EXPERTS ON EXPERT: Johann Hari

[0] Hello, everybody.

[1] Welcome to experts on expert.

[2] I'm your host, expectant parentinson and my co -host.

[3] That sounded like, it sounds like Latin for expecting parent.

[4] Yeah.

[5] Well.

[6] Are you an expecting parent?

[7] Are you telling us now?

[8] I'm expecting great things for my children as they mature.

[9] And I am joined by expectant bacheloretum.

[10] Wow.

[11] Wow.

[12] Wow.

[13] Wow.

[14] Today we have Johan Hari.

[15] I heard Johan Hari on Sam Harris.

[16] And I just loved him so much.

[17] And I thought, I really want to chat with this gentleman.

[18] Yeah.

[19] I was aware of his work in his previous book.

[20] Chasing the scream.

[21] That was about addiction with a totally different view of it.

[22] I don't always agree with it, but I found it really interesting.

[23] We have a fun little juicy debate about that.

[24] But his.

[25] book that he's here to talk about is lost connections uncovering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions he's a just a beautifully optimistic wonderful person that i think has a really nice assessment of humanity and before you enjoy johan harry i want to announce that in response to popular demand we're going to denver y 'all yeah we're going to denver colorado on april 19th Buell Theater.

[26] I hope I'm saying that correctly.

[27] The Temple Hoin Buell Theater.

[28] H -O -Y -N -E, I don't know.

[29] Hoyne.

[30] H -O -N -E.

[31] Hoin.

[32] H -N -E.

[33] Hoin.

[34] We're going to be at the Temple Hoin Bule Theater.

[35] Tickets go on sale Friday, March 15th at 10 a .m. Mountain Standard Time.

[36] The link is on our website, armchairexpertpod .com.

[37] I hope you snag tickets for that.

[38] We're going to have a raucous good time.

[39] you might even get blasted in the head with a t -shirt can.

[40] And now please enjoy Johan Horry.

[41] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now.

[42] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[43] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[44] Do you mind if I don't wear the chairs?

[45] You don't have to?

[46] I hate hearing my own voice.

[47] Oh, you do.

[48] I love your voice.

[49] Thank you.

[50] Yeah.

[51] I get the constant British positive discrimination that you get in the United States.

[52] I remember one's going into an IHOP in Arizona and trying, like, ordering pancakes, whatever it was.

[53] And the waitress kept going, what?

[54] And after like five tries, she just looks at me going, do you speak English?

[55] It's like, you're fucking invented it.

[56] Very well, actually.

[57] Oh, girl, I'm more than speak it.

[58] I invented this shit.

[59] Exactly, exactly.

[60] But Winston Churchill said the British people and Americans are divided by a common language.

[61] which.

[62] I don't think he's totally the right way thinking about it.

[63] Yes.

[64] One of a trillion great quotes by him, right?

[65] He was ridiculously quotable.

[66] Yeah.

[67] And now now he's under fire, right?

[68] People publicly will, you know, revere him.

[69] They then come under fire for...

[70] The thing of Winston Churchill is that he simultaneously represents the greatest moment in British history and some of the worst moments, right?

[71] So the great moment when Britain stands alone against the Nazis, when...

[72] Oh, the fucking speech.

[73] Genuinely incredible thing, right?

[74] And he was when very few people in the British elite wanted to resist the Nazis.

[75] Most of them wanted to cut a deal with the Nazis because they were quite anti -Semitic themselves.

[76] They didn't give a shit about the Jews of Europe.

[77] He was absolutely 100 % right and an extraordinary wartime leader.

[78] Also, we've got to be honest about this.

[79] Just like Americans, talk about how George Washington was a great independence leader, but also owned slaves, which is a monstrous crime.

[80] Winston Churchill, it's not just that he rhetorically said things.

[81] He actively led and took part in horrendous crimes And there was a massive famine in Bengal, in what was then British occupied India.

[82] You know, he deliberately opposed all the attempts to relieve the famine saying they bred like rabbits.

[83] They, you know, we're better off without them.

[84] During the war, he wanted to give speeches in which he compared Hitler and Gandhi saying they were equally bad, right?

[85] Because that was how racist he was about Indian people.

[86] Right.

[87] So, you know, it's like a lot of people.

[88] And we can have a complex, you know, kind of conversation about Winston Churchill, right?

[89] Which I welcome, you know.

[90] I think we would love and we fantasize about like one type of person that's perfect for all occasions.

[91] But that we just don't come in that shape generally, do we?

[92] That's a good way of putting it.

[93] Anywho, you're here, first of all, because you're very generous.

[94] So I just want to say thank you for coming because I know you get invited everywhere.

[95] But I heard you on Sam Harris's podcast.

[96] And I loved it so much.

[97] the correlation you kind of discover between opiate addiction, these pockets of opiate addiction, and then also politically what happens in those situations.

[98] And again, this shows generally apolitical, but you just have a very, I have this sense that we are approaching the division completely wrong on both sides.

[99] I think we're both horrendously guilty of it.

[100] And I don't think that any of us are listening to one another.

[101] And I think it's tragic.

[102] And I don't think it's the way.

[103] forward.

[104] And then you just have such an articulate way of breaking that down and giving some kind of data behind that.

[105] Oh, thank you.

[106] Yeah, it was really, I was like, fuck, that's what I'm in trying to say, but I didn't know how to say it.

[107] But first and foremost, you kind of, at least I became aware of you because you wrote, I guess your second book is chasing the scream, the first and last days of the war on drugs.

[108] I'm 14 years sober.

[109] I go to AA.

[110] So your book is, is, is, polarizing, I guess.

[111] Could you say that?

[112] Between the different camps, there seems to be camps around addiction.

[113] And yours was a totally different point of view, which I love.

[114] I don't think any one point of view on it is correct.

[115] I think it's compatible with, I think the insights that I learned from the leading experts in the world about addiction are compatible with a whole range of perspectives.

[116] There's only one, there's only a couple of perspectives it's not compatible with.

[117] So the reason I cared about this is because one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to.

[118] And I didn't understand why then because I was just a little boy.

[119] But as I got older, I realized we had addiction in my family, drug addiction.

[120] And it got to the point where when I started researching my book chasing the scream about eight years ago, I was just really despairing because like a lot of people who love someone who's got an addiction problem, I felt nothing I was doing was helping, nothing I was doing was working, and I didn't know what to do.

[121] So I ended up, I didn't realize it would be like this at the start, but I ended up going on this really big journey.

[122] all over the world.

[123] I wanted to go to the places that have the toughest policies towards addiction, places like Arizona, where I went out with a group of women who were made to go out on a chain gang, wearing t -shirts saying, I was a drug addict, while members of the public mock them and attack them.

[124] And I wanted to go to the places had the most compassionate policies like Portugal, where they decriminalized all drugs and transferred all the money they used to spend on screwing people's lives up and used it instead to help them turn their lives around.

[125] And I wanted to just sit with a crazy mixture of people who've been affected by this drug war and by addiction from a transgender crack dealer in Brooklyn who turned out to be one of the smartest people I've ever met to a hitman for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel who is not one of the smartest people I ever met to you know and I guess I learned a huge number of things but the heart of what I learned is that so much of what we think we know about this subject is wrong right drugs are not what we think they are addiction is not what we think it is the war on drugs is not what we think it is and the alternatives to the war on drugs are not what we think they are and I think one of the the core insights that emerges from this that I was taught by the leading experts in the world that I think does refute some of the things people think they know about this and is compatible with some of the views out there is something that I believed right if you had said to me eight years ago when I started doing this research what causes for example let's say heroin addiction because that's something that was close to me I would have looked at you like you were an idiot and I would have said well heroin causes heroin addiction right right right the clues in the fucking substance.

[126] We've been told this story for a hundred years that's become totally part of our common sense.

[127] It was part of mine.

[128] We think, you know, we're sitting here in Hollywood, we think if we grab the next 20 people to walk past here and like a villain in a saw movie, we injected them all with heroin every day for a month.

[129] At the end of that month they'd all be heroin addicts for a simple reason, right?

[130] There are chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically need and that is what addiction is.

[131] It's this desperate, physical hunger for the chemical hook.

[132] That's what I thought, right?

[133] It turns out chemical hooks are real.

[134] They play a genuine role in addiction, but it's actually a surprisingly small role.

[135] To support your argument, you don't really see that these substances are innately more addictive than others.

[136] So when I'm in a meeting, they're just, there mostly people are addicted to booze there.

[137] That's number one.

[138] And then, you know, heroin, of course, Cocaine, you don't really get a physical dependency on cocaine.

[139] There's not really bad withdrawals.

[140] It's not life -threatening.

[141] It's not like what people see in the movies when quitting heroin.

[142] So even within those two substances, one, your body does get more physically addicted to than the other, just physiologically speaking.

[143] And then weed, people, there's no physical dependency on weed.

[144] You could quit any time, but certainly many, many people are addicted to marijuana.

[145] Well, it turns out that the addiction depends to a significant degree on the context.

[146] context, right?

[147] So this breakthrough is made in the 1970s by an amazing man I spent a lot of time with in Vancouver called Professor Bruce Alexander.

[148] So he explained to me, this theory that a lot of us believe that we've, that addiction comes primarily from the chemical hooks, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century.

[149] They're really simple experiments.

[150] Your listeners could try them at home if they're feeling a little bit sadistic, right?

[151] And have access to cocaine.

[152] Exactly.

[153] You take a, they can get it pretty easily, I'm sure.

[154] You take.

[155] You take it.

[156] You take.

[157] a rat, you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles.

[158] One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine.

[159] If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself within a couple of weeks, right?

[160] People around our age might remember a famous advertisement in the 1980s that showed this experiment and said something like, it will happen to you, right?

[161] Yeah.

[162] Again, another attempt to humiliate whoever's addicted to it, that do you want to be as powerless as this dumb -ass rat?

[163] You know, there's even subtle messaging within those scared.

[164] Yeah, but actually, we already knew by then, by the time that advert was made, in the 1970s, Professor Alexander came along.

[165] He was working with people with addiction problems.

[166] He's looking at what was causing this?

[167] And he looks back at these early experiments, and he says, well, hang on a minute.

[168] We put the rat alone in an empty cage where it's got nothing that makes life meaningful for rats.

[169] All it's got is these drugs.

[170] drugs, and it uses them until it kills itself, right?

[171] What would happen if we did this differently?

[172] So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats, right?

[173] They've got loads of friends, they got loads of cheese, they got loads of coloured balls, they can have loads of sex.

[174] They can fuck all the time.

[175] That's right.

[176] Let's not leave that out.

[177] That's an important ingredient.

[178] Anything a rat could want in life is there in Rat Park.

[179] And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water, and the drug water, of course they try both, they don't know what's in them.

[180] This is the fascinating thing.

[181] In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water.

[182] No, hardly ever use it.

[183] None of them ever use it compulsively.

[184] None of them ever overdose.

[185] So you go from almost 100 % compulsive use of overdose when they do not have the things that make life meaningful to none when they do have the things that make life meaningful.

[186] Now, there's loads of human examples, I'm sure we'll get on to illustrate this principle plays out for us.

[187] But the core thing I took from this is the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, important though that is to many people.

[188] the opposite of addiction is connection.

[189] The core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be, right?

[190] And if we want to understand why people turn compulsively to painkillers, we've got to understand why they're in such pain, right?

[191] Everyone listening to your show knows they've got natural physical needs, right?

[192] Obviously, you need food, you need shelter, you need clean air.

[193] If I took those things away from you, you've been real trouble, real fast.

[194] But there's easy, equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs.

[195] You need to feel you belong.

[196] You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose.

[197] You need to feel that people see you and value you.

[198] You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense.

[199] And this culture we've built is good at lots of things.

[200] I'm really glad to be alive today.

[201] But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs.

[202] And the places where addiction crises are worse.

[203] And by the way, my more recent book is about this, places where depression and anxiety are worse, are the places where we are not meeting people's psychological needs.

[204] It's happening across the society, and it's happening more acutely in some places than others.

[205] Now, just really quick, I wonder if you know for certain, I don't.

[206] Now, rats in general, are they a hierarchical structure?

[207] Do they, you know, like us humans are very social animals.

[208] We're very obsessed with status.

[209] We're very obsessed with where we're at in the pack.

[210] Do rats have that?

[211] Do you know?

[212] Well, humans are hierarchical in some situations and not others, which I think is interesting.

[213] But no, rats are, I mean, the men fight a bit.

[214] Which situation are they not?

[215] Oh, well, where you create situations of inequality, humans become very conscious of status.

[216] But actually, where you have general situations of equality, people become much less status conscious.

[217] I mean, humans always think about status to some degree.

[218] But actually, the more unequal a society becomes, like the United States at the moment, is the most unequal points since the 1920s, the more people become conscious of status, because if you lose your status, you're really fucked, right?

[219] As you think about a country like Sweden, where, you know, the bottom is not, you don't hit the street, right?

[220] And the gap between the bottom and the top is much smaller.

[221] People are much less status conscious, and that leads to actually a lot less stress.

[222] There's people who've done really good research on this, like, um, uh, the authors, well, Keith Payne, have you, have you read on the broken ladder?

[223] No, I don't think so.

[224] It's incredible.

[225] It's so mind -blowing, and it's all about income inequality, which is way more complicated than just the words income inequality, because it actually has less to do with measurable differences in poor and wealthy, is feeling poor or feeling wealthy, that there are many people that are poor, they're objectively poor, they're below the poverty line, by all metrics, they're poor, yet their neighbors are also poor.

[226] And so take a state like Iowa, Iowa doesn't have this extreme that California does, where you've got billionaires and super poor people, right?

[227] Generally, Iowa is a low -income inequality state.

[228] Those people don't feel poor.

[229] And so what's interesting is the people that feel poor actually have a more dire outcome in educational attainment, how much money they'll make, life expectancy, all the markers that we generally associate with being poor.

[230] But the people who are objectively poor don't suffer as much as the people who feel poor.

[231] So much of it is mental.

[232] So much of it is the comparison we're doing between one another.

[233] That's kind of driving this depression, addiction, all these things, I think.

[234] So that's why I'm just wondering if the rat scenario is perfectly mappable onto humans, because I wonder if they have the same obsession with their rank.

[235] I think if we want to understand if the principles of rat part play out with humans, we've got to look at the places that tried it, right?

[236] Because it's not a kind of theoretical conversation.

[237] So I spent a lot of time in Portugal because of what happened there.

[238] In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in the world.

[239] One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is remarkable.

[240] And every year they tried the American way more.

[241] They shame more people.

[242] They imprisoned more people.

[243] They actually became more unequal.

[244] And every year the problem got worse.

[245] And one day the prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they're like, look, we can't go on like this.

[246] What are we going to do?

[247] They decided to do something really radical, something no. one had done since the drug war, global drug war began 70 years before.

[248] They said, should we like ask some scientists what we should do?

[249] So they set up a panel of scientists and doctors led by an amazing man I got to know called Dr. Huau Guilau, who'd set up the first ever drug treatment center in Portugal.

[250] And they said to this panel, you guys go away and figure out what would genuinely solve this problem.

[251] And we've agreed in advance, we'll do whatever you recommend, right?

[252] So just took it out of politics.

[253] So the panel goes away, two years, look at everything, including Rat Park, and they came back and they said, decriminalize all drugs, from cannabis to crack, everything, but, and this is the crucial next step, take all the money we currently spend on fucking people's lives up, shaming them, imprisoning them, arresting them, harassing them, and spend all that money instead on turning their lives around.

[254] And interestingly, it's not really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States.

[255] So they do some residential rehab, which has real value, but most of what they did was a big program of reconnection with meaning and the society.

[256] So say you used to be a mechanic, they go to a garage and they say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages.

[257] It's much cheaper than sending him to prison, right?

[258] They set up a big program of small loans for people with addiction problems to set up businesses about things they cared about.

[259] When they did this, people were like, this is crazy, they're just going to spend all their money on drugs, they're going to fritter it away.

[260] Actually, by the time I went to Portugal, it was 13 years since this experiment had begun, and the results were in.

[261] According to the best scientific study, which was published in the British Journal of Criminology, addiction was down by 50%.

[262] Overdose deaths were massively down.

[263] Crime was massively down.

[264] One of the ways you know it worked so well is that virtually nobody in Portugal wants to go back.

