What If Feeling Better Helped You Fix Your Life? | Episode #173 transcript

The big lie that everyone repeats all the time is that anxiety and depression as you experience them are pushing you to improve. This is bull. Anxiety and depression are debilitating. The reality is that being serene and calm from one of these drugs can be the launch pad for calm, logical work to improve the objective realities of your life that are causing you problems. Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for the Making Progress channel.

This is something that is nearly inevitable and will be here sooner than many people expect. If you are struggling with depression, with anxiety, with a bunch of related conditions, you're going to be having a much better time in the next likely five years or less. just this is a hypothetical discussion, but this is kind of what I'm thinking is going to happen and then we're going to talk about how it's going to affect uh society and you and whether you should take it and all this stuff.

This is a pill that they're going to make eventually. It's going to improve overall mood substantially, making you way happier. It's going to do this for 90 plus% of all the people that ever take it. It's going to reduce anxiety by a similar magnitude. So, the pill does two things. It's going to massively reduce depression, aka anybody who takes it, it's going to elevate their mood substantially. It's going to reduce their anxiety a ton.

And it's going to come with minimal side effects that are very manageable. And it also won't it also won't work less well over time. For example, tzepatide for weight loss and hunger management just works the first time you take it. And then because it's got a really long halflife after 5 weeks of taking it every week, it works really really powerfully. And the only way it works less over time is if you lose a bunch of weight and a bunch of fat such that your baseline hunger is radically come up.

But the drospatide fights that off. So it's like just come up halfway. But if you are 200 lb and you take drospatide for a year and a half and you're still 200 lb, it will work exactly as well to manage your hunger after two years as it did from after five weeks. And these happy pills, these future drugs will very likely have the same dynamic because a lot of people think happy pill they're like, "Yeah, you're going to get addicted to it and then it's just going to manage your side effects and it's going to be like you're just like not trying to withdraw and it's going to [ __ ] you up." These drugs won't do that.

The people designing them already know about all of these things. The modern medicines already don't do some of this, but some of this they're bad at. These next generation drugs are going to be like the tursepatide of psychology, of happiness, of depression, of anxiety. Tzepide is designed to reduce your body fat and to improve your metabolic health. Its side effects are incredibly small, incredibly contextual, incredibly manageable, and most people will have a grand old time on it.

And it never ever quits. So take all that idea, just transplant those ideas from one side of your brain that deals with weight loss and metabolic health into depression and anxiety, a drug like trespatide, which maybe you take once a week or maybe you take every day and it makes you way happier and it makes you way less anxious and it does not quit. Not after days, not after months, not after weeks, not after years, nothing.

Just keeps going. So, what would happen if you took a pill like this? What would happen if you took the happy pill? Our future happy pill of 2032, you would probably get a huge reduction in the internal stress that you have walking around. You'd be more calm because the drug calms you. You would get a massive elevation in mood. You would probably feel like your average day is a great day. Think about this. Think about a specific time in your life, like a several hour period, when you were just in a amazing mood and you weren't on drugs.

You were just in an amazing mood for whatever happened. Someone came to visit, blah blah blah. You got a great grade at school, all this stuff. That mood 24/7, 365. There is nothing pharmacologically, theoretically that makes this a non-reality in the future. This is possible. I'm here to tell you early that it is possible. And one really trippy thing that these drugs are likely to do is to create a huge boost in optimism about almost all issues.

You want somebody to be pessimistic, you get an average person, average pessimism, you give them anxiety, you give them depression. They're going to be the most pessimistic person you ever met in your entire life. You take the average pessimistic person just on worldview and you give them this new superdrug that reduces their anxiety and depression by a ton, they're going to be way more optimistic. Wouldn't that be strange seeing lots of optimistic people around?

Would be strange indeed. Now, what is this internal mood shift likely to do to you? I have an idea that people seem to like to debate with me on a bunch of podcasts that I've been on, and I love the debate. The idea is that when people massively reduce their anxiety, depression, it just makes them better at everything instead of worse. I think these drugs will empower you to fix your actual problems, not make you a heroin sloth.

