Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - PART TWO: Johann Hari: The Truth About Depression, GLP-1s and ADHD & Why Our Biology Is Not To Blame

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

Is Big Pharma really healing us — or profiting from keeping us sick? NYT best-selling author Johann Hari (Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, Chasing the Scream, Magic Pill) returns with a powerful breakdown of the real causes of depression, anxiety, and the global attention crisis. Johann Hari reveals why only 2 of the 9 causes of depression are biological, exposing how Big Pharma, social media addiction, and modern lifestyle traps are fueling mental health issues. He dives into the dark rise of GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic) and society’s toxic beauty obsession, while uncovering the overlooked role of sleep, community, and social connection in healing. Hari shares his personal experience with antidepressants, and explores how childhood shame and trauma drive addiction, weight gain, and despair. You’ll learn why even pets are being diagnosed with ADHD, what Silicon Valley insiders confessed about attention-hacking technology, and how our loss of focus is sabotaging relationships, careers, and democracy itself. If you’re ready to challenge the myths of mental health, regain your focus, and take back control of your mind, don’t miss this eye-opening conversation with Johann Hari. Check out all of Johann Hari's Books: ⁠https://johannhari.com/⁠ Our first episode with Johann Hari: ⁠https://youtu.be/JKFuI96biDU⁠ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm I'm the Alec. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to part two of our conversation with Johann Hari, the author of, I mean, so many books. Lost Connections about depression, chasing the scream about addiction, stolen focus, why you can't pay attention and how to think deeply again. So many things that we've been told about depression, anxiety, ADHD are actually being, in many cases, manipulated and co-opted by so many different aspects of industry. that Johan's going to speak to us about.

We break down some of the perverse incentive structures that are really hijacking our attention, causing us to lose our focus, to be sick. In many cases, these companies are knowingly producing products for their incentive structure. And Yohan has an amazing perspective on this on. And he also talks about cultures that don't have these experiences of ADHD, places in the world where these conditions don't,

appear and what are the factors that are happening there that we can really learn from. He also has an amazing amount of hope about what it's going to take to create the change in our world that will benefit all of us. I was so touched by the way that he inspires us to create change. We're also going to spend some attention on how far the ADHD conversation has gone. It has gone into conversations about medicating people's pets. And we're going to talk about some of the implications about that and also what that looks like. If you haven't already checked out, Miami-Bialax breakdown on Substack, that is our breaker community where we release exclusive content and have the opportunity to ask

Maim or Jonathan questions. Please take a look at it, join Mayam-Bi-Alex breakdown on Substack and can't wait for you to join us there. We hope that you've heard part one of this conversation. We cannot wait for you to hear part two without further ado. Here's part two of our conversation, Johann Hari. Break it down. So the people who are supposedly in charge of the forefront of the most advanced medical system in the world are failing

because it doesn't pay them to send people to a community group, to a walking group, to going out in nature. You know, as much whatever you say about Canadians, they prescribe. I'll give them that. They'll give a prescription to go out in nature. Now, it would be much better if they went out in nature in a group, on a hiking group. as you say, because these studies exist, yet they have failed to be implemented into the larger healthcare system. So what is the incentive to keep people sick or to find the best possible treatment, whether that be in a pharma option or in a combination of both where you're getting

a social connection? And this is where it begins to be hard to not see that there is a incentive in keeping people sick? So it's a failure at two levels. You're right that there's a failure in the medical system, but that failure is happening because of a failure at a higher level, which is a failure of the political system, right? The political system is bought and owned

by the health insurance companies. Literally, you know, you look at the first day of the Obama care negotiations as both parties. They're literally funding the Republican and Democratic side the same sides because they want the politicians to work for them, right? So this is a system built entirely around profit and entirely around these dysfunctional,

incentives where, yeah, a better solution that doesn't cost anything will not be considered compared to a worse solution that makes profit, right? So I say that's the overarching system. And you know, the answer to that is a political solution. Don't fucking tolerate it, right? I completely agree with Bernie Sanders and that part. I don't agree with him on everything. But absolutely, this is 100% right that I'm constantly amazed that Americans don't burn down the system of health care in this country. It is an outrage. So obviously I live half the year in Britain, half the year in this country. Even think about we mentioning OZMPIC. When I buy the OZMPIC in London, it's like 150 pounds a month.

So that's about what, about $200. Here it's $800, right? You are constantly being ripped off so unbelievably rich people can be even richer. It's why you get this. I was very disturbed by the rage around Luigi Mangione because the support for him I found very frightening. in a democracy we do not murder our political opponents and we do not celebrate murder. And it's awful and appalling and that was still a human being.