[265] I went and interviewed a guy called Huo Figuera, who led, he was the top drug cop in Portugal at the time of the decriminalization.

[266] and he led the opposition to it.

[267] And he said what lots of people think, understandably, when you say we should decriminalise all drugs.

[268] They say, surely we'll have a huge increase in drug use.

[269] Surely we'll have a huge increase in addiction.

[270] We'll have all sorts of problems.

[271] And Huau said to me, when I went to go and see him in Lisbon, everything I said would happen didn't happen.

[272] And everything the other side said would happen did.

[273] And he talked about how he felt really ashamed that he spent so many years prior to the decriminalisation, screwing people's lives up, when he could have been helping them, turn their lives around.

[274] And you know, this is something I learned for chasing the scream all over the world, right?

[275] The places with policies based on shame and stigma and punishing people, sometimes people say, oh, that makes that fails, it doesn't work.

[276] The truth is much worse than that.

[277] They make the problem worse, right?

[278] Once you understand that pain is the fuel for addiction, right?

[279] People are addicted because they are trying to avoid their deep internal shame.

[280] Exactly.

[281] You can see why the drug war approach, which is let's inflict more pain on them in order to give them an incentive to stop, is a profound mistake, right?

[282] Yes.

[283] And this is why everywhere that adopts these brutal stigmatizing policies ends up with greater addiction crises.

[284] Right.

[285] Now, so, yes, I'm aware of that Portugal example, and I definitely agree with it.

[286] So let me just start there.

[287] And I believe that the war on drugs over the last 40 years, has been a pretty obvious failure.

[288] Now, with that said, I can also acknowledge that this country's vastly different than Portugal.

[289] I mean, I don't know what their income inequality status is in Portugal, but I know that ours is the worst.

[290] So I do wonder how, what impact that has, that if that model could be, you know, transplant to the U .S. in its full form that you just described, you know, part of me. needs it much more.

[291] I mean, Portugal wasn't imprisoning the equivalent of two million of its own citizens, right?

[292] I think we've got to understand it in the context of the deep history of the way that Americans have responded to addiction, right?

[293] And the place where I opened my book about this chasing the screen is with a story that at first might seem well, but I think it's worth telling.

[294] First you might think what's this got to do with addiction?

[295] I think it tells you the heart of why the drug war began and what it's doing to people with addiction problems and the alternatives, right?

[296] So, in 1939, the great jazz singer, Billy Holliday, walked onto a stage in Midtown Manhattan in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

[297] And for the first time, she sang a song.

[298] Song was called Strange Fruit, right?

[299] Your listeners, or your listeners will know it.

[300] It's a song against lynching.

[301] It's the idea that in the South, the bodies of African -American men hang from the trees, and that's a kind of strange fruit.

[302] That night, Billy Holiday received a warning from the agents of a man called Harry Anslinger.

[303] And the warning effectively said, stop singing this song, right?

[304] Now, Harry Anslinger was probably the most influential person no one's ever heard of.

[305] He's affected the lives of loads of people listening to your show.

[306] Harry Anslinger was a government bureaucrat and he took over the Department of Alcohol Prohibition just as Alcohol Prohibition was ending.

[307] So they've had this war on alcohol and it's been a shit show and it's ending, right?

[308] And just enriched a lot of bad dudes.

[309] Exactly.

[310] Yeah.

[311] Exactly.

[312] And he wanted to keep his government department going.

[313] So he invented the modern war on drugs and he built it around two groups he really intensely hated.

[314] The first was African -Americans.

[315] He was regarded as an extreme racist in the 1920s.

[316] I was tired to do, yeah.

[317] I mean, he used the N -word so often in official police memos.

[318] His own senator said he should have to resign.

[319] The other group he really hated because of a bad experience he'd had when he was a kid was people with addiction problems.

[320] And to him, Billy Holliday was a symbol of everything he despised, right?

[321] She's an African -American woman standing up to white supremacy, and she had an addiction problem.

[322] When she was 10 years old, she was raped.

[323] the man who raped her was sent to prison for a year and a half she was sent to prison for longer she was sent to a so -called reformatory where they told her it was her own fault she brought it on herself they locked her in with dead bodies overnight to punish her eventually she managed to escape she went to join her mother but her mother was working in a in a brothel so Billy Holiday starts kind of in inverted commas working alongside her mom from when she was 14 she's being raped every day for money by strangers right to deal with the grief and the pain of this Billy Holiday turns initially to huge amounts of alcohol and later heroin by the time Harry Anslinger catches up with her.

[324] When she gets this warning from Harry Anslinger to stop singing this song, Billy Holiday's attitude is, fuck you.

[325] I'm an American citizen.

[326] I'll sing what I damn well please.

[327] And when she says that, Harry Anslinger resolves to destroy her.

[328] He hated employing African Americans, but you couldn't really send a white guy to stalk Billy Holiday around Harlem.

[329] It'd be kind of obvious.

[330] So he employed a guy called Jimmy Fletcher, an African -American agent.

[331] It was called a bag man. And he said, follow her everywhere she goes, document her drug use.

[332] We're going to break her.

[333] We're going to destroy her, right?

[334] Jimmy Fletcher follows her everywhere.

[335] He dances with her in nightclubs.

[336] He spends a year following her.

[337] And Billy Holiday was so amazing that Jimmy Fletcher fell in love with her.

[338] Yeah, I was just going to say, I feel like this is a great recipe for like a dark rom -com.

[339] Yeah, well, Lee Daniels is directing the movie of my book.

[340] So Jimmy Fletcher buss Billy Holiday on Anslinger's orders.

[341] And his whole life, he's really ashamed of this and what happened to her.

[342] So she's put on trial.

[343] The trial was called the United States versus Billy Holiday and she said that's how it felt, right?

[344] She's sent to prison for 18 months.

[345] She doesn't sing a word in prison.

[346] But when she gets out, Ansling is not finished with her, right?

[347] He sends an obese, bizarre agent called George White, who we now know was a rapist and drug user and drug addicts, in fact, to stalk her everywhere.

[348] One of the things, in order to sing anywhere where alcohol was served, You needed to have something called a cabaret performers license.

[349] They take singing away from Billy Holiday.

[350] This, by the way, is what we do to people with addiction problems all over the United States today.

[351] Instead of helping them reconnect, we put barriers between them and reconnecting.

[352] We shame them, we give them criminal records, we make it really hard for them to get jobs, right?

[353] In that situation, of course, Billy Holiday relapses.

[354] She starts using heroin heavily again.

[355] One day, not far from where she'd first sung strange fruit, she collapses.

[356] The first hospital won't even take her because she had an...

[357] addiction problem.

[358] Second hospital takes her.

[359] She said on her way into the hospital to her friend Maley Duffy, the Anslinger wasn't finished with her.

[360] She said, they're going to kill me in there.

[361] Don't let them.

[362] She wasn't wrong.

[363] She's taken into the hospital and she's diagnosed with quite advanced liver cancer.

[364] And she starts to go into herring withdrawal, which is dangerous when you're weak, right?

[365] Like when you're old or whatever.

[366] Maly Duffy, her friend, manages to insist the doctors give her methadone.

[367] Anslinger's men come and they arrest her on her hospital.

[368] bed.

[369] They handcuff her to the hospital bed.

[370] I interviewed the last person who'd been in that room, a man called the Reverend Eugene Callender, who's the only person they let in to see her.

[371] They tell her that she's going to be ruined, right?

[372] Outside the hospital, people lead protests with signs saying, let Lady Day live, right?

[373] People knew what was being done to her.

[374] After 10 days, they cut off the methadone.

[375] The next day she died.

[376] One of her friends said that she looked like she had been violently wrenched from life.

[377] And one of the things that I think is so important, And the reason I open chasing the screen with this story is I think it tells us so much about the drug war.

[378] What was it about right from the start?

[379] The same things it's about now, right?

[380] Overwhelmingly about persecuting African Americans.

[381] The same time, Harry Anslinger, found out that Billy Holiday had a heroin addiction.

[382] He found out that Judy Garland, who played Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, also had a heroin addiction.

[383] By the way, that changes how you view the Wizard of Oz when you watch it.

[384] We know what he did to Billy Holiday.

[385] With Judy Garland, he went to see her and advised her to take longer vacations.

[386] spot the difference but even more importantly it's about what we do well not not more importantly you see what it does to people with addiction problems right far from preventing addiction reducing addiction it devastates people with addiction problems and makes them worse but the main thing I took from this story was a slightly different thing which was actually it helped me with the people I love who have addiction problems because I think one of the reasons why this debate is so intense about addiction in the drug war is because if we're honest it runs through the hearts of all of us right anyone who loves someone who's got an addiction problem there's a Harry Anslinger in your voice in your head that looks at you looks at them rather and thinks God someone should just stop you why are you doing this and then there's another part of you most of us that can see that doesn't work actually this person's in pain they need love and compassion and you know we only tell in this culture one heroic story about people with addiction problems which is that they stop, right?

[387] That is indeed a heroic story.

[388] Your story is a heroic story.

[389] You deserve a huge amount of credit for this tax.

[390] That's not the only heroic story.

[391] Billy Holiday never stopped being addicted, right?

[392] She was using to the day she died or a few weeks before she died, right?

[393] No matter what they did to her, she always found somewhere to sing strange fruit, right?

[394] She would go to the worst parts of the Deep South where you didn't need a license, and she sang that song even though people threw bottles at her, right?

[395] She never stopped singing her song.

[396] Billy Holliday was a hero as a person with an addiction problem who never recovered, right?

[397] And I think you can see in this story and lots of the other stories I tell in the book, I think the kind of microcosm of what we're doing and why it's going wrong.

[398] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[399] We've all been there.

[400] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers and strange rashes.

[401] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing, but for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery.

[402] Like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[403] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[404] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[405] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[406] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[407] Prime members can listen early and add free on Amazon Music.

[408] What's up, guys?

[409] It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season, and let me tell you, it's too good.

[410] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[411] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[412] And I don't mean just friends.

[413] I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on.

[414] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[415] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[416] Yeah, I agree with so much what you're saying.

[417] And I do believe that a very, very significant percentage of addicts are probably suffering from some inequality or issue that is fueling that addiction.

[418] I concede to that.

[419] I agree with that.

[420] but I would also say that there is also a significant number of people that are addicts that don't have any of those issues.

[421] I have been in meetings with many, many people that don't have any trauma in their childhood.

[422] They were on top of the world status -wise economically.

[423] They're married.

[424] They have kids.

[425] They're happy by all accounts.

[426] And this is where maybe your nice opinions may diverge is that to me it sounds like for you it's an outside in situation so so the rat cage they're in is so uncomfortable that it's leading them to addiction and I would argue again from my point of view of how I got sober and how I've seen other people get sober those things are bullshit those things are what we call life on life's terms now you can wait for the world around you to change, to fill you up, or you can give yourself self -esteem.

[427] And there's innumerable ways to give yourself self -esteem that don't require that the state do anything or that society changes to meet your needs.

[428] The issue of self -esteem, I don't believe, is actually reliant on these things.

[429] So I'm just curious your thoughts on providing that stuff, for yourself because to me, we have a slightly different definition of addiction.

[430] I agree with what you're saying, but I would also add, when someone is an addict, they are trying to regulate the inside with things on the outside.

[431] And to me, you will never successfully and sustainably regulate the inside with external things.

[432] You have to learn to regulate the inside from the inside.

[433] So an attempt to change someone's exterior in order to solve their internal issues, I'm a little suspect of.

[434] There's loads of things in what you just said, Dax.

[435] And I've thought a lot about these questions, I think are really important.

[436] The first part of what you said first, so people who become addicted, depressed, or anxious, but have what appear to be good lives, right?

[437] This is really important to something I thought about a lot because like you, I know a lot of people in that position.

[438] I think a big part of this comes down.

[439] And the way you phrased it was really helpful.

[440] You said, they have good lives because they have high status.

[441] I'm paraphrasing high status and they have money and they're not, they're not like, you know, a homeless person on the street or something, right?

[442] And I think this goes to something I thought about it.

[443] I was really helped to understand it by a man called Professor Tim Kasser, completely amazing person.

[444] So everyone listening to your show knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right?

[445] As you can tell from my chins, I'm not averse to this myself.

[446] But there's equally strong evidence that a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick.

[447] But thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're going to feel like shit, right?

[448] That's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that is the gist of what he said.

[449] No, I think you've got a verbatim.

[450] But weirdly, no one had actually scientifically investigated this until Professor Kassas started to 25 years ago, right?

[451] professor castor showed loads of things so human all human beings everyone listening to your show is a mixture of two kinds of motives right so imagine you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it gives you joy right that's what's called an intrinsic reason to play the piano right you're not doing it to get anything out of it it's just that's a thing you love right right okay now imagine you play the piano might even be praying no one's hearing it exactly yeah now imagine you play the piano not because you love it but i don't know because you're parents are massively pressuring you because that's their dream for you or in a dive bar to pay the rent or to post a clip on Instagram to show or a lansome gal who likes piano exactly it might be a piano fetishist out there who knows right um that would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano or i would call a junk reason to play the piano you're not doing it because that thing pleases you you're doing it to get something further down the line out of it right right it's a means doing it exactly now we're all a mixture of both these things you have to be to be alive right Yeah.

[452] But Professor Kasser showed a few really interesting things.

[453] If your life becomes dominated by chasing these extrinsic values, these junk values, if your intrinsic values shrivel up or don't have a big part in your life, you are much more likely to become depressed and anxious, which we know leads to high levels of addiction as well.

[454] But he also showed something, I think even more important, as a society, as a culture, we have become much more driven by these junk values, by these extrinsic values.

[455] It's a cliche to say everyone listening to your show knows they will not lie on their deathbeds and think about all the likes they got on Instagram and all the shoes they bought, right?

[456] But as Professor Kasser put it to me, we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life, right?

[457] So I know lots of people who would say, I have a good life, I have nothing to be unhappy about.

[458] Look, I bought all these things.

[459] I live in this big house.

[460] I earn this amount of money.

[461] But when you understand this model that Professor Kasser is talking about, do they in fact have the things that human beings need to feel satisfied, to feel contented?

[462] Now, there's lots of things going on with addiction.

[463] I'm not saying this is the only thing going on.

[464] Sure, sure, sure.

[465] And in lost connections, I go through the nine causes that scientists have demonstrated that cause despair, right?

[466] And only two of them, you say, are biological.

[467] Yeah, two of them are, in fact, biological.

[468] There's your genes, which can make you more vulnerable to this stuff, although they don't determine your fate.

[469] and there are real changes in your brain that happen when you start to feel bad that can make it harder to get out.

[470] But most of the factors that are causing despair, depression, anxiety, addiction are not in our biology.

[471] They're factors in the way we live.

[472] I wrestle with this regularly because I do believe thus far of the many different experiments we've run, I do believe capitalism is the best system.

[473] I do.

[474] I believe the marketplace is the best.

[475] Yet a component of capitalism that I can't stand is that it's all.

[476] about selling products and we've got to advertise those products to sell them and that we are victimized by the endless comparison between what we're seeing on the commercial and that product will make you feel that way or look that way and all those things.

[477] When I look at Instagram or Twitter or any of these things, I go, holy shit, it's reached.

[478] It's unavoidable conclusion, which is we are now a product.

[479] So we have an ad page.

[480] We have a ability.

[481] Billboard in its Instagram.

[482] And so we are now marketing ourselves.

[483] And it's like, you know, it's just come to where it was always heading, which is we're a product as well.

[484] So it's tricky because, again, I have no desire to get rid of capitalism, but I also have, something has to change because we're just inundated from day one with this comparison junk food modus apirondi.

[485] That's how the whole thing works and supports itself.

[486] So it's, it's really interwoven in our system, I think.

[487] Yeah, there's a difference between getting rid of capitalism and regulating capitalism, right?

[488] Right.

[489] Having rules of the road, right?

[490] And, of course, markets are a really important part of the economy.

[491] They shouldn't be everything and they shouldn't be the only principle that determines what we do.

[492] But I think you're getting a much deeper thing there, Dax, which is really important, which is about understanding what we've had up to now is a debate about these problems like depression, anxiety, and addiction that's been dominated by talking about the biology of them, right?

