Modern Wisdom - #418 - Johann Hari - Why You Can't Pay Attention And Focus

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

Johann Hari is a writer & a journalist. You probably struggle to focus on the task you're doing. You probably wish that you could pay attention for longer and that you were less easily distracted. Why is this such a common problem? Is this a byproduct of the modern era? Technology? Social Media? Johann has travelled the world trying to work out what is going on. Expect to learn how your attention system works, whether attention loss is reversible, whether modern life is going to further decrease our productivity, the relationship between sleep and focus, what impact stress and diet has, whether phone addiction is to blame, the single biggest influence Johann found which no one is talking about, the strategies which help to regain focus and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Stolen Focus - https://amzn.to/3JIXg51 Follow Johann on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/johann.hari/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, my guest today is Johan Hari, he's a writer and a journalist. You probably struggle to focus on the task that you're doing. You probably wish that you could pay attention for longer and that you were less easily distracted. Why is this such a common problem? Is this a byproduct of the modern era, technology, social media? Johan has traveled the world, trying to work out what's going on. Expect to learn how your attention system works, whether the attention loss is reversible, whether modern life is going to further decrease our productivity, the relationship between sleep and focus, what impacts stress and diet has,

whether phon addiction is to blame, the single biggest influence Johann found, which no one is talking about, the strategies which help to regain focus and much more. I don't know of a single person that likes the relationship that they have with their phone. There isn't a single person that I meet as say, hey man, like what's your relationship like with technology? They say, yeah, do you know it? Is it really adds a lot to my life? I never overuse it. I don't think that it actually detracts away from me pursuing my meaning for long term goals. Everybody, absolutely everybody has a problem with their attention and their focus.

And it's something that not only impact your daily productivity, but also your long term happiness and quality of life. This is an incredibly important conversation. So do your best to try and pay attention. But now it is time for the wise and wonderful Johan Hari. Yo Hanhari, welcome to the show. Hey Chris, good to be with you. Really glad to have you back man. I'm very excited, hooray. Yes, precisely.

So you say that each book that you write is trying to solve or work out a different mystery. Why did you get interested in the mystery of attention? God, you know, for so many years, I felt my own attention getting worse. I looked at so many of the people I knew and I could see their attention was getting worse. But I was responding to that by saying, really by blaming myself,

like everyone else only was blaming themselves and thinking, oh, you know, you're just weak, you're not strong enough, you don't have enough willpower. And then I was sort of, I also reassured myself by saying, whatever generation feels like this, right? You can read letters from monks almost a thousand years ago, one of them writes to the other one and says, oh, my tension ain't what it used to be, right? It's not exactly, but that's the gist of what they said. And I thought, okay, so this is just, you know, you get older, your attention gets worse. But really it was looking at the young people in my life, as some young people I love, that made me think, you know what, this really does feel markedly different. And then I started looking at some

of the studies of this. There's a small study, for example, of American college students that found that on average, they focus on any one task for 65 seconds. And the average office worker focuses on any one task for three minutes. It's something deeper going on here. So I ended up going on this huge journey all over the world. Fortunately, pre-plague interviewed over 200 of the leading experts in the world about focus, what causes it to boost, what causes it to deteriorate. I went from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, and I went to places that have been affected by this attention crisis in all sorts of different ways, from our favela in Rio de Janeiro, where attention had collapsed in a particularly disastrous way to an office in New Zealand where they found an incredible way to boost attention.

And what I concluded, having met the kind of leading experts in the world, is there's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that can boost or degrade your attention. Loads of those factors have been really significantly increasing in recent times and we are in a real and acute attention crisis which is actually on course to get even worse unless we deal with these deep underlying causes of the crisis. So it is a modern phenomenon. I say it's the result of very specific things that are happening in the modern world. It's not just the modern world in itself. We could have the benefits of the modern world without most of this if we make the necessary adjustments.

But it's definitely, to some degree, this is a perennial human dilemma, but it's gotten much worse in response to specific things that are happening now. What was the trip that you took where you sequestered yourself before the plague, you decided to take yourself away with a special needs big, big button phone and throw yourself on an island. Do I happen there? Well, it was a response to something else that happened actually, and that was really the reason why I wrote the book. So when, when he was nine years old, my godson, developed this brief obsession with Elvis. I never understood how he found out about Elvis, but he would start obsessively singing V

Velas Vegas and suspicious minds. And it was particularly cute because he didn't know that I'd become like a cheesy cliche. So he was doing it with his heart catching sincerity. And he kept getting me to tell him the story of Elvis' life. And obviously I tried to skip over the bit where L this, you know, shit some self-dead-death on the toilet. But one night when I was tucking him in, he said to me, very intensely, he said, Yo-ham, will you take me one day to Graceland?

And I said, yeah, sure, in the way that you tell nine-year-olds, so I'll do something no, and I'll forget it the next day. And he said, no, do you really promise you'll take me to Graceland? And I was like, yes, I absolutely promise. And I didn't think of it again until 10 years later when so many things have gone wrong. So when he was 15, he dropped out of school. And by the time he was 19, he was just constantly alternating between his iPad, his laptop, and his iPhone, and his life was just a blur of WhatsApp, YouTube, porn,

and one day we were sitting, you can't see it, but the sofa just behind the laptop where we're talking. We were sitting there, and I was trying to talk to him, and it was like he was wearing at the speed of Snapchat. It was like nothing still or serious could touch him, and it was really distressing, and it was distressing partly, because I could feel the same thing happening to me. It wasn't as extreme, but I could feel the same. I was sitting there looking at my own phone and I suddenly remembered this moment from all those years before. And I said to him, hey, let's go to Graceland. And he was like, what? And he said, you don't even remember this thing that happened. And so I reminded him and I said, look, I'll take to Graceland. We've got to break this numbing routine. But when we go there, you've got to leave your phone in the hotel while

we're away. You can't just be taking it everywhere. And he said, I promise I'll do that. So we, two weeks later, we flew from Heathrow to New Orleans, which is where we went first. Anyway, a couple of weeks later, we arrived at Graceland. And when you arrive at Graceland, even pre-COVID, there's no person to show you around. What happens is they give you an iPad, and you put in earbuds, and the iPad shows you around. So it says go left, go right, and every room you're in, it tells you about that room. And in every room, there's a digital representation

of that room on the iPad. So we're walking around Graceland, and I'm noticing that what happens is everyone just walks around Graceland staring at the iPad. Okay, more and more tense. And we got to the jungle room, which was Elvis' favorite room around Graceland staring at the iPad. Okay, more and more tense. And we got to the jungle room, which was Elvis' favorite room in Graceland. It's kind of loads of fake plants.

And there's this Canadian couple next to us. And the husband turned to the 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 thought he was joking, so I looked him in laugh. And then him and his wife just start swiping back and forward. And I turned him and I said, but sir, there's

an old fashioned form of swiping you can do. It's called turning your head because look, we're actually in the jungle room, right? You don't have to look at a digital representation. We're literally there. And they clearly thought I was insane. I'm sort of back to where, I understandably. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it. And he was just standing in the corner looking at Snapchat. Because from the minute we landed, he was just constantly looking at it. He couldn't keep his promise. And I just lost it. I shouted at him and I said, you know, you're afraid of missing out. But this is guaranteeing that you're missing out. You're not being present at your own life. And I tried to grab his phone on him and he sort of stomped off.

And I wandered around Graceland on my own. And then that night I found him in the heartbreak hotel down the street where we were staying, where there's a swimming pool shaped like a guitar. And he was sitting by the swimming pool. And he was was looking at his phone and I apologized to him and he said, look, I know something is really wrong but I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, oh, fuck, I need to look into this. And at first I thought, well, this is a personal, purely personal problem, right? He can't stop looking, I can't stop looking. The solution is to do something personal. I thought the problem lay in me and in my phone. So I did this very drastic thing. I just, I booked a little place in a beach house in Provincetown and came to Cod and I said to everyone, I knew, look, I'm going

completely offline for three months. I'm going to have a phone that can't access the internet. I'm going to have a laptop. My friend, Imt Empty Eyes gave me his old broken laptop that couldn't get online. I'm just tired of being wired in this way. I'm out of it, right? And so I went to Provincetown for three months with no phone, and it was this kind of... It taught me a lot, both about the strengths of that approach and the weaknesses of it. And what were they? Well, the first few weeks were like a haze of decompression and this incredible sense of relief. And it's a very funny place province town for people who don't know it. It's a little kind of gay resort town. It's a place where more than one person makes a full-time living dressing as Ursula, the villain from the Little Mermaid and singing songs about kind of lingers.

So it gives you some sense of what it's like. So to this sort of haze of decompression, I think it, oh, this is, this is, this is so good. Thank God. It was like, and then about two weeks in, I had this really bitter crash. I was walking down the beach and Providence Town like, Grace stand like every place you'll ever go now, was just full of people who were using, probably as one of those beautiful places in the world, were just using problems town as a backdrop for their selfies. So you'll see these people, particularly painful to see with parents with children doing this, who were just never looking around them, who were just constantly looking at their phones, but instead of thinking, oh, you don't have to be present, I start sort of thinking,

give me that phone, I fucking want it, right? And I felt this tremendous craving. And I realized that for so many years, you know, I had been exposed throughout the day to the kind of thin, insistent signals of the internet, of the web of the current apps that we use. And when those were gone, this is a very pretentious way of saying it, but Simone De Bove while the French philosopher said that when she became an atheist, it was like the world had gone silent. And that's how it felt. It felt like the world had gone silent, like I, like crucial signals that I needed were gone. And even if you're getting on well with people, and I was getting on well with people in Providence town, they're not, you know, people don't flood you with hearts the minute they meet you, right? So I realized

after that, actually I had created a vacuum where previously the signals of the internet were and it wasn't enough to just separate my, it's necessary for a period to separate myself and that, but then what I needed to do was fill that vacuum with something. And I started to learn a lot, I had already learned a lot, and I started to read more and later met the leading scientist who learned about flow states, which I can talk about in a minute. But I was amazed that once I got through that, the haze of decompression and then the dip, what amazed me was how much my attention came back. I thought, you know,

I thought, I thought, I thought, I'll surely my brain is tears a bit, you know, actually, my attention was as good as it was when I was 17. I was lying there reading books for like eight hours, not feeling, not my attention, not atrophying. And I remember towards the end of those three months, thinking, this is amazing. I never want to go back to that way of being. And then within a couple of weeks of getting back to Boston and getting my phone back, my tension was as bad as it had ever been. And I had to really explore, okay, what's happening here. Why is it so hard to sustain those lessons in our normal lives? And how can we begin to do it? so hard to sustain those lessons in our normal lives.

And how can we begin to do it? The interesting thing you say about your godsend and that frenetic, very anxious, bouncy attention that you had, I want to say it was a Washington Post huge op-ed piece from a psychology high school teacher or university teacher that went to go and live with some of the most famous TikTokers in a cloud house. Oh, fascinating.

