The Rich Roll Podcast - Johann Hari On Why You Can’t Pay Attention (& How To Reclaim Your Focus)

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

We are living in a time of upgraded technology and downgraded humans. Our collective ability to resist distraction and sustain attention is in decline. Although will power plays a role, this problem is not entirely our fault—it’s the by-product of powerful forces incident to modern life. Disconnection from nature. Disrupted sleep. Toxic environments. Predatory tech. What exactly does a focus-less future augur? And what can be done to reclaim our ability to truly concentrate? Back for his second appearance on the show, our steward for these existential questions is journalist & multiple New York Times bestselling author Johann Hari, who, when confronted with his own deteriorating attention span, dove deep into the individual and systemic solutions to this dispiriting collective trend. Johann has written for the LA Times, Le Monde, and many other outlets, has two of the most-watched TED Talks, and has been profiled in essentially every prominent media outlet. His books include Chasing The Scream and Lost Connections,, which explores the roots of addiction, and was the subject of our first exchange back on episode #416. But today, he’s here to share big lessons from his latest book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, which is a provoking journey into the forces robbing us of our attention and a look at how we might begin to reclaim our minds, and our lives. Today’s conversation focuses on the problematic impact of big tech, smartphone addiction and surveillance capitalism on our well-being and that of our children. We discuss the specific factors contributing to attention decline–from reduced sleep, environmental pollution, and something called the switch/cost effect, to chronic stress, poor nutrition, lack of exercise, and disconnection from others and the natural world. Beyond the many problems, we, of course, also address solutions—both systemic and individualistic—such that we may recapture our focus and be the best version of ourselves. Johann is quite the entertaining storyteller, with humor that makes hard truths go down a little easier. To read more, click here. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. This is a hopeful conversation about how to build a life of greater joy, enhanced personal fulfillment, and focus. My wish is that it serves and enlightens. Enjoy! Peace + Plants, Rich

It doesn't matter what you want to do in your life. If you can't pay attention, you won't be able to do it. So the first thing we need to do is deal with the deep underlying factors that are damaging our attention in the way we eat, in the technology we use, in the hours we work, in the polluted air we breathe. There's all these factors. We need to do lots of things as individuals, but we also need to realize this is being done to us.

It is being done by really powerful forces, and we need to change the nature of our demand, right? Because at the moment we're just blaming ourselves. Most people just blame themselves for their attention problems. But I think we need to realize when we are all plugged into machinery that makes us angrier and angrier and angrier. If it's enraging, it's engaging, it will keep people scrolling. We know what the effect is because we just have to turn on the news, right? We've become a society where we can't listen to each other, where we are constantly screaming at each other, where the center is collapsing and people are going to greater and greater extremes. Focus is essential to having a good life. Attention is like a form of light that illuminates your life. When you get to it,

it's an amazing feeling. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Today, we're gonna tackle an issue I think we can all relate to, which is the decline of our collective ability to focus, to pay attention for any sustained period of time, to hone in and resist distraction so we can do our best work. And this is a problem, a growing problem. I'm certain many of you have experienced

or witnessed in others or in your children, especially over the course of the past couple of years, but it's also a problem, not entirely our fault because it's being fueled by powerful forces incident to modern life. And it's a problem I think can fairly be characterized as somewhat existential. Well, my guest for this discussion,

back for his second appearance on the show, his first being RRP 416, four years ago, is journalist and multiple New York Times bestselling author, Johann Hari, who when confronted with his own declining ability to focus, ended up spending a couple of years going really deep into the reasons why and the individual and systemic solutions to this dispiriting trend. Johan's books include Chasing the Scream, which is all about depression, and Lost Connections, which explores the roots of addiction.

He's also written for the LA Times, Le Monde, and many other outlets. He has two of the most watched TED Talks, has been profiled in essentially every prominent media outlet, and is here today to dig into the details of his latest book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention, which is a provoking journey into the details of his latest book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention,

which is a provoking journey into the forces that are robbing us of our attention and a look at how we might begin to reclaim our minds and our lives. The conversation is coming right up, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com i've been in recovery for a long time it's not hyperbolic to say that i owe everything good in my life to sobriety and it all began with treatment and experience that i had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well

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We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. I've, in turn, helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices.

It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com.

