From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - How To Reconnect To The Real World & Reclaim Your Stolen Focus

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

This week, Sean and Rachel bring journalist and author of Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention and How To Think Deeply Again Johann Hari to the Kitchen Table to discuss the lack of connection and loss of focus in today's society.   Johann emphasizes that through the years, people have lost the ability to engage in real life and have succumbed to a virtual one on devices. However, he says our attention has not been collapsed, it's been stolen, and suggests ways to gain attention span back.   Follow Sean and Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You've always wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself. You live for experience and lead by example. You want the most out of life and realize what you're looking for is already in you. This is for you. The Canadian Armed Forces. A message from the Government of Canada. Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm your host, Sean Duffy, along with my co-host for the podcast, but also my partner in life, Rachel Campos Duffy. Thank you, Sean. Hello, everyone. And we're back with conversations from our kitchen table. And today we're bringing you someone really special. He's a journalist. He's an author of a new book called Stolen Focus. Why You Can't Pay Attention. He also wrote the New York Times bestseller, a book I read and loved, Lost Connections, Why You're Depressed and How to

Find Hope. Both great books. I encourage everyone to get them. I think they're very much interconnected and we'll talk about that a little bit on the show. Everyone, please welcome Johan Hari to the kitchen table. Johan, thank you for joining us. I'm so happy to be with you guys. Hi, Sean. Hi, Rachel. Great to have you, Johan. Thanks for being here. Hooray.

Johan, I almost don't even know where to begin with you because I find you so imminently fascinating. And I think that you've really touched on some topics that for some reason, we're all moving so quickly in life that we almost forget. And we think about it, but we're not articulating what we see is happening in our culture. And one of them is depression and anxiety. And you point out that more young people in particular feel like they're anxious and depressed more than any other time, at least that we know of more now than ever. I certainly, as a mom of nine and a mother who sees my own kids and their friends,

I'm shocked at how many kids say they're anxious, depressed, ADHD, whatever it is, that these things that we never heard of when we were young, but also most, as most parents were really concerned about this attention. And I want to start with the title of your book, because you call it, you don't call it losing your focus. You don't call it restoring your focus. You say it's stolen focus. And if I know you from reading your book, I know that that's a deliberate intentional title. Totally. So for me, you me, I started writing this because I had the exact worry you had about young people. I'll come to that in a second. But I also felt with each year that passed, that my own attention was getting worse and worse, that things that require deep focus that I love,

like reading a book, having deep conversations, were getting more and more like running up a down escalator. You know what I mean? I could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. And I could see this happening to almost everyone around me. And I started looking at the research on this. It's quite shocking. For every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now a hundred children who are identified with that problem. The typical American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. So I wanted to understand what happened to us. And most crucially, how do we get our brains back?

So to understand this, I used my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to go on a really big journey all over the world from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne. And I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on focus and attention. And I learned that I did a lot of research into their work. And I learned from them, there's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make your attention worse. And some of which include our tech, but go way beyond it. They include the food we eat, the sleep we don't get, a huge range of factors. And what I learned is loads of the factors that have been proven to make your attention worse have been hugely

increasing in recent years. So if you're losing your ability to focus, or if your kids are, it's not some mysterious flaw in you. It's not just that you're lacking willpower or you're losing your ability to focus or if your kids are, it's not some mysterious flaw in you. It's not just that you're lacking willpower or you're not strong enough. This is being done to all of us. It's being done by some very powerful forces. Your attention didn't collapse. It has been stolen. But once we understand the factors that are stealing it, we can begin to get our attention

back. And do you mind if I just tell you, Rachel, because I'm so connected to what you said at the start about parents being worried about their kids and their ability to pay attention. Do you mind if I just tell you there was something that happened to me? Because those thoughts I just said to you, I've been worried about attention for a while, but it was one particular thing that made me realize, you know what, I need to investigate this subject. I've got a godson who I call Adam in the book who, when he was nine, he developed this brief, but really intense obsession with Elvis. I never even, I love Elvis. I think I already like him. What was so cute about it

is that he didn't know Elvis had become a cheesy cliche. So I think he was probably the last person in the world. Did you say he's a cheesy cliche? I'm so sorry. What the heck? I thought we liked you. Did you just call Rachel cheesy? Yeah, did you just call her cheesy and cliche? But my godson would have been 100% on your side

when he was singing Viva Las Vegas. Sounds adorable. It was incredibly cute. And every night. Wait, hold on. I'm forced to watch Elvis movies in my house. Blue Hawaii? Come on.

You poor man. Johan, you're gay. You've never watched Blue Hawaii? I have watched Blue Hawaii several times. I have seen Viva Las Vegas and Ann-Margaret's role in it so many times. All right, continue. I'm sorry.

No, no, no. You're quite right to correct me on this every night when I would tuck him in my godson would get me to tell him the story of Elvis's life I tried to skip over like the bit where he died on the toilet at the end and and one day as I was tucking him in he looked at me very intensely and he said Johan will you take me to Graceland one day and I said yeah sure The way you do with nine year olds, because you know, next week it'll be, you know, Disneyland or whatever. And he looked at me really intensely and he said, no, do you promise, do you swear one day you will take me

to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely promise. And I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years until everything had gone wrong. So he dropped out of school when he was 15. And by the time he was 19, he spent almost all his waking hours, that's not an exaggeration, switching between his iPhone and his iPad. And his life was just passing in this blur of YouTube, pornography, WhatsApp. And it really was like he was whirring at the speed of Snapchat when nothing still or serious could touch him. And one day we were sitting on my sofa where I'm sitting now. In fact, I was funny. I feel a bit emotional thinking about it. And I was trying to talk to him

all day and he just wouldn't look up from his devices. And to be honest with you, I wasn't that much better. I was staring at my own phone and I was kind of disgusted at myself. And I remembered this moment all those years before. And I said to him, Hey, let's go to Graceland. And he was like, what are you talking about? He didn't even remember this thing that happened all those years before. But I said, look, he was 19. And he was like, what? And I said, look, we have to break this numbing routine. We have to, we can't live like this. I said, let's go all over the South, but you've got to promise me one thing, which is that you'll leave your phone in the hotel when we go out. And I could see that this appealed to him, this idea of breaking this routine. And he made that promise.

And two weeks later, we landed in New Orleans where we began. And a couple of weeks later, we arrived at the gates of Graceland. I'm guessing, have you been, Rachel? Yes, I have, of course. It's amazing. I have not, have you been Rachel? Yes, I have. Of course. It's amazing. I have not Johan. Ah, you got it. So you won't know this yet, Sean, but I don't know if it's like this when you went Rachel, but now even before COVID, when you get to Graceland, there's no physical guide to show you around. What happens is they hand you an iPad. I had an audio tape with a headphones,

but now they've moved to iPad. So I was there a while ago. Right. So they've upgraded it. So what happens is you put in the earbuds and the iPad guides you around. It says, go left, go right. And everywhere you go, there's a picture of that room on the iPad in front of you. Right. So what happens is everyone just walks around Graceland staring at the iPad and I'm getting kind of more and more tense as I walk around. I'm like, everyone look at the place you've traveled to, right? And we got to the jungle room, which was Elvis's favorite room. And there was a Canadian couple next to us.