So he goes and lives with them and he tells this story about how they, one of the evenings they were going to go and play basketball and they were saying, right, let's go and play a game of basketball, let's organize it and it's all, everything's a bit kind of hyper and it's like everyone's on e-numbers and too much caffeine anyway. But these people have ridiculous numbers of followers, you know, some of the most

followed TikTok accounts on the planet. And then they spend time organizing people into groups and picking who the teams are going to be. And then just as they're about to play the game, someone walks off the pitch, walks off the basketball court. And then the pitch, walks off the basketball court, and then slowly everybody else walks off as well. And he turns to one of the guys and he says, hang on, you guys just made all of this time picking teams and saying that we're going to play a game of basketball. And now one person's walked off and a bunch

of other people have walked off and now it's not going to happen. He says, oh, yeah, this happens all the time. People just start something and then they can't even hold their attention on the thing that they just began to do, and they get distracted and walk off. And there's something... We all experience the degradation of our attention inside of our brains, right? But what I find so strange is when it manifests physically,

you know, when you see someone locomot themselves from one location to another, because they simply couldn't hold on to, I'm supposed to be doing this physical thing. It feels like when it manifests physically, it feels like another degree of insanity. I love that story because it's like a parable about what I think is the worst aspect

to this attention crisis, which has two levels. And so if you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals, but that anything, right? So at a personal level, anything you want to achieve from a small thing, I want to go to the shop and buy some Diet Coke, or a bigger thing I want to read this book,

or a bigger goal, I want to write a book, I want to set up a business, I want to be a good dad, whatever it might be. Whatever your goals are, if you lose your ability to pay attention, you cannot achieve those goals. That's true at a personal level and that's true at the level of a whole society, right? A society of people who are adored and can't pay attention, won't be able to achieve collective goals either. So, I think you're absolutely right, that's the chilling thing. And you're also right when it manifests physically, it's more disturbing because of the 12

causes that I learned about a lot of them are in relation to the body, which surprised me. Sleep, we sleep 20% less than we did 100 years ago. That is a physical process we desperately physically need. And even if that was the only thing that had changed, Dr. Charles Seisler, the leading expert in the world on sleep at Harvard Medical School said to me, even if nothing else had changed, that alone would be causing a huge crisis in attention. Children sleep 80 minutes less than they did 100 years ago. That alone would be causing a huge crisis in children's attention. There's loads of evidence that the way we eat, the kind of standard Western diet has a catastrophic effect on people's ability to focus and

pay attention. There's a whole range of these which are physical, I mean the fact that we are the first human society ever in the last 100 years, who think it is either possible or sensible to get small children to sit still for eight hours a day, when all the scientific evidence shows children's attention grows when they can run around and exercise. So again, these may seem like no shit Sherlock insights, but we don't live in, we're not acting on these insights. We have a society that's radically disconnected from these insights. So I think there's so many things in that parable that you've just said about the parable of the TikTokers. Yeah, I love that.

How have you come to understand how attention works then? After all of this research, how do you frame what attention is and how it works? So so many ways of thinking about it. And I was surprised by how complex the phenomenon of attention is. And it's a physical process, like we just said, requiring all these things. If you disturb yourself physically to use one example

by eating food that cause energy spikes and energy crashes, which I do, that's gonna fuck your attention. There's physical process. There's many layers of attention. There's a wonderful guy who really helped me to think about this, called Dr. James Williams, who was a Google designer for many years,

very senior at Google, became profoundly disenchanted with what they were doing to the world's attention, quit, and is now, I think, the most important philosopher of attention in the world, that interviewed him in Moscow. He was living there because his wife works with the World Health Organization. And James has created this kind of a typology of attention

that I think is really helpful. He says there are three layers of attention. I would actually suggest a fourth as well, which I think he would agree with. So the first level of attention is what we call the spotlight, right? This is the dominant way we think about attention. So your spotlight is, so I'm in a room now where in the corner over there, there's my television, my phone is somewhere in this room, I've hidden it so I don't see it while I'm talking

to you. There's noise in this room, you know, I can see people out my window, but I have I filtering all of that out and I'm narrowing my spotlight onto you, right? And I'm looking at you all facing thinking, what did Christa start to me? So the spotlight is your ability to attend to immediate short term tasks by filtering out all the shit around you, right? And we all know how that works. That's actually generally most of the debate about attention when we think, oh, I can't pay attention, we think of being distracted in that sense, right? I sat there to read a book, but my phone rang, I was trying to spend time with my kids, but, you know, but my boss emailed me, we think about that

immediate form of disruption of spotlight. So Dr Williams suggests there's a second layer, which is what he calls your starlight. And your starlight is your medium to long term goals, right? So it's not, I wanna read this book or answer this email, it's, I wanna set up a business, I wanna be a good dad, I wanna write a book, it's your medium to long term goals. And the third car, it's called the starlight because when you're lost in the desert, you look to the stars and you figure out where you're going, right?

The third layer is what he calls your daylight. And your daylight is how you even know what your long-term goals are. How do you know that you want to set up a business? How do you know what kind of business you want to set up? How do you know you want to write a book? How do you know what it means to be a good parent, right? It's called daylight because you can only see clearly when the room is flooded with daylight, right?

How do you know these things? If your life has dissolved into 65 second and three minute pellets, like a hail storm is constantly going on around your attention, how do you know who you are? If you never get time to think and contemplate away from being constantly disrupted and fucked with, right? And he argues that we're not just being disrupted at the level of the spotlight, which is what we think about, but our ability to achieve longer term goals is being profoundly disrupted. And our ability to even know what our longer term goals should be is being profoundly disrupted.

I would argue there's a fourth layer, which I would call our stadium lights, which is how we see each other. As a society, how can we achieve sustained goals, right? There's all sorts of crises facing our society, but if we can't focus, it's not just that you can't achieve your goals, we together can't achieve our goals. It fucks us at every level. So I think at the moment,

all four of those forms of attention are being profoundly disrupted for us and for our children. But the reason I'm most optimistic about this is because I think there are ways back from this. The problem is that there's a trickle-down effect, right? That if you fracture and fragment the spotlight, that means that you don't ever make progress towards your meaningful long-term goals.

And as you start to do that, the cohesive narrative that you make around who am I, what am I values, why am I here, that begins to get fractured and fragmented so much. And then over time, as you spread that out across a bunch of individuals that cohesive together to make themselves into a society, they don't get to do it.

There's a line in, it's either digital minimalism or deep work where Cal Newport says, he's talking about Twitter specifically, and he says, Twitter fractures our days into slivers so small that we can't get anything meaningful done, because we're just constantly task switching from one form to another, and we'll get onto task switching. In fact, let's talk about that. What's the issue with speed and switching and filtering?

Yeah, this is one of the first interviews I did for the book, and it was so great. Actually, almost the very first interview I did with the book really fucking sobered me. I just before I get to switching, you just made me think of it. There's a guy called Professor Roy Balmeiste who's a professor at the University of Queensland. That's a legend. One of the most distinguished psychologists ever. The people who've heard of the Marshmallow test, he's the guy who invented the Marshmallow test. So he's the lead by far the leading expert in the world on willpower.

He wrote a book called Willpower, right? So go to interview him and I say, oh, you know, Professor Balmeiste, Ipower. He wrote a book called willpower, right? So go to interview him and I say, oh, you know, Professor Balmastron, I think you're writing a book about whether people are struggling to pay attention. And he said, you know, it's, it's not his exact words, they're in the book. He said, you know, it's interesting. You say that because I've just found, I can't really pay attention a lot of the time now. I just play video games on my phone all the time. And I'm sort of see there. And I'm like, wait, didn't you write a book called

Will Power? This is the good father of Will Power and he's struggling. I was like, fuck me. If you can't pay attention, this is really happening to everyone. So I was really, so I remember walking that interview, we got that interview video bit, days, right? I was like, it's like you go to Yoda and Yoda just goes,

I don't know, right? Yeah, I'm just playing Clash of Clash of clans over here on my phone, and sorry, it was really dispiriting. But then one of the moments it started to fall into place for me, so this caused that you're talking about. I went to interview guy called Professor El Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, he's at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Professor Miller said to me, you've got to understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else. You can only think about one thing at a time.

That's it, consciously, right? That's it. This is a fundamental aspect of the structure of the human brain. The human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years. It ain't gonna change on any timetable, any of us are gonna see, you can only think about one thing at a time.

But he said we have fallen from mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at the same time. But what happens is when Professor Miller's colleagues get people into labs, and they test them, they say, okay, they get them to do, think they're doing lots of things at the same time. Well, they always discover is that in fact, when you think you're doing more than one thing at a time, you're juggling,

you're very quickly alternating between tasks, right? Your consciousness papers over it, it gives a seamless impression that you're just doing one thing, but actually you're juggling. And this comes with a really significant cost. It's called the switch cost effect. And it turns out when you are juggling, it degrades profoundly degrades your ability to do any of the things you're doing. In there's lots of forms of harm we can talk about, but I'll just look at there's two studies, I think, that really two small studies that help me to think about this. Heal at Packard, the printer company, a commissioned scientist to do a study where they got a group of their workers and split them into two groups. First group was told, just do whatever your task is for the day.

And we won't interrupt you. Second group was told, do your task for the day and you're going to have to respond to a lot of emails and phone calls. And then they tested the IQ of both groups. The group who was not distracted, not interrupted, scored 10 IQ points higher than the group there was. To give you a sense of how big that is, if you or me smoked a fat spliff now together and got stoned, our IQs would go down by five points. So just being chronically interrupted had twice as bad an effect on your IQ as getting stoned. You would be better off in the short term, there's a debate about the longer term effect to cannabis on IQ. But in the short term, you'll be better off sitting at your desk, getting stoned and doing one thing at a time, then sitting at your desk, not getting stoned

and being bombarded with emails and phone calls. Or just to quickly say another study, the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction lab did a really interesting study. They got 138 students, they split them into two groups. They got them, all of them to do the same exam, but one group was told, just do it in normal exam conditions, and the other group was told, you can have your phone on and you can send and receive texts. Now, instinctively, you would expect the second group to do better, because they could have cheated, right? In fact, the second group, on average, did 20% worse,

because being interrupted ruins your ability to think. Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus you had before. But most people never get 23 minutes of uninterrupted the same level of focus you had before. But most people never get 23 minutes of uninterrupted time at work, right? You said that it was on average three minutes and 30 seconds for people that are in a workplace

environment or 65 seconds for a uni student. And this goes right to the top. The average CEO of Fortune 500 company only gets 26 uninterrupted minutes a day. Right? So at every level of the economy, every level of the society, well, the way Professor Miller put it to me is we're living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of this constant interruption. And again, I remember leaving that interview, I'm feeling pretty fucking sober to thinking, because one thing to have this suspicion of something's happening here. But when you go and you keep interviewing like the leading scientists in the world on these questions and they're saying, no, this is really bad, right? I'm a branch being Professor Barbara Domeni, who's one of the leading scientists

in France. She won the Leisgeon Donner, which is the biggest civilian award you can get in France. And her just saying, well, there's no way you can have a normal brain today and thinking, fuck, this is, you know, but so that can feel when you hear it and was to me when I first learned it very overwhelming. But the reason why I feel, why I think there's reason to be optimistic is because there are solutions to these problems and I think they have to happen at two levels. So one level is the personal, there are personal solutions we can pursue as isolated individuals in our own lives,

and we can talk about lots of them. I'll just give you one example. You can't see it from here, Chris, but in the corner of the room over there, it's called a K-Safe. This company should start fucking pay me commission, because I'm saying this is an every-blog guys, but they're not exactly. So K-Safe. This company should start fucking pain me commission because I'm saying this is an every blog guys but they're not sadly. So K-Safe is

a plastic safe. You take the lid off, you put your phone in, you put the lid on, you turn the dial at the top and it will shut your phone away for anything between five minutes and a week. And you lock it and you can't get your phone. I mean if there was a fire or something you could just smash it but then you'd have to buy another K-Safe. So I do I use that for four hours your phone. I mean if there was a fire or something you could just smash it but then you'd have to buy another case. So I do, I use that for four hours a day. I would not have been able to write my books if I didn't do that. Also on the laptop I'm speaking to you on, I have an app called Freedom which can cut you off either from the specific websites you tell it to if you were addicted to say Twitter or just the entire

internet and I use that for the same four hours every day. So there's lots of personal things we can all do in our lives to defend ourselves and our children against the systematic invasion of our attention. But I want to be honest with people, the evidence shows that that can improve your attention but it will only get you so far. Because at the moment, it's like we're living in an environment where someone is, and by the way, tech is of the 12 causes not the biggest which surprised me and we are living in an environment that is constantly pouring itching powder on us and it's a bit like at the moment the person pouring itching powder on us is going you know what mate you might want to learn how to meditate then you

wouldn't scratch so much and yeah I, I'm in favor of meditation, but fuck you, we need to stop you pouring itching powder on us, right? So we've got to have another level of response at which, together, we are taking on these forces that are fucking with our ability to pay attention. I know that can sound a bit abstract, so can I give a very quick, a specific example of a place that did that? So France in 2018 was having a big crisis of what they called L'Aberneau, which I don't think I need to translate. And the French government under pressure from the trade unions got a guy called Bruno Metting, who was the head of Orange, one of their biggest telecoms companies to figure out what the fuck was going on. And he found, he

did loads of research and he discovered that 35% of French people felt they could never turn off their phones or stop checking their emails when they were awake, because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night, and if they didn't reply, they were in trouble. So you can give those people all the sweet self-help lectures you want in the world about, oh, you'd be much better up, by a case say, they can't do it, right? Remember thinking when I learned that figure, you know, you're younger than me, Chris, but I remember when I was a kid, the only people who were on call were the Prime Minister and doctors.