[493] So we talk about, you know, chemicals that are missing in your brain, or the levels that fall when you become depressed.

[494] We talk about chemical hooks, which you're talking about before.

[495] Those things are real, but they're one part of the much bigger picture.

[496] And one of the things that I think is so important to understand is that if you're listening to this and you're in pain, your pain makes sense.

[497] You feel these ways for reasons, right?

[498] Because when I was a teenager, I went to my doctor, and I explained that I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me, and I couldn't control.

[499] it.

[500] I couldn't regulate it.

[501] I felt very ashamed if I didn't understand it.

[502] And my doctor told me it with the best of intentions, an entirely biological story about why I felt this way.

[503] He said there's just a problem in your brain.

[504] And all you need to do is drug yourself.

[505] And I did get some relief from the drugs for a while.

[506] For how long?

[507] Well, for a few months, I got a really significant boost.

[508] And then I felt this feeling come back, but not as bad as it had been.

[509] So I went back.

[510] The doctor said clearly didn't give you a high enough dose, gave me a higher dose.

[511] Again, I felt a bit better than about a couple of months after that, maybe a little bit less.

[512] less.

[513] I felt the feeling came back and they kept jacking up the dose until for 13 years I was taking the maximum possible dose.

[514] At the end of which I was still depressed, right?

[515] Now, at any point when you first went to see the doctor, did you have any suicidal ideations or anything?

[516] No, I wasn't suicidal, but I was, but I was acutely.

[517] Because I think this is, this is relevant.

[518] And it's a shame.

[519] We love and it's very efficient to talk of things in such broad strokes.

[520] This applies to addiction, just like depression and anything else.

[521] I am against Suboxone as a solution to addiction, yet I also recognize if I am a parent and I have a 19 -year -old and the stakes are dead or not dead from a heroin overdose, I have to recognize that there is a third option I might not like that, but might also be better than the alternative.

[522] And so I just want to make sure we're being clear about there are many different grades of depression.

[523] and there are people that would be dead without medication.

[524] I believe that.

[525] So we know.

[526] My own mother who was in here and was very brave in telling her story, she had two different suicidal episodes, one where you would totally expect it going through a divorce, you know, economic insecurity, all these things.

[527] Another one of them at the height of everything, family's perfect, her business is thriving, and then the floor drops out.

[528] So, you know, it's just, it's, it's, I would, I just, I just, I just, I would, I just, I just hope everyone resist the urge to want there to be a one -answer blanket for all these things.

[529] I think what we've had up to now is an extremely simplicity of debate, particularly in this country.

[530] We talked only about biology and offered only drugs as a solution.

[531] Now, there is a real biological component to be sure drugs give some relief to some people and have real value, right?

[532] But we've also got to – there's one person who really helped me to understand this a bit differently.

[533] I went to interview this South African psychiatrist called Derek Somerfield, who's a wonderful man and he told me he happened to be in Cambodia in 2001 when in that country they introduced chemical antidepressants for the first time and the local doctors the Cambodian doctors had never heard of these drugs before right so they're like what are they and he explained and they said to him we don't need them we've already got antidepressants and he said what do you mean he thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy like Jincoebelober or something instead they told him a story there was a farmer in their community who worked in the Icefields and one day he stood on a landmine left over by the war with the United States and he got his leg blown off.

[534] So they gave him an artificial leg and he went back after a few months to work in the fields, right?

[535] But apparently it's super painful to work underwater when you got an artificial limb.

[536] I'm guessing it was traumatic for obvious reasons.

[537] Sure.

[538] The guy starts to cry all day, doesn't want to get out of bed, eventually refuses to get out of bed.

[539] He develops classic depression, right?

[540] They sent to Dr. Somerfield, well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant and he said, what was it?

[541] they explained that they went and sat with him they listened to him they realized that his pain made sense it had deeper causes they started to think well how could we solve that they figured if they bought him a cow he could become a dairy farmer he wouldn't be in this position that was causing him so much distress so they bought him a cow within a couple of weeks his crying stop within a couple of months his depression was gone they said to dr summerfield so you see doctor that cow that was an antidepressant that's what you mean right Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that it's simply a problem in the brain, or overwhelmingly a problem in the brain, that sounds like a bad joke.

[542] I went to my doctor for an antidepressant.

[543] She gave me a cow.

[544] But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years.

[545] If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the main, a machine with broken parts.

[546] You're a huge.

[547] You're a huge.

[548] You're a human being with unmet needs.

[549] And what you need is very practical help to get those needs met.

[550] So a big part of what I'm asking in lost connections is, well, what is the cow for the things that are screwing us up, right?

[551] What are these wider things that are happening and how can we solve them?

[552] Now, some of those are internal things, as you say.

[553] It's not just about solving the environment.

[554] So we know there's very strong agreement among scientists that there's three kinds of cause of all mental health problems from depression to addiction, right?

[555] There's biological causes, which we've been talking about, which are very real.

[556] There are psychological causes how you think about yourself, which I think are the things you're most drawn to, Dax, for good reasons.

[557] And there are social causes, which are about the environment, which I think you can tell other things I'm most instinctively drawn to, but we need to acknowledge a reality of all three, right?

[558] Yes, yes.

[559] And I think it's really important for us to understand that all of those things are real, and we need to attack these problems at every level that we can, right?

[560] But that requires us to see depression, anxiety and addiction are signals that something's not right, there's something missing, right?

[561] So instead of what we've been doing up to now, I think too often, not always, is insulting the signal, saying, oh, it's weakness, it's craziness, it's purely biological.

[562] Well, even if you look at, I remember learning this in Anthro, if you just study the language of mental disorders, in this country, we say she's schizophrenic, he's manic depressive.

[563] These are permanent labels.

[564] If you go to sub -Saharan Africa, people don't have permanent mental disorders.

[565] They are going through something that is temporary.

[566] And just approaching a problem with the simplest thought of this is a permanent condition versus this could be a temporary phase is just hugely telling of how we're comprehending the whole thing.

[567] I thought about that a lot in relation to one of the causes of depression and anxiety that I learned a lot about.

[568] But if I'll tell you the story of how it was discovered, because I think it really speaks to it.

[569] Yes.

[570] And then I want to hear specifically, which I know you're honest about in your most recent book, your journey.

[571] So I want to know what are the practical tools and steps and actions that you took as an alternative to the medication.

[572] If I'm in the audience and I'm like, oh, okay, well, I get that.

[573] Yeah, maybe that's just a temporary solution.

[574] That'll run its course as well.

[575] But now what?

[576] Okay, great.

[577] So it's not just.

[578] that.

[579] How do I address?

[580] Yeah, and it's not enough to understand the problem.

[581] You've got to solve the problem, right?

[582] Right.

[583] Yeah.

[584] Well, it's like you said about Suboxone, right?

[585] Dead people don't detox, right?

[586] Suboxone is not the long -term solution for most people.

[587] Right.

[588] But if you're dead, we can't solve any of your problems, right?

[589] So we keep people alive long enough that we can help them to solve their problems.

[590] But I think in relation to this cause that I was thinking about, and I think you're exactly talking about it in the right way, which is this is complex and it's a, there's no one -size -fits -all solution.

[591] For some people, drugs will be an ongoing part of the solution and that's important to stress.

[592] And there are, and that should be one thing on the menu alongside loads of other things.

[593] Yeah.

[594] It's a deeper problem than just a problem in people's biology, right?

[595] But let's think about this one that I learned about.

[596] So, for a minute, listeners are going to think, why is he talking about this in relation to depression, but it led to an incredible breakthrough in depression that I don't think that you can understand if you don't know the whole story.

[597] In the mid -1980s, a doctor I got to know later called Dr. Vincent Felidi in San Diego gets approached by Kaiser Permanente, the big not -for -profit medical provider there.

[598] And they're like, look, we've got a big problem we don't know what to do about.

[599] Every year, obesity was going up, as it still is, and they're like, look, nothing we're doing is solving this problem.

[600] What can we do?

[601] So they gave him a pretty big budget, and they said, just go away and do blue skies research, figure out what the hell we can do.

[602] So he starts to work with 250 severely obese people, people who weighed more than 400 pounds, right?

[603] And one day he has an idea that seems, and in some ways is, quite stupid.

[604] He asked himself, what would happen if really obese people stopped eating and we gave them like vitamin C so they don't get scurvy and we gave them nutritional supplements would they just burn through the fat stores in their bodies and lose weight so with a shit ton of medical supervision they start doing this and incredibly in one sense it worked there's a woman who I'm going to call Susan to protect her medical confidentiality who went down from being more than 400 pounds you can say it Kristen bell went down from being more than 400 pounds to 138 pounds right Right.

[605] And people are like, my God, you've saved her life.

[606] This is incredible.

[607] Similar things were happening with loads of people.

[608] And then one day something happened that no one had expected.

[609] Susan cracked.

[610] She went to KFC or whatever it was.

[611] She starts obsessively eating.

[612] Pretty soon she's back at a really dangerous weight.

[613] And Dr. Felidi called Susan in.

[614] And he said, yeah, Susan, what happened?

[615] What the fuck happened?

[616] She looks down.

[617] She's really ashamed.

[618] She says, I don't know.

[619] I don't know.

[620] And he's sitting there puzzled.

[621] And he says, well, tell me about the day you cracked.

[622] Did anything happen that?

[623] that day.

[624] Turns out something had happened that day that had never happened to Susan.

[625] She'd been in a bar and a man had hit on her, not in a horrible predatory.

[626] It went quite a nice way, but she felt really frightened and freaked out.

[627] That's when Dr. Felidi asked her saying it never occurred to him to ask his patients before.

[628] He said, when did you start to put on your weight?

[629] In Susan's case, it was when she was 11.

[630] He said, did anything happen when you were 11?

[631] That didn't happen when you were 9 or 14, anything that year?

[632] She looked down and she said quietly, yeah, that's when my grandfather started to rape me. Dr. Falidi interviewed everyone in the program.

[633] He discovered that 55 % of them had put on their extreme weight in the aftermath of being sexually abused, which is such a weird and extreme number compared to the general population.

[634] It's like, how can this be?

[635] Yeah.

[636] He's talking to them and Susan gave him a pretty good explanation.

[637] She said, overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be, right?

[638] He began to see this thing that seems so irrational.

[639] It was like the disguise she was wearing.

[640] Exactly.

[641] That's a really good way of putting it.

[642] and thought of it that way, but I think that's exactly right.

[643] He realized this thing that seems so irrational, obesity, and of course is really bad for you, was in fact performing a crucial function, right?

[644] It was protecting her from sexual attention.

[645] But look, this is a small group, 250 people, right?

[646] You can't make big scientific conclusions based on that.

[647] So he goes to the Centre for Disease Control, big body that funds medical research, and got an enormous budget to study everyone who came for medical care in San Diego for a whole year.

[648] So if you, and this is where it leads to the breakthrough into practice, depression and addiction.

[649] If you came in, it didn't matter what for, headaches, broken legs, schizophrenia, anything, you were given two questionnaires.

[650] First questionnaire said, did any of these 10 bad things happen to you when you were a kid?

[651] Things like depression, anxiety, oh sorry, that's wrong.

[652] The first part asked, do any of these 10 bad things happen to you when you were a kid?

[653] Things like neglect, sexual abuse, physical abuse.

[654] Second part asked, have you had any of these problems as an adult?

[655] Obesity and then they added all the other stuff, depression, suicide attempts, addiction.

[656] And when the figures were added up by the CDC, at first they thought they'd been a mistake, for every category of childhood trauma you experienced, you were two to four times more likely to have developed all these problems.

[657] But when you got into the multiple categories, the figures exploded.

[658] If you had experienced six categories of childhood trauma, you were 3 ,100 % more likely to have attempted suicide and 4 ,600 % more likely to have an addiction problem which is like you just don't get things like i remember being in dr felicity's office the first time i met him and i remember being so angry listening to him that i actually ended the interview early because i was worried i was going to shout at him right and i remember leaving his office and thinking why am i so angry with this really like wonderful benevolent human right and i remember going and walking on the beach in san diego and it made me realize why i had been so drawn for so many years to a simplistically biological explanation for my own depression right so when i was a child i'd experienced some very extreme things from an adult in my life i didn't want to give this individual power over me sure i didn't want to think that was still playing out in my life but one of the reasons why i'm really glad i stayed and i kept going back to see dr felidi to talk to him about it's because of what he discovered next which i think is so important when people indicated on their form that they'd experience some form of childhood trauma their doctor was told don't call them back in but next time they come in for something else, say to them something like this, I see that when you were a child you were sexually abused or whatever the nature of the abuse was.

[659] I'm really sorry that happened to you.

[660] That should never have happened.

[661] Would you like to talk about it?

[662] 40 % of people said they didn't want to talk about it, but 60 % of people did.

[663] And they wanted to talk about it on average for five minutes.

[664] And then it was randomly assigned.

[665] Some of them were told you can go to a therapist and talk about it more.

[666] What was incredible was just those five minutes of an authority figure saying i'm so sorry this should never have happened yeah that alone led to a really significant fall in depression and anxiety and then the people who were assigned to a therapist hadn't even bigger for but what this shows us it's part of a much bigger body of evidence from people like professor james pennabaker it's not the trauma that destroys you it's the shame about the trauma right and giving people places where they can release that shame is an antidepressant one of the key things i'm arguing in lost connections is anything that reduces depression should be regarded as an antidepressant.

[667] For some people, that will be chemicals.

[668] For some people, it'll be reducing the shame about their childhood trauma.

[669] I mean, I go through a big range of them because we've only talked to, I think, one or two of the causes of depression and anxiety.

[670] But there are solutions to all of them, right?

[671] And I've seen them being tried all over the world.

[672] And that's what the book's about.

[673] But it made me realize, Dr. Robert Ander, who worked on that program with Dr. Felitti, said to me, he said, this work made him realize when you see someone who's depressed, addicted, anxious, obese, we need to stop asking what's wrong.

[674] We need to stop asking what's wrong with you and start asking what happened to you, right?

[675] And I would add a question after that, which is, and how can we help you solve the underlying problem here?

[676] Right.

[677] And you're right that part of that, so that's a good example where you're saying it's not just outside in, right?

[678] That's, that's an intervention where the people are helped, but that's primarily helping them with the psychological dimension of the problem, right?

[679] That's not a, that's not in the rap part model that yeah.

[680] Well, and this will be tiresome for some people because I've been on this kick lately, which is I was listening I've listened to two or three podcasts recently and watched a bunch of different documentaries where there is a charismatic leader and of course that charismatic leader eventually sexually assaults all their followers this is very common and uh almost all these cases I don't know what your own personal situation was but the the the abuser has leverage over you right yeah and there is a moment where you know your participant in something you don't want to participate in.

[681] And you push through that because of whatever thing they have leverage over you on.

[682] And so there's a part of this equation that is the personal responsibility of just acknowledging, yeah, I did.

[683] I didn't listen to that voice.

[684] I didn't listen to my stomach.

[685] I didn't listen to my intuition.

[686] For me, a big breakthrough is like admitting that so that I could forgive myself.

[687] Because I agree with you.

[688] I think shame is the high octane fuel in the end.

[689] engine.

[690] And I think we so quickly want to educate that person that, oh, you were a victim, wasn't your fault.

[691] Well, that doesn't clear it up.

[692] You go home and you still feel this stickiness inside.

[693] You still have a little thing in your head that goes, well, they don't really know the whole truth because I got some signs that I should get out of there.

[694] And I purposely ignored those because I wanted this thing.

[695] And so I think it's really important that people admit that to themselves solely so that they can then forgive themselves and go, yeah, when you're fucking eight someone can leverage something over you or when you have this dream and someone has the power they can leverage you know i just think one of the steps i don't hear being talked about that i think is crucial is just it's okay to admit you're part of it and then forgive yourself that part of it and then you can see yeah and i was a total victim to someone who exploited their leverage over me which is predatory and malicious yeah i think that's really are hard to hear but really important and there was lots of people in the program that Dr. Felidi ran where that insight was really important I remember an old woman wrote to him and she'd been wrote when she was a young child and she just said thank you for asking no one ever asked me I thought I would die and no one would ever know and I think you're right that of course when people speak out loud with trusted authority figures and people should be careful who they talk about it with when people talk about it with loved people, people who are loving and supportive, when you say out loud this internal logic that's been hidden in your head for so long, of course you see no sane person listening to your podcast thinks an eight -year -old can invite sexual abuse, right?

