Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1077 - Johann Hari
Uploaded: 2018-02-12T23:32:21.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1077 - Johann Hari' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-02-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1077 - Johann Hari' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-02-12. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1077 - Johann Hari

Johan Hari I got it right you said it right you are literally the first person
to ever say my
saying to your fair that I once waited for six hours with a broken arm in an
emergency room
because they were calling for Joanna Hairy to come forward so anyone who gets
my name better
than that is by by me. Didn't you just assume that was you when you heard you
heard Joanna
Hairy? No to be fair I had a broken arm and I was lying there like weeping and
being like
fuck someone help me so I think in my normal mind I would have done. What went
down with
your arm? Oh I just I fell and tragically nothing no glamorous story to it I
fell down a staircase
I wasn't even drunk I wasn't even fucked on anything I just fell down the
stairs right
I wasn't even a victim of domestic violence you know like no right no uh
surrounding narrative
that would make that an interesting story sadly. So give me your if you had
like a one paragraph
take on depression. Sure. What is your take on depression? So this is why I
wrote this book
Lost Connections Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and Anxiety and the
Real Solutions
so I wanted to understand why does depression and anxiety why depression
anxiety seem to be rising so
much. It's very personal to me when I was a teenager I'd gone to my doctor I'd
explain that I was in this
deep sense of pain and all my doctor did was tell me a biological story just
said basically your brain's
broken and all he did was give me drugs right and drugs play a role in treating
people but I was still
depressed all that time I was taking these drugs right most of the time and
after 13 years of it I thought
right I need to understand what's really going on here so I ended up going on
this big long journey
over 40,000 miles interviewing the leading experts in the world on what causes
depression
and anxiety and what solves them and what I discovered is the we've we've told
a ridiculously
simplistic story to people about what depression is and how to solve it that
you know until I was a
teenager and I went to my doctor I thought depression was all in my head
meaning you know you're just
being weak you're being a pussy basically and then the next 13 years I thought
it was all in my head
meaning you know it's a chemical imbalance in your brain what I discovered is
the overwhelming
evidence from the World Health Organization leading medical body in the world
and loads of other
places is there are real biological factors that can make you more sensitive to
this stuff but the
causes of depression and anxiety are overwhelming in the way we're living there
are these nine causes
of depression and anxiety for which I could find scientific evidence seven of
which in the way we're
living and some of which are rising which explains this kind of epidemic and
that opens up a whole
different way of finding solutions now when you were young and you were
experiencing depression how
would you categorize it like what how would you describe it if you had to
describe it to someone
who didn't understand depression yeah try to keep this amount of fist away I'm
sure I think I'm a bit
a bit closer to me I think depression depression is despair spreading everyone
has moments of hopelessness
in their lives right right it's that spreading further but I think one of the
things I learned is a deeper
way of thinking about this which is everyone listening to this everyone
watching this knows that they have
natural physical needs right you need food you need water you need clean air
you need warmth if I took
those things away from you you would be in real trouble real fast right there's
equally strong evidence that
human beings have natural psychological needs right you got to feel you belong
you got to feel your life
has meaning and purpose you've got to feel that people see you and value you
you got to feel that
you've got autonomy you've got to feel that you've got a future that makes
sense and our culture is good
at lots of things I'm glad to be alive today but our culture has been getting
less and less good
at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs for lots of people and
that is the key reason it's not
only one but it's the key reason why we have this rising depression and anxiety
epidemic that can sound
a bit weird in the abstract so I can give you some specific examples if you
want okay sure so I'll give
you one example I noticed that lots of the people I know who are depressed and
anxious their depression
and anxiety focuses around their work right start to think what's going on here
so I start to look for
evidence about how people feel about their work best research on this was done
by Gallup the opinion poll
company massive detailed study took a couple of years they found the figures
for how people feel
about work in the US and and other comparable countries what they found is 13%
of us one three
percent basically like our work most of the time we get energy from it 63% of
us are what they called
sleep working so don't like their work don't hate their work they're just kind
of enduring it
and 24% of people fucking hate their work right fear it and dread it so I was
quite struck by that when I
looked at that means 87% of people don't like the thing they're doing most of
the time that's
incredible it's striking and bear in mind this thing that we don't like has
spread over even more of
our lives right average person answers their first email at 7:48 a.m. and
leaves work at 7:15 p.m. so this
is most of our waking lives we're doing something we don't like I start to
think could there be some
connection between that and this epidemic of awful sort of forms of despair
anxiety depression addiction so I
started to look for scientists who'd studied this I discovered an amazing