And the man turned to his wife and he said, honey, this is amazing. Look, if you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right. And I laughed out loud, right? And I turned and looked and they're just swiping back and forth and I leaned over and I said but hey sir there's um there's an old-fashioned form of swiping you could do it's called turning your head because we're in the jungle room you don't have to look at it on your ipad we're actually there you're literally in that room and they looked at me like I was insane and backed away. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it. And he was standing in a corner staring at Snapchat because from the minute we landed,

he could not stop. He couldn't stop staring at his phone. And I went up to him. I did that thing that's never a good idea with a teenager. I tried to grab the phone out of his hands. And I said to him, I know you're frightened of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out. You're not showing up for your own life. You're not present at your own existence. And he stormed off. And I wandered around Memphis on my own that day. And I found him that night in the Heartbreak Hotel where we were staying across the street. And he was sitting by the guitar shaped swimming pool, staring at his phone. And I went up to him and I, I apologize for getting so angry. And I said, in fact, he said, I know something's really wrong, but I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought,

okay, I need to investigate what's happening to our attention and how we get it back. Yeah. You know, it's so interesting because when I, I remember when I first started hearing about ADHD and I'm one of these people, I, you know, if, if I have a headache, I don't take an aspirin. I just drink water. You know, I'm like, I would, I resist taking medications and things like that, which is by the way, one of the things that really appealed to me when I was reading your book, lost connections, because I do believe there is a over-prescribing culture that we live in. Tell the story about, is it your nephew? Yeah, my godson, yeah. Godson. And I got to tell you, for me, I look at the kid, we have nine kids. And so I've got all age ranges. And sometimes other friends will come over to the house and oftentimes we'll leave them alone. Then we'll come down and engage them and this could be like when i was growing up this was fun to have all your friends over and like you

you you have things to do and you're telling stories and you're joking and you're wrestling all of them are sitting on the couch on their phone and it's not just kids because sometimes and we catch ourselves sometimes like you know you know, we're in a big family. When we're all together, sometimes I'll walk in and I'll pick my own head up from my phone and look at everyone else. And they all have their heads in their phone. And I guess I think this is a cultural phenomenon that we all are getting. There's a time suck into these devices. I recognize the problem.

We've been trying to control it. And one of the problems for the kids is all of their other friends are on these devices and on these platforms. And if you're not on, to your point, you're missing out on life because that's where they get their pictures and that's where they send text messages to each other. And so to take it away, which I think is we've tried to struggle with. And we are doing. And we are. We could do a better job of it. So what steps do parents and kids have to take to go get out of the false, by the way, one other story I'll give you. Oftentimes they'll be at a fun place

and they'll just be taking pictures and putting them on social media to pretend like they're having fun, but they're not engaged in that moment, actually having fun with their friends. They want the perception that they're having fun. And I guess, what are your ideas on how do we tackle this massive issue? And I guess we're talking about phones and social media right now, but what's your advice? So I think there's a, obviously I talk a lot in my book, Style and Focus, about tech, and what we can do specifically to

deal with the aspects of tech that are designed to invade our attention. But actually, there's a layer about childhood. I feel so passionately about this. If it's okay, I'd like to talk about first because you're absolutely right, Rachel, there's been an explosion in children displaying attention problems. Part of that's due to tech, part of that's due to the food that we're feeding our kids. Part of that's due to their lack of sleep. There's a huge range of factors we'll get to. But actually, I think the biggest one is something different and it's something for which the solution is free and everyone listening can do. So one of the heroes of my book is a woman called Lenore Skenazi. And Lenore is not the hero because she describes the problem. It's easy to describe problems. She's the hero because she built the solution that everyone can pursue. So Lenore grew

up in a suburb of Chicago in the 1960s. And from when she was five years old, she left her house on her own every morning to walk to school that was 15 minutes away. And she would bump into all the other five and six-year-olds generally because everyone walked to school on their own. When they got to the school, there was a 10 year old boy whose job was to help the five year olds cross the street, right? She ended up marrying that 10 year old boy, by the way. And when she left school at three o'clock, she would just wander around the neighborhood with her friends on her own. And they would find their way home at five o'clock when they got hungry. You can't do that in Chicago anymore though, Yogi. That's other factors, right? We can talk about that, but that is what human childhood looked

like everywhere in the world at that point, right? That's what mine was like. Sean lived that life for sure. I kind of did too. And then by the time Lenore was a mother in the 1990s, all of that had ended. But in fact, by 2003, only 10% of American children ever played outside without an adult supervising them ever. Right. And the ones, even that 10% got an average of, I think, 12 minutes. So basically it was over. Even before COVID, we imprisoned our children and we made childhood a thing that happened behind closed doors. In fact, the only place where our kids get to explore anything is on Fortnite and World of Warcraft. We can hardly be surprised they become

so obsessed with them. It turns out that childhood we've lost contains a huge number of things that are essential for children to develop focus and attention. The first, and this is a real kind of obvious one, but the evidence is overwhelming, is exercise. If you run around, your brain gains more connections. You can pay attention much better. The single best thing you can do to boost kids' attention is let them go and run around, right? We've stopped that. Even before, obviously, COVID intensified the stopping of that, but even before that. But Johan, do you remember when our moms would say, go outside? I mean,

they'd force us outside and they wouldn't let us in. Social services would call you down, but, but truly they would say, don't let go outside. I need to clean the house. Well, my mother's actually, that would be considered cruel or neglectful.

Now. My mother was like, why are you here? I would be asked to be whatever I appeared. Right. Yeah. And what's so interesting, there was the real wisdom in what I don't think our mothers would have thought about it in this way, but it turns out when children play freely without adults standing over them, they learn how to pay attention. Dr. Isabel Benke, the Chilean scientist has shown this. So kids learn what they find interesting when they

play freely. That's really important for attention. They learn how to persuade other kids to pay attention to them. They learn how to pay attention to other kids. They learn how to cope with anxiety because you take risks, you get things wrong. You slowly, and anxiety ruins attention. They learn how to cope with life's challenges. If you've got an adult standing over them enforcing the rules, they don't learn it, right? Because they're just always looking to the adult, tell me what to do, tell me what to do. So Lenore understood all this, right? She could see that. And at first she thought, well, the solution is kind of obvious. I'll just persuade, I'll let my kids play outside and I'll persuade other people to let their kids

play outside. So she would try and persuade people. And she would often say to them, what is something that you love to do when you were a kid that you don't allow your own children to do? And people would say, oh, I used to ride my bike in the woods. I used to roll marbles around in my mouth, like all sorts of things, right? But Lenore discovered it doesn't really work to just persuade people as an individual, because like exactly like you say, Rachel, if you're the only person who lets your kid out, you know, they get scared. You look crazy. And actually people often call the police. Right. So what Lenore did is she began to run an organization called Let Grow. Every parent listening go to letgrow.org. And what

they do is they go and persuade whole schools and whole communities to let kids have increasing levels of independence that build up to playing outdoors again. And I went to spend a lot of time in Let Grow programs for my book, Style and Focus. And I think of all the conversations I had for the book about all the 12 factors that are harming our attention, I think probably the most moving was with a 14-year-old boy in a Let Grow program in Long Island. So this boy was a big, strong boy. He was taller than me, and I'm not sure. And until this program had begun nine months before, he had never been allowed out of his house on his own. His parents wouldn't even let him run around the block. I asked him why, and he said, my parents are afraid of all these kidnappings. He said,

this is a town where the French bakery is across the street from the olive oil store. And he had a level of fear that would be appropriate if he lived in Syria. Right. And then this Let Grow project began and he started to play outdoors. And I said to him, what did you do? And first they played ball games, but then him and his friends, they went into the woods and he said, we didn't have any cell phone signal, but we still went there. He said, there's a real shock in his voice. And I said, what did you do in the woods? And he said, we built a fort together. And now we go and sit in the fort, even though our phones don't work and we build things. And Lenore was with me that day. And when he left, she turned to me and she said,

think about all of human history and all of human prehistory. Young people had to go out and explore. They had to hunt. They had to build things. And we took all that away from them. And it has stunted their ability to pay attention. It stunted their bodies. But those boys, given a tiny little sliver of freedom, what did they do? They went into the woods and they built a fort. Exactly. That's exactly what we all did when we were little. Wait right there. We'll have more of this conversation next.

