The Joe Rogan Experience

I like that you narrate your books. It's very frustrating with someone who's a great speaker does not narrate their books so thanks for doing that. ... to Talking to Strangers.

the question is why that's what I began to get really fascinated by is you think at this point in human evolution we would have got this thing about Talking to Strangers down and we clearly don't and we're being pushed to talk more and more to strangers right in a kind of globalized world and if we're bad at it that doesn't bode well does it?

I wrote my second book, Blink, and I have in that book a chapter about a very famous, infamous police shooting in New York case of Amadur D'Alo. It was organized around the Sandra Blanc case. The whole thing unfolded over a minute and a half, and I noted that the entire incident took only two seconds.

Every book we read in high school, college, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, 1980, or Animal Farm, like The Giver, which we read in middle school.

He wrote a book about it, right? Like living with a Navy SEAL. I think he did it for about 30 days.

And they're both, I interviewed him recently, really just to solve it, very solid stuff, awesome. Yeah.

And I was telling you, I just started your new book.

And tell people your book, One More Times the title. Until the End of Time. It's out today.

Then I have a third book that I wrote a few years ago called Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases that describes the neglected tropical diseases.

That's one of the things I talk about in the book. I mean, we have learned so much in the last couple of years about autism.

And that's one of the reasons I say vaccines did not cause racial autism.

Vaccines don't cause autism because autism was already underway in early early brain development.

Like Rachel, for instance, wasn't actually diagnosed until 19 months of age. And there's some fabulous studies now showing that that clinical expression of autism actually coincides with a big increase in the volume of the brain.

And that's very important because parents will often remember, oh my kid got vaccinated on 18 months of age or 15 months of age. You want to link the two.

I have a book coming out in a month called Letters from an Astrophysicist.

This book will be available when it comes out in October. I'm very proud of this book; it's my most heartfelt thing that I've ever done. It includes letters from people in prison, a person who just learned they had terminal cancer, and many others reaching out.

It's a great movie. Carl Sagan wrote that book.

I was teaching a course on Isaac Newton, and he writes this big book, The Principia. It's like the most famous book in the history of science. And the publisher got arrested for publishing pornography.

and so far as I get to provide a uh you know a more authentic high integrity highly actionable path for people um yeah I'm just I'm just grateful that I get to do what I do and I do it on my podcast The Genius Life and I'm super excited for people to watch the film which I've worked on for the past 10 years and again I think it's the most important thing I've ever done and I'm super proud of it and grateful to be here so thanks for having me.

listen to my podcast The Genius Life and I've got books The Genius Life genius foods and genius kitchen

listen to my podcast the genius life and I've got books the genius life genius foods and Genius Kitchen

Oliver Twist. Christmas Carol is the one I was trying to think of. David Copperfield, Great Expectations.

Salman Rushdie was an author who wrote a book that wasn't even specifically about Islam.

Satanic verses?

That's it.

Satanic verses.

His book "The Happiness Hypothesis", I'm in the middle of right now.

It's so fantastic, it's so crucial for people that want to understand their own personal biases.

So this was what my more recent book which is called Lost Connections uncovering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions is Is about because I think The core of addiction is about trying to deal with pain right but the causes of human pain are obviously huge But what I learned is the scientific evidence for nine causes of kind of deep despair, right?

So I wrote chasing the screen because of this addiction in my family And I go on this big journey all over the world to understand the drug war And I said a line in my I did a TED talk about it called everything you think you know about addiction is wrong And I said a line in that which is the opposite of addiction is connection. I said it earlier in our conversation Based on rat park right and lots of people started saying to me Well, are you just saying it's social isolation? Right like loneliness and I very clearly in my mind know that I don't think that's the lesson of rat park Right. I don't think that's just what's going on in rat park It's they don't have anything that makes life meaningful now rats are obviously much more Much less complex than us right so I started thinking well what What is actually missing for people who are addicted depressed Anxious what is driving this crisis?