Why? We already know that happier, calmer people are more effective at selecting problems to work on and productively working through them. This is direct empirical psychiatric literature. People who are hyper anxious and hyperdepressed are less effectual at fixing their problems. The big lie that everyone repeats all the time, maybe not everyone, a lot of people, is that anxiety and depression as you experience them are pushing you to improve.

This is [ __ ] Anxiety and depression are debilitating millions of people, possibly you. The reality is that being serene and calm from one of these drugs can be the launch pad for calm, logical work to improve the objective realities of your life that are causing you problems. Let me give you an example. People will say because your life screwed up, it gives you impetus to change. And when we give you psychiatric drugs to make you less depressed and less anxious, it takes the stimulus away from having to change and then you won't change your life.

Yeah, if you're being prescribed heroin, I guess that's probably true. But if you have a low-key calm, serenity, happy, open-minded approach, and you notice that things in your life, toxic relatives, toxic partners, toxic, I don't know, I just ran out of jokes, toxic sludge you're drinking out of the river when there's a toxic sludge factory just upstream. all of that stuff, you'll be more clearheaded about seeing and being like, you know what, I'm pretty happy in this relationship because I'm on the happy pill.

But, uh, now that I'm on the happy pill and not debilitated by anxiety and depression, I'm going to seek my way through therapy. And if it doesn't work, I'm going to seek my way the [ __ ] up out of here because like now that I know that I can be happy, I'm not in this weird dynamic anymore. When people have massive anxiety and depression, they are less likely to do something about it. Not more. Not more. Big deal. Huge deal.

The key assumption here for this pill that will be made and will be real is that it will remove pathological anxiety and depression without flattening your motivation, making you probably more motivated without flattening vigilance, ambition, attachment, sexuality, or appropriate fear. I think it is possible to make this pill. I think it's incredibly likely just as it was possible to make trespide. Why is it so impressive that they made trospatide?

I'll tell you why. People look at the idea of the happy pill and they think, "Okay, but making a happy pill with no big side effects and no feedback loop to where it makes you sad over time is incredibly hard because happiness is such a deep reward circuitry in the human brain that like it's just wired too deep and you can't fuss with it without breaking something else." Let me ask you a question. There's a fine idea on First Pass, guys.

Hunger is about as deep as evolutionary neural circuitry gets. Every animal cell in some sense experiences hunger when it's out by itself like an amoeba. It doesn't have a nervous system, but it wants to gobble. And as soon as we have nervous systems, maybe hunger to in animals to acquire external resources and put them inside is probably one of the earliest neural circuits that evolution installed and got right. And so you guys, we sort of solved hunger with trespathide and retrotride and all the other tides that are going to come out in the next few years.

Like hunger is a thing that you could just turn dial down and up as you like with minimal side effects. And so what's to say we can't do that with happiness and with serenity reducing depression and reducing anxiety conccomantly? I think we can. The default hypothesis is that we can and I think we will with AI power. Holy crap, we sure as [ __ ] will. Now, after people come out and start taking these drugs and we do that thing we did with this epicide where like a lot more people take them.

I think the world will never be the same. This is one of the reasons why low-key I think the 2030s are going to look and feel almost completely differently than the 2020s. It's like a big big step change. And this is one of the reasons why. Why? What are the social implications? People who are in a better mood are going to make better decisions on average. Those are going to lead to better relationships. There's going to be more trust.

You're going to have higher productivity. You're going to have greater prosperity because everyone's more productive. You're going to have lower environmental stress because people are yelling at each other less and you get even better outcomes. What are some examples of how this actually is going to work in the world? First potential example of how this will work is that crime and aggression can plummet. If you're serene, you have less threat sensitivity and emotional overreaction.

How I feel about traffic and other people cutting me off with their shopping carts is directly proportional to if I'm having a bad time with anxiety, depression or not. If I'm in a great mood, I don't give a You're probably like this, too. But if you're in a bad mood, everybody could get it today. You're going to see fewer impulsive fights, assaults, road rage incidents, way less domestic violence and revenge behavior, fewer perceived slights escalating in conflict, more emotional regulation before action, and all kinds of stuff like that.