Okay, so Johan is quite the entertaining storyteller, and today's stories illuminate the important terrain previously mentioned. We talk about the problematic nature of big tech, smartphone addiction, surveillance capitalism, and the impact of this on all of us, including our children. We also discuss other factors contributing to attention decline

from reduced sleep, environmental pollution, and something called the switch cost effect to chronic stress, poor nutrition, lack of exercise, and disconnection from others and the natural world. Beyond the many problems, we also, of course, address solutions, both systemic and individualistic, such that we may recapture our focus

and be the people we're capable of being. Johan is always a lot of fun. I really enjoyed this one. So without further delay, this is me and Johan Hari. Well, I love the book. You did a great job. It's such an important issue. And we're gonna get into all of that.

But before we even like tiptoe in that direction, I have to know, you just did Bill Maher the other night. We're recording this on Monday. That's Friday night, right? Yeah. They tape on Friday night. I didn't watch it, but I listened cause they put it up as a podcast.

So I was listening to it the other day. So how was that experience? Cause I found him to be, you know, pretty contrarian and a little bit cantankerous with you. Oh no, I love Bill. I've done Bill's show like, I know Bill well. I've done it like six or seven times. No, I thought he, he essentially,

so basically his view is our attention is fucked, but there's nothing we can do about it. And what I was trying to say to him is, you're right, our attention is fucked, but we could absolutely solve this problem. You kept trying to sneak in solutions and he wasn't having it. He has a very pessimistic view of humanity's ability

to deal with this existential crisis. Yeah, and that's, yeah, I get where he's coming from and I love Bill, but I don't think he's right. I absolutely think we can solve this problem. I hope so. Well, that's what we're gonna talk about, right? It is good to see you. Of course, you've been on the show before.

That was- In the before times. It was four years, how long ago was that? Four years ago, exactly four years ago. Almost this time of year, right? And I do remember when I started reading the book and kind of a big inflection point and why you even got interested in this subject of focus and attention

was by dint of your own struggles with your ability to maintain focus. And so you go to Provincetown and you leave the phone on the mainland and you get an old laptop that can't connect to the internet and the idea is you're gonna go three months being completely offline. And I believe that was in the summer of 2018, right?

Yeah, yeah. So I remember when I was trying to book you for the podcast and I was corresponding with, I don't know if it was your publicist or your publisher and they're like, he's on an island, we can't reach him. And I was like, all right, well, I'm here when he comes back. So actually when you did the show, you had already had that experience, right?

So that's how long you've been working on this book. That's so interesting. Yeah, there were loads, when I got back from this three months, there were loads of people. You, Oprah had been trying to contact me. Couldn't get through, right? Right. And no, the reason I did this is because,

with each year that passed, I felt for myself, like things that required deep focus were 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 most of the people I knew,

particularly the young people in my life, a lot of whom seem to be kind of whirring at the speed of Snapchat, where nothing still or serious could touch them. So I started looking into this. I used my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to kind of begin to dig into this. And I think the figures on this are quite shocking.

You know, for every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now 100 children who've been identified with that problem. The typical American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. And I started thinking, well, what's happened to us, right? What's happening to our attention? Because I thought right at the start of this, I thought, you know, I just thought the problem was that I didn't have enough willpower.

I thought I wasn't strong enough. And I also thought the problem was that someone invented the smartphone, right? Those are basically the two stories I had in my head. But when I began to research this, I ended up going all over the world from Moscow to Miami to Melbourne to interview the leading experts on attention and focus in the world. I interviewed over 200 of them. And what I learned is that actually from them and from digging really deeply into their research over three years, what I learned is that actually from them and from digging really deeply into their research over three years, what I learned is from them is that there's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better

or can make it worse. And loads of the factors that can make it worse have been hugely supercharged in recent times. So we are in a serious attention crisis, but people need to understand if you're struggling to focus and pay attention or if your kids are, this isn't your fault. This is happening to almost all of us.

Your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by these big forces and together we can take on those forces. Right, front and center is tech and tech addiction and what's happening with our smartphones, et cetera. But what was interesting about the book is that you kind of, you go into that, of course, but there's also all of these other factors that you have 12, right?

Like that are contributing to all of this. I think it's fair to say, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the book on some level is sort of a graduate course extrapolation on the documentary, The Social Dilemma. You interview many of the same people, most notably Tristan Harris and Jaron Lanier, who feature in that documentary.

And you kind of highlight the issues that that documentary brought up, but you go into them a little bit more deeply. And then you kind of venture beyond that to evaluate these other risk factors or contributors to this situation, such as, you know as pollutants and stress and sleep deprivation, exhaustion and the like.