And even doctors weren't on call all the time, right? Now 35% of the economy is just on call all the time, right? Now 35% of the economy is just on call all the time. And many people are burdened by this, many more people are burdened by this. So Bruno Metting proposed a very simple solution which the French government then introduced into law. It's called the right to disconnect. It just has two things. You have a legal right to have your work hours defined in your contract. And you have a legal right to not have to check your phone or email outside those work hours. That's it.

So I went to Paris to interview people about this, just before I was there, rent a kill, the pest control company, got to find 70,000 euros, because they tried to get one of their workers. They told off one of their workers for not responding to an email and hour after his work hours ended.

Now you can see how that's a collective thing. Companies are never gonna do that unless we make them do it. I mean, some might do it as a benefit, but that's, yeah, they're going to get a few benevolent bosses, but most are not. That's something where you can't do that on your own. You can go to your boss and say, I want a right to disconnect and they'll go like, fuck off, right? But we can do that collectively by banding together and fighting for that to be introduced. So that's one of many things we need to do collectively. So we've got to all of these problems have to be tackled at both levels. The individual things we can do, which we'll get us to a certain level,

and then the collective things we can do, which will make it possible for many more of us to do those individual things. Does that ring true, Chie Chris? Yeah, it does. So we had this discussion when we talked about lost connection to your last book on depression. And I think that this, Belize, like a bias that I have, where such, I'm an only child, right?

So radical personal responsibility, and never ever looking to anything else outside of me for a solution. It always surprises me when you talk about how systemic changes can influence the individual because that's a solution that doesn't often come very true to me. One of the things that I'm not that I'm concerned about, but one of the things that I think it would need to be, and you put it across well in the book, it needs to be laid at people's feet, like, look, you need to be, and you put it across well in the book, it needs to be laid at people's

feet. Like, look, you need to do everything that you can personally to be able to try and sort your attention out. And then we can band together to try and make these changes occur long term, because they're not going to happen straight away. One of the concerns I would have is that it's potentially easy for people to fall into a victim mentality. Well, look, your hands book said, look at this environment that I'm living in. I'm being forced. There's itching how to be poured on me. Look, I can never get out of this suboptimal attentional environment.

Right? And I think that it's important that people realize, yes, there are challenges that you have in the environment. You need to do the things that you can and over time, we can try and make the environment become better. And I think that the blend between the two is correct, but it always surprises me how many solutions are actually out there that can be done that are going to assist people with what they can do personally, because almost all of the solutions that I look to immediately

are right, well, I'll try and fix it. I'll try and come up with some sort of a solution. But I mean, to try and run through some of the ridiculous ways that I sort my attention out, I sleep with my phone outside of my bedroom. I have two separate phones. One has social media on, and the other one is for messaging. The one that has social media on has no SIM card. So that one's always attached to the Wi-Fi in my house.

I have intimate and fasting for my phone. I don't use it before a certain time. I don't use it before a certain time. I don't use it after a certain time. I have an app called Cold Turkey on my laptop, which locks me out of my laptop after a particular time at night. And I can't get out of that. There's an option on that called Frozen Turkey,

which literally just shuts your laptop down. And there's nothing that you can do to stop it. Now, I've gone away on a holiday and not enabled data roaming so that I don't ever use my phone as soon as I leave the apartment. I just pick your endless number. The notifications have been turned off. Gone grayscale mode on the phone. And there's an awful lot of tricks and tips and stuff that I've put together to try and constrain how much my attention

can be distracted. And yet for the fact that I didn't realize, maybe there is something systemic out there. I think it was almost like, do you know what it was? It was almost like learned helplessness. I think it was almost like, I don't think that we can enact change. These big tech companies are going to be so powerful and they have so much influence and they make so much money. There is no way that we're going to be able to actually do anything to impact them. So it's all on me. Like I'll carry the boat, David Goggin's style, right? And I think that that was kind of, that was where I got to. And yeah, you know,

I really do hope that we can try and make a better attentional environment because it worries me how nerfed the human species growth has been due to the fact that in the space of 10 years, 10 years ago, around about 2011, 2012, I think we had the optimal amount of information available on the internet, briefly for a two month period in like the autumn of 2011 or something. We had the right amount of information available. And then very quickly we went from a world where information was a scarcity that you wanted to get more of because it would help you survive, it would make you more competitive, it would make you more attractive, it would mean that you had better life, very quickly went from wanting more to needing to filter less.

The best people on the planet, the smartest people on the planet now are not the ones that can forage for information, they're the ones that can sort signal from noise, they're the ones that can discriminate between what they don't need in the wealth of information that's hitting them in the face and what they do need. And that skill is just not one that we've got. I'm sure that you've heard about information foraging that that's, I think that it's the same Euro scientists that you spoke to earlier on that talks about that. The fact that we're constantly on the lookout for information because it was so scarce and so important and so useful to us in our past. And, um, yeah, man, some systemic changes would also be pretty nice. Well, it's about, I love what you just said. I

think it's so interesting. And I just want to think through a few of the things you've said, Chris, because I'm just processing them. And I think what you're saying is it is really important because I had a similar sort of dialogue with myself where so I was going into being I'll give you an example like I called Professor Joel Neg who is the leading expert on children's attention problems in the US. And he said to me that we're living in what he calls, he thinks we might be now living in what he calls an attentional pathogenic environment, which is where for everyone forms of deep focus like reading a book, are getting more and more like running up a down escalator. And one of the worries about that is that it's not like we will even remain at the current level of invasiveness of our attention. Many of the factors in voting our attention

are going to get much worse. Paul Graham, one of the leading Silicon Valley. Unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. And a hugely prominent figure in Silicon Valley said that the world is on course to be more addictive in the next 40 years compared to the last 40 years. If we don't regulate the way this stuff works, that's me adding the clause if we don't regulate, not him. So I thought a lot about this because when you hear that initially initially it can feel exactly what you said, the last thing I ever want to do with anyone, in my writing about addiction, depression, or attention, is to inculcate a victim mentality.

If people read my book and thought, well, I'm fucked then, then I have failed completely, because you're genuinely not fucked. And I think part of the problem is, how do I put this? That people feel like it's about, it's about the question is about asking people where your power lies, right? So if you think about people feel like, understand very understandably feel like I have power over my immediate behavior to some degree, but if something is bigger than me, I have no power over that, right? And a big part of what I want to communicate to people because I think the evidence is very clear that it's true is that you have power at many levels. Now you have power at the level of your individual behavior

and even people in the most horrendous environment if you are in solitary confinement for the rest of your life. You still have some power over what you do, right? A Victor Frankl wrote about how he exercised agency in the concentration camps. When he was in prison there by the Nazis and his family were murdered, you always have some agency but also at the individual level, but you also have power at a collective level when you band together with other people. And I want to just give a very practical example. And I would really urge people to think about their own families in relation to this as well. I think a lot about my grandmother's. Partly I was raised by my Scottish grandmother because my mother was ill when I was a kid and my dad was in a different country. So my grandmothers, my grandmothers were 42 in 1963. One of my grandmothers was a working class

Scottish women living in a Scottish tenement and my other grandmother was living in a wooden heart on the side of a mountain in Switzerland. And in 1963, neither of them was allowed to have a bank account because they were married women. Neither of them was allowed to have a bank account because they were married women. Neither of them was allowed, well, both of them could be legally raped by their husbands. In practice, their husbands could beat the shit out of them because the police never did anything about domestic violence. My Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote. Both of them had left school when they were 13, even though the men in their families carried

on going to school later, because no one gave a shit about girls being able to learn anything. My Swiss grandmother, she loved to paint and draw, but they were like, why are you doing that? Fucking shut up, get into the kitchen. So I think about their lives, right? When they were the age I am now, I knew them.

I loved these ago, yeah. This is very recently, right? And then I look at my niece who's 17, who loves to draw on paint. She never knew my grandmother's sadly. Loves to draw on paint. And when she draws in paints, we're like, you should go to art school. This is brilliant, right? And even like no one, you'll be regarded as a deranged maniac if you said, my niece should not be allowed to have a bank account, it should be legal for her to be raped, you know, she shouldn't be allowed to vote. I mean, it would be unthinkable, right? No one would ever, literally no one says that, right? Or perhaps the craziest, farthest fringe,

but like almost nobody. How did that change happen, right? At the level of my grandmothers in 1963, I can well imagine them saying, fuck me, we're never going to take this on, right? How is this ever going to change? In 1963, every single country company, police force, all of them were controlled by men and had been ever since those things were invented thousands of years before, right? Except for a few hereditary queens every now and then, right? At the level of the isolated individual, you could say to my grandmother, look, you have some agency. Yeah, I mean she could have There were certain things adjustments they can make in their behavior But the truth is that the margin for them to make changes in that society were very limited

So how do we get to the change where my niece does have lots of margins? The truth is that the margin for them to make changes in that society were very limited. So how did we get to the change where my niece does have lots of margins. My niece just, as she was going out with a boy, he didn't treat her well, she told me to fuck off. All the boys around, sided with her, a complete transformation. It would be unthinkable to my grandmother's, right? How did we get that? It didn't happen because lots of women made isolated individual changes.

It happened because lots of women banded together and plenty of sympathetic men as well and said, we're not going to fucking take this anymore, right? No. And I would argue, so I think that's really important about people knowing where their power lies. I stress very strongly and I know this is your instinct as well. We have powers isolated individuals, but we also have power we band together. And in a way, I don't think of those things,

you can overdo the separation between those things, right? So you can think there's, there's I have power, all the collective has power, but the collective is you. It's you banding together with everyone else. That's how change is happening. We're all the beneficiaries of those changes, right? Think about something that we used to take for granted and was in place for a long time, the weekend. The weekend is some natural thing that just appeared. We have a weekend because workers who used to be made to work seven days a week fought for fucking 40 years and got shot and fucking fired and beaten up by the police until they achieved the weekend. Right now the weekend has been eroded again. We can talk about that

if you want. But so we're all the beneficiaries of these big collective struggles and there's no trade off between those two things. The more you gain control of yourself personally, the better able you are to participate in a collective struggle, and the more the collective struggle succeeds, the better, the more we can set people free to do the things that all empower their attention anyway. Do you see what I mean?