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live in the country here, but we really lived in rural America and it is different. And I do think it's interesting that while the pandemic has exacerbated so much of the things that you talk about in this book and the things that, you know, so many kids had, you know, we used to talk about limiting screen time here. We mandated screen time for them. Many people were locked up. I'm not able to go outside, but some families saw this and said, we want to be free. And you saw a lot of people moving to rural parts of the country or places that maybe didn't have mass mandates. And maybe they decided, you know what, we always dreamed of living in the country.

And they made those moves. Some people, actually, the pandemic spurred that. But I agree. I think I read a book when I was really a young mom. And I'm really grateful I read it really young. And it was called The Genius of Play. And there is genius in it. And I have my phone is full of videos. My iCloud is full of videos of just watching my children videotaping them like where they can't see me. Just just playing outside, but also inside with no structure. I've never been a playdate person.

I've never been a sport, organized sports person. We never allowed video games in our home growing, you know, with our own children. But we have run into the phone issue and we've had to make adjustments. That's so interesting because that comes back to what you were saying, Sean, right? Which is about the tech question. Because the way I started to think about it is the tech we, so I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing people who designed key aspects of the world in which the stuff that obsesses us and our kids. And I learned from them, I'll come back to this in a second, that the tech we use is specifically designed in order to hack and invade our attention. And it's unbelievably good at it, right? And there's

a solution to that that I'll come to. But it's interesting because what I sort of realized is, if you think of that tech as like a virus, right? It would have, any moment it came along in human history, it would have screwed with our attention really badly. But it came along a moment when it's like our immune system was already down, right? We didn't let our children play. So they didn't develop attention. So they were really easy prey for this technology. Children sleep 85 minutes less than they did a century ago. And sleep is essential for focus and attention. Do we know why that changed? Yeah, I can talk about that because I

did a lot of research on that. So I interviewed the leading experts on sleep in the whole world. And it was fascinating. I interviewed this guy called Dr. Charles Eisler, who's at Harvard Medical School, who advises the US Secret Service and the Boston Red Sox and everyone else on sleep. And there's a whole range of reasons why we sleep so much less than we used to, which is a huge factor in our attention crisis. One of the factors is stress. We're much more stressed than we used to be. And we stress out our children with these dumb, ridiculous tests that are completely pointless, that don't test anything useful. I mean, one person said to me, if you wanted to design a school system that would ruin children's attention, you would design the one that we have, which is just for all sorts of reasons.

I can talk about that in a minute as well. But another factor that's ruining our sleep is our relationship with light. And so Dr. Seisler said to me, humans are as sensitive to light as algae. Right. as sensitive to light as algae, right? We are really sensitive to light. And there's one thing in particular that we're doing that's really screwing with our ability to sleep. So human beings evolved so that when it gets dark, we get a sudden surge of energy. So imagine you can see how this would have been helpful in the past. So imagine you go on a camping trip, right? And it starts to get dark and you haven't put up your tent. You get a sudden surge of energy and that's great because you can put up your tent before it gets dark. So you can see how in the past that would have been very useful for human beings, right? It gets dark, you get a surge of energy, you get back to your cave. But what's happened is

now we control when it gets dark. So 90% of us lie in bed and look at a glowing screen just before we go to sleep. And then you switch that screen off and what your body gets is a message. Oh, it suddenly got dark. We need to give Sean and Rachel energy to get back to the cave, right? Your body doesn't know you're already in the cave, right? You don't need any energy. So you get this sudden surge of energy. It's much harder to get to sleep. When you do get to sleep, your sleep will be much less good quality. So what you need to do is absolutely profoundly limit your exposure to light in the two hours before you get to sleep. At the moment, it's like we're taking a drug that wakes you up immediately before we go to sleep. And then we're puzzled that we can't sleep. So I developed a way of doing this. It's actually something that's helped me

with a lot of- Are you going to tell us your bedtime routine? I will. It was like confessing. No, I'm seriously very, very curious. So the thing that solved this for me, you can know in your mind what I just said, but you'll still be lying there just before you go to sleep and going, you know, there's that one email I've just got to answer. So the solution I built, and it's actually a solution to a much wider, for all of the 12 causes of our attention problems that I write about in stolen focus, there's sort of two levels

at which we've got to solve it. There's, I think of them as defense and offense. There's all sorts of ways we've got to defend ourselves and our kids. And then we've got to take on some of the forces that are doing this to us, but to focus on defense. So I bought something called a K-safe. I'm stupidly, I'm pointing at it, but this is the radio. No one can see me. So in the corner over there, I have this K-safe. It's a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial and it will lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. On my laptop, I have an app called Freedom that does the same. It just cuts you off from the internet. I use that box four hours a

day. And particularly, so two hours before I'm going to go to sleep, I put my phone in it and I set it to unlock in six hours time. So that even if I crack and I'm like, ah, I have to send that email, what can I do? It's locked away. There's nothing I can do. I've still got a landline. I mean, if there was an emergency, I could call the cops, but I've just shut it away. And I found that was the only way for me to get out of this cycle of exposing yourself to light that wakes you up, that ruins your sleep. And this is particularly disastrous for kids. You mentioned ADHD, Rachel, you know, in children, lack of sleep will manifest as mania, right? So there's many things going on with ADHD and I go through lots of them in the book, but if you have chronically underslept children, a lot of them will become manic, right? And then we'll, and then we give

them stimulants to drug them, which is not a sensible, I'm not blanketly opposed to ever giving stimulants, but that's not the solution to kids not being able to sleep. Right. Right. So you put your phone in the case and then you lay down and then what? I read a book. So I try to get a light for a book because I used to fall asleep with a book all the time. And then in the last few years, she falls asleep with Twitter. I do. It's a family problem. No, it's more of a marital problem. But I will tell you this. But let me say this. I have to have the light on to read too.

There's a difference between having a gentle light behind you and staring directly into the light. So if you think about looking at your phone is the equivalent of actually directly staring into a light bulb in terms of the amount of light you get exposed to. So one thing you could do is massively turn down the brightness on your phone. That will help a bit. So you want the brightness to be as low as if you had a gentle light behind you. That can also help. I want to get back to reading though. Honestly, I think it was better for me. And I think I fell asleep faster also when I was reading. Well, and there's so much evidence that reading, and I go through this in the book as well, reading books nurtures your attention. It'll mean that you focus better even when you're away from the book. But just to go back to the social media stuff, because,

so we've got all these factors. If you think of the social media as a virus, it comes along- I want to do just one quick question for you. How, how much time should adults sleep and how much time should kids be sleeping? So adults should get, and this will sound shocking to people because we get so much less adults should get eight hours sleep a night and young children should get much more than that. So at the moment, only 15% of us wake up feeling refreshed. And as an experiment, when I was writing Style and Focus, I went for three months with no internet enabled devices, no laptop and no smartphone. And loads of things happened to me. I thought maybe my attention had gotten so bad because I

just got old, right? I was about to turn 40. I thought maybe this is just aging. My attention became as good as it had been when I was 17. I could read for eight hours a day. But one of the biggest changes that I only noticed about a month in, I remember waking up one morning and going into the kitchen and just instinctively flicking on the kettle to make some coffee, which I do first thing I wake up. And suddenly thinking, I've got a really strange feeling.

