(relaxing piano playing) - Hi, my name is Ashley Mason and I'm an assistant professor
of psychiatry at UCSF and I'm here with Rob Lustig who is a neuro-endocrinologist
here at UCSF as well. And today we're talking
about his new book, called The Hacking of the American Mind. So, Rob, why don't you start by telling us what the book is about in a way that folks without a medical
degree would understand. - Ashley, I wrote this
book because we've suffered a crisis in our culture,
and I believe it comes down to a mistake that we've made between the interpretation of
two of our most important and positive emotions,
pleasure and happiness. Lot of people equate the two. But I'm here to tell you that
they are completely different. Lot of people they're exactly the same. In fact, on the internet,
you can find definitions that actually conflate
and confuse the two. So what are the differences
between pleasure and happiness? And I believe there are seven. Pleasure is short-lived,
happiness is long-lived. Pleasure is visceral,
happiness is ethereal. Pleasure is taking, happiness is giving. Pleasure can be achieved with substances, happiness cannot be
achieved with substances. Pleasure is experienced alone, happiness is experienced in social groups. The extremes of pleasure
all lead to addiction, whether they be substances or behaviors. Yet there's no such
thing as being addicted to too much happiness. And finally, number seven, most important, pleasure is dopamine and
happiness is serotonin. Now these are two biochemicals. These are two neurotransmitters. These are two chemicals
that the brain makes and uses to communicate between one neuron brain cell and another. Now, why do we care? So what? Well, turns out dopamine
excites the next neuron and neurons when they're excited too much, too frequently, tend to die. So the neuron has a defense
mechanism against that. What it does is it reduces
the number of receptors that are available to be stimulated in an attempt to try
to mitigate the damage. - When you say to be stimulated, you mean to be excited? - To be excited, that's right. And so we have a name for that process, it's called down regulation. And a lot of different
chemicals in the body do that. Now, you get a hit, you get a rush, the receptors go down. Next time, you need a bigger hit to get the same rush, 'cause there are fewer
receptors to occupy. And you need a bigger
hit, and a bigger hit, and a bigger hit until finally, taking a huge hit to get nothing. That's called tolerance and then when the neurons start to
die, that's called addiction. Serotonin however is inhibitory. It's not excitatory. It inhibits its receptor
to provide contentment, to zen out if you will. So you can't overdose
the serotonin neuron. - And what does it mean
to inhibit a receptor? - What it means is it binds,
but it doesn't activate the process beyond the receptor. So, what it does, is it basically
slows down those neurons, instead of causing them to fire up. And in doing so, you end up
with the process of contentment, that feeling of one with
the world, if you will. That thing we call happiness. Now, there's one thing that down regulates serotonin, dopamine. So the more pleasure you seek,
the more unhappy you get. And, Las Vegas, Madison
Avenue, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington DC, have very specifically and
in a coordinated fashion, confused and conflated the term happiness with the term pleasure. So that you can buy happiness. So that they can sell you their junk. It's called the American economy. And it's based on hedonic substances, substances that drive pleasure,
rather than happiness. And in the process, we have
become most decidedly unhappy. And the problem is you can't fix a problem unless you identify what the problem is. That's the reason for this book. - In the title of the book
you use the word hacking. This sounds pretty dark
and conspiratorial. Do you really think
that there's been a plot to control our minds? - So let's first of all,
I define the word hack. So hack has a relatively short history. The very first time
the word hack was used, other than in a butchery, was in 1955, when it was used at MIT,
the Model Railroad Club, to talk about a unusual
solution to a complex problem, and that's what it
meant for quite a while. An example, stealing a
car is a felony offense. Stealing a Boston police
car, dissembling it, carrying each piece up five floors to the great dome of MIT, reassembling it, and putting a mannequin of
a Boston police officer, with a box of donuts in the
front seat, that's a hack. Over the course of the
next several decades, the word hack became synonymous
with clever approaches to complex computer problems, which we now call white hat hacking, which is very prevalent and
common here in Silicon Valley. But in the process, we also