[696] Right.

[697] But if you have these thoughts shut away in your head where they can't see the sunlight, they can be addressed.

[698] They can really poison you.

[699] And I think that's a really important aspect of this.

[700] Well, I remember, do you recall, like you just said.

[701] to me that you were the victim of some kind of abuse.

[702] I mean, I can tell you what the air temperature was, my position on the car I was leaning on when I told this girl, Emily, that I had been molested.

[703] Up till that point, and it was now nine years later, I didn't think I could ever tell anyone that.

[704] In every single subsequent time, it's gotten easier and easier and easier and easier.

[705] Like, I can't explain the relief that comes with just saying it out loud.

[706] It shouldn't be, as powerful as it is but boy just including as you say you're having these conversations with yourself and and we're not always the best debate partner you know our minds are often trying to destroy us for whatever weird reason well and often your mind is patterned by the abuser right you've been you've been taught initially how to think about this by the abuser and that voice is very deep in your in your mind right so if you are if you experience um abuse as a child and you don't know you don't have a worldview or an orientation where you can see how you feel the pain of it but you don't have a conceptual framework for seeing right this shouldn't be happening to me you're in fact almost invariably victims of abuse are told you brought this on yourself and you're the only person that this has happened to as well because no one else is talking about it exactly think about Billy Holiday right what they did to her I mean I think about the way Billy Holiday was was told to feel about the fact that she had been raped the violence she was doing to herself, in turn, you know, and then what do we do?

[707] We get these people who've, very often people will look at someone who's got an addiction problem, for example, and they'll say, well, I wouldn't do that.

[708] And you want to go, right, it's like looking at someone who was in a car crash and had their legs amputated and going, well, what a fool, I wouldn't have my legs cut off.

[709] And you want to go, right, you weren't in a car crash, right?

[710] These are people who've been in like a car crash of the soul, right?

[711] Now, this is not not, as you stressed earlier, it's really important to say, not everyone when he's got an addiction problem, had childhood trauma.

[712] This is why I talk about the other nine, the other eight causes, rather, in Los Canations.

[713] But it's really important that we stress that this is, again, I think what you've just been saying helps us to see why giving just biological explanations for problems like addiction and depression can be problematic.

[714] You know, we are the loneliest society there's ever been, right?

[715] There's a study that asks Americans.

[716] Yeah, you've got a square footage analogy that I like.

[717] There's a study that asks Americans How many close friends do you have who you could turn to in a crisis?

[718] And they started doing it years ago.

[719] The most common answer was five.

[720] Today, the most common answer is none.

[721] And, you know, I spent a lot of time with an amazing man called Professor John Cassiopo, who was at the University of Chicago, leading expert on loneliness in the world.

[722] And he said to me, why do we exist, right?

[723] You, me, everyone listening to your podcast.

[724] One of the key reasons is our ancestors on the savannahs of Africa were really good at one thing.

[725] They weren't faster than the animals they took down.

[726] They weren't bigger than the animals they took down, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating, right?

[727] Just like bees evolved to need a hive, humans evolved to need a tribe.

[728] Oh, yeah.

[729] And we are the first humans ever to disband our tribes.

[730] Because one of the key things I was thinking about in relation to loneliness is, well, okay, what's the cow for that, right?

[731] If you think about that model.

[732] And there's an amazing approach that's been pioneered.

[733] One of the heroes of lost connections is this extraordinary doctor called Sam Everington.

[734] It's a general practitioner in East London, where I'm from.

[735] And Sam was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to him with depression and anxiety.

[736] And like me, he thinks chemical antidepressants have some role to play.

[737] But he could see most of the people who was giving them to were becoming depressed again.

[738] And they were becoming depressed for perfectly good reasons, like they were really lonely.

[739] He decided to pioneer a different approach.

[740] One day, a woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham, who'd been shut away in our home with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years.

[741] Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'll keep giving you these drugs.

[742] I'm also going to try something else.

[743] There was an area behind the suite of doctors' offices called Dog Shit Alley, which gives you a sense of what it was like, just kind of scrub land that dogs would, in fact, shit on.

[744] He said to Lisa, what I'd like you to do is come and turn out a couple of times a week at Dog Shit Alley.

[745] I'm going to come to, because I've been quite anxious.

[746] We're going to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people.

[747] We're going to find something to do together, right?

[748] First time the group met, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety.

[749] But they start chatting and they're like, okay, what are we going to do?

[750] These are inner city East London people like me didn't know anything about gardening They decide we're going to learn gardening Right They start to watch YouTube They start to read books They start to get their fingers in the soil They start to learn the rhythms of the seasons There's a lot of evidence That exposure to the natural world Is a really powerful antidepressant But something even more important happened They start to form a tribe They start to form a group They start to care about each other If one of them doesn't show up They go looking for them right And they did what human beings do When we form tribes They started to solve each other's problems The way Lisa put it to me me. As the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom.

[751] There was a study in Norway of a very similar program that found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants.

[752] I think for an obvious reason, right?

[753] This is something I saw all over the world in my research, from Sydney to Sao Paulo to San Francisco.

[754] The most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we feel this way.

[755] But to understand that, you have to explain to people.

[756] Your pain makes sense.

[757] This is a signal that's something.

[758] is missing in your life, you have been deprived of something basic and innate that you need.

[759] Now, Lisa didn't think that at first.

[760] She thought there was just something wrong with her brain.

[761] When she was given this opportunity to socially reconnect, she began to see something had been missing that she hadn't been able to understand when she was just cut off and isolated and in the throes of that depression and anxiety.

[762] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[763] Now, am I right that I've heard this, and you would know, I assume, assume that the NHS, the England's national health system, that they stopped prescribing antidepressants for moderate to low depression and have prescribed gym for people, like trainers in place of that, for people to get three days of exercise a week.

[764] Do you know anything about that?

[765] No, that's not quite right.

[766] So antidepressants are still massively given out by the British National Health Service, but alongside that, there were some, one of things was option of exercise.

[767] There's some small areas, where they pioneered.

[768] Because they get longer, better, long -term results from physical...

[769] Oh, yeah.

[770] I mean, there's really strong...

[771] We are human beings built to move.

[772] Well, my, my like not a scientist's theory is, uh, is, you know, there is a reason we have dopamine, serotonin, all these things.

[773] We are given rewards, uh, for hard work.

[774] And as hunting and gatherers, we were doing about six hours of labor a day.

[775] And then we got the predictable, uh, dopamine and serotonin reward.

[776] And now we're all just sitting all day long, and the body's not going to release that without doing that thing.

[777] Yeah, you should, I should introduce you to my friend Isabel Benke, who's a Chilean primatologist at Oxford University.

[778] You would love her.

[779] She comes to L .A. quite often.

[780] So she explained to me and taught me about something really important.

[781] So animals in zoos lose their shit, right?

[782] Right.

[783] It's called zucosis.

[784] Parrots will rip out their feathers.

[785] Horses will start obsessively swaying.

[786] elephants will start grinding their tusks which are a source of pride in the wild down to like bloody stumps right if you take an animal and you deprive it of its natural habitat it will go mad right and there's an argument and there's pretty strong evidence there's several things going on here but that one of the things that's happening with us is we as animals have been deprived of our natural habitat right yeah the state prison in michigan wasn't designed just by coincidence has one part that looks out over concrete and one part that looks out of a beautiful greenery and It was a study of this that found it's totally random where you ended up in the prism.

[787] If you were looking out over the green areas, you were 25 % of something to develop mental health problems or of any kind than if you were looking out over concrete, right?

[788] Yeah.

[789] So there's a whole – but I keep thinking about as you're talking, you know, obviously I learned a huge amount about depression and anxiety for my books and addiction from experts.

[790] But underlying a lot of my response to a lot of your questions, there's one place that I think taught me the most.

[791] I actually wasn't a place where they were scientists.

[792] Can I tell you the story what happened next?

[793] I think it would really help you to think about this.

[794] In the summer of 2011, on a big anonymous housing project in Berlin, a woman called Nurea Changis climbed out of her wheelchair and put a sign in her window.

[795] The sign said something like, I got a notice saying I'm going to be evicted next Thursday.

[796] So on Wednesday night, I'm going to kill myself.

[797] Now, this is a kind of big housing project, like anyone in the US really.

[798] No one really knew anyone.

[799] It was a poor part of West Berlin.

[800] So only three groups of people lived there.

[801] There were recent Muslim immigrants like this woman, Nuria.

[802] There were gay men, and there were punk squatters.

[803] And as you can imagine, these three groups didn't get along very well.

[804] No one knew anyone.

[805] People are walking past her sign in the ground floor.

[806] And they're like, oh, what should we do?

[807] So people start knocking on her door.

[808] They said, do you need any help?

[809] Nuri said, fuck you.

[810] I don't want any help.

[811] I'm going to kill myself.

[812] Okay.

[813] And one of them one day had an idea.

[814] This housing project, which is called Kotti, has a big thorough.

[815] affair that runs through it into the center of Berlin.

[816] One of them said, on Saturday, if we just block the road and we protest and we wheel her out, they'll probably be a bit of a fuss.

[817] They were actually all pissed off because everyone's rent was going up and loads of people were being evicted.

[818] They're like, they'll probably let her stay.

[819] There might even be some pressure to keep our rent down.

[820] Let's do it.

[821] Right.

[822] So comes to Saturday, they block the road.

[823] Nuri is like, well, I'm going to kill myself.

[824] I may as well, let them push me. Yeah, yeah.

[825] Put her at the head of the vanguard.

[826] Exactly.

[827] They wheel her out.

[828] And the media doesn't.

[829] And the media does.

[830] come and there's a bit of a fuss that day.

[831] And then it gets to the end of the day and the police are like, okay, guys, you had your fun, take it down.

[832] But the people there are like, and Cotty are like, well, hang on a minute.

[833] You haven't told us that Nouria gets to stay.

[834] Actually, we want a rent freeze for this whole housing project.

[835] When you've told us we've got them, then we'll take it down.

[836] But of course, they knew the minute they left, it would all be, you know, over.

[837] So one of my favorite people in Cotty, a woman called Tanya Gartner, who wears, she's one of the punk squatters.

[838] She wears tiny mini skirts, even in Berlin winter.

[839] She's pretty hardcore.

[840] went up to her apartment and brought down, she had a claxon, you know, those things that make loud noise in soccer matches.

[841] She said, okay, here's what we're going to do.

[842] We're going to draw up a timetable to man this barricade.

[843] We're going to man it 24 hours a day.

[844] If the police come to take it down, let off the claxon, we'll all come down from our apartments and stop them until we get what we want, right?

[845] So people start signing up to man the barricade.

[846] People who've never met, would never have met.

[847] Weird mixtures of people.

[848] So Nuria, very religious Muslim, was in a full hijab, was paired with Tanya in her, tiny little mini skirt, right?

[849] So they're sitting there through the night and they're like, we've got nothing to talk about.

[850] This is super awkward.

[851] Yeah.

[852] As the weeks went on, Tanya and Nuria realized they have something incredibly powerful in common.

[853] Nouria had come to Berlin when she was 16 years old from a village in Turkey with her two young children and she was meant to earn enough money to send back home for a husband to come and join her.

[854] After she'd been in Berlin for a year and a half, she got word from home that her husband had died.

[855] She told everyone that he died of a heart attack, actually sitting there in the cold in Cotty, she told Tanya something she'd never told anyone in Germany.

[856] She told him that actually he died of tuberculosis, which was seen as like a shameful disease of poverty.

[857] So when Tanya told Nouria something she never talked about, she explained that she'd actually come to Cotty because she'd been thrown out when she was 15 by her middle class family.

[858] She found her way to a punk squat in Cotty.

[859] She actually got pregnant almost straight away.

[860] They realized they had both been children with children of their own in this place they didn't understand, right?

[861] This was happening all over Cotty, were being paired up, they were talking.

[862] Directly opposite this housing project, there's a gay club called Zudblock, run by a guy I love called Rick Hardstein.

[863] And it's a pretty hardcore gay club, right?

[864] To give you a sense of the...

[865] Like a leather bar, old -fashioned, you know?

[866] Well, the Berlin gay scene is crazy.

[867] So give you a sense of what it's like.

[868] The previous place he owned was called Cafe Anal.

[869] Oh, wonderful.

[870] Yeah, I always thought you wouldn't want to have a sandwich from Cafe Anal.

[871] Sure, sure.

[872] And when they'd open this club, a couple of years before the protest began, you know, there's a lot of very religious Muslims there.

[873] Some people had smashed the windows.

[874] They've been a lot of aggression.

[875] And when the protest began, Zubloch gave all their furniture to the barricades.

[876] And after a while, they started saying, well, you know, you guys, you should have your meetings in our club.

[877] We'll give you free drinks.

[878] We'll give you free food.

[879] And even the, like, lefties at Kodi were like, you're not going to get these really religious Muslims to come and have meetings underneath posters for, like, fisting night, right?

[880] It's not going to happen.

[881] It did start to happen.

[882] As one of the German -Turkish women there said to me, we all realized we had to take these small steps to understand each other.

[883] after the protest had been going on for about a year and the barricade had been manned every minute of that year one day a guy turned up called Tungai who'd been living homeless he was in his early 50s at the time and when you meet Tungai it's clear he's got some kind of cognitive difficulties but he's also got an amazing energy about him everyone liked him he started helping out and by this point they'd actually built a permanent structure in the street right it wasn't just a barricade it was like a roof and everything and they said to Tungi look we really like you we don't want you to be homeless you should come and live in this thing we've built right?

[884] He started to live there.

[885] He became a much loved part of the protest camp.

[886] And after he'd been there for nine months, one day the police came to inspect, right?

[887] They would do this every now and then.

[888] And Tung Kai doesn't like it when people argue.

[889] He thought they were arguing.

[890] So he went to hug one of the police officers.

[891] But the police officer thought he was being attacked, so they arrested Tung Kai.

[892] That was when they discovered Tung Kai had been shut away for 20 years in a psychiatric hospital, often literally in a padded cell.

[893] He'd escaped one day, lived on the streets for a few months.

[894] and found his way to Cotty.

[895] So the police took him back to the psychiatric hospital, at which point the entire Cotty protest turned into a kind of free -tun -try movement, right?

[896] They descend on this psychiatric hospital.

[897] And these psychiatrists are like, what is this?

[898] They've got these women in hijabs, these very camp gay men and these punks, demanding the release of someone they've had shut away for 20 years.

[899] They're like, who the fuck are you?

[900] It's like the nightmare version of the village people.

[901] Was that a construction worker?

[902] Oh, that's a mini -scar.

[903] Oh, there's the hijab.

[904] Well, I remember one of the protesters, Uli Hartman, saying to them, the psychiatrist, yeah, but you don't love him.

[905] He doesn't belong with you.

[906] We love him.

[907] He belongs with us, right?

[908] Lots of things happened at Cotty.

[909] It took a while.

[910] They got Tunkai back.

[911] He lives there still.

[912] They got a rent freeze for their entire housing project.

[913] They then launched a referendum initiative to keep rents down across the whole of Berlin.

[914] They got the largest number of written signatures in the history of the city of Berlin.

[915] But the last time I saw Nuria, she said to me, look, I'm really glad I got to stay in my neighborhood.

[916] That's great.

[917] I gained so much more than that.

[918] I was surrounded by these incredible people all along, and I would never have known.

[919] One of the other Turkish...

[920] Well, there's a bunch of ingredients in there.

[921] There's community, there's purpose, there's being of service, not thinking about yourself.

[922] I mean, there's just that thing, yeah.

[923] I think one of the key things is a sense of home, right?

[924] One of the Turkish German women there, Nereman Manker, said to me, when I grew up in a village in Turkey, I called my whole village home.

[925] And I came to live in the Western world, and I learned that what we're meant to call home is just our four walls, right?

[926] And then this protest began, and I started to call all these people and this whole place my home.

[927] And I thought then about, in some sense, in this culture, we are homeless, right?

[928] The Bosnian writer Alexander Heyman said, home is where people notice when you're not there.

