Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 439: Why You Can’t Pay Attention - And How to Think Deeply Again | Johann Hari

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

What is it about modern life that is completely disrupting our ability to focus, and how much of it is our fault? Turns out, not a lot. A number of factors from technology to our sleep habits, and even air pollution, play a role in what causes us to have about the same attention regulation skills as a kitten. In this first episode of our two-part series on focus, guest Johann Hari breaks down why our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and what we can do about it. Johann Hari is the author of Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again. His first book, Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs was adapted into the Oscar nominated film The United States Vs Billie Holiday as well as a documentary series. Johann is also the author of Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions which was featured in a previous episode. His TED Talks have been viewed more than 80 million times.   In this episode we talk about: Johann’s notion that there are twelve factors draining our focusHis argument for the importance of both collective and individual action to reclaim our attentionWhat he learned from a self-imposed three-month internet-free experimentHow this impacts our children, and what we might do about it Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/johann-hari-439See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I have noticed that often when I sit down to meditate or try to get any work done or endeavor to have a sustained conversation with another homo sapien. My mind can be all over the place. I seem to have the same attention regulation skills as Arquiton, Ozymandias, who I have noticed within a range of roughly 30 seconds can go from chasing a ladybug to chasing his own tail to gnawing on my foot. Again, maybe I'm alone in this, or maybe this

is just part of the human condition. I think a lot of people feel like they are uniquely distractible that they have some sort of bespoke lunacy. However, as I like to say, for better or worse, you are not special, at least in this regard. Evolution bequeathed us a racing mind that is really good at spotting threats and finding food. And my guest today will argue that modern life is making our inborn tendencies way worse. He says we're in the midst of a perfect storm of cognitive distortion. But he doesn't just complain about it, he offers some practical solutions. Johann Hari is a journalist and author.

His new book is called Stolen Focus. Why you can't pay attention and how to think deeply again. His first book, Chasing the Scream, the first and last days of the war on drugs, was adopted into the Oscar-nominated film, The United States, versus Billy Holiday. His second book was Lost Connections, uncovering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions. He came on this show actually to discuss that book. It was a hugely popular episode, so we're happy to have him back. In this conversation, we talk about Johan's argument that there are 12 factors that are draining our focus, none of which are our fault as individuals, but all of which can be combated.

We'll get granular on some of those factors, which include everything from social media, to our diets, to our sleep habits, to air pollution. We talk about his argument for the importance of both collective and individual action to reclaim our attention. What he learned from a self-imposed three-month internet-free experiment, his tips for maximizing not just attention, but also states of flow, how all of this is impacting our children and what can be done about that. And we get his response to his critics. I should mention this is part one of a two-part series this week on focus.

Coming up on Wednesday, we're going to talk to the great Dharma teacher, Shaila Catherine, about how to focus in meditation. Heads up before we dive in here, there are some references to a variety of sensitive topics, including obesity, drug use, sexual assault, and domestic violence. We will get started with Johan Hari right after this. Before we jump into today's show,

many of us wanna live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app.

It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay. On with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur.

On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast.

Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Yo, Anhari, welcome back. Hey, Dan. I'm so happy to be back with you. So you've written about addiction and you've written about depression. In fact, you came on and gave a great interview on this show a couple years ago on the subject of depression. Now you're writing about our struggles with attention. Why and how did you come to that subject? It started with something very personal for me, which is that with each year that passed, it felt to me like things that required deep focus, like reading a book, having deep conversations,

watching long movies even, we're getting more and more like running up a down escalator. You know what I mean? I could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. And I noticed this seemed to be happening to a lot of people around me, particularly the young people that I know,

a lot of whom seem to be kind of worrying at the speed of Snapchat, where nothing still or serious could touch them. And I started to do just some very small initial research and was quite struck by how far these trends have gone. For every one child who was diagnosed with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now a hundred kids who've been identified

with that problem. The average American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. So I wanted to understand what's happening to our attention, why is this happening to us? So I use my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to go on a really big journey, most of it obviously before the plague, and I traveled all over the world from Moscow to Miami to Melbourne to Montreal and not just cities that begin with the letter M, I don't

know why I was so literative there. And I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts in the world on focus and attention, and dug really deeply into their science. And what I learned from them is that there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse, and loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been significantly rising in recent years. In fact, Professor Joel Nick, one of the leading experts on children's attention problems in the world, told me we need to start asking if we're living in what he said was an intentional pathogenic culture,

one in which we're all gonna struggle to pay attention. But the most important thing I learned is your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some very big forces. And once we understand what those 12 forces are, it opens up a very different set of ways in which we can get our brains back. So it's not our fault. We may be telling ourselves a story that we're uniquely damaged, but there's more a

foot here. Yeah, when I started working on this, the story I told myself was there's just something wrong with me. I don't have enough willpower. I'm not strong enough, right? Why can't I resist this stuff? And I guess I had one other story which was someone invented the smartphone

and that must have done this to me as well. But I had these very simplistic stories in my head. And it was funny for a long time, I was stuck with those stories, I felt my attention getting worse. And actually, it was a very personal experience that made me realize I had to start investigating the science of this.

I've got a godson who in the book I named Adam. And when he was nine, he developed this brief, but freakishly intensive session with Elvis. I never understood how he found out about Elvis, but it was particularly cute, because he didn't know that Elvis had become a kind of cheesy cliche. So he was singing all the Elvis songs and doing the impersonation with all the kind of heart-catching sincerity of a little boy who sincerely believes he's being cool. One night, I was tucking him into beddies to get me to tell him the story of Elvis'

life over and over again. I tried to skip the bit at the end where Elvis died on the toilet. And one night he looked at me really intensely. And he said to me, Yo Han, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I said, sure, I'll take you. The way you do with nine-year-olds, knowing that next week it'll be Lego Land or whatever. And he said, no, do you really promise one day

you are going to take me to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely promise. And I didn't think of it again for 10 years until so many things had gone wrong. Adam had dropped out of school when he was 15 and by the time he was 19 he was just spending his entire life alternating between YouTube, porn, WhatsApp, Snapchat and I remember one afternoon we were sitting on my sofa and I had been trying to talk to him all day and I just could not get any traction. And to be honest, I wasn't that much better than I was sitting there staring 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 was like, what? You didn't even remember this thing that I'd promised all those years before, but I reminded him. And I said to him, let's break this numbing routine. This is no way to live. Let's just get out of here. We'll go all over the South. We'll go to Graceland. But you've got to promise me one thing, which is that when we go, you'll leave your devices

in the hotel. You won't, you know, we'll be constantly getting a Snapchat everywhere we go in it. And he made this promise. And two weeks later, we took off London, he threw to New Orleans. And a couple of weeks later we arrived at the gates of Graceland and when you get there, this is even before COVID, there's nobody who shows you around anymore. The way it works is they hand you an iPad, you put in some earbuds and the iPad shows you around so it says, you know, go left, go right, whatever. And in each place you go in Graceland, there's a picture of that place on the iPad in front of you.

So what happens is everyone just walks around Graceland staring at their iPads. And I was walking around getting more and more tense because it's like, we came here to get away from the subcession with devices and no one's even looking around them. And we finally got to the jungle room, which was Elvis' favorite room in Graceland. And there was a Canadian couple next to us. And the Canadian guy 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 like, you just did, I laughed, right?

I thought he was kidding. And I turn and look at them and they're just swiping back and forth on the iPad. And I leaned over and I said, Hey, Sarah, there's an old fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning your head because, look, we're actually in the juggler room. You don't have to look at a digital representation of it. Look, we're literally here. And they look to me like, I was some kind of maniac. I come back to out of the room. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it to say, God, isn't this funny? And he was in a corner looking at his phone, flicking through Snapchat, because from the minute we landed, he could not stop.