Does that, I know that it might seem viscerally, it's not, it doesn't match with your gut instinct, but can you see that there's a truth in that, Chris? I feel like you can. No, yeah, absolutely, man. I mean, you are a part of the whole. There's an emergence and a synthesis that goes on between what you can do as an individual and the environment

that you're in and then as you get more agency as an individual and become more aware, you can contribute to the people around you. You know, my friends make me a better person. Why? Well, because they do a thing, they gain some agency, they learn about something and then they influence me. Just scale that up across a country or a nation or a world, right? A species. So yeah, I agree, man. I just, it's, that's something that maybe

me, and also a lot of the people I think that listen to podcasts probably need to be conscious of, that personal responsibility is something which is spoken about so much that it can actually be not to a detriment but it can blind you to some other solutions that could be useful, you know, collective solutions. Yeah, it's an interesting one. What about the relationship between attention and well-being and how we actually feel? Does it have a relationship to how we feel about ourselves? Oh totally. So, and it goes both ways. Think about something like anxiety, right? So, as your ability to pay attention to grades, you're less able to achieve your goals. You have less of a sense of what's called an internal locus of control. If I'm not this relates very strongly to what you were just saying. So there's a

control. If I'm not this relates very strongly to what you were just saying. So there's a locust of control is your ability to feel you can change things in your world, right? You're immediate world or the wider world. And there's lots of evidence. So if you have an internal locust of control, you're someone who feels I can make things happen, right? And if you have it, what's called an external locust of control, that's where you feel, look, whatever I do, nothing will ever change, I can't make things happen, right? And there's a, as you as your attention gets worse, your locus of control begins to break down because you're not see, think about your TikTok as you couldn't even play a basketball game, right? What can they make happen? Okay, they can make their follow-up, rack up on TikTok, which probably does give, I'm sure does give them a sense of agency, but they can't make happen? They can make their follow-up on TikTok, which I'm sure does give them a sense of agency,

but they can't make things happen outside that realm. You're going to feel incompetent. There's actually lots of ways, particularly with young people, that our environment makes people feel incompetent. The way our school system works, makes boys particularly feel incompetent, and is really damaging their attention,

their sense of having a locus of control. There's a whole range of things we can think about in relation to that. So there's one level at which, okay, you can't achieve your goals, you become more anxious because you're just not as effective a person in the world. There's also another direction where as you become more anxious, anxiety itself undermines attention, stress undermines attention. I think a lot of this is happening at the moment with COVID, where without getting into the debate about COVID, because fucking Ella can't bear that. If you think about saying that I think is happening to all of us, whatever you think about the response to COVID, there's a woman called Nadine Burke Harris,

amazing woman. She's now the surgeon general of California the leading medical officer in the state And she explained this thing to me. It's helped me to think about why so many people haven't been able to focus during COVID I remember at the start lots of people going, oh, I'm gonna finally read that 900 page book. I'll be meaning to read and no fucker I know read the 900 page book during COVID, right? And Nadine said to me once, it was not that long before COVID, although we didn't know it. She said to me, okay, imagine one day you're attacked by a bear, you're just going about your business and you're attacked by a bear. In the weeks and months that follow, involuntarily something will happen to your

attention. It will flip, it will scan the horizon for potential risks and dangers. This is just a natural thing. You, somethings hit you out the blue, so you're going to be on the lookout for other things that might come out the blue. So it'll be harder for you to focus on like a book, say, because a little bit of your brain, or a big bit of your brain, is going,

what the fuck's going on? Is there another danger around the corner? Okay, now imagine you're attacked by a bear again. Then you might flip into what's called a, you're likely flip into a state called hyper vigilance where immediate focus on task like reading a book will be really hard, because you're just like, fucking hell, I don't know what's going on here.

I need to scan for risks, right? There was a great child psychiatrist that interviewed in Adelaide in Australia called Dr. John Gerardini who said to me, you know, deep focus is a really good tactic when you are safe, right? It will help you grow, it will help you develop your mind, you'll become a better person, but it's a fucking stupid strategy if you're in danger, right? If you're in, you'd be a fool to sit at the battle of the psalm and read War and Peace, right? You're going to get shot in the head, right? So, um, a deep attention is something we can provide when we feel safe. And the kind of weird

instability of COVID, um, I think has put a lot of people into a state of vigilance and hyper vigilance, partly about the virus itself, partly about their work, partly just about what the fuck's happening? Where are we, right? So I think, I forgot what your question was Chris, what was that, how did I get onto this? Just looking at how it is that focus and attention relate to our sense of wellbeing, but what you've identified there is that it's reverse. It's that our sense of well-being can influence our ability to focus, which makes sense. Like, think about any time that you've had an impending awkward conversation,

and you're trying to do something to assuage the feelings of anxiety about the upcoming terrible discussion with your boss or girlfriend or whatever whatever mate. And it's impossible. It's absolutely impossible. And you talk about flow states as well, right? Yeah, I think you're right that it goes in both directions. And flow states are a really interesting example of a form of attention that we know massively boosts mental wellbeing.

So a flow state, everyone listening will have experienced a flow state. A flow state is when you're doing something and doing something that's meaningful to you and you really get into it and your sense of time falls away and your sense of ego falls away and your attention just comes so easily you're not even thinking about paying attention. One rock climber said, flow is like when you feel like you are the rock you're climbing, right? And flow states are the most deep and precious form of attention human beings can provide. And it's particularly important form of attention because it's not an effortful form of attention. When you get into flow,

it's not like when you're trying to learn something for an exam and you're like, oh, fucking hell, okay, this happened then and how do I memorize that? It's completely effortless. So obviously I was thinking a lot about how do we get into flow, right? How do we get into states of flow? How do we, if this is like a gusha of attention that we all have within us, where do we drill to get that gusha, right? So I went to interview Mahali Cheek sent me high, who was the, you have no idea how long it took me to memorize saying that name, who was the, he's a, I think I did the last interview he ever did. He was, he sadly died not long afterwards. Incredible man. So he was a Hungarian psychologist who discovered, coined the

phrase flow states and spent 50 years investigating them. And he discovered lots of things. He discovered, crucially, if you're question about wellbeing, the more flow states you experience, the better you feel about yourself. And interestingly, although in the state of flow, you have no sense of ego. Afterwards, you have a healthier sense of self. So people, there are some people, about 15% of people, very rarely experience flow states.

And that correlates very highly with things like depression, anxiety and the more flow states you experience, the happier you are and the more, more importantly, the more, the more fulfilled you are. And so I was talking to him a lot about, you know, what, what's going on here? How can we get flow states? And he had discovered an enormous number of things about this. But I think the purposes of listening as we want to maximize their flow states, there's three things I would recommend from his that he learned in his incredible 50 year body of research on this. The first is there's three things you need to do to get into a flow

state. The first is you have to choose one clear goal, right? If you're trying to do more than one thing, you'll never get into flow, right? So I can't say I'm going to read this book and I'm going to watch the latest episode of whatever, the one will undermine the other, you'll, I mean watching, you know, you get the idea. So interruption, distraction or multiple goals, fuck flow. The second is the goal has to be meaningful to you, right? And this is very important. You can't flow into something that doesn't matter to you. So you could say to me, Yo-han, paint this canvas or play this guitar or climb this rock, and I would never

get into flow with that, right? The guitar would sound like I was killing an animal, and the rock, well, I would just fall off the rock and die, so there would be a flow state because the blood would flow out of my body body but that would not be great, right? So it's got to be something that matters to you and a lot of the times when people struggle to pay attention at work, it's often because their work is not meaningful to them and we can talk more about how you can build meaning into work if you like. The third, this is the one that most helped me, is if you want to maximize your chances of getting into flow, choose something that's at the edge of your abilities.

So if you're a medium talent rock climber, you don't want a clamber over a garden wall, you're not going to get into flow over that, but equally you don't want to suddenly try and climb Kilimanjaro, you're going to just be overwhelmed. You want to choose a rock that's slightly higher and harder than the last one you climbed. So clear goal, meaningful goal, edge of your ability, those one person who said life begins at the edge of your comfort zone and I think flow states begin at the edge of your comfort zone. When you do that, you maximize your chance of flow. But I would argue and argue in the book that we're living with a crisis of flow states. Given what Mahali said and scientifically proved that to get into flow you have to be

able to do one thing and not be distracted, given that we know the enormous quantity of interruption that we're all exposed to, I think we're experiencing crippling a flow state, which is one of the reasons why it's not the only one but any means, but it's one of the reasons why we've got higher levels of anxiety and depression and a lot of these other problems. So they sort of feed, what gets you into flow, Chris? What's your... At podcasting, it's probably the closest that I get to it when it's a really good conversation

and everything just gets forgotten about and it's, you're just here. I've found it's easier for me with physical practices than mental ones. That reading a book, reading a good book is, I can get there, but it's usually fiction. I struggle to get into a flow state with a nonfiction book. I find a narrative and you can imagine the landscape of whatever's going on inside of your mind, but you know, I played pickleball, for instance, for the first time, which is kind of like, like miniature tennis with paddles and a big ball. I played that for the first time in Austin while I was out there, and we went for three hours.

That for me, I can drop into a flow state in a physical practice super easily. I learned, wake surfing while I was out there, I went shooting, tactical shooting at targets, that all of those things I can drop into very easily. For me, it's much harder to do mentally. But I had Stephen Kotler on from the Flow Research Collective, that all of those things I can drop into very easily. For me, it's much harder to do mentally. But I had Stephen Kotler on from the flow research collective. So he looks at the biology of flow

and he said exactly the same thing that you have. If you task switch, you're looking at sort of between 15 and 20 minutes, 23 minutes for you to be able to get back into that. We also said that any type of emotional response will knock you out of flow very quickly. And this is why turning off notifications is so important, or if you're doing something where you're trying to get into flow, having a constrained environment where just you don't get external

stimuli, someone sends you an email, even if the email is basically neutral in terms of what it means to you, the fact that it's popped up will probably give you a small sense of annoyance. You notice it, or maybe there's an excitement, or there's an annoyance, or whatever, and that emotion is enough to kick you out of flow. So that's the same as a task switch. You know, your attention goes up, you notice something, maybe it annoys you, maybe it makes you happy, maybe it doesn't do anything, but it's just a little bit of something, and then you're out. And to get yourself back into that biologically optimal state for flow, it takes too long. And yeah, it's this, our days become fractured into segments

so small that we can't get anything meaningful done, but we also can't get into a state that makes us feel meaningful. We can't get into a state that makes us feel good. So yeah, it's, I think that's such a good way of putting it, Chris. I'm just thinking about that, because I think you've put that better than I did.

And I'm just thinking about the so many aspects of that. Also, so part of what's happening is that we're exactly what you just said, that process where we're so broken up, but we can't find meaning. Also, we're plugged into a machinery that diverts us into a form of meaning that is mostly bullshit, right? So you think about the craving for likes and retweets, which everyone is on Instagram and Twitter will experience, right? And you feel good when you've got them and you, and it was really interesting.