What do I feel? And it was only after a few minutes, I suddenly thought, oh, I've got a really strange feeling. What do I feel? And it was only after a few minutes, I suddenly thought, oh, I'm not tired. Like I woke up feeling refreshed. I don't remember that happening between basically my teenage years and then, right? And sleep is important because Professor Roxanne Prashad at the University of Minneapolis explained this to me really well. When you're sleeping, your brain is cleaning itself. It's repairing. Basically, waste builds up in your brain throughout the day, metabolic waste, and then it gets rinsed out of your brain when you sleep. So if you don't sleep, your brain is clogged up. If you stay awake

for 19 hours, your focus deteriorates as much as if you had got legally drunk so sleep this is why sleep is one of the 12 factors that i go through in the book that we've really got to deal with okay so we got sleep we've got let's go to play we've got social media though we got to go to the social media well let's think about an element in social media i think this is something that will be playing out for absolutely everyone listening unless they're very unusual so i went to mit the massachusetts institute of, to interview Professor Earl Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. And he said to me, look, there's one thing you've got to understand about the human brain more than anything else. We can only consciously

think about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not changed in a very long time. That's it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not changed in a very long time. It ain't going to change anytime any of us are going to see. You can only think about one or two things at a time. But what's happened is we've fallen for an enormous delusion. The average American teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. So what happens is scientists get people into labs, not just teenagers, older people as well. And they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time. And what they discover is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you juggle. You juggle very quickly between tasks. And it turns out that

comes with a really big cost. The fancy name for it is the switch cost effect. When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you're going to do all the things you're trying to do much less competently. You'll make more mistakes. You'll be much less creative. You'll remember much less of what you do. And this isn't a small effect, right? There's a study, a small study that was done by Hewlett Packard, the printer company. And they got a scientist in and they got him to split their workers into two groups. And the first group was told, just get on with your task, whatever it is, you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is, but you've got to also answer a heavy load of email and phone calls. So pretty much how most of us live.

And at the end of it, the scientist tested the IQ of both groups, the intelligence, the group that had not been interrupted scored 10 IQ points higher than the group that had to give you a sense of how big that is. When you smoke cannabis, your, your IQ goes down by five points in the short term, right? So being constantly distracted in the way we are is twice as bad for your intelligence attention as getting stoned, right? You'd be better off sitting at your desk, getting stoned and doing one thing at a time than sitting at your desk, not getting stoned and being interrupted all the time. To be clear, you'd be better off neither getting stoned nor being interrupted, obviously, but you can see, you know, so when people say multitasking is a lie, like the thing that they told us, you can multitask and you were rewarded for thinking you could you were a good multitasker.

There's no science behind that being true. In fact, the science is very clear. We cannot do it right. It can't be done when you try. And the one study found that if you receive just eight text messages an hour, that lowers your brain power for the main thing you're trying to do by 30%. So I would argue, if you're interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted. But most of us never get 23 minutes spare. And the reason this is so relevant to

social media is that social media as it currently exists is designed to interrupt you, right? And I interviewed loads of people in Silicon Valley who designed the world in which we now live that obsesses us and our kids. But never forget one moment in particular, I interviewed a guy called Dr. James Williams, who'd been a very senior figure at the heart of Google. And he was disgusted by what they're doing to us. And he quit. And he spoke at a tech conference to designers who literally, everyone listening, your kids are using the apps that literally these people designed. And he said to them, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, please put up your hand now. And put up their hand they're all being taken over

by their own creations their attention is being destroyed too so i wanted to understand you know one of the ways that i go through six ways in which this is destroying our social media is as it currently exists is really damaging our focus and attention one of them is that it's designed to interrupt us um this is not what I say or what these dissidents say. This is what the people in Facebook say. Sean Parker, who was the biggest initial investor in Facebook, said, we designed Facebook to maximally invade people's attention. We knew what we were doing.

We did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our kids' brains. And to understand, I think it's important to understand why they did that. It's not that they're not like James Bond villains. They're not devils. They did it for a very particular reason. And it's a reason that we can actually fix. So anyone listening, if you pick, don't do this, but if you did, pick up Facebook, TikTok,

Twitter now, open them. Those companies immediately begin to make money out of you. And they make money in two ways. The first way is really obvious. We all know about it. You see advertising. Okay. Everyone knows how advertising works. The second way is much more important. They start to learn all about you. Everything you do on social media is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to learn who you are. So let's say that you clicked that you liked, I don't know, Bette Midler, Donald Trump, and you told your mom you just bought some diapers. Okay. If you're a

man who likes Bette Midler, they'll figure out you're gay. Maybe there's a straight man out there who likes Bette Midler. I've never met one. If you click that you like Donald Trump, obviously they're going to figure out you're conservative. And if you're talking about buying diapers, they figured out, okay, this is someone who's had a baby. They have got tens of thousands of pieces of information about that, about you. They know who you are. And they're learning that for a couple of reasons. One is they want to sell you to advertisers. They want to sell your attention to advertisers. So someone who sells nappies wants to market to people who've got babies. There's no point marketing to people who don't.

But more importantly, they're figuring out the weaknesses in your attention. They are learning about the weaknesses in your attention so they can keep you scrolling. Because the longer you scroll, the more money they make. So their entire business model is built around figuring out what makes Sean and Rachel pick up their phones as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. What makes Sean and Rachel's kids pick up their phones as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. That is their business model. Just like the head of KFC, all he cares about in his professional capacity is, did you guys go to KFC today? All the heads of these companies care about is how often did we get you

to pick up your phone and scroll so you can see how it's designed to hack and invade attention in the way it currently works yeah and so as a policy prescription how do we fix that what should the so you know i don't know if you know this johan but sean's a former congressman so he's thinking about this i was another side of the aisle probably than you, but I was with your dad. We were talking before I came on air that my dad, the only time my dad is ever proud of me is when I come on Fox. He always says Fox is way too liberal. So that's his issue. But the policy prescription. So this is something that I thought about a lot. And for all of the 12 factors that are damaging our attention that I write about in the book, I talk about these two levels. There are things we can do as individuals, and then there's the bigger policy prescription. And I think there's an analogy that both of you

will remember, and I think most listeners will remember, that really helped me to think about this. So I remember when I was a kid, the standard form of gasoline was leaded gasoline, right? I remember the smell of it, right? I remember my mom putting it into her car. A bit before my time, and I think before both of your times as well, people used to paint their homes with leaded paint. And then it was discovered exposure to lead is really bad for your brain and particularly terribly damages children's ability to focus and pay attention. And everyone was breathing in lead because if it's in gasoline, it gets into the air and the air was just full of lead, right? So what happened is a group of ordinary moms, a group of housewives learned about this and

banded together and they said, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing the lead industry to screw with our kids' brains? This is crazy. But it's really important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, so we're anti-paint and we're anti-gasoline. Let's ban all paint and all gasoline, right? That would have been crazy. What they said is, let's deal with the specific component that is so badly harming people's attention and focus. And so they campaigned for lead to be banned from gasoline and from and from uh paint and these were often quite conservative moms right it was coalition but it was often quite conservative moms you can get by the way when it comes to kids you can get left and right to come together you're seeing that right now here in the united states right don't mess with our kids and i don't care

if you're the lead industry and i certainly don't care if you're big tech, right? I care about my kids. You couldn't be more right. This has been so interesting to me because obviously I'm speaking to both sides about my book. And this is one of those things where you can really see, you know, I think I've written the only books ever that have been praised by both Tucker Carlson and Hillary Clinton, right? I think for exactly this reason. And so I think there's a really interesting analogy with lead paint, right? I think for exactly this reason. And so I think there's a really interesting analogy with lead paint, right? So I spent, obviously when I was speaking to people in Silicon Valley who designed this, I'm kind of saying, well, what's the solution here? Because at first, when you hear this stuff, it can be a bit like, oh, Jesus, like, so are we just stuck

in the matrix? Is there nothing we can do? And for example, Asa Raskin, who invented a key part of how the internet works and his dad, Jeff Raskin, who invented a key part of how the internet works, and his dad, Jeff Raskin, invented the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. Aza said to me, look, there's an exact equivalent to the lead in the lead paint here. What you got to do is ban the current business model for social media. You mean the business model that rewards you for more eyeballs for cash? model that rewards you for more eyeballs for cash. Exactly. He said, just say a business model that is premised on secretly surveilling you in order to figure out the weaknesses in your attention and keep you and your kids scrolling. That is just inhuman. It's screwing us up. Don't allow it.