And I stormed up to him and I said, I know you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you're missing out. You're not present at your own life. You're not showing up to your own existence. You're missing your life. I tried to grab the phone off him, never a good idea with a teenager, and he stormed off as well. And I stomped around Memphis on my own, and that night I found him in the heartbreak hotel

where we were staying up the street, and he was sitting by the guitar-shakes swimming port looking at his phone, and I went up up to him and I apologized for getting so angry. And I said that I was sorry and that I wish I hadn't done it. He didn't look up at me, but he just said, I know something's really wrong here, and I don't know what it is. And that was when I thought, you know, I've got to look into this, I've got to investigate this,

is this really just a failure of individual will power or something more happening here? And that's when I decided I had to go on this journey to investigate the science. Okay, so let's talk about the science. You mentioned earlier the 12 causes for our apparent degradation in attentional capacity. Let's go through some of these. One of them you list is the increase in speed in our lives, which has been referred to as the great acceleration. What's that all about? Yeah, there's lots of evidence that when you go faster, your ability to pay attention to any individual thing you do gets much worse. And we are doing everything faster. There's evidence

we talk significantly faster than we did in the past. We walk significantly faster than we did in the past. It's obviously connects with the themes that are very important to you, Dan, because Professor Guy Clackston, who's at the University of Winchester, he's a professor of the Learning Sciences, has done really interesting research where he looked at loads of different practices that involve slowing down from meditation to yoga to Tai Chi. And what he found is all of these practices improve attention, not just when you're doing them, obviously your attention is a bit better when you're doing them, but they improve your attention even when you're not doing them if you

build them regularly into your life. And I think this fits with the wider evidence with slowness, slowing down boosts attention. What we've lost is depth. What we've lost is the ability to pause and think deeply. And with that, we lose so much more. I would just say to anyone listening, 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 lot of focus and attention. And the evidence shows that when focus and attention break down as they clearly are now, our ability to achieve our goals and our ability to solve our problems also breaks down.

We can all feel it when you can't pay attention, you're just less competent, you can't follow through on things. In many ways you become like a kind of stump of yourself, you can sense what you might have been, but you feel like you can't get there. And obviously, speed is one key aspect to that, and there's one factor in speed that I think everyone listening, unless they're extraordinarily guru-like, will be experiencing this today. So I went to interview a man named Professor Earl Miller who's one of the leaving neuroscientists in the world. And he said to me, he's at MIT, we're interviewed him. 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 just a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years. It's not going to change on any time frame. Any of us are going to see, you could only

think about one or two things at a time. But what's happened is we've fallen for a mass delusion. The average American teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. So what happens is scientists get people into labs and they get them to think they're doing lots of things at the same time and they monitor them. And what they discover are always, as you can't do more than one thing at a time, what you do is you juggle very rapidly between tasks.

Your consciousness kind of papers over it to give you a seamless impression of consciousness, but actually you're just very rapidly juggling and going, wait, what was that on Facebook? What did you just say on the TV? What did Dan just ask me? What's this message on WhatsApp? You're juggling, juggling, juggling. And it turns out that comes with an enormous cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. So when you try and do more than one thing at a time, you will do all the things you're trying to do much less competently. You'll make way more mistakes. You'll remember much less of what you're doing. You'll be much less creative. When it's first explained to me, I profess

a Miller and other scientists, and I'd start looking at their work. At first I thought, yeah, I get that, but that's a small effect, right? You can intuitively ruin it, it's true. It's a shockingly big effect. I'll give you an example from one quite small study, but there's about a wider body of evidence. He'll at Packard, the printer company, got a scientist in to work with their workers, and the scientist split their workers into two groups. And the first group was told, just do whatever your task is and you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told, do whatever your task is, but you're going to have to answer a heavy load of phone calls in email, so pretty much how most of us work.

And at the end of it, this scientist measured the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored 10 IQ points higher than the group that had been interrupted. To give you a sense of how big an effect that is, when you smoke cannabis and get stoned, in the short term, your IQ goes down by five points. So, this constant distraction is twice as bad for your intelligence as getting stoned. You'll be better off sitting at your desk, getting stoned and doing one

thing at a time, then you are doing what most of us do, which is sitting at your desk, not getting stoned and trying to do lots of things at St. up. To be clear, you'll be better off doing neither getting stoned or stretching. This is why Professor Miller told me we live in what he called a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being interrupted. Same just one of the fact, Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon discovered if you're interrupted it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted. But most of us never get 23 minutes spare. So we're constantly

operating at this profoundly diminished level of intelligence, of attention, of brain power, a different study found. If you get just eight text messages in an hour, that lowers your brain power for the task you're doing by 30%. That's a lot of brain power for us to be losing all the time. So just to remind folks we're going through the 12 causes that you identified of cognitive degradation. And we started with speed and you move to another cause, which you discussed in your book, switching. And you actually, from what I can tell, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong here, lump three causes into one chapter, speed and switching, which we've've just covered and then something called filtering

Yeah, so filtering is again everyone will have experienced this So I'm talking to you now from a hotel room in Florida if I turn my head very slightly I can see out the window quite a lot of people walking past they're walking down towards the beach if I look around this room I can see all sorts of details in this room. Over in the corner of the room, I've got my phone, I'm deliberately not looking at it. I'm filtering out everything else in this room and I'm focusing on your question. I'm saying, what would a dangerous person ask me? Are you asking me about filtering? So, different environments have different levels of filtering. So, for example, we know there's lots of evidence.

People who live in noisy areas find it much harder to pay attention than people who live in quiet areas because it takes a certain amount of brain power to filter things out, right? I'm filtering out the people just outside the window, but if there was a construction site across the street, my filtering powers would have to be working much harder. The way Professor Adam Gazzali, who's a brilliant neuroscientist, who I'm going to feed in San Francisco, but it's me, he said, you've got to think of this. It's like there's a brilliant neuroscientist, arranged for you in San Francisco, but it's me. He said, you've got to think of this as like, there's a bouncer in your head, right?

This is the metaphor he gives for the prefrontal cortex part of the brain. There's a bouncer in your head. And for you to be able to focus, that bouncer can fight off a lot of people. He can keep five people out of the nightclub. He can keep 10 people out of the nightclub, but at a certain point in that bouncer

just gets overwhelmed and can't protect your attention. It can't keep out all these things that you're having to filter. And I think most people can see, and there's strong evidence, our filtering powers have to kick in much more now than they did in the past. So there's all sorts of reasons. And a way I think of them, it's interesting because obviously when I say I wrote this book about why we can't pay attention and how we can get our minds back and our attention back loads of people think, oh, see, write a book about tech, right? And that was initially what I thought would be the dominant theme of the book.

It's why I did this very extreme experiment with my own tech use, which I'm sure we'll get to. But actually, infeying the leading experts in the world digging really deeply into the science. Actually what I learned is although there is a component in our tech that is profoundly harming our attention and we will have to deal with. Actually I don't think this is the biggest factor. I think what's happening is to use a metaphor that's horribly familiar to us from the last two years. If you think about the elements of the tech that we use that are designed to invade our attention. If you think of them as like a virus, right?

They arrived at a moment when our immune system was already down We were already doing lots of things that are profoundly damaging our attention We sleep drastically less than we did in the past we sleep 20% less than we did a century ago We can talk about sleep. The food we eat is profoundly damaging our ability to focus and pay attention. We're exposed to air pollution that's profoundly damaging our attention. All sorts of factors are going on, are lowering our ability to focus, and then these invasive technologies arrive, designed to hack our attention, and us and our kids, and obviously

in the last quarter of the book is about what's happening to our kids and what we can do about that. I'm much more proud to that everyone listening, just think about how Davey Veeaton allows you to feed and you didn't sleep very well the night before. That's much more likely to be a day when you just mindlessly scroll through Facebook or TikTok than a day when you slack well, you've eaten well, you know, you're not overworked, you're up for the game. All these factors are coming together and that's why we have to build solutions to these problems one by one. I definitely want to get into your thoughts about the solutions, but let's live in the problem for a second. You just listed a few other of the 12 causes are diets, the level

of pollution in the atmosphere, the rise of exhaustion, lack of sleep. Can you say a little bit more about that, noxious cocktail? Yeah, so this really surprised me because a lot of these factors, to be honest, and telling to the experts, I hadn't really thought about them very much in relation to attention.