So I found it very interesting and comprehensive in that regard. But I think if you, for the listeners out there, if you responded to that documentary, which we've talked about at length on this podcast in the past, cause I found it to be so profound, this book really is kind of the next step cause I found it to be so profound. This book really is, you know, kind of the next step in digging deeper

and exploring that subject matter. Well, I think of it, and I think you're totally right about the social dilemma and those documentary makers, because it takes me so long to write my books, they came along while I was doing interviews with those guys. And you had known Tristan before that, right?

Yeah, I've been interviewing him for years now. I think he's one of the great heroes of our time and such an important thinker and such a wonderful human being. But the way I started to think about it, I think you framed it really right there, Rich. The way I started to think about it is, if you think about some aspects of the tech

we're currently using, by no means all of them, if you think of those as like a virus, right? They came along and they would have been powerful at any time but they came along at a moment when our immune system was already down when we were already doing loads of things that were profoundly damaging our ability to focus and pay attention so one of the reasons we've got such a serious attention crisis is we've got the combination of technology that is designed to hack and invade our attention combined with all these factors that are in different ways

undermining our ability to pay attention. So I'll give you, that can sound a bit fancy or weird, so I'll give you a very obvious example. We sleep 20% less than we did a century ago. Children sleep 85 minutes less than they did a hundred years ago. And I interviewed the leading sleep experts in the world. And they explained to me,

look, the scientific evidence is overwhelming. If you want to be able to focus and pay attention, you've got to get a really good night's sleep. You've actually ideally got to get eight hours sleep a night. 40% of Americans are chronically sleep deprived. They're getting less than seven hours a night. In fact, only 15% of us currently wake up feeling refreshed. And obviously I delved a lot into the science of this,

but there was one finding in particular that really drove it home for me. There's an amazing guy called Dr. Charles Sizler, who's at Harvard Medical School. He's arguably the leading sleep expert in the world. He's advised everyone from the Boston Red Sox to the US Secret Service. He discovered if you're awake for 19 hours

Which doesn't feel like very much when I say it your attention deteriorates as much as if you had got legally drunk But he did this experiment very simple. He's the first person to combine these technologies when studying sleep There's a technology that can scan your eyes to see what you're looking at And there's a technology that we all know about that can scan your brain. And so he put them together and he gets tired people, and they're not even that tired, into this machine and he tracks them, what they're looking at and what's happening in their brains. And what he discovered is kind of mind-blowing. You can be as awake as you and I appear to be. You can be looking around you, you can be talking, but whole parts of your brain kind of gone to sleep. It's called

local sleep because it's local to one part of the brain. So when we say I'm half asleep, it turns out that's not a metaphor, right? A lot of us are literally half asleep a lot of the time. And there's a lot of reasons why this is so important for our attention. One is, as Professor Roxanne Prashad at the University of Minneapolis explained to me, is that when you're sleeping, your brain is repairing. It's healing itself. Throughout the day when you're awake, metabolic waste builds up in your brain, right? She calls it brain cell poop. And when you're sleeping, a watery fluid rinses through your brain and it carries this brain cell poop out of your brain, down into your liver, and eventually out of your body. If you don't sleep, your brain doesn't clean out that metabolic waste.

You know that feeling when you feel almost hung over or clogged up when you're tired? Well, that's because your brain is literally clogged up. So you can see that's one example, right, of how we sleep much less. Think about how if you have a night where you don't sleep, the next day you're much more likely to be mindlessly scrolling through TikTok than the night we had a really good night's sleep. So you can see that's one of many factors that are undermining our ability to focus. And then that combines with technologies that are currently designed. The technology doesn't have to work this way,

but the technologies that are currently designed to hack and invade our attention as much as possible. You can see how that's such a kind of toxic combination. And I think for people who want to think about this, it's worth thinking about why that's such a toxic combination. And I would just say to anyone watching or 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 that thing you're proud of is that thing required a lot of sustained focus and attention and the evidence shows that when attention breaks down your ability to achieve your goals breaks down your your ability to solve your problems breaks down that's why this is such a deep problem when when you have a long period when you can't pay attention,

I feel like it's almost like you can, you become almost like a stump of yourself, right? You can sense what you might've been if you've been able to apply yourself, but you feel like you can't get there. This is why I think we really need to think deeply about what's happened to our attention. And we need to build the scientific solutions, which I saw all over the world from France to New Zealand,

for how we get it back. Well, positive progress requires some level of sustained attention by bright people focused on those problems, right? And if there's a degradation of that, that doesn't bode well for the future of humankind and society, right? So that's why I really do think it is an existential crisis.

