Trevor Noah: My Depression Was Linked To ADHD! Why I Left The Daily Show!

Trevor Noah (0:00)

It felt like life was meaningless. I would think to myself, I hate this, this sucks. I don't know what I want to do with life anymore. And that's sometimes where the depression would kick in. But I didn't realize that the depression that I was suffering from was untreated ADHD depression. And so I've learned rules now for myself and for anyone out there. If you are suffering from this, ask yourself a few simple questions.

Steven Bartlett (0:24)

Mr. Trevor Noah, the former host of The Daily Show. Where he gained a massive following for his humorous yet incisive take on politics and society.

Trevor Noah (0:31)

I was born to a black mother and a white father in South Africa at a time when it was illegal in the country. They were scared the police were going to take me away. And then my mother met my stepfather. And it became an unsafe household.

Steven Bartlett (0:42)

Your mother had been shot point blank in the head by this man.

Trevor Noah (0:46)

Yeah. And from that day onwards, everything changes.

Steven Bartlett (0:49)

You arrive in America to pursue your dream as being this comedian. You are very hardworking to say the least. Which led to you being the host of The Daily Show. But it didn't go so well at first.

Trevor Noah (0:57)

It was absolutely terrible. People would just be like, go back to where you came from.

Steven Bartlett (1:01)

Death threats.

Trevor Noah (1:02)

It was really hard. But I persevered. And I would get home at 9pm, work until midnight, get back to the office at 7pm the next day, and do it all over again.

Steven Bartlett (1:09)

And then The Daily Show went on to become a smash hit, but what was the cost of it?

Trevor Noah (1:13)

I had made my life about work, and I had made everything else secondary. And to be honest with you, a lot of people are doing this. We've neglected connection. And I think we're experiencing a generation of men in particular who are not just isolated, but not practiced in the arts of connecting. And it's affecting society now.

Steven Bartlett (1:29)

So those men that are struggling, where do they need to start?

Trevor Noah (1:31)

This is a lesson that I've learned if you're struggling with this. So you...

Steven Bartlett (1:46)

Trevor, what are the most important things that I need to understand about your earliest years to understand the man that sits in front of me today?

Trevor Noah (1:56)

Well, that's a tough one because I feel like my perception of what the most important things are may not be the most important things. I could say it would be my sense of humor, and then it might be where the sense of humor comes from, which might be my family or my country. It might be which schools I went to. It might be where I've lived or where I've traveled to.

It's one of those, if you ever try to break down a food or something that you consume and you go like, what is the most important ingredient? What are the ingredients that really make it what it is? And it's like, is it the crunch? Is it the acids? Is it the salt? Is it the fats? What is it? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. If I knew, then I would be able to either create more of me or maybe figure out which parts I want to tweak. But I honestly don't know the answer to that question.

Steven Bartlett (2:47)

I often think of everyone that I meet, but also myself through the context of, I guess, a similar analogy. Like a set of ingredients that came together, that were then put into an oven and the heat was turned on, and we were baked. Not to say that we can't be changed after that moment, but what are those ingredients?

Trevor Noah (3:07)

So my mother, South African, and Hossa woman, my father Swiss from Switzerland, but was living in South Africa. So those are the parental ingredients. My grandmother, I think, is a key ingredient, because I spent a lot of time with her as a young child. My grandfather was a crazy, funny man, was bipolar, but we didn't know at the time. I think we knew towards the end of his life, but it made him wildly entertaining.

Yeah, it's an interesting and tough one, because I often think as much as we're baked, to what you're saying, I think that we're baked, but then we are very much a product of the people that we then come into contact with. So I think of most people sort of like a sponge cake, like most cakes are very basic, most of them. Then what really makes them special is what the baker does to them afterwards. But the fundamental cake is pretty much the same. And I think people are like that, yeah, there's certain things, like the color of our skin and tone of voice and all of that. But then I think it's everyone we come into contact with that gives us the icing, that gives us the shape, that gives us the dynamic texture that makes us who we are. And so strangely enough, I feel like it's all of these people that I was lucky enough or unlucky enough to bump into that gave me a little bit of that texture and shape. And I think that's the same for everyone. That's probably why I'm so conscious of choosing my friends. Because I think that's me actively choosing the people who are going to keep shaping me as I live my life.