So think about food, right? As I thought you and I have talked about before, Dan, I was raised by my working class, Scottish grandmother, effectively on the diet almost entirely of junk food. The day the microwave was invented was the happiest day of my grandmother's life. So I don't say this with any superiority. There's been this really interesting rise of a movement called nutritional psychiatry that looks at the ways in which what we eat affects our mental capacities, our ability to use our brains.

And from interfering a lot of the leading figures in that field, I learned at the moment there's at least three ways in which what we eat is really damaging our focus and attention. The first is, so let's imagine you have the standard American or British breakfast, the kind of thing that I grew up eating, I expect you grew up eating as well. Let's say a sugary cereal or white bread and butter or something like that toast. What that does is that releases a huge amount of energy really quickly to your brain. It releases a lot of glucose. So your energy level is just kick in when you eat that and it feels great. You're like, oh, I've woke it up. You feel like you're alert. But what happens is you

get to your desk an hour or two later, or your kid gets to their school desk and your energy absolutely slubs it crashes. And you experience what's called brain fog, which is where it's very difficult to focus until you have another sugary carbietry. And the way we eat puts us on a rollercoaster of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day, which gives us long patches of brain fog in which we struggle to focus. The way Dale pinnuck is one of the leading

nutritionists in Britain put it to me, it's like we're putting rocket fuel into a mini. It'll go really fast for five minutes and then it'll just stop, right, and then it needs some more rocket fuel. The second way is that in order for your brain to fully operate, for your brain to work fully, you need to have a whole series of nutrients in your diet and our diets are chronically lacking in many crucial nutrients. Most famously omega-3s, which are found in fish,

fresh fish, sardines, and it turns out supplements just don't cut it. Your body does not absorb supplements in the same way that it does actual food. The third way is even more disturbing. It's not just that our food lacks the nutrients we need. Our diets also contain chemicals that act on us like drugs and interfere with our attention. There's a study in the British City of Southampton in 2007, but they've got 300 kids and they

split them into two groups. And one group was just given water to drink and the other group was given water, laced with the kind of synthetic dyes that occur in the food that most of us buy in the supermarket for most days and candies, various popular chocolate bars and whatever. And then the kids were monitored and the kids who drank the synthetic dyes were significantly more likely to become manic, to become hyperactive, to struggle with their attention. So you can see how these three factors are coming together. And it's interesting because if you look at all of the 12 factors that I write about in the book, there's two levels at which we've got to deal with this. I think of them as defense and offense.

So there are lots of things that we can do as isolated individuals, tomorrow, to protect and defend ourselves and our children as much as possible from these forces. And I'm passionately in favour of those things. I do them myself. They can significantly boost your attention. But I also want to be honest with people, at the moment, it's like we're living in an environment where we're being covered with itching powder all day. And then the people covering us with itching powder are leaning forward and saying, hey, buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch so much.

Now, I'm passionately in favour of meditation, as you know, we've discussed this before. But we also need to stop the forces that are pouring itching powder on us because they're undermining our ability to be mindful. So you think about this in relation to food. Of course most people listening will be able to make some adjustments in their diet, but they're also up against an enormous food industry that has profoundly transformed the way that we eat. In three generations, my Swiss grandmother found the food I ate incomprehensible when she looked at British junk food. She'd grown up on a, the side, a wooden heart on the side of a mountain, all her life,

she ate fresh, nutritious food. She grew and cooked herself like almost all humans before her. And when I took her to McDonald's, she literally didn't even recognize it as food. She didn't understand what it was. She was incredulous that I was eating it. From the moment we're born, we are inculcated in a machinery that gets us to associate positive feelings with unhealthy food. More 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means, the know their own last name in the United States. So there's an enormous food industry that is designing highly addictive food that

goes directly to our crew primitive pleasure centers and really harms us. Now as an individual, to some degree, those of us who are privileged and lucky can opt out of that, but the United States is what's called an obesity-genic environment and environment, which is very easy to become obese and quite hard to get out of there. And the way we've got to deal with that is we've got to deal with the food supply system. The reason why they have drastically lower obesity and say Norway or the Netherlands, is not because Americans are somehow greedy or lazy

and people in Norway are what thrifty and industrious, is because in those countries, they've actually taken steps to change the environment. For example, subsidize healthy food, not subsidize unhealthy food, not subsidize unhealthy food, which is what we do in the US, to build cities that it's easy to walk and bike around, to have policies that reduce stress, which reduces comfort eating, in a similar way, for all of the things that are damaging our attention with one exception, air pollution,

well, I think there's only a collective solution, that we've got to have two levels of solution, we've got to have the individual steps,. We've got to have the individual steps and we've got to have these bigger collective steps as well. Coming up, Johann talks about the impact of factors as varied as sleep, air pollution and technology on our attention. He offers an alternative vision for what social media could be and he'll tell us what happens when he quit the internet for

three months, right after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts.

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but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. Could you say a little bit more about both sleep and pollution as causes for reduction in our capacity to focus? Yeah, these were two of the most shocking for me. So I think one of the moments when it really landed for me, I knew I was exhausted and I knew that almost everyone around me seemed to be exhausted. Only 15% of us wake up feeling refreshed.

40% of Americans are chronically sleep deprived, meaning they get less than 7 hours a night on average. And it really landed for me, though, two scientists in particular, interviewed loads of scientists, but it's too particular where the moments really landed with me. I went to interview a man called Dr. Charles Seisler, who's at Harvard Medical School, and arguably the leading sleep expert in the world. He's advised everyone from the US Secret Service to the Boston Red Sox on sleep. And there's one experiment he did that really took me back.

He combined two forms of technology. There's a form of technology that can scan your eyes to see what you're looking at. And there's a form of technology where you all know about that can scan your brains. So what he got is he got tired people and they weren't that tired. And he puts them in these machines to see what they're looking at and to monitor their brains. And what he discovered is when you're tired, you could appear to be awake, you could be looking around you, you could be talking as surely as I'm talking to you, Dan. And yet, whole parts of your brain can have

gone to sleep. This is called local sleep because it's local to one part of the brain. It turns out when we say we're half asleep, that's not a metaphor. A lot of us are literally half asleep, a lot of the time. If you stay awake for just 19 hours, which doesn't sound very much when I say it, that damages your attention as much as if you had got legally drunk. And obviously I wanted to understand why, right? By the way, Dr. Seisler said to me,

even if nothing else had changed, even if the only change that had happened in our society was that we sleep 20% less than we did a century ago. In fact, children sleep 85 minutes less than they did a century ago. Even if that was the only change that had happened, that alone would be causing a very serious attention crisis. And as everyone listening knows, that is certainly not the only change that's happened. And I wanted to understand why is sleep so important for attention. One of the people who helped me to understand that is an amazing woman named

Professor Roxanne Prishard, who's at the University of Minneapolis, Ray interviewed her. And she's discovered many things about this, but she's explained to me, we think of sleep as a passive process, right? You know, people joke, oh, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Sleep is a profoundly active process. When you go to sleep, your brain is cleaning and repairing itself. So throughout the day, when you're awake, metabolic waste builds up in your brain. What Professor Prishard calls brain cell poop. And when you go to sleep, a watery fluid rinses through your brain, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open up, and that metabolic waste is carried down to your liver and out of your body. If you don't give yourself eight hours sleep a night, your brain can't

clean itself properly. So you know that feeling you get when you're tired, when you feel hungover, you feel clogged up. Again, that's not a metaphor. Your brain is literally clogged up. This is why, by the way, people who sleep less are significantly more likely to get dementia later in life because their brains are literally clogged up. But you can see how this huge decline in sleep is a massive factor. Or look at pollution, Professor Barbara Duminier, who's one of the leading scientists in France, she won the Leisonde-on-Eur, the highest civilian honoured in France.

