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Podcast Summary: Begin Again with Davina McCall - Episode with Johann Hari
Episode Overview In this episode of the "Begin Again" podcast, hosted by Davina McCall, the guest is Johann Hari, a journalist and author known for his insights on mental health, addiction, and societal well-being. The conversation revolves around the root causes of addiction, the significance of addressing unmet psychological needs, and the effects of social media on mental health.
Key Points Discussed
- Core of Addiction:
- Addiction is rooted in individuals' desire to escape painful realities.
- People often misinterpret psychological distress as a flaw within themselves rather than a signal of unmet needs.
- Misconceptions Around Mental Health:
- Traditional medical narratives often suggest that mental health issues stem from chemical imbalances rather than external factors.
- Hari argues that this leads to a lack of understanding and misinterpretation of distress signals.
- The Importance of Psychological Needs:
- Humans have deep psychological needs such as belonging, purpose, and validation, which are often unmet in modern society.
- The conversation emphasizes that feelings of depression and anxiety are signals that indicate unmet needs, not shortcomings.
- Impact of Support Networks:
- Building a support network is vital for addressing mental health issues.
- Being part of a community can help individuals feel valued and understood.
- Tough Love vs. Compassionate Support:
- Hari critiques the "tough love" approach to treatment, advocating instead for compassionate support and understanding.
- Real change often comes from nurturing rather than punitive approaches.
- Social Media’s Role in Mental Health:
- Social media algorithms favor negativity, leading users to engage with destructive content.
- The conversation discusses the need for healthier social media models that prioritize well-being over engagement.
- Real-Life Applications:
- Examples are shared, such as a Cambodian doctor who prescribed meaningful social interaction instead of antidepressants which resulted in improved mental health for patients.
- A community gardening initiative is highlighted as a successful method of social prescribing, illustrating the power of collective action.
- Calls to Action:
- Listeners are encouraged to reconsider their narratives surrounding mental health and addiction.
- Emphasis is placed on the ability of individuals to affect change within themselves and their communities.
Key Takeaways
- Understanding Addiction: Recognizing addiction as a coping mechanism for underlying pain can lead to more effective treatment approaches.
- Community Matters: Establishing connections with others can provide the emotional support necessary to overcome challenges.
- Reassessing Mental Health Narratives: Shifting the focus from individual blame to understanding societal factors can pave the way for better mental health solutions.
- Compassion Over Tough Love: Supporting individuals with empathy rather than judgment may yield better outcomes in recovery.
- Reimagining Social Media: There is a need for a collective movement to reform social media practices that harm mental well-being.
Final Thoughts Davina McCall and Johann Hari's conversation offers profound insights into the societal factors affecting mental health and addiction, urging listeners to embrace community, compassion, and a transformative outlook on midlife. The episode serves as an empowering reminder that it’s never too late to begin again, fostering hope and the possibility of change.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00The core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be. Well, I'm going to cry. We're being taught to mistrust the signals we get from our own bodies and our own psyches. My biggest problem was that I had to say that I was an addict and I'd never said that out loud before. And I thought, once I say I'm an addict, I can't go back and use easily again. The addictive behaviour is a way of, in that moment, not being present with that pain and distress. Sorry, it was a very hard thing. Everyone knows they have natural physical needs. You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air.
0:37There's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong, you need to feel people see you, you need to feel your life has... We've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep psychological needs. People feel that something's wrong in their lives, they feel there's something they want to change. Those signals, they're painful, of course, horribly painful, but those signals are absolutely necessary. They are telling you the most important thing, which is if you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy.
1:05You're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is. Yes, yes. Johan, I mean, first of all, I just want to tell people how we met because it was way back in the day on Big Brother, obviously. 17 years ago, I looked it up. Oh, my God. Was it really? Yeah, properly, yeah. Look how good we still look. Still got it. So I wanted to really start off with asking you, what do you think are the kind of major factors that prevent us from moving forwards or starting again? Yeah, I was thinking about this because in a way, so many people feel that something's wrong in their lives. They feel there's something they want to change.
1:42But I think the way I began to think about it, I was thinking about our conversation is sort of, there's all these kind of locks in the way we live that are trapping us. I think, well, OK, what we need to do is help people get to the keys to undo those locks. and so many of the books that I've written in different ways about different problems are about that right I'm you know I'm sort of to some degree subjects I write about like depression addiction attention problems weight problems you know to some degree I've got a sort of intellectual interest in them but to be honest the main reason I mentioned them in understanding them sort of in a different way is okay does that help us get to better solutions does we get to better answers so I was thinking there's so many sort of locks and keys that we could we could talk about there's so many places we could start.
2:24I guess I would start, the one that first came to mind, and this will sound a bit, I don't know, fancy or abstract at first, is I think one of the things that blocks people right at the start is that we're being taught to mistrust the signals we get from our own bodies and our own psyches, our own kind of spirits in a way, and to actually insult the signals that we get and to not understand them. So I think about it in my own case, right? But think about it in relation to depression. You know, so when I was a teenager, you know, I'd had a, as you know, we've talked about this so many times, I grew up in a very crazy environment.
3:06There was a lot of addiction, a lot of insanity. And I think about myself when I was 17, I went to the doctor, I was, you know, distressed, right? The way I've sometimes put it is I felt like pain was leaking out of me. And I look back now, I think about the 17 year olds I know now. And I think, well, of course, it was kind of obvious why I was in that state, right? And my doctor told me something that was very common in the 90s. It's still being told to people a lot now. I get emails from it all the time. My doctor said, we know what's wrong with you, you've just got something wrong with your brain.
3:43You're lacking a chemical in your brain. All we need to do is give you some drugs. You're going to be fine. So I started taking an antidepressant called Paxil. But these feelings of pain kept coming back. And I kept taking higher and higher doses until for 13 years. So by the time we first met, I was on an unbelievably high dose. I had been on it for many years. And I think back now, my issue isn't with the drugs. There's obviously benefits and drawbacks to all drugs, but my issue isn't so much with the drugs. My issue, antidepressants benefited me for a while. They benefit many people. Anyone watching, if you're taking them, they're benefiting you.
4:13Carry on. But my issue is about thinking about that signal right at the start. By saying this is just like a kind of glitch in a computer program, right? It's like a malfunction, a biological malfunction. Inadvertently, what my doctor was doing was saying, well, this signal doesn't mean anything, right? It's not a meaningful signal. It's a malfunction. so all you need to do is sort of firstly it locates the problem in you right actually problem wasn't in me I was a great kid right actually what I need to be told is how amazing that you survived all this well done you right like that would have been a really powerful message to be told not you're broken there's something wrong with you even though it was very well I want to stress again very well intentioned and I think that's happening a huge amount in our culture right so sometimes it's easier to see it if you think about it in the recent past if you think about the 1970s, right?