[929] By that standard, lots of us are homeless And what they did is they built a sense of home These people, it was so clear to me in Cotty Think about how distress these people were Nuria was about to kill herself Tunkai was shut away in an actual padded cell Loads of these people were depressed and anxious and addicted In the main they did not need to be drugged They needed to be together They needed to be valued They needed to be seen They heard and shown that people loved them And wanted them around right And I remember sitting one day outside Zublox that gay club with Tanya, the punk squatter and her saying to me, you know, when you feel like shit and you're all alone, you think there's something wrong with you.

[930] But what we did is we came out of our corner crying and we started to fight and we realized we were surrounded by people who feel the same way.

[931] And to me, that was the most important thing of all the insights.

[932] I got, as I think you can tell, I love these people in Cotty.

[933] But in some ways, they are not exceptional, right?

[934] They are completely random people.

[935] They were united by one thing.

[936] They happened to live on one housing project, right?

[937] And this hunger for reconnection and this sense of the lack at the core of our culture that is driving the opioid crisis, that is driving our depression and anxiety crisis.

[938] You know, I'm 40 years old.

[939] Every year that I've been alive, depression and anxiety have increased in the United States and across the Western world, right?

[940] This hunger for reconnection is all around us, right?

[941] It is just been.

[942] It's just been, the surface.

[943] This is not like explaining quantum physics to people.

[944] I sometimes feel like both my books are giving people permission to know the things they know in their heart anyway.

[945] There's lots of details, I'm sure they won't know.

[946] But we don't have to live this way, right?

[947] And this was one thing that was kind of frustrating in both inspiring and frustrating, both researching, chasing the screen and loss connections, was realizing, you know, I went all over the world for both books going to places that had in fact solved these problems, right?

[948] And realizing the solutions are not abstract, right?

[949] Too often people say, well, how do we solve the depression crisis?

[950] How do we solve the addiction crisis?

[951] People start talking like, we're at some philosophy seminar.

[952] Well, maybe we could try this.

[953] I'm like, no, no, no. Let me tell you about the actual places I went, the actual people I met.

[954] Switzerland had a massive opioid crisis.

[955] Now, nobody is dying of opioids, right?

[956] I can tell you how it happened, right?

[957] we've got to start make it more real to people than this weird abstraction yeah it is uh it is frustrating that uh so many places have have made such strides and these problems that face all humans and yet we seem to be resistant to adopt that now again it is relevant the um you know the makeup of the society i don't think you again a lot of these things seem to be in my opinion pitched an either a left -right, a black or white option.

[958] And I often don't think that's sufficient.

[959] So yes, I think a lot of places have solved a lot of things.

[960] I also think it's a lot easier to solve a lot of things in a lot of places.

[961] Yeah, I think that's a really important point.

[962] And I think in terms of the drug war, the first thing we need to do is stop making the problem worse, right?

[963] The strategy we have now, punish, shame, stigmatized, actively makes the problem worse.

[964] Yeah, I agree.

[965] So first thing you have to do is stop harming people, right?

[966] Then we talk about the solutions.

[967] I think you're right that the U .S. faces challenges that a lot of societies don't.

[968] By the way, these are all zero risk propositions because we couldn't be failing worse.

[969] That's the thing.

[970] It's like there's almost nothing at risk for us to try something else.

[971] Well, the one thing you can say in defense of the war on drugs is we've given it a fair shot.

[972] The United States has done it for 100 years.

[973] We've spent a trillion dollars.

[974] We've imprisoned millions of American citizens.

[975] We've killed hundreds of thousands of people at a conservative estimate.

[976] We've destroyed whole countries like Colombia.

[977] And at the end of all that, we can't even keep drugs out of our prisons where we pay guards to walk around the war perimeter the whole time, right?

[978] So good luck keeping drugs out of the 3 ,000 -mile border at one side, right?

[979] This is a ludicrous fantasy.

[980] Can I do?

[981] I would feel morally a little less.

[982] I have to acknowledge one thing.

[983] So I am very pro -legization.

[984] I think I'm very progressive in my views of the war on drugs.

[985] But I saw a frontline documentary, like a three -parter on meth.

[986] And one thing I had to concede to was in the late 70s, 80s, we had a quailute addiction problem in the U .S. And as it turned out, there was a single place that manufactures quailudes in Switzerland.

[987] And they, the DEA, approached them and said, do you really need to make this drug?

[988] and it was decided no they don't really need to make it and then our quailute problem at least minimally that did end and this this was about crystal meth well crystal meth doesn't grow on trees it's not coming out of the ground it is manufactured in these really complex laboratories in India and then shipped to become pseudafed and part of me was like no when you can just stop meth go ahead and do it so I did find myself a little bit like well when you can you should.

[989] So it's important to say what happened when quailudes disappeared is not that those people just suddenly went back to good lives.

[990] The crack epidemic followed, right?

[991] So it's important to say, if you don't deal with the underlying pain, then people will seek other intoxicants, right?

[992] And that's really important to stress.

[993] But I think also, you're absolutely right about legalization.

[994] It's really important to explain this to people, right?

[995] Legalization means different things for different drugs.

[996] Like, I don't know the rules here in California, but I'm pretty sure if you really wanted to, you could own a dog, a monkey, and a lion.

[997] But the rules are different, Right?

[998] So a dog, I'm pretty sure you and I can just go to a store right now.

[999] A lion, I'm pretty sure they come and like inspect your home or a monkey.

[1000] Maybe you need a license.

[1001] I hope.

[1002] Yeah, yeah.

[1003] Right.

[1004] So they're all legal, but they're legal in different ways.

[1005] Yeah.

[1006] When we say, legalizing or drugs, maybe there's some very hard -called.

[1007] I think people go straight to, oh, 7 -11, I can buy an eight ball.

[1008] That's not going to work.

[1009] No one thinks there should be a heroin aisle in CVS, right?

[1010] Or maybe some super hardcore libertarian, but that's, and it's more to say this is not abstract, right?

[1011] I went to Switzerland, which legalized heroin.

[1012] I'm a Swiss citizen.

[1013] My dad's from there.

[1014] And so in the year 2000, Switzerland had a nightmare heroin addiction crisis, right?

[1015] People will remember they can look on YouTube, like just...

[1016] People falling about this, yeah.

[1017] Yeah, parks where people are injecting openly in the neck, like nightmare, right?

[1018] Now when you want your kids to see on a walk.

[1019] Exactly.

[1020] And Swiss people especially are obsessed with order.

[1021] It's not coincidences.

[1022] They invented clocks, right?

[1023] Yeah, yeah.

[1024] You know, so to them, this is like a horror show, okay?

[1025] So, again, they've tried for years.

[1026] the American way of shaming and imprisoning, and they're just like, look, we can see the results, right?

[1027] And they're the results everywhere where you do that.

[1028] So finally, they got, initially she was the Minister of Health and then the first ever female president of Switzerland, extraordinary woman called Ruth Dreyfus.

[1029] And Ruth explained to the Swiss people, I think the solution is to legalize heroin.

[1030] And I know it sounds shocking.

[1031] When you hear the word legalization, what you picture is anarchy and chaos.

[1032] What we have now is anarchy and chaos.

[1033] We have unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown drug users.

[1034] They legalized heroin.

[1035] So if you've got a heroin problem, you're assigned to a clinic.

[1036] I spent some time in the one in Geneva, obviously a journalist, not because I need to have an heroin addiction.

[1037] You go there.

[1038] By the way, President Dreyfus, former president lives opposite this clinic.

[1039] I think that tells you something.

[1040] She's nuts, right?

[1041] That's what you're supposed to glean from that.

[1042] She, um, so the way it works is you're assigned to the clinic.

[1043] You have to go at seven o 'clock in the morning because Swiss people believe in doing things insanely early.

[1044] This is a constant argument between me and my dad.

[1045] You turn up.

[1046] You're given your heroin there.

[1047] It's medically pure heroin, not the contaminated shit that you're talking about.

[1048] Um, you have to use it there.

[1049] You can't take it out with you, partly because they don't want you to resell it, but mainly because they want to watch you while you use it.

[1050] And then you leave and you go to your job because you're given loads of support to get work, housing and therapy to deal with the underlying issues that are going on, right?

[1051] And I spent a lot of time in this clinic.

[1052] Real quick question.

[1053] What kind of jobs can folks do blasted on heroin?

[1054] President Dreyfus one day, after clinic had been open for about four years, went there, and she's meeting the patients.

[1055] And one of them just very quickly hands her a note, and then it leaves.

[1056] And she goes back to the president's office, and she reads the note.

[1057] And it said, how you don't know me?

[1058] I was a homeless street addict.

[1059] This policy has changed my life.

[1060] I'm really grateful to you.

[1061] I'm not sure what to tell you this.

[1062] but if you walk out of your office and go four doors down, I work in that office now for you as the president, right?

[1063] Oh, wow.

[1064] She kept that note.

[1065] So there's a few things to explain about the Swiss system.

[1066] Some of them seemed, it was hard for me to think about this when I arrived, right?

[1067] So one of the things that's really surprising is they will give you any dose you want, except for one that will actually kill you, and there was never any pressure to cut back.

[1068] And yet, when I went there, it had been open for, I think, 12 or 13 years, and there were like three people who had been on it at the start, were still there.

[1069] And I remember saying to Dr. Mangy, Rita Mangy, who runs that clinic, it's like chief psychiatrist there, well, hang on, how can that be?

[1070] We're told if you take the drug, you need more and more, it takes you over.

[1071] Why would they stop if they've got an infinite free supply?

[1072] And she looked at me like I was dumb and she said, well, we help them so their lives get better.

[1073] And if your life gets better, you don't want to be anesthetized so much, right?

[1074] Yeah.

[1075] Well, this is a definite, there's some cognitive dissonance.

[1076] going on for me because what I know about my addiction is yes my life is great i've built a lot of things over the last 14 years i've kind of rewired how my brain processes things i just have a whole different thing now you add alcohol to this system because i know because i tried to go back many times you add alcohol to this system and whatever predictions you could have made about me meeting me here or knowing me over the last 14 years they're gone as soon as that's in my body And I know this not on a theoretical level.

[1077] Soon as that is in my body, a wall of fire will not stand between me and cocaine.

[1078] I will find it any fucking where.

[1079] In Mongolia, I will find it.

[1080] Now, this is not who I am.

[1081] So it is really hard for me to comprehend that I could be doing a little bit of heroin and making strides.

[1082] So it's really important to stress in Switzerland.

[1083] The option of abstinence -based care is always there, right?

[1084] And that's the first thing you're offered.

[1085] So in Switzerland, you would not have been offered that.

[1086] you would have been offered abstinence -based care, which clearly has worked incredibly well for you.

[1087] So Switzerland acknowledges it's a complex problem that needs a range of solutions.

[1088] For some people, the solution will be what you got, which is abstinence -based care, and they'll have the relationship to addiction that you have.

[1089] Other people will have a different relationship like these people, and we need to acknowledge the complexity and offer a complex menu of options.

[1090] Yeah, that's where I could expand my viewpoint on it.

[1091] Exactly.

[1092] And I think we can see the results.

[1093] So Switzerland has had this policy for 15 years.

[1094] Do you know how many people have died of heroin overdoses on legal heroin in that program since then.

[1095] I'm going to guess zero.

[1096] Not one person.

[1097] And there's been an enormous fall in deaths outside the legal program as people transfer in.

[1098] And, you know, Swiss people are not liberals, right?

[1099] If Switzerland was a state in the union, it would be Utah, right?

[1100] My Swiss relatives make Trump look like Oprah, right?

[1101] And yet Swiss people, after this had been in place for three years, had a referendum on it.

[1102] And 70 % of them voted to keep heroin legal, not because they're so compassionate.

[1103] That's not really what was going on.

[1104] They weren't in the parks anymore.

[1105] There was a huge restoration of public order, huge fall in crime of all kinds, property crime, street crime.

[1106] Street prostitution literally ended, right?

[1107] Oh, bummer.

[1108] And I think, but you've got, the reason we think about this in relation to the opioid crisis is, so think about the Swiss, the Swiss model has two prongs, right?

[1109] The first prong is, for the people who feel they need it, give them the safest possible version of the drug, right?

[1110] Right.

[1111] But at the same time, give them massive help to transform their lives, right?

[1112] Now, what we're doing, and by the way, that Swiss model, as we say, has led to zero deaths, right?

[1113] What we're doing is exactly the opposite.

[1114] So firstly, if your doctor finds out you're using oxy or percassette or whatever, not because they have got to throw you off.

[1115] Otherwise, your doctor will be busted as a dealer.

[1116] That's happened to loads of doctors.

[1117] I've met many who's happened to, right?

[1118] So firstly, far from giving you the safest version of the drug, we deny you.

[1119] the safest version of the drug, at which point you go and buy street heroin, right?

[1120] That's overwhelmingly happening.

[1121] Secondly, far from giving you the support to turn your life around, we put obstacles between you and turning your life around.

[1122] We shame you, stigmatize you, imprison you.

[1123] Criminal record.

[1124] Exactly.

[1125] One of the key things we've got to do when it comes to addiction is stop copying the places that have failed and start copying the places that are succeeded.

[1126] And everywhere that has policies based on shame, punishment, and imprisonment have growing addiction crises.

[1127] All the places that have policies based on love and compassion and restoring order and giving people help.

[1128] Have declining addiction crisis.

[1129] It's not perfect, right?

[1130] They still have some problems in Portugal and Switzerland, of course.

[1131] But there's been such a huge improvement.

[1132] And this tells us something about how we should be treating the people in our own lives.

[1133] because very often what people are told, this really helped me with the people I love, right?

[1134] And I can't say, how would I put it?

[1135] I can't say I live this all the time and I can't say because I don't and it's really hard.

[1136] But very often what people have told in this culture is if someone you love has an addiction problem, throw them out, cut them off, right?

[1137] I'm a proponent of that, by the way.

[1138] See, I think that's the importing of the logic of the drug war into our private lives.

[1139] Dr. Gabon -Marte said to me, if negative consequences stopped addiction, there wouldn't be a single addict left, right?

[1140] What negative consequences haven't been?

[1141] Now, I'm not saying there are no circumstances where you shouldn't, no one is obliged to sacrifice themselves.

[1142] And it's a bit like that thing in the airline, you know, put your own oxygen mask on before you put someone else's on.

[1143] Yes.

[1144] But the reflex of the first solution is go, get out, make things worse for them because then they'll feel the pain and they'll sort themselves out.

[1145] Yeah.

[1146] I mean, if that were true, then Portugal and Switzerland would have very high levels of addiction, and Arizona would have very low levels of addiction.

[1147] Exactly the opposite is true.

[1148] I'm not saying there aren't no circumstances where that should, you know.

[1149] Yeah, I totally disagree with you.

[1150] I think that people make fundamental changes when their life is at risk.

[1151] I think that's when people are motivated to change.

[1152] And I think the severity of change required is so, daunting that it literally has to be life or death for people and so yeah maybe if this fully other functioning system were in place I would agree but no I think in general you're prolonging what what eventually has to happen which is that person has to have enough wreckage and consequences that life is so fucking miserable they're willing to try something else most people who give up smoking don't do it the week they lose their job or get made homeless or their wife leaves them.

[1153] Almost everyone who gives up smoking, which by the way, we know nicotine is the most potent chemical hook that there is.

[1154] Yeah.

[1155] Give up smoking when life is going well.

[1156] And I'm not saying there are no instances where people's lives fall apart and then that spurs them to stop addiction.

[1157] But we do know places that provide support and love see a reduction in addiction and places that maximum humiliation and pain, see worsening addiction crises.

[1158] And I think one of the challenges we have with addiction, this is a hard thing to talk about.

[1159] And I feel like this is a safe space so I can.

[1160] Yeah, yeah.

[1161] I was on a panel with someone in London.

[1162] It was me, I'm not going to name her because I don't want to shame and stigmatize her for reasons you'll see.

[1163] Christina Ricci.

[1164] It was me and this very right -wing British politician called Ian Duncan -Smith.

[1165] who had led policies that have really harmed the lives of people with addiction problems, kind of tough love approaches, which are, in fact, just cruelty.

[1166] And a woman who runs a drug rehab centre, right?

[1167] And I was saying the kind of things I'm saying now about love and compassion for people with addiction problems.

[1168] And she said something like, to me, she kept praising this right -wing politician who's made addict's lives much worse.