So she said to me, as a result of the pollutants we're exposed to, it is not possible to have a normal brain today, quite a sobering thing to hear from a leading scientist. And one of the factors is Professor Barbara Mah, who's at the University of Lancaster in Britain, has done lots of important research on this. So anyone listening who lives in any city in the Western world, as you walk around, you're breathing in air pollution.

And one of the things you're breathing in is iron. Actually, a lot of people became conscious of this during COVID because air pollution went right down. My sinus problems went away. I thought I've had to start from my adult life. They just went away during COVID. They started again now that we've started again. But one of the things you're breathing in is iron. Now, nothing in human evolution prepared people to absorb iron through the nose directly into the brain. There's just nothing in our evolution

that prepared for that. And what this does, Professor Mar and other scientists, including people in Mexico City and Spain have shown, is that this causes brain inflammation. The way Professor Mar and other scientists, including people in Mexico City and Spain, have shown, is that this causes brain inflammation. The way Professor Mar put it to me is this causes a chronic repeated insult to the brain, which over time, damages your ability to focus and pay attention. Some of the research on this is horrifying. There was a study in Mexico City, compared kids in a heavily polluted area, part of Mexico City to a part that was not heavily polluted. And the kids in the heavily polluted area already have plaques and tangles that look like

early forms of literally what dementia patients get. So the exposure to the pollution we're getting is clearly affecting our ability to focus and pay attention. Something I had never thought about. There is something that I have thought about it. I think all of us have thought about it and you made it nod toward it, but I think it's worth diving into it quite deeply as one of the causes of this current situation. And that is just the rise in technology.

So what have you learned here that might be illuminating, given that we all know technology is complex? I spent a lot of time exploring this in Silicon Valley with a lot of the people who designed key aspects of the apps and the parts of the internet that obsess us and our children because this was obviously something I really wanted to get to the bottom of. And I learned a huge amount both in terms of the personal solutions we can pursue and the collective solutions we can pursue. But one of the things that first struck me was how much, even the people who created this world have been hijacked by it. In Tristan Harris, so a lot of your viewers will know about

a wonderful person. He had been at the heart of Google. And he worked on the Gmail team when Gmail was first been invented. One thing they were particularly focused on was how to get people to pick up Gmail more often, how to get the people who had already signed up to use Gmail more frequently throughout the day. And one day he was in the Googleplex. And one of his colleagues just said, I've got an idea. Why don't we make it so that whenever anyone gets an email, they're fine vibrates a little

bit. And everyone said, oh, that's a good idea. Let's do it. And a week later Tristam was walking around San Francisco and he just heard these vibrations all around him like a kind of dystopian bird song and he suddenly thought wait we did that and that's happening all over the world one of the things he discovered calculated later was that that decision that him and his colleagues made so casually was causing 10 billion interruptions to people's

day throughout the day across the world. 10 billion. Think about what I was explaining before about how when you're made to switch tasks, it degrades your attention. Think about that being done 10 billion times. Think about the fact, like I mentioned before, that every time you're interrupted, it takes you 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before. Imagine that being done 10 billion times.

And Tristan was particularly worried about this because he felt it damaging his own attention, his own ability to focus. One of his friends and colleagues at Google, who I also interviewed and spent a lot of time with later, Dr. James Williams, we was speaking at a tech conference one day and was increasingly uncomfortable with what they were doing. And this tech conference was full of people who are designing the things that obsess the kids of everyone listening to this podcast and the show.

And he said to them, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we've created, please put up your hand now and not one person put up their hand. So the most important thing to understand, the thing that blew my mind about learning about this is that the way to frame this problem is are you protect or anti-tech, right? And actually that just makes you feel fatalistic because we're not going to give up our technology. So you sort of just like, oh, well, we just have to be protect by default. But actually, the question is not are you protect or anti-tech? The question is, what tech should we have designed for what purposes working in whose interest? And this became clear to me when it was explained to me by all these people.

And this became clear to me when it was explained to me by all these people. What the current business model for social media is and what the alternatives to that business model are. Because at the moment, social media has been designed around one very specific goal that is profoundly harming us. So anyone listening, if you take out your phone, don't do it, but if you took out your phone now and you opened Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, whatever it is, those apps start to make money out of you immediately in two ways. The first way is obvious.

You see ads, we all know how that works. The second way is much more important. Everything you do on Facebook or on the other apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence. For a simple reason, they're building up a profile of you, a very detailed profile of you. So let's say that on Facebook you said that you like Betmiddler, Donald Trump, and you told your mom you'd just bought diapers, right? I'm guessing this is a small vendigran, but there might be someone out there like that.

They're building up an enormously complex picture of you throughout the day. Think of all the things, all the tens of thousands of facts you've ever divulged about yourself on social media. The way Azeraskin, he designed a key part of how the internet works, explained it to me is they're building up a voodoo dollar view. And they're building up that voodoo dollar for two reasons. Firstly, because they want to figure

out what the weaknesses are in your attention, so they can keep you scrolling. And secondly, because they want to sell that information about you to advertisers, because you are not the customer of Facebook or any of these other apps, you are the product they sell to advertisers, right? Your attention is the product they market. So when you understand that, the key thing you need to know is that every time you open these apps, they make money. And every extra second you scroll, they make more money. And every time you put

down those apps or close them, those revenue streams disappear. So all of their engineering power, all of their algorithmic genius, all of these super smart people in Silicon Valley, they are deploying their intelligence for one goal and one goal only. To figure out how do we get Dan to pick up his phone as often as possible and scroll as long as possible,

how do we get Dan's kids to pick up their phones as often as possible and scroll as long as possible? That's it. That's their sole business model. And this is not just some view from the disaffected people who've left. This is what the key figures in Facebook say, Sean Parker, one of the biggest initial investors in Facebook, right at the birth of the whole thing, he said, we designed Facebook to maximally invade people's attention. We knew what we were doing and we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.

That's what he said. I can quote you lots of other people from Facebook who said similar things and we now have leaked research from within Facebook showing that they know that own data scientists showed, they know they're destroying our collective attention. But the really important thing about this that amazed me is that social media doesn't have to work that way.

We can have social media that isn't designed to maximally invade our attention. And I only really began to understand that when I thought about it through a historical metaphor. So you'll remember, I think we're about the same age, Dan. You'll remember from when we were kids. It used to be normal, my mum used to do it, I'm sure your parents did, to put leaded gasoline in your car. That was the dominant form of gasoline, right? It also, a little bit before our time, used to be completely normal that people would paint their homes with leaded paint. And it had been known, go all the way back to ancient Rome,

that exposure to lead is really bad for you. By the 1920s, an amazing scientist, called Dr. Alice Hamilton, had discovered the exposure to lead is particularly bad for children's brains and particularly bad for children's ability to focus and pay attention. But the lead industry funded a kind of

bogus pseudoscience to deny this. But by the time he got to the 1970s, when we were born, the evidence was just overwhelming. The exposure to lead really harmed children's ability to focus and pay attention. So a group of moms, and it was mostly moms, banded together and they said, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing our children's attention to be destroyed so that some big company can profit? This is crazy. It's important to notice what they didn't advocate. They didn't say, let's ban all gasoline. They didn't say, let's

ban all paint. They said, let's ban the lead in the paint, let's ban the lead in the gasoline. In the same way, I think there's a solution here for social media. Now, there's lots of things we can do as individuals to protect ourselves at a kind of local level and I can talk about what they are and I do lots of them. But we've also, I think, got to take on this force that's doing this to us. There's an equivalent to the lead in the lead pain. And it's the business model. The way A's Eraskin, who I mentioned, who invented a key part of the internet, the way he put it to me is, look, if you want to deal with the tech component of the attention crisis, more than anything else you've got to do one thing. You've got to ban the current business

model. It's the equivalent of lead in the lead paint. You've got to say, a business model that is based on secretly surveilling us in order to find out the weaknesses in our attention, hack them, invade them, and sell our attention to the highest bidder. That is just fundamentally immoral. It's unethical and we won't allow it. But I said to Azer when he said that to me, because it's hard to process this at first and to lots of the other people instead of convalue you advocated this.