Australian social scientist
called professor Michael Marmot who I got to know who discovered the key to
what causes depression at
work right there's several aspects this can tell you the story of how he
discovered it if you want
to think it's an amazing story but the core of it is if you go to work and you
are controlled so you feel
low or no control you are radically more likely to become depressed you're even
more likely to have a
stress-related heart attack and I think the reason is clear that I'm a bit
further than professor Marmot does
and human beings need to feel our lives have meaning right and if you're
controlled
all the time you don't feel like your life has meaning you don't feel like you
it disrupts your
ability to create meaning out of your work and it makes you feel like shit
right hmm that makes
sense and one of the things so one of the things that was really important to
me in everything I was
learning for in the research for lost connections was there was this it
required this kind of shift
in my mind because what I was basically told by my doctor is your pain is a
malfunction right he said
you know we know what causes depression it's just some people naturally have
low levels of serotonin in
their brains um you know you're clearly one of them that's what's going on here
and one thing that was
really striking speaking to the leading experts in the world is that story is
just not true there are real
biological factors there are real things that happen in your brain obviously
but actually a professor
andrew scull at princeton university says it's deeply misleading and unscientific
to say depression
is just caused by low serotonin right this is just not true um but but one
thing that was so important
to me looking at these nine real causes of depression and anxiety was realizing
actually our pain makes
sense right if you're depressed if you're anxious you've been told basically
that you're a bit crazy there's
something not working but actually you're not a machine with broken parts right
you're a human being
with unmet needs and that requires a very different set of responses so you
think about i start to think
well let's think about that problem with work right most people feel they've
got no control at work or low
control and it's making them feel terrible they're not wrong to feel that right
they've got a need as
human beings and it's not being met how can we deal with this and i i learned
there's a really interesting
strategy to deal with this now this is something some people will be able to do
as individuals
but it's something we can actually change as a society so far more people could
do it
i went to baltimore and i interviewed a woman called meredith keogh young woman
meredith used to go to
bed every sunday night just sick with anxiety right she would she would she had
an office job it wasn't
the worst office job in the world right she wasn't being bullied she wasn't
being harassed but she just
she just felt like she just couldn't bear the thought the next 40 years of her
life
we're going to be this right and one day with her husband josh she did this
quite bold thing josh is a
working-class guy from baltimore since he was a teenager he'd he'd um worked in
bike stores and
you know working in a bike store your viewers will know it's insecure work it's
um controlled you do
what your boss tells you you don't even get vacations unless the boss you know
is nice to you and and josh
and his colleagues in the store they didn't hate their boss he wasn't a
particularly bad boss as far as
bosses go they quite liked him as a person but one day they just asked what
does our boss actually do
right we fix all the bikes and he seems to make all the money what's what's
going on here they decided
to do an experiment they they they they set up a different bike store a rival
bike store it's called
bordermore bicycle works and it works on a different principle so most people
listening to this will work
in corporations right top down you do what the boss says it's modeled like an
army that is a very recent
human invention right it only comes along in the late 19th century what they
did was try a different
model they're called democratic cooperatives so at baltimore bicycle works they
take all the big
decisions together about their work they vote they share out the good tasks and
the shitty tasks so no
one just gets stuck with all the shitty tasks they share the profits obviously
so they control their
environment together they're like a little tribe that control their environment
instead of an army with
one guy at the top controlling it and one things that was so fascinating
spending time with them which is
totally in finding with professor michael marmot's research about what causes
depression at work
is how many of them talked about having been really depressed and anxious when
they were when they
were working in this controlled way and their depression and anxiety had
largely gotten still had bad days of
course but they're that kind of nagging depression and anxiety had gone away in
this
different environment and as josh said to me there's no reason why any business
should work in this top
down controlled way that makes people depressed it's not even more efficient a
study at cornell university
found that democratic businesses grow four times faster than um than uh you
know top-down businesses and i
think what this opens up is a different way of thinking about depression so
what we've done up to now
is we've said to depressed and anxious people the job of fixing this is
basically on you buddy right
maybe if you're lucky your family maybe if you're lucky your doctor but
actually once you begin to
realize that the reasons why people are depressed and anxious makes sense this
is just one of many
reasons why people are depressed and anxious and also one of things that's fueling
the addiction crisis
which you can talk about if you want and once you realize it makes sense you
suddenly realize what
you've got to do is deal with the problem in the world as well as the problem
just in the individual
skull do you see what i mean yeah so you're focusing on work environments right
um and there's there's
many reasons as you were 