[1169] And she said to me, you don't understand when I was a heroin addict, when I was using heroin addict, I was evil.

[1170] Right?

[1171] and a lot of people who've been through addiction a bit like we were talking about with childhood trauma develop these hardened knots of internalized stigma like this woman I remember saying to this woman after the panel like it really breaks my heart that you think that you were not evil right you may have done bad things and by the way people with addiction problems do bad things and people without addiction problem we've all done bad things right but you were not evil and I think when people who've been through something that's deeply stigmatized like addiction you can one thing we can do is say there's several ways of challenging stigma isn't there one way of challenging it is to say to essentially accept the stigma like this woman did this is definitely not what you're saying that so I'm not describing this view to you but this woman was dealing with it by going well yeah I was evil and now I've overcome the evil right so one way of challenging the stigma is to essentially accept it's true of people who were in the throes of addiction and then say oh it's became it.

[1172] Another way of overcoming stigma is to say, no, she was never evil and people with addiction problems aren't evil and they don't deserve suffering and they don't deserve pain and they don't need to be thrown into pain and agony in order to sort their lives out.

[1173] And actually a lot of people who've totally understand, a lot of people who've been addicted and then had this agony develop a narrative where they go, well, that agony was redemptive.

[1174] I had to have it in order to better.

[1175] And it's very painful to hear.

[1176] Actually, you didn't need that agony.

[1177] If you've been in Switzerland, if you've been in Portugal, you wouldn't have been humiliated and made homeless and broken and destroyed.

[1178] And you would have had a better chance at recovery.

[1179] You've been to Portugal.

[1180] You've been to Switzerland for 14 years and years before that I've been to tens of thousands of meetings.

[1181] I've watched a hundred thousand people in a meeting over the last 20 years.

[1182] I can tell you about half of the men in there are there because their wives were leaving them.

[1183] That was it.

[1184] The wife's like, not a chance.

[1185] I'm not living with someone like this.

[1186] And I'm taking my kids out of this situation.

[1187] Half the people that are there and have long -term sobriety are there because they had to make a choice between their family and this thing.

[1188] But that's really, sorry, it's really important to clarify what I'm, that's really helpful to clarify what I'm saying.

[1189] Yeah.

[1190] So to me, that's not enabling, that's having boundaries, that's protecting yourself and not being codependent.

[1191] That's not going down with someone else's sinking ship.

[1192] And that is telling someone, if you're going to do this thing, I won't be in your life.

[1193] And that, in my experience, is why more than half the people, people that are there, are there.

[1194] Achieving long -term sobriety.

[1195] When you look at the Swiss program, half the people there are there for that reason as well.

[1196] So the argument is not people should just, if you have someone you love who self -harmes with razors, I'm not saying you should sit there, watch them self -harm or buy them another pack of razors, right?

[1197] No one is saying addictive behavior is good and should be encouraged, right?

[1198] That's absolutely not the argument, right?

[1199] We can help people to overcome their addicted behavior.

[1200] Now, look, there's who I've done my best to help and I can't, right?

[1201] So, and I'm like that woman saying, well, okay, you're just going to have to leave you then, right?

[1202] Yeah.

[1203] So I'm not saying people should sacrifice themselves in their lives for people infinitely.

[1204] But what we do know is you can say, I can't take this and I'm going to help you towards a place that will give you greater love and compassion.

[1205] Well, here's what I believe in, which is loving, which is the day you want solution, I will drop everything and be there.

[1206] solution.

[1207] I mean, one of the really hard things to say is that for a lot of people in this culture, the drugs are the best solution they've been offered.

[1208] Now, it's a terrible solution, right?

[1209] Yeah, yeah.

[1210] I agree.

[1211] There are many people that without the drugs, they would have committed suicide.

[1212] Life is too miserable.

[1213] You know Marianne Faithful, the British rock star.

[1214] She went out with Mick Jagger and people remember her mainly for that, which really pisses me off because she's much better than Mick Jagger.

[1215] But so she's slow.

[1216] You're a fucking roll.

[1217] Mick Jagger is God on Earth.

[1218] She has this line in her memoir.

[1219] that I found really challenging.

[1220] And I think it's worth thinking about.

[1221] She said, she had a heroin problem in the 60.

[1222] She'd been homeless.

[1223] She said, heroin saved my life because if it wasn't a heroin, I would have killed myself.

[1224] Which is very challenging.

[1225] Now, she's obviously not saying heroin isn't a good solution to depression and despair, right?

[1226] I say alcohol, say mine.

[1227] Exactly.

[1228] We've got to understand, and this is a kind of theme that's run through all of our conversation facts, isn't it?

[1229] Like, people behave these ways for reasons.

[1230] The reason is not just that they're irrational and it's never that they're evil, right?

[1231] and the more we can help one of the terrible things we do in this culture is we put the onus for solving depression or addiction or anxiety solely onto the depressed or addicted person and their family right and for many people like the women who you know saying to that the guys in your a group or in a group um i can't take this anymore you're right it should never have been left to those women to solve this alone right and obviously lost connections the last third is about the bigger changes we can make so that i also i want to had i've never ever ever heard a share ever where the person said I was an alcoholic but then I found employment and then I got a raise and then I met a beautiful woman and then I became so happy I decided to stop and enter here I've also never heard where someone's junk value solutions I mean I do know lots of people who stop junk values solutions are you know money and status which you're right don't deal with despair right but I know lots of people who found meaning and who were loved and helped and, and as a result, overcame their addiction.

[1232] Actually, we know why are people in West Virginia got a much worse recovery rate than people in other parts of the country, right?

[1233] West Virginia has what's called the lowest social capital, so the highest, lowest level of social connections, highest level of people being humiliated by being offered humiliating and controlled work, highest levels of pessimism about the future, right?

[1234] Yeah.

[1235] This is what all this research about the opioid crisis shows.

[1236] These aren't like theoretical questions.

[1237] There's a ton of corollaries.

[1238] You can't ignore.

[1239] Yeah.

[1240] Well, it's not just corollaries.

[1241] They're predictive, right?

[1242] When despair comes to a place, addiction crises follow, right?

[1243] And you can see this across the board, right?

[1244] Yeah.

[1245] And where societies are deeply humiliated, there will be an addiction.

[1246] Look about Japan after the end of the Second World War.

[1247] Huge outbreak of methamphetamine addiction, right?

[1248] What happened?

[1249] They were nuked.

[1250] They were destroyed, right?

[1251] No societies, it's hard to imagine a society's been more broken and humiliated, right?

[1252] And what happens?

[1253] They have a five -year meth rampage in the country, right?

[1254] Right.

[1255] So it can't be that the things that are the solutions at the larger societal level don't work at an individual level.

[1256] Now, I understand the point you're making, which is it's complicated.

[1257] People need to protect themselves.

[1258] We haven't created a society where people have good options, right?

[1259] We've put so much pressure on those isolated individuals and their partners.

[1260] but I think we have to be guided by the places that have genuinely reduced addiction crises and we have to look at the principles behind what they did we have to look at the experts who guided that we have to talk to the people with addiction problems in those places so how did this help you and bear in mind there's a whole load of people who aren't at your meetings because they were thrown out and they died right sure like you know there's a lot of people who the people whose stories are are worse.

[1261] The people who's rock bottom was death, they ain't there to tell you.

[1262] Well, I wasn't helped and I'm dead.

[1263] Well, and I'll say, I guess the only thing I'm pushing back on, because I agree with your Switzerland example and Portugal, I guess what I'm pushing back on is there are two options.

[1264] You're on the left and everything is the system, or you're on the right and everything is the individual.

[1265] And it's horseshit.

[1266] Neither side has a monopoly on the truth.

[1267] The individual is completely relevant and the system is completely relevant.

[1268] And there are many things that work great for the system that don't work great for the individual.

[1269] So I don't know that you have to in a family dynamic model the response after a state system.

[1270] You definitely don't have to.

[1271] Look, I've tried with some people I've done that and it's helped and other people I've done that.

[1272] Well, that's unfortunately the event.

[1273] So you're going to probably have to have an expectation that we're going to have to try a few different approaches.

[1274] There'll be a section.

[1275] of the population, for whatever reason, 30 % of people who try to get sober can maintain it with this thing.

[1276] For other 30%, unfortunately, it's going to be Suboxone.

[1277] I don't think they're going to get to the underlying cause of this addiction to begin with.

[1278] And then there's going to be a third, you know.

[1279] I think you're right that we don't want to replace a simplistically biological story about things like addiction and depression with a simplistically social story, right?

[1280] Yes.

[1281] That's really important point.

[1282] That's the only thing I'm really differing.

[1283] And I think in a sense, my temperament is to emphasize the social stuff.

[1284] Well, because it's a new, you're proposing basically a new way of thinking about it.

[1285] But I do talk very clearly, I think, about the individual aspects, the psychological aspects and the biological aspects.

[1286] So it's important to stress that they're all real, and we need to deal with all of these factors.

[1287] Yeah.

[1288] And we need to be attentive to all of them.

[1289] Because what we've had up to now is very, very simplistic stories.

[1290] I mean, I think about the 13, years I was, you know, being drugged and it gave me some relief.

[1291] No doctor ever said to me, is there any reason you might feel this way?

[1292] Now, I don't want to be oversimplistic about this either.

[1293] I'm not sure.

[1294] In fact, I suspect had they asked, I would not have been able to talk about the childhood trauma I've been through, right?

[1295] So I don't want to be simplistic about this.

[1296] But the fact that it wasn't even asked is a real failure of our medical system.

[1297] It doesn't mean those doctors weren't good and decent people doing their best.

[1298] They were.

[1299] Yeah.

[1300] But that's a failure of the model we're offering people, right?

[1301] Sure.

[1302] It sounds to me like you, yeah, it sounds to me like you recovered because you respected your pain and listened to it, right?

[1303] Yeah.

[1304] Well, and in fact, there's a lot of different little mantras I have about that, which is I get that way for periods and I go, oh, this is temporary, this is temporary, this is temporary, everything changes, everything evolves, you know, it's, it's very easy in those moments to feel like it's a permanent state of mind that requires some kind of, you know, biological rescue or something or chemical rescue but yeah it's totally okay to experience these things for a period of time yeah yeah okay i have a question so it sounds so great but how do you convince like the store owner to hire the guy on heroin like how do you make it so appealing to everyone in this country that like they should get on board with this because people are selfish and they have businesses they're running and like to say like I'm going to pick this person over someone who is totally qualified who's responsible and how how do you infect that into people well in Portugal they did a pretty simple thing which is to say we'll pay half his wages for a year yeah incentivize it financially and one of the things is money recovered from the super expensive war on drugs But also, let's be honest about this country, do we think there's going to be enough votes for an entitlement program of that size?

[1305] Well, the most important thing is it's not new money, right?

[1306] What they did in Portugal is they took all the money they spent on shame, punishment, incarceration, policing, and transferred all of that into help, love, support practical solutions, right?

[1307] So this costs no extra money, right?

[1308] The Swiss program saved loads of money.

[1309] I was going to say in our country, I bet it would save money because it would.

[1310] Well, it totally would.

[1311] I mean, I would vote for this in a second.

[1312] I'm as liberal as it gets, but I can just see that...

[1313] You know, I understand the reservation you're making.

[1314] It's very easy to think when I think, oh, we're up against this huge thing.

[1315] Whenever I think that, I think about a friend of mine, Andrew Sullivan, a great journalist.

[1316] A lot of your listeners will know who he is.

[1317] In 1993, Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive at the height of the AIDS crisis.

[1318] His best friend had just died.

[1319] People were dying all around and there was no hope in sight.

[1320] And Andrew went to a little town in Cape Cod called Province Town to die.

[1321] And he decided before he died he was going to do one last thing.

[1322] He was going to write a book about a crazy utopian idea, nobody had ever written a book about.

[1323] The idea he wrote the first ever book advocating was gay marriage.

[1324] And when I get depressed, I try to imagine going back in time to 1993 in Provincetown and saying to Andrew, okay, I've got some good news.

[1325] 27 years from now, you're going to be alive.

[1326] Great news.

[1327] But they're saying much better, you're going to be married to a man because gay marriage will be legal.

[1328] And I will be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States quotes this book you're writing when it makes it mandatory for every state in the United States to introduce gay marriage.

[1329] And then the next day you will be invited to have dinner in a white house that will be lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you and so many other people have achieved.

[1330] And by the way, the president who invites you, he's going to be black, right?

[1331] Every aspect of that would have seemed like ridiculous science fiction.

[1332] It happened.

[1333] Andrew lived to see every step of it, right?

[1334] We can change our society for the better.

[1335] You know, you're a woman of color.

[1336] I'm a gay man. Our lives are unimaginable compared to the lives of people before us, right?

[1337] Why did that happen?

[1338] At every stage, people said, it's a nice idea it'll never happen, right?

[1339] About every progressive idea that changed your life and my life and the life of everyone listening to this show, right?

[1340] And what happened?

[1341] People banded together.

[1342] They appealed to the goodness and decency of the people around them.

[1343] They didn't give up.

[1344] They didn't get discouraged.

[1345] And they kept fighting until they achieved it.

[1346] And the factors that are causing depression, anxiety and addiction in this society, we can absolutely.

[1347] One of the good things, few good things about how deep the crisis is, is we've got a fucking big well of people to draw on to be our supporters, right?

[1348] I mean, find me a person who is not affected by one of the nine causes of depression and anxiety I write about in lost connections.

[1349] You really struggle, right?

[1350] We've got a big well of discontent.

[1351] We've got the solutions.

[1352] Now we need to fight for the, fight for them.

[1353] That's a wonderful note to go out.

[1354] Can I say my publishers always tell me off if I don't say this at the end.

[1355] Anyone who wants any more information about my book about depression, it's the lost connection.

[1356] dot com.

[1357] It's available as an audio book.

[1358] Book about addiction.

[1359] It's it's www.

[1360] Chasing the Scream.

[1361] Scream as in ah, as in like Jamie Lee Curtis and Halloween.

[1362] Dot com.

[1363] That's fantastic.

[1364] So it's been such a pleasure.

[1365] You deliver beyond my expectations, which makes me very happy.

[1366] I adore you.

[1367] So thank you for coming.

[1368] Thanks, thanks.

[1369] I'm so happy to have been here a wonderful person.

[1370] Thank you.

[1371] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman.

[1372] Uh -oh, what are we got?

[1373] A little puppy dog.

[1374] Put on your Yamika.

[1375] Here comes Monica.

[1376] So much Fonika with Monica.

[1377] Yay.

[1378] That was suggested to us.

[1379] Oh, it was.

[1380] Yeah, by her handle is at Teeny.

[1381] 318, T -E -E -E -N -Y -3 -18, Christine Padilla suggested, put on your Yamaka.

[1382] That's a great one.

[1383] I was really wrestling with her whether I should try to do an Adam Sandler impersonation.

[1384] Oh.

[1385] To make the song sound even more familiar.

[1386] Oh, okay.

[1387] You know, but I don't know that I can do one.

[1388] What does he talk like?

[1389] I don't feel like he talks to that specific, does he?

[1390] Yeah, he's got like opera man and, you know, and he's water boy.

[1391] but those are characters he's doing that's not his voice right but when he sings he kind of has a character doesn't he oh it on your yarmaca that's not very yeah it's not even in the zone boy that was embarrassing there's nothing worse when you try an impression and you you don't get anywhere near not even the outer rings of the uh dark board there are other things that are more embarrassing than that like pooping your pants on the floor or i'm sorry pooping on the floor wait wait wait Well, you poop in your pants and then it falls on the floor.

[1392] Put your pants up off the floor.

[1393] Fants.

[1394] Come on.

[1395] I'll poop your pants up on the floor.

[1396] Pants.

[1397] Come on.

[1398] You know, we're doing something new.

[1399] Armcherry's, we are out of our routine right now because it's Sunday morning.

[1400] We only record during the week.

[1401] Normally, yes.

[1402] But Monica had, I don't know, to shoot two commercials this week?

[1403] I shot one commercial.

[1404] That was two days.

[1405] You're right.

[1406] Two days, one commercial.

[1407] Two dogs, one top.

[1408] Two days on commercial, you shot every day.

[1409] Yeah, well, I'm doing 70 -some hours a week on that.

[1410] And so now we're going on the weekends.