Relationships are likely to become dramatically healthier, less jealousy, less insecurity, less abandonment, panic, which often comes from just bad moods, less catastrophizing about partner's behavior. Because sometimes partner misbehaves and it kind of infects you. But this thing on the drug, it'll just infect you less or not at all. And you'll be like, "Oh, they're having a bad time. I should help them instead of, "Oh, they're having a bad time and I'm making me feel bad." There's going to be fewer resentment and argument spirals, less depressive withdrawal and anxious reassurance seeking, which is really, really gnarly when it happens.

More stable marriages, potentially friendships, and family environments because people having bad times generally tends to break people apart. People having good times generally tends to bring and keep people together. Next thing is a massive decline in addiction and escapism. A huge fraction of substance use is relief seeking. It's not pleasure seeeking. A lot of people need to escape their not great time in their head they're having with anxiety and depression through alcohol, weed, gambling, food, porn, scrolling.

They're just trying to get out. ordinary sober consciousness once it becomes pleasant, you just have way fewer compulsive behaviors that are used for emotional regulation because you're already regulated. Addiction shifts more towards recreation and away from self-medication. And the number of people that get addicted just recreationally is tiny compared to those that self-medicate. If you are addicted to a drug because you recreation went too far, that happens sometimes.

But a lot of the people that get addicted to drugs, their drugs are masking something for them. And when they unccork the drugs, not great things happen. This is going to be massive. The number of people that are addicted to pain pills and stuff that are basically anxious and these are powerful anxolytics is like some enormous fraction of that. And they'll just they'll just stop being addicted to these things because they have a better drug.

Now to the extent that humans are involved in the economy at this point, productivity and economic growth can surge because people are focusing less on rumination and worry. Listen, worry and anxiety is really interfering with with workforce productivity. You just have way way less of it. People in better moods, more serenity can have better focus, persistence, learning, and decision-m way less absenteeism, burnout, and workplace dysfunction because depression is one hell of an absenteeism thing.

People can be more open-minded, more willingness to change careers, negotiate, create, and compete, be free. Because when you're anxious, it tends to give you keep you locked in to whatever decisions you've made already. And potentially a huge boost in entrepreneurship because of a lower fear of failure. Oh, if I fail, that's okay. I'll just try something else versus being ultra anxious, ultra depressed, and ultra not able to find that confidence inside of yourself to do the right thing, education may improve massively.

Anxiety will not eat into working memory anymore during learning and it so much does. A lot of kids have trouble learning at school are are really really anxious and that's what's screwing them up. People may procrastinate less and avoid less. Students may become less afraid of looking stupid or making mistakes. It's okay to try. No big deal. You'll get more curiosity, more experimentation, more persistence, and thus a higher long-term accumulation of skills and human capital.

This next one is one of my favorite ones. Politics and social media may become much more sane. Why? because you're not as susceptible on these pills to fear and outrage, which you're really susceptible to if you're really depressed and especially if you're really anxious about the state of the world. Fear and outrage just became become less effective engagement tools. And things that stoke fear and outrage, you just don't just scroll by them.

There's going to be less tribal threat perception and political catastrophizing. Like a lot of the anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States today is just cuz they're like h people are having a bad time like ah I got to blame somebody the foreigners. It's not all im anti-immigrant sentiment but that's a lot of it. And all of a sudden when they're feeling hunky dory that'll probably just go away. People can have a greater tolerance for uncertainty and disagreement like I'm feeling good about myself.

If that person has different political views that's okay. I don't hate them. I don't want to ban them. Conspiracy theories and rage bait become less emotionally rewarding. You don't need that lift anymore. You feel just fine. There's no reason to have a conspiracy to explain how bad you feel. And maybe even more room for evidence-based disagreement instead of just identity warfare. People who are anxious and or sad tend to engage much more in identity warfare.

As a matter of fact, this has been at least well studied in people on the political left. The more extreme a leftist you are, the much much higher probability is that you have anxiety and depression. I'll leave you with that for that part. Another thing is social trust and cooperation are very likely to rise. When behavior is ambiguous and people don't know if you mean well or not well, they're probably going to be interpreting it more positively and less negatively and all of a sudden things go smoother.