But it's a symptom of the crisis of democracy that everyone is being fucked over. And in a functional democracy, the democracy offers the solution, right? The democracy goes, you are being fucked over. And this is happening with depression. It's happening with attention problems. It's happening with fucking giving insulin to diabetic. It's happening across the board, right? You have to go, okay, the answer is.

to that is a democratic solution where politicians compete to offer better solutions. But if they're all bought and owned by the by the pharma companies and by the healthcare companies, that they have a lock on the political system. And the way you break that is you just, you elect politicians who will challenge that break on the lock, right? Because how many times are we going to have a study that proves that five minutes with a doctor can change the course of someone's life? How many studies do we need to prove again, oh, it's in Norway, oh, it's in Sweden. Oh, they're showing. here and here, but it just stays in these little pockets and people hear about them on podcasts, and they then don't really go anywhere. It's maddening. With all of those, there are very powerful

vested interests who benefit from the system being as it is, and all of us getting sicker. It's not that they want us to be sick, that that's going too far. It's just that they profit from our sickness and therefore the system is built around it. And it can feel overwhelming. You can hear that. I can sense people hearing what you just said and going, we're never going to challenge that. hear that I think about two things. I think about a friend of mine who I just spent a load of time with called Andrew Sullivan. A lot of your listeners and viewers will know his work. He's an amazing writer. So in 1993, Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive at the height of the AIDS crisis. He'd just watch his best friend Patrick die. As far as he was concerned, there was no hope in sight.

He thought, well, I've got a few years to live. What am I going to do? So he quit his job, he was the editor of the New Republic, and he went to Provincetown in Cape Cod to do one last thing before he died. He decided to write a book about a crazy, wild, utopian idea that nobody had ever written a book about before. And he's like, well, I'll never live to see this idea put into place. No one alive today will ever live to see it, but maybe somewhere down the line, someone's going to find my book and find this idea. The idea that he wrote the first ever book about was gay marriage. And when I get depressed, I try to imagine going back in time to that year when Andrew's writing virtually normal that book,

saying to him, okay, you're not going to believe me, but 23 years, I think it is from now. A, you'll be alive. That would have fucking blown his mind. B, you'll be married to a really hot man because that will be legal. And I'll be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States quotes this book when it makes it mandatory for every state in this country to introduce gay marriage rights. And the next day, you'll be invited to our White House lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you and so many other people have achieved,

to have dinner with the president. Oh, and by the way, that president, he's going to be black, right? That would have sounded like the most fucking absurd science fiction, right? It happened. Why did it happen? It happened because gay people went and blew anything up. It didn't happen because we raged at people or canceled them. It happened because we appealed to people in a spirit of love and lots of very brave gay people.

spoke out and lots of very brave straight people open their hearts and sided with us. And, you know, you think about how unlikely that is. You've got 2,000 years of gay people being imprisoned, burned, murdered. And in the space of a very short period of time, I don't want underestimate we still got challenges, but that comes crashing down, right? To the point where even current really right-wing Republicans are not trying to reverse give the gay marriage ruling, right?

I think a lot about my grandmothers. I really loved my grandmother. I was raised by one of my grandmothers because the addiction of my family. And I'm 46. When I was 46 years old, I think about my grandmother's life. So one of them was a Swiss peasant woman

living in a wooden hut on the side of a mountain. And the other one was a working class Scottish woman living in really tough circumstances. A husband had just died, which was the age I am now. I think about what their lives were like. Legally, they were not allowed to have bank accounts in their own names, right? It was legal for them to be raped by their husbands, as it was legal in every country in the world for a man to rape his wife.

My Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote, right? My grandmother's lives were permanently disfigured by that misogyny, right? My grandmother, my Swiss grandmother, she loved to paint and draw. And she was told to shut the fuck up and get into the kitchen. right? And by the time I knew her, she broke her heart to draw because it made her think about the life she could have had, right? Now, even the most crazy way out misogynist is not saying women shouldn't be allowed to have bank accounts and it should be legal to rape them. I mean, maybe there's someone out there. We're probably getting there. But like no one in, you know, if any Republican congressman said such a thing, they would have to resign, right? How did that happen? You've got, again, thousands of years where men controlled essentially.

every institution of power. And then groups of women just said, we're not fucking taking it anymore. No, you can't do that to us, right? And it took an enormous fight. And obviously, this fight continues and I'm very conscious that I'm a man looking at you, man-splaining this, which is extremely irritating.

So however powerful the healthcare companies are, and they are really powerful, they are not a tenth as powerful as men were in the year my grandmothers were my age. They're not a tenth as powerful as homophobia was, for the whole of human civilization pretty much, right? Hugely powerful concentrated interests can be taken down when enough people challenge them.

And we've got to level with people about how big the challenge is. The factors causing depression and anxiety and our attention problems are really fucking big. Let's be honest with people. It's not a matter of do five minutes on a meditation app or just swallow one pill, although pills can help, meditation apps can help. There are really big things,

but we need to listen to the signal and honor the signal that we're being told and act on it, even if that requires us to do big things. The more people I know with young children in schools, the more I'm hearing about conversations about ADD and ADHD. My kids were homeschooled, and I would say if you took all the homeschoolers in our community, I'm sure all of them would meet a diagnosis

by standardized school measures. In many cases, in many cities, schools are essentially maximizing the number of young people who are on medication for ADD, that it makes for a more efficient school day, it makes for class management. In many cases, you know, the statistics of boys and female teachers is not one to be ignored, meaning the distribution of men versus women who are in boys' lives has really shifted in the last. I don't know, half century or so. People medicating their kids for days when it's important,

but they can be themselves on the weekend and all summer, but that fundamentally to fit into this society, young people in particular are being encouraged, and parents are being encouraged to medicate children. And in many cases, adults are saying, oh, I have it too. I can be much more productive if I'm on Adderall. What is going on?