5:06In the 70s, there was, still is now, but there was even more domestic violence in Britain, right? It was very common. And very often, women who were being violently abused would go to their doctor, they're being beaten up, and the doctor would say, you've got a nervous disorder and you need Valium to treat your nervous disorder. And people were literally told there's something wrong with your actual physical nerves, right? It wasn't like a metaphor, right um lots of people believe that now when we look back on it we can see oh right that wasn't what those women needed to be told was you need to get the fuck away from this man who's abusing you right you don't need valium you need a domestic violence shelter and a society that supports you and sides with you against violent men who think they can abuse you right but at the time people couldn't some people saw it obviously it's why heroic women set up domestic violence shelters but a lot of people couldn't see it and i think in a way we're a lot closer to that than we'd like to think right lots of things are going wrong in our culture in lots of ways people watching your deeper psychological needs will not be being met you're experiencing signals of that which can be depression anxiety attention problems addiction all sorts of things overeating whole battery of things right you've got all four of my books they go down the list right but they all come from the same thing right they all come from an unhappiness a trauma and need to fix something and we're going to look at anything to try and do that and you know with with with this kind of abuse that you went through or the the trouble the trauma that you went through in your childhood meant that you felt troubled and you actually were sensible enough and brilliant enough to go and see a doctor about it whereas I reached for the drugs you know which is chasing the scream it's always that trauma that leads you to something but so many so many people are going through some kind of dealing with trauma But it's so true to me.
6:53And even people aren't going through trauma in the way that we did. I would say everyone knows they have natural physical needs, right? You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. Obviously, if I took those things away from you, you'd be screwed. 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 and are proud of you. It's something I've heard you talk about a lot. you've got a future that makes sense and the culture that we've built is good at loads of things i'm glad to be alive today right many things are much better now than in the past but there's lots of evidence i talk about a lot in my book lost connections that we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs and when you reframe the problem there are real biological contributions your genes can make you more sensitive to all the problems we're talking about um although they don't write your destiny but when you reframe it is mostly about unmet needs, it opens up a different way of thinking about it.
7:52I remember there was a moment this really fell into place for me because I was struggling with it, right? I was very much in this story. I was very deeply committed to the story my doctor told me. I'm biologically broken. It gives a lot of relief to you. It seems to release shame. How would you describe it? Well, I just think it's relaxing because then you think, oh, great. I don't have to do any work on this thing that really is hurting a lot. I can just fix it with a pill. That's much easier than looking at the thing or the place, going to the place I don't want to go. That's so important. I'm just thinking about the way you put it.
8:28I think that's exactly right. I think there's that. I think there's also, we're in this kind of dichotomy where we think it's either brain or blame, right? Either, oh, there's a problem with your brain or you're to blame, you were lazy, weak, whatever, right? And there was a moment I sort of realised, it was opening up for me of realising, saying, all right, there's a third option beyond brain and blame. He's called Dr. Derek Sommerfeld, and he's a South African psychiatrist. And he told me this story. So he was in Cambodia in 2001, when they first introduced chemical antidepressants in that country in Southeast Asia.
9:02They'd never had antidepressants before. And the local doctors, the Cambodians, were like, what are antidepressants? He wasn't there to study it or anything. It just happened to be there at time. And he explained to them what they were. And they said to him, oh, we don't need them. We've got antidepressants. And he was like, what do you mean? And he thought they were going to talk about some kind of like herbal remedy, like, I don't know, Ginkgo biloba or something. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day he stood on a landmine that had been left over from the war with the Americans, and he got his leg blown off.
9:35So they took him to hospital. They gave him an artificial leg. They're good at that in Cambodia because they have a lot of landmines. And a few months later, he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently, it's really 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 fields where you got blown up. The guy started to cry a lot. He developed kind of what we would call classic depression. After a while, he just refused to get out of bed. And the Cambodian doctors said to Dr. Sommerfeld, well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant.
10:06and he was like, what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. You only had to talk to the guy for five minutes to realise why he was so traumatised. They said to him, one of the doctors figured, if we bought this man a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that we're screwing up so much. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone. It never came back, they said to Dr. Sommerfeld, so you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant, right? Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that sounds like a weird joke.
10:40I went to see my doctor for depression and 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. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the main kind of machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs and what you need is love and practical support to get your needs met so i think if we think about it in terms of locks and keys right one of the locks that locks people in is they're in a situation that doesn't meet their needs they experience distress and then absolutely not the fault of the system but it starts to tell people oh no this this distress you're experiencing because you're unmet needs is actually just that you're broken There's something wrong inside you.
11:29And all you need to do is drug yourself. And of course, the drugs can give some people some relief and do give some people some relief. But it keeps you in that lock. It leads you to actually distrust your most essential feelings. It's not just that those signals, they're painful, of course, horribly painful. But those signals are absolutely necessary. They are telling you something really important about, Now, in fact, the most important thing, which is your needs are not being met, right? And that's in the situation you were in when you turned to addiction, the situation I was in. The way I think of it is if you don't have an accurate map of your pain, you can't find your way through the territory, right?
12:14Oh my God, yeah. And we're giving people inaccurate maps of their pain and it leaves them locked in this dysfunction. So the first thing we need to do is sort of start with helping people to create accurate maps of their distress. What does this mean? Why do you feel this way? And there can be many reasons. Obviously, I go through in Lost Connections, nine different forms of disconnection that have been proven to cause depression. There's lots of other things going on as well, obviously. So it has to start with a very different kind of conversation about our pain. Because if you've got the wrong story about it, you're very unlikely to get to the right solution.
12:47Does that ring true to you? Well, I mean, God, there's so much to get at there. One of the things that I loved is when you said your emotional needs aren't being met. And I remember in recovery early on, I was in a meeting and I just said, I'm just so needy all the time. I just feel so needy. I just kind of look at people. And some wise old timer came up to me at the end and said, in a relationship, he said, you know, have you thought about the fact that you're just needy because your emotional needs aren't being met? And I'd always seen being needy as something horrible. You know, it's like a fault in me.
13:22But actually, it's like, oh, well, maybe I'm with the wrong person and they can't meet my needs. I mean, now I would look at it in terms of love languages, probably. And my need is touch and theirs wouldn't be. And I'd be kind of going like, can you? Hello. And they'd be like, I don't want to. And I'd read that as you don't love me. But so I loved what you said there. But I think I'm thinking about depression nowadays and how hard it is for people that have been through a journey of constantly from a relatively young age being put on this drug and then using that and then continuing to live a life where they aren't doing nothing to fix that feeling in themselves of being content or having purpose.
