Offline with Jon Favreau - How to Avoid Distraction with Johann Hari

Episode Date: January 8, 2023

Have you lost your ability to pay attention? Do you struggle to read a book? Can’t focus on a single task? Johann Hari, author of the New York Times bestseller Stolen Focus, joins Offline to discuss his 4-year, multi-country journey to regain control of his attention. He and Jon talk about the science behind focusing, how tech companies have maliciously destroyed our brains, and what we can do, collectively and individually, to steal our attention back. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Hewlett Packard, the printer company, got a scientist in to study their workers and he split them into two groups. And the first group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is, and you're not going to be interrupted. Just do what you've got to do. And the second group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is, but at the same time, you've got to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls. So pretty much how most of us live.

And at the end of it, the scientists tested the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored 10 IQ points higher than the group that had. To give you a sense of how big that effect is, if you and me sat down together and smoked a fat spliff right now, our IQs would go down in the short term by five points. So being chronically interrupted in the short term is twice as bad for your intelligence and attention as getting stoned. You'd be better off sitting at your desk, getting stoned and doing one thing at a time,

than you would sitting at your desk, not getting stoned and being constantly interrupted. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I might have had that experience from time to time. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey everyone, and Happy New Year. My guest this week is Johan Hari, author of the New York Times bestseller, Stolen Focus. Seeing that it's the season for resolutions, I figured Johan would be the perfect guest for our first show of 2023. The reason I started offline, a feeling that our collective screen addiction is breaking our brains and our society,

is the same reason that Johan went on a four-year journey across the world to write Stolen Focus. After a demoralizing family vacation, which you'll hear about in a bit, Johan realized he needed to do something about his inability to really focus or think. So he left his phone on a friend's kitchen table, ditched his laptop for one that couldn't get online, and headed to a small coastal town for three months, completely unplugged from the internet. In that time, he felt his brain completely rewire itself. His focus returned, his sleep improved, he read and wrote and generally enjoyed his life a lot more. But he couldn't swing a digital detox forever.

And as soon as he returned, Johan found himself right back to where he started, addicted to his phone. So then he set out to find ways that he could regain control while living in our very online world. He talked to some of the world's leading sociologists, psychologists, and tech researchers to learn what our online existence has stolen from us, why these platforms are designed to be so addictive, and what we can do as a society and as individuals to regain our focus. I invited Johan on to talk about that journey, break down how he thinks about focus and attention, and learn about the steps he's taken to live a less distracted, disjointed life. If you've ever questioned your relationship with your phone or the internet, I think you'll find this episode helpful. It certainly was for me. As always, if you have comments, questions, or concerns, please email us at offline at

cricket.com. And please take a moment to rate and review the show or share an episode with a friend. Here's Johan Hari. Johan Hari, welcome to Offline. I'm so happy to be here. Cheers. Every so often, I get to have a conversation that gets at the heart of why I wanted to do this show. This is one of those conversations. So I've always been prone to distraction. I've always been a phone addict. It wasn't until the pandemic that I became hyper aware of both the huge amount of time I was spending online, but also what it was doing to my ability to read, to think, to write, to have meaningful conversations. What made you realize that our collective inability to focus is a problem worth studying and trying to solve?

I think philosophically, I knew, like if you said to anyone watching, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. So I guess I knew at some level, well, if your ability to pay attention breaks down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down, your ability to solve your problems is at least diminished. And I could feel it happening to me. I could feel that it was like with each year that passed things that required deep focus like reading books having proper long conversations watching films which is

so important to me we're getting more and more like running up a down escalator I could still do it but it was like the escalator was getting faster and faster and I was getting fatter and fatter and I think I was really afraid to look into it because i thought well it's obvious why i don't have enough willpower i'm weak there's something wrong with me and someone invented the smartphone and that screwed me over so i had these two what i later learned were hugely oversimplified stories in my mind and so i really put it off and put it off and then i had a moment in my life and i think with a lot of people, we tend to confront problems, not when we see them in ourselves, but when we see them in people we love. I've got a godson who, when he was nine, developed a brief and unbelievably cute obsession with Elvis Presley.

And the reason it was so cute is he seemed to genuinely not know that impersonating Elvis had become a kind of cheesy cliche. So I think he was the last person in the history of the world to do an entirely sincere version of jailhouse rock and when i would tuck him into bed every day he would get me to tell him the story of elvis's life over and over again obviously i skipped over the bit at the end where elvis you know died on the toilet and um one day i mentioned graceland where elvis lived and i mentioned that people go visit it and he and his eyes lit up and he said johan will you take me to Graceland one day? And I said, sure, the way you do with a nine-year-old, knowing next week it'll be Legoland or Disney World or whatever.

And he said to me, no, do you really swear one day you will take me to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely promise. And I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years until so many things had gone wrong so when he was 15 he dropped out of school and by the time he was 19 this will sound like an exaggeration it's not he spent literally all his waking hours almost alternating between his iPad his iPhone and his laptop and it's like his life was just this blur of WhatsApp YouTube porn and it really it felt like he was almost kind of whirring at the speed of snapchat where nothing still or serious could get through

to him and one day we were sitting on my sofa here in london and all day i was trying to get a conversation going with him and he's really intelligent and a great person and i just couldn't i couldn't get any traction in his mind and to be totally honest with you john i wasn't that much better right i was sitting there looking at my own devices and i suddenly remembered this moment all these years before and i said to him hey let's go to graceland and he looked at me completely blankly it's like what you talked about he remembered this thing but i reminded him i said this is no way to live let's break this numbing routine let's get out of this let's go on a road trip all over the south but you've got to promise