So the reason I wrote my book Stolen Focus about this is that I could feel my own attention was getting worse, right? With every year that passed, things that require deep focus that are so important to me, reading books, watching movies, having long conversations were just getting harder. It was like trying to run up a down escalator. You know what I mean? I could still do it, but like it was getting harder. And I could see that happening to pretty much everyone around me. And I was particularly worried about the young people in my life. and I had this real epiphany

about this I've got a godson and when he was a little boy when he was nine he developed this brief and unbelievably cute obsession with Elvis Presley and the reason it was so adorable

is that he seemed to genuinely not know that impersonating Elvis was a kind of cheesy cliche so I think he was the last person ever to do a totally sincere version of Joe House Rock it was super fucking cute and every night when I would tuck him into bed

I would tell him the story of Elvis's life over and over again and obviously I skipped the bit where he beats himself to death on the toilet. And one day I mentioned Graceland where he lived, that people go and visit Graceland. And his whole face lit up. And he said, Johan, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I was like, yeah, definitely the way you do with nine-year-olds

because next week you'll want to go to the North Pole or something. He's like, no, do you really swear one day you'll take me to Grace land? And I said, I absolutely promise. I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years until just so many things had gone wrong. My MBLX breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine. Drink more water. There's no real data. There's no game plan. This has happened to me many, many times, especially on the perimenopause journey.

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When he was 15, he dropped out of school. and by the time he was 19 this will sound like an exaggeration I promise you it's not he spent literally almost all his waking hours alternating between his iPad his iPhone and his laptop

and his life was just this blur of WhatsApp Snapchat porn and it was like he was kind of spinning at the speed of Snapchat do you know what I mean like and I remember

one day I was sitting on my sofa with him in London and all day I was trying to get a conversation going with he was really clever trying to get a conversation going with him and I just couldn't. He was just... And to be totally honest with you,

I wasn't much better, right? I was staring at my own devices. And I suddenly remembered this moment all these years before and I said, hey, let's go to Graceland. And he looked at me completely blankly. He's like, what you're talking about. I didn't remember this Elvis obsession

so I reminded him. And I said, we can't live like this. This is no way to live. Let's go on a road trip all over the south. But I thought ahead, you've got to leave your phone in the hotel during the day if we're going to go because there's no point in us going if you're going to look at your phone the whole time

and he wasn't happy living like this he's like let's do it and I think it was literally two weeks maybe three weeks later we took off we went to New Orleans first and a couple of weeks later we got to the gates of Graceland have you been there it's really worth going but when you get there this is even this was before COVID now there's no human being to show you around Graceland what happens you arrive they hand you an iPad you put in earbuds and the iPad shows you round it's says, you know, go left, go right. Every room you go in, there's an image of that room on the iPad in front of you and it tells you a story about it. So we're walking around Grace Land

and everyone is just staring at the iPad and I'm getting a little bit tense like, come everyone, you know, you travelled a long way to be here, look at it. And we got to the jungle room that was Elvis's favourite room. It's got loads of fake plants in it. They kept it just how it was. And I'll never forget them. There was this middle-aged Canadian couple next to us. And the guy turned to his wife and 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 because I thought they were kidding. And I watched them and they were just swiping back and forward. You could just turn your head. Well, this is what I leaned forward and said, but sir, there's an old-fashioned

form of swiping you could do. It's called turning your neck because you realize we're in the jungle room. You don't have to look at it on the internet. It's literally around us in three dimensions. and they looked at me like I was insane and backed out of the room and I turned to my godson to laugh about it and he was standing in the corner staring at Snapchat because from the moment

we landed he just could not stop he couldn't stop and I went up to him I tried to grab the phone out of his hands never a good idea with teenagers and I said to him look I know you're afraid of missing out but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out you're not present at your own life if you're not showing up in your own existence.

And understandably, he stormed off and I walked around Memphis on my own that day. And I found him that night by the big, we were staying at the Heartbreak Hotel and he was by this huge guitar-shaped swimming pool looking at his phone. And I went up to him and I apologized for getting so angry. And he didn't look up.

But he said, I know something's really wrong and I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, we came away to get away from this problem of distraction. But there's nowhere to escape to. It's everywhere, right? It's the air we all. breathe. And that's why I went on this big journey for stolen focus, where I interviewed, you know,

hundreds of the leading experts all over the world on attention. What I learned is the scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse. And loads of the factors that can harm your attention have been hugely rising in recent years. Your attention did not collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by really big and powerful forces. And again, we're being told this oversimplified story, which is, oh, it's just a biological malfunction. And there is a biological contribution for some people that we can unpack. But what an amazing coincidence that this biological malfunction happens to have blown up. At the same time that we're all exposed to technologies that are designed by geniuses to hack and frack our attention.