I think that's a really good way you just put that. It makes me think about this guy called Dr. James Williams, who worked, was a senior figure at Google for many years, was horrified by what they were doing to our attention, quit, and has become, I would argue, the leading philosopher of attention in the world right now. I interviewed him in Moscow in Russia. And he lives there because his wife works there

for the World Health Organization. And he said to me, he gave me a metaphor that really stayed with me. He said, imagine you're driving somewhere, you've got to do something. And someone just throws an enormous bucket of mud over your windshield. Doesn't matter what you've got to do

when you get to your destination. The first thing you've got to do is clean your windshield because you can't get anywhere if you don't clean the windshield. And I think that's a good metaphor for the attention crisis. It doesn't matter what you want to do in your life. If you can't pay attention, you won't be able to do it. So the first thing we need to do is deal with the deep underlying factors that are damaging our attention in the way we eat, in the technology we use,

in the hours we work, in the polluted air we breathe, there's all these factors. But this to me is the first order crisis because it's not that there aren't bigger crises in the world, but if we don't deal with this one, we can't get to any of the bigger crises, either in our personal lives or in a bigger societal sense. Yeah, and both the problems and the solutions

can be bifurcated into two categories, the systemic and the individualistic, right? There are certain things that we can do to kind of rebut this. And there are also systemic problems that need to be addressed. And we can talk about all of those, but I wanna kind of hearken back

to the Provincetown experience because it's fresh in my mind because I just got back from a month sabbatical I was in Hawaii. And unlike you, I didn't leave my phone on the mainland, but I did promise myself that I would restrict my access to the phone and my time spent on it. Like I really needed to get away from work

and I do this every year and it's an opportunity to kind of just refresh myself and relax and return with a renewed enthusiasm for what I do, because I tiptoed up to burn out a couple of times. And when you're kind of endeavoring to have a truncated relationship with devices, it becomes very, you're very aware and present

with the allure and the pull of it. And I probably, you know, I said this the other day, but like I would give myself like a B minus. Like I only checked email like once every two days. And you know, I have to FaceTime with my kids and all that kind of stuff. So I wasn't gonna get rid of the phone, but you know, there were plenty of times

where I found myself just scrolling for no reason. And I'm like, what are you doing? You're here to not do that. You're here to have an analog experience. And yet I can, I would do it. And there is a sense of powerlessness over it, which goes to both the individualistic relationships

that we have with these devices, but also the great forces and systemic powers that are behind the scenes with these things that make them so irresistible. How did you feel different when you were able to go longer without it? Well, of course better, yeah, fantastic. And then, but then you like, in a moment you resort to it

and you're doing it again, and then you find yourself getting aggravated. And then I'm like, what are you? And then there's a vicious cycle because then I'm beating myself up for doing the thing that I said that I wasn't going to do. This is exactly the dilemma that I had right at the start of working on the book

that led me to Provincetown. And this period of three months completely off the internet. Because I had this moment with my godson, who I call Adam in the book, that when I realized something was really wrong. So when he was nine, he developed this brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis. And it was particularly cute because he didn't know that Elvis had become this kind of cheesy cliche. So he did it with like, really heart-catching sincerity.

He would do this Elvis impersonation. And when I used to tuck him in, it kept getting me to tell him the story of Elvis's life again and again. I tried to skip over the bit at the end where he dies on the toilet. And one day he said to me, very intensely looked at me and said,

Johan, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I was like, sure, I'll take you to Graceland one day in the way you do with nine-year-olds knowing that next week it'll be Legoland or whatever. And he said, no, do you really promise you'll take me to Graceland? I was like, I absolutely promise. And I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years

until everything had gone wrong. So he dropped out of school when he was 15. And by the time he was 19, he just spent literally all his waking hours alternating between WhatsApp, Snapchat, porn, YouTube. And one day we were sitting on my sofa in my apartment and I'd been trying to talk to him all day. And he's a lovely, intelligent person and just nothing was getting any traction in his mind and to be honest with you rich i wasn't that much better right i was sitting there staring at my own devices mindlessly and i suddenly remembered this moment all these years before and i said to him hey let's go to graceland and he couldn't even remember this moment right it's like what you're talking about and i said no let's go to graceland we've got to

break this numbing routine. Let's get out of here. Let's go all over the South. But you've got to promise me one thing, which is that when we go, you'll leave your phone in the hotel. And he said, I absolutely promise I'll do that. And whatever it was, two weeks later,

we took off for New Orleans. We traveled around. Two weeks later, we got to Graceland. Have you been to Graceland, Rich? No. Ah, I'm going to take you one day. So when you arrive at the gates of Graceland- Is that a promise?