me one thing which is that when we go you'll leave your phone in the hotel during the day because there's no point in us going if you're just going to stare at your phone the whole time and he took some time and he really thought about it because he wasn't happy living like this and he said let's do it let's go so I think it was literally two weeks later we took off to New Orleans where we went first and a couple of later, we got to the gates of Graceland. And when you get there, this is even before COVID, there's no person to show you around. What happens is they hand you an iPad and you put in earbuds like the ones I'm wearing now. And the iPad shows you around. It says, you know, go left, go right. It tells you a story about the

room you're in. And everywhere you go, there's an image of that room on the iPad in front of you. So we're walking around Graceland and I'm noticing this slightly weird thing, which is that no one is actually looking at Graceland. They're all just kind of staring at their iPad. It gets a bit tense and irritable about this. And then some people do look away from their iPads,

but they look away from their iPads to take out their phone, take selfie put it away and then look back at the ipad and we got to the jungle room that was albus's favorite room it's full of fake plants and i'll never forget them there was a canadian couple i guess they're about 50 next to us and the man turned to his wife and he said honey this is amazing look if you swipe left you can see the jungle room to the left and if you swipe right you can see the jungle room to the right and i laughed out loud so i was funny joke and i turned and him and his wife were just swiping back and forth and i leaned over and i said but hey sir there's um an old-fashioned form of swiping you could do it's called turning your head because you you

realize we're in the jungle room you you don't have to look at it on the internet it's literally all around us and they looked to me like i was completely insane possibly correctly and i turned to my godson to laugh about it and he was standing in the corner staring at snapchat because from the moment we landed he literally couldn't stop and i went up to him I did that thing that's never a good idea with teenagers I tried to grab the phone out of his hand and I said to him look I know you're afraid of missing out but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out you're not present at your own life you're not showing up at the events of your own existence and he stormed off understandably again and I walked around Memphis on my own that day and I found him

that night by the Heartbreak Hotel up the road where we were staying. And he was sitting by the giant guitar-shaped swimming pool looking at Snapchat. And I went up to him and I apologized for getting so angry. And he didn't look up, but he said, I know something's really wrong and I don't know what it is. And that was when I thought, wow wow we came away to get away from this problem of distraction but there was nowhere to escape to because it was everywhere we looked the average american office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes and for every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when i was seven years old

there's now a hundred children who've been identified with this problem that's when i thought okay i need to figure out what's going on here. And that was really when I began working on the book. Yeah. I think that's so powerful because, you know, I can totally see a lot of myself in your Godson, I'm sure like, as you could in a lot of other people that I'm around. And I think the challenge is the awareness that this is a problem. And it's not just, oh, I'm on my phone too much, or people are on their phone too much.

And I think part of figuring out just how significant the problem is, and you write about this in the book, there's different layers of attention that have been stolen from us. So the first layer is our spotlight, which is when we focus on what's right in front of us, immediate actions. I couldn't finish a book because I was checking Twitter. I couldn't focus on parenting because my friends were texting me. Could you talk about the other deeper layers of attention that we're losing? Yeah, this typology was invented by someone called Dr. James Williams. It's a fantastic person. He used to be at the heart of Google, the heart of the Silicon Valley machine that's

playing a key role along with lots of other factors in so disturbing our attention. He was horrified by what they were doing, quit, and became, I would argue, the most important philosopher of attention in the world. So as you say, he argues there's three layers of attention. I would actually argue there's four, and I know he agrees with this because we've talked about it. So like you said, your spotlight is your ability to narrow down your focus to one immediate task. And we can all feel that's being disrupted. And mostly when we think about distraction, attention problems, that's the layer we think about.

That's really debilitating, but it's only the first layer. The next layer up is what he calls your starlight your starlight isn't your ability to achieve an immediate goal like going to the fridge to get a diet coke your starlight is your ability to achieve a long-term goal like i want to set up a business i want to write a book i want to be a good parent it's called your starlight because when you're lost in the desert and you don't know where you're heading if you don't have GPS, you look to the stars and you're like, that's my goal. That's where I'm heading, right? So it's not just that we're disrupted at a short-term level.

If you're disrupted at a short-term level long enough, your whole starlight gets disrupted. The next level up is what he calls your daylight. And your daylight is your ability to even know what your long-term goals are. How do you know what business you want to set up. How do you know what business you want to set up? How do you know what book you want to write? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? To have a sense of those things, you have to have periods where you rest, where you think, where you have conversations, where you reflect.

It's called your daylight because you can see a room most clearly in daylight. And if you're jammed up all the time you don't get to do that and he argues that we begin to what he calls decohere we have much less of a coherent sense of who you are as a person who i am as a person the next level up is what i would call our stadium lights and that's not just our ability to formulate and achieve individual long-term goals it's our ability to formulate and achieve collective goals right it's, it's our ability to formulate and achieve collective goals. It's not just, and I'm really interested in your thoughts on this, John, it's not just

that our individual attention is breaking down. Our collective attention is breaking down in disastrous ways. When countries as different as Britain, Burma, and Brazil are having political crises that are very similar, that tells you there's some underlying mechanisms. I'm not saying the attentional crisis is the only one. It certainly isn't. But it's not a coincidence we're having the biggest crisis of democracy in the world at the same time since the 1930s, at the same time as we're having this huge attentional crisis. I think they're closely interrelated in their causal mechanisms and in their effects in ways

