The One You Feed - Johann Hari on Stolen Focus and Attention

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

Johann Hari is a writer and journalist. He has written for the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, and other newspapers and his TED talks have been viewed over seventy million times. His work has been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey to Noam Chomsky to Joe Rogan.Eric and Johann discuss his book, Stolen Focus Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply AgainBut wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Johann Hari and I Discuss Stolen Focus and Attention and…His book, Stolen Focus Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply AgainHis experience of spending 3 months with no internet or smartphoneThe negative effects of consuming too much of social mediaHow the evidence is showing we are in an attention crisisThe deep forces at work that are damaging our attentionUnderstanding the two levels of response to the attention crisis; individual and collectiveCruel optimism is offering a simple solution to complex problems that may not workThe alternative to cruel optimism is bringing awareness to the many layers of the problemHow the human brain can only think about one thing at a timeThe negative effects of multitasking, or the switch cost-effect The debate between being “pro” tech and “anti” techThe damaging effects of the current business models of social media designed to steal people’s attentionHow technology could be used to heal and aid your attention rather than steal itHow the current model of economic growth contributes to dwindling attentionHis thoughts on the need for an attention movement to resist the forces invading our attentionJohann Hari Links:Stolen Focus Book WebsiteJohann’s WebsiteTwitterInstagramWhen you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed. Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you!If you enjoyed this conversation with Johann Hari you might also enjoy these other episodes:Johann Hari (2015 Interview)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most things worth saying will not be agreed with immediately. Probably, if everyone agrees with you straight away, what you're saying didn't need to be said. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes

conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

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wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode, who has been on before, is Johan Hari, a writer and journalist. He's written for the New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, and other newspapers, and his TED Talks have been viewed over 70 million times. His work has been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey to Noam Chomsky to Joe Rogan. and you're one of my favorite podcast hosts. Oh, well, thank you. Marriage made in heaven. And you can check. I don't say that to any other podcast host. I've never said that to a podcast host before. So I would like everyone to scour the internet

and confirm you're not my side piece favorite podcast host. You're the main guy. The main guy. We're going to get to your book, Stolen Focus, why you can't pay attention in just a minute. But before we do, let's start the way we always do, which is we start with that parable. There's a grandfather talking with his

grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I'm very impressed that you can still say that story with animation. Because I know you've said it like more than 400 times so I'm very impressed by that you know it's funny I actually thought about that

parable quite a lot when I was writing Stolen Focus there was a particular moment when I found myself thinking about it so for the book I took three months completely off the internet and with no smartphone and I went to a place called Provincetown in Cape Cod. And honestly, I didn't even think of it particularly as a kind of experiment. I thought of it as I can't bear that my attention is deteriorating, that with every year that passes, things that require deep focus feel more and more like running up a down escalator. I just need a break. But it actually ended up giving me some useful insights, both about what we can do and the limits of some of the things we try to do. But I remember thinking a lot while I was there about the difference

between a day that's filled with looking at social media and a day that's filled with reading books, feeding yourself with these different forms of being with the world. And I found myself thinking about Marshall McLuhan's famous line, the medium is the message, which I had never really understood. Obviously, you hear, it's a kind of cliche, you hear people talking about it all the time. And for people who don't know, Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian information theorist who became very famous in the 60s, partly by talking about this. And I read McLuhan while I was out there, I ordered it from a bookstore, physical bookstore. And I think what McLuhan was saying, and there's actually a debate about what McLuhan was saying, but the way

I understood it is McLuhan was arguing when you absorb a medium, whether it's a book, television, or although of course McLuhan didn't see this then, social media, it's like you're putting on a set of goggles and seeing the world through that medium so when you watch television which of course mccluhan was primarily thinking about when you watch television doesn't matter whether you watch wheel of fortune or the wire you are absorbing a view of the world where the world will begin to look to you like television so you know it'll give the impression that the world is very fast that that it's very speedy. Even just think about things like, if you read novels that were written before the advent of cinema and television, the way they talk about memory is quite different to the way we talk

about memory. Think about the concept of the flashback, which we have, right, which doesn't exist in the same way. Of course, people talk about human memory, but not in the same grammar that's created by television, right? So when television comes along, it trains us to see the world as shaped like television. But I thought a lot about what is the message hidden in the medium of the book versus the message hidden in the medium of social media. So if we think about, let's say, Twitter, right? It doesn't matter whether you're Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or Bubba the Love Sponge, right? When you tweet, you are agreeing to a certain set of implicit ideas that are embedded in that medium. One of the ideas is the world can and should be described in 280 characters. You can meaningfully describe a lot of the world in 280 characters.

Secondly, what matters is that you respond to things very quickly. Thirdly, what matters is whether people immediately agree with what you have decided to say very quickly in 280 characters. The way you win at Twitter is if lots of people immediately agree with you, right? Or think about Instagram. What's the message implicit in that? The message is what matters is how you look on the outside and whether people like how you look on the outside. We could go through, you know, there's a message implicit in Facebook that friendship, what human friendship is, is to present the edited highlights of your life for others to view, and for you to view the edited highlights of their life, and for you to exchange likes and comments on these edited highlights,

right? There's other messages implicit in it as well. So I thought about those messages, which of course I was suddenly deprived of when I was off the internet. Obviously throughout my life I've read a huge number of books, but I was reading a lot of books and I was thrilled that my attention went back to what it had been in my early twenties, really long periods of deep reading. And I thought, why do I feel so much better when I'm reading a book compared to when I'm on social media? And I think it's partly because there's a message implicit in the printed book, right? It doesn't matter what the book says, this specific book, there's a message in the form of the book, which says, firstly, it's worth just thinking about one thing for many hours. Slow down, right? Think about, you want to, I'm just

glancing at the books behind me, you want to think about Joseph Stalin, you want to think about Columbia in the 1930s, whatever it might be, it is worth taking many hours to think about this one thing. Secondly, it is worth thinking about the internal lives of other people in great depth and realising that other people have rich, complex internal lives like you. And it's worth spending your time with an object that is going to be saying the same thing 100 years from now, as it says today, right? And I realised, in some deep sense, I don't agree with the messages implicit in the mediums of Twitter and Facebook, right? Actually, very few things that are worth saying can be said in 280 characters. Actually, it really doesn't matter whether people agree with you immediately or not. In fact, most things worth saying will not be agreed with immediately.