14:08They've gone for the job where they're dissatisfied. I mean, there were horrific percentages, I think you said, something like 80, in the 80 % of people who were dissatisfied in their daily job. That's five days a week of doing something that you're not happy in. Imagine having that and having a situation that you're trying to deal with, but you're dealing with in the wrong way. It's almost like, how do you untangle yourself from that in life? if it's such a, and feeling the way that you do, vulnerable, scared to come off the drugs because you think, I don't want to go back to where I was. I think that's really important.
14:43I think there's a lot of things what you just said to Venus. I don't think it's the drug that traps people. There are benefits to the drug and drawbacks to the drug. It's important to weigh them. And I know you're not contradicting what you're saying. No, no, I mean, I'm agreeing with you. I think you're absolutely right. Exactly. but for me it comes back to that story so you can see how when you shift the story you can start to get to some things that unlock let's give you an example again just up the road from here a really important breakthrough in the history of depression was made and a really inspiring one I think so there's a doctor up the road in the Bromley by Bow surgery I'm pointing that way but I have no idea what direction Bromley is from here but not far called Sam Everington a great wonderful person and um so sam was he's a gp family gp and he was very uncomfortable because he had loads loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety and like you like me he's not against antidepressants he thinks they have some value but he could see that very often antidepressants were giving a bit of relief but not really solving the problem.
15:53And that his patients were often depressed and anxious for really good reasons, like they were really lonely, they're really financially insecure, there's a whole range of things. And one day Sam had an idea. So a patient came in called Lisa Cunningham, I got to know her later. And he said to Lisa, you know, she'd been shot away in her home with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years. She was in a bad way, Lisa. And he said to her, okay, I'm going to prescribe something else for you. I'll carry on giving you the drug, but I'm going to prescribe for you to come here to the doctor's offices twice a week to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people not to talk about how shit you feel you can do that if you want that's not the point of it i want you guys to find something meaningful that you can do together and the first time the group met lisa literally vomited with anxiety it was just so overwhelming yeah to be around people right if you've been shut away and the group started chatting people rubbed her back they're very nice to her the group started chatting they were like what could we do these are inner city East London people like me, they knew nothing about gardening, right?
16:53But there was an area behind the doctor's offices that was called Dog Shit Alley, which gives you a sense of what it was like. It was like scrub land where dogs would go and shit. And they were like, we could turn Dog Shit Alley into a garden, right? Why don't we do that? So they started to watch loads of gardening clips on YouTube. They started to go to the library to get out, books about gardening. They started to get their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. There's a lot of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a really important antidepressant. But they started to do something even more important, right?
17:22They started to form a tribe. They started to form a group. If one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking for them and go, hey, are you okay? Do you need any help? And the way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom, right? This approach is called social prescribing. It's spreading all over Europe. There's a small amount of research on it, but the small research we have suggests it's twice as effective as chemical antidepressants. I think for kind of obvious reason, right, it's solving some of the deep underlying problems that are making people so depressed and anxious in the first place.
17:58So I would say we want to get to a lock, one of the first locks. If we think about the, or rather we get to a key, if one of the first locks is being trapped in an overly simplistic story, misreading your signals, one of the first keys I would talk about would be it is exceptionally hard to solve that on your own. If you are sitting alone and you're trying to disentangle that, it's really hard. You would not have got out of your addiction without NA. Lisa would not have got out of depression without this social prescribing group. So I would say the first thing you want to do is connect to a wider group of people who are also trying to solve that problem.
18:35The very fact of being in a group massively increases your chance of unlocking what's going on. It's through dialogue with other people that you can begin to uncover what's actually happening and crucially build solutions to it. I really hope you're enjoying this episode. And if you can, give us a follow. I mean, I feel like crying every kind of other sentence with you at the moment because it's moving me deeply because of the, well, you've got such a brilliant way of wording things. But one of the things that I couldn't believe at my first NA meeting, like my biggest, my biggest problem was that I had to say that I was an addict and I'd never said that out loud before and I thought once I say I'm an addict I can't really go back and use easily again how old were you then 24 so to say it out loud meant that I was admitting to other people but even worse I was admitting it to myself and once I've admitted it to myself then that makes it quite hard or it will ruin my using forever.
19:37I can't never enjoy it again. Mark wasn't enjoying it much at that point anyway. That's why I was in a meeting. So all through the meeting, I'm obsessing about I'm going to have to say it. Oh, my God, if I have to talk, I'm going to have to say it. And then they say now is the time for newcomers to say anything. And sort of everybody just looks at me. I'm thinking, oh, no. I say, my name's Davina. And I'm like, it's like vomiting out the words. I'm an addict. And then I just cried for kind of two minutes and people rubbed my back. And a bit like you were saying, you know, somebody was rubbing Lisa's back because she was so anxious.
20:11And I really identified with that feeling of being in a group of like-minded people suffering the same kind of problems, but supporting each other with the knowledge of exactly what that person's going through. And a bit like maybe Lisa felt, I've never felt true depression before, I don't think. But I get that feeling from friends of mine that have spoken about it, that you just feel that the entire world, even people that you know love you, would be better off without you. Like, you are worthless. And this feeling that when Lisa or somebody didn't turn up in that group of people, how much it would mean when somebody would come to look for you and you'd think, why?
20:50Why are you doing this? We talked a bit about tough love. And I remember calling you from a rung, having a fucking epiphany, you know. I remember the second. And how I'd always believed that to be true, that I'm going to cry as fuck. Sorry. It was a very hard thing reading that book because it was a philosophy that was so ingrained. It's a bit like you being told that you taking medicine was like, oh, great, I can take this. This is the philosophy that I've been told to believe in. I believe in it all this time, but there's something not quite right about it. It felt a bit mean. And how come when we were nice to somebody that was coming in, we weren't shunning him or telling him to go away or telling him?
21:34We gave him love. We gave him somewhere. We gave him a cup of tea and we gave him a biscuit. And five years later, he made it. That realisation that actually maybe tough love isn't the correct way to move forward. What made you think about that? Did you look at drugs and think maybe this is another plaster that society is putting on itself? You're going to make me cry as well. Sorry.
22:03Well, as you know, I had a lot of addiction in my family. And, you know, I had this experience the other day.
22:12A young member of my family had a very bad addiction problem. If you'd met six years ago, you would have thought there's no hope for this person. and he um last week he got called for jury service and he was chosen as the foreman of the jury and he persuaded them to acquit the guy and uh he called me and he was so proud and oh my god six years ago yeah they would have looked at you and i thought the only context in which you were interacting with the jury was as the defendant right and i thought and he's he's worked really fucking hard to make that happen. And I'm really, really proud of him. But I think the key thing to understand about addiction is that it's an attempt to solve a problem.