And when he first said that to me and loads of people in Silicon Valley said that to me, I couldn't really understand what they were saying. I finally said to to me and loads of people in Silicon Valley said that to me. I couldn't really understand what they were saying. I finally said to Aza and other people, okay, let's imagine we do what you're saying. The next day, if I open Facebook, would it just say, sorry, everyone, we've gone fishing? He said, of course not. What would happen is they would have to move to a different business model. And absolutely everyone listening has an experience of the alternative business models. So one is subscription. We all know how

HBO and Netflix work. You pay a small amount, you get access. The other one, think about the sewers. Before we had sewers, we had feces in the street, people got cholera, they got really sick. So we all pay to build and maintain the sewers and we all own the sewers together. Anyone listening, you own the sewers in the town where you live, right? Now it may be that like, we want to own the sewage pipes together. We want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the equivalent of cholera for our attention, for our minds. But the key thing all these experts kept explaining to me is that when you move to a different business model, all the incentives change, right? At the moment, all the incentives are figure out the weakness

in people's attention, hack it, raid it, steal it as much as possible, because you're not the customer. You're the product they sell to the real customer who's advertisers. But when you move to these different models, either subscription or some kind of shared ownership, suddenly you become the customer. Suddenly they have to go, not how either subscription or some kind of shared ownership, suddenly you become the customer. Suddenly they have to go, not how do we hack and raid Sean and Rachel? Instead, they have to say, what does Sean and Rachel want? Oh, it turns out Sean and Rachel want to be able to pay attention. Is this feasible, Sean, on capital?

I was ready to whatever answer you gave to that question, Johan, to not like it, because I'm a free market, capitalist kind of guy. But I agree with your point and the analogy on paint and gasoline. And it has become such a problem that I think that parents are going to start to push for some kind of solution. And I like the idea to say, we have to change the model. Either we're going to make these public entities, which I don't necessarily like that idea, but otherwise the subscription actually is a fantastic idea to go. If you want to be on Facebook, there's a fee you pay monthly. Maybe there's a family discount that you'd get for the Duffeys. You all can be on. And again, that does take that incentive away. And just to kind of, as you were talking, it made me think of something else on this whole attention issue. As a culture, it's a national security risk. If I can't get my kids to focus and think and learn, and another culture, another country isn't doing that to their kids,

isn't sucking their attention away, they're going to be smarter. They're going to be the new innovators, the new creators creators one culture will take over the other well sean i gotta tell you that's not hypothetical that's not hypothetical the chinese are already doing it aren't they you know china i want to be clear i don't support this china is a monstrous communist tyranny this is not worth having a communist tyranny to get this policy. We have so much in common with you, Johan. Are you sure you're not a Republican? The Chinese government, you're totally right,

has severely restricts by law the amount of time kids can spend on video games and different forms of social media. But I think this is so important, Sean, what you're saying about it being a national security risk, because at the moment we're in a race, right? Partly it's a race with other, you know, Chinese communist tyranny, but also there's a race within our societies. On the one hand, you've got all these 12 factors that are harming our ability to focus and pay attention. And many of them are poised to get much worse. Paul Graham, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, said the world is on course to be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40. Think about

how much more addictive TikTok is to your child than Facebook. Okay, now imagine the next crack like iteration of TikTok, the metaverse, all of these things. So that's one side of the race. On the other side of the race, we've got to have a coalition of all of us saying, no, no, you don't get to do this to our children. No, you don't get to do this to our brains. No, we don't want a life where we can't pay attention. You know, one small study found that the average American college student now focuses on any one task for only 65 seconds, right? This is crazy. This is not what we want. This is not a good life. We've got to choose that, but it requires a shift in focus and a shift in almost like a

kind of philosophical shift because we've got to realize there are- A cultural shift. Totally. Because there are loads of things we can do as individuals that I'm passionately in favour of. And in my book, Stolen Focus, I go through lots of them, really urge people to do them. But also we have to have this bigger level to the fight where we realise we are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and we can take them back from these forces that are stealing them, but we're going to have

to fight for them, right? If we don't fight, if we don't have, if there's no other side of that race, they're going to carry on pillaging and raiding us. And we'll look back nostalgically on the day when office workers focus for three minutes on any one task and college students can focus for 60 seconds. And I'll tell you what, there's several things that scare me. The first is, so when you went off for three months and, you know, sort of detox yourself from tech and, and, and another things that were distracting you and got back to reading and long walks and all the things that you did that you said brought your mind back to the way it was when it was 17, that sort of mental fog was gone.

And that clarity, I don't know if kids today have that memory to go back to. It's like, I can tell that, like, I can tell that I'm not able to read a book the way I used to, because I used to read a book. You know what I mean? So easily. And now I see that I'm distracted. It's one of the things that, that really struck me about your story, because I know I have a desire in me to be the kind of reader I used to be. But this generation of kids may not even know what that means. I think that's really important. The reason why I have some optimism we can begin to rediscover this.

James Williams, who I mentioned before, had been at the heart of Google. to rediscover this. James Williams, who I mentioned before, had been at the heart of Google. He said to me, the axe existed for 1.4 million years before anyone thought to put a handle on it. The entire internet has existed for less than 10,000 days, right? We can fix a lot of this stuff. But it's also crucially that the pleasures of focus, once you start to get them back, that the pleasures of focus, once you start to get them back, are so great. Your life begins to make sense again. You become much more competent. You become much better at achieving your goals, at solving your problems. This is why the solutions I write about in Stolen Focus think it's so important. So I'll give you an example of another one that really helped me. But can I stop you for a second? Because that's so interesting. Remember I talked earlier about

the connection between this book and your other awesome book, Lost Connections. So you could be depressed or not have good self-esteem because you haven't achieved something. But to achieve things, you have to have focus and concentration. Not only that, you have to have a relationship to be in a friendship or to be part of a family. You have to be focused. People take time. And if I'm sucked into my phone, I don't build the friendships and relationships and bonds that are so important. When I listened to one of your talks, you were talking about, we have been part of tribes since the beginning and these things are pulling us all away. And I think that's such an important point.

And Sean and I have been really like one of our things that we've, Sean got out of Congress because I think it was after a while, we just realized it was a big strain on our family, as much as good work as he was doing. And part of what we want to do in this next phase of your life. You didn't agree with all of it, but some of it, you did agree with my working. this next phase of your life. You didn't agree with all of it, but some of it you did agree with my working. Some of it you would have been very opposed to, but I will tell you that when we got out and it was a family decision. And one of the things that we really feel strongly about is, you know, you talk about lost connections in addition to all this big, you know, we can blame tech and food and sleep and all this stuff, but there are so many broken families.