Probably if everyone agrees with you straight away, what you're saying didn't need to be said, right? If I think about most of the people I admire, you know, whether it's Noam Chomsky or Joan Rivers, actually, a lot of people really didn't agree with them initially, right? And indeed don't agree with them now. But also very few things that are worth saying should be said immediately and at great speed. Actually, most important insights require you to slow down, think through the complexity of a situation. Not in every instance, there's value in some immediate responses. There's times when it's necessary. And I realized, I kind of thought to myself, be careful what mediums you expose yourself to, be careful what technologies you expose yourself to, because over time, your consciousness will come to be shaped to a significant degree by the mediums you look at,

right? If you feed yourself very heavily with social media, you will begin to implicitly think of the world using those messages. You just can't be plugged into a reward system where, oh my God, he got 500 likes and I got one. You can't be plugged into machinery like that without starting some level psychologically to try to compete in the architecture of that machinery. And this is a very pompous way of putting it, but I want my mind to be shaped like a novel, not like a TikTok feed, not like a Twitter feed. I don't want to be thinking in tiny pellets of anger and snark. I want to be thinking in rich, complex ways about the inner lives of other people over many hours, many days, many months.

I want to be thinking in a sustained way. So I want to feed myself people over many hours, many days, many months. I want to be thinking in a sustained way. So I want to feed myself. And this is of course, not just true of books. There's many other ways of feeding yourself in that way. At the moment, we're feeding ourselves very heavily with something that contains messages that I think are not, I can say they're not true, but they're value judgments. That's a harder thing to say, that contain value judgments that I think are not, I can say they're not true, but they're value judgments, that's a harder thing to say, that contain value judgments that I think are profoundly destructive to the human psyche and destructive to human society, actually, in ways that I'm sure we'll talk about, which is not to say that all social media is bad, and I'm sure we'll get to that as well. But I thought about that very parable when I was thinking this through. What have I been feeding

myself with and how do I feel when I feed myself with? And how do I feel when I feed myself with that? Versus how do I feel when I feed myself with slower, deeper forms of media? Yeah, that's great. I really caught that part of your book, actually. The way you said it was, I realized one of the key reasons why social media makes me feel so out of joint with the world is that I think all these ideas, the messages implicit in these mediums are wrong. And that I just, bam, it hit me. I was like, that's exactly it. Like, I'm the same way. I do not believe the world can be explained in 280 characters. You know, there's another thing that makes me think of, I don't know who said this, but they said, the least viral thing you can say is, I don't know. And was like it's it's one of my favorite

phrases right i don't know you know like there's a curiosity to i don't know there's an openness to i don't know oh i love that that's so brilliant i remember seeing on the news a few years back i forget what it was one of the rolling news channels and they were talking about something had happened between israel and the palestinians presumably one of the wars that was happening and they said tweet us with your views of the israel palestine conflict and i thought hmm the idea that something is complex and fraught with complexity and ambiguity if you think that anything worthwhile can be said about israel palestine in 280 characters i don't want to hear what you have to say about it. Yeah.

Yeah. The other thing that you said that struck me as we were talking about social media and you described a phrase that I've tried to say this in a lot of different ways, but I never said it as well as you did what I'm about to read. Because when we talk about being on social media all the time, I've talked about, well, I feel distracted. I feel sort of edgy. I feel kind of scattered. I feel tired in a way I don't know. But what you said was, I understood why when I felt constantly distracted, I didn't just feel irritated. I felt diminished. And I was like, distracted. I didn't just feel irritated. I felt diminished. And I was like, that's the word I've been looking for, for what too much time on social media makes me feel. It's not just scattered. That's part of it, but diminished. Like I have less to offer the world than I did

before that. And I actually am just inside like shrunken. By taking part in that medium, you are expressing, and the mediums as they're currently structured, and they could work differently, and we can talk about that. You're consenting to a whole set of ideas that people like you and me don't agree with, and would never dream of teaching to our children, right? You would never want to communicate to your children what matters in life. What matters in life is to say things really quickly, really confidently, really aggressively, and to immediately obsess on how many people agree or disagree with the thing you said extremely confidently, really quickly. I wouldn't dream of teaching the children I love that. I would regard someone who taught

their children those messages as, I mean, abuse is too strong a word, but as really harming their kids, right? And this fits with a wider issue, as you know, Eric, which is, of course, this is one dimension of a much wider crisis, a crisis in which we are all being diminished, which is, for a long time, I thought, when I felt my own attention fraying, when I saw it happening to lots of people I knew, and I said to them in a very smug way, which some of my friends have reminded me of recently, every generation thinks this, right? Everyone thinks, you know, you get older, your brain deteriorates and you blame the deterioration of your brain. You mistake the deterioration of your brain for the deterioration of the world, right? You know, you can find letters from monks nearly a thousand years ago, writing to each other going, well, my attention ain't what it used to be, right? It's not an exact quote, but that's the gist of it.

But then actually I traveled all over the world and I interviewed the leading experts on attention and focus. And I went to places that have been profoundly affected by changes in attention from a favela in Rio, where attention had collapsed in a particularly disastrous way, to a company in New Zealand that found a really interesting way to restore their workers' attention. And actually, based on everything I saw in the evidence, I think there is good evidence that we really are in a serious attention crisis, that this is somewhat analogous to the obesity crisis or the climate crisis. There's something, as Professor Suna Lehman, who I interviewed in Copenhagen and Denmark, said to me when he did the first study that proved our collective attention

span has been shrinking. He said to me when he saw the data, God damn it, something really is happening here. And you can see this in a whole array of forms. And I learned that there's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that enhance or degrade attention. And I was really surprised that actually tech is only one of them, that tech I do not think is the biggest. And actually, it's a narrower aspect of technology that is causing this problem than we sometimes think. It's a very deep contribution to the problem. But I think we need to reframe how we think about attention across the board. And we need to reframe how we think about the tech component as well.