[1411] And then, of course, weekends is, well, it's both Miller time and it's family time, which means we've got to do it early so that Wobby Wob can weigh his lovely little boy.

[1412] And I could be semi -present.

[1413] Anyways, we're here early on a Sunday.

[1414] Yep.

[1415] Put that in your craw.

[1416] I think it was a long way of saying I'm not making you laugh.

[1417] very hard and I just I had to make an excuse for myself well maybe you should try a little harder I don't know I don't know what to tell you um you're wearing a real cute new jump jump thank you yeah it's purple people are people are people are wild about your fashion do you notice that I hope you feel good about your fashion statements thank you half of our comments on our Instagram account are people requesting that you tell them where you got your boots your jumper they're interested in my shoes a lot, which I like because, you know, I have a very limited supply of shoes.

[1418] Okay.

[1419] Is that true?

[1420] Check your privilege.

[1421] I have like 10 pairs.

[1422] 10 pairs.

[1423] Is that a lot or not a lot?

[1424] Well, geez.

[1425] Well, it's such a spectrum, right?

[1426] For like some, a West L .A. woman, probably 30 pairs of shoes.

[1427] Is average.

[1428] Is average.

[1429] Everyday shoes.

[1430] I have some pairs of boots.

[1431] What we would say in the automotive world is your daily drivers.

[1432] My daily drivers.

[1433] I have, I would say...

[1434] 20, 21, 6, and add the 9.

[1435] 7.

[1436] 42 pairs.

[1437] 7 pairs.

[1438] Where are you getting them from?

[1439] Do you order them online or do you go into a store?

[1440] Depends.

[1441] I love them all.

[1442] Do you think you would like an open -air bazaar, like in Morocco, like a street bazaar?

[1443] You would feel scared.

[1444] No, I would feel too crowded.

[1445] Oh, okay.

[1446] If it's...

[1447] What if you went on off hours?

[1448] That's a Muslim country.

[1449] Like, what if you went during the prayer where everyone was on their mat facing east and you could just stroll through unimpeded?

[1450] I like that.

[1451] I like flea markets and stuff.

[1452] Oh, you do?

[1453] Well, then, yeah, you would love.

[1454] I feel like the flea market is an extension or our outgrowth of the bazaar.

[1455] Yeah.

[1456] Although I had an epiphany last time I went.

[1457] Kristen and I went to this vintage place.

[1458] Flea market.

[1459] I don't know we could call it.

[1460] Yeah, I guess it was sort of a flea market, but it was all like vintage.

[1461] clothing was so fun um but i and i told myself going in i was like don't just buy it don't get wrapped up and of course i did and then i got home and now there's stuff that i'm like i'm not i'm never going to wear that you yeah a bunch of dusty old t -shirts that made you giggle for a second at the flea market oh i didn't buy any of like a guy on a hot dog that says hot diggity dog i might wear that probably not though but no you think there's a shirt that says hot diggedy dog and it's a guy riding a hot dog like a bucking bull probably i think we could find that i worked with a bowl on friday you did yeah a very good size bowl were you scared it brought me right back to that scene and without a paddle where there's a big bear behind me because this bowl was behind me and i wasn't allowed to look in the wrangler i kept hearing all kinds i were you know oh god clearly the bull wasn't following the wrangler's instructions and then i'd hear like thrashing around and it was all behind me. And I was just waiting to get gourd.

[1462] Kicked.

[1463] No, no, it was, the horns were facing me. Oh.

[1464] I would have got the horn.

[1465] Did you feel like Jody Foster about to get mauled by lion?

[1466] I don't know.

[1467] I don't know how she felt, you know?

[1468] Okay.

[1469] But in fact, it sounds like she wasn't scared and then it got, and then the big surprise happened.

[1470] I was scared and nothing happened.

[1471] Sure.

[1472] Yeah.

[1473] Okay.

[1474] Oh, last thing.

[1475] I think I've said it before, but stop telling me to buy monotone.

[1476] Monica stuff on Instagram, a footstool, a mic stand.

[1477] She has all that shit.

[1478] Well, I wouldn't say I have all that shit.

[1479] I don't have an ottoman and I don't have a mic stand.

[1480] Your mic stand is right there.

[1481] Okay.

[1482] You just won't use it.

[1483] You've had it for, I don't know, for three months now.

[1484] It's not, there's no mic on it.

[1485] And I don't know how to do that.

[1486] Because we keep asking if we, what you want, we've asked you twice now if you want, you want us to set it up and you say no. No, that was before.

[1487] Then when you asked me, I said, okay, but then it's still there.

[1488] Okay, so we'll set it up for you.

[1489] Let's set it up.

[1490] But you have one.

[1491] Okay, I have one, but I don't have an ottoman.

[1492] Okay, I'll get you.

[1493] I guess it's on me. I'll just get you this stuff and people stop saying it.

[1494] I just don't like the implication that I am abusing you by not buying you an ottoman.

[1495] You're a woman of means.

[1496] Why don't these people say to you, Monica, buy yourself an ottoman.

[1497] I should do it because I'll probably pick one out.

[1498] That's cute.

[1499] I should pick one out from Joy Bird.

[1500] They probably have one.

[1501] You should look and see if they have ottomans.

[1502] I should.

[1503] Yeah, mid -century ottomans.

[1504] Mid -century modemans.

[1505] Oh.

[1506] So, Johan, a little peek behind the curtain, I left about 30 minutes in to this episode and came back with about 30 minutes left.

[1507] So I missed a whole big chunk.

[1508] Yeah.

[1509] And I don't want people to think you had explosive diarrhea because that was not why you left.

[1510] No. Your mom was having a crisis.

[1511] Her car was towed, right?

[1512] Is that what happened?

[1513] Mm -hmm.

[1514] Yeah.

[1515] Her car got towed.

[1516] She was stranded and she parked in an area she wasn't supposed to park.

[1517] And then she got towed.

[1518] And she had to go to work, right?

[1519] Or something?

[1520] Was she late for work?

[1521] Yeah.

[1522] So I had to go drop her off, drop my car off to her.

[1523] Yeah.

[1524] So I missed a big chunk.

[1525] So when I was listening back, I got to kind of listen for the first time.

[1526] That was cool.

[1527] like an arm like a proper arm chair exactly and did you get sucked into it yeah when i hear them and i am not interviewing the person i can almost hear them for the first time because generally i'm trying to stay ahead of the conversation so i can ask some kind of pertinent questions so i i miss a lot of stuff or i just can't let it seep in i think it's a different experience listening to someone when there's nothing on your plate there's no responsibility building your side.

[1528] Yeah.

[1529] Anyway, so I missed it and it was great.

[1530] And yeah, he's so interesting.

[1531] He's accumulated so many stories.

[1532] Again, you know, people have different approaches to all this stuff as we talk to different experts.

[1533] And his is very specifically like he, the amount of names he memorizes to tell these stories.

[1534] Like I would, I just don't have that kind of memory.

[1535] I'd be like, I met a guy in South Africa or, I don't know, it might have been Belgium.

[1536] Anyways, you know, like I. Yeah.

[1537] But actually, that's true and not true.

[1538] Like, you remember the names of, like, stunt guys and stuff.

[1539] Sure, and cars and engine parts and stuff.

[1540] Yeah, so it's what your focus is.

[1541] Yeah, and I think what you're choosing to remember.

[1542] Yeah.

[1543] Yeah, I can tell you the brand of superchargers that are on most cars from the 90s.

[1544] Yeah, that's a good memory.

[1545] That's a pretty good memory.

[1546] Okay, so he said that Winston Churchill compared Gandhi and Hitler.

[1547] because he hated Indian people.

[1548] And I didn't really see the quote of the comparison of those two, but he did say a lot of bad stuff about Gandhi.

[1549] He said it's alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi.

[1550] A seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a Fakir?

[1551] I don't know what that is.

[1552] But striding half naked up the steps of the vice regal palace.

[1553] So he didn't like that.

[1554] And he said a bunch of other negative stuff.

[1555] I think I could infer that Fakir means like a man of the people Yeah.

[1556] Or a martyr or something.

[1557] Yeah.

[1558] A plebeian.

[1559] Yeah.

[1560] The proletariat.

[1561] He said Gandhi should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting.

[1562] We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the empire if he died.

[1563] Hmm.

[1564] So.

[1565] Well, he was certainly on the wrong side of history with that.

[1566] Yeah.

[1567] I thought you were going to say he didn't like him because he looked like Ben Kingsley.

[1568] Oh.

[1569] Oh.

[1570] Oh, and then he felt like he was getting his thunder stolen.

[1571] Well, just because Ben ended up playing him in the biopic of Gandhi.

[1572] I know, but we are not on the same page, I don't think.

[1573] I want to be on the same page.

[1574] How can I help?

[1575] I don't know.

[1576] I don't think you are doing anything wrong.

[1577] I'm just feeling like we're not.

[1578] You know what we could start doing is if we had a special, like my best friend Aaron Weekly and I had a really complicated handshake that had lots of clapping and stuff when we saw each other.

[1579] And it was good to get in sync.

[1580] Maybe we need a really elaborate clapping ritual before we start.

[1581] Okay.

[1582] That sounds good.

[1583] Or like, you know, backstage before you do an improv show, you play these stupid little games.

[1584] Mind melt.

[1585] Remember, we played it on our trip.

[1586] Yeah.

[1587] I taught everybody mind melt.

[1588] Yeah, it's fun.

[1589] Or you do like one word story or two word story.

[1590] Yeah.

[1591] We could do a couple of those exercises.

[1592] A little warm up.

[1593] Mm -hmm.

[1594] Okay.

[1595] Next time.

[1596] So, yeah, anyway, so he was a bit racist against Indian people.

[1597] Yeah.

[1598] And I don't know if it had anything to do with Ben Kingsley.

[1599] No, probably didn't.

[1600] But I think that came way after Churchill.

[1601] I hope Ben Kingsley isn't racist.

[1602] No, he loves Gandhi.

[1603] You have to love the characters you play.

[1604] You hear people even say when they play serial killers.

[1605] That's true.

[1606] Deep to find a way.

[1607] Yeah, to love them.

[1608] But I hope he didn't have to find a way, you know.

[1609] No. But maybe he did.

[1610] I don't know him.

[1611] I have to imagine if you rank the most lovable historical.

[1612] historic figures.

[1613] Gandhi's always making the top 10.

[1614] Yeah, he's high up there.

[1615] He's in that Jesus category.

[1616] He's on that Jesus tip.

[1617] Yeah, who got, probably Martin Luther King.

[1618] Gandhi.

[1619] Mother Teresa.

[1620] Oh, yes.

[1621] Another Indian gal.

[1622] Is she Indian?

[1623] Yeah.

[1624] She did work in India.

[1625] Oh, okay, okay.

[1626] I think she is.

[1627] And a leopard colony, right?

[1628] Teresa doesn't sound anything at all.

[1629] She vacationed at a leopard colony.

[1630] leopard you know when they catch a leopard for the zoo sometimes they leave behind orphans and she went and raised those orphans at a leopard colony do i have the history wrong on this now that sounds right to me yeah leper leopard leopard leopard colony beef that's her vacation i feel guilty my vacation is turks and kakos yeah so so winson churchill was a racist yeah and Ben Kingsley.

[1631] No, no, no, no, no. Ben Kingsley is a very nice man who looks for parody among all ethnic groups.

[1632] He seems really nice.

[1633] He does.

[1634] Do you think it's because he's got a diminutive stature?

[1635] No, he has like a very wise owlness to him, right?

[1636] He's on, by the way, Stephen Conrad has a new show called like Grace Something Limited with Ben Kingsley.

[1637] There's so much good TV we have to watch now We just watched Mike Jackson Neverland Yeah Oye, aye, yo, y 'oy Guys Oof Yeah, so we've talked about Mike Jackson a ton on here Well, last time you didn't want to talk about it Oh, I didn't?

[1638] You got me, you cut me off I did?

[1639] Yeah You mean before we started recording?

[1640] No, we recorded and Mike Jackson came up And then I said, oh, and then you said We don't want to talk about that.

[1641] Oh, I did?

[1642] Yeah.

[1643] Oh, well, I'm sorry.

[1644] Maybe because I wanted to finish watching it.

[1645] Is that one?

[1646] We hadn't watched it yet.

[1647] You just didn't want to get into a whole thing about Mike Jackson, but we're going to right now.

[1648] Yeah, we are.

[1649] And I've been for, the whole time, every time we talk about Michael Jackson, I say I believe he was a pedophile.

[1650] Yeah.

[1651] That's consistent.

[1652] Me too.

[1653] But what's in, well, so the Neverland is an incredible documentary.

[1654] Finding never.

[1655] Is it finding?

[1656] Forgetting Neverland?

[1657] We'll be well, we'll figure it out while we march on.

[1658] But Wade Robson and James Safechuck are the two guys in the documentary.

[1659] Leaving Neverland.

[1660] Leaving Neverland.

[1661] On home box office.

[1662] It's so good.

[1663] Yeah.

[1664] And this is what I was going to tell you this morning before we started recording this.

[1665] I tweeted, I'm always blown away when folks do back.

[1666] flips on motorcycles but that's a three on the bravery spectrum compared to these guys 10 yeah absolutely and I wish them much easier past going forward so I tweeted that and of course 99 % of people like hearted that or agreed with it and then some guy some verified account guy was like you need to read you know this article uh Wade is a is a con man blah blah blah and I'm like my response was you couldn't possibly have watched this documentary there's no way you're you're saying that this without having watched it i guarantee you yeah because there's no way there's absolutely no way that these two guys are telling the nearly exact same story and their whole family is telling the exact same story also just pull your fucking head out of your ass a 40 -year -old man does not sleep with seven -year -olds in his bed i don't give a fuck i don't know how you construct some story oh because his childhood was robbed that's why he sleeps with seven years that makes no That doesn't make any fucking sense.

[1667] Yes, he had a terrible childhood.

[1668] Yes.

[1669] I feel terrible for him.

[1670] I feel terrible for the victims.

[1671] But these are the same knuckleheads that watch Lance Armstrong win seven fucking tour de France's.

[1672] And they were like, no. A normal human will win that race seven times.

[1673] That's totally.

[1674] I mean, I don't.

[1675] There's some flaw in our brain architecture.

[1676] Well, we love someone or we hoist somebody to alpha status.

[1677] Boy, we will just ignore the most obvious shit in the world, like someone winning the fucking tour to France seven times or a 40 -year -old man sleeping with dozens of seven -year -olds every night that he doesn't know that aren't family members.

[1678] Yeah, I think a lot of people mistakenly conflate like a creative genius with like moral superiority and they're just not even remotely the same thing.

[1679] Did you read Jedediah Jenkins?

[1680] He did a three -part Instagram, like pictures of Michael, and he just said it perfectly.

[1681] And it's basically that.

[1682] Like there's no connection between character and artistic genius, unfortunately.

[1683] No. And then let me also say the much sadder, huge global thing about this, I think we said it once before, but I'm going to say it again.

[1684] The really sad thing is that we have.

[1685] destroyed all black heroes systematically the FBI was tapping Martin Luther King's phone bugging his hotel rooms so there has been a systematic attack on black heroes so of course in the black community they are apprehensive any time someone tries to tear down another hero yeah although I'm very sympathetic to that aspect of it I don't think though in this case it's so much of a race thing weirdly.

[1686] It's because Michael Jackson has been elevated to this godlike status for all Americans.

[1687] And his whole brand was I love kids of the world and want to save them and protect them.

[1688] I mean, when I watched it, I felt, well, two big takeaways.

[1689] One, I know these parents are, they're just like the guilt is so intense.

[1690] and I understand that.

[1691] But when we were watching it, I also understood how it happened because everyone's like, how could a mom let their kid?

[1692] And I get that.

[1693] But when you see how it slowly happens and how they had their own relationship with him and what you forget, which he's, I think, Jimmy in the documentary says it really well.

[1694] I think it's him.

[1695] Who says, even if you've known him for four, hours you think you've known him for seven years because he's been in your living room he's been in your life and you've been singing along with him yes you've already constructed this whole idea about him you think you know him and that's not anyone's fault that's just the way our psych our brains work also the the like completely unique and bizarre experience of being invited to his fucking amusement park where everything is perfect and then you go on the road with him and the whole world standing outside of his hotel room cheering for him and you're now touching that and experiencing that it's it would take a very uniquely strong uh internally guided person to not be affected by that yeah absolutely it says a lot it's like a failing on many many different levels it's like celebrity status, money, all these things we kind of worship and covet coming together perfectly to.