I had this, I've had periods in my life where I've been sort of successful on those metrics and it gave me a sort of rush, but it never made me feel good the way a flow state does. And when I was in Provincetown and I had those three months off the internet, I was really able to think about that. And I sort of had this kind of slightly wonky epiphany where I was thinking a lot about, because when I was away, you know, I was away for this for as long as I'd been since they were invented, right? And I was trying to think, why do I feel so much better when I'm, for me, reading a book, or that different people have different flow states,

whether it's playing the guitar or surfing or whatever it might be? Why do I feel so much better when I'm doing those things than when I'm, even when I'm sort of winning at social media, right? And I had this, I started thinking about this, this Canadian philosopher, called Marshall McCluen,

who in the 60s said this famous thing that I had never understood. And he said the medium is the message, right? Which I was like, heard, but I'd never any new way men. And I started reading while I was out there and he's been dead for many years. And McCluen said that he was talking about television

when a new medium, a new way of humans communicating is invented like television. There's obviously the specific TV show that might have a message in it, right? You can watch the wire, that's got one message, you can watch Wheel of Fortune, that's got a different message, right? But whether you watch the wire or Wheel of Fortune, the medium itself has a message in it. If you watch a television, you begin to see the world as being like television. Even if you think about something as simple as like how we think about our own memories,

it's like flashbacks in a TV show, right? Like when you think about your childhood, you picture it, I picture it as like a flashback in a TV show. People didn't think about memory that way before television was invented. They obviously have memories, but they process them in different ways, right? So when a medium comes along, it changes how you see the world. It's like putting on a new set of goggles and you start to see the world through that medium. I think that's what he was saying. I couldn't be misunderstanding him.

But I started thinking about that in relation to say Twitter or Instagram, right? Because what is the message hidden in the medium of Twitter, right? It doesn't matter if you're Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or Bubba the Love Sponge. When you tweet, you are buying into an implicit set of messages. The first is the world canon should be described in 280 characters. That is a useful, valuable way of predominantly thinking about the world, right? And the second is that what matters is whether people immediately agree with your

280 characterisation of the world, right? Or think about Instagram where the messages, what matters is how you look and whether people immediately like how you look. And I was thinking about it, and I mean, I like looking at people who look good, but with Twitter, I thought, one of the reasons I don't feel good even when I'm winning in that game is because I don't think that's true. I think that underlying message is really wrong actually. I don't think many things that are useful can be said in 280 characters. In fact, almost nothing. Maybe if you're a fucking Japanese high-coup artist, all right?

But I don't see many of them on Twitter. And actually, whether people immediately agree with you is a very bad metric for measuring the value of what you think can say, right? Actually, almost everyone I admire, the first time they started saying what they said, people didn't agree with them. If everyone immediately agrees with you, it probably didn't need to be said actually. Everyone already knew it, right? And the same with Instagram, there's a value in people looking good. But if that becomes, you know, it's actually after I wrote my book about depression, loss connections, I cannot tell you how many messages I got on Instagram from people with enormous Instagram

followings. These like stunningly beautiful, you know, porn stars, sadly all women, if the male porn stars want to get in touch, they're very welcome to. The who just feel like shit. And if you look to their Instagram, they're the ones that are winning in the game, right? Because this is a very bad metric to dominate your life. It's a perfectly good metric some of the time. In a way, I don't think Twitter is ever a good metric.

I think looking good is good. But these messages are not good. And then I thought, well, when I read books, I feel very physical books. I feel quite different. And I was like, what's the message in a book? In a respect to the specific words of that particular book, the message is firstly, slow down, just slow down. Think about one thing. But a book, it'll take you seven,

10 hours, whatever it is. It's worth thinking about just one thing for 10 hours. That's a pretty fucking radical message in the world we live in, right? Secondly, you might want to think, it's really something you said about fiction. One of the messages is, think about other people's internal lives. Stop and think about this, you might read a novel about someone who's really different to you.

But they've got an internal life just like you. You realize that we're in fact incredibly similar. I just read a book about Chinese peasant. and you were like, oh, you know, you've sort of seen written by somebody I've been a Chinese peasant. You know, you start to see the similarities, the differences. To me, the message is about slowness and death. Those are things that are actually worth having now. People can get them in different ways, doesn't have to be a physical book. But slowness and death are things that are actually worth having that people can get them in different ways. There's now to be a physical book. But slowness and depth of things that are worth having. If everyone listening, if you think about something you've achieved in your life,

it will be because you slowed down, you focused deeply, you paid attention. It will not be because you thought in quick, rapid, fucking verse, and loads of people gave you hearts. If you not... If you are happy when... If you think that's your greatest achievement, then you're going to have quite an unhappy life, right? Does that ring Chuchu Chris? Yeah, man. There's a quote from Navale that says, place-to-pead games wins stupid prizes. What do you mean? I love that. What's that? Navale Ravacant is an investor from Silicon Valley and it's just one of the smartest guys on the planet. Place-to-pead games wins stupid prizes. What is the prize that you get for winning

at the game that you're currently playing? What's the prize that you get for always keeping your Instagram DM requests folder at zero? What's the prize that you get for always being the person that replies the quickest in the WhatsApp chat? What's the prize that you get for being the person that gets retweets on Twitter? Okay, like, you know, if you're trying to grow your company's fucking Instagram account because you think that you're going to be able to change the world and clean up the seas because that's what it does, maybe, you know, that's a good way to do it, but most people don't realize

what the prize is for winning the game that they're playing. And if you looked at it, you wouldn't want to win that prize anyway. What's the prize for texting while you drive because you want to be the first person to respond in the group chat to that shit meme that you've seen before, like with a fucking emoji? We have to question around what it is that we're trying to do and why we're playing those

games. You mentioned earlier on actually about sleep. How does sleep relate to focus? Well, I spent a lot of time interviewing some of the leading experts on the world on this and it's fucking chilling. The guy I mentioned before, Dr. Charles Seisler, who's a Harvard Medical School, an amazing man, he did this experiment that really haunted me. He combined two bits of technology that had not been combined to look at sleep before.

One is there's a technology that can scan your eyes to see what you're looking at and there's another kind of technology that can obviously scan your brain. And you put together and you put in people into this machinery who were tired, not completely fucking knackered, they've been awake for 19 hours. And what he found was really chilling. So basically you can appear to be awake, you're looking around you, you're talking just as surely as we're talking now. But what the brain scan showed is that significant parts of their brain were literally asleep. So you discovered this phenomenon, it's called local sleep, it's called local because it's local to one part of

the brain. And this has all sorts of catastrophic effects on attention. So if you have been awake for 19 hours, your attention is as impaired as if you were legally drunk. This is why drowsy driving is one of the biggest causes of death. If you if you factor in drowsy driving and distracted driving, they're just enormous causes of death. And so I wanted to speak to people out, well why is it right? Because the evidence is overwhelming. Two things, if you don't sleep, your attention will be fucked. Even if you just sleep six hours a night for't sleep, your attention will be fucked. Even if you just sleep six hours a night for a week, your attention gets to the point that there's a few legally drunk.

And B, we sleep much less than we did in the past. So I was thinking about, okay, well, what can that, you know, why is that happening, right? A person who really helped me to understand this is an amazing woman called Professor Roxanne Prishard, who's at the University of Minneapolis, where I interviewed her. And she said she explained to me, it used to be thought that sleep was a passive process, right? So I'm not using my arm muscles right now, they're inert, right? As you can see, I don't ever use them. Not for occasionally to lift books or big Macs. But it used to be thought that when you were asleep, your brain was sort of like that. It was inert, it was passive.

It's not doing much. Why sleep wasn't studied scientifically for a long time. Then it was discovered when various new technologies came along that made it possible to do this, that sleep is an incredibly active process. Lots of things are happening when you are asleep. Your brain is repairing, it's healing itself, it's clearing out the metabolic waste that builds up during the day and it takes it down to your to a liver and flushes it out.

All sorts of absolutely necessary physical processes happen during sleep. There's one expert who said it's a bit like having a house party. You can either have the guests in your house or you processes happen during sleep. There's one expert who said, it's a bit like having a house party, you can either have the guests in your house or you can clean the house, but you can't do both at the same time. For whatever reason, your brain can't repair itself while you're away, can do all the work you need to do while you're awake, right? And so what we've done is we've radically cut back on the amount of time we allow our bones to rest and repair.

And as Roxanne explained to me, Professor Prashad explained to me, you know, you can live and do that, right? Of course, we wouldn't have survived hurricanes or been able to raise babies if we couldn't go without sleep. But she said, when you go without sleep, your body interprets that as an emergency. It's like, oh, I must be fleeing a hurricane. I must be tending to a sick child, whatever it is. And it goes into all sorts of emergency modes.

It will make you crave more sugar and more fatty food to give you more quick release energy. It'll raise your heartbeat. It'll raise your blood pressure. It will cut back on all the kind of longer term forms of thinking, like like creativity free association all sorts of things that we need to be people who can think deeply right because if you've got an imminent threat you don't want to be thinking about your 10-year goals you need to presumably be

hiding from the tiger that's outside of the cave. Exactly when a tiger is chasing you're not worried about how you're going to pay the rent right it's cutting back on all of those worries about how you're going to pay the rent, right? It's cutting back on all of those worries. But what's happening is many of us are living in that bodily emergency, right? We're living, you know, I mean, Roxanne was really struck by her students. She's an incredibly engaging, brilliant lecturer, but her students, she noticed how many of them were just fall asleep and she told her colleagues, and like, it was happening in all their classes. And she then studied these students and discovered that the average college student slept as much as the average parent of a newborn baby

or the average active duty soldier. And when she began trying to explain to them what they were doing, she realized that they had just been raised in an environment where sleep deprivation is the norm. What were the sort of numbers on that, do you know? I know the figures generally, I can't remember for college students, but the figures are staggering for Britain.

23% of British people sleep five hours a night, right? That is devastating for their ability to think, to pay attention. And again, that's related to lots of things that are going on. Some of that is related to stress, work stress, the inability to unplug, anxiety, there's a whole range of things that are going on there. Some of it's related to poor sleep hygiene, you know, and Dr. Seisler at Harvard did a lot of research on this that I thought was really interesting. So basically, he's the person who identified what's called the second surge of energy. So imagine if you were, well, our ancestors, but imagine you, analogous situation to a situation

that ancestors found ourselves in. Imagine you go camping and it starts to get dark. Just as it starts to get dark, you get a fresh surge of energy in your body as it starts to get dark, you get a fresh surge of energy in your body as it starts to get dark because that means you can pop up your tent, right? You can see how that would have been very useful for our ancestors. Oh, it started to get dark. Let's give them a surge of energy so they can get back to the tent. There's still five miles away from wherever the rest of the camp is. We need to run back.

Okay, so we'll give them an extra kick. That'll get them over this little hump as things are getting darker and more dangerous. They get back home, they can fall asleep. Exactly, there's a very good evolved reason for that to happen, which exactly is you describe. What, sorry, do you know what the surge is of? Do you know what is being released at that time?

I think it's all the things that give you energy. I'm sure he did tell me, but it's five years since I met him. Four years since I met him, I can't remember, but all the things that normally give human beings energy, I assume adrenaline, but I would want to double check that. And obviously, for almost all of human existence, we had no say over when it got dark, right? That was just a fact of nature.