Okay. Let's imagine we do that. What happens the next day when I open Facebook? Does it say, oh, sorry, guys, we've gone fishing? He said, of course not. What would happen is all these companies would have to move to a different business model, crucially, a business model that would not be built on invading our attention. Everyone listening has experience of the tool tend to business models.

One is subscription. Everyone knows how HBO and Netflix work. The other, literally everyone listening has experienced off, which is think about the sewers. Before we had sewers, we had feces in the street, we got cholera. So what do we do? We all paid to build the sewers together and we all own the sewers in common, right? You own the sewers in the city where you live, I own the sewers in the city where I live. It may be that like we want to own the sewage pipes together, we want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the kind of attentional equivalent of cholera.

But whatever the alternative model we choose is the most important thing to understand is all the incentives for what it does to our attention changes, right? So at the moment, all the incentives are the more you scroll, the more times you pick up your phone, the more money they make. But if you move to a different business model, subscription or some form of public ownership, well, suddenly, the goal of the design is not to go, how do I hack Dan's attention in order to invade it and get him scrolling as much as possible? Suddenly, you're not the product anymore, you're the customer.

They have to go, what does Dan want? Oh, turns out Dan wants to be able to pay attention. Okay, let's design it to be able to pay attention. Okay, let's design it to heal his attention, not destroy, oh, turns out Dan wants to be able to meet up with his friends offline, because people feel better when they look into each other's eyes. Okay, let's design it, not to keep people interacting

through little chat boxes, let's design it to facilitate people meeting face to face. You can see how all these changes are completely technologically possible. Tristan Harris and his friends could design that Facebook in a week, right? But at the moment, the incentives aren't there, and they're not going to be there unless we make them, just like the lead industry, was never going to one day go, you know what, guys? I think we've just made enough money. I don't think we need to do this anymore. That's not how it works, right? They had to be made to do this. We have to have a movement of ordinary people saying

we're not going to tolerate this anymore. We're not going to tolerate this is not a good life where we can't pay attention. It's not a good life where children can't focus but it requires a shifting consciousness. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of Kings Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds, and we have to take them back from the forces that have invaded them. You call this in the book, the Attention Rebellion. I'm just curious, there are many parts to the aforementioned Attention Rebellion that you proposed, but on this tech piece here, what you call surveillance capitalism, how optimistic are you that there's ever going to be a real move toward making

these changes? And if those moves were made, would it perhaps be government overreach? So just to say the phrase of Alan's captors and comes from the brilliant professor Shashana Zuboff, who's at Harvard. So when I think about this, Dan, because obviously I thought a lot about, okay, we're up against some powerful forces here, right? To get our attention back, there are lots of things we can do to defend ourselves individually,

but we're going to have to take on these powerful forces. And Big Tech is just one of the powerful forces we're going to have to take on and it can feel really daunting. And maybe this will sound odd, but when I think about how daunting it is, I think about my grandmothers, who I really loved and obviously knew extremely well. My grandmothers were the age I am now in 43, in 1963. One of them was a working class, got a Schwooman living on what we would call here in the US, a housing project, and the other was a Swiss peasant woman living in a wooden hut on the side of a mountain. I think about what their lives were like. So both of my grandmother's left school when they were 13, even though the men from their families went on to school much longer because no one gave a

damn about girls learning anything. My Swiss grandmother loved to paint and draw. She was told to shut up and get into the kitchen. By the time they were the age I am now, so neither of them were allowed to have bank accounts in their own names, because they were married women. It was legal for their husbands to rape them. In practice, it was legal for their husbands to beat them, because the police never intervened anywhere in the world in domestic violence. My Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote. And I think about the gap from where they were to let's say my niece Erin, who's 17, my niece she never met my grandmother, but

like my grandmother she loves to draw on paint. And when my niece loved to draw on paint we didn't say shut up, get into the kitchen, we started looking up art schools. Now I don't want to underestimate how far we got to go for the liberation of women. But that gap, that enormous gap from where my grandmother's were to where my niece is. And that happened because ordinary women and some sympathetic men banded together and said, we're not taking this anymore. We're not taking this stunting of our lives, right? We're going to reclaim our lives. And when I get just hearted, I think, oh, big tech is really

powerful. And many of the other forces, of course, the 11 other factors, the forces, of course, in one of these, many of them are very powerful. As powerful as men were in 1963, men controlled literally everything. They controlled every government, every company pretty much, every police force, and they had ever since those institutions had been created with the exception of a handful of hereditary female queens. Men had controlled everything forever. Right, and that generation of women didn't give up. They got up and they fought and they made extraordinary advances and we still need to go further of course, but they made extraordinary advances. So, absolutely,

I believe we can take these forces on. You know, Dr James Williams, or I mentioned before, we think about tech, he said to me, you know, the ax existed for 1.4 million years before anyone thought to put a handle on it. The entire internet has existed for less than 10,000 days, right? A lot of these factors that are so harming our attention are really recent. Like, your grandparents didn't experience most of them. My grandparents didn't experience most of them. These are not just forces of nature, right? These are things that have been done by humans and they can be undone by humans. In terms of whether they're governmental overreach, I think about it a bit differently. So at the moment, you have enormous private institutions that are, let's say, would take for a moment, of course, as we

rightly keep stressing over many other factors, enormous private institutions that are doing incredible harm to our attention. As they themselves know because their own data scientists we know from the leaks, are out clean from France, South-Gone, we know their own data scientists are saying this. Those private institutions have very little accountability to us. They're accountable to their advertisers to some degree. They're not accountable to us. Governments in democracies are accountable to us.

Now, I don't want to be naive about that. Government has also been corrupted by big money lobbying, we need to reverse citizens united. There's all sorts of things we need to do to re-democratize our governments. But there is a possibility of democratic control over the government. There's no possibility of democratic control

over Mark Zuckerberg, right? He's not interested. He's been told the harm's been done. He doesn't care because he's more interested in becoming even richer. In fact, his own data scientist told him that Facebook's business model is inherently tied to damaging people's collective attention. His own research indicated that and he told them not to bring him any other report like that ever

again. So it's not just government regulation, there's all sorts of steps. And actually think about, was talking about feminism, you know, think about feminism, how to operate it, every level of the society, every, and still has to, every office, every schoolroom, you know, and every statehouse, the national government, at every level, I would argue, the attention movement has to be the same. We have to fight for our attention and the many factors that are causing it at every level, but certainly at the level of the national government.

Look, this is entirely doable. Think about what happened in Australia last year. Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister, the centre-right Prime Minister, not someone I'm normally sympathetic to, I have to confess, did a brave and good thing. So basically, Facebook's advertising has destroyed the media because advertisers who used to place ads in newspapers now place them on Facebook.

So people go to Facebook to get their news, they see newspaper stories on Facebook, but the newspaper gets no money for it. So what Scott Morrison said to Facebook is, you've got to start giving a load of your advertising money to the media organizations who you depend on who fill the feeds for your users, but are currently being bankrupted. And Facebook went crazy. They huffed and puffed. They threatened to cut the whole of Australia off from Facebook. And what happened in the end? Facebook quietly gave in. Because we are more powerful than them. We can pressure our governments, our governments can pressure them. So I don't think it's overreach.