[1696] And I also, I do think, which is like the most traumatic element is that their love was real.

[1697] Yeah.

[1698] So, yeah, it's weird.

[1699] When you think of victims of child abuse, sexual abuse, you kind of think of a strange.

[1700] you're doing it or you think of like you know the the uncle they've only met a few times but you don't think of it as someone they they already love to pieces like they're already infatuated with the person and then they're receiving all this attention and then they don't know that that type of attention that there's anything wrong with it they're little and they don't know yeah I feel particularly bad like for me it's very easy to hate the person that molested me very easy so there's no real confusion for me there but man if i had loved you know bert reynolds was molesting me or something taking me for a ride in that trans am yeah part of it i felt so special and awesome i know that's so confusing and they and he you know is saying i love you and i again i don't know that in his fucked up stunted brain i don't know that he's lying i don't i don't know if it's an active manipulation or if in that moment he does love him sure oh yeah but then then what's interesting is you know he falls in the same pattern as any kind of sex addict with endless options falls into which is he just bored he tires of them gets a new one it gets a new one yeah yeah oh god I mean for Christ's sakes he fucking that the trial that happened in Santa Barbara was a kid that was a make a wish kid that he was molesting I mean it's it's it's just it's so funny because there should be no levels of the outrage but for me there was it was like the first kid was it was bad it was really bad uh James yeah it was like wow that's terrible but then boy uh Wade is like a seven he's a little tiny boy he's almost a baby still and you're like oh my god he wants to do that with a baby and then then make a I don't know how then then you make a wish kid it gets this thing's even lower.

[1701] I know.

[1702] Well, it because it, it's just vulnerability.

[1703] The level of vulnerability gets worse and worse.

[1704] It increases each time.

[1705] Yeah.

[1706] Yes.

[1707] Oof.

[1708] It's really worth watching, though.

[1709] I hope people watch it because it, like you said, it's really brave.

[1710] The most.

[1711] I can't imagine.

[1712] The details they're giving about the experience would be so humiliating for me to give.

[1713] Like I have never intended to tell people all the gory details of my experience.

[1714] It's not going to happen.

[1715] Yeah.

[1716] Yeah.

[1717] so the fact that they do it i just was i'm just i was blown away it's heartbreaking yeah but it's important i think it's important for people to be aware of this kind of actually dovetails into johan because the outcomes of their lives become very predictable both of these guys the the damage is so severe yeah you know i they kind of hint at one of them had some addiction another one just had these periods of kind of depression that you It's like, so to support Johan Hari's idea that, you know, this terrible existence will produce a pretty predictable stress relief outcome is real evident in this.

[1718] Yeah, that environment plays such a big part in all of these things.

[1719] And what they kind of, I think we're saying is more than, more than the act itself was the secrecy.

[1720] Yeah.

[1721] And some of these people are like, oh, well, he, you know, he, he went on, uh, twice.

[1722] They went on TV and defended him.

[1723] And he went into a trial and gave a deposition and gave testimony.

[1724] Yeah.

[1725] Yeah, that's what you do when you love somebody.

[1726] And you, like, these guys didn't want Michael Jackson to go to prison.

[1727] No. They still, even after all this, even after they've come to terms with the fact that they were completely abused and it wasn't loving and it was totally manipulative.

[1728] Yeah.

[1729] They still love them.

[1730] They do.

[1731] Yeah.

[1732] They love him so much.

[1733] It's so dark And Adnan starts tonight Oh You said that you don't get a chemical dependence on cocaine And that there's no physical dependency on weed According to the American Addiction Center .org The drug cocaine prevents dopamine A neurotransmitter associated with elevated mood pleasure and excitement from being reabsorbed.

[1734] So instead, it lingers in the brain, causing intense euphoria.

[1735] Not only does cocaine change how neurotransmitters are released, but a study found that cocaine addiction actually changes a person's genetics, and this could lead to physical addiction.

[1736] Most of the withdrawal symptoms associated with cocaine addiction are mental and emotional, but the body can strongly crave the drug to regulate resulting depression, fatigue, and other symptoms.

[1737] So yeah, physical withdrawal doesn't seem like it's really a thing.

[1738] Yeah, like I've had DTs from drinking several times where my body is uncontrollably convulsing when I'm trying to sleep and sweating profusely.

[1739] And it's fucking gnarly and humiliating.

[1740] But never have I had withdrawal.

[1741] I'm depressed.

[1742] Yeah.

[1743] My body isn't like convulsing or tremoring because of cocaine withdrawal.

[1744] Right.

[1745] Marijuana.

[1746] Marijuana use can lead to the development.

[1747] meant a problem abuse known as marijuana use disorder, but which just means no, there's nothing.

[1748] You're not going to have violent tremors there either.

[1749] No, you're not.

[1750] You are not.

[1751] Okay.

[1752] So you asked if rats have some sort of hierarchy.

[1753] Mm, uh -huh.

[1754] Okay.

[1755] This is kind of...

[1756] Oh, I'm glad you found this out.

[1757] Yeah.

[1758] Rats and mice differ in their social organization and use of aggressive behaviors.

[1759] Mice are territorial and do not tolerate unfamiliar males within their home range or cage.

[1760] Females may establish territories but tend not to defend them with aggressive behavior.

[1761] Male and female mice mark territorial boundaries with urine.

[1762] This is an important method of avoiding unnecessary aggression and its consequences in the species.

[1763] In contrast, rats have evolved to live in multi -male, multi -female groups and tend to coexist peacefully if group composition is stable.

[1764] Although both mice and rats establish social dominance hierarchies within groups, they differ in important characteristics.

[1765] Male social hierarchies and stable rat groups tend to stay the same despite changes in weight and or size.

[1766] In these types of groups, age may be the best predictor of social status.

[1767] Male mice also establish social dominance hierarchies in a group, but they will continuously compete for dominance.

[1768] Changes in group composition, the presence of a female mice in the room, or manipulation of the mice may increase fighting.

[1769] If multiple mice are in the cage, removal of the dominant mouse will not necessarily stop the injuries as the remaining mice will fight to reestablish the social order.

[1770] So there is some stuff happening with mice.

[1771] Is anything about sexual dimorphism between the males and the females?

[1772] I think that's generally a good clue about how regimented the social hierarchy is.

[1773] Like in guerrillas, it's of the primates.

[1774] it's the most extreme they're like almost two and a half times the size of the females and in humans it's pretty extreme we're like you know 1 .5 times the size and chimps too are pretty high those male chimps are can be you know 125 and the females are like 60 to 80 yeah it didn't say but I assume there's not much of a difference because they're all small they all seem to same size to me but we're Oh, what do I know?

[1775] I'm not a misologist.

[1776] You should be.

[1777] I should go back to school and get my mysology degree.

[1778] You said income inequality is the worst in the U .S. I have some conflicting research on that.

[1779] But one article said this group, Alliance calculated each country's wealth genie coefficient.

[1780] Yeah.

[1781] G -I -N -I?

[1782] Yeah.

[1783] So that's the metric by which you measure income inequality.

[1784] And you can, our own government, he gives a website in the book.

[1785] You can go look at any town in America.

[1786] So when you're deciding which town to move to, he recommends moving to one with low -income inequality.

[1787] Wait, who?

[1788] What are you talking about?

[1789] The author of Broken Ladder.

[1790] Oh, Keith Payne.

[1791] And so he pronounces it Ginny?

[1792] Genie or Jeannie.

[1793] I don't know.

[1794] So Jeannie or.

[1795] or Ginny coefficient, a measure of inequality in which zero is perfect equality, and a hundred would mean perfect inequality, or one person owning all the wealth.

[1796] Okay.

[1797] I bet Russia's pretty high on there then.

[1798] Well, it says we are 80 .56, showing the most concentration of overall wealth in the hands of the proportionately fewest people.

[1799] So in that article, it says we are the highest, but then on Wikipedia, it doesn't, it doesn't say that.

[1800] It doesn't.

[1801] No. So I don't really.

[1802] I believe that article over Wikipedia for some reason.

[1803] I guess I do too, but I also kind of don't.

[1804] Like in places like India where there are just people on the street and then also like some of the richest people in the world.

[1805] I'm like those places must have.

[1806] I think it's bad there.

[1807] But I think they have just numbers wise, far, far fewer billionaires and 100 millionaires than in the U .S. I guess.

[1808] I think it's just the total amount of wealth in a country, what percentage owns it, right?

[1809] Yeah.

[1810] So even though there's like a handful of billionaires in India, if you did the total wealth of the country, it'd probably represent a smaller percentage than it does here in this country.

[1811] I guess.

[1812] It just seems like the disparities were way worse there, in my opinion, but I don't know.

[1813] Right.

[1814] Just driving around.

[1815] Yeah.

[1816] Okay, so we talked about this for a second, but when he talks about Switzerland and how they have these facilities where the people will go, they'll get, like, heroin administered to them and then they go and they, like, go to work.

[1817] Like, I, again, in theory, this sounds so great.

[1818] Yeah.

[1819] But how can someone on heroin be productive at their job?

[1820] I don't.

[1821] And it is such a liability for who.

[1822] whoever is working at that job or the boss, like, it just feels great in theory.

[1823] But in reality, like, who would put their own business at risk to hire a person on heroin?

[1824] Well, I think you're both right.

[1825] Like, certainly they can't let them be the bus driver in town or the train conductor or the guy operating the thin slicer at Arby's.

[1826] There's got to be, like, millions of jobs you don't want someone on heroin to do.

[1827] Right.

[1828] But I'll also just say, I think you're running into junkies all the time and don't even realize it.

[1829] I think people can be way more functional than you would imagine.

[1830] I think the image we have of the junkie is a guy nodding out in the park.

[1831] And I think there's people like Keith Richards, who was putting on shows for millions and playing the guitar better than almost anyone on the planet, high on heroin.

[1832] So I think there can be a high level of functionality while intoxicated on heroin.

[1833] Because there's a lot of opiate addicts walking around.

[1834] They're your agents.

[1835] They're your, you know, lawyers.

[1836] The people I see in meetings are like professionals who were 35 a day Vicodin users that were still doing their job.

[1837] Yeah, that's true, I guess.

[1838] But yeah, I agree.

[1839] Like the junkie nodding off in an alley doesn't seem like he should be greeting you at Starbucks and taking your order.

[1840] even on a functioning level like if i was using zip recruiter and i had two candidates for my open position i am not going to pick the one who's on heroin well of course now unless though they let's say you signed it a number you go okay if i get a junkie doing this job his product his productivity is going to be half of what a sober person is right but then the state is saying saying we're going to subsidize his wage and you're only going to pay 25 cents on the dollar.

[1841] At that point, you might be better off with two junkies.

[1842] You're paying 50 cents on the dollar for than one healthy person.

[1843] I agree.

[1844] But I also now hearing that, I'm like, that is so unfair to the person who is not on heroin.

[1845] It is unfair to that person.

[1846] I agree with you.

[1847] And then that's when you get into this never ending.

[1848] We're constantly doing it.

[1849] Are you focusing on the individual or the overall system?

[1850] So the strain on the overall system, the collective, to have a junkie sitting in the park, stealing radios to support the habit that has a collateral level of damage to everyone involved, right?

[1851] So then it's like, well, you're right, it's not fair to the sober person that junkies wages are subsidized, but then the sober person is also going to live in a much better environment because you don't have hundreds of junkies in the park.

[1852] Well, unless they can't get a job, then no, they're not going to live in a good environment.

[1853] Well, they might live in a good environment, but they themselves might be suffering.

[1854] Yeah.

[1855] So it just really becomes the utilitarian continent debate that is endless.

[1856] I mean, I am all for.

[1857] Like a conservative.

[1858] Yeah.

[1859] That's basically here.

[1860] This is a conservative stance.

[1861] Yeah.

[1862] Which is fun to actually acknowledge.

[1863] Like, this is one of the times where that would be the conservative point of view.

[1864] Absolutely.

[1865] The individual's liberty has to be protected.

[1866] And they shouldn't be competing in an unfair system that waits someone else.

[1867] Yeah.

[1868] And it's fun when you find yourself on a conservative point of view occasionally because you go like, oh, so that's interesting.

[1869] So, you know, I kind of get that part of it.

[1870] Mm -hmm.

[1871] And, yeah.

[1872] Yeah.

[1873] I don't think in this country we have anything like that.

[1874] So currently.

[1875] So I don't think anyone who is actively doing really well is losing a job to someone not.

[1876] Well, I agree.

[1877] And again, I'm four different versions of affirmative action.

[1878] But this is the affirmative action debate between conservatives and liberals.

[1879] Conservatives would say it's not fair to some kid who studied really hard and got all A's and 1 ,600 on the SAT would lose a spot at a college to someone who got a 1 ,300.

[1880] But I think the difference for you would be easily is that heroin is a choice someone makes and inheriting.

[1881] 300 years of racial injustice is not a choice.

[1882] Yes.

[1883] I, though, I also like, I don't, people on heroin are not.

[1884] I don't think they're, I mean, they are making a choice, but they are, they have inherited some reason to be in that position.

[1885] And you do escape pain.

[1886] Yeah, it's all, that's the thing.

[1887] And that's where I think we all need to give each other a little credit in good faith, which is these are really complicated.

[1888] They are, of course.

[1889] Either decision at best is a 60 % right decision.

[1890] There's like there aren't 100 % perfect answers to a lot of the crises that face.

[1891] Yeah.

[1892] This complicated world.

[1893] Yeah.

[1894] I mean, I guess with affirmative action, if it does feel a little bit like, oh, this is the government trying to write something that they did wrong, that they were a part of and to start this whole issue.

[1895] Whereas the drug thing, it feels a little different, although who knows?

[1896] It's probably all the same thing.

[1897] Well, there is all these things, right, though, that are like personal accountability.

[1898] And again, that's more the conservative point of view, which is the junkie, albeit may have a bad childhood, but they have some responsibility, right?

[1899] But then they just apply that, of course, as well to black folks.

[1900] It's like, yeah, you had a shitty situation.

[1901] but it's on you to make the best of yourself.

[1902] So I don't agree with that, but I understand why all these conversations, I don't think there's evil people on either side.

[1903] No, I'm saying that.

[1904] Yeah.

[1905] Yeah.

[1906] I'm always just trying to bring us together, Monica.

[1907] That's all.

[1908] Yeah.

[1909] I mean, I like the idea of them having something to do, having a purpose, having a community.

[1910] I do think all those things help the situation.

[1911] The idea that a person wouldn't be able to get a job who's fully qualified because they're a bunch of heroin junkies working there instead, like that feels crazy.

[1912] Also, I don't think in reality that's what's happening.

[1913] But I would say that there should be some designated jobs for them to do.

[1914] Sure.

[1915] But what's funny is it's still.

[1916] So, yeah, I agree.

[1917] And you see this here where they'll start like a, um, uh, uh, homeless person newspaper right where everyone right which is great it is great but what's funny is then you could also go like well why doesn't the normal person just have the government putting funds into creating a job for them like that so these people got rewarded because they are junkies and they they got their own industry created for them and then your average person who's worked their ass off didn't get an industry created for them it's like you know you can't get around you I think you have to just go like, well, what outcome are we are, is more valuable?

[1918] Is the outcome that every single person has complete liberty and no one's being helped over another person?

[1919] Or do we want the outcome to be a city that doesn't have tons of crime and junkies littering up the park?

[1920] It's just like, you just at some point you're going to make the decision whether you want liberty or that.

[1921] Just the bottom line, though, is that, yeah, someone's a. going to suffer a little bit and someone's going to be helped a little bit as we slide the lever one way or another.

[1922] There's just really no way around it.

[1923] Yeah, that's true.

[1924] So if anyone's looking for like a perfect solution where all 100 % of the population wins, it's just never going to happen.

[1925] Well, that's it.

[1926] That was it.

[1927] That was it.

[1928] Oh, okay.

[1929] Yeah.

[1930] Well, those were good.

[1931] Those were tasty, tasty treats.

[1932] A little fasty fasty tacks.

[1933] I love you.

[1934] Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[1935] You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[1936] Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry .com slash survey.