now have black hat hacking, as we learned during the
2016 presidential election when the Russians hacked
Hilary Clinton's emails. - So then, black hat hacking
is, can you define that? - So it's a malevolence, in an attempt to basically blackmail or to cause
the crashing of a computer. To wipe out a hard drive, so
clearly not something good. And the question is, how
can your brain be hacked? And the answer is, well
it doesn't get hacked with computer code but it gets hacked with false information. And in fact, we've had false information since the time of the Romans,
it's called propaganda. So what's the difference
between marketing, which is what companies say
they do, and propaganda? And the answer is the truth,
that's the difference. When companies express a point of view that furthers their goals,
then that point of view references true facts,
that's called marketing. When a company expresses a point of view and tries to advance its goals based on misinformation, that's called propaganda. So the difference between marketing and propaganda is the truth. The corporations of
America today have engaged in a very specific attempt
to market their propaganda in order to get us to do different things than we might otherwise have done. Examples, the easiest
one of course is food and the one that I've
written about previously. The idea that foods can be healthy, goes back a long way,
in fact not eating food, is not healthy, it's called starvation. The question is which foods are the ones that ultimately lead to health? And the answer is not the ones that the food industry has touted. In fact, we have the
data that demonstrates that they knew what they were doing. When we went low-fat in the 1970s, The Sugar Association
knew what it was doing. In fact, there is a now paper
trail of the communications between The Sugar Association and two Harvard school
public health scientists, to specifically exonerate
sugar and finger saturated fat as the culprit for our
cardiovascular disease debacle. Turns out, we now have
the data to show that that was completely untrue, that we have actually
experienced an increase in obesity, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes,
hypertension, lipid problems, cancer and dementia because
of our processed food diet, which we were told was healthy. And they knew, back in the 1970s
that that was not the case. That's black hat hacking. Our minds have been hacked
to believe certain things that are not true. And it's been a very
specific corporate plot. Now I won't go so far as
to say it was a conspiracy, because we do not have data that says, that different corporations
colluded with each other to specifically defraud
the American public, and to inflict malice
upon the american public. But we do have the data to show, that individual companies engaged in their own plots to do so. Another example of course was tobacco. Tobacco made it very clear for many years that there was no relation
between nicotine and addiction, except that they had the
data that said otherwise and they lied to congress,
very specifically. So, tobacco, alcohol, food, guns, energy, these are all hedonic
substances and or behaviors. And they have costs and
we're paying those costs now. We're paying it in terms
of our addiction crisis, we're paying it in terms of our opiod, our depression crisis,
we're paying it in terms of lives lost and we're paying it in terms of our healthcare debacle. And you can't reverse it,
till you understand it. You can't pull yourself out of the ditch until you figure out
how you drove into it. - So Rob in your book, you
talk a lot about the difference between pleasure and happiness. In just a few sentences, can you tell us what is the major
distinction between the two? - So from a social standpoint, pleasure is the feeling
that this feels good. I want more. Happiness or contentment,
is the feeling of this feels good, I don't
want or need anymore. They're not the same. In fact, pleasure begets more pleasure. This is what the casinos are counting on. On the other hand, I don't
want or need anymore, says, if there was something to purchase, I don't need to purchase it. In fact, all of the things that say, this feels good I don't
want or need any more, are things that you can't buy. They're not for sale. They are however, accessible to every single
human being on the planet. They're all the things
your mother told you, but you forgot. I call them the four Cs. First one, connect. So, interpersonal connection turns out to be extraordinarily
important for happiness and the reason is because
face-to-face, eye-to-eye connection, generates
something called empathy. Empathy activates a
specific set of neurons in your brain, which have
been termed mirror neurons. So that the feelings of the
person you're talking to ultimately become adopted by you as well. And in that process, you