I think it would be chronic underreach for governments to oversee the destruction of the citizenry's attention spans, the destruction of the citizenry's ability to focus on, particularly children's ability to focus and bear attention and just do nothing. I think that would be like doing nothing about a pandemic or doing nothing about all sorts of huge public health threats.

A society where people can't focus is gonna produce all sorts of problems. It can't be a democracy, for example. I don't think it's a coincidence that all over the world we're having a huge crisis in democracy. At the same time as we're having a collapse in attention and we're interacting primarily through media that are designed to make us angry. So no, I think there's an overwhelming public interest in having a population who can think deeply, who can pay attention, who can follow issues through.

I think it's essential. Coming up, Johan talks about ditching his smartphone for three months offers his advice on how to maximize your chances at entering into a flow state, makes an impassioned argument for rethinking modern childhood and responds to his critics. After this, you've talked repeatedly throughout this interview about the levels that we can try to solve this problem on an individual level, and then there's also, as you've just been discussing, a sort of societal or structural level. Let's go to the individual because you've referenced a few times that you personally

did a rather extreme experiment. What did that entail? Well I was so locked in thinking about this as a failure of willpower and as a failure of my personal relationship with the phone. That one summer, it was just after I came back from that experience with my godson in Memphis. I came back and I was in this really privileged position of what the film writes to one of my books had sold, so I had some money. And I just said to everyone, I knew,

I'm tired of being wired. I can't take this anymore, I don't want to be like this. I'm going away for three months, and I will have no laptop that can get online, and I will have no smartphone. I'm taking three months completely off the internet. So I went to a place called Provincetown and Cape Cod. Have you been to Provincetown then? Well I grew up in Newton Red Hat at a Boston so yes, I'm familiar with the Cape and with Provincetown yes. So for people who don't know Provincetown, it's the kind of place where more than one person earns a full-time living by dressing as Ursula, the villain from the

Little Mermaid and singing songs about sex acts so obscene, I'm sure I can't mention them on your show. It's a great place. So I booked a room in a beach house in Provincetown. And I left my phone and my laptop across the water in Boston. And I remember getting the boat over. I remember thinking about the very first time I ever saw a cell phone and finding it completely a ridiculous over. I remember thinking about the very first time I ever saw a cell phone and finding it completely a ridiculous invention. I was thinking, God, if you told me then that 20 years later I'd be getting on a boat to try to escape this technology. I would have thought you were completely crazy. And lots of things happened to me in Providence Town. There were quite a lot of ups and downs. But the thing that amazed me is I thought,

you know, I was nearly 40. I thought, maybe my attention is just less because I've got older, and seems perfectly plausible. My attention went back to being as good as it was when I was 17. I could sit and read books for 10 hours a day. I was stunned by how much my attention came back. I learned a lot about actually the value of mind wandering, not just that direct focus. I mean, it was such an incredible experience. And then I remember the last day I was there before I went back to Boston, just saying to myself,

I'm never gonna go back to using my devices the way that why would I do that? And this is so much better. The pleasures of focus are so much and thinking deeply, are so much greater than their crappy rewards of likes and hearts and retweets. Why would I ever go back? And within a month they're getting my devices back. I never went back to being as bad as I was. I went back about 70 to 80% back to where I've been. And I only really understood

it when I went to Moscow to interview Dr. James Williams, who I mentioned before, and he said to me, look, the mistake you've made is it's like you thought the solution to air pollution is for you personally to wear a gas mask, right? Now, I'm not against gas masks. Protecting yourself individually will help. It's worth doing, but you've also got to take on the forces, and that's when I went on this bigger journey. But I also then did learn about how to integrate some of those individual changes that I've made in Providence Town into my normal life.

So I give you a very simple example, I own something called, it's in the other room, something called a K-save. So a K-save is a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial at the top, and it will lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day.

On my laptop, the one I'm speaking to you through, I have an app called Freedom. Freedom will cut you off from a specific website, say you're addicted to Twitter, or the entire internet for however long you tell it to. I will not sit down and watch a movie with my partner. I will not have dinner with my friends unless we all imprison our phones in the

case safe and people get really antsy and I got antsy when I started doing it. It's hard, but you also see the relief in people's faces when they start to be able to pay attention again, when they're not primed for the constant interruption, the constant distraction. So that's one of lots of changes that I've made. I can talk about more, but I'm also conscious. As I say that, you know, so I use my case say for four hours a day, so I can read books. And as I say that, I'm very conscious that lots of people listening will be thinking, I can't do that, right? I can't do that. And a lot of them are right at the moment they can't do that. And that's why there's also a collective layer, a solution that I saw in one place, that I think is really worth all of us fighting for as well.

So in France, in 2018, they had a huge epidemic of what they call Le Burnout, which I don't think I need to translate. And the French government under pressure from Labour unions set up a government inquiry to figure out why is everyone getting so burned out? And what they discovered is that 35% of workers felt they could never switch off their phones or stop checking their email because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night and if they didn't answer they could be in trouble. I remember when we were kids down, the only people who were on call all the time, the only person who's on call all the time is

the president and doctors were on call some of the time but even they were on call all the time, the only person who was on call all the time is the president, and doctors were on call some of the time, but even they were on call all the time, right? Now, almost half the economy lives in the state that only a handful of people lived on just a generation ago. And this is really harming our attention, stress harms our attention, exhaustion harms our attention. So the French government proposed a very simple solution, which they then passed into law, it's called the right to disconnect. It's very simple. Says every worker has a right to legally defined work hours and every worker has a right to not have to answer their phone outside those work hours. I went to Paris to talk to people about this. Just before I went, rent a kill, the big pest control company, had been fined 70,000 euros for trying to get someone to check their phone an hour after they left work.

Now you can see how that's a collective change that frees people up to make these individual changes, because the truth is in an economy where you might get fired if you don't check your phone constantly. I can give you all the lovely self-help lectures in the world about sleeping more, switching less, spending more time with your children. We have to make it possible for people to do these things in an environment that currently is militating against them doing it.

That point is very well taken and it really just does speak again to this theme and this conversation of the personal and the political or the individual and the structural. Let's just stay though because I'm curious on the level of individual for you, because you mentioned you've made loads of changes. I believe there are six that you list in the book. You talked about your case safe and your freedom app, both of which I think could be slotted under what you call pre-committment, committing in advance to protecting your

bandwidth. You also talk in the book about getting yourself ready to achieve flow states. I'd be curious to hear more about that. Yeah, this was a really important one. So a flow state is when you're doing something and you really get into it and your sense of time falls away and your sense of ego falls away and you are just flowing into the thing you're doing. The way one rock climber put it is it's like you are the rock you're climbing. And it flows really important for attention, I think for two reasons. Firstly,

because flow is the deepest form of attention that human beings can provide. And secondly, flow is the form of attention that is least difficult once you get into it. When you're in flow, it's not like memorizing facts for an exam where you're like, oh God, okay. So Henry VIII was born in this year or whatever you're memorizing. It just comes. You can pay attention really deeply. So obviously, I want to figure out, if this is a gusher of attention that exists within all of us, how do we drill to get that attention more? So I went to interview Professor Mahali and she

sent me a high A. Who is the scientist who first coined the term for low states and studied them for over 50 years. I'm pretty sure I did the last interview with him because sadly, he died not long afterwards, which is even though he was a very odd man, a terrible loss because he was a completely remarkable person. And Professor Cheek sent me a high, he had discovered many important things about flow, but I think for anyone listening, he wants to maximise their chances of getting into flow. There's three things he learned that really helped

me in particular. The first is, if you want to get into flow, you've got to narrow down what you're doing to one goal. I want to climb this rock, I want to paint this canvas, I want to write this article. If you're trying to do more than one thing at a time, you will not get into flow, right? Multitask, so-called multitaskasking, kills flow dead. So choose one thing. The second thing is you've got to choose a goal that is meaningful to you. So different people find different things, give them flow for you. It might be making bagels or brain surgery for me, it's writing. If I tried to make bagels, I wouldn't get into flow. They

would just be awful if I tried to paint a canvas that I could child and vomited on it, it doesn't work. So you've got to choose a goal that is meaningful for you. Your attention will just slip and slide off goals that aren't meaningful to you. And thirdly, it will hugely help if you choose a goal is at the edge of your abilities, the edge of your compass zone, but not beyond it. So let's say that you were a medium talent rock climber. You don't want to just try to climb over your garden wall. That's not going to get you into flow.