And I'm sure it's not helping families and marriages that we have all these distractions. And so if families and relationships are the foundation of any society, really, I mean, it's the central thing. We should not have, we should at least be conscious of what's tearing families apart. And I definitely believe, you know, dinner times and so many things that bring families together and bond them together are being totally destroyed by tech. Yeah, you couldn't be more right. Or even think about something even more basic. There's a person called Professor Catherine Steiner-Adair, who I interviewed, who's shown that babies are getting much less eye contact than they used to yes yes because their mothers are staring at the phone not into their eyes and it's we know there's really

important developmental yes it's very important for child development i saw that by the way in my own children because when i had my first child as you have nine so when I had my first child who's 22, I didn't have a phone. And I would find that the, the latter babies, I had a lot more temptation to, you know, be on my phone or get distracted. And so when I saw that study come out about what was lost between just staring into your baby's eyes and more importantly, your baby staring into into your eyes um wow i had to think about that a lot but also rachel just think about how powerful these creations we're talking about are that they can temporarily override a mother's desire to stare into her baby's eyes right that's a really so what we have to be doing is talk about lost connections, lost connections. So I think what, I think what we have to do is tap the, the really powerful forces within us.

I'll give you an example. One of the deepest forms of focus that any human being can provide is something called a flow state. And everyone listening in, even if you don't know the term is experienced a flow state. A flow state is when you're doing something that is deeply meaningful to you and you just really get into it. And your sense of time falls away. Your sense of ego falls away. The way one rock climber put it is it's like you are the rock you're climbing, right? And different people get into flow, do different things. It might be making bagels it might be brain surgery it might for me it would be writing right hmm sports sports people can exactly they're writers yeah definitely not sports for me but yeah for some people it is um and and um flow flow states are really important for understanding attention because flow states are both the the deepest form of attention that human beings can provide.

And once you get into it, it's the least difficult form of attention to provide. It's not a slog. It's not like memorizing facts for an exam. It's like a gusher of attention that exists inside all of us. So obviously I wanted to understand, okay, if it's a gusher of flow that exists inside all of us, how do we drill for it right where how do we get it so i went to interview an incredible man named professor mihali cheek sent me hi you have no idea how long it took me to learn how to say that who is i say it all the time now because i'm just so pleased i learned um who he's the man who in the 1960s first coined the phrase flow states and did some of the most important research on it over 50 years. And he discovered loads and loads of things, but there's three things that I think would be

particularly useful for your listeners if they want to increase their own chances of getting into a flow state. So the first thing is you have to choose one of your goals and give yourself space for a while where you set aside all your other goals, right? You've got to do one thing. I want to paint this canvas. Say that again. Say that again. You've got to do just one thing for a long time. You know, I want to run this race. I want to paint this canvas. I want to learn to play this Beatles song on the guitar, right? If you're trying to do more than one thing at a time, you'll never get into flow. Secondly, you've got to choose a goal that's meaningful to you, right? If the goal isn't me, so for me, trying to run a race would not get me into flow. I would just feel stressed and fat,

right? Or, you know, trying to paint a canvas wouldn't do it for me. If I tried to paint, it looks like a child threw up, right? So you've got to choose a goal that's meaningful to you. And thirdly, and this seems a bit counterintuitive at first, it will really help if you choose a goal that is at the edge of your ability. So let's say you're a rock climber, a medium talent rock climber. You don't want to just climb over your garden wall. That's too easy. You won't get into flow. Equally, you don't want to suddenly try and climb Mount Kilimanjaro. It's way too much. You'll be overwhelmed. You want to choose a rock face that is slightly higher and harder than the last rock face you climbed, right? So if you do these three things, narrow down to one goal, make sure it's a meaningful goal to you and choose one at the edge of your abilities because flow begins at the edge

of your comfort zone. You can begin to tap this deep form of attention that exists inside all of us. So there are these really powerful, these 12 forces that are invading our ability to focus and pay attention. They're really strong, right? We've got to take them on, but there are also forces within us that are really powerful, that want to focus, that want to pay attention. Because when you can focus and pay attention, your life begins to make sense again. You become capable of achieving your goals. At the moment, I think for a lot of us, it's like we're becoming stumps of ourselves, right? We can sense what we would have been had we been able to focus, but we can't get there. But what I want to say to people is you don't have to tolerate this being done to yourself

and your children. We don't have to tolerate this. These are very recent changes, most of them. They are human changes. It's not changes in the weather. These are human changes. We can deal with them and we can reverse them together. Just like we didn't have to tolerate our kids being poisoned with lead and that damaging their brains, we don't have to tolerate any of these 12 factors that are doing this to us. We can fix this, but to fix it, we've got to understand what's actually happening to us. And we've got to actually deal with it, both at an individual level and together.

That's right. To fix the problem, you have to understand the problem exists. We'll be right back with much more after this. Oh, interrupting their playlist to talk about defying gravity, are we? That's right, Newton. With a Bronco and Bronco Sport, gravity has met its match.

Huh, maybe that apple hit me a little harder than I thought. Yeah, you should get that checked out. With standard 4x4 capability, Broncos keep going up and up. Now get up to $6,000 in rebates on eligible 2024 Bronco family models. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or Ford.ca. Do you think that it's important for us, those of us who are parents who see what happens with technology, I know that's not the only factor here, but to actually put your phone away, actually have the discipline to do it. Absolutely.

I think with our kids, we have to figure out structures in how we limit their use and when they get access to this technology, which is really important. I'm going to go to Rachel, but I want to tell you about why I think there's hope for legislation as well. Well, just really quick, I also think that there's a lot of no tech talk or how do we deal with tech, but I think there's also this thing about modeling what they should be doing. So are you sitting on your phone or are you reading a book? Are you doing reading hour with your kids? I did an interview. I used to have a show on Fox Nation called Moms, and I interviewed a woman who wrote a book literally about the good things

that happen brain-wise, kind of like what you're talking about, the eye contact with the baby, just from reading aloud to your child. Sean grew up in a family where his mother read him, you know, was it the Lord of the Rings and all kinds of things? We didn't have a TV. He grew up with no TV. That's very rare.

He was a Wisconsin boy with no TV. And they read at night. And I think that those are things that we're losing, but easy to bring back. I mean, we just say, we're having a reading hour or just put your phone down and read. And it's amazing how your kids will just start to emulate what you do instead of us just haranguing them to put their phones down. Can I give you my, so here's how politics has changed, Johan. So members of Congress, all of them, senators, governors, they all get elected

because they have enough money to get their message out, right? So they have to fundraise. And they look to some of the biggest corporations that have political action committees or PACs to give them resources to help them run. And oftentimes that company will give or that PAC will give to a candidate who's aligned with the beliefs of the employees of that corporation. That's the way it works. But also, when you have big companies like Meta or Facebook and Twitter and Google that give massive amounts of money to politicians, you don't find politicians actually willing to take the leap of faith to actually change the law. And what's different now because of technology is that small dollar contributions

are coming in to campaign. So there's a program for the Republicans. It's called Win Red. For Democrats, it's Act Blue. And small dollar contributions are making up way more of the resources that candidates have to run their races, as opposed to the money that comes from corporations. And so the power dynamic with money and politics has completely changed over the last, for Republicans, last three years, for Democrats over the last 10 years. You put that in conjunction with what we've seen with moms across Americaica with masks for kids pushing back to open up schools and parents are i think what there's even parents

are seeing this that they're a force to be reckoned with and it's bipartisan on that but you saw the school board in san francisco change you saw moms in new york are now like i'll vote for anybody who's for my kids for my kids And so when you see moms start to pressure and push their legislators to actually do something on this issue and the legislators haven't sold out to big tech, that's the secret sauce that you need to pass legislation. And so I'm very hopeful. I am too. I think this is totally bipartisan.

Johan, also, I wanted to share with you something that, because I love that, how you go around and you hear people's stories. And I have a story to share with you that I haven't seen in your book, but maybe somebody else has told you this story. So I grew up in an Air Force base. And so as a Catholic family, we got to see what the Protestants did often because the Protestants shared the same church with us. And one of the things that the Protestants did, at least on the basis that I was at was they would have their service and the children would be removed from the service and they would go do a craft and they would color Sunday school. Yeah.