I promise 10 years from now, there's gonna be some broken rack. I'm a 65 year old man. Yeah, you're gonna take me to Graceland. We'll do it. And it's a funny thing because even before COVID, when you get to Graceland now,

there's no person to show you around. What happens is they hand you an iPad and you put in earbuds and the iPad shows you around. So it says, go left, go right right whatever and and as you're walking around um there's a representation of the room that you're in on the ipad right and it narrates the history of it whatever so what happens is everyone just walks around graceland staring at their ipad and barely looking up right and i'm walking around feeling like more and more tense like trying to make eye contact to people who's looking down and And we got to the jungle room, which was Elvis's favorite

room in Graceland. And there was a Canadian couple next to us. And the husband turned to his wife and 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 left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right. And I laughed because I thought he was kidding. And I turned to look to him and they're just swiping back and forth. And I leaned over and I said, but hey, sir, there's an old fashioned form of swiping you could do.

It's called turning your head because look, we're actually in the jungle room, right? You don't have to look at it on your screen. We're actually there. And they backed away clearly thinking I was insane. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it. And he was in the corner of the room just flicking through Snapchat

because he could not stop. From the minute we landed, he couldn't stop. And I went up to him and I just said, look, I know you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out. You're not showing up to your own life. You're not present at your own existence, right? This way to live and he stormed off and I wandered around Memphis on my own that day and I found him that night in the Heartbreak Hotel where we were staying

across the street and he was sitting by the guitar shaped swimming pool and I went up to him and I apologized for getting angry and he was just scrolling and scrolling and didn't look up, but he said, I know something's really wrong, but I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, okay, I need to investigate this. And when I came back from Memphis, I was just so tired of being wired. I was disgusted by what I saw happening to me, to so many people around me. And at that time, I still was stuck in those two stories, that this was a failure of willpower and someone invented the smartphone. I later learned there's a much more interesting

and complex story happening to all of us. So I thought, okay, those are the two problems. I've got a solution here. I was lucky the film rights to one of my books had just been sold. It was made into a film called The United States versus Billie Holiday. And I just thought, I'm done done i'm going to take this money i'm going to go away for three months

and i'm going to be completely offline so i rented a little sliver of a beach house in in provincetown in cape cod um and i left my phone and my laptop in in boston right my smartphone and and i took a laptop, my friend Imtiaz gave me his broken old laptop that can't get online. And yeah, and those three months taught me just a huge amount. Right, so during that period of time,

I'm sure you didn't really talk about this in the book, but I would suspect for at least, I don't know, seven to 10 days, there had to be kind of a detoxification, like weaning off, like kind of, you're grabbing for the phone that's not there or just feeling antsy because you can't get that immediate dopamine fix that the phone will always provide.

It's funny, there was, the first five or six days were just like a haze of decompression. I almost felt stoned, right? Like just, I felt a tremendous lightness and sense of relief, but I was exhausted by then. I had been working unbelievably hard in the run-up to it. That might've just been just being on a break, right? But I kept having these, it was a physical response where I would, exactly what you described, I'd pat my pocket, you know, feeling a panic, you think, shit, where have I put my phone? You're like, oh yeah, you don't have it.

And I had, I'd bought a phone, it's called the Jitterbug. It's the only phone you can buy in the United States now that won't, it has no internet capacity. It's designed for extremely old people, it has enormous buttons. And it has an emergency button so that if you fall over, it'll call the nearest hospital. So I thought, hey, it's a win-win.

And it's funny, I would open that phone in those seven days and just sort of stab at the buttons, couldn't do anything, the phone literally does nothing. And it reminded me of when I was a kid, I saw maybe some David Attenborough wildlife documentary of a mother penguin whose baby has died and she just keeps nudging it to try to get it to do something.

And I kept thinking of that. And then I had a real crash, a terrible crash. It was interesting. I remember I was walking down the beach in Provincetown behind the West End of Provincetown for people who know it. And I was seeing what I'd seen in Memphis, right? People just, Provincetown is one of the most beautiful places

in the world. And people were just looking at their phones. People with kids weren't even looking at their kids. It was driving me insane. Normally it would drive me insane. But this time, instead of saying to them, oh, you're not present in your lives, you're not, you know, I wanted to go up to them and go, give me that phone. I want it, right?