Equally, you don't want to suddenly try and climb that Kilimanjaro tomorrow. That's going to be so overwhelming you won't get into flow. You want to climb a slightly higher and harder rock face than the one you did last time. So if you do these three things, you narrow yourself down to one goal, you make sure it's a goal that's meaningful for you, and you choose a goal that's at the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them. You maximize your chances of activating this deep capacity to get into attention. And when I say that, you can again see how the way we're living at the moment is

militating against that, right? Even just the first step, just do one thing at a time. If we're being constantly interrupted, you won't get into flow. That's why I argue in the book we're in a crisis in flow states, which makes you feel more anxious. Flow is extremely effective for reducing anxiety, for giving people a sense of meaning and purpose, for giving them a sense that they're effective in the world. Because when you're in flow, you really are effective.

I've been, in terms of the edge of my abilities that I recently bought my son at Electronic Drumset. He's seven. He's starting to take lessons. I largely bought it because I love to play the drums. He and I have been really listening to a lot of Andeal Perth, the drummer from Rush, and I've been thinking that I might try to teach myself how to play Tom Sawyer, which is one of the hardest drum parts of any rock song ever. So that would be my one potential route to flow.

I love that, Dan, and that's so interesting to me thinking about your son as well, because actually, I've all the things I learned from my book, Starlin' Focus, the stuff that got me most emotional was the stuff around what we're doing to our kids. And there's many aspects of this. The design of our school system is a disaster. We were just talking about how, and this is not the fault of teachers who did not design the system and that had been both sensibly arguing

against these reforms all along. You know, we were talking just now about how attention evolved to attach to meaning. You will find things easy to pay attention to, they're meaningful to you. But we've redesigned our entire school system. So it's built around meaningless road learning and idiotic tests that demonstrate nothing. And it's destroying children's attention at school. In fact, after the no-child life behind Act was passed in 2004 by President George W. Bush, which massively increased road learning and meaningless testing, ADHD diagnoses went up by 25% in the United States because kids can't pay attention to meaningless rubbish, nor

should they. But there's an even bigger thing about children that to me it's so heart-rending but also so powerful because there is a solution We can all build on this and I think really cuts across all political device I think most people when they hear this can really see the sense of it So one of the heroes of my book. It's a woman called Lennore Scanazi and Lennore grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the 1960s and From when she was five years old, in the morning, she would walk out of her house

on her own and walk to school, which was 15 minutes away. And generally, she'd bump into the other five-year-old kids who were all also walking to school on their own. When they got to the school, there was a busy road, and there was a 10-year-old boy whose job was to help the five-year-olds cross the road. And then when school ended at three o'clock, she left and wondered around the neighborhood

with her friends, they played freely, they did ball games, they did whatever they wanted to do, and then they made their way home when they were hungry at five or six. Right? That is what all human childhoods look like in the 1960s. Ask your parents, ask your grandparents, that is pretty much what human childhood looked like for all of human history. By the time LaNour had her own kids in Queens in the 1990s, all of that had ended.

She was expected to walk even had teenage children to school, wait there when they went through the gate and be there waiting to them to collect them like a package when they left. In fact, by 2003, only 10% of American children ever played outside without an adult. And I think of that 10%, I think the average amount of time they got was 12 minutes a week. So effectively it ended, right? We suddenly imprisoned all our children in their homes.

Childhood became a thing that happened behind closed doors. And it turns out that in the kind of childhood that Lenore had, and all human children had before her, with a handful of exceptions, there were all sorts of things that are extremely important for children to learn, attention and focus. Some of it is really obvious. They got to run around. The evidence is overwhelming. Professor Joel Neg, the leading expert on children's attention problems,

has written about this in detail. Children who run around, develop better brain connections and compare attention much more. We have stopped our children running around, right? We are the first humans ever to think it is sensible to get children to try to sit still for eight hours a day. Also, when children play freely, they learn how to deploy their attention.

They learn how to persuade other children. They learn how to persuade other children. They learn how to make things happen. They learn what they find interesting, which is extremely important for developing an ability to focus and pay attention. We've taken all that away from them. In fact, the only place where most of our kids get to do any exploration of any kind now is on Fortnite or World of Warcraft. So we can hardly be surprised when they become obsessed with it.

But the reason why Lennore is one of the heroes of my book is not because she discovered that problem, but because she's at the heart of building the solution to it. So Lennore initially just tried to persuade individual parents, right? So you've got a 70 year old, she'd go to you and she'd say, , damn, what's something that you love to do when you were a kid, that you don't allow your own child to do? And people would say, I used to ride my bike through the woods, I used to play marbles, there were at least huge numbers of things they did. But what she discovered is just trying to persuade people at an individual level doesn't

work, because if you're the only parent, even when you're intellectually persuaded and most parents are persuaded, if you're the only parent who even when you're intellectually persuaded and most parents are persuaded, if you're the only parent who's sending your kid out, you just seem like a crazy person and the chart gets frightened. So what Lenore does? Lenore runs an incredible group called Let Grow and I recommend every parent and grandparent listening, go to letgrow.org and get them involved at your school. And your community, what they do is they go to whole schools and whole communities and persuade all of them to start giving their children increasing levels of independence that build up to letting them play outside. It's on their own. It's about restoring childhood. And I think probably there's a couple of contenders but I think probably the most moving

conversation I had for the whole book. I spent time with loads of let-grow projects, and I went to a middle school in Long Island where they had a let-grow program, and there was a boy who was, I'll never forget him, he was a big strong 14-year-old boy. And until this program had begun nine months before, he had never been allowed out of his house on his own without an adult. Ever. His parents wouldn't even let him go jogging around the block. I asked him why. And he said, my parents are afraid of all these kidnappings. That's the phrase he used to give you a sense of where this place is. This is a town where the olive oil stores across the street from the French bakery. And then this program began, and he started to meet up

with his friends outside his house, and asked him what kind of things they did, and it turned out they had gone out into the woods. And even though their phones didn't work, they still went there, and they built a fort with their own hands, and they were going sitting this fort without their phones, build staffed to physical games and watching this boy describe this,

I know this might sound a bit melodramatic, but I felt like I was watching him come to life, right? And I thought about how many children I know who have been denied anything that our grandparents would have recognized as a childhood, right? And Lenore was with me that day, and when that boy left, she was there when I had that conversation with him. And when that boy left, she said to me, you know, think about all of human history. All throughout history, young people had to go out, they had to explore, they had to build things,

they had to map their environment, they had to take risks. And in one generation, we took all of that away from them. And that boy and his friends, given a little bit of freedom, what did they do? They went into the woods and they built a fort. Because this is so deep in human nature. We want to explore and build things.

And if you take that away from children, you've thought their bodies, you've thought their attention, you've thought their mental capacities, you make them really anxious, they don't feel they're competent, they don't feel they're good at anything. And restoring childhood, I talk about a lot of big goals we want to do, we're going to rebuild attention and restoring a human childhood, our grandparents would have recognized. It's absolutely one of the, I would say one of the three biggest goals we need because if kids don't develop attention when they're kids, it's going to be much harder for them to develop it as they get older.