We could light fires, but that was it. But obviously with the rise of electronic light, now we decide when the sunset happens, right? There's obviously the physical sunset, but then there's when we turn out the lights. And the difficult is, if you're sitting there staring at your phone or your laptop or your television until midnight, and then you turn out the lights

and it goes dark, what happens is you experience that second surge of energy. You're lying there and suddenly you're like, lights and it goes dark. What happens is you experience that second surge of energy. You're lying there and suddenly you're like, oh, it just got dark. We need to help him get back to the camp, right? But you're already in your camp, you're in your bed, right? So this is why, and it's one reason, one of the reasons our control over electronic light

is having such a negative effect on our sleep. As Dr. Seisler said, human beings are as sensitive to light as algae. Light profoundly alters our bodily processes and our control over light is obviously a great gift for all sorts of blinding obvious reasons. But it is having this effect. So one of the things we need to do is have a, have different forms of hygiene around this. So, you know, everyone gets recommended this, but it really does help. Don't look at blue shining light,

the light from your laptop. We've only been for two hours before you go to bed. Because it will wake you up and it will also mean that when you do sleep, your sleep is less good quality. Or there's plenty of other things that are going on with sleep. I went to in Montreal, I interviewed Professor Torra Nielsen, who runs the Dream Lab at the University of Montreal, which I thought was a great description of a job, but I'm the head of the Dream Lab.

And he discovered that another thing that's really bad for us is about this declining sleep is there's lots of evidence that dreaming helps you to process emotional events. You experience something without being flooded with stress hormones and just you make connections when you're dreaming. And the most intense stage of dreaming REM sleep tends to happen in the seventh and eighth hours of sleep, so from seven hours on. But of course, most of us are now not experiencing that. And I remember sitting there with them and thinking, God, what does it mean that we've become a society where we literally don't give ourselves time to dream, right? And that has all sorts of knock-on effects on anxiety, which

causes tension problems, but across the board. And it was interesting. Some level people know this, like I commissioned the UGUB to do the first ever opinion poll of why people think if and why people think their attention is getting worse. And we're identified, people who think their attention is getting worse. And ask them, why do you think that is? And we gave them 10 options. And interestingly, the decline of sleep was by was number one. It was 48% of people, it was tied. 48% of people said sleep. And 48% of people said a change in life events

like having a baby or getting older. But the intranly tech, our relationship with tech was fourth, which I thought was really interesting. The third one was stress. But we've said so far, we've kind of laid a lot of the problems kind of in and around the feet of technology, right? And technologies ubiquitous in our lives, you basically can't escape it, so it kind of makes sense that it would be pretty pervasive throughout everything.

But you said that you thought there was a number one reason for our loss of attention that wasn't technology. What was that? I think there's quite a lot. I would agree with the opinion poll, I think sleep is ahead of it, I think stress is ahead of it. I think stress is ahead of it. I think probably the biggest, although it's the one over which there's some scientific uncertainty. If you put a gun to my head and said 100 years from now, if there's still people and they can still think, when they look back at us,

and they think we had an attention crisis, what will they attribute it to? It might well be air pollution. So I interviewed lots of scientists about this and it was really chilling. If you just live in any city, you are currently breathing in a huge amount of air pollution. One of the things Professor Barbara Marre at the University of Lancaster has done some of the best work on this. When you breathe in these pollutants like iron, let's say iron is a pollutant that's in the air that everyone listening is not in a very rural place is breathing in. That cause, so you breathe it in and the iron goes straight to your brain. Nothing in our evolution prepared us for iron coming into our brain that way.

It causes brain inflammation. And the way Professor Mar described it is it causes a repeated chronic insult to the brain. So we know we have emerging evidence about this. So for example, people who live close to a main road, there's a study in Canada of this, were radically more likely to develop dementia because of this repeated chronic insult to the brain. So we have at that end of life, we have evidence. At the other end of life, we have evidence as well, which is there's a really disturbing study, it's at least in Barcelona and Mexico City, children who live in highly polluted areas, when they did brain studies of them,

literally had plaques and tangles in their brain that were like the plaques and tangles early stages of dementia. So we're exposed to a huge amount of pollution, not just in air pollution, but also in flame retardants, Professor Barbara Domenese, the leading expert on this, flame retardants, pesticides, plasticizers. And to be honest, I've always been somebody thought that was loaded bullshit when I heard people complaining about that. I always thought it was kind of neurotic, hippie bullshit. But when I looked at the evidence, it was quite chilling actually.

What can people do? Let's say that someone does live in a city. Is there anything that we can do on an individual level to help mitigate that? So that's what I asked all the experts and the answer was quite chilling, which was, I mean, it was the way Professor Dominique said to me, said it to me is, look, you can eat organic, you can shut your windows, you can't escape this stuff in the current environment we've created. But what you can do, and there's a great example of this, and I think this is really, in terms of thinking about the solutions, obviously, we're talking a lot about the individual solutions as well, which is really valuable, but giving

an example from the recent past, right? I just remember this from when I was a kid, but older listeners will remember, so in the 70s, it was very common for people to use lead in paint in their houses, lead in paint, and a lot of cars had lead in petrol, right? And then it was discovered it had actually been known for a long time, but the lead industry denied it, but by the 70s it was undeniable that lead fucks your brain, right? Exposure to lead for children causes really severe attention problems. In fact, the exposure to lead was so great in the 60s that it's almost certainly why there was a huge spike in violence in the 60s. There's a big scientific debate about this, but I think it's quite persuasive

because lead causes attention problems and disinhibition, which in some people causes violence. So you could really track the lead exposure and violent murders, and they track very well together, right? So by the 70, I mean, this has been known about since fucking ancient Rome, but the lead industry suppressed the evidence, denied it, funded a load of fake science.

By the 70s, it was so clear that people started to organize campaigns here in Britain. There was a woman, what was her name? Amazing woman. Renette was her last name, it'll come to me in a minute. Who, Jean Renette, that was her name, who was just like, fucking hell, my kids are being poisoned and launched a campaign to get rid of leaded petrol, which succeeded, right? Now, you know, leaded petrol is banned pretty much everywhere in the world,

almost everywhere, and leaded paint is gone. Now it's important to say, we did not stop painting our houses and we did not stop driving cars, right? We just moved, and this is really, and I think it's a really good analogy for social media. Because it's very easy to think, oh, social media came along and it's fucked my attention. I'm not going to join the armist and give up social media so I'm just fucked, right? Actually, it's not. There's a degree to which these technologies

would always increase distractions to some extent. But we're in a particularly, we're in a situation where the current business models of that drive these apps are the primary driver of the problem. If you open Facebook, now Facebook starts to make money in two ways. The first is obvious we all know about UC ads. Second way is much more valuable. Everything you do on Facebook is scanned and sorted by the algorithms. So let's say that you like Kylie Minogue, Donald Trump, and you say to your mum, you've

just bought nappies. Okay, so the algorithm figures out, if you're a man and you like Kylie Minogue, you're probably gay. If you like Donald Trump, you're probably right wing. And if you're talking about nappies, you've probably got a baby, right? It's got tens of thousands of data points like this. It's building them up all the time in order because you're not the customer of Facebook, you're the product. They sell you to the advertisers so the advertisers can target you because if I'm selling nappies, I don't want you to have to admit to me and you, we don't have babies. You want to send it to someone who's got babies, right? The minute you close Facebook, Facebook loses both of those revenue streams. So the primary, in fact, the entire motive of Facebook is to maximize the amount of time

you spend scrolling, right? That's what all the engineers or the algorithms are designed to do. To maximize the amount of time you spend scrolling. That's their goal. In the same way that they're CEO of KFC, all he cares about is did Chrissy Fried chick in this week, all the people who run Facebook care about is how many hours did Chris spend on Facebook? So that means we currently have a machinery that is designed to maximally invade people's attention, right? It has to, to make its money, right? And this is not the view

of kind of radical outsiders to Facebook. This is what Facebook themselves admit. Sean Parker, one of the biggest initial investors in Facebook said, when we designed it, we designed it to maximally raid people's attention. We knew what we were doing and we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our kids' brains. That's what he said, right?

We've now got a lot of leaked information from Facebook, we're building all sorts of dark things. But I remember first learning that, it took me a long time to get my head around that. I was interviewing lots of dissidents in Silicon Valley. And then they kept explaining to me, but don't you see this makes the solution easier, not harder. It's the problem isn't the paint and the petrol, the problem is the lead in the paint and the petrol. And in the same way, that business model is the primary problem. There are different ways social media could work, where it could be designed not to hack your attention, but to heal your attention. Asa Raskin, who designed key aspects of how the internet works, explained to me, look, the thing we need to do is you need to ban

the current business model, just like we ban to do is you need to ban the current business model, just like we banned lead in petrol, you need to say a business model premised on scanning and surveilling people to build up data on them to sell that information, to advertisers to hack their attention. That's just an inhuman model and we won't allow it. But I remember saying to all these people who were saying this to me, well, okay, let's imagine we did that, what happens the day after when I open Facebook, does it just say, sorry, we've gone fishing? And they said, of course not. Facebook would move to a different business model.

It could be like Netflix. You pay a small sum every month and you're on Facebook or it could be like the sewage system. Everyone listening, you know, we used to not have sewers, we got shit in the streets and cholera. We all paid for the sewers to be built and we all own them together. It might be that just like we own the sewage pipes,

we want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the attentional equivalent of cholera. But whatever the alternative business model is and there's many possible configurations, the important thing is it changes the incentives of the social media companies themselves. Once we've got that model, you're not the product anymore, you're the customer. So they have to think about, not how do I sell Chris to someone else, how do I sell Chris's

attention, how do I maximally invade it, they have to think, what is Chris want? Chris wants to be able to see his friends, why don't we put in a button that says, I'd like to meet up with my friends, is anyone around who wants to meet up? They might start saying, it's all sorts of waste-faced but can be redesigned, not to hack your attention, but to heal your attention, but to do that we've got to change the business incentives. I know that can seem like a big thing, but James Williams, the guy we mentioned before, the Google engineer 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. We can change the way these things work. Now that's a fight, that's a big fight. Facebook isn't going to do on its own. Facebook isn't even dealing with the most fucking heinous things they do. Their own internal research discovered that a third of all the people who joined neo-Nazi groups in Germany did it because Facebook's algorithms specifically recommended it. You might want to join and they're not even dealing with that. They won't deal with that on their own promoting Nazism. They're not going to deal with this on their own, but they will if we make in the same way the lead industry wasn't going to stop

putting lead in your pain, right? They had to be made to do it, but we can make them, we can make them do it. You're igniting my inner activist, honestly, it's, it's just, it's a, it's a mode of thinking that I usually don't think about, but I, I appreciate that, that type of insight. And to me, if this is what you, your wider way, think about these things, Chris, because it's a way of, you know, it's a way of challenging our self-conception because at the moment, I do think we're in quite a victimly mindset about attention.

We're just like, oh, I'm not good enough. Oh, I'm, I'm weak. And to me, it's like we've got to say to people, you are, 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. We own our own minds and we can take them back from the fuckers who've stolen them, right? We are dignified people who own our minds and we will not allow them to be hacked and invaded in this way. And we will allow our kids to be fucking hacked and

invaded in this way. You talk about some of the framing to do with how we perceive our unintention. You talk about cruel optimism. What's that? Yeah. So cruel optimism. And this is a very difficult line to tread. It comes back to what we were saying before. So cruel optimism is where you take something, it was a phrase by the way invented by guy called Lauren Beland, who was an American historian. Cruel optimism is where you take something with really big causes like attention crisis and you offer a really small solution. We've all been told something like, if you just open this meditation app for 10 minutes

a day, you'll get your attention back, you'll solve all these problems of distraction. And I'm in favour of meditation strongly and I talk about the way in the book in the ways in which building slow practices into your life boosts your attention. But the reason, so it sounds like optimism, you're saying to the person, I've got a solution for you. The reason it's cruel is because it's so small it will almost certainly fail. It might give them some boost but it won't solve the problem and it probably will give them a boost, but it won't solve the problem.

And the problem is if you've oversold it at the problem. And it probably will give them a boost, but it won't solve the problem. And the problem is if you've oversold it at the start, well, that person will then think is, oh, fuck up. I did the solution, right? I did the thing you're meant to do. And I'm still shit, and I still can't pay attention. There must be something wrong with me.