I wanted to, and it was interesting, this tremendous hunger, because I realized for 15 years prior to that, throughout the day, I had been completely acclimatized to receiving the kind of thin insistent signals we get from the web, which are designed as rewards to keep us coming back. Retweets, hearts, likes, we all know how they work. And when they were gone, this is a bit, it'll sound a bit pretentious.

It is a bit pretentious. But Simone de Beauvoir, the great French philosopher, said that when she became an atheist, it was like the world had gone silent. And that's how I felt. I felt like the world had gone silent, right? Like these signals I was so used to were gone. And no normal social interaction,

even though I was meeting amazing people, they don't flood you with hearts the minute you meet them. That would be a very weird social interaction, even though I was meeting amazing people, they don't flood you with hearts the minute you meet them. That would be a very weird social interaction, right? And that was when I realized a big part of this, if you just extricate yourself from that, that creates a vacuum. You need to then fill that vacuum. And that was when I started to read a lot more

and later interview the leading scientist in the world on flow states. And that was how I kind of got out of it and later interview the leading scientist in the world on flow states. And that was how I kind of got out of it. We can talk about that a bit if you like. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there, but I think kind of the lesson that I think is powerful for anybody who's listening to this is over that course of three months through that detachment process,

you were able to kind of restore your sleep, like sleeping better than ever, repair your ability to sit down and work on a book and focus, be tuned into the news by reading a newspaper every day. And then that being that for the rest of the day, connect with friends, be present in your life. And you explained this time of waking up

and not feeling like you needed to drink coffee and feeling just awake in a way that you hadn't since you were a young boy. And a lot of this is about returning to a more natural state of man, right? Like we live in the modern world, we're not gonna go live in caves or anything like that. And it's unrealistic that we're gonna be Luddites,

but to the extent that we can exert some control over these tectonic forces that are driving us to this exhausted state, there are things that we can do. And your experience is an example of how these natural states that have alluded us can be restored. Yeah, you put it really well. It was one of the things that amazed me was I thought I was nearly 40 at the time. I thought, oh, maybe what's happened

is I've just got older, right? And maybe brain just gets deterrence. My attention went back to being as good as it had been when I was 17. I could sit and read a book for eight hours a day and focus deeply. And I later realized that wasn't just about the tech withdrawal. That was many things, many changes that happened. I completely changed the way I ate. None of these things were conscious at the time. It was when I later interviewed the scientists who've researched this sort of thing

that I realized how much those changes have weighed on me. You know, my sleep, you mentioned lots of factors. But I think you're right that there's two ways we have to respond to this crisis, or two kinds of way we've got to respond to this crisis. I think of them as defense and offense, right? We've got to defend ourselves and our children as much as possible from these forces that are pouring acid on our attention. And I talk a lot, give dozens of examples in the book about things we can do. But I want to be honest with people about this. That will hugely help. I'm passionately in favor of those things. I try to do all of them myself, but that will only get you so far. Because at the moment, it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all the time and then leaning forward and going, buddy you might want to learn how to meditate

then you wouldn't scratch so much and you want to reply going well screw you i'll learn to meditate you stop pouring itching powder on me which is why we've got to have an element of offense we've got to take on the forces that are doing this to us now that can sound very fancy and grand i can talk about lots of practical ways that can be done and ways it has already been done in many parts of the world and ways it was done in the past in the United States. But you're right that we've got to get, you know, when you say this about the way we live, you're absolutely right. Even as I was doing that, I thought, well, this is not sustainable. And I remember, so of course, what I was asking was, well, how can we integrate some of these insights into our normal lives?

And I remember the last day I was in Provincetown, going to, what's it called, where the lighthouse is. There's a spot where you can look back over the whole of Provincetown. I hadn't left Provincetown the whole three months. I hadn't been in a moving vehicle for three months. So I could see the kind of whole landscape of where I had been.