That is such a thought, provoking argument, and especially for me as a parent, that mean the changes to childhood are incalculable for sure. I'm sensitive to the amount of time we have left. Before I let you go, I do want to ask you though a challenging question because as you know, you've got some critics. In particular, there are folks who are taking a hard run at you and questioning whether one of the central points they say you are making is actually true. There have been folks who are questioning whether there's any evidence that our attention

spans are actually diminishing on a society-wide level. I'd be interested to hear you respond to that critique. are actually diminishing on a society-wide level. I'd be interested to hear you respond to that critique. So there's two ways I think we can reach reasonable conclusions about this question. The idea would have been, it'd go back a hundred years, scientists have given the same attention test

to ordinary people consistently starting in say 1900. That would be the gold standard of evidence, and then we could be completely confident. Sadly, scientists didn't do that, that data wasn't gathered so we don't know. But I do think there's another way in which we can reasonably draw these conclusions. And more importantly, many of the leading scientists

believe we can reasonably draw these conclusions, which is there are lots of trends that we can show in the more short and medium term profoundly damaged attention and there's good evidence that many of those trends have been increasing for the past 100 years. So we mentioned before sleep, for example, we know the evidence is absolutely overwhelming from experimental psychology, lack of sleep profoundly damages attention and there's a broad scientific consensus, not unanimity, but a broad scientific consensus from all sorts of longitudinal research that we sleep significantly less than we did in

the past. This is why, as I mentioned before, Dr. Saislow, the leading expert at Harvard Medical School, said to me, even if nothing else had changed, that we're at a moment because of a serious attention crisis. So I think we can infer from these other big trends, we know in the short term they harm attention, we know in the longer term they've been hugely increasing, I think we can put that together now.

When you make that argument, you do have to, as I do in the book, also weigh the counter argument, where there's a reasonable counter argument, which is to say, okay, those trends have damaged our attention, but have there been any counter-vailing trends that have improved our attention? And I think there are two counter-vailing trends that have improved our attention. One is there's a lot of evidence that stress really damages attention. And some factors of stress have hugely increased, overwork, for example,

but some factors that causes of stress have hugely increased overwork, for example, but some factors of stress have hugely decreased. There's much less violence than they used to be in the past. This is controversial. Professor Stephen Pinker has advanced the case as much as violence, and I find it persuasive. I don't want to flag up. There are some scientists who disagree. But I think the evidence is pretty clear that violence is formed.

Obviously, being subjected to violence is a huge cause of stress. So, I think it is reasonable to say that has improved human attention. Also, we mentioned lead before, we're exposed to much less lead than we used to be, and you would expect that to improve attention again. Now you have to weigh that against all these other factors and many that we haven't talked about, that I talk about in the book, which are very clearly damaging attention. There isn't a kind of calculator you can put this into, but I do think we can reach reasonable conclusions on this,

which is why many of the leading scientists in the field, I mean, the people who've made the criticisms that you mentioned are not scientists that just make them any less legitimate, but they're not scientists who've studied attention. The scientists who have studied attention like Professor Sunalaman, who did the first big study that showed that collective attention span really has shrunk, have very vigorously defended the book and the science put forward

in it. So I think we can reach reasonable conclusions here. I also think it will match with what most people are listening, are seeing around them. Of course, that is more ambient and anecdotal. But it's been honest, I think the argument that that nothing has changed with teenagers' attention, which is what these people that you mention are putting forward, I think it's silly. I think it's childish. We can all see around us what's happening.

There is an argument that they put forward that is very worth weighing and that I thought through carefully in the book. So what some of them argue is that this is a moral panic, right? So moral panic is a term from sociology to give a couple of examples. In the 1950s, loads of kids were reading

at horror comic books. And there's a big panic at the time, people, well, I, oh my God, this is gonna make children really violent. There were hearings in the Senate. And of course, now when we see a kid reading comic book, it looks very sweet and innocuous to us. I'll think about one that we'll both remember, Dan, the panic about rap music in the 1990s. It's big panic, a typical lead, you know, that rap music was going to make people violent.

And now, you know, when President Obama praised Jay-Z, no one was, that seemed completely innocuous. It's like praising Beethoven, right? So we can see there are times in the past when there were changes where people became disproportionately anxious and they turned out to be wrong. So what they argue, they focus, as far as I can tell entirely on the tech component, they ignore the evidence for everything else.

But what they argue is the tech change is a moral panic. When you look at the evidence, and more importantly, when many of the leading experts look at the evidence, I think there's a different historical analogy. If you look at a picture of a beach in the United States or anywhere in the world in 1960, it's really odd to us,

because everyone is what we would call slim or buff, everyone. And you look at it and think, well, where's everyone else? And then you look at the figures and there was virtually no obesity in 1960 in the United States. And then a whole series of big social changes happened. Our food supply changed, as we mentioned before. We built cities that it's impossible to bike or walk around and we became more stressed in some ways and obesity exploded and the average American has gained 22 pounds since then.

And if you look at the time, pretty early on by the early 70s, you've got people warning about this saying, look, if this continues, we're going to have a situation where a majority of the population overweight and obese and people responded by saying, oh, this is just a moral panic. People in the past are panicked about things. This is absurd. And in fact, we should have listened to those people then because if we'd listened to what they recommended, if we dealt with those problems in the food supply, if we'd maintained cities that was possible to walk and bike around, we wouldn't have the huge obesity crisis we have now. And Professor John Nierke, who I mentioned before, one of the leading children's, experts on children's attention says that we need to think about this attention crisis as like

the obesity crisis. There's all these factors that are happening, and I'm going beyond what Professor Nigg says now. But I think this is particularly important right now, because at the moment, we're in a race. On the one hand you've got all these factors in value are attention and many of them are on course to become much more powerful. Think about Paul Graham, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, said the world is on course to be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40. Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to your child than Facebook, right? So on the one hand,

you've got all these forces which are invading our attention, which are poised to become more intense. It won't stay at this level of invasiveness. It will get even worse. Think about the metaverse. On the other hand, there's gotta be a movement of all of us saying, no, no, you're not gonna do this to us. You're not

going to do this to our children. We want a life where we can think deeply, where we can read books, where we can sleep, where we can have long conversations, where we can look into each other's eyes. Would you not want a life that dissolves the average, like I said before, the average office worker now focuses on any one task for three minutes. What is your life like when it dissolves into a hail storm of three minute fragments? We all know that is not a good life, right? We have to have a movement that says, no, we were just like we needed a need of feminist movement to reclaim women's bodies and their lives. I argue very strongly we need an attention movement

to reclaim our minds. We don't have to tolerate this being done to us. This is not a force of nature. This is being done to us by very recent forces. We are more powerful than those forces if we band together. We can take them on, we can stop them and we can reclaim our attention. But we're going to have to fight for it. Because if we don't do anything, they'll invade us more and more and more. Johan Hari author of Stolen Focus, always fun to talk to you. Thanks for coming back on the show.

I was totally my pleasure, Dan, and I meant to say that people can get the book, the e-book or the audio book, and that they wanna listen for free to interviews with loads of the experts that I've talked about, they can go to stolenfocusbook.com. I also, at the end of all the interviews, a lot of people say to me, so where can people follow you on social media? And I always want to go, have you been listening to me? No, they shouldn't follow you on social media.

They can if they want to, but I won't be looking at it very much. Awesome. Thank you again. Cheers, Dan. I always enjoy talking to you. It's a delight. Thanks so much. Thanks again to Johan Hari. Thank you as well to all the people who make this show a reality two and a half times a week. Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davy, Kim Baikamah, Maria Wartel, and Jen Poyant with audio engineering from the Good Folks over at Ultraviolet. Audio, we'll see you all on Wednesday for part two of our series on focus with the Dharma

Teacher, Shiloh Catherine. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. at Wondery.com-survey.