At the same time, we're all exposed to chemicals in our food that have been proven to harm attention. At the same time, go down the list, these 12 factors. We've got to understand this in this wider context rather than just sort of seeing it again as a sort of technical malfunction. You know, even just I think about one that you said about dads, right? I interviewed a wonderful man called Dr. Sammy Tamimi. He's a doctor in Britain. And he took over a doctor's practice. He noticed about, if I remember rightly, the figures are in the book.

About 60 of the kids were being given stimulants for attention problems. And he thought, well, this is a very serious drug. We don't actually know the long-term effects of giving children stimulants. There's no long-term research on giving these kids these drugs in the long-term, which is a staggering fact. He's like, I should do due diligence. I should bring these kids in and see what's going on with them. And he noticed, for example, lots of them.

Again, he asked that question, Dr. Flutti asked lots of them, he would say, when did your attention problems begin? Lots of them, it's when their dad's left the home. This is interesting. What's going on there? So he decided to phone their dads and say, hi, I'm your son's doctor. Your son really misses you. He's been having a lot of attention.

He can't really focus when you're not around. Would you be able to come and see him once a week? The dad started getting involved. Not all of them, but a lot of them started getting involved again. As the dad's got involved again, he found he could take the kids gradually off this medication. Their attention problems did not recur. Now, that's not happening with every kid.

There's lots of things that can cause these problems. But again, it helps you to see when you expand your understanding of what causes the problem, you can expand your sense of what the solutions are in a way that actually serves, particularly we're talking about children here. right, particularly serves children better. So we've got to understand what's really happening to us.

It is not a coincidence that we're all struggling to focus at the same time. That is not a coincidence. It's about a lot of time in Silicon Valley intervening the people who designed the stuff that does this to us, but a lot of time speaking to food scientists. You can go down the list. Look how our schools work. I went to an Amish community called Alcart LaGrange.

Amazingly, Amish kids don't get ADHD. The phenomenon does not exist. Fascinating. Right? Go and talk to them. Why is that? They would say, well, we have a lot of, some kids who don't like to sit still. They're the ones who help us hunt and fish and run around.

We love those kids, right? We are the first human society ever to try to get children to sit still for eight hours a day. No one's ever tried to do that before because it's such a fucking dumb idea, right? Amazingly, when you, and it's even you said, you know, we're giving these kids these drugs to improve how they're doing. You know, I know, I know you were sort of paraphrasing how the other people speak. Amazingly, and there's lots of research on this, it doesn't even improve their test scores to give them these stimulant drugs? Oh, I don't even think. Yeah. To me, it's about class management. It's about behavior management. I mean, look, I taught sixth grade Hebrew school when I was in college, and most of my job was behavior management.

And I enjoyed it very much. I mean, I enjoyed being a teacher. I enjoyed the material, and it was at a very lovely synagogue. But I could tell what was going on in the homes of the kids who had the most trouble focusing. Many came from very, very wealthy families. They weren't getting a lot of attention. This will sound ridiculous and crazy. You won't believe me, but if you look this up, it is really happening. Maybe you will believe me because you live in L.A., so you will see it. There's been an explosion in pets being diagnosed with ADHD.

Oh, yeah. So I went to interview the guy who pioneered this, a guy called Professor Nicholas Dodman. Actually, perfectly nice man. And it was so interesting. Do you like how easily I was like, oh, yeah, I've heard of this? I live in L.A. and know people. You're literally feeding Ritzel into your dog right now. No.

Are pets supposed to focus? Well, this is a, well, it's kind of like saying, you know, pets can experience depression. They can experience anxiety. You know, very, I mean, birds are very smart. I had one for 12 years. They will pluck their feathers out. They will self-mutilate if they're upset. When an animal's depressed, I mean, my cat, I came home, I was away for the weekend seeing you,

every single meal was vomited up. Every meal all over the house. anxious stomach. My cat has an anxious stomach. And he's very jittery and he's very, like, that's an anxious animal. So that's different than focusing on his mouth. No, but you see that. But we're on a spectrum. We're on a spectrum of conversation about chemicals and chemistry. And yeah, you would be able to tell a difference between a dog who cannot, let's say, sit still to focus on eating, to focus on cuddling, like that has anxious energy that's always moving like me. Exactly. But what's so fascinating, right? So exactly as you say,

before I went to interview him, I thought he would say he would give an explanation for animal ADHD that was like the kind of explanation you would get from a doctor about your child. There's something biologically wrong here.

And the drugs is a biological solution to a biological problem, which is what most parents are basically told, right? To his credit, he didn't say that. He described, for example, dogs are meant to run for about six hours a day. Dogs are pack animals, they're not meant to be on their own. But most pet dogs get a tiny fraction of that

walking every day. and they're left alone for a lot of the dead. And usually while they're being walked, this is one of my pet peeves, their owner's on the phone. They're not even giving them attention while they're walking their dogs. Exactly. So the dogs act up, right? Because they have unmet needs and they're acting up.

And I said, so when you give them Ritalin, does that solve the problem? He said, no, of course not. It just makes them more manageable, right? It's the same thing with humans. You've just described the problem with humans. Exactly. The analogy.

