The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 53 - Why Doing This Is More Important Than Ever Before: Johann Hari

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Johann Hari, is the man behind multiple bestselling books speculating on depression, anxiety, happiness, and loneliness. In this clip, we talk about the important role spending time reading plays in our lives. We are so absorbed in the information that we see across social media because of the short and fast forms they are presented to us in. Whether that’s twitter posts or Instagram captions, the medium of these messages make us impatient when it comes to reading a book. Johann calls it screen inferiority which diminishes our ability to retain information. He explains that instead of skimming (or scrolling) across loads of things, we need to take a bit of time to think about one thing. Slowing down, looking at one bit and spending time thinking about what you are actually reading is how we are going to increase our engagement. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/9vzo9qSXdpb Johann - https://twitter.com/johannhari101?lang=en https://www.instagram.com/johann.hari/ Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. Why is reading so important? What role does reading play? We all consume information digitally now. Why do we need to go back to reading stuff? There's a few reasons. And it's not, again, not a snooty thing at all. So you're absolutely right that reading books has massively declined. 57% of Americans now never read a book in any given year. It's the

first time in the history of the American Republic that's the case. We're still a bit better than that in Britain, but not by much. And there's several people who really helped me to understand this and what that's doing to us. That's partly a symptom of our declining attention and partly a cause of it. And I'll talk a bit about how so interviewed a woman called professor ann mangan is at stavanger university in norway who's a professor of literacy and probably the leading expert in the world on on these questions she explained lots of things but there's one very simple one you can do studies have been loads of studies showing this now so you get group people you split them randomly into two the first group let's say you could do it with my book you give one group of people my book on the ipad like your ipad there and the other group you give the physical book right and then

you go back to them a week a month a year later and you just ask them questions about the book and it turns out invariably the people who've read it on the screen remember significantly less and understand significantly less of what they read this is a very well proven effect it's called screen inferiority it's such a big effect that if you take a 10 year old child it's the equivalent of two-thirds of their progress in reading in a year is lost when they're reading on a screen it's that's how that's how much it diminishes our ability to think and it seems to be there's lots of there's a big debate about why but when you read let's say um you know we opened the bbc news site now and you and me read the same story when we read on a screen what we tend to do is read in a sort of skimming z pattern you sort of skim keywords right boom boom boom um

when you read a book generally we read linearly we read from left to right you know and you keep going but part of the problem is if you spend too much time reading on screens when you read a book you start doing that when you read books and it screws with your ability to read books but the truth is i think it's something more subtle right so there's this marshall mccluhan was this kind of professor in the 60s who said this famous thing that I never understood for years. He said the medium is the message, right? And what he meant was when a new medium comes along, he was talking about television. So a new way of telling stories and thinking about the world comes along. You know, you could turn on your television and you can watch The Wire or Wheel of Fortune or anything

in between, right? The medium of television itself has a message in it right irrespective of the show you're watching on the television so the medium of television the message is the world is very fast it's all happening at the same time uh we can all think about things you get from watching tv the way you feel if you want and i love tv things you feel when you when you watch tv but i think there's a medium in the message of social media, right? So think about Twitter. When you open Twitter, it doesn't matter if you're Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or I know Bubba the Love Sponge, right? There is a message you are absorbing about how the world should be. I would say the message is, firstly, the world should be interpreted and thought about very quickly right quick quick quick it should be interpreted very briefly anything worth saying

can be said in very short little bursts binary and exactly and what matters the thing that is most important is whether people immediately agree with this very fast very short thing you've said right that is the message hidden in the medium of Twitter, right? Think about Instagram. What's the message hidden in the medium of Instagram? It's What really matters is whether you look good and whether people like how you look right? That's it. That's the message What's the message in Facebook? The message is okay friendship, which is the most precious human thing, friendship is looking at other people's photographs of their life, that you should narrate your life to your friends through images and crave their likes.

And that's what friendship is, mutually watching each other's carefully collected paparazzi images of each other and liking them. Now, I think all those messages are wrong. That is a terrible way to live your life right it is not true that life should be interpreted quickly the one actually if people immediately agree with what you're saying what you're saying probably didn't need to be said at all right um yeah i like pretty people instagram fine okay but if that's the thing that you overweight your life towards, something's really gone wrong. And friendship, a true friendship is nothing like a Facebook friendship. But think about the message, the reason I say this in

relation to reading is, think about the message in the book, right? The printed book, what does a printed book say to you? Firstly, the world is complicated and you might want to take a good bit of time to think about one thing Secondly, it says you should slow down Slow down Look at this thing that we'll be saying the same thing a hundred years from now as it says right now Right? And thirdly, it says you might want to spend time thinking about the inner lives of other people Because the inner lives of other people because

the inner lives of other people are really interesting and you'll find that they're like you in some ways and unlike you in others right so i would say take care what technologies you absorb because over time your consciousness will come to resemble those technologies you know you want to have had a life of meaning and purpose where you engage with complex things where you showed empathy where you showed love these are not these are things that the current model of social media absolutely militates against and the books help with they don't they're not the solution you know they're not the sole solution there's lots of things going on but i deeply believe in the medium of the book