A lot of people will become way less defensive, way less hostile, way less expecting of betrayal. They'll trust more. You'll need to micromanage people less. You'll need to protect yourself interpersonally less. The ability to cooperate between co-workers, neighbors, institutions, and strangers is going to go through the roof. You guys ever see that? I think the that the the fans of the team that won the big game come out of the stadium.

Dude, everyone's vibing. You'll hug people will hug each other randomly not knowing each other. You can just have that with this drug all the time. And if parents take it, parenting can get radically better because if you have more patient and emotionally regulated parents, they end up yelling less, they withdraw less, they catastrophize less, and they transmit their stress way less to their kids because there's not much stress to transmit.

Some people just naturally have parents that are super calm and upbeat. And um when children have those homes in the statistical literature with more calm and upbeat parents, they tend to just get better attachment styles, better exploration, more confidence, more resilience. Even when those parents are not genetically related to them, they just have a better time growing up. And these benefits can compound across generations.

It can be a humongous deal. I love my parents dearly, but I grew up with them having a lot of anxiety and depression, and it wouldn't so fun. Here's my last thing for today. Yes, I'm advocating for folks to make this pill. Yes, I'm saying that once it's tested and out and approved, you should consider taking it. But here's the key thing. I think I think this pill is nearly inevitable. It's mostly about when this pill comes out, when the ompic moment of psychiatry will be.

Not nearly as much if, just when. Let's take a look at three things. Incentives, opportunities, and demand. We'll start with demand. The demand is people able and willing to pay for a pill that makes them 10 times happier and 10 times less anxious with onetenth of the side effects of normal medication of the psychiatric kind. I mean, it's in the hundreds of millions. It's probably in the billions of people that would like to take this drug.

I mean, how many people drink alcohol? It's billions. How many people do caffeine? Billions. And these drugs suck on a side effect profile and main effect profile compared to this drug. It'll be billions of people, guys. That's the demand. That's the latent demand that exists. What is the incentive? Well, for pharmaceutical companies, if they sell this for a dollar a pill, eventually. So like you get a 30day supply for 30 bucks.

You multiply that by 900 million per month people taking that pill and you have a money press. So the incentive is enormous. We've had the demand for years. We've had the incentive for years, decades. What we didn't have is the opportunity. The opportunity now is that AI assisted advanced drug discovery and screening is going to 10x and then 10x and then 10x our ability to do the following things. Get drugs with way bigger main effects benefits, way tinier downsides at a tiny fraction of the developmental time that the normally the drugs will take to come out and at a tiny fraction of the cost.

That's the opportunity. Now you finally have this ability to do the thing. How many people would have benefited from the RP hypertrophy and RP diet coach apps in the 1990s? Oh my god, millions of people. The things that organize your training and diet. Why didn't we make them then? Because mobile computing was not tractable then. We couldn't make computer programs of that power and that size and put them on mobile devices.

So, we didn't have the mobile devices. Didn't have the computing power to make all that stuff. And so, the incentives were there for these apps. The demand was there for these apps. The opportunity was not. That is the same thing that we're in today with advanced drugs to make you happier and less anxious. All that's missing sort of is the opportunity. But the opportunity has now come because AI is here and will get ever ever ever ever more powerful with every year that it's out.

And so the AIs of the late 2020s will put drugs into the pipeline that come out in the early to mid 2030s that will do all of this and more at real deep levels until eventually they're changing your genetics so that you're always ultra happy, ultra serene. So when it comes out, when this happy pill or its various different kinds come out, maybe even if you don't need it need it because you're not diagnosable, give it an open mind because it might just be the beginning of a radical upgrade to humanity itself.

Because people say, you know, what is it to be human? What does it mean? Does it mean that we have flaws? Is that what it means to be human? I think what it means to be human compared to pretty much all the other animals is to modify the environment around you and eventually modify yourself. Animals don't make shelter like we do. They don't make clothes. They don't make their own food. They don't make drugs. They don't make technology.

We do and we use it. And this is just that next step of being even more human than you were years ago and allowing these advanced drugs to change you internally. Because one thing is true. It's just going to be better, you guys. It's just going to be better. See you next time.