And I remember thinking, well, I'm never going to go back to living how I lived before. Why would I do that? This has been amazing, right? The joys of deep thought, of reflection, of mind wandering, of the joys of being present in your life, they're so profound. Why would I go back? And I got the boat back to Boston. I got the ferry back to Boston. I got horribly sick on the journey. My friend Shailene gave me back my laptop and my phone. And within a month, I'd say I was 80% back where I've been. Yeah, that was the-

How long did it take before you were just completely where you were before? Well, I only really began to understand why when I went to interview Dr. Williams, the attention philosopher who I mentioned, who had been at the heart of Google. I remember James saying to me, you know, the mistake you've made, Johan,

is it's like thinking the solution to air pollution is for you personally to wear a gas mask, right? I'm not against gas masks. If I lived in Beijing, I'd wear a gas mask. But gas masks aren't the solution to air pollution, right? In an environment that is deeply invading our attention. I mean, Professor Joel Nigg, one of the leading experts on children's attention problems in the world, and as you know, a big part of the book is about what's happening to our kids. Professor Nigg said to me that we need to ask if we're now living in what he called an attentional pathogenic environment, an

environment that is undermining the ability of most of us to pay attention. And if that's the case, and I think the evidence is pretty clear it is, then we have to think about how together can we change our environment in order to deal with those factors that are so invading our focus and attention. And there lots of practical ways we can do that. It feels as if, you know, there's so much working against us. So in terms of the individualistic changes that we can make, and you talk about like, you can get these lock boxes, you know, for your phone, and you can use the freedom app,

and you can, you know can set intentions ahead of time about what your habits are going to be. I feel like those are all great. And I have some of those myself that I deploy, but ultimately that feels like it's only gonna get you like 15% there. I'm not talking about the sleep and the other stuff is different.

You have more agency over that. Because the systemic forces are so powerful and rebutting those systemic forces, and I'm talking specifically about tech, is really going to require a populist movement in order to change. And you talk about other movements in the past and, you know, in this sort of call to action

that, you know, we do have more power than we think we have in terms of making change. Let's look at an example from our lifetimes of a collective action that profoundly improved attention. So you'll remember, Rich, I can just remember it. It used to be totally normal that people use leaded gasoline in their cars. It was the standard form of gasoline.

And a bit before our time, it was completely normal that people used leaded gasoline in their cars. It was the standard form of gasoline. And a bit before our time, it was completely normal that people use leaded paint in their homes. And it was discovered that exposure to lead profoundly damages people's brains and in particular, absolutely ruins children's ability to focus and pay attention. So what happened? A group of ordinary moms, it was mostly moms, learned this evidence, could see it happening to their kids and banded together and said, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing a for-profit industry to screw up our abilities, our children's ability to pay attention? And it's really important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say ban all gasoline. They didn't say ban all paint. They said ban the lead in the paint and in the gasoline.

And it took a while. They had to fight for years, but they succeeded, right? There is no leaded gasoline in this country anymore. There's no leaded paint. There's still some leaded pipes. But there's other than that, which we've got to get rid of. And that was originally part of the Build Back Better program that sadly got taken out.

So, and that reduction in exposure to lead, the CDC, the Center for Disease Control said has caused an improvement, an average improvement of three to five IQ points in American children, right, per child. So you can see that you identify something that's damaging attention, we band together, we fight for it, we get it out of the environment.

There are loads of equivalent to the lead in the lead paint that we're talking about now. Sure. So I give you one- The fluorocarbons example and deodorants and things like, I mean the suffragette movement, mothers against drunk driving, there's tons of examples similar to that.

Well, we are all the beneficiaries of people in the past who identify something that was wrong. People said, oh, this is hopeless, we'll never fix it. But they banded together, they fought for it and they put it right. And you know, Dr. Williams, who I'm quoting a lot in this interview, he's a great person, said to me, talking about the tech example, he said, look, the axe existed for 1.4 million years before anyone even thought to put a handle on it. The entire internet has existed for less than 10,000 days, right? We can fix these things.

These factors that are doing this to us are quite recent. You know, a lot of them, not all of them, but most of them are quite recent. They're relatively new. They are created by humans. We're humans. We can disinvent or deal with those factors that are doing this to us. There are equivalents to the lead in the lead paint, just like we don't want to get rid of gasoline and we don't want to get rid of paint. We don't want to get rid of tech. Tech is a great thing. We're not going to all convert and join the Amish nor should we no disrespect to any Amish viewers who are cheating and watching now um but we we can deal with the specific factors that are doing this to us so I'll give you an

example there's lots of individual things we can do as we've talked about I'm sure we'll get to lots more but let's look at a social example that I think everyone just when they hear it gets how this improves attention. In France in 2018, they're having a big crisis of what they called le burnout, which I don't think I need to translate. And the French government under pressure from labor unions

set up an investigation to figure out what the hell's going on. Why is everyone getting burned out? And one of the things they discovered is that 35% of French people felt they could never stop checking their phone or 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. So, you know, you can see

how that's a very recent thing. I mean, when we were kids, the only people who were on call were doctors and even doctors weren't on call all the time, right? So we've gone from almost nobody being on call, maybe the president was on call 24 hours a day, to almost half the economy being on call all the time. You can see how that means, you know, I can give those people all the lovely self-help lectures about the benefits of unplugging, of getting more sleep, but they're going to say, screw you, I can't do that.