23:00That sounds weird to a lot of people at first, but the core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be. And the addicted behavior, which can be heroin, it can't, should be gambling or porn or whatever it can be, is a way of in that moment not being present with that pain and distress. There's a really challenging thing that Marianne Faithful said once. She said, heroin saved my life because if it wasn't for heroin at that point, I would have killed myself. Now, Marianne is not saying that heroin, I assume, I'm pretty sure, not saying heroin is a good solution to despair, obviously for all the reasons that everyone watching knows.
23:40But it's the best solution anyone offered her. And it's on us that no one offered her a better a solution? I feel like you and I are similar people. We want to see the good in people and I get fed good things. So I actually went through my Instagram account and I deleted a lot of accounts where I thought I don't want to see this content anymore. And now I get fed a lot of positive action. I'm on X less than I used to be. But what I see in other people is they get served hatred for people and they they read their social media and they get so angry about things and it could be angry either way but I'm in some blissful kind of ignorant um space in between these two sides and of course I get agitated about things or misjustice or unfairness things like that but I hate hate and I hate anger it it disturbs me deeply so this is why I'm sad about this situation because I feel like what we want is social media that gives people the experience you're having of Instagram we don't want to get rid of social media we don't want to even if we could I wouldn't but what we want is that so the question is why are most people not having that experience and how do we give them your experience and the people in Silicon Valley who designed it taught me what's going on right so if you took out your phone now and please don't and you opened tiktok facebook instagram x i don't like calling it x but i'm i know it's funny and you start to scroll those companies they begin to make money out of you immediately in two ways the first way is really obvious um you see advertising right we all know what that's about the second way is much more important everything you ever do on these apps including in your so-called private messages is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and what makes you tick.
25:37So let's say you've ever said, I don't know, that you like Nigel Farage, Bette Midler, and you told your mum you just bought some nappies. It's going to go, okay, if you like Nigel Farage, you're probably right wing. 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. And you've just bought nappies. Okay, you've got a baby, right? If you've been using these apps for a while, they know tens of thousands of things like this about you. They've got an incredibly detailed profile of who you are. And they're building that up for lots of reasons.
26:10But the most important one is to figure out how to keep you scrolling for as long as possible. Because every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money. The longer you scroll, the more money they make because the more ads you see. So all this genius in Silicon Valley, all this AI, all these algorithms 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, right? That's all that's going on. And I remember they kept explaining this to me, people who'd been there, who'd literally been in the rooms where they decide what to show people, and say to them, it can't be that simple.
26:47There must be some more going on here. And they said to me, no. And one of them said to me, I think it was Asa Raskin, who played a key role in designing a lot of this, the head of KFC might be a very nice person, but all they care about in their professional capacity is how often did you go to KFC this week and how big was the bucket you bought? And if you become obese, that's not their problem, right? They want you to eat as much fried chicken as you possibly can. In exactly the same way, these companies, what they want to feed you, what they want from you and your kids is for you to scroll as long as possible and never stop.
27:22So why does that lead to negativity in particular? Yes. Right? And again, it took me a while to get this. People at the heart of it kept explaining it to me. So the algorithms are set up to scan what you look at and what everyone in the world looks at, billions of people. And they just want to find whatever keeps you scrolling. They don't give a shit about what you actually look at. What I'm looking at, yeah. Totally agnostic. They don't care. As long as it's legal, they don't care. Yes. All they care about is, did it keep you scrolling? So the algorithms are set up to just track everyone, on what keeps you scrolling, what doesn't.
27:52And the algorithms bumped into an underlying psychological truth that's been known about for, I don't know, 80 years now, which is part of human nature. Fancy term for it is negativity bias. It's very simple. People will stare longer at things that make them angry and upset than they will at things that make them feel good. If you've ever seen a car crash on the motorway, you know what I mean. You stared longer at the car crash than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street, right? This is very deep in human nature. 10 week old babies will stare longer at an angry face than a smiling face that's always been part of who we are but when it combines with algorithms that learns you that learn you intimately what specifically makes you angry it has a horrendous effect so you think about negativity bias right I'd like to think I'm pretty sure you find what I'm saying really interesting there's a nice camera guy there if he started uh punching someone else in the corner you would stop um listening to me and you would turn and watch him punching someone else, right?
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28:49I know you're not going to do that, don't worry.
28:53Because the negativity bias would over... And we've got negativity bias for a good reason, right? Our ancestors who weren't looking out for the fight, for the danger, they got eaten. They didn't get to be our ancestors. That's a slightly crude way of putting it. You get my point, right? So the algorithms learned, if we show you stuff that makes you angry and upset, you're going to scroll for longer, right? So you picture two teenage girls who go to the same party and leave to go home on the same bus. Yes. One of them opens the video and opens TikTok and goes, that was such a great party. We danced all night to Taylor Swift.
29:25Fucking loved it. The algorithm is scanning the kind of words you use and it'll put that into a few people's feeds. Okay, now imagine another girl opens it and goes, Beth was an absolute skank at that party and her boyfriend's, I have no idea if teenagers still use the word skank. I think they probably don't. I don't know, but it sounds funny to me. I love that. Skank's such a good one. Bring back skank. Yeah. But if Oasis can come back, the word skank can come back. But, you know, she's a skank, her boyfriend's a prick, starts angrily denouncing everyone at the party. It's going to put that video into far more people's feeds.
29:54Because if it's enraging, it's engaging. But now imagine that being done to a whole country, where the nice people, the kind people are muffled and pushed to the back, and the mean, angry people are pushed to the front. I've been thinking about the power of community lately, thanks to our favourite creative tool and sponsor, Adobe Express. You might know it as the quick and easy create anything app from Adobe, but it's also a really buzzing creative network. So the other day I couldn't get our Begin Again logo to look how I want it in a doc. So we jumped into the Adobe Express Facebook group and within minutes, the gang in there came to my rescue.
30:33And there are thousands of business owners and creators in there all helping each other out. And it's not just design advice and they're not frightening at all. and loads of resources and stories. Honestly, it's amazing. If this podcast has taught me anything, it's that starting a new chapter, you know, whether you're creating a logo for your new business idea or just doing a personal project, you know, obviously it's always going to have its ups and downs, but having the right people around you can really make all the difference. So if you're ready to take on your next big thing, don't be afraid to reach out.
31:04It's not as scary as you think. There are loads of helpful people out there and they want to help you along the way. So search for Adobe Express to find out more and get the app for free. We're taking a quick break to talk about today's sponsor, Fiverr. Have you experienced the immediate panic when you're asked to create something on the computer but you have absolutely no idea how to do it? For me, it's social media. But I have realised that I can rely on Fiverr. It's an online marketplace. It's got talented freelancers who specialise in different areas from social media and graphic design to marketing, website building and coding.