So I ended up Again going on this big journey all over the world from a crazy mixture of places like an armish village in indiana because the armish have low levels of depression to a Lav in baltimore where they're giving people psychedelics to a city in brazil that banned advertising To see if that would make them feel better Did it

The weird thing is I sometimes feel like with all my we've both my books chasing screaming Lost Connections I sometimes feel like I'm giving people permission to know the thing they already know right like I had this completely bizarre experience when the book first came out where I was being Lost Connections to depression one where I was being interviewed by some american interviewer. I don't know who it was and um I'll talk about how loneliness causes depression right And the interviewer goes saying like Well, this is a very controversial theory And i'm kind of sitting there and I thought How did we get to the point? We're pointing out the most fucking obvious thing you can imagine That if you're really lonely are much more likely to become depressed. I don't think there's controversy at all. I think that person's silly But I think but I think the reason it's controversial Is because these biological stories which have some truth in them Have dominated how when I was a teenager I went to my doctor It's only thought of as being a medical issue when I when I went to my doctor when I was a teenager And I was really depressed and I said I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me and I couldn't control it My doctor told me an entirely biological treatment said there's just a problem with your brain here And all you need to do is drug yourself right and I drug myself and I got some relief from the chemical antidepressants But it did not solve my depression and one of the reasons I wrote Lost Connections is because after 13 years Of taking the maximum possible dose I was like well, what's going wrong here? There's something missing in this picture because I still feel depressed and every year that I've been alive I'm 40 depression and anxiety have increased in the united states and britain and across the western world There's something missing in this picture and I think the reason why that's controversial It seemed controversial to that woman even though to you and me it's crazy to think it's controversial Is because these biological stories which have some basis in reality have become the whole of the picture for a lot of people right I had a completely bizarre experience where You know peter teal if you had him on your show no, but I know him. Yeah, so peter teal people who don't know is the Founder of PayPal gazillionaire right back to the trump campaign I got an invitation from peter teal Just before it was after trump had been elected but before he'd been inaugurated his people to go to a they were organizing a um conference for app developers who were trying to Develop apps to deal with depression anxiety and addiction and i'm a bit like I don't think apps are really the solution But I wanted an excuse to go to san francisco anyway, so I go It's a day-long conference I didn't hear every speech but some really great scientists people like thomas ensor who's therefore my head of the national institute of health Who's a hugely admirable man? and i'm sitting there and i'm like All they're doing is looking at pictures of brain scans right if all you knew about depression and anxiety Was this conference and addiction you would literally think they were just things that happened inside the brain Yes, and i'm like the last person up. I don't think this was designed this way Maybe they did i'm sitting there. I'm thinking what do I say to these people and I thought you know It's like I was trying to get metaphors you could have a conference about obesity that just looked at scans of people's stomachs right It wouldn't be untrue. It wouldn't be bad science But you'd miss the whole fucking reason why they're fat right? You could you could tell the plot of romeo and juliet using like newtonian physics You could draw diagram romeo moves this way juliet means that you wouldn't understand a Damn thing about why anyone does anything right It was such a deep misunderstanding or not a misunderstanding such a partial truth right and I said to them So we were in san francisco We were really near the tenderloin which obviously people know is a place with a lot of chaotic street addiction. It's like Let's not discuss this. Let's all just walk over to the tenderloin Sit with the first person within an addiction problem we meet Listen to their life story for half an hour and come back and tell me the main problem here Is is a malfunction of the amygdala. It's a bizarre Is there something going on with those amygdalas? Yes, is it important to understand that science? Of course, right. I'm strongly in favor of brain science. I'm in favor of the science of understanding the stomach But it's a bizarre reduction of what human beings are To think that these are the main drivers of these crises, right? Yes. It's ridiculous Yeah, I agree. We have to wrap this up. We're already after

And then more recently he wrote "Digital Minimalism" and he goes into detail about just the effect of writing down my phone, but it feels sacrilegious to put that as an out to take it out right now, yeah.

She would talk about going to see Gone with the Wind and at the Paramount here in Austin, you know, and she would watch Gone with the Wind, you know, three times a week... She had always wanted to be a movie star and talked about The Godfather.

the movies are like The Notebook i mean these movies are really essentially what people use as a guideline for the ideal relationship but instead of a really good relationship that you're aware of that actually exists