generate contentment. So, interpersonal connection
is extraordinarily important. This is one of the reasons
why we have religion, is for that interpersonal connection. Turns out the faith is not important, the interpersonal connection is. But then you have to ask the question, well, what about
non-interpersonal connection? Like for instance, Facebook. Turns out Facebook
actually sows unhappiness, in part because there is no
interpersonal connection, there's no serotonin rise. There's a dopamine rise
every time a message flashes across your screen,
it's called variable reward. And actually causes you
to increase your actions to access more Facebook
and that actually drives further depression and the data now, show that this is a vicious cycle. Second one, contribute. And contribute means not to your bankbook, it means to outside of yourself. So you can do it within your work, by making the work a better
place for your colleagues, or you can do it outside of your work, by volunteerism, or philanthropy. So there are a lot of different ways to accomplish, contribute. But ultimately it has
to be outside yourself. Third one, cope. So in order to reduce stress, thereby improving your serotonin receptors to allow for better feelings of happiness. There are three things. One, sleep, something
we're getting much less of, in part because of our screens. In fact, my colleague Kristine Madsen at UC Berkeley showed that 8th graders who slept with their
cellphone in their room, got 28 minutes less sleep each night, then those who charged their
cellphones outside the room. A recent study showed
that if the cellphone is sitting on the desk, even if it's off, it takes three times as
long to accomplish the task, as if the cellphone is not there. By being a distraction
and from the blue light emanating from the screen
and actually activating that part of your brain
that keeps you awake. Cellphones and other screens, which now have dominated our lives, have actually promoted unhappiness. Second thing within cope, mindfulness. We know a lot about
mindfulness, we study it, along with other people at
the Osher Center here at UCSF. In fact, multitasking is
probably the single biggest destroyer of happiness that we have. People pride themselves on
their being able to multitask, companies look for the people
who can multitask the best, turns out, only about
2.5% of the population can actually do two things at once. Everybody else, it's smoke and mirrors, and the most things you take on, the quicker you get unhappy and the lower your serotonin goes. And finally, within cope,
the last one is exercise. It turns out exercise
will tamp down dopamine and increase serotonin on its own. And when you use exercise
as a mitigator of stress, you can clearly advance your serotonin in a very positive way. And then lastly, the fourth
C, cook for yourself. When you go out to a fast food restaurant, you don't know what you're eating. It turns there are
three items in your diet that matter in terms of the
serotonin, dopamine connection. First one, tryptophan. Tryptophan is the amino acid
that is the building block to make serotonin. Happens to be the rarest
amino acid in our diet. It's mostly found in fish and flax. We don't eat a lot of fish, in general. It's probably low on our list. In part because of shipping processes, farmed fish versus wild fish, et cetera. But the bottom line is, fish have a very high level of tryptophan. Omega-3 fatty acids. Those are found also in fish and they are found in certain food stuffs that are grown, mostly
algae, things that eat algae ultimately increase your omega-3s. So fish eat algae, we eat the fish. Why are omega-3s important? Because they provide stability
to neuronal membranes. So it's less likely that neurons will die. And they can be compressed easier, they allow for neurons
to come back to shape, so that you don't kill off the neurons that ultimately drive happiness. And then lastly, the negative
one, fructose, sugar, the one that actually drives dopamine up, also drives serotonin down. So high tryptophan, high
omega-3 fatty acids, low fructose, that's called real food. When you cook for yourself,
that's what your making, that's what you're eating. And, you're cooking for
yourself and your family, you get the interpersonal connection, you get the contribution to
something outside yourself. It's basically a win-win-win. On the other hand, in fast
food, you're eating alone. You're eating things, you
don't know what's in it. And you're eating a
hell of a lot of sugar, because every item at
the fast food restaurant has been spiked with added sugar, specifically for their
purposes, not for yours. So we have moved on to a fast
food consumption society, and in the process, we have actually impeded
our ability to get happy. And we have to understand these problems, in order to unravel them. - A lot of the substances