Excellent. Well, thanks for leading us kind of back into the book. And as you say, your point is in the book that there are these deeper forces at work that are damaging our attention and that attention is actually something really, really important. Right. something really, really important, right? So first, maybe say why to you, attention is a thing that is so important to try and preserve. I think there's kind of two levels to thinking about that. So one is a personal level, the level of the individual. So attention is generally defined, it's a definition that goes back to William James, the founder of American psychology in the late 19th century,

an incredible man, is your ability to selectively attend to stimuli in your environment, right? So I'm sitting in a room talking to you, but if I really tried, I can hear my heater over there and I can see that the light is flickering in the corner because I need to change the bulb over there. And I can see all my books around me. I can see my television there. I'm selectively attending to you. Oh, I'm talking to Eric. I'm filtering all that out. Now, when your attention breaks down, the average American college student, according to a small study, now focuses on any one task for 65 seconds. focuses on any one task for 65 seconds. In fact, the median amount they focus is 19 seconds. And the average office worker now focuses on any one task. According to Professor Gloria Marx's research, I interviewed her, the average office worker now focuses for three minutes. So you've got people whose entire working lives have dissolved into a sort of hailstorm

of tiny little three minute chunks. Now, when that happens, it becomes much harder to formulate and achieve your goals in life, right? Pretty much anything anyone wants to achieve, if anyone listening, think about something you're proud of having achieved in your life. That achievement, whether it's being a good parent or setting up a business or writing a book, whatever it might be, learning to play the guitar. That achievement took a lot of sustained attention and focus. And if your attention breaks down, your ability to achieve goals across the board breaks down. Your ability to form connections with other human beings degrades. So there's that level to it. Then there's a social level to it, which is a society of people whose attention breaks down

will find it much harder to solve their collective problems, identify their collective problems, and solve that collective problems. I don't think it's a coincidence that this attention crisis is occurring at the same time as a really significant crisis in democracy across almost all the world's democracies. Now, I don't know if I'm oversimplistic about this. There's many factors that are contributing to this democratic crisis and the kind of rocking and roiling of our democracies. But I think one factor is we can't pay sustained attention to problems. We can't listen to other people because listening requires sustained attention. And when we can't

pay attention, and there's lots of research on this, we look for more simplistic solutions. We zone out complexity. We become more shallow. We become more angry and irritable. I think you can see these things happening. So individuals who can't focus face real problems. Societies comprised of individuals who can't focus face real problems. And I think you can see that is playing out all around us. And then I think the core message from there is that, yes, there are some things that you as an individual can do to work on, to improve your ability to pay attention. And we're going to talk about some of those things. But that this is a bigger problem. It's a more systematic problem and that,

yes, you can make some changes individually, but you may only get so far with it. So share a little bit more about that. When I struggled to focus and pay attention, I would go into a very negative dialogue with myself. I would say, oh, you're weak, you're lazy, you're not disciplined enough. Funny enough, I had a little epiphany about this when I went to interview a man called Professor Roy Baumeister very early in the research for the book. He's at the University of Queensland. And Professor Baumeister is the leading expert on willpower in the world. He wrote a book called Willpower. People listening will probably know his famous experiment, the marshmallow experiment. So I go to see him and I said, I'm thinking of writing a book about attention.

There seems to be a problem here. And he said to me, you know, it's funny you should say that because I just find I can't really pay attention anymore. I just spend loads of time on my phone playing video games. And I'm sort of listening to him say this and I'm like, I didn't say this. I was like, didn't you write a book called Willpower? I was like, geez, if it's even happening to you, right? So I would go into sort of negative self-recrimination and I would seek purely

individual solutions. And I tried many individual solutions that I learned about based on the evidence, many of which helped me significantly. But I had an interesting moment. Obviously, I engaged in an extreme act of willpower. I literally gave away all my internet connected devices for three months. And that led to all sorts of positive improvements. And then at the end of those three months, I thought, well, I've cracked the code here. I'm going to re-discipline and integrate all these insights. And within a few months of being reunited with my devices, I was as bad as I'd ever been. And I went to Moscow to interview Dr. James Williams. Totally incredible. I think

arguably the most important philosopher of attention in the world today. He's a former Google engineer who left and did a PhD on attention at Oxford. And James said to me, what you got wrong by just trying to get out your own devices for three months is what you've done is a bit like thinking that the solution to air pollution is for you individually to wear a gas mask two days a week, right? Now, he's not opposed to gas masks, right? If I lived in Beijing, I would wear a gas mask. In fact, the air pollution is so bad here in London, there's an argument for wearing them here. But we all know that's not the solution, right? The solution is to actually deal with the source of the air pollution. And for me, what I learned is there need to be two levels of our response to this attention crisis. One level has to be individually protecting ourselves, right?

And that's very important. And I talk about lots of ways we can do that. I'm strongly in favour of that. But I really worry about the fact that almost all the books about how to cope with these problems end there, right? Because the truth is, we're living in an environment that is pouring itching powder on us all the time. And what's happening is it's like the forces that are pouring itching powder on us lean down and go, you know, you might want to learn how to meditate, then you wouldn't scratch so much, right? Now, you can see with through that analogy, no, we need to stop these people pouring itching powder on us. And sometimes, and I know that can sound a bit abstract, we'll get into lots

of very concrete ways, both individually and collectively, we can deal with some of the 12 forces that are invading and destroying our attention. But I think we need to understand this in a more truthful and complex way than we have up to now. I think we've had a very simplistic approach. I certainly had a very simplistic approach about self-blame, self-criticism. I also think it can be slightly false to present it as, I'm conscious that even the way I've just put it to you is slightly simplistic, because sometimes it can be framed as there's an individual solution, and then there's these huge grand political solutions. But actually, the big solutions only happen if enough of us as individuals band together and demand them, right? It's not we don't wait for a messiah to suddenly

deliver us from these collective problems, right? We'll wait forever. The collective solutions come from us individually persuading each other and standing together, as we've seen with pretty much every positive change that's ever happened in history, right? Every positive political change that's ever happened. Yeah, so conscious that all the things I've just said can sound rather abstract if we don't give concrete examples, and I'm sure we'll get to those concrete examples, but you're absolutely right to raise right at the start. And I think one of the reasons why I'm so uncomfortable with simply giving the individual solutions, even though they have been hugely beneficial to me and will be beneficial to everyone listening if they do them is you know this concept it was thought

of by the philosopher lauren berlant he called it cruel optimism a cruel optimism is where you take something with a really big social cause like obesity depression attention problems or addiction and you offer people in a very upbeat tone, a really simplistic solution. Hey, you can't focus. I've got great news. I've got the solution for you. You just need to do 10 minutes of this kind of meditation every morning. You're going to be fine, right? And it sounds very kind. You're offering the person a solution. But the reason it's cruel is because although meditation has lots of positive effects i'm in favor of it i do it myself for the vast majority of people that's not going to solve the problem

right it will help it's a good thing to do but if you sell that as the solution and they try it and the individual still can't focus what they think is there's something really wrong with me right what the cruel optimism whispers is the problem isn't in the system, the problem is in you. And that leads to all sorts of harm. And it takes us away from the bigger solutions. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

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So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week buying power column. Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter.

Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. This chapter was a challenging one for me because I didn't know the term cruel optimism, actually. I'm happy to have a term for something that I wrestle with

in my own life, in the work that I do. Because there are times that a lot of what we do is putting out individual solutions to individual suffering and challenges. And I have this discussion with my son, who's much more of a systematic activist type guy, you know, and so he'll say, it's a way bigger problem than that. And I'll go, I agree, it is a way bigger problem. And, you know, to use your analogy, still got to figure out how to put on the gas mask, you know, you still got to do that. But the cruel optimism part is kind of like you say, is this idea of giving people, it's just really easy to solve your

problems. And all you got to do is do this. The self-help industry is known for basically saying, I'll tell you to do something when you don't do it. Instead of you turning back to me and saying, the problem is with your method, the way it's all structured is the problem is about the person who's trying the method. It's almost a foolproof way to keep people coming back. You know, it's so interesting because this is something I wrestle with in a similar way. And obviously I thought about it very deeply and talked to a lot of people about it for the book. And the way I came to think about it was the alternative to cruel optimism is not pessimism.

The alternative to cruel optimism is to level with people about the layers of the problem and to explain to them them there's always things you can do as an individual even if you are in solitary confinement and you've been put there for a crime you didn't commit and you're there for 60 years even there you can do something right primo levy of course yeah writes about this so does victor frankl even people in the concentration camps who were entirely at the mercy in one sense of these monstrous um well, the Nazis, had some agency in their own minds if nowhere else. So there's always things individuals can do, even if the margin is very small. But you want to also explain to people the truth, which is there are many layers to this. One layer to which you can

respond is the individual level, and that will get you a certain way, right? And there are other levels where you also can exercise power. Now you can exercise some power as an individual. And I'm conscious that this can all sound a bit abstract. So if it's okay, I'll give you a very specific example of a problem which has both an individual and collective solution, I think. So I'll go for a real low-hanging fruit one, one that I think everyone will get immediately. So I went to interview Professor Earl Miller at MIT, one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. And he said to me, look, there's one thing more than anything else

that you've got to understand about the human brain. You are only able consciously to think about one thing at a time. That's it. The human brain has not significantly changed in 40,000 years. Ain't going to change on any time scale we're going to be around for. This is just a limitation of your brain. But we have fallen for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at once. And what Professor Miller's colleagues found when they get people into the labs, not just teenagers, and they get them to think they're doing lots of things at the same time, is they discover that in fact, when you do that, you're juggling, right? You're switching very rapidly between tasks. So let's say somewhere in this room, there's my phone. Let's say that while you were talking, I just glanced at my text messages

for a moment and I glanced back at you. What happens in that moment is my brain is focused on you. Then it refocuses on the text message. Oh, right. My friend Rob messaged me. Okay. That's what that means. Then I have to refocus on you. And that process, that juggling incurs a cost. It's called the switch cost effect, right? It takes a certain amount of your brain power. Now it doesn't sound like much, but in fact, switching in this way incurs four really quite significant costs. The first is there's just a certain amount of brain power in the switching itself that you lose. The second is that as you switch, you make more mistakes and then you have to go back and correct your mistakes for obvious reasons. The third is you remember less of what you experience because encoding your experiences into memory takes a certain amount of mental energy that is just diminished if your brain is doing other stuff.

And fourthly, this is a more medium to long-term effect, you become significantly less creative. Creativity comes from your mind wandering, thinking back over all the experiences you've had and bringing together, popping together two ideas that have not previously been brought together. All of those things diminish. Now this can sound like a small effect. In fact, the evidence is pretty shocking on this actually. I'll give you just a small example. Hewlett Packard, the printer company, did a small study where they got a scientist to split a group of their workers into two groups. And the first was told, just do whatever your task for today is, and we're not going to interrupt you. And the second task was told, do whatever your task is for the day. And

they were heavily interrupted with texts and emails. Then at the end of it, they tested the IQ of both groups. The group that was not interrupted tested as having 10 IQ points higher than the group that was interrupted. To give you a sense of how big that effect is, if you or me got stoned now, if we smoked cannabis together, our IQ would drop by about five points. So being severely distracted, it has double the degrading effect on your attention, at least in the short term, as smoking cannabis. You'll be better off sitting at your desk, smoking a spliff and doing one thing at a time than sitting at your desk, being constantly distracted and not smoking cannabis. There was a similar study by Carnegie Mellon University. They split 138 students into two groups. They both did the same exam.

One group was told, do the exam in normal did the same exam. One group was told, do the exam in normal exam conditions. And the second group was told, you can leave your phone on and you can receive and send text messages. Now you'd expect instinctively the second group to do better because they could have cheated, right? They could have texted people and asked for the answer. In fact, the group that had texts on did 20% less well on average than the group that did it in exam conditions. Now we are all losing that 20% of our brain power throughout the day. Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you're interrupted, it takes you 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus that you had before the interruption. But most of us never get 23 minutes without being interrupted. So we're constantly, the way Professor Miller said it to me at MIT is, we live in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation. Now, there's both

personal and collective solutions to that. So there's lots of personal solutions that obviously I write about in style of focus to give you a very obvious one. You can't see it here, Eric, but in the corner of my room over there, I've got a white plastic timed safe. It's called a K-safe. K-safe should start paying me commission because i'm recommending it in every interview i do they should that it's very simple it's plastic safe you take the lid off you put your phone in it you put the lid on you turn the dial and it will lock your phone away for between five minutes and a week whatever you tell it to lock it away for every day i put my phone in in that case safe for four hours. So I just get space to properly think without being interrupted. So that's an obvious individual solution. One of many individual solutions to this problem. But there's a reason why we also have to think at