31:41I don't know what I'm going to leave. But with Fiverr, I can leave it to the experts and focus on the stuff I do best. So if you want to give Fiverr a try, and I think you should, search Fiverr.com or click the link in the description and use the code DAVINA at the checkout for 10 % off your first order. That's F-I-V-E-R-R.com. And don't forget, the second R. You mentioned a solution. Please tell me there's something we can do about this. It's so important to understand this. that social media does not have to work that way. This is what loads of people explain to me. And weirdly, this only fell into place with me when I thought about it when someone explained it to me by an analogy with something that happened in our lifetimes that you'll remember.
32:22I remember. So when we were kids, the only form of petrol you could get was leaded petrol. Remember it really click. I remember the smell of it. I can remember my mum putting it into a red mini. And it was discovered that exposure to lead is really bad for people's brains and particularly bad for children's ability to pay attention. And if it's in petrol, it's in fumes, everyone was breathing in a shitload of lead when we were kids. So what happened was a group of ordinary mums led in Britain by an amazing woman called Jill Runette banded together and they said, well, why are we allowing this?
32:59Why are we allowing the lead industry to screw up our kids' brains? And it's really important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, let's ban cars, let's go back to horse and cart. Just like you and me are not saying about this, let's all go back, you know, it's all during the Amish, right? Yes. And give up our technology. What they said is let's get rid of the specific form of the petrol that screws up our kids and us and move to a different form of petrol, unleaded petrol that doesn't, right? And we forget this now, but that was a really big fight. The lead industry fought back hard and it followed the kind of classic pattern of all successful movements.
33:33It was described by Gandhi. First, they ignored them. then they laughed at them then they fought them then they won no more leaded petrol we banned it Venezuela just became the last country in the world to ban it as a result the average British child is five IQ points higher than they would have been had we not had those mums not fought like hell for all of us and for their children now to me that's a really important model because social media like I say doesn't have to work that way so you can have all the social media we currently have but not have it work this way what you've got to do is break that what people kept explaining to me is you've got to break that mechanism.
34:09So basically, there are three ways that social media can work. It can be funded, it can be paid for, right? So the model we have now, the fancy term for it from Professor Shoshana Zuboff, is surveillance capitalism, which sounds like a nightmare, but it's actually very simple. You seem to get TikTok and X and Facebook for free, but in return, they track and surveil you, they learn you, they hack you, they fuck your attention. So you pay with your attention, I would argue with our democracy, with the mental health of our kids, all that other stuff, right? So that's one model. There are some advantages to that model.
34:41You get it for free, right? Don't dismiss that in a cost-of-living crisis. That's not nothing, right? But what a lot of people who've been at Heart of the Machine said to me is, what we need to do is just ban that business model. It's like lead in petrol. Don't allow it. And I said to them, all right, let's imagine we do that. And the next day, we do the ban, and the next day I open Facebook and TikTok. Would it just say, sorry, guys, we've gone fishing? They said, of course not. What would happen is they'd have to move to one of the other two business models. And almost everyone listening will have had an experience of the other two business models.
35:14So one of them is subscription. We all know how Netflix works, right? You pay a certain amount. In return, you get access. The key thing is under a subscription model, all the incentives change. But suddenly under a subscription model, you are the customer. What would you like? So that's one option, right? Subscription. All the incentives change. Suddenly they're like, oh, what does Davina want? Davina feels good when she meets up with people offline. Let's design the app to maximise offline interaction. Davina, Bob's up the road. He wants to have a coffee. My friends in Silicon Valley could design that in five minutes.
35:45But how do we do? I'm feeling an activist, kind of the activist in me lit up here. Like, what do we do? How do we make that happen? So it will only happen if enough people fight for it and demand it. Governments can regulate these companies to do this. We need a movement to restore our attention. right we've got a catastrophic crisis of attention so catastrophic yeah well I would say to anyone because you might hear that and think oh it's a little bit over the top no I would say to anyone think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of whether it's starting a business being a good parent learning to play the guitar whatever it is that thing that you're proud of required loads of sustained focus and attention we're talking in the middle of the Paralympics right and the focus and attention that gets you to be an olympian or a paralympian right but even just everyday achievement being being a good dad or a good mom requires a lot of attention and the evidence is very clear if your ability to focus and pay attention deteriorates your ability to solve your problems deteriorates your ability to achieve your goals deteriorates and when you regain your attention it's like regaining your superpower right i mean i felt that with lots to the changes I made based on what I wrote in Stolen Focus, that it's such a joyful thing.
37:03And I would argue, actually, that's another one of these keys that unlocks this. A lot of us are trapped because when you're seeing the world in 20-second bursts, it's very hard to get any sense of, like, traction on your life. And also you get lost in these negative signals. And I absolutely feel that happened with me many years ago. But when I used to be, I'm not standing above this world going, well, you're judging it, right? I was completely part of this. When I think about times when I was a heavy user of Twitter as it was at the time, you know, whatever it would be, 14 years ago. I think you and I were probably in the same, right in the same time.
37:38Yeah. On it all the time. I remember we would talk to each other on it and we were ahead of the curve in being there and ahead of the curve in backing away from it. But the real disaster that happens to me, I've seen it happen to so, we know lots of people who have high profile position on Twitter,
38:02the catastrophe that happens, there are many catastrophes that can happen on Twitter, but one of them is when you start to mistake the signals from social media for meaningful social signals around you. Because if you start to repattern yourself to please or avoid that kind of abuse, you just go crazy or because if you're trying to feed that machine it will coarsen you it will make you i saw a really weird example of this with um do you remember milo yiannopoulos is no it's to your credit that you don't know who he is um so milo is um he was a when i met him many years ago well more than 10 years ago um he was a kind of little bit right-wing journalist He's gay.
38:53He's quite funny. He's kind of a little bit right wing. Never my taste. But, you know. And he wrote this really interesting article called something like The Internet is Making Us All Psychopaths, where he said at the time, all the incentives in this system is to be the worst version of yourself, to be mean, cruel. And then he became a very extreme internet troll. He whipped up literal riots in Berkeley he became a huge champion of Trump and ended up sort of imploding in various for various reasons but um and when I was writing Stalin Focus I went to interview him I didn't use this material in the book in the end it was so interesting because he had prophesied his own fate very articulately right he'd entirely did he was he not aware of what he was doing he said he completely denied that any of it was due to the incentives of social media and I thought wow that's how powerful this is yes you don't even know it can profoundly repattern your character yes obviously it had to activate something in any way most people wouldn't be as extreme as him but it can profoundly repattern your character and you don't even know that's what happened to you you know we talk all the time um in our culture about post-traumatic stress disorder right i don't like the disorder bit of it because actually i don't like telling people any of these things are disorders because they're actually human responses and often necessary human responses But we're talking about post-traumatic stress.