that you're talking about are everywhere, they're ubiquitous. - [Robert] Indeed. - How do we become aware
of our addictions to them? - Well, it can be hard. I can tell you, I know what
I'm addicted to, caffeine. My wife and I, two
codependents with a crux. The fact is, that a lot of people don't necessarily understand
that they are addicted. They know they need something, when want becomes need, that's
usually a sign of addiction. And I will tell you, I
need my two cups of coffee in the morning just to function and I'm not proud of it. On the other hand, if you take
my Starbucks away from me, I will kill you. A lot of people say
they have a sweet tooth, that's usually a sign of sugar
addiction, if they say that. If they find themselves, not
being able to concentrate on their job, or on their family, because this craving is calling to them and it's interfering with their
daily life in some fashion, or in their work, that's
usually a sign of addiction. And that can happen from
shopping, from porn, from video games and cellphones, that of course has been the
most recent addition to this. If you find yourself
checking your cellphone every two minutes waiting for a new email, that's usually a sign
of cellphone addiction. And it works in the same way
in terms of the dopamine. There's a paradigm that
companies use to get us addicted. It was outlined in a book
by Nir Eyal called Hooked. It starts with a trigger,
an itch if you will, and then that itch has to be scratched and presumably the scratch is something that's socially acceptable, like for instance,
checking your cellphone. And then, variable reward. Now if the rewards the same every time, it won't become a habit, it won't become an addiction. But, if it's different each time, then there is an impetuous and a pressure to keep doing it and keep checking it. And ultimately it becomes
part of your daily life. That is what cellphones have done over the last 10 years. They've basically occupied
this primary position within our culture, to the point where, we almost now can't even
concentrate on our jobs. And the last part of
the cycle is investment. That is, you have to be
willing to be plunk down another $299 for the next iPhone in order to keep the addiction going. And indeed, virtually everyone in America has opted for that addiction, virtually over everything else. So this has been a slow but nonetheless, steady drumbeat that
has preoccupied America and not just America but the entire world and it's one of the reasons why Apple and Samsung duke
it out for market share, because basically, it's
about who's going to supply the rest of the world
with their addiction. - So then, craving is big component of it, being willing to forgo these
components of happiness is another component and then, being willing to invest. - Well, not necessarily
forgo feelings of happiness. The problem is, that you have
to know what happiness is in order to be able to-- - Forgo in the connection
and the contribution, and all of these things. - Right. So the question is, why is it that pleasure and happiness
have become confused. Did industry start that? It actually started early than that. It started with the
declaration of independence. Remember life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness? Well, turns out life is
going in the wrong direction. We now know that
lifespan, average lifespan in the United States is going
down for the first time. Liberty, turns out depending
on where you were born that determines your final salary. If you were born in Palm
Springs or in Los Angeles, you make more money than if you were born in Baltimore or
Detroit, for the exact same job. We've constructed ghettos
of our own volition, whether they be inner-city ghettos, or walled ghettos in fancy parts of town. They're still prisons,
gilded ones sometimes, but prisons nonetheless. And finally, happiness. Remember that clause the
pursuit of happiness? It was said twice. Once in The Virginia
Declaration of Rights in 1776 and then re-appropriated
by Thomas Jefferson for The Declaration of Independence. - One of the substances that
you've written and talked about the most, has been food, processed food. And of course, how this
contributes to metabolic disease. It seems like our healthcare system is setup, albeit not the best,
to treat metabolic problems, more than to prevent them. Is it hopeless? Where do you see this going? - Right now, we have more money going out for chronic metabolic disease,
then for everything else. In fact, 75% of our
healthcare expenditures are for the diseases that
constitute metabolic syndrome, that is type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lipid problems, cardiovascular
disease, cancer and dementia. You add that up, that's
75% of expenditures. Here's the math. The food industry grosses