this collective level, because a lot of people, when they've heard what I just said, I put my phone away for four hours a day, will experience me saying that as a bit like if I'd gone up to a homeless person and said, Hey buddy, do you know what would make you feel much better? It'd be if you went into that fancy restaurant over there and you had a really nice dinner, you'd feel much better, right? The homeless person entirely understandably would say, screw you. They won't let me in. And lots of people hearing that will go, yeah, I'd love to not be interrupted. Screw you. I can't do that. Right. And there's a place that dealt with this. And in and lots of people hearing that will go yeah i'd love to not be interrupted screw you i can't do that right and there's a place that dealt with this there's lots of places that have dealt with this but i'll give you an example of one that i went to so in france in 2018 they had a huge debate about what they called le burnout which i don't think you need me to

translate and under pressure from labor unions the french government appointed a guy called pruno metling who was the head of orange their leading telecoms company to investigate this figure out what's going on so metling did all this research and he discovered that 35 of french workers felt they could never stop checking email or turn off their texts because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night and they would get in trouble if they didn't answer. So they were never mentally unplugging. They were never physically unplugging, right? They were in this constant ratchet. I mean, I remember when we were kids, the only people who were on call were the prime minister and doctors, and even doctors weren't on call constantly, right? Now, almost half the economy spends their time on call. So Metling proposed a very simple

solution that was then passed into law. It's called the right to disconnect. It's very simple. It says two things. One, you have a right to have legally defined work hours, written work hours that are stipulated to you before you start work. And you have a right outside those work hours to not have to check your email and your phone. So I went to Paris, spoke to lots of people about this. Big companies now get fined. Rent-A-Kill, just before I was there, got fined 70,000 euros because they criticised a worker for not checking his work email an hour after his work hours had ended, right? Now you can see how that is a collective solution that was fought for by French workers through their labour unions.

They have very powerful unions in France because they band together. That was fought for by ordinary French workers. That is a collective solution that frees up individuals to make individual solutions. Sometimes it's framed as individual solutions versus collective solutions. But actually, the collective solutions make it possible to make individual changes. There's many examples like this, but I think that's an example of problem, individual solution, collective solution. And people can see how the collective solution adds an extra layer that we can't get to.

Maybe some people listening will be so powerful in their workforce that they can go to their boss and go, you know what? I'm just not checking my email after I leave at 5pm. But the vast majority of people are not going to be in that position, right? That's why you have to have a collective fight, not just an individual fight. Yeah, and I think the way you explain that is really, really good. And it kind of sort of leads us into one of the more, you called it, I think, controversial parts of the book, which is a discussion between you and another previous guest of the show, Nir Eyal, about this, right?

Because what he's saying is, look, there's a Do Not Disturb button on your phone. There's a way to turn off all these notifications. You can just very easily go do this, right? And then your point is, and there's a lot of nuance going to be lost in this. So I encourage people, before you say anything about this, you should read the whole section. And I know Johan, you posted the interview or conversations between you guys on your website. So I'm not trying to foment a debate between two people here in any way, shape or form. But it's an important part of the book, which is he says, the tools are there, it's your responsibility, turn them off. And you, as you just eloquently said, not

everybody can do that, right? And so I think what you said is really great, which is we got to look at the layers here, right? Because I know there are people, coaching clients I've worked for before, who could go to their boss and say, look, I'm just not going to be answering emails overnight. And they could do that. They choose not to do that because some of it's culturally conditioned, but some of it is, as Nir would say, it's their internal trigger. It's their own anxiety, like to be connected. I got to know what's going on. I got to know what's going on. So I think both things can be true. But I think what you're pointing out is that for a lot of us, and this gets to, I think, the cruel optimism bit too, for a lot of people,

these strategies and solutions that will work, they might work. And for many people, they won't work at all. And the people that do are often very privileged. You know, I think you just put that really well. And I'm grateful to Nir for engaging with me. And there's a lot in what he says that I agree strongly with, but I felt two levels of discomfort. So Nir talks a lot about, well, the phrase he used to me is people should just push the fucking button, right? They've got a button on their phone that they can turn off on the notifications. He says, this is actually really simple, right? People should just push the fucking button, that kind of thing.

And I want to be fair to Nir, there are some collective solutions that Nir is in favour of. He's not entirely focused on the individual. I think the collective solutions he proposes are very small, but there are some collective solutions that Nir is in favour of. He's not entirely focused on the individual. I think the collective solutions he proposes are very small, but there are some. But there are two levels at which I was uncomfortable with what he said. One is the cruel optimism element that we've talked about. And it's interesting, he uses an analogy that I think is really interesting and revealing. was a child, he was obese, which is very surprising when you see him now, because he's like, he looks quite buff to me now. And he overcame his obesity by realising that he was emotionally eating to deal with distress. And he overcame that, right? And he extends that analogy in a way that will be extendable for some people. And I think he overextends it in a way that becomes cruel optimism.

If we look at the obesity crisis, you know, if you look at a photograph of a beach in the United States in 1970, everyone is what we would call slim or buff, right? Everyone. There's no fat people on the beach, right? And that's not that the fat people were hiding away. There was almost no obesity in 1970, right? And what happened? The average American has gained 22 pounds. And that's not because they all individually failed or individually ate their feelings. It's because our entire food supply system changed in ways that causes obesity. It's because the way our cities work, it's essentially impossible to walk or bike around many American cities. I spend a lot of my time in Las Vegas. Try walking anywhere in Vegas. It's impossible, right? So there's one level at which I feel it's overly simplistic and it's cruel optimism,

but there's a second level at which I'm uncomfortable with it, which I discussed with him. And to be fair, people should listen to his response, which is posted on the book's website, stolenfocusbook.com, because I don't feel like I can entirely fairly summarise his argument. But Nir wrote this book saying, you can get control of your attention really easily, you know, push the fucking button, that kind of thing. And to be fair, he proposes various techniques, all of which I'm in favour of, and I discuss some of them in Install and Focus. But he wrote a book before that, a book called Hooked. So Nir is a tech designer, and he wrote a book called Hooked, which, as he describes it, is a cookbook for tech designers to figure out how to manipulate human behavior. So a typical headline

on his website, giving advice to people was, want to hook your users, drive them crazy, right? And in Hooked, he describes a series of very powerful techniques, which he describes as designed to hook people, to create very strong cravings in them. And this has been a very influential book. The head of Microsoft held it up and told all her workers to read it. Lots of apps have been designed using this advice, right? And what I felt very uncomfortable with is he writes this book saying, hook your users. I have seen kids in my life become hooked by precisely the techniques that Nir has advocated. And then when they do become hooked, he says,