40:15But weirdly, there's a lot of science that's emerging around. I've not written about it yet, but post-traumatic growth. So you can follow people who go through traumatic events. And some people indeed do develop what would be called PTSD, right? Classic PTSD. And they obviously need a lot of support and help. Actually, lots of people who go through traumatic events grow and learn from it. So you can follow up people who've been in plane crashes, for example. Now, no one thinks a plane crash is a good thing, right? Obviously. You can fuck me in a plane crash and go, do you know what, I survived that plane crash and it was a horrible thing that happened to me.
40:49But I realised life is short and I left that husband who was an arsehole and I got a different job. And you know what? I wouldn't go back and undo it now, right? And I think you're, does that ring true to you? You're a great example to me of post-war crisis growth. I was just wondering what makes somebody, somebody able to get through something like that. I do a show called Long Lost Family. I fucking love it. This is about helping people find people. In the 60s, young children were sent out to Australia and told they were orphans. And actually their parents were alive. They'd just been taken away from their parents who maybe were deemed not suitable or whatever, taken from their mothers who were single mothers and just shipped out to Australia and put in boys' homes.
41:34And the abuse that they suffered in boys' homes would mean that quite a few of them would end up taking their own lives. but there was a man who left as soon as he could, went and joined the army, did brilliantly in the army. It made him, went on and got a job, had a family and talked very movingly about the people left behind and about I don't know why I'm different, I don't know why I didn't do that, but why it actually made me stronger. and when he talked about it, I thought, oh, I've been through some things and I wonder why I'm such a positive person. Like I'm annoying, I'm literally aggravatingly positive.
42:16Like I annoy people and you've been through... But you're not aggravatingly positive. There's a thing called toxic positivity, which I think is a real thing, which people sort of respond to people's distress by going, ah, but look at the bright... That's not what you do. No, I hope not. No, okay, thank you. You don't, you absolutely do not do that. I wouldn't say you don't if you did. So I just thought, oh, can you change the type of person that you are? I mean, I've had friends of mine that I've tried to help and they've ended up taking their own lives. And you think, what happened there? Why couldn't they get it?
42:49What's your take on that? It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately because, as you know, a close relative of mine killed himself almost exactly two years ago. and obviously in the aftermath of that you think a lot about this and I don't have an obvious answer. There's all this research on, it was done by people I interviewed for Lost Connections called George Brown and Tyrell Harris. Amazing. It should have been game-changing research on depression but it's one of those things where people didn't actually want to hear the breakthrough. we went off in a very different direction they were incredible people but they looked at they followed a load of uh women here in london to look at why do people go through similar distressing things why do some of them um you go down into depression and some of them thrive so some people had like they measured all sorts of deficits that you could have like you know insecure housing a husband to beat you up whatever it might be i've got the specifics in the book i might be misremembering them um and so they measured like sort of deficits that's not the term they use these different term and then they measured what they called stabilizers do you have friends um you know do you do you have a supportive partner uh do you have money you know all sorts of stabilizers and basically you could actually measure it pretty tightly i mean there were obviously outliers but you could actually so you wanted the presence of stabilizers and the absence of destabilisers um so i think it's partly that but i never it always feels more mysterious to me like when you experience something really painful it can just finish you off it can break you and there's lots of people like that and i've got a lot of love and compassion for them and i think a lot about i've got a friend i have to um i haven't checked with her if i can tell this story so i have to be someone know um she'll probably recognize it but i have to be slightly i'm going to slightly euthanize it she's a very senior and incredible british journalist and when she was in her early 40s she got breast cancer and nearly died and on her way into the operation she's a completely inveterate journalist she was asking the doctor all these questions about the nhs and how it works and he mentioned that he um works with medicine sa pontiere who do i've seen their work who people don't know um if there's like an earthquake or war or something they'll drop these doctors in to do emergency surgery and then they take them out again.
45:25And she said to him, you're really interesting. And she told him her name. And he said, if you've ever got a new story, call me. And then the anesthetic kicked in and she passed out. 11 years passed. One day she was in her office and a secretary came in and said, oh, there's a guy on the phone. Says he needs to speak to you urgently. He's the guy who did your cancer operation 11 years ago. Oh my God, how nuts. And he says, hi, you won't remember me. She said, I do remember you. He said, I need your help. this was a day or two after the massive earthquake in Haiti, devastating earthquake in 2010.
45:56And he said, I'm in a building that's collapsed. I've got a two-year-old girl here who's badly burned. Her whole family's dead. Every hospital on this island has collapsed. If I don't get her out of here, she's going to die. I phoned everyone I could think of to help me and no one could help me. And suddenly I remembered you. She said, what can I do? He said, please help me. She said, what are your GPS coordinates? I'm sending a camera crew now. They sent a camera crew. They put her on the news. They raised the money to get her out in like three minutes. She was airlifted to, the girl was airlifted to Britain.
46:29And one time I went to my friend's house and that girl was there. She's now her godmother and that doctor is now her godfather. And she said to me, she looked at this girl, she said to me, I can't ever regret that I got cancer now. Because if I hadn't got cancer, that girl would have died in the rubble in Haiti. I think a lot about that.
46:52Because, you know, the age we are, we know lots of people who face tragedies. We've had various things in our lives. Everyone faces tragedies.
47:02It's, you can always take the most terrible and painful things and turn them into something else. I don't mean you can undo the harm. No. I don't mean you can, you know, put right the thing. No. but you can you can always make something good out of your pain and we're trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places we've got a kind of almost a kind of kfc for the soul and there's a person who did research on this that i think about all the time she called dr brett board she was at berkeley when i interviewed her but she i think she's in toronto now she's part of a team of scientists it's really basic and mind-blowing research so they wanted to figure out if you tried consciously to make yourself happier would you actually become happier right let's say you spent two hours a day going okay you're going to make me happy does it work yes they did this research in four countries it was let me see the u.s um taiwan russia and japan what they found was really weird in the u.s if you try to make yourself deliberately happier in the main it does not work you do not become happier in the other countries if you try to make yourself happier you do become happy until i asked weird what's going on so they did more research what they discovered was in the u.s i'm sure it's true of us as well on the main if you try to make yourself happier you do something for you right you go shopping you work harder to earn more money you display what stuff you bought on social media so jealous so we have a an individualist conception of happiness right the way you get to be happy is you boost yourself as an individual in the other countries in the main there were exceptions on both sides obviously but in the main when you tried to make yourself happier you did something for someone else your friends your family your group your community so they had an instinctively collective idea of what it means to be happy and it turns out this individualistic idea of happiness that we're all being taught all the time just doesn't work right even if you think about the advice we give people be you right if someone's not feeling down just be you be yourself and i was going i remember thinking this at Cotty actually, and I was with all those people, don't be you, be us, be part of the group, be something bigger than you, right?