They would do like a Sunday school while their parents were in their Protestant service. Right. If you know anything about, I don't know if you're Catholic, Johan, but we're a Catholic family. We both grew up in Catholic families. I remember being very jealous of the Protestant kids because I wanted to go color. I wanted to go do stuff.

And, but I had to sit in church. And as you know, Catholic mass is, is very formal. It's long. My parents were straight Catholics. And as you know, Catholic mass is very formal. It's long. It's long. Thank you. My parents were straight Catholics, so I was never allowed to bring a toy or a book or anything. I was expected to sit there. Now, I didn't have to do.

I mean, I had to kneel and stand when I was told, but nobody could control my mind, right? I could pay attention. I could come in and out of this ancient ritual that we do, which is called the mass. But I could look up. And one of the beauties of being a Catholic is we have the best architecture and art. And so our minds could flow. And we talk about the smells and bells in Catholic church. There's smells.

There's the incense. There's the beautiful architecture. There's the art and statues and so when i i was forced to sit through an hour hour and a half of mass and and i would i my parents believed i had the attention to do that now that i mean like i couldn't let my mind wander, which, as you talk about, is actually a powerful thing for a child to do, but also to take in all of these things. And so I as I listen to your book and I know we're going to close up here soon, I want to tell you the things I took away from all of your books. I think you're a treasure, Johan. I really do. I think you're a treasure to to Western civilization, to everybody who's who's reading these things, because I think you're thinking about things that we should be thinking about that we're all too distracted to think about. I tried to take everything you have taught and brought forth,

and I tried to put it in the context of our family, which is a Catholic family. With nine kids. With nine kids. So imagine that. And I took away, one, the importance of family connection, the we. So for us, the we is our family and family dinners. And by the way, there's lots of studies on the power of family dinners. So family dinners was important. I think family dinners are really important.

The power of play. I love that you talked about that. I think in American culture, I grew up, my mother is an immigrant, so I didn't have the sports culture that Sean grew up in. And the sports culture has gone into overdrive and like parents are just shuffling kids everywhere. And there's so much adult directed play and I've never been part of that. So I love the play part. I love the reading part. I think that we should be modeling reading with our children. And then I think this idea of spirituality and, you know, we have the rosary for meditation, we have mass, we have all these things. And so I think this is, these are really important things that I've taken what you've, what you've talked about and I've Catholicized it for you.

That's so fascinating, Rachel. I'm just thinking about what you're saying because I went to this Amish community called Elkhart-le-Grange. It's just outside Fort Wayne. And I did a really stupid thing, which is I watched the movie Witness the night before I went. That's not smart.

It was dumb, but actually it was totally fascinating spending time with the Amish. And one of the things that's so interesting is the Amish have very low levels of depression and they do not have children who exhibit ADHD, right? And so I went there. Wow, I didn't know that. It's really interesting. So the Amish, so sometimes people say, oh, it's a cultural difference. They don't talk about it, but actually there's fairly good ways of measuring depression that show that they actually are less depressed, depressed. And it was kind of challenging to me to go and spend time with them, although they were

super nice, to sort of realize these people who live so differently to us. And there's lots of things about Amish culture I would not want to adopt, don't get me wrong. But one of the things that was fascinating is, I remember talking to them specifically about ADHD and they said, we have some kids who don't like to sit still. And I said, well, what do you do with them? I said, well, we let them go run around. We let them go fishing. Why would we make a kid who doesn't want to sit still, you know, torture the child? You know, we let them go run around, right? Those kids are really good at fishing. Those kids are really good at the farming stuff, right? And it's this thing where I think the Amish have a very strong sense of

meaning and purpose, which I think is what you're getting at as well, Rachel. A very strong sense, and we know that attention attaches to meaning. The more you have a sense of meaning, the better your attention will be. The Amish have a very strong sense of community and togetherness. There are no lonely Amish. They have other problems to be sure, but they're not lonely, right? And loneliness causes attention problems. They obviously don't have the technological invasion that we have because they're not using tech. And it's kind of humbling. It's tempting to think about the Amish as this sort of, and to be honest, when I was a teenager, I probably would have thought they were sort of backward, a kind of relic of the past. But to go there and realize I was a teenager, I probably would have thought they were sort of backward,

a kind of relic of the past, but to go there and realize, oh, actually you guys are doing some things better than us, right? You've actually figured out some really important things that we need to learn from you. Not everything. I'm not going to convert and join the Amish, right? And not just because what they did to Harrison Ford in Witness. But I do think we have to be humble when approaching, when seeing the flaws of the culture that we built. There's loads of great things about our culture, right? Loads of great things. I'm glad to be alive today, but we've got to be humble. And I think this connects with, and this is true of attention, depression, addiction across the board. You know, everyone listening knows they have natural physical needs. Obviously you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air, but there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have certain

innate psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And this culture we built is not good at meeting those needs. And of course, we all know in the last two years, those needs were at a very basic level not met. And unsurprisingly, what happened? Depression enormously increased, addiction enormously increased, suicide enormously increased. That's not surprising. You take away people's psychological needs and there's a degree to which it was taken away, not by the actual virus itself, and to some degree by some of the restrictions. And some of the restrictions in my view were wise

and some of them were foolish. I spent a lot of the pandemic in Las Vegas because I'm writing a book about it. It is insane that the casinos were open and the schools were closed. And the churches were closed. That is a society that's got its values wrong, right? Caesar's Palace is less important than your kid going to school, right? Much as I like Caesar's Palace, right? So I do think when people's needs are not met, psychological needs, it causes, and indeed physical needs, it causes all sorts of malfunctioning and all sorts of things go haywire, addiction, depression, attention problems.

So we've got to really focus on meeting our psychological needs. And I think what you're articulating, Rachel, when you're talking about family meals, a sense of meaning that for you comes from Catholicism, a whole range of these things. These are things that meet your needs and that anchors you and centres you. And of course, different people get their needs met in different ways. And, you know, Catholicism isn't for everyone. And, you know, there's all sorts of different things that meet people's needs. It's not, Johan? I know this is controversial.

I apologize. When I arrive in hell, you can persuade me. I love that we live in this multi, you know, what you're talking about are the things that actually unite us, that we all need as humans regardless. And this is something that is so important to me because one of the things that I'm really scared about is it's not just that our individual attention has broken down. Our collective attention has broken down. Our ability to talk to each other and listen to each other has profoundly collapsed.