well, you could just solve it really easily. Just sort yourself out, push the fucking button, right? And to me, there's a disparity between the thinness of the personal solutions he advocates and the power of the big invasive forces he advocates right yeah so he talks about these very powerful techniques of reinforcement that are applied to to people the cravings to use his words drive them crazy and then his solutions are things like picture yourself as a leaf on a river meditating i mean there's a real disparity between these things. And you can see how, and I want to be clear, I do not believe this is conscious on Nia's part. I don't think it is mendacious or anything, but you can see how this is how big tech wants us to think about our

attention problems, right? They drive us crazy. And then they tell us, well, what's wrong? We've given you the tools to solve the problem. Just push the fucking button, right? And sorry to keep repeating that phrase. It reminds me there's a great Israeli pop song called Push the Button. But to me, that disparity makes me very uncomfortable. And as Dr. James Williams said to me, it lets the people who are doing this to us off the hook. Yeah, yeah. I have a couple thoughts on that. One is, I agree with you. I mean, I often, when I'm working with a coaching client, I'll have somebody say something like, well, I didn't write today because, you know, I was just going to watch one episode of my favorite show on Netflix, then I was going to write. I was like, that is never going to work.

Like, there are people who are incredibly smart people who are sitting around and their thing they're thinking and spending lots of energy on is how do I get that guy not to turn it off after this one show? So you are fighting a losing battle if you structure things that way. I mean, another example doesn't apply exactly, but it does have some relevance, which would be, it's a whole lot harder to stop snorting cocaine if you're at a crack house, right? Like it's just, when somebody wants to get sober, we try and remove ourselves, you know? But as we're saying, we can't really remove ourselves. The vast majority of people can't do what you did, which was go away for three months. And even you can't do that all

the time, right? That's a pretty rare, rare thing. So I agree with you about that general idea that we've got these really smart, powerful forces that are going against us. And I had another point that is now gone to me. How apropos is that? The forces of distraction. I think that's really important what you've just said. And it was really interesting. One of the things I took from many things I learned, but partly from my conversations with Nir, the way Nir, I think, would like to frame this, perhaps that's unfair. The way I think a lot of big tech would like to frame this, Nir may disagree with this, is I think they want us to frame this debate as a debate between being pro-tech or anti-tech, right? And I'm sure my book

will be described as anti-tech. I'm not anti-tech at all. The question isn't pro-tech or anti-tech, right? And I'm sure my book will be described as anti-tech. I'm not anti-tech at all. The question isn't pro-tech or anti-tech. The question is what tech working in whose interests with what goals? And to understand that, I think it's worth just unpacking a bit what I'm getting at, because what I learned is we could have social media that worked on very different principles. We currently have a model have social media that worked on very different principles. We currently have a model of social media that is designed to maximally hack and invade your attention. That's not my view. That's not the view of Silicon Valley dissidents. That's the view of Facebook, right? Sean Parker, one of the first investors in Facebook said,

when Facebook was being designed, we designed it to figure out how we could maximally take your attention. We knew what we were doing. We did it anyway figure out how we could maximally take your attention. We knew what we were doing. We did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our kids' brains. That's what one of the key figures in the history of Facebook is saying. And we now know from the leaked Facebook memos by Francis Haugen, they were saying many other things like that internally. And there was a moment, this really fell into place for me. So over many years, I interviewed lots of times, Tristan Harris is a very well-known former Google engineer who now is a kind of outspoken critic of the current business model that the social media companies are adopting. It's a moment that really stayed with me that Tristan said, this is not the moment I'll get to, but Tristan worked on the Gmail team when they were trying to figure out very early in Gmail, where they wanted to maximize, obviously they wanted to increase their user base, but they also wanted to increase

the number of times a day someone used Gmail for reasons I'll get to. And one of his colleagues, they were sitting in the Googleplex and one of his colleagues had an idea. He just said, why don't we make it so that every time someone gets an email, their phone vibrates? And everyone said, that's a good idea and a week later Tristan was walking around San Francisco and he just hears these vibrations everywhere like the chirping of birds and he just realizes shit we did that and that's happening all over the world everywhere in fact he later calculated about a year later that that decision at that time was causing 11 billion interruptions to people's day across the world. It'd actually be much higher now.

It's staggering. So Tristan said to me one day, as I was talking to Tristan about many different aspects of this, and Tristan said to me today, ask yourself something really important. Open your phone, open Facebook, and Facebook will tell you lots of things. It'll tell you whose birthday it is, who tagged you in a photo, what you said on the exact same day, 10 years before, whatever it might be. There's one thing Facebook will never tell you. There is no button on Facebook that says something like, I'd like to meet up with people or any of my friends nearby, right? Any of them want to meet up. There's no such button. Now, as soon as I say that, everyone listening to this is on Facebook would think that'd be a really nice button to have, right? That would very clearly be a popular option. Why does Facebook not provide that?

When you follow the trail from that, I think you begin to understand what's being done to us and some of the solutions. So every time you open Facebook, they make money two ways. One is very obvious. You scroll down your feed, you see advertising. We all understand how that works. Second way is more subtle and much more important. Everything you do on Facebook is scanned and sorted to build a profile of you. So let's say you click that you like, I don't know, Bette Midler, Donald Trump, and you're saying a message to your mother that you just bought some diapers. Okay. Facebook now knows you're probably a gay man. No disrespect to the straight people who like Bette Midler. You're probably a conservative and you've probably got a baby because you're talking about diapers. Now they've got tens of thousands of data points like that about you. They know a lot about you.

They then sell that portrait of you to advertisers. So those advertisers can take your attention, right? Because if I'm selling diapers, I don't want to market to everyone. There's no point showing an ad about diapers to me. I don't have a baby, right? They want to show it to someone who's got a baby. So that's the really valuable part. Okay, now imagine that they did invent that button, the button that says, which of my friends are available and want to meet up. If you push that button, it goes, oh, Dave's up the road. I'll go for a drink with Dave. You would close Facebook and Dave would close Facebook and you would look into each other's

eyes and you would talk, right? The things that make us feel good as human beings. That's a disaster for Facebook because they lose both those revenue streams, right? They immediately lose them. They want you to be maximally interacting through their device because that's how they harvest the information about you to sell your attention to advertisers. So all of their machinery or the engineering genius they use, all of their algorithms is all designed for one goal, one purpose. How do I keep you, Eric, from scrolling and scrolling and never putting that

phone down, right? That's the maximal goal that they want because that's how they maximize their profits. But the entire model is based on the principle that your distraction is their fuel, right? It is an attention harvesting model. But the important thing to understand is, as lots of dissidents in Silicon Valley explained to me, social media doesn't have to work that way. So think about an analogy. Lots of older listeners will remember, until the 80s, we used to use leaded gasoline. I can remember the smell of it, right, from when I was a kid. We also used to, earlier than that, it ended in the 70s, we used to paint our homes with lead paint.