49:12We're so stuck in these individualistic metaphors. And that question you were asking about, why do some people overcome it and some people don't? I think there's lots of things going on. I don't believe anyone is doomed to be in the category it doesn't go right i think it's do you find your way to a story about what happened to you and a story about how to find your way out and then do you get help to find your way out when i think about the cow story right we talked about a while back yes one of the most important things about the cow story is they didn't go okay so we figured out that it's working in this field that's making you're really depressed and you're in this pain all right go sort it out mate right they went to they went and got him account right they helped him right they lifted him up right um and i'm that's feeling loved isn't it that's feeling kind of um cared for and and i was trying to think like maybe narcotics anonymous helped me find the positivity but when you said about deficits and strikes I think I was loved you know I had my dad and my granny and my mum loved me in a very dysfunctional way but uh but I you know now I'm older I can see that and I can feel gratitude I did feel love and I think that's a very basic thing you know I you've you've spoken about love not war you know love not hate like love is going to do everything in the world hate does nothing Hate just destroys.
50:44Love builds. I think that's so true. And there's so many people taught me this. And I always think about someone you would have loved who taught me this so deeply. I wrote about him in my book about addiction chasing the screen. And his name is Bud Osborne. So Bud was a homeless guy with a quite bad heroin addiction. and he was living in a kind of notorious area called the downtown east side of Vancouver. If anyone's been to Vancouver... Oh, yes, I know it. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of... It's famous, isn't it, for being dodgy? Chaotic street use, you know, like it was a rough neighbourhood. And Bud was watching his friends just die one by one of overdoses.
51:33And one day he was walking down, he was at the corner of Main and Hastings, and he bumped into someone who told him that a really good friend of his had just died. and he thought, I can't just sit here and watch all my friends die, but he also thought, this is the words he would have used at the time, I'm just a homeless junkie, what the fuck can I do? And he had an idea. So at that time, the police were really cracking down on the downtown east side. They were arresting anyone who was visibly addicted. So it meant that people would go and hide to shoot up. They would hide in dumpsters or abandoned buildings or whatever.
52:10But obviously that meant if you were hiding when you shot up. Yeah, chances are you'd OD or like. Yeah, and you start to OD, no one finds you, you just die. So he gathered together a load of the addicts. And he said, when we're not using, which is most of the time even for quite hardcore users, why don't we just drop a timetable and we'll just go look in the places where we shoot up. And if someone's overdosing, we'll call an ambulance, right? And loads of people have come to the downtowning side with these big plans. But this is like Bud, they knew him, they liked him. They were like, all right, let's try it.
52:40So they started to do it. And in the next three months, the death toll on the downtown Eastside massively fell. And obviously it was good because people who would have died lived. But it also meant that people there were like, maybe we're not the pieces of shit everyone thinks we are, right? Oh my God, that's so powerful. It was like the change in self-concept would be the fancy way of putting it. And so they started thinking, well, what else could we do? So Bud went to the library and he learned that in Frankfurt, in Germany, they had opened what we would now call overdose prevention sites. So they're places where if you've got an addiction problem, you can go, they'll give you clean needles, you shoot up there and they monitor you, nurses monitor you.
53:17They obviously revive you if you overdose. And also there's loads of help. So when you're ready, you can go to rehab or treatment or whatever you need. He was like, OK, we should do that in Vancouver. But there had been nothing like that in the whole of North America for 70 years, right? But he's like, OK, we'll persuade our mayor. The mayor at the time was a right-wing politician called Philip Owen. who was from a really rich family, never known anyone with addiction problems, super privileged. And he ran, when he ran for mayor, saying all the drug users should be taken and locked away at the local military base in Chilliwack, never let out, right?
53:50But I was like, it's okay, we'll persuade him. They built a coffin and they wrote on it something like, who will die next, Philip Hoen, before you open a safe injection site? Everywhere he went, they followed him with a coffin. every time he spoke in public one of them, this group was called VANDU the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users every time he spoke in public, one of them would stand up and go, who will die next Philip Owen before you open an overdose prevention site one time, Dean Wilson, one of the people there he stood up and asked that and he said, do you remember Julia who asked that question last time it turned out to be her because you haven't done it yet and this went on for years and there was no change and people were starting to lose hope.
54:36And one day, 100 % to his credit, Philip Owen said, who the fuck are these people? What is this? Who's following me in the coffin? What's going on? And he went and just spent loads of time on the downtown east side and got to know loads of people. And it blew his mind. He thought that addictive people were like people who party too hard, were indulging themselves. And he's meeting people who were like horrifically sexually abused. It's been through hell. And he held a press conference, Philip. And he held, who was there? Chief of police, coroner. and Bud and all the people from Van Dyke. He said, I'm never talking about addiction again without having these guys here with me.
55:09We're going to open the first overdose prevention site in North America. We're going to have the most compassionate drug policies in North America. Things are going to change around here just to wait and see. And Philip Owen's right-wing party was so horrified they deselected him as their candidate and his political career ended, but he'd started it in motion and then it opened under the next guy who won from a more kind of liberal party. And over the next 10 years, the life expectancy on the downtown east side rose by 10 years which is like you don't get that except when a war ends right and I remember when so they had a kind of conservative government who tried to shut it down it went all the way to the supreme court and the supreme court ruled that addicted people have a right to live and therefore they have a right to this so that will never be taken away now and I remember after I got to know all these people when Bud died Bud died in his early 60s after i got to know him he'd been you know he'd been homeless in a drug war it's difficult they shut down the streets of the downtown east side and they had this incredible memorial service and it's now a huge sign in downtown east side that says if you don't care who will care which is a quote from bud and um i remember thinking that day that loads of people in that crowd they knew that they were alive because of what bud had started because so many other people joined them joined joined what he'd begun I remember thinking you know lots of people will be listening to what we've said they're thinking yeah yeah I get it things can change but that's hard to do and someone else will have to do it and it's hard to think of a more powerless person in our culture than a homeless drug addict I was just thinking Andrew Sullivan but you know same same thing you know I'm a powerless person there was Andrew thinking that he was dying from HIV.