So, and that's why it turns into crueltyism. So what you want to do is, the alternative to crueltamism is not pessimism. This is very important to stress, right? pessimism is the enemy of getting anything done. The alternative to crueltamism is authentic optimism, which is where you say to people, you explain truthfully the scale of the problem,

and you build tools to tackle the problem at every level, right, which is individual and collective and you explain to people how we can do that. And I get really worried about cruel optimism because I think it fucks people over and I think there's a, you know, writing the book about a guy called Neary Alive, you had Neary on your podcast, I think you might have done it. Yeah. I have.

And the interesting thing is that you mentioned, I haven't listened to the audio bit that you've put on your website. You mentioned the conversation with him got heated. My conversation with him didn't get heated, but there was something about indistractable, which was the book that we were talking about. There was something about it that didn't resonate with me, and I couldn't really work out what it was at the time. And I think that the cruel optimism part of it, I think that I feel so much distaste towards social media companies and technology at large, that as soon as somebody says, well, you

know, this technology is essentially an ambivalent tool. It's all about how you interpret it. You know, this is on you. I'm like, no, I want to be able to take responsibility for my technology use, but I don't want you to ever try and say that these companies on the technology that we have is impartial. They're not. They're not. They're racing to the bottom of our brainstems to try and reduce the amount of free sovereign time that we have during our brief window of consciousness while we're alive on this planet. Like, it is the most predatory of predatory institutions. And I don't know, I can't fully remember the book about what we spoke about, but there was something that didn't resonate, and I wonder how much sort of that was a genesis of your disagreement

with him as well. That is super interesting, because, so just to explain people who don't know, Neary Al is an American, very influential American tech designer. The CEO of Microsoft has held up his work and told everyone to read it. That level of... Not indistractable, by the way, it was called. It was his other one, Hook, which is how to design addictive products. Well, this is exactly it. So, and to be fair to me, I'm offering my summary of what he thinks.

I suspect he would disagree with it. So anyone who wants to, you can go to stilafocusbook.com and listen to the full audio of the conversation I have with him, where he expresses his view in greater length. But so near a book called Interstractable, which argues primarily, not entirely, he does think there are some forms of regulation that should be introduced. He argues overwhelmingly the solution is solely that you change your individual behavior. As he put it to me, you know, every phone has a button that can says, do not disturb. He said, it's really simple, push the fucking button. Right? That was the phrase he used. And he, he argues for a whole

series of individual changes, many of which I agree with some of which I've implemented into my own life. But he, my discomfort with it became clearer when I read his previous book called Hooked. I tried to remember the subtitle. It's something like, how to build habit forming products. He describes it as a cookbook for human behavior. And it's a guide for tech designers to make habit forming products. And it could really be summarized the message

of it, I think, I mean, this is probably unfair, but part of it could be summarized by a headline he wrote on his blog, advice to tech designers, want to hook your users, drive them crazy. And what I felt very uncomfortable, it's a weird thing reading indestructible as an ordinary user of the internet. It's like the moment at the end of the Batman film where they catch the villain and he explains how he did it all along. You know, like what he was doing step by step, it's quite disconcerting because you sort of realize, oh shit, that's happened to me, right? And when I spoke to Neil what I was trying to draw out

was the disjunction between these two books, right? You got indistractable which says, this is a push the fucking button, it's an easy thing. You can do it. And then you've got Hook, which is saying, let's drive them crazy. We can really get into their heads. We can make them crave our products. He describes an imaginary woman called Julie.

He said if she's standing in a line, we want to get her, we want to get her to deal with her anxiety by turning into our product, right? And yet in Interstestructible, he says things like, picture yourself as a leaf on a river. Imagine yourself floating down the river. And I'm like, hmm, bit of a distinction between the most powerful fucking machinery in the world, and picture yourself as a leaf on a river, right? Well, that's what Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology says, right? He says,

for all that you think that you can use your willpower, that you can try and finagle your device to work, so that you don't press the next button, behind every button press, there's a thousand engineers using the most powerful artificial intelligence algorithms on the planet to try and get you to push it. It's a hopelessly unwinnable war. Exactly, and Tristan's a good friend of mine

and obviously I spent a lot of time interfering him for the book, and I think he's one of the fucking heroes of our time. And I think he's absolutely right. And it's interesting, Tristan and near both went to the same, this course at Stanford, which used to be called a course in mind control, but they thought that sounded a bit sinister. A sort of technology.

Yeah. Is that the persuasive technology lab? Yeah. Which is run, it's basically so many of the key figures who remade the world in Silicon Valley went through this course which teaches you how to use methods of persuasion and control in technology. And but I do think we are in this mode now where the tech companies are going to systematically try to transfer responsibility for the problems they have caused onto us. They want us to think about it

as your sign wrong with you, your floor. We're going to be the benevolent people who give you the tools to deal with your problem, right? And again, some of those tools will be useful. I'm not disputing that, but they are much more the problem than the solution. Well, the thing is that the problem is much more slippery and much more addictive than the solutions are. It's the same as a company releasing a new type of food, which is just amazing and beautiful and full of fat and process to shit and it's going to make you gain loads of weight and say, yeah, yeah, I know that we released that but we've also released some apples and you can go and have the apples and you go well look there is an asymmetry in the weaponization of these types of food you've designed one of these types of foods to be incredibly addictive. And the other one, yes, you're right, I can use that to no long.

If I ate that, I wouldn't need to eat the addictive one. But the problem is that there's an asymmetry in the weaponizing of this. One is much more slippery. It's the same reason that conspiracy theories get more traction online versus the truth. Conspiracy theories hijack our attention in a way that the truth simply can't.

And that's why they get propagated so much more quickly. And it's why it's dangerous to share conspiracy theories. Well, I think you've gone to really, I mean, several things were just said, you're right, it's like you're dealer saying to you, well, I'd like to offer you some crack in a nice bottle of water. Yeah, which one do you want?

I get different questions. But the thing you said about anger and conspiracy theories is really important because again, something that surprised me, saying I learned from Tristan and other people, is how much, so there's a degree to which what you said is absolutely true, conspiracy theories are attention, you know, are inherently eye catching, right? Through a lot of people, particularly in the circumstances where we live at the moment where people have been really disempowered and made to feel like shit. But there's also a degree to which the current business

model maximally promotes conspiracy theories and things that make us feel like shit. And it comes back to you. So think of what we're saying about before. The sole goal of Facebook is to keep you scrolling. That's it, that's their goal, right? It's all they care about. So all of their algorithms, all of their engineers, things to start on is describing, ask constantly scanning, what keeps people scrolling versus what makes people put down Facebook?

And these algorithms, this wasn't the intention of anyone at Facebook, it's important to stress that. It's not like they're not like Bond villains, but what the algorithm stumbled upon is an underlying human truth. It's been known about by psychologists for a long time. It's called negativity bias, negativity bias. Anyone who's ever seen a car accident on the motorway knows what negativity bias is. You stare longer at something that's angering and upsetting.

Then you do it. The pretty flowers on the other side of the road, right? Frightening things catch our eye and we stare at them. But useful, right? Evolutionary, it was much more important for us to know where the thing that could kill us was than where the thing that might keep us alive. The thing that keeps us alive only keeps us a bit more alive, but the thing that kills us makes us a lot more dead. Yeah, the people in the past who stared at the pretty flowers more than the dangerous

thing, they didn't get to be our ancestors for obvious reasons, right? But that has a horrendous effect when it meets algorithms designed to keep people scrolling because what the algorithms discovered is if I show you things that make you angry and upset, you will engage for longer than if I show you things that make you feel good. So think about that just at the level of imagine two teenage girls who go to a house party and they leave and they get the same bus home and one of them does a Facebook status update where they go, that was a really nice party, everyone looked good, I enjoyed it. And the other one goes, Karen was a fucking ho at that party, she's stank and a boyfriend's a cunt and you know, I

spent a lot of time with my niece looking at social media. So I'm overly familiar with the techniques of teenage girls on social media. And so'm overly familiar with the techniques of teenage girls on social media. And so the algorithm will put the first apps status update. It will put it in some people's feats, but it will put the second one. It scans for angry and outraging words. It will put far more of them into people's feeds. Because if people see the one going, it was quite nice. Some people might just click like and move on, but the one that's Karen's a fucking hoe, loads of people go, how can you say Karen's a fucking hoe? You're so right. Karen is a fucking, you know, you can see how that if it's in raging, it's engaging and they want to increase engagement. Now that's

disastrous enough at the level of teenagers at house party, but what's happened is that dynamic has happened to the whole fucking society. It's why countries as different as Britain and Brazil, about as different as countries can be, have been ripped apart. It's why countries as different as Britain and Brazil, about as different as countries can be, have been ripped apart. It's one of the reasons not the only one. Why are countries are being ripped apart by division? Why we are screaming hatred at each other the whole fucking time? Why we're hardening into these tribes that despise each other?

Why we're losing the space to have common conversations, to speak to each other in sane ways. We're plugged into a machinery that is constantly, even in very extreme situations, continues to ramp up hatred. The UN has pointed out that during the genocide in Myanmar, Facebook's algorithms were key factor in that because if you were tweeting about kill the Rohingya, the algorithm was promoting you versus people who were saying, let's not kill the Rohingya, there are brothers, right? So this is a disastrous consequence. And of all the links from Facebook, I thought the most revealing and the most chilling was

the one related to this. So in the wake of the victories of President Trump and a Brexit, Facebook commissioned its own data scientists to look into what had we plotted a role in polarization. And we now have the report it was leaked. And the report found that Facebook's algorithms inevitably and reluctantly promote anger and rage. And that the only way that Facebook could deal with that would be to abandon its current business model and adopt what they called a degrowth strategy where they said we're not going to fucking set the world on fire and we'll make a bit less money. They would still, by the way, be unimaginably rich and we'll actually not be like causing this horrific effect. And there's a

very dry, when the Wall Street Journal reported on this leaked information, they wrote, that that was very funny, they just said to their news report, after reading the report, Mark Zuckerberg asked that he not be brought any more reports like this in the future, right? That was their response, it's just don't fucking tell me, right? Which is incredible when you think about how Mark Zuckerberg's own, you know, relatives had to flee antisemitic persecution. Not that long ago, they're one of the biggest promoters of vial antisemitism in the world at the moment. So yeah, this, this, this, this anger machine is another reason. And this comes to one of the things I really was left with towards the end of the book, which is a sense of

Whatever you want to deal with in your personal life or politically We've got to deal with this crisis first James Williams who have been quoting a lot He said to me it's like you're driving somewhere and someone's just throwing a fucking bucket of mud over your windshield It doesn't matter what you got to do when you get to wherever you're driving First of all you've got to clean the windshield. You don't do that. You can't do anything. Everything is mediated by these technologies, right? And everything else is mediated by our ability to pay attention. So you said at the very beginning, you have this sort of topology of the spotlight, the starlight, the daylight, and then the stadium light. And all of these

are getting fractured and fragmented. And then even the ways in which you consume information that you hope is going to be able to fix your attention is mediated by these technologies too. And that's where I think you have managed to, to let us say ignite the activist inside of me. And you're like, okay, yeah, there's so far that I can take this myself, but there's an upper bound.

And if I'm operating in a really, really suboptimal environment, this is not going to be particularly good. So what, what, after having done all of this research and stuff, what strategies have you applied to your own life to try and retain, regain a bit of attention? I sleep much more. I sleep eight hours a night now, which I didn't do before. I sometimes think more than that actually, quite often. I've got the case safe. I lock it where I've got freedom on my phone. When I feel my attention fracturing, I don't do what I did before, which is go, oh, you twat, why can't you do this? You're just weak. I pull back and I try to identify why can't I focus

at this moment. It's usually, because I'm not in the right zone for flow. So I pull back and I go, okay, do one thing at a time. Is the thing you're doing meaningful to you? Sometimes when my focus breaks down, it's actually a useful sign. If I'm writing a chapter and my focus breaks down, often it's like, actually at some level,

you know you're not right what you're saying here. The meaning isn't right, you're wrong. Actually, sometimes the lack of attention can be a healthy signal. And I try to do something at the edge of my ability. So the next book I'm writing is about a series of horrific crimes in Las Vegas. That's been research.

That's fucking it, the edge of my ability. It's not like this book, right? So I kind of go, okay, what can I do that say? The edge of my ability. It's not like this book, right? So I kind of go, okay, what can I do that say the edge of my ability? How can I push myself? Which seems counter-intuitive when your attention is breaking down, you instinctively think. Why would I do something harder? Yeah, but actually the hot, and there is rest is important,

and I'm unbelievably bad at that. And I've got a whole chapter about the places in New Zealand that move to a four-day week and achieve more in four days than five. We can talk about that if you want, but there are plenty of things I should do and want to be candid about I don't do because self-help books have this structure that's like, dear reader, I had this problem, I did the following ten things and now look, I'm this perfect godlike phenomenon and the truth is that would be bullshit for me to say that right, the partly because it's a collective problem and partly because I'm a flawed person. So I should have improved my diet, I should

have moved away from carb, heavy, you know, fast food to, and I'm a bit better than I used to be, but only a little bit and there is literally, I'm on laptop, there's a KFC bag, so because you've some sense it's not perfect. So there's lots of other things I should have done that I haven't done. I mean, I take very long breaks from social media and I announce in advance that I'm doing it because you'd feel like a right twat if you said, I'm going to be off Twitter for the next two months and then a week later you pop up again. And when I do that, I get a friend of mine to change my password. So even if I crack in the night, I can't get in. So I take very long deliberate breaks. There's a whole range of things that I talk about lots more in the book, but I'm editing. I was doing yoga until COVID and then I couldn't see my

teacher. You know, there's other things that I should rest more and work less, I'm very bad at that. So there's a whole range of, I mean, sleep is basically the form of rest that I increased. The other stuff I just, I can't do, I'm no good at it. So yeah, there's a whole range of things that we can do. And I would say that has really deeply boosted my attention, like properly, it's a lot better than it was before I went to Graceland.

And what about collective solutions? What do we need to do as a community? So I think there's a huge range of things. I think we've got to have a movement. And I would say that top three things I would recommend would be, we've got a ban, this surveillance, sorry, we've got a ban this business model of surveillance capitalism that is premised on hacking our attention and replaced it with the other models, which can make it possible to heal our attention. I would say that, I would say we've got a ban

the fucking pollutants that are inflaming our brains. That's relatively easy to do. And there's plenty of historical precedents for that. Think about what happened with the ozone layer. There was the thing that was fucking up the ozone layer. CFC. CFCs, yeah. We banned them. The ozone layer is now healing, right? We could have the equivalent for that. The third is, so we haven't talked about,

but relates to children. And I think we've got a deal with this right where it begins with children's attention problems. And the very first thing I would recommend is we need to restore childhood, right? Children develop an ability to pay attention when they play freely with other children. And that has all but ended, and it ended before COVID, the, the, although it's obviously got worse during COVID, only 10% of children now ever play outside their homes without adult supervision.

That's a, and I can go through the evidence that it's a longer conversation, we should do another podcast, but that is one of the key factors why our children can't pay attention. We have deprived them of the thing that the scientific evidence shows is absolutely crucial for children being able to learn how to deploy their attention, think, look at, you know, not be anxious. It's a horror show. There's, you can do experiments with rats, a guy called Professor Xavier Castellan or some interviews done work on this.

You deprive infant rats and adolescent rats of the ability to play with other adolescent rats. And by the time they grow up, they can't solve problems. They're much less good at it. And you can see this happening, right? You can see this happening with young people all the time at the moment. So I would say bans, violence capitalism, get these fucking pollutants out of the air and restore childhood would be my three big initial goals. But then there's like, would you put an age restriction

on the use of technology? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't want to go down the Chinese route of, you know, the Chinese government is one hour a week at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Between eight and nine PM on a Monday, sorry on a Friday sat this Sunday. Yeah. And, you know, I'm strongly opposed to have been authoritative.

Well, communist dictatorships are a bad thing, even if they do something that you agree with. Yeah. And the wicked and despicable communist dictatorship in China is, I'm glad we don don't I'm glad we have a government that can't do that And I wouldn't want a government that could do that but But they're not wrong to identify that this was causing a profound degradation in in children And I would I would I would want to go a long way towards restricting this stuff. And parents listening, there's a good group called Concord Promise, who get parents.

I think about my godson who I'm very close to, their father died and I'm like, kind of father figured to them. And they're just at the age now where lots of their friends are getting smartphones. What ages are? They're 12 and a 12 and 11 and honestly I feel like they're about to be fucking poisoned, you know, like it you know, so I mean I personally would urge parents to whether you want governments doing that, I mean I would be more uncomfortable with that. Yeah, well you can have a cultural imposition as well as a legislative one, right? You can make it so that it is commonly held societal practice that parents try to restrict the amount of time that children under the age of whatever, whatever the research seems

to suggest. Don't let their children, I mean, man, think about all of the challenges that me and you have with our attention. And then think about the fact that I didn't have an iPhone, I was part of Blackberry Squad until later than it was cool still to be. I didn't have an iPhone until probably 24, 25 years old. So I went through, I've been way, way, way, way more than half my life, you know, like two thirds of my life, more than two thirds of my life. I've had without a smartphone in my pocket. But yeah, it's funny because I remember when I went to Provincetown and I was off all these devices.

And I always people in my age were saying to me, but what will you do? And I kind of said, but you do realize that we lived half our lives like this. Yeah, yeah, it's not even as if you were 18 years old and you've grown up never knowing a world that was out this, it's like, no, no, no, no, no, your life arc had a period of this. Do you not remember that you used to do a world that was out there. It's like, no, no, no, your life arc, how do period of this?

Do you not remember that you used to do a thing? Yeah, precisely. It was really interesting. And it was, even, I remember when I brought I had to go by, so I wanted to have a phone that couldn't get onto the internet. And I remember even when I was in Boston, because Boston's across the water from Provincetown,

and even I remember going into the shops, and I would say I want a phone that can't get onto the internet. And the guy at the target gets like to me, so this one can only, the internet is quite slow and I'm like, no, no, no, no, I don't, I can't access the internet. And he was just baffled and kept saying, what, is, is, is if I wasn't speaking English, right? He was just like, but what do you mean? Right?

Like it was incomprehensible. The ones that are not wanting to be on the internet. And yeah, so the, the, the, although I stress that my goal is not that we not be on the internet. And yeah, so the, the, although I stress that my goal is not that we not be on the internet, is that we have an internet that is not designed to maximally invade our and ruin our attention. And essentially, I'm sure some people are going to describe my book as anti-tech. And I am not anti-tech at all. The question is not pro or anti-tech. The question is, what tech working on what principles in whose interests are the moment we have tech that's working in the interests of small numbers of people?

But it comes back to saying you were saying before Chris, I was thinking about as you were talking, my biggest worry is that this could be like, say, the obesity crisis or the climate crisis, which is the furthering you get, the harder it is to get out, right? It's like when you become so fat you can't exercise anymore, right? My worry is, if we don't deal with it pretty fucking soon, if we continue to degrade or if we continue on the trajectory where these technologies are invading us more and more and more, my is, we'll be so far gone, our attention will be so far gone,

that it's harder to summon the individual and collective attention to find our way out. So I think we're actually a really important moment. It feels like a press-apist, man. If our capacity to deploy the thing that makes change gets reduced, then the further in that you get, the more difficult it is to use the thing that you need to turn it around. I'm so for this. When you said that, I went to interview in Copenhagen in Denmark. I went to interview this guy called Professor Sunal Lehmann, who did the first study that has proved that our collective attention span is shrinking. This wasn't that long into the research of the book. And he said to me,

just banished Shring King. This wasn't that long into the research for the book. And he said to me, oh, I can't do the, I can't do the, Dave Shaq said, he said, oh, I saw this photograph yesterday. Have you seen it? And he just pulled it up on his phone and showed it to me. And it was a room. Everyone is wearing one of those VR headsets.

And Mark Zuckerberg is the only person not wearing the VR headset standing in front of them. I think it became quite a famous photo after this. And he said, and it having just explained to me all the ways in which I collected attention as badmas collapsing, he said, and that very understated Danish razor, I saw this and I thought, oh fuck, this is the future. Oh fuck it're like, oh, fuck it out. But in a race, right, we're in a race between all these forces that are invading our attention. And on the other side, there's got to be a movement of all of us saying, no, you fucking don't.

I think when we look back, when people look back in 50 years time, probably between 1500 years time, they'll look at factory farming and they'll think, hang on, you bread sentient creatures so that you could kill them to eat them. You, you people were fucking barbaric and they will say what the actual fuck were you doing with your attention? What were you doing with the technology that was supposed to serve you and you were serving it? You know, we don't need terminator, we don't need Arnold Schwarzenegger to come around, to come down to be a totalitarian, fear-mongering, artificial intelligence robot that follows us around. We all have one in our pocket all the time. It's just that it uses slightly more subtle ways to deploy its techniques.

To be clear, if Arnold Schwarzenegger is watching and would like to come to my house, he's doing a fucking mobile game app, advertvert. It's called like Titans of tanks or something. And I saw it yesterday and he's done the get to the chopper, but it's get to the tank instead of Arnold. You, the governor of California, like you should, anyway, anyway, stolen focus. Why you can't pay attention, Johann's new book will be linked in the show notes below.

It's awesome, man. I think this is the most, one of the most important conversations that people need to have. I'm really, really glad that you wrote this book and everybody should go and check it out. Oh, that, Chris, has been such a thoughtful and interesting conversation. I'm going to process loads of the things you said. I'm also meant to say on my publishers, tasme, that anyone who wants to know where to get the audio book, the ebook or the physical book, can go to stolenfocusbook.com and I got in trouble at the end of a podcast about a year ago. I was, I should not have done this. I was interviewed by this guy and he said, so what's your

Twitter and I said it? He said, what's your Facebook and I said it? He said, what's your Instagram and I said it? And then he said, what's your Snapchat? And I said, I am a 42 year old man, right? The only 42 year old man on snapchat are definitely Peter files. And he did laugh, but I have this terrible thing if I tell a joke or someone doesn't laugh, where I start leaning into the joke. And I said, you know that show to catch a predator, the American show where they basically catfish Peter files, they pretend to be children. I said, the next season of to catch a predator should be just walking up to Adopt men in the street and saying, what is your Snapchat?

And if they say, this is my handle, immediately fucking throw them in the van. I can see why that would go down badly, yeah. Well, it went down even worse because this guy didn't laugh at all of us that were a bit poised. I looked him up later, he is 50 years old, that has a large Snapchat following. So I'm glad we got through this interview without me accidentally calling you a Peter Fah. No foot in mouth, no snapchat, forays, no you fine.

Yo Hanman, it's always a pleasure to speak to you. Oh, tightly my pleasure. Cheers Chris. Until the next time mate. Brilliant, thanks. you