I mean, it's what believe your own book. You've just described the problem with humans. Well, I was so struck with that. And I remember he would describe times when there were dogs with ADHD who would chase their own tails, obsessively running around. And then they were, because they lived in tiny apartments, and then they were sent to live on a farm. And amazingly enough, their ADHD disappeared, right?

Now, it's important to stress again. There is some biological spectrum with attention. There are some people who biologically are less inclined to pay attention. By the way, those people are hugely fucking valuable. We want them in the human tribe. We need them. But the environment we're living in is driving. all of us to struggle much more with attention and focus.

Think about the obvious one which everyone will be thinking about, which is technology, right? One of the things that most struck me, so I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and when I spoke to the people who invented this world we live in, the thing that most struck me is how sick with guilt they feel about what they've done. They know what they've done, right? Give you an example, an amazing guy called James William. So James worked at the heart of Google, was very uncomfortable with a lot of what was going on and one day he was speaking to an audience of tech designers who literally are the people

who design the stuff your kids are using today. 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 and nobody put up their hand. And he's like, I can't do this anymore. And he quit and became this a really important philosopher of attention at Oxford University. But the people who designed this machinery kept explaining to me why it's having this effect on us and how we can fix it, right? So they explained.

If you open now, if you open TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, which I refuse to call X, Instagram, whatever, right? And you begin to scroll. They make money out of you immediately in these two ways. The first way is really obvious. You see advertising, okay, we all know how that works. The second way is much more important.

Everything you ever do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and what makes you tick. What makes you happy? What makes you angry? What makes you horny? What makes you sad? And it knows, if you've been using them for a while,

it knows... For me, they're all the same thing. And it's his beard. You know, it knows far more about you than your neighbours because your neighbours aren't reading your so-called private messages at 3am, right? It knows a huge amount. So let's say you've ever indeed. on any of these apps that you like, I don't know,

Bet Midler, Donald Trump, and you've told that you just bought some nappies, right? Diapers. Okay, so it's going to figure out, if you like Bet Midler and you're a man, you're probably gay. No disrespect to any straight men who like that middleer. I don't actually believe you, but okay,

you like Donald Trump, you're probably conservative or right wing, and you just bought some diapers, you've got a baby, right? It knows all this stuff about you, right? And it's learning that for lots of reasons, but the most important is to figure out what to show you, next to keep you scrolling. Because every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money because you see ads. The longer you scroll, the more money they make. Every time your kid opens the app and begins to scroll, they begin to make money. The longer

your kid scrolls, the more money they make. Every time you or your kid close the app, their revenue stream disappears, that's a disaster for them. So all this genius in AI, or this Silicon Valley, genius with the algorithms and the AI, is geared towards one thing and one thing only, figuring out How do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible? That's it. That's all they care about. Head of KFC, I'm sure, is a very nice person. But all he or she cares about is how often did you go to KFC this week and how big was the bucket you bought. And if you become obese and get diabetes, that's not their problem.

In exactly the same way, all these companies care about is how much of your attention are we monopolizing. The more the better. It is a machinery, as my friend Tristan Harris puts it, designed to frack and hack your attention. Not because they're evil bond villains. They're not. Purely and simply because of this incentive structure, the longer you scroll, the more money they make, right? So then when you talk about content,

you get to layer on this other level of our favorite word, shame. If you layer content with body positivity challenges, right? If you layer that algorithm, right, especially for young people, for young women, with all of these other components, you then get a shame generator. And when the reason that's so important, I'm so glad you said that, because there's an even deeper dynamic to this, which is catastrophic at both an individual and a societal level, which is actually the biggest reason why we need to act on this. So the way I put it is, picture two teenage girls, go to the same party and go home on the same bus. and they both open TikTok. And one of them does a video going, we had such a great night,

we danced to Taylor Swift, loved it. Their algorithm is constantly scanning for the kind of words you use. It's going to put that video into a few people's feeds. Okay, now imagine the other girl opens it and goes, Karen was a fucking skank at that party. I don't know if teenagers still stay skank.

If they don't, they absolutely should. They have other words that are. We need to rehabilitate the word skank, but Karen was a fucking skank at that party. Her boyfriend's a prick. Just angrily denounces everyone, right? it'll put that video into far more people's feeds for a very simple reason there's a quirk of human psychology which you know about called negativity bias right

human beings evolved to stare longer at things that make us angry and upset than we did at things that make us feel good if you ever saw a car crash on the highway you know what I mean you stared longer at the mangled car wreck 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 stare longer at angry faces than smiling faces. And you know, you can see why we would have evolved like that. Our ancestors who didn't look out for the angry face got eaten, right? I mean, it's a slightly crude way of putting it, but you know what I mean, right? So that's always been part of our psychology. But when it combines with technologies that intimately learn your wants and likes and angers and hatreds, it has a

catastrophic effect, right? It's one of the things that's supercharging anti-Semitism in the moment because rage-based content, but it's supercharging anti-democratic forces across the world, right? Imagine a culture. Think about that, TikTok. The nice girl is muffled, the nasty girl is supercharged, right?