56:54Nobody would want to touch him or go near him, a gay man. And then there's Bud. Exactly. Look what they did. I actually think the most admirable person in that whole story is Philip Owen, the former mayor. Yes. He stuck his neck out, right? And the last time I saw him, we were sitting on the downturning side and he said, I would sacrifice my entire political career all over again to do this. How many times do you get to be part of saving thousands of people's lives, right? And I think it comes back to that line from the Philadelphia story, the time to make your mind up about someone is never. Philip Owen was the most unlikely person.
57:28I would have frankly said, if Bud and all these people had asked me at the start, we're going to win over Philip Owen, I would have said, don't waste your breath, right? Try to defeat him and wait for the next guy, right? But they didn't. I always think one of the most amazing things about life, especially the age we are now, you genuinely don't know what's going to happen. You don't know who's going to change. Some people change for the worse, but lots of people change for the better. You genuinely don't know. The unpredictability of life is an incredible and joyful thing, right? And you can try to be part of that by being part of the rage and the hatred and the negativity.
58:03And there's a lot of temptations to that. And there's some pleasures in that as well. We should be honest about it. I remember it from years ago. There's pleasures of being part of angry, hateful. Or you can try to be part of the love and compassion. And that goes through all of us, right? You know, the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, the battle between good and evil runs through every human heart. We've all got both in us, right? It's not like we're the good people and the bad people are over there. We've all got these temptations. But I guess what I'd really want people to understand who are struggling to change is you are much more powerful than you think.
58:36Andrew was really powerful. Didn't seem it. Bud was really powerful. Those mums who fought to ban leaded paint, they were really powerful. Every single person watching this is a beneficiary of what those mums did for all of us, right? Know where your power lies. There's a lot of people who want you to believe you're powerless, who want you to believe there's nothing that can change, who want you to be like those women who were being beaten up in the 70s and were just handed valium to tranquilise themselves to get through the violence, rather than the people who said, get the fuck away from those men and come to our domestic violence refuge and let's get the police to arrest that man, right?
59:10And help him to change. that the change is possible it is necessary you can you can do it by connecting with other people who are determined to fight for change so i think after everything that we've talked about lost connections is probably going to be the book that people would really enjoy getting their teeth into um so you can get that everywhere and this is i think this is the one and the audiobook yeah Yeah. And audiobook's amazing. I had a really weird experience with the audiobook of this. I was in, when it came out, I flew to Australia and I couldn't sleep the night before. And I couldn't sleep on the flight because I can never sleep on flights.
59:50And I landed in Melbourne and I was fucked. I was delirious. And I was standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus into the city centre. And suddenly I heard my own voice talking about depression. And it's literally the only time in my life I've genuinely thought, oh my God, I've actually gone mad. Like I'm actually having like a psychotic breakdown. what's happening and suddenly I realised someone in front of me was listening in their car to the audiobook of the book and if I'd been more on the ball that is so good I would have leaned forward and been like well hello because you can't imagine how weird that would be you're in Australia listening to a British audiobook and so the person goes hello just appears in your car door and then they just drove off it's actually weird and like bizarrely my books sell an insane amount in Australia I don't quite understand why god bless Australia um but yeah so the audiobook that's I'm slightly haunted by the thought of the lost because I literally about 20 seconds I thought this is it I've lost my mind i've literally gone mad but anyone who wants to know where to get the book or other stuff or where to follow me i will not follow you back so look at it um it's you can go to j-o-h-a-n-n-h-a-r-i dot com and you can see about all the books and my ted talks and the documentary was made out one of my books and the oscar-nominated film and i'd like to advise everybody to go forensic Harrow.
1:01:00Yeah, because I think every topic you cover is, you know, sorry, because I keep making this podcast longer and longer, but I was just thinking that everything you talk about, in particular, I love this stone and focus thing about the phone, that my best ideas, my most creative moments come from when I'm bored. And we never let ourselves get bored anymore. Get bored. Get bored. Go on to johanhari.com, really read a lot of stuff and then sit down and do fuck all. And your brain will go mad. It'll be great. You'll have amazing ideas. And whereas I can phone you and talk about those ideas, they can't.
1:01:44But anyway. Hooray. What a joy. Thank you so much, Davina. It's always a joy. Hooray. I mean, Johan always blows my mind when I talk to him. He gives me so much to think about. And I guess with Begin Again, I always want to try and gift you with something. And I feel like it's been Christmas today, people, for you and for me. So I think a lot of the things we discussed are problems where society is trying to fix us with outside things. and that there are ways that we can look at all the significant issues that people are facing in modern times and we can turn the solution on its head and look at it from a completely different way.
1:02:35This is what I love about him. He's always coming at problems that we all suffer with and saying, look, here's another way of looking at it. I think one of the things I love that he said was that people can change. And you might really not like someone, but everyone is capable of redemption. And I really like that idea. It also makes me believe that I can change, that we aren't stuck in our ways, and that society can change. He gave me hope for society. And he also made me realize that it doesn't matter who you are, what you do, where you are, or where you perceive you are in society's packing order you can change the world that's amazing isn't it what a great thought so I loved him don't worry I'll get him back
From the publisher
In this episode of Begin Again, Davina welcomes Johann Hari, an acclaimed journalist, TED speaker, and New York Times best-selling author of The Magic Pill, Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections, and Stolen Focus. Renowned for his exploration of mental health, addiction, and the societal factors shaping our well-being, Johann offers profound insights into why tackling the root causes of our challenges is key to true transformation.
Find more of Johann’s work here:
www.johannhari.com
FB: @JohannHari.Page
Insta: @johann.hari
TikTok: @johannhari
Twitter: @johannhari101
Follow me here:
www.instagram.com/beginagain
https://www.tiktok.com/@beginagainpod
(0:00) Intro
(1:26) How to Move Forward in Life After Setbacks
(6:18) Healthy Ways to Cope with Trauma
(13:44) Why Anti-Depressants Aren't the Only Solution to Depression
(15:01) The Importance of Finding Your Support Network
(20:54) Why Tough Love Often Backfires
(23:45) How Hatred Controls Our Lives and How to Break Free
(30:07) Adobe Ad
(31:15) Fiverr Ad
(32:05) Escaping the Social Media Rabbit Hole
(40:00) How to Reframe Negativity into Positivity
(50:04) The Healing Power of Feeling Truly Loved
(51:17) How to Use Your Inner Power to Create Positive Change
(01:59:22) Johann's Book
(01:01:50) Davina's Takeaways
Sponsored by:
Adobe - https://www.adobe.com/uk/express/
Fiverr - https://fvrr.co/davina"
SetArtwork provided by Kimi Zoet. Enquiries: kimizoet.artsales@gmail.com
https://g2ul0.app.link/oQMAPbdSGNb
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