And then it was discovered that inhaling lead inflames the brain and causes, is catastrophic for people's attention, particularly children's attention attention it can actually be disinhibiting to the point of violence for some people so what do we do we banned lead in paint and we banned leaded gasoline now you will notice i'm in a room that has been painted right you're in a room that's been painted we still paint our homes we still have gasoline in our cars it's just not leaded paint and leaded gasoline in the same way it may be that we decide that the current model is the equivalent not leaded paint and leaded gasoline. In the same way, it may be that we decide that the current model is the equivalent of leaded gasoline. Someone called Asa Raskin really helped me to think about this. Asa designed a key part of how the internet works. His dad, Jeff Raskin,

was the guy who designed the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. And Asa said to me, we should just ban the current business model. We should just say a business model premised upon surveilling you in order to figure out how to hack your attention and sell that attention to the highest bidder is anti-human and unacceptable. It's like leaded paint and we do not tolerate it. And I said to him, and lots of other people who advocate this approach, well, okay, but what would happen if I opened Facebook the day after we banned it? Would there just be a little notice saying, sorry, we've gone fishing? And he said, no, of course not. What would happen is they would move to a different business model. And there's plenty of other business models they could move

to. Subscription is an obvious business model. You pay a certain amount to HBO and you get HBO. Or one of them may be, you know, everyone listening to this will be somewhere close to a sewer, right? Now, before we had sewers, we had feces in the street and people got cholera and it was a disaster. So together we funded the building of sewers and together we own the sewer pipes. They're collectively publicly owned, right? It may be we want a model of public ownership, independent of government, which would be very important, where we say, just like we own the sewage pipes, we want to own the information pipes, right? We want to own the means by which we communicate. The reason this is so important is if we move to a different model, the incentives for the design of social media completely change.

If at the moment you're not the customer, you're the product they sell to the real customer, the advertiser, but under a subscription model or a public ownership model, you become the person they want to serve. So they're not saying, how do we hack Eric to sell his attention? They're saying, what does Eric want? Oh, Eric wants to spend time with his friends. Let's give him a button that will tell him where his friends are. Oh, Eric wants to be able to focus. Let's warn him every time he gets a link from us that he thinks it'll only take a few seconds. It actually takes 23 minutes before he'll get back to what he's doing. There's a thousand ways, which are not technologically hard. They could be designed by Tristan and his friends in a day that would transform it.

So instead of being designed to hack your attention, it could be designed to heal and aid your attention. Instead of being a vacuum sucking up your attention, it could be a trampoline sending you back into the world, right? But for that to happen, we need to change the business model. And they're not going to change it on their own, right? We need to make the same way that companies that made lead paint and leaded gasoline, they were never going to give up their model, right? Without being made to do it by movements of ordinary citizens. Does that ring true to you, Eric? Totally. Yeah, that makes complete sense. I love that analogy because,

as you said earlier, it's easy for this to all start to sound anti-tech and that's not what it is. And I think the leaded gasoline model and the leaded paint model really makes a lot of sense because it's saying like, yeah, we still want the benefits that social media gives us. 100%. 100%. And we all know the benefits of that. Think about something as simple as I'm gay, right? And I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who has a gay son. He's like 15 and he can find other gay people incredibly easily in a way that was really, I mean, that's partly the social advance in attitudes towards gay people, but also this

technology makes it possible for him to find other gay kids in a way that was unthinkable for me, right? We can all think of an enormous number of answers. We want to keep the positive steps, but not the disastrous ones. And there are ways we can do that. And again, that's where someone like Nir, in my view, although he would disagree, I think frames the debate in a false way where, you know, it's not pro-tech or anti-tech. It's what tech, right? Because that's what tech and whose interests. At the moment, we have tech that doesn't work in your interests or my interests, right? It works in the interest of a very small number of people who want to harvest

our attention, which is having disastrous effects. I don't want us all to convert to become the Amish, right? That's my idea of hell, right? I don't want to go, well, hell's going too far, but it would be awful, right? But under no means do we want to renounce these things. And of course, there's some degree to which these technologies would have increased distraction, but to have them maximally designed to harvest and invade attention is a disaster. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's so many different directions we could take this, and we're somewhat limited on time. But I think the other thing to speak to how your book isn't anti-tech, or the message isn't anti-tech, is you make the point of this attention span dwindling has been going on for quite some time, of this attention span dwindling has been going on for quite some time. And that, you know, largely what several people that you talked to and studied sort of showed was if you want to make people's ability to focus on one thing smaller, so that we focus on more and more things,

all you have to do is just keep feeding more information into the system. And that did not start with technology that's been going on for a while. You know, the more things we have to focus on that get put in front of us, the less time we the Technical University of Denmark. And Professor Lehman did a really important study with many other scientists, some of whom I interviewed, like Dr. Philip Steen in Berlin, which was the first study that showed that our collective attention span genuinely has shrunk. And it found something really important in relation to what you just said, Eric. So the way they did it initially is Sasuna was worried about his own attention. That's how it began. Like me, I wanted to figure out, well, is this just a kind of grumpy old man thing or is something really changing? They started by doing a very small study that opened up into a much bigger technique that was much more revealing.

So initially, so they wanted to look at collective attention. And initially they just looked at Twitter and anyone who's on Twitter will know that Twitter has something called trending topics where it's the AI is scanning and the algorithms are scanning to see what topics are being most discussed that day, whether it's, I don't know, if Justin Bieber fell over somewhere or whatever, you know, we could all think of things and it will show the most discussed things on Twitter that day. They looked at data on Twitter between 2013 and 2016, and they just started with a very simple question. How long did a trending topic get discussed for on Twitter?