Now imagine that happening to a whole country where the nice people, the decent people, people who don't hate each other, want to find ways forward, want to find empathy, they're muffled, and the meanest, angriest, most hateful people are pushed to the front

and dominate the conversation, except you don't have to imagine that, because we see in countries as different as the United States, Britain, Burma, Brazil. Attention is being fucked across the board by these forces, but democracy is how we pay attention together. You cannot have democracy in an environment where people are constantly being primed for hours every day to nihilistically hate their fellow citizens. So we need to deal with these underlying forces, and I can talk about how absolutely urgently for our kids because they're really struggling for us because we're struggling for our work because our work is struggling and for our democracies. This is where it does feel like there is ill intent because there is research and it's been

revealed that there were studies at these large platforms that knew that they were causing increase in suicidality, increase in bodily harm, especially. amongst young women, increase in depression, and yet they chose to continue to make them as sticky and as intense to drive attention as possible. So yes, do they have a requirement to their bottom line? Okay, but at what cost? And is there no safeguards? I don't think you can regulate safeguards into these organizations. They should be held responsible in the court of public opinion as well. picture a factory that's pumping pollution into a river and downstream it's giving people cancer, right? Does the factory want to give people cancer? Obviously not. They're not psychopaths.

But once they know they're doing it, do they bear moral responsibility? Or even before they do it, if there was a risk that happened, do they bear moral responsibility? Absolutely. So absolutely people like Martin Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have moral responsibility for this. Did they want to create a machinery that supercharges anti-democratic forces and anti-semitism. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg's own family fled genocidal anti-Semitism, and he is the individual in the world now who is most

responsible for supercharging genocidal anti-Semitism. Is that his intention? Of course not. But is he knowingly doing it now? Yes. And you look at a guy called like Guillame Chaslow. So, Guillame Chasloe, he worked at YouTube for a long time, and he was the person who blew the whistle

that basically, because the YouTube recommendation videos you watch a video about a documentary about the Holocaust that is a factual and accurate documentary about the Holocaust it wants to recommend other videos but it wants to keep you engaged so it will recommend escalatingly angry

videos so he showed from the inside that it created a chain where if you watched a factual documentary about the Holocaust within a chain of six videos it would always lead you to Holocaust denial right now to be fair to YouTube they have, they have changed that. To be fair to holocaust, deniers,

to be fair to the horlochors, do you know, wow. But the, so you see that once they know that's happening, it's not why they set up that mechanism, of course not. But once they know it's happening, absolutely there's a moral responsibility. But the primary responsibility, look, these companies are never going to regulate themselves, right? That's not how capitalism works, right?

Companies don't voluntarily restrain themselves from making more money. What absolutely can be done within capitalism is democratic regulation. And there's an example from our lifetimes where every single person watching and listening has a better attention span because of something that happened in our lives, right? So when we were kids, the only kind of gasoline you could get in this country was leaded gasoline, right? And it was discovered that exposure to lead fucks your brain and particularly harms children's ability to focus and pay attention.

So what happened was a group of ordinary moms, what at the time were called housewives, banded together and said, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing the lead industry to fuck up our kids' brains? It's important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, so let's get rid of cars. Let's burn down the gas station. Exactly.

Let's all go back and join the, let's all convert to the Amish. No disrespect to any Amish who are watching. You are kind of cheating if you are. But they didn't say that. They said, let's replace this thing that is harming our kids with something that does the same job but isn't going to harm our kids. And these mothers, this is forgotten now, they fought like hell for their children and all of us. And it followed the classic pattern of all successful political movements that was described by Mahatma Gandhi.

First they ignored them, then they laughed at them, then they fought them. Then they won, as we all know, no more let of gasoline in the world. As a result, the CDC is calculated. The average American child is five IQ points higher than they would have been. Now, to me, that's a really important model. In my book, Stolen Focus, I go through loads of things we can do at an individual level to improve your own attention and our kids' attention. And I'm passionately in favour of those individual changes.

But we also need to deal with it at a collective level. This attention crisis didn't happen because you had bad habits or your kids have bad habits. It happened because extremely large and powerful forces are benefiting from making our attention worse. And we need to take on those forces like we took on the lead industry. We need to regulate them. Well, I thought also, you know, when we were kids, they literally used a cartoon camel to sell cigarettes. Like that seemed like a normal way to advertise cancer sticks. And when it came out that Philip Morris and the cigarette industry, they knew they were adding things to make cigarettes burn faster.

So you smoke more. They were adding addictive components so that it was even more addictive than tobacco naturally would be because of its nicotine content. There's a lot of conversation now, in particular, regarding things that many in the holistic community, like, you know, wacky homeschool people, homebirth people like me, have been talking about for a long time. And I wonder if you can touch on it because it's entered conversations about politics because RFK Jr., who in many cases, I think, does a lot of lunatic things. in other cases he talks about certain aspects, for example, of food dyes, of additives and preservatives that most of the Western world does not use in food because they are known to be bad for the brain. These things have become so politicized. How do we have conversations around things like food, dyes, additives, preservatives, without it becoming, oh, well, that's a political issue and that's the conservative.

trying to take our red M&Ms away or whatever. Because many people do report significant behavioral changes when dietary changes are made, and many of them revolve things that are now being kind of politicized. Where does that fit into the conversation? To me, that's such low-hanging fruit. Yeah, you're totally right. You have to start. What's the thing my monody said?