1.46 trillion dollars a year, of which 657 billion
dollars is gross profit. They're making a huge profit. However, healthcare expenditures are 3.2 trillion dollars, of which 75% is chronic metabolic disease, of which 75% of that could be prevented if we could fix the food problem. Bottom line. You can't have healthcare reform, unless you have health reform. And you can't have health reform, unless you have diet reform. Now, Obamacare promised that we could put 32 million sick people onto the rolls. And that we would pay for it, with preventative services, by being able to go to your doctor, you wouldn't have to
have the emergency room, which costs 50 times as much. And that's how we would be able
to pay for all these people. Turns out, that with Obamacare, emergency room visits went up, not down and costs went so high that three of the major insurers opted out. And that was one of the reasons for the election of 2016
focusing on healthcare. Here's the problem. Obamacare did not address diet. But neither does
Trumpcare and neither does the current senate and house bills that are trying to repeal and replace. The bottom line is, until we
address the problem of diet, which will also of course
address the question of pleasure and happiness
at the same time. We will not see an improvement in our healthcare system anytime soon. This has to be front and center. In addition, food is 20% of investment, but it is 40% of climate change. Agriculture contributes
40% of climate change. So if people are worried
about this problem, as they should be, then fixing America's diet
has to be front and center for the two biggest
problems that we have today, climate change and healthcare. This is at the center of
both of these phenomena and we will not be able to solve it, until we start to address it. - Can you tell us a little
bit about what lead you to write this book in the first place? - I've known about the dopamine, serotonin connection for 30 years. I knew about this when I was a post-doctoral fellow
at Rockefeller University, cutting up rat brains and studying how hormones
effected neurons. But it wasn't until 2014, when I was giving psychiatry grand rounds at a major medical school
here in the United States, and I talked to the outpatient coordinator of their recovery program, who herself was a reformed heroin addict. And, she told me something,
that was so jarring. What she said to me was, she said, "When I was shooting up, I was happy. "What my new life has
brought me, is pleasure." and I thought to myself, wait a second, this is exactly opposite. When she was shooting up, that's what brought her pleasure, because it was heroin. And her new life has provided
her with a more steady, long-term feeling of contentment. So I thought to myself,
how often does this happen? And is this potentially at the bottom of why we have an opiod
and an addiction crisis? And I've talked with many psychiatrists who have had the same experiences told to them by their patients. About a week and a half after I got back from that trip, I was
talking to my sister-in-law. And she used to work the
help desk at Pillsbury, before they were taken
over by General Mills. People would call in, why they have icicles in
their Poppin' Fresh dough. Why the carton would, the
microwave carton would melt in the microwave, things like that. And she stayed friends with
the people she worked with and they had a gourmet club every year and they would all bring things. And one of the members of her gourmet club said to my sister-in-law, "You always stay "so nice and thin, how do you do it?" And this woman had just undergone bariatric surgery for obesity. And my sister-in-law said, "Well, really, "I just only eat when I'm hungry." And the woman said to her, "Eating for hunger? "Eating is for happiness." and I thought to myself, a-ha. I take care of obese kids for a living and I've heard that story, but it was never so jarring as when I heard this, this discussion and I
put the two together, and I said, "We don't
know the difference." and indeed, there is an entire paper trail of not knowing the difference. And you can see it on
television, on YouTube, virtually every day. Coca-Cola's Open Happiness campaign. Happy hour. Cialis, will you be ready? Add a little stress thrown in. Bottom line, we have mistaken the experience of pleasure for the experience of happiness. And so we continue to drive our interest in pleasure at the
expense of our happiness. And you can't undo the paradigm
unless you understand it. And the four Cs, are the
way to fix the problem. - Thank you for talking with
us today about your new book. You can buy Rob Lustig's new book, The Hacking of the American Mind, at amazon.com or a bookstore near you. (upbeat piano music)
Total truth!!! But every thing is all about money power and greed!!! Nothing changes!!! The lies stay the same!!!