Hello, it's Chris Anderson here, and you're about to hear a talk from the journalist Johann

Hari about addiction. Johann has made a habit of diving into questions that really matter,

but are quite hard to talk about. More recently, he's tackled the topic of depression,

talking to dozens of researchers around the world. For my podcast, the TED interview, I got to have an

extended conversation with Johan. He argues that instead of just prescribing drugs for depression,

there are many other possible remedies. I found the whole conversation surprisingly uplifting

and actionable for anyone. I hope you'll check it out. It's the TED interview on Spotify, Apple

podcasts, or wherever you listen. One of my earliest memories is trying to wake up one of my

relatives and not being able to. And I was just a little kid so I didn't really understand why.

But as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, including later cocaine addiction.

I've been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it's now exactly 100 years since

drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest

of the world. It's a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts

and punish them and make them suffer because we believe

that would deter them, it would give them an incentive to stop. And a few years ago, I was looking

at some of the addicts in my life who I love and trying to figure out if there was some way to help

them. And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic

questions I just didn't know the answer to. Like, what really causes addiction? Why do we carry

on with this approach that doesn't seem to be working? And is there a better way out there that we

could try instead? So I read loads of stuff about it and I couldn't really find the answers I was

looking for. So I thought, OK, I'll go and sit with different people around the world who've lived this and studied this

and talked to them and see if I can learn from them. And I ended up, I didn't realize I would

...