And they're entirely right. In the current configuration we've got, they can't. This is why the French government introduced something, very simple legal reform. It's called the right to disconnect. It gives every French worker two rights. First right is your work hours have to be laid out in your work contract. And second part is you have a legal right to not check your email or answer your phone when your work hours are over, unless they are formally paying you overtime, right? Now, you can see how that is called the right to disconnect. You can see how giving people the right to disconnect is a collective change that we've got to fight for together that frees people up to make a lot of the individual changes they want to

make. Now, there's lots of changes like that, where the collective change enables people to make the individual change, whether it's, which of course not to say there aren't individual things we can do at the moment as well, but absolutely are. Does that ring true to you, Rich? Yeah, of course. I think, you know, it's a very tactile, like low hanging fruit solution that makes a lot of sense

and feels like, you know, is appropriate because it's true. We are all kind of like available all the time. And I think that that is, you know, beyond draining and, you know, creates, you know, undue pressures on us that elevate our cortisol and our stress levels and impair our ability to sleep and have all these downstream implications. I think the issue with, you know, kind of to go back

to your, you know, lead and gasoline example, the kind of qualitative difference with tech is that this is so much more complex than removing an ingredient from a consumer product. Like the speed at which technology continues to advance and, you know and AI continues to mature has a rapidity to it that so far outpaces government's ability to even understand it, let alone regulate it.

And there are so few people that truly understand it, which is why people like Tristan are so important in his foundation. So even just getting a grip on what exactly is happening is challenging, let alone understanding it sufficiently enough to be able to figure out what a remedy would be. And you have some, I mean, I want to talk about kind of the business plan pivots, because I think that's interesting. I think you're right about getting a handle. We have to understand some of the ways in which what we're doing now is harming our attention.

So let's look at an example I think will ring true to everyone listening, right? So I went to interview Professor Earl Miller at MIT. He's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. And he said to me, there's one thing about the human brain you've got to understand more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not significantly changed in the last 40,000 years. It ain't going to change on any timescale. We're going to see. You can only think about one or two things

at a time. But what's happened is we've fallen as a culture for a mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. So what happens is, and this has been studied a huge amount, scientists get people into labs and they get them to think

they're doing more than one thing at a time. And what they discover, every time is the same thing. You're not doing more than one thing at a time. You're very rapidly juggling between the tasks. And your consciousness kind of papers over it. So you don't, you feel like you're doing the things at the same time, but you're not.

And what they find is when you try and do more than one thing at a time, something called the switch cost effect kicks in. Everyone should know this term, the switch cost effect, because it's harming your life. The switch cost effect shows 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 more mistakes. You'll remember less of what you do. You'll be less creative. And this feels like a small effect when you hear about it. You can go, yeah, okay, I get it. But how big can that be? The effect, it shocked me when I learned about it. effect is enormous i'll give you two examples of just small studies backed by a much wider body of evidence that have found this um hewlett packard the printer company got a scientist in to study their workforce and he split their workers into two groups and the first group was told just get on with your task whatever it is and you're not going to be interrupted and the second group was told get on with your task but you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told, get on with your task, but you're going to have to answer a fairly heavy amount of email and phone calls. So pretty much

how most of us live our lives. And then at the end of it, they tested the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher than the group that had been interrupted. To give you a sense of how big an effect that is now, if you get stoned, your IQ goes down in the short term by five points. So being chronically distracted is twice as bad for your IQ, your intelligence, in the short term as getting stoned, right?

That's a big effect. Or look at another example, Professor Larry Rosen discovered, if you receive eight text messages an hour, which doesn't sound like very much to me, that lowers your brain power for the main thing you're trying to focus on by 30%. These are huge effects.

I would argue where most of us are losing about that 30% most of the time. This is why Professor Miller said to me, we're living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation at the moment as a result of constant distraction. And there's kind of two levels at which we can respond to this.

Like we said, there's defense. So you mentioned I own something called a K-safe, right? I should totally be being paid commission by these guys because I keep recommending it. K-safe is a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid and do you have one, Rich? No, but I know what it is.

I know exactly, I know what it is. Okay, this is gonna be this radical. I do use freedom though. Yeah, so you turn the thing, the dial at the top, and it will lock away your phone for anