocaust deniers.

• 1:25:01Speaker 04

  To be fair to the Holocaust, you know, wow. But the, so you see that once they know that's happening, it's not why they set up that mechanism, of course not. But once they know it's happening, absolutely there's a moral responsibility. But the primary responsibility, look, these companies are never going to regulate themselves, right? That's not how capitalism works, right? Companies don't voluntarily restrain themselves from making more money. What absolutely can be done within capitalism is democratic regulation. And there's an example from our lifetimes where every single person watching and listening has a better attention span because of something that happened in our lives, right? So when we were kids, the only kind of gasoline you could get in this country was leaded gasoline, right?

• 1:25:45Speaker 04

  And it was discovered that exposure to lead fucks your brain and particularly harms children's ability to focus and pay attention. So what happened was a group of ordinary moms, what at the time were called housewives, banded together and said, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing the lead industry to fuck up our kids' brains? It's important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, so let's get rid of cars, let's, you know, go back.

• 1:26:10Mayim Bialik?

  Let's burn down the gas station.

• 1:26:11Speaker 04

  Exactly. Let's all go back and join the, let's all convert to the Amish. No disrespect to any Amish you're watching, you are kind of cheating if you are, but they didn't say that. They said, let's replace this thing that is harming our kids with something that does the same job, but isn't going to harm our kids. And these mothers, this is forgotten now, they fought like hell for their children and all of us. And it followed the classic pattern of all successful political movements that was described by Mahatma Gandhi. First they ignored them, then they laughed at them, then they fought them, then they won, as we all know, no more leaded gasoline in the world. As a result, the CDC has calculated, the average American child is five IQ points higher than they would have been. Now, to me, that's a really important model. In my book, Stolen Focus, I go through loads of things we can do at an individual level

• 1:26:57Speaker 04

  to improve your own attention and our kids' attention. And I'm passionately in favor of those individual changes, but we also need to deal with it at a collective level. This attention crisis didn't happen because you had bad habits or your kids have bad habits. It happened because extremely large and powerful forces are benefiting from making our attention worse and we need to take on those forces like we took on the lead industry. We need to regulate them.

• 1:27:21Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I thought also, you know, when we were kids, they literally used a cartoon camel to sell cigarettes. Like that seemed like a, a normal way to advertise cancer sticks. And when it came out that Philip Morris and the cigarette industry, they knew, they were adding things to make cigarettes burn faster, so you smoke more. They were adding addictive components so that it was even more addictive than tobacco naturally would be because of its nicotine content. There's a lot of conversation now, in particular regarding things that many in the holistic community, like, you know, wacky homeschool people, home birth people like me, have been talking about for a long time.

• 1:28:04Mayim Bialik?

  And I wonder if you can touch on it because it's entered conversations about politics because RFK Junior, who in many cases, I think does a lot of lunatic things.

• 1:28:18Mayim Bialik?

  In other cases, he talks about certain aspects, for example, of food dyes, of additives and preservatives that most of the Western world does not use in food because they are known to be bad for the brain. These things have become so politicized. How do we have conversations around things like food dyes, additives, preservatives, without it becoming, oh, well, that's a political issue and that's the conservatives trying to take our red M and M's away or whatever? Because many people do report significant behavioral changes when dietary changes are made and many of them revolve things that are now being kind of politicized. Where does that fit into the conversation? To me, that's such low hanging fruit.

• 1:29:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're totally right. You have to start, what's the thing my mona di said? Speak the truth, whoever listens. You know, like you just have to start from, we cannot give into this insane tribalism that is consuming the country and the world, partly because of these factors that we're talking about. We just have to start from, okay, what's actually true here? And the evidence is overwhelming that the kind of foods that American kids are fed is disastrous across the board, but is having a really negative effect on their attention. For example, in Britain, in 2009, there was a study called the Southampton Study. Pretty simple study, I write about it in Stolen Focus. They got 191 kids and they split them into two groups.

• 1:29:46Speaker 04

  The first group was just given water to drink and the second group was given water laced with the kind of additives that kids are being exposed to the whole time. Then they monitored the kids. The kids that were given the additives were significantly more likely to be hyperactive and struggle with focus, right? And that's just a very low exposure. So this is why the EU subsequently banned a lot of these dyes, but obviously we haven't hit. If everyone wants to do an interesting experiment, next time you go to Europe, before you leave at the airport, buy some M&Ms. And then when you land in the airport, buy some M&Ms and open them next to each other. You'll notice the American and European M&Ms don't look like each other. The American ones [bleep] glow, right? Whereas the European ones look kind of dull and, you know, because

• 1:30:28Speaker 04

  they don't have these crazy dyes in them. So I don't care if, you know, who wants to articulate that truth. Obviously, I disagree, I'm sure you can guess, very strongly with RFK Junior on many things. But if he wants to take on the food dye, those companies, all credit to him and we should all entirely support that aspect of his agenda while opposing those. I don't, to be quite frank, I don't actually believe he will take on those forces. But I want to be proven wrong on that. I don't, I don't see much willingness on the part of the Trump administration to challenge vested power interests, right? And they are a very powerful vested power interest. But I think we should go further and say he deserves credit for saying that, by the way. I think one of the difficult things is, you don't think Ronald Reagan, again, not someone I, not my part of the political spectrum.

• 1:31:12Mayim Bialik?

  But don't we miss that kind of Republican?

• 1:31:14Speaker 04

  But, but he said, you know, my 80% friend is not my 20% enemy. And I think one of the things we have to get better at is engaging with people who we may not agree with on 10 things, but we agree on the 11th thing, right? And this idea that almost like a pollution based model where, no, you're contaminated. I'm really proud, actually. Lost Connections is the only book that was ever praised by both Hillary Clinton and Tucker Carlson.

• 1:31:38Mayim Bialik?

  Amazing.

• 1:31:40Speaker 04

  And I'm really, really proud of that, actually. And, and by Noam Chomsky, you know, people from completely different parts of the political spectrum. And some people were like, how could you put on your website a quote from Hillary Clinton? Or how could you put a quote on your website from Tucker Carlson? Like, no, this is exactly what we need. We need to find the areas where we agree. Look, we could just nihilistically say, okay, we're dividing into two tribes and let's just.

• 1:32:01Mayim Bialik?

  No, but, but to me, that's about truth with a capital T. I'm not a person who believes in, let's say, the truth of one religious, you know, denomination over another. That's not the kind of truth I'm talking about. What you write about is true. And that shouldn't fall on partisan lines. And the, the kind of hijacking of our humanity to make us make decisions based on who your mom and dad told you to vote for is actually not the way that we have progress, you know?

• 1:32:32Speaker 04

  It's obviously not the case. I have my own politics. We all have our own politics. But it's obviously not the case that all of human wisdom is concentrated in one place on the political spectrum. But that, that, no, it's not a credible thing to claim, right? The, of course, we all have our commitments, we all, but, but this kind of, so I would go further. Actually, I was holding back and I'll be, I'll say, while I would vehemently contest some of the things RFK Junior says, I would also, Tim, absolute congratulations to you that you are fighting on this cause. And on this cause, people like us will back you 100% of the way.

• 1:33:05Jonathan Cohen?

  I really admire the level of optimism you bring. And I do believe that there is reason to be optimistic. When I talk about the, you know, forces of, of negative influence and the systems that are incentivized to keep people sick, I think it is important to do so because we need to be realistic about what we're up against in order to have that. One of the three things that we talked about a little earlier was the way tech is designed, the way food is designed, and then the way the school systems are designed. And, you know, you hear Eric Weinstein, for example, talk about how we are removing creativity

• 1:33:47Jonathan Cohen?

  from the school system. We're removing the ability for those people who are going to think differently, who aren't able to sit still, to be successful. And we're sort of driving towards this middle of the bell curve whereby the people who are going to be the most creative and think most outside of the box and potentially provide the largest number of solutions to some of our greatest problems are being excluded from the system. I'm wondering how you see that and if you see any solution for it.

• 1:34:16Speaker 04

  This is one of the things I feel most strongly about. It sounds fancy, but it's actually very straightforward. Attention evolved to attach to meaning. It's much easier to pay attention to something that is meaningful to you, right? A frog will pay attention to a fly, not to a stone, because the fly means something to the frog, right? We all know that about ourselves. If, if, if you gave me a book about 1970s American politics, I'm reading a biography of Gerald Ford right now, I'm ripping through it. I find that really interesting. If you gave me a book about, I don't know, Formula One, I would really struggle to read it. I don't give a [bleep] about Formula One. It bores me, right? We all know that. The more meaningful something is to you, the, the easier it is to pay attention. And yet we have designed our school system to strip out meaning. We've designed a school

• 1:34:59Speaker 04

  system which is built around getting kids to memorize meaningless, contextless facts for tests that measure nothing of any value, that we've stripped out pretty much everything except that. Memorize this garbage for this test that measures nothing. Doesn't measure intelligence, doesn't measure creativity, doesn't measure anything we value, right? That's been happening for a long time now. So there's that. We've stripped meaning from education. We make kids sit still the whole time. Finland has one of the lowest levels of ADHD in the whole world. They never require children to sit still for more than 45 minutes without giving them 15 minutes to run around. Amazingly enough, their kids pay attention much better than ours.

• 1:35:40Mayim Bialik?

  But do they have ADHD dogs?