Speak the truth, whoever listens. You know, like, you just have to start from, we cannot give in to this insane tribalism that is consuming the country. and the world, partly because of these factors that we're talking about, we just have to start from, okay, what's actually true here? And the evidence is overwhelming that the kind of foods that American kids have fed is disastrous across the board, but is having a really negative effect on their attention. For example, in Britain, in 2009 there was a study called the Southampton study.

Pretty simple study, I write about it in Stolen Focus. They got 191 kids, and they split them into two groups. The first group was just given water to drink and the second group was given water laced with the kind of additives that kids are being exposed to the whole time. Then they monitored the kids. The kids that were given the additives

were significantly more likely to be hyperactive and struggle with focus, right? And that's just a very low exposure. So this is why the EU subsequently banned a lot of these dyes, but obviously we haven't here. If everyone wants to do an interesting experiment, next time you go to Europe, before you leave at the airport, buy some M&Ms.

And then when you land in the airport, buy some M&Ms and open them next to each other. You'll notice the American and European M&Ms don't look like each other. The American ones fucking glow, right? Like, whereas the European ones look kind of dull and, you know, because they don't have these crazy dyes in them. So I don't care if, you know, who wants to articulate that truth? Obviously, I disagree. I'm sure you can guess very strongly with RFK Jr. on many things.

But if he wants to take on the food dye, those companies, all credit to him and we should all entirely support that. aspect of his agenda while opposing others. I don't, to be quite frank, I don't actually believe he will take on those forces, but I want to be proven wrong on that. I don't see much willingness on the part of the Trump administration to challenge vested power interests, right? And they are a very powerful vested power interest.

But I think we should go further and say he deserves credit for saying that, by the way. I think one of the difficult things is, you don't think Ronald Reagan, again, not someone I, not my part of the political spectrums. But don't we miss that kind of Republican? But he said, you know, my 80% friend is not my 20% enemy. And I think one of the things we have to get better at is engaging with people who we may not agree with on 10 things, but we agree on the 11th thing, right? This idea that almost like a pollution-based model where, no, you're contaminated. I'm really proud, actually, Lost Connections is the only book that was ever praised by both Hillary Clinton and Tucker Carson.

Amazing. And I'm really, really proud of that, actually. and by Noam Chomsky, people from completely different parts of the political spectrum. And some people were like, how could you put on your website a quote from Hillary Clinton

or how could you put a quote on your website from Tucker House? I'm like, no, this is exactly what we need. We need to find the areas where we agree. Look, we could just nihilistically say, okay, we're dividing into two tribes. And let's just... No, but to me, that's about truth with a capital T.

I'm not a person who believes in, let's say, the truth of one religious, you know, denomination over another. That's not the kind of truth I'm talking about. What you write about is true. And that shouldn't fall on partisan lines. And the kind of hijacking of our humanity to make us make decisions based on who your mom and dad told you to vote for is actually not the way that we have progress, you know? It's obviously not the case.

I have my own politics. We'll have our own politics. But it's obviously not the case that all of human wisdom is concentrated in one place. on the political spectrum. It's not a credible thing to claim, right? Of course, we all have our commitments, we all, but this kind of edit. So I would go further. Actually, I was holding back and I'll be, I'll say, while I would vehemently contest

some of the things RFK Jr. says, I would also, Tim, absolute congratulations to you that you are fighting on this cause. And on this cause, people like ours will back you 100% of the way. I really admire the level of optimism you bring. And I do believe that there is reason to be optimistic. When I talk about the forces of negative influence and the systems that are incentivized to keep people sick, I think it is important to do so because we need to be realistic about what we're up against in order to have that. One of the three things that we talked about a little earlier was the way tech is designed, the way food is designed,

and then the way the school systems are designed. And you hear Eric Weinstein, for example, talk about how we are removing creativity from the school system. We're removing the ability for those people who are going to think differently, who aren't able to sit still, to be successful. And we're sort of driving towards this middle of the bell curve whereby the people who are going to be the most creative

and think most outside of the box and potentially provide the largest number of solutions to some of our greatest problems are being excluded from the system. I'm wondering how you see that and if you see any solution for it. This is one of the things I feel most strongly about. It sounds fancy, but it's actually very straightforward. Attention evolved to attach to meaning. It's much easier to pay attention to something that is meaningful to you, right?

A frog will pay attention to a fly, not to a stone, because the fly means something to the frog, right? We all know that about ourselves. If you gave me a book about 1970s American politics, I'm reading a biography of Gerald Ford right now, I'm ripping through it, I find that really interesting. If you gave me a book about, I don't know, Formula One, I would really struggle to read it. I don't give a shit about Formula One, it bores me, right?

We all know that. The more meaningful something is to you, the easier it is to pay attention. And yet we have designed our school system to strip out meaning. We've designed a school system which is built around getting kids to memorize meaningless, contextless facts for tests that measure nothing of any value that we've stripped out pretty much everything except that.