And in 2013, with the earliest data they looked at, on average, a trending topic was discussed for 17.5 hours. By the time you got to 2016, a trending topic was only discussed for 12 hours. So collectively, we were talking about any one thing less than in the past. But then we're like, okay, well, maybe that's just a phenomenon of Twitter. They looked at many websites, Reddit, they looked at Google searches, things people search for on Google. And across the board, with one exception, Wikipedia, the graph looked exactly the same people were talking about one topic for less and less but then they did something to me much more interesting

so there's a way they discovered you can do this by looking at publications in the past so as you know Google Books has scanned books going back as long as there have been books. And what you can do is you can train an algorithm to read through those books and detect the equivalent of trending topics in the past. The fancy term for it is detecting engrams. So there's plenty of phrases that pop up in the language, get intensely discussed for a while, and then disappear again. Think about no deal Brexit. No one had ever said the phrase no deal Brexit before 2016. No one will ever say it again, apart from historians 10 years from now. Or think about the Harlem Renaissance. We can all think of something, right? So you can look at how quickly did topics

emerge and how quickly did they vanish in the past? It's a very clever technique. And what they discovered was really striking. They looked at books for every decade since the 1880s. And since the 1880s, the graph looked almost exactly like the graph on Twitter. With each decade that passed, people were focusing collectively together, but for less and less time. And this is a really interesting phenomenon, which again suggests it's way too simplistic to think this problem is just the internet. Now, clearly, the internet and particularly And this is a really interesting phenomenon, which again suggests it's way too simplistic to think this problem is just the internet. Now, clearly the internet and particularly the business model that drives the dominant forms of the internet has clearly accelerated this trend.

And there's good evidence for that, but it also shows there's something deeper going on. And I spent a lot of time trying to think about what this is. Some of that is technological advance. And it appears by the way that we're doing all sorts of things faster. There's evidence that we speak faster than we did in the 1950s. There's evidence that we walk faster than we did in the 1950s. There's all sorts of forms of acceleration going on. One British writer, Robert Caldwell, has talked about how we live in the great acceleration. And we know the effects that acceleration has on attention. You can even look at just studies as simple as training people to speed read. You can train almost anyone to read significantly faster.

But what happens is they understand less, they remember less, and they think in a much more shallow way about what they've read, which is a bit of a no-shit Sherlock finding. But it sort of helps by analogy for us to think about what's happening to all of us with acceleration. Now, there's a big debate about what's driving this acceleration. And I offer this more tentatively than I offer some of the other conclusions that I put forward in this conversation or in the book. But I spoke to a lot of people like Professor Thomas Hilland Ericsson in Norway and Professor Jason Hickel, who's now based in Spain, argued that part of what's happening is probably linked

to the broader economic model we have of economic growth. So as Professor Ericsson, who's one of the leading social scientists in Norway, and one of the most prestigious in the world said to me, if you have an economic, so we have a model based on economic growth, as everyone knows, if a company grows, we reward the CEO, if it shrinks, we punish the CEO. If the country's economy, if the next election, if the economy grew, President Biden will have a much better chance of re-election. If it shrank, his re-election will be less likely if he runs again. And Professor Erickson said to me, if you have to deliver growth all the time, since we live in a growth machine, there's really two ways you can deliver growth. One is you can discover a new

market. And clearly that does happen. But the other way is you can discover a new market. And clearly that does happen. But the other way is you can get an existing market to consume more rapidly. So think about something as simple as if I can get you to watch television and tweet about it at the same time, I've doubled the amount of potential advertising you're exposed to. You see it on the TV and you see it on Twitter. So he argues that economic growth, built into economic growth, is an inherent rapid acceleration of the experience of life. And the way Suna Lehman put it to me, the guy who did the studies, look, there's just got to be a limit to how much speed we can tolerate without it causing a profound degeneration in our ability to think. Now I offer that more tentatively because that seems to me very plausible.

It's hard to know how you could design a counterfactual to look into that given that every economy in the world, I mean, you could sort of talk about Bhutan a bit. You could talk about some economies that have tried to extract themselves from the growth economy. That's a very, very hard comparison point. So my instinct is, I believe that we're going to have to build, in addition to having all sorts of individual defences in front of our attention, I think just like women had to build a feminist movement to reclaim control of their bodies and their lives and indeed still need that movement, I think we're going to need something like an attention movement to reassert control of our minds, to resist many of these forces that are invading our attention. And my hunch, which could be wrong, is that somewhere down the line, an attention movement would have to bump into the logic of economic growth, and we'd have to think about that. Now, I also think there are very, and this I feel more confident of, there are other very good reasons to think about moving beyond the model of economic growth

to do with the climate crisis and so on. We can talk about that another time and there's people much better qualified to talk about it than me, but my hunches will end up bumping into that topic. But I feel like that's, if we're thinking about the layers of the debate and the discussion, that's like 10 layers up from where we are, right? You've got my case safe at the lowest level of the debate and a debate about economic growth is the highest, highest, highest level. And I think we're so far from thinking about this as a collective problem that requires collective solutions

that I feel like let's put a peg in that and debate it 10 years from now if we've got a really good movement going. Well, Johan, I could do this with you for hours and hours, and you and I are going to continue a little bit more in the post-show conversation. And one of the things that we are going to talk about is, is mind-wandering good for you or is mind-wandering bad for you? Because you hear both

these and you actually summarized it in one sentence. As I was saying to you before, I love the way you look at these different things. We're going to talk about that as well as I'd like to explore your three main goals you would see in a movement to reclaim our attention would focus on. Listeners, if you'd like to get access to the post-show conversation, you can go to oneufeed.net slash join, hear the rest of this conversation with Johan and I, lots of other post-show conversations and all kinds of other goodies like ad-free episodes. So that's oneufeed.net.net join johan thank you so much for coming on it is always such a pleasure i always love talking to eric and i meant to say or my

publishers will tase me yes anyone who wants to know where to get the audio book the e-book or the physical book i mean get it from any good bookshop or indeed any shitty bookshop but you can go to www.stolenfocusbook.com and you you can also on the website, you can hear what lots of prominent people have said about the book. And you can listen to audio of loads of the experts that we've talked to. You can listen for free to the audio with them. And that conversation I had with Nir and many other that we were talking about that got a little bit contentious. And you can find out loads of other good stuff about the book. Yep. And we'll put a link in the show notes. So if you just click on that, it'll take you right there also. All right. Thank you, Johan. Oh, thank you. Hooray.

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