I'm sure we'll explore. So when you begin to think about this layered nature of attention, you begin to see how crucial it is to everything we do, from the most trivial task to the most exalted political goal. Attention is at the heart of this. To use another analogy that Dr. Williams uses, you know, imagine you had to get somewhere, but someone throws a bucket of mud over your windshield. Doesn't matter what you've got to do when you get to a destination. The first thing you've got to do is clear the mud off your windshield because you're not going anywhere if you don't do that. And the attention crisis, which I would argue is rapidly worsening, is like that mud on

the windshield. If we don't get the attention crisis right at a personal level and at societal level, I think we're going to really struggle to get the other stuff right. Yeah, I mean, to the stadium-like layer of attention, I completely agree. One of the reasons I started offline was because I thought there were individual consequences to living extremely online, as we all are, but also that it was sort of threatening the foundations of democracy, which when I first sort of pitched this, people were like, what, what's the connection there? But the more guests I've talked to have drawn that exact connection. And look, I think it seems like hyperbole to say, you know, Twitter is breaking democracy or the media is contributing

some of that. But I do think the structure of how we receive, consume and process information now through both social media platforms and the media at large, which is mostly online these days, is contributing to this sort of disjointed feeling of aggravation, irritation, not being able to sit and have conversations with other people to sort of resolve our differences that way, because everything is moving so fast and we can't actually sit and think. I think that's really important. And I think it's worth teasing out one of the mechanisms that I learned about when I was researching Stolen Focus to help me to understand why this is so injurious. So for the book, I traveled all over the world from Moscow to Melbourne to Miami to interview over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus.

Actually, what I learned is there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make them worse. And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely increasing in recent years, including loads of things I don't even think of as having a relationship to attention. It never occurred to me that the food we eat has a profound effect on attention, for example. But i think you're absolutely right going to the the tech question obviously is one of the key ones i spent a lot of time in silicon valley interviewing people who were at the heart of the machine that has played a key role in one of the 12 factors that i write about in stone and focus the thing that was most striking is how sick with shame and guilt they feel

they really have a sense of what they've done and how harmful it's been, many of them, not all. And I think it's worth thinking about one of the mechanisms, because you said it gives us this sense of anger. There's one in particular I found really shocking. So I think it's worth spelling out how it affects individuals, then how it affects society, so that's okay. So anyone listening, anyone watching, if you open TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram now, please don't, but if you did, those companies immediately begin to make money out of you in two ways. The first way is really obvious. You see advertising, okay, no one needs me to explain that.

The second way is much more important. Everything you do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are, to learn who you are and what you're about. And they're learning that for a few reasons, partly because they want to target the advertising. If I'm selling diapers, if an advertiser is selling diapers, they want to know that you've got a baby like John has. But most importantly, they're learning that in order to figure out what would keep you scrolling. So imagine you've been on these apps for a while. Let's imagine that you've said over time that you like i don't know donald trump bet midler and you told

your mom you just bought some diapers in a private message so the app knows okay if you like donald trump you're obviously right wing very likely if you like bet midler and you're a man you're probably gay no disrespect to any straight men watching you like bet midler i don't believe you and if you've bought diapers you've got a baby right if you've been on these apps for a while they have got tens of thousands of data points like that about you and they're harvesting that partly to sell that in front of advertisers but also crucially to figure out what will keep you scrolling what will interest you and what will keep you scrolling because every time you pick up your phone open the app and start to scroll they begin to make money the longer you scroll the more money they

make and every time you close the app their revenue stream disappears so people at the heart of sitcom family kept explaining to me all this ai all this genius all these algorithms they are geared when it was applied to social media to to one thing and one thing only, figuring out how do we get you to open your phone as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. That's it. That's all it's about. Well, you know, I did an episode, I talked to Scott Galloway about TikTok. Is TikTok sort of a threat to national security? A lot of people have been talking about it in terms of the data collection, privacy,

the Chinese government being in control of it. But I think the Chinese government is in control of an algorithm that is turning an entire generation into mindless zombies. And I know because when I started on TikTok, because I was like, I'll go to TikTok because I'm a Twitter addict, right? And I'll see what TikTok's all about. And the first couple times you open up TikTok, it doesn't know you yet, right? So it's giving you videos.

I'm like, what are these videos? I don't really care about this. And then the more you do it, the more it knows you. And now if I open TikTok, now I could stay there for, I don't know, suddenly I lose track of time. And it's not very fulfilling. It definitely distracts you and pass the time, but it's not very fulfilling. And I think that is the bigger fear about TikTok right now. It's not necessarily that there are all these privacy concerns, though there are,

but that we have an authoritarian government just turning us all into mindless zombies. Well, it's the debasing of the population. And that in itself is a huge political problem. And you think about that element. And it was very striking to me in Silicon Valley, people, I kept saying, but it can't be that simple. There must be more to it than that. And one said to me, you know, all the head of KFC cares about in his professional capacity

is how many times did you go to KFC this week and how much fried chicken did you buy, right? That's all he cares about. That wouldn't surprise you to know that, right? Why would you be surprised to learn that social media companies are developing and are all about developing staggeringly sophisticated methods for keeping you scrolling? We can talk about some of those methods if you want, but the reason this connects to politics is,

so the algorithms are set up by all these companies to just figure out, okay, you're scanning most of the world's population. Look for what keeps them scrolling and those algorithms stumbled upon an underlying truth about human psychology that's been known about for what 90 years now the technical term for it is negativity bias it's very simple um human beings stare longer at things that make them angry or upset than they do at things that make them feel good if you've ever seen a car accident on the highway you know exactly what i meant yeah you stare longer at the mangled car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street right this is very deep in human psychology

10 week old babies stare longer an angry face than a happy face it's probably for very good reasons in our evolution our ancestors who didn't look out for people who were angry got eaten right it's a slightly crude way of putting it but me get my point right but when you get a combination of algorithms designed to keep you scrolling with negativity bias you end up with a disastrous outcome so picture two teenage girls who go to the same party and go home on the same bus and one of them says does a little video where they say oh that was such a great party. We danced all night to Ariana Grande. It was such fun. Whoa.