Memorize this garbage for this test that measures nothing. Doesn't measure intelligence, doesn't measure creativity, doesn't measure anything we value, right? That's been happening for a long time now. So there's that. We've stripped meaning from education. We make kids sit still the whole time. Finland has one of the lowest levels of ADHD in the whole world.

They never require children to sit still for more than 45 minutes without giving them 15 minutes to run around. Amazingly enough, their kids pay attention much better than ours. But do they have ADHD dogs? We've done so many dumb things to our school system. We've obviously massively underfunded them. We've massively stressed out the kids. It's just stress is bad for beyond a low dose.

Stress is very bad for attention. And it was so interesting. So I went to a lot of progressive schools for the book. One thing that's so interesting, I went to a place in Massachusetts that has a model that goes much further than I would, but it's essentially a model where the kids are taught absolutely nothing at all. They just play all day, right? Play all day and they can ask the adults to teach them things if they want to learn them.

It essentially takes everything that we think of as education out of the education system. And I want to be called I'm not advocating that model, but what's fascinating, you go there, every kid there can read, every kid they can write, they go on to have good jobs, think, wow, we could take pretty much everything that stresses and upsets our kids out of the school system and the kids still can function. Now, I believe in teaching, of course, but just not the way we do it. So I wouldn't go as far as that school. But you begin to see, like, what we are doing is deadening kids. The part of our kids that can't pay attention to this boring, shi-mechanical repetition is the best part of it.

our kids. The kids who refuse to do it are the ones that we should be most proud of, right? This is not a good system. Now, of course, this is not in any way criticism of teachers who are heroic people and do amazing work, but they're being forced to work in this rigid testing-based system that is screwing them over and screwing over the kids and make it impossible for them to pay attention. So we need to really just completely redesign the school system from the ground up. We need to build it around what kind of kids do we want? You know, if you want kids who can mechanically memorize stuff. I've got news for you. We've got AI who can do it a hundred times better than your kids. What we want is what we will need is the kids who can do the things that the AI can't do.

And that's creativity, that's empathy, that's listening, that's paying attention to each other. And we've got a school system that is literally destroying those capacities in favor of the thing the AI does much better. So we've got to just profoundly redesign the school system around places that actually do have good school systems like Finland, where they have the smartest kids in the world, and they're not doing any of this shit. In fact, kids in Finland, they don't get homework. They don't get any exams until they're 16. Just all the things that we're doing wrong that are pointless and deadening, they don't do them. Yes, absolutely. I mean, the amount of psychological stress that kids are under in order to be hit a mark that is actually absolutely

pointless and doesn't provide any of the skills that are going to help them navigate the real world. It's mind-blowing. I remember when I was 11, when I first went in Britain, that's when you go to like the bigger school. It's different to the system here. I remember being given a timetable looking at it and it's saying, you know, 10 a.m. you're going to do history, 11 a.m. I'm going, who the fuck are these people to tell me what I'll be doing at 10 a.m.?

I haven't committed a crime. Like what the fuck? Like what is this? Like just being absolutely enraged. And I'm really glad that that part of me was not successfully deadened by the school system. Although my God, they tried, right? I would not be sitting here with you now about to reenact the entire script of beaches. is if I had allowed myself to be deadened into that system, right?

So it's a system that's, it really is a terrible system. Like it's really, really bad. And if we're summarizing when you talk about the deadening, what I'm hearing and what I believe to be true is attention and lack of attention is a signal. Depression and feeling anxious, feeling a lack of meaning, a lack of purpose, a lack of drive is a signal. and if we're not looking at the context around that signal, then we're missing the mark entirely. And actually, that signal can be an indicator that things are on the right track.

You may be depressed because there's something very wrong in your life that needs help and attention. You may be unable to focus because there are factors, either algorithmic factors or a lack of meaning in your life that you're not connected to and that when we see them as a signal, then we can begin to make the changes that are required to reconnect us to the vital parts of ourselves that actually want to be alive and thrive and are reflective of our core capability and natural gifts that we have to contribute. What can you tell us about what you're working on now? What can you reveal?

What can we look forward to next? So I'm just finishing a book that I've been working on insanely since 2011 about a series of crimes that have been happening in Las Vegas. So I'm literally just came here from Vegas because of a legal proceeding that I had to be present at. And so that is my next book. Awesome. Yeah, but I'm not meant to say any more than that. When is it supposed to come out?

It'll either be late next year or early the year after. Oh, very exciting. It takes ages for... The legal process for this is going to be intense because I'm like describing lots of murderers and lots of criminals. And so it's, yeah, it turns out quite a high legal bar for accusing someone of being a serial killer. Who knew? Anyone who wants to know where to get any more information about the books,

you can get my books as audiobooks or physical books. if you go to www.j-a-n-n-h-a-n-h-a-r-I-com you can see where to follow me on social media but I won't see you back because I never look at it but you can follow my stuff if someone else does it for me

and yeah, you can see where to get the audio books and e-books and you can watch the documentary it was such for one of my books and load about the stuff as well. Thank you for being here in person thank you for continuing to be a friend of our podcast and we just so appreciate your perspective and all the things we get to talk to you about

so thank you. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's my and be all next time. It's My and Beallix Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One, fiction.

And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.