I don't think it's a coincidence that we're having these huge political crises at the same time as we're having this crisis in attention. We can't talk to each other. And that is so dangerous. I'm really frightened about this because you just see it coming apart, right? And we have to restore attention. It's like you said before, Sean, about, you know, in a family, you've got to be able to restore attention it's like you said before sean about you know in a family you've got to be able to pay attention to each other to have conversations and build relationships that's also true as a society beyond the fact it's definitely true within families it's also true just in a society but if you can't do it at this but if you can't do it with your family how are you gonna do it with all these strangers that's very true that's very true in

schools you can't do it in college so we? That's very true. That's very true. You can't do it in schools. You can't do it in college. So we're not teaching our kids. I think this is a really important issue. Listen, I don't have to like your point of view, Johan. You don't have to like mine. But we should be able to sit and have a conversation and debate. And I might go, you know what? I kind of see where Johan is coming from. I disagree with him. But I get his perspective and why he's where he's at. And hopefully he'll understand, maybe disagree with me too, but understand where I'm coming from. And that's how we work together in the society to kind of come up with this

collective resolution. But if you don't talk to people, if you can't talk to people, if I'm right in your wrong, or you're talking to people because you're flipping phone, you grew up. It is, it is cataclysmic for culture, I believe. It really is. And that's a really good point. And we put it on overdrive during this pandemic. That might be another podcast with Johan

talking about just conversation. It's so interesting because there's another thing here that is related to what we were saying before about social media that I think helps to explain some, by no means all, of what's going on. And it comes back to, so think back to what we were saying before about social media that I think helps to explain some, by no means all of what's going on. And it comes back to, so think back to what we were saying about, you've got these, you've got a business model for social media at the moment that is based on getting people to scroll as long as possible. That's all it does, right? It's designed to do that. So that algorithm is constantly figuring out what

keeps people scrolling. And this wasn't the intention of anyone at Facebook or Twitter, but it bumped into an unfortunate human truth, which is the fancy term for it is negativity bias, which is basically human beings will stare longer at something that makes them angry and upset than they will at something that makes them feel good. If you've ever seen a car crash on the highway, you know what I'm talking about. You stared longer at the car accident than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. This is very deep in human nature. 10 week old babies will stare longer at an angry face than a smiling face, probably for a good reason. And that, you know, humans, it gives us an advantage if we're alert to danger, right? But when this combines with a business model on social media that is designed to keep you

scrolling, it leads to a disaster. So picture two teenage girls who go to the same party and they leave and go home on the same bus. And one of them does a status update where she says, oh, that was such a nice party. I had a great time. Everyone was lovely. And the other one does, Karen was a skank at that party. She looked like a tramp, just goes down a list, just insults everyone who was at the party. The algorithms are scanning and they look for

the kinds of language you use. And it'll put that first status update into a few people's feeds. But the second update, it will put into far more people's feeds because if it makes people angry or keep them scrolling longer, people go, what do you mean Karen's a skank? You're a skank. Now that is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls at a party. We all know what's happening to the mental health of teenage girls. Imagine that being done to a whole society except you don't have to imagine it. It is being done to the whole society. It is pulling us apart. Facebook's own internal research, which we got leaked thanks to Francis Haugen who worked there,

Facebook's own internal research showed that they are tearing us apart. They are encouraging us to hate each other. If you do a status update where you go, you know what, I don't agree with Democrats on this, or I don't agree with Republicans on this or that, but we're all Americans and we all belong together. And, you know, there's some wisdom in Republicans. You know, we do need markets and we do need these things. And there's some wisdom in Democrats. We do need some things that regulate the market. And, you know, if you say that, you're not going to be picked up by the algorithms. If you go, these people are the devil. They are destroying our country, we have got to stop these evil people, the algorithm will hugely promote it, right? And so, you can see if we're plugged into a machine that is promoting the most hateful anger all the time and demoting,

just we can still and we should still disagree. I don't want us all to agree. My idea of hell is to be locked in a room with people who agreed with me all day, right? We should, and we should still disagree. I don't want us all to agree. My idea of hell is to be locked in a room with people who agreed with me all day. Right. We should disagree and we should debate things absolutely vigorously, but we shouldn't do it in a way that is just promoting nihilistic hatred. And we're plugged into a machine that is promoting nihilistic hatred. And I don't see how this trend can go on much longer without it leading to

absolute disaster. Right. We, we, we turned into like, I i mean i've never heard this is the last couple years is the first time i've ever heard the word civil war in america talked about outside of history we need conversation we need focus we need attention we need all those things to make people work together now i don't want to be with anyone who I agree with all the time either. I love conversations and debate and perspectives. And you know what?

I'm better off for hearing what other people say. And you probably would. We all are. Johan, when I get mad at Sean because he doesn't do something the way I like, do you know what he says to me? Did you really want to marry yourself? I love it.

And I say, no, you're right. I guess, you know, not everyone wipes down the counter the same way. Let me just say this. I know you got to go. So I'm going to close this up on this. I love that you tackled some of the policy problems that we could start to take on, but ultimately everything happens first on the, at the home level for parents, especially. And I think if all of us as parents are aware of the things that you're teaching, the things that you're pointing out, the information that you're getting out into the universe. And thank you for that. All of us, at least in our own homes, can start to make these small changes.

And hopefully that will spread as moms and dads network and talk about it and and hopefully we'll all start as you said we i am not a peasant um living in the kingdom of facebook and twitter i i have more agency than that and hopefully it will turn into a political movement that we can take back our culture johan this is the longest podcast we've done and it's been fascinating one of my favorites flowing is that what you said before i might just say old school we were jamming together Johan, this is the longest podcast we've done and it's been fascinating. You know what? We were flowing. Is that what you said? I might just say old school. We were jamming together.

This is brilliant. It's insightful. And it's addressing issues that we all know that we have. And so I would encourage all of our listeners to get your new book, Stolen Focus. And as Rachel just read your last one, which is Lost Connections. I love Lost Connections. Wonderfully smart and insightful with real solutions on how we can fix these problems. Johan, you're so wonderful. You're as delightful. I just want to re-note, you're as delightful as you seem on TV. You're as delightful on a podcast. I hope one day we can share a real cup of coffee, not a virtual one at our kitchen table

with you and keep putting all this wonderful stuff into the universe. I absolutely love what you're doing. Oh, this has been such a delightful and lovely conversation. And I'm meant to say, my publisher's tased me. Anyone wants to know where to get the audio book, the ebook or the physical book can go to stolenfocusbook.com. But it's funny, I did a podcast about a year ago with a man who was 50, which is relevant to what I'm about to say. And at the end of it, he said, so what's your social media? And my assistant, I give her my social media. I don't look at it. But he said, what's your Twitter? And I said it. And he said, what's your Instagram? And I said it. He said, what's your Facebook? And I said it. And then he said, what's your Snapchat? And I said,

I am a 43-year-old man. Only 43-year-old men on Snapchat are definitely pedophiles. Why are they there? And he didn't laugh at all. So I have this terrible thing where if someone doesn't laugh at my joke, I lean into it. And I said, you know that show To Catch a Predator? I said, the next season of To Catch a Predator should be, they just go up to adult men in the street and say, what your snapchat handle if they have one immediately arrest them right he didn't laugh at all and later i looked him up and he's a 50 year old man with quite a big snapchat following so i always get really relieved now when i get to the end of an interview without accidentally calling the host pedophiles this has been delightful in every way and particularly i'm glad i did that i didn't do

that did not offend us in any way we think you're charming and um i really encourage everyone to to either you know listen to your your ted talks um um many of your interviews your one on tucker was fantastic um lost connections and stolen focus stolen focus johan hari you're amazing thank you thank you so much what a delight thank you so much thank you so much. What a delight. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Massively enjoyed that. Cheers. Wow, Sean. I really enjoyed that conversation with Johan.

I know you did too. I think he's talking about real problems that our culture faces, that our families face, that our kids face, that we face. And he addresses it head on with science and investigation. And then I like that he came up with solutions on how we can address these problems. And I agree with you. This starts in the family. It starts in the home.

And if it starts there, it can actually go to our legislative bodies to get real change, to make sure that, again, we stop these. That we're not slaves to Facebook and Twitter and all these big tech. Predators on the American people and on the American child. Childhood. They are childhood predators. They're stealing our children's childhood. They're burglars. Yeah. Yeah. They're childhood burglars. I agree with you. I 100 percent do. Well, anyway, lots to think about. I think they might actually, Sean, in the very near future, do a podcast where we sort of talk about it, just sort of how it's all

playing out in our family. I think that would be really good. Well, I enjoyed this conversation. If you did too, let us know, subscribe, rate, review this podcast at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts. We hope to see you around our kitchen table next week. Bye, everybody. Have a good week.