• 1:35:42Speaker 04

  They, we've done so many dumb things to our school system. We've obviously massively underfunded them. We've massively stressed out the kids. It's just, stress is bad for, beyond a low dose, stress is very bad for attention. And it was so interesting. So I went to a lot of progressive schools for the, for the book. One of the things that was so interesting, I went to a place in Massachusetts that is, has a model that goes much further than I would, but it's essentially a model where the kids are taught absolutely nothing at all. They just play all day, right? Play all day and they can ask the adults to teach them things if they want to learn them. Essentially takes everything that we think of as education out of the education system. And I want to be clear, I'm not advocating that model,

• 1:36:26Speaker 04

  but what's fascinating, you go there, every kid there can read, every kid there can write, they go on to have good jobs. Think, wow, we could take pretty much everything that stresses and upsets our kids out of the school system and the kids still can function. Now, I, I believe in teaching, of course, but just not the way we do it. So I wouldn't go as far as, as, as that school. But, but you begin to see, like, what we are doing is deadening kids. The part of our kids that can't pay attention to this boring [bleep] mechanical repetition is the best part of our kids. The kids who refuse to do it are the ones that we should be most proud of, right? This is not a good system. Now, I'm not, of course, this is not in any way criticism of teachers who are heroic people and do

• 1:37:08Speaker 04

  amazing work, but they're being forced to work in this rigid testing based system that is screwing them over and screwing over the kids and making it impossible for them to pay attention. So we need to really just completely redesign the school system from the ground up. We need to build it around what kind of kids do we want? You know, if you want kids who can mechanically memorize stuff, I've got news for you. We've got AI who can do it 100 times better than your kids. What we want is, what we will need is the kids who can do the things that the AI can't do. And that's creativity, that's empathy, that's listening, that's paying attention to each other. And we've got a school system that is literally destroying those capacities in favor of the thing the

• 1:37:49Speaker 04

  AI does much better. So we've got to just profoundly redesign the school system around places that actually do have good school systems, like Finland, where they have the smartest kids in the world, and they're not doing any of this [bleep]. In fact, kids in Finland, they don't get homework. They don't get any exams until they're 16. Just all the things that we're doing wrong that are pointless and deadening, they don't do them.

• 1:38:10Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, absolutely. I mean, the amount of psychological stress that kids are under in order to be, hit a mark that is actually absolutely pointless and doesn't provide any of the skills that are going to help them navigate the real world.

• 1:38:24Speaker 04

  It's mind blowing. I remember when I was 11, when I first went in Britain, that's when you go to like the bigger school, it's different to the system here. I remember being given a timetable, looking at it and it's saying, you know, 10 a.m. you're going to do history, 11 a.m. [inaudible]. I'm going, who the [bleep] are these people to tell me what I'll be doing at 10 a.m.? I haven't committed a crime. Like, what, what the [bleep]? Like, what is this? Like, just being absolutely enraged. And I'm really glad that that part of me was not successfully deadened by the school system, although my God, they tried, right? I would not be sitting here with you now about to reenact the entire script of Beaches if I had, if I had allowed myself to be deadened into that system, right? So it's a system that's, it really is a terrible system. Like, it's really, really bad.

• 1:39:06Jonathan Cohen?

  And if we're summarizing, when you talk about the deadening, what I'm hearing and what I believe to be true is attention and lack of attention is a signal. Depression and feeling anxious, feeling a lack of meaning, a lack of purpose, a lack of drive is a signal. And if we're not looking at the context around that signal, then we're missing the mark entirely. And actually, that signal can be an indicator that things are on the right track. You may be depressed because there's something very wrong in your life that needs help and attention. You may be unable to focus because there are factors, either algorithmic factors or a lack of meaning in your life that you're not connected to. And that when we see them as a signal, then we can begin to make the changes that

• 1:39:51Jonathan Cohen?

  are required to reconnect us to the vital parts of ourselves that actually want to be alive and thrive and are reflective of our core capability and natural gifts that we have to contribute.

• 1:40:01Mayim Bialik?

  What can you tell us about what you're working on now? What can you reveal? What can we look forward to next?

• 1:40:07Speaker 04

  So I'm just finishing a book that I've been working on insanely since 2011 about a series of crimes that have been happening in Las Vegas. So I'm literally just came here from Vegas because of a legal proceeding that I had to be present at. So that is my next book.

• 1:40:23Mayim Bialik?

  Awesome.

• 1:40:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I'm not meant to say any more than that.

• 1:40:26Mayim Bialik?

  When is it supposed to come out?

• 1:40:27Speaker 04

  It'll either be late next year or early the year after.

• 1:40:30Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, very exciting.

• 1:40:30Speaker 04

  It takes ages for, the legal process for this is going to be intense because I'm like describing lots of murderers and lots of criminals. And so it's, yeah, it turns out quite a high legal bar for accusing someone of being a serial killer. Who knew? Anyone who wants to know where to get any more information about the books, you can get my books as audiobooks or physical books. If you go to www.johannharri.com, you can see where to follow me on social media, but I won't see you back because I never look at it. But you can follow my stuff if someone else does it for me. And yeah, you can see where to get the audiobooks and ebooks. You can watch the documentary, it was actually one of my books and a lot of other stuff as well.

• 1:41:07Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you for being here in person. Thank you for continuing to be a friend of our podcast. And we just so appreciate your, your perspective and all the things we get to talk to you about. So thank you. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.