And the other girl does a video where she says Karen was an absolute hoe at that party. And her boyfriend's an asshole and just does an angry denunciation of the party. The app is scanning for the kind of words you use. And of course, the first video, it'll put into a few people's feeds. The second video, it'll put into far more people's feeds. Because if it's enra far more people's feeds because if it's enraging it's engaging it keeps you scrolling what do you mean Karen's a hoe you're out you can see how that starts a fight which keep harvest engagement now that is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls on a bus we all know what's happened yeah to teenage girls mental health but now imagine an entire society plugged into a machinery where that

dynamic is taking place, where the people who are kind and decent and treat people well are muffled, and the people who are cruel and scornful and hateful are massively amplified. You don't have to imagine it because you've all been living it. Yeah, we're in it. We're in it. But if we don't deal with that dynamic, we're in real trouble. You know, we're speaking just a couple of days after Lula da Silva was reelected in Brazil. But we came within 0.5% of losing Brazilian democracy. And it's worth thinking about that moment because in a sense, Trump is so close to us that it's easier to think about it in relation to someone like Bolsonaro. So Jair Bolsonaro, the fascist, and I don't use that word lightly at all, who was defeated by Lula, by damn whisker, thank God. Jair Bolsonaro

in 2012 was a washed up, forgotten, hated far-right senator, nostalgic for the military dictatorship. And what happened? There's been very good analysis of this i spent a lot of time in brazil looking at it as well the algorithms on particular youtube also facebook picked him up and he began to make particularly repulsive statements in order to catch the attention of the algorithms for example in the debate in the senate about rape he told a female senator you don't need to worry about that you're so ugly ugly, no one will rape you. He said that people who lived in the favelas, who are overwhelmingly blacker than other Brazilians, were not even good for breeding and should go back to the zoo. I mean, absolutely abhorrent statements, which get picked up by the algorithm.

Remember, if it's enraging, it's engaging. The night Bolsonaro won, after being massively pumped, what do his supporters chant outside the election rally facebook facebook facebook they knew this and by the way it's not just that they knew it facebook knew it in the wake of the election of trump and brexit and you know it's better than i do john um facebook set up an internal inquiry got its own data scientists to look at did we play a role in this and their own data scientists came back and made exactly the point a role in this? And their own data scientists came back and made exactly the point that I'm making to you now. We only know this because a

heroic whistleblower, Francis Haugen, leaked it. They explained that the algorithms were systematically promoting rage and division in catastrophic ways. We actually know it promoted the genocide in Myanmar, in case the Rohingya minority it was provided in fact they discovered that one third of all the people in germany who joined neo-nazi groups joined because facebook's algorithm specifically recommended it and by the way what was mark zuckerberg's response as the wall street journal dryly reported he disbanded the group and asked that he not be brought any information like this ever again yeah so you can see this dynamic is very real but the most important thing to know about this is that we can solve these problems you know to quote dr williams again the axe existed for 1.4 million years before anyone

said guys should we put a handle on this thing the entire internet has existed for less than 10 000 days right but all of the 12 factors that I write about in Stolen Focus, many of them are very recent developments, right? But we've got to understand what's happening to us in order to deal with it. Well, to that point, because look, we have talked on this show many times about sort of the society-wide implications

and what these social media platforms are doing and the design of the algorithms. And I still keep coming back to the idea that on an individual level, this is almost a more challenging addiction to solve than tobacco or obesity or any of these challenges because it involves a self-awareness that we are being tricked, that our minds are being tricked. I think you're absolutely right. When we're thinking about solutions, the way I think about it is for all of these 12 factors, we've got to approach all of them with two different strategies.

I think of them as defense and offense, right? There are loads of things that we can do to defend ourselves and our children immediately right from these factors that are invading their attention so give you an example of what i feel a bit like a qbc person when i do this but uh this is a k-safe have you got one no but i heard you talking about this on another podcast i should sell shares in this company before my book came out because they're massively done better but uh so people who don't know and I know some people are listening on audio, I'm holding up a plastic safe. It's got a lid at the top. You take off the lid,

you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial at the top, and it locks your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. I use that three hours a day to do my writing. I won't sit down to watch a film with my boyfriend unless we both put our phones in the phone bin uh i will have my friends around for dinner unless everyone agrees to imprison their phone and at first it's really terrifying to me that is both hearing about that is both thrilling and terrifying well but that's so fascinating because you know at some level right um and i try to always be very sympathetic about it but you know that the pleasures of sitting with your friends and them listening to you and you try to always be very sympathetic about it but you know that the pleasures of sitting with

your friends and them listening to you and you listening to them is so much greater than the pleasure of whatever shitty distraction is coming up on your notifications right and something like oh my god what if there's an emergency i'm like you're not joe biden you don't need to give orders about you it's like the world could be without you for two hours it's okay if you're in a whole week right it's okay um so there's dozens of things like that that we can do we can talk about lots more that i go through in the book but i try to be really honest with people because i don't think most books about attention and most people who talk about this issue having studied the science in such detail i don't think most

people are leveling with everyone i am passionately in favor of these individual changes they will make a really big difference on their own they will not solve the problem because at the moment it's like someone who's pouring itching powder over us all day and then leaning forward and going hey buddy you should learn to meditate then you wouldn't scratch so much and you want to go screw you i'll learn to meditate that's hugely valuable you need to stop pouring this damn itchy powder on us so what we need to do is collectively take on the forces that are doing this to us that sounds very fancy and abstract but i'll give you lots of practical examples of places i went to they did it i'll give you an example of just one if it's okay um yeah in france in 2018 they were having a huge crisis of what they called low burnout, which

I don't think I need to translate. And the French government, spurred by labor unions, set up an inquiry to figure out why is everyone so burned out all the time? And the guy who ran it, Bruno Metling, discovered one of the key reasons, which was that 40% of French workers felt they could never stop checking their phone or email because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night. And if they didn't answer, they'd be in trouble. So, you know, I can give those people all the lovely self-help advice in the world, buy a case safe, do the other 20 things I talk about in the book. They can't do it,

right? They can't do it. If the price of your employment is that you don't do it, you can't do it, right? So the French french government labor union suggested to the french government a solution which they then adopted because labor unions are powerful in france and you know they fight for their rights what they suggested was that every french worker in law they're given something called the right to disconnect very simple everyone's work hours are laid out in their contract and when their work hours are over you don't have to check your phone or your email when i was in paris rent to kill the best control company was fined 70 000 euros for trying to get one of their workers to check his phone an hour after

he left work now you can see how that's actually restoring us to a state we all remember i mean when we were kids did your parents ever get called by their boss when they came home never happened to my parents right we've gone from almost nobody being on call, except for doctors, the president, to almost half the economy living their whole lives on call. This is a very straightforward solution, which frees people up to make these individual changes we need to make. So I talk about lots of things that we can fight for collectively that will deal with this attention crisis in addition to the things that we can do individually for ourselves and our kids well i i do want to talk about the sort of the individual level sure just because like so we

gave everyone two weeks off around the holiday and you know for like the first time in six years of working here, there were no emails over the two weeks. There was no work problems. I was free. I had a couple of days where I really just didn't have anything to do. And I thought I would, you know, go out, drive around, go read. And I still found it difficult, even without a lot of the distractions of my day-to-day life, I found it difficult to sit and become engrossed in a book. I found it difficult because, you know, I've been trying some of this stuff for a little while now, especially since I've done this show, on my walks without my phone, if I'm just walking to Starbucks and walking back down the street, I think about one thing, but then my mind jumps to 10 other things. And so even getting rid of a lot of the distractions and a lot of the technology, I still feel like it has done something to my brain where it is hard for me to focus even without the outside stimulus.

Yeah, so there's lots of research on this that I've looked at, which is if you develop a habit over time and then abruptly stop, it's very hard. And those habits will carry over into other activities. And I think it's worth thinking about because it's really interesting what you're saying about email. It's worth thinking about the mechanism there that is harming our attention because I didn't understand this until I researched it.

So I went to mit to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world an amazing man named professor l miller he said to me look there's one thing you've got to understand about the human brain more than anything else you can only consciously think about one or two things at a time that's it this is a fundamental limitation of the human brain the human brain hasn't changed significantly in 40 000 years it's not going to change on any time scale we're going to see you can only think about one or two things at a time but what's happened is we've fallen for a kind of mass delusion the average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of

media at the same time and the rest of us aren't very far behind them so what happens is scientists like professor miller scientists all over the world, get people into labs, young people, older people, and they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time. And what they discover is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you juggle very quickly between tasks. You're like, wait, what did John just ask me? What is this message on WhatsApp? What does it say on the tv there the technical term for it is the switch cost effect when you try and do more than one thing at a time you do all the things you're trying to do much less competently you make more mistakes you

remember much less of what you do you're much less creative the evidence is this is really big i'll give you an example of a small study backed by a wider body of evidence hewlett packard the printer company got a scientist in to study their workers and he split them into two groups and the first group was told get on with your task whatever it is and you're not going to be interrupted just do what you got to do and the second group was told get on with your task uh whatever it is but at the same time you've got to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls so pretty much how most of us live and at the end of it the scientists tested the iq of both groups the group that had not been interrupted scored 10 iq points higher

than the group that had to give you a sense of how big that effect is if you and me sat down together and smoked a fat spliff right now our i IQs would go down in the short term by five points. So being chronically interrupted in the short term is twice as bad for your intelligence and attention as getting stoned. You'd be better off sitting at your desk, getting stoned and doing one thing at a time than you would sitting at your desk, not getting stoned and being constantly interrupted. I don't want to get the wrong idea. I might have had that experience from time to time. Well, just to be clear, you'd be better off neither getting stoned nor- Right, yeah, no, of course.

This is why Professor Miller said we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted. So you think about living in that state for a really long time, right? And what we know is attention is a muscle, right? And if you don't use it, it atrophies. But the good news about that is if you do use it, it begins to build up again, right? So for example, I've been in Vegas for a while doing some research. So I don't have a personal trainer there.

I came back to London. I've been away for months. I went back today. It was agony. It was terrible. It was awful, right? And I wanted to cry at the end of it. I know two weeks from now, it'll be merely horrible, right?

Not agony. So attention is like that, right? Can you talk about the experience you had? Because this sort of is a thread throughout the book. You tell the story of how you completely unplugged for about three months. No phone, no internet, like laptop that didn't connect, all that. You went to Provincetown, my home state of Massachusetts. What was that like

how hard was it and what did you learn from that experience i know that you came out of it having ultimately wrote a novel which is pretty cool but um when i haven't read i think that novel might be shit i haven't reread it yet but when you talk about in the book it i what made me like hopeful about that experience was that it was hard at the beginning. Your attention didn't just snap back. Yeah, yeah. So I'd come back from Memphis and I was just disgusted with myself, like horrified. And I thought, you know, this is awful. I don't want to live like this. And I was in this really lucky position that one of my books got made into a big Hollywood movie. It's called The United States versus Billie Holiday.

And so I had some money. And I thought, why am I sitting here not living the life I want to live when I've got money in the bank? This is stupid. So I went away for three months, like you say, to Provincetown. I've been to Provincetown. It's a little gay beach town in Cape Cod. It's the kind of place where more than one person makes a full-time living by dressing as ursula the villain from the little mermaid and singing

songs about cunnilingus it's a great place so i went there and it was really i left my phone my laptop everything in in boston with my friend and uh yeah like i had these three months where i had my friend empty as his broken old laptop that can't get online and i had a phone designed for extremely old people because it's the only phone you can still buy that doesn't access the internet it does have a button we will call the nearest hospital if you fall over which which we had no cause to use and it was a really weird experience because bear in mind i was still locked in those stories that i had right at the start i thought well the problem here is you don't have enough willpower and someone invented the smartphone. So it seemed obvious. Use your willpower, abandon the smartphone.

And I remember the first week was like this just haze of decompression. I felt almost stoned, actually, like just sort of weird. I couldn't quite read or anything. I remember trying to read great expectations the dickens novel i'd be like come on get on with it i've got it you're an orphan come on now come on now i'm going around right um episode irritable but hazed and cheerful and then i had this really blissful couple of weeks where i was stunned by how much my attention came back like you know

because also i thought i was getting older i was nearly 40 i thought maybe my attention is just getting worse i'm getting older my attention went back to being as good as it was when i was 17 i read war and peace i was you know it was amazing and then i can remember exactly how it happened i was walking down the beach and i saw a load of people on the beach who were just doing exactly what people had done in Memphis taking photos you know using Provincetown as like a backdrop for selfies not um but instead of thinking oh you suckers why you're not living your life you're not present I was like I really felt a sense of give me that phone I want it I want to just snatch it off them and I realized

after such a long time of my my whole way of being in the world being mediated by these constant interruptions obviously didn't miss the interruptions what i missed was a particular kind of feedback right if you're online like you and i are john you you gain feedback throughout the day from the world it's saying oh we want to hear from you we liked what you said there we didn't like what you said there and suddenly this is a very pretentious way of putting it but simone de beauvoir said that becoming an atheist was like the world had gone silent for her and it felt for me like the world had gone silent right no ordinary social interaction with someone you've just met will flood you with heart so that'd be a very odd fact it would be extremely frightening and bizarre

right right um so it was this moment where i suddenly felt this crash where like the world had gone silent and i felt this tremendous urge to get back online but luckily i'd sort of hemmed myself into a significant degree and then i sort of realized oh so when you leave this stuff behind you create a vacuum and in that vacuum you've got to fill it with meaning and we'll come back to that in a second because there's lots of things we can do about that and then at the end of the three months having had that weird first week that great two weeks then that horrible crash i then found this very happy state where i really felt better than i have in many years and i remember the last day i was in provincetown i went to the you know where the lighthouse is just beyond there and

i looked out and I could see this little place where I'd been this whole time thinking god why would I ever go back to how I was before this is this has been great and I remember getting the boat back to Boston getting my phone and within two months I was like 70% back where I was and really feeling this kind of revulsion at myself and then just beginning the interviews with the scientists and kind of realizing oh it sets us up to fail to think about it solely in terms of individual changes of course the vast majority of people can't do what I did anyway hardly anyone I know could do that but it wasn't just that it's that it's like going out of a

polluted environment into a place with fresh air and then going back to the place of the polluted environment the solution is not to long for you know then going back to the place of the polluted environment. The solution is not to long for, you know, to go back to the island. The solution is to deal with the pollution. I want to go back to sort of filling the vacuum, that idea, because I think that's key to so much of what you write about. And also I keep coming back to,

if we want these broader societal changes, if we want these policy changes, those have to come from people wanting them. And to get people to want them, people need to be aware that this distraction is a problem. And that when you don't have these devices, or you don't have these distractions, that you can fill the vacuum with something fulfilling. Because I think one of the problems is we like being distracted because when there is no phone, when there are no apps, when there are no screens, and we're just sitting there with our own thoughts, sometimes it's like, well, I liked what I was reading or I liked what I was seeing on TikTok or I liked the conversation I was having on text, right?

And so what are some of the ways that people can start sort of filling the vacuum again? I know you've talked about sort of reading and how to, you know, the collapse of sort of deep reading and deep thinking and how we can get some of that back. But can you maybe walk us through some of that? It's very tempting to frame it the way, and I used to do this, to frame it the way you just did, which is to say, okay, you've got the tech, that's a given.

And then you've got what are the alternatives but actually i think with the tech we need to have a more interrogated relation with this the question is not are you pro-tech or anti-tech the question is what tech do we want working in whose interests designed for what goals the key thing to understand that i learned from a huge number of people in silicon valley people have been at the heart of the machine is that we can have all the tech we currently have but have it not designed to maximally hack and invade our attention indeed with the right regulatory framework it could be designed to help and heal our attention it's a really interesting historical analogy where something like that has happened before so just park that for a second because i think that's that that so i don't want to accept the given of the technology we have is the technology we will always have and we just have to accept and

most importantly that our children are constantly exposed to this technology designed to maximally hack and invade your attention we do not have to tolerate that that is not a given that and the alternative is not no tech i'm not suggesting we will join the amish and convert you know no insult to any amish people who are watching you are cheating if you are watching this though and that that's not that the option is not the invasive tech versus the amish the option is invasive tech versus tech that is humane like my friends run the center the humane technology that's designed to work for as not against us i know that all sounds a bit fancy there are very practical ways we can

deal with that i'll come back to. But in terms of filling the void, for me, when I was in Provincetown, I started to think a lot about a form of science I'd actually studied and learned a lot about before, which is the science of flow states. I later went to interview the leading expert on this. So that flow states were first identified in the 1960s by a totally incredible man named professor mahali cheeks at me hi so for everyone listening everyone watching you will have experienced a flow state even if you don't know the term a flow state is when you're doing something and you just totally get into it the way one rock climber put it is when you're in flow it's like you are the rock you're climbing

and your sense of time falls away your sense of ego falls away and when it's over you're like whoa that went quickly god got a lot done there right and different people get into flow doing different things for me it's writing it might be anyone listening making bagels doing brain surgery it can be almost anything um and flow is really important for the discussion about attention because flow is simultaneously the deepest form of attention that human beings can provide and once you get into it it's the easiest form of attention to provide right it's not like memorizing facts for an exam oh god well you did the civil war again or whatever it comes very easily so obviously i wanted to understand if this is a

gusher of attention that exists inside all of us. Where do we drill? How do we get there? And Professor Csikszentmihalyi discovered loads of things about flow states, obviously, but I think there's three key things that you can do that will maximize your chances of getting into a flow state. It doesn't guarantee it, but it will hugely increase the chances. The first thing you've got to do is you've got to set aside a significant amount of time to do is you've got to set aside a significant amount of time

to do just one thing. I want to paint this canvas, I want to write this chapter, I want to learn to play this song on the guitar, whatever it might be. If you're trying to do more than one thing at a time and that includes answering texts on your phone, you won't get into flow, right? So significant amount of time to do one thing. Secondly, you've got to choose a goal that is meaningful to you, right? Attention evolved to attach to meaning. A frog will stare longer at a fly than it will at a stone because the fly has a lot of meaning to the frog and the stone does not. So attention evolved to attach to meaning.

Make sure that you've got a meaningful goal, right? That it's meaningful to you. Often when your attention breaks down, it can be a sign that what you're trying to do isn't meaningful for you. Not always. Thirdly, and this seemed a bit counterintuitive to me when I first learned it, it will really help if you push yourself to the edge of your abilities but not beyond them. So let's say you're a medium talent rock climber. You don't just want to climb over your garden wall.

It's too easy. Equally, you don't want to suddenly try and climb Mount Everest. It's too much. You want to climb a slightly higher and harder rock face than the one you did last time. Flow begins at the edge of your comfort zone when you push yourself, but not too far. So if you do these three things, set aside a good amount of time to do one task. Make sure that task is meaningful to you. Push yourself to the edge of your abilities but not beyond them, which is a

difficult balance. You massively increase your chances of getting into these deep sense of flow. But of course, we live in an environment, even as I've said all that, you can see how we're currently living in an environment that is militating against all three of those things. Professor Joel Neig, the leading expert on children's attention problems in the United States, said to me that we need to start asking if we're living in what he called an attentional pathogenic environment, an environment that is systematically undermining our attention. If that's the case, and he's raising it as a question, he's not saying we definitively are, then we need to deal with those underlying elements. But certainly, a lot of people listening will be in a position where they can reorganize their life so that they at least have some time in their life when they're creating those conditions afloat.

It's interesting. When I was preparing for this interview, I was reading your book. I was listening to some podcasts you've been on. And I decided that it would be the most depressing irony possible if I was distracted with all the other distractions of life while prepping for an interview with you about stolen focus. So last night I got home and when our toddler went to bed, I tried something new that I don't always do. And I just shut off the Wi-Fi and all of my devices. I put my phone in the other room. So I just had a laptop.

I had your book and I had a laptop. This sounds like it's not revolutionary. People are like, yeah, no shit. I do that all the time. But the time it took me to prepare and sort of the level of thought that I was able to put into it was just it was so much faster and easier than any other task I usually do. And I was like, oh, I should probably do this more. You obviously we've talked a lot about sort of the big policy changes that can be made. And we've talked about we've talked about on the show with other guests and people should continue to push for those. You said you made six big changes in your life that obviously didn't fix all these problems, but I think you said improved your own attention,

like 15 to 20%. Can you talk about what those six changes are? Can I just tell you something that's even more depressing than what you just said about the potential of being, you know, if you couldn't focus on my book because you couldn't focus i went to interview a guy called professor roy baumeister who's the leading expert on willpower in the world the people who know something called the marshmallow test he's the guy who invented the marshmallow test an amazing scientist i went to interview me as professor in queensland in australia and it was one of the first interviews i did for the book and i said to him so you know i'm writing this book about attention I'm really keen to understand how the science you work on is relevant to attention and he said something like the exact quote is in the book that was interesting you say

that because I've noticed I can't really focus very much anymore right I just play Candy Crush a lot of time a lot of time on my phone and i'm sort of sitting there like hey you're the willpower guy what did you write a book called willpower i'm the leading but but actually it was really helpful because you know just naked willpower is not going to solve this problem right what works is environmental change as much as possible at an individual level and at a societal level i think for these six and there'll be lots of other things that emerge for people from reading the book and there's lots of other solutions these are just the six that stuck with me one is what's called pre-commitment pre-commitment is where you want to do something better for yourself but you know you're likely to crack right so for me it's if i

buy cookies and they're in my cupboard i said i'm not going to eat them at 2 a.m i will eat them at 2 a.m right so my problem pre-commitment for that is I don't ever buy cookies and bring them into my home. Right? I just don't ever let them there. So there's all sorts of forms of pre-commitment. We talked about the Ksafe, the PlasticSafe. I would really recommend absolutely everyone listening go and download Freedom. It's an app that cuts you off either from a specific website, say you're addicted to Instagram or whatever it might be or it will cut you off from the entire internet go and download that now so that's pre-commitment uh what is changing your relationship to your own distraction i had a very how to put it extremely negative self-dialogue when i couldn't focus when i couldn't focus i before doing all this research i'd be

like i'm an idiot what's wrong with you why aren't you strong enough shut up proust is really interesting keep going why can't you do that right i don't do that anymore partly by learning these structural causes you get out of this frenzy of self-criticism and actually get angry with the people who have actually done this to you yeah um another one is i take half the year off social media at least in fact i'm about to um probably by the time this airs i will no i should be a little bit after this airs i um i'm taking the whole year off um social media i've got to finish my next book which is about a series of terrible crimes that been happening in las vegas that i've been researching for 12 years i've really i've written about half of it i really want to give that my full saying that really matters to me i want to give it my full

attention so i'm taking the whole year off so to do that what i do two things i announce that i'm taking the whole year off because then you're like an absolute fool of two weeks later you pop up and you're like oh i see you know john baylor Boehner did this. It's not good. And then I get my assistant to change my password. So even if I crack, I can't do it. So announce that you're taking time off social media and really do it. You can also set freedom. I do this on my phone

so that it just renews every 24 hours. So I have Twitter and Instagram permanently blocked on my phone. I can't ever look at them on my phone wow mind wandering is a whole other topic but to put it succinctly mind wandering is what happens when you allow your mind to think without any immediate stimulus you don't have anything to look at you don't have a podcast to listen to you're just letting your thoughts float freely and And in our culture, we're kind of taught that mind-wandering is a bad thing. If you go to your a few years ago, you're going to your kid's parents' evening, and if they say, oh, your child daydreams all day, that won't be seen as a good thing. But actually there's been this huge

renaissance of science in the last 20 years around mind-wandering. And I interviewed many of the people who've made huge breakthroughs on this like Professor Marcus Reichel and essentially mind wandering is one of the most important mental states we can get into when you let your mind wander you process your past you anticipate your future and you bring together ideas that otherwise you would not see the connections in which is where creativity comes from so mind wandering is essential for creativity and processing and anticipating and we really have really squeezed out mind wandering from our culture it's very unusual that you see someone just you know wandering around with nothing to distract them and so now every day wherever i am in the world i give myself an hour a day where i go for a walk and i don't have my phone and i don't have any devices

and i and i just let my mind wander it was really difficult to do that at first but that is almost invariably the most creative and fertile hour of my day so yeah i would really recommend try to build time for more even if you give yourself 15 minutes a day you'll want to build that up more another is i massively prioritize sleep um we sleep 20 less than people did a century ago dr charles sizler the leading sleep expert in the world at harvard medical school said to me even if nothing else had changed that alone would be causing an enormous crisis in attention and focus and there's lots of reasons why but one of them is the whole time you're awake your brain is building up what's called metabolic waste one

scientist called it to me brain cell poop which helped me to understand it and when you go to sleep especially longer into your sleep uh your cerebral spinal fluid channels open and a watery fluid washes through your brain and carries that brain cell poop down into your kidneys and eventually out of your body if you don't get eight hours sleep a night that stays clogging up your brain and it slows your brain down this is why often when you haven't slept well you actually feel clogged up and almost hung over yeah it's not a metaphor you are literally clogged up so i used to see sleep as like a wasteful indulgence now i really prioritize it and the last thing uh obviously a lot of the book is about children with the children in my life who i love i don't have kids of my own but i'm very close to

my god sons and my nephews and my niece i used to always do these like improving middle class things like it's about class mobility my grandmother was a clean toilets for living and i kind of thought oh now i've become middle class i have to they have well take them to music you have to do these things right um and actually all the evidence is the single best thing you can do for your child's attention is let them run around freely with other children and not stand over them enforcing the rules i talk in the book about why that's so important for attention um partly just because exercises but also it's when children are playing freely with other children that they learn how to deal with anxiety and how to make things happen which are crucial elements

of attention and we have just crowded that out of our children's lives right uh by 2003 only 10% of american children ever played outside without an adult supervising them when you take away free play from children you hugely stunt their ability to focus and pay attention without going into it too much there's an amazing group that is the solution to this i write about in the book but anyone with children go to letgrow.org and you can learn all about how they are restoring free play and massively healing children's attention so now when i'm with the kids i love i try not to do that kind of helicopter parenting improving uh and and try to actually let them just like play which is call me crazy uh and yeah that so those are some of the changes i've made but there's loads of other

changes some of which i really struggle with the eating there's some stuff i couldn't really stick with but the other people i know who've read the book have stuck with and that the science does recommend. So different people will have different things they connect with. And if there's something as complex as attention, you know, there's these 12 big causes. When I started writing the book, I thought it would be a book about tech, but actually only about a third of the book is about tech, right? There's all these other big factors that are playing out. But the main thing i was left with was just this was this really deep sense of optimism you know these factors that are doing this to us are quite recent there are solutions that aren't just turning back the clock there are loads of places that are pursuing those solutions that i saw that aren't like fantasy science fiction

policy paper imaginations new ze Zealand is a real place. It's quite nice. Quite boring, but quite nice. Sorry, I apologize to all the people in New Zealand. I think they know. It was really exciting. At the start, I was in such a funk of pessimism. There's something wrong with me.

We're fucked. We're trapped in the matrix. By the end of it, I was like, this is a much more solvable problem than I thought. There's so much we can do. What we've got to do now is change our consciousness so we can get to those things. We'll end on that note of optimism.

Fantastic advice. Fantastic book, Stolen Focus. Everyone go read it. Johan Hari, thank you so much for joining Offline. Cheers. joining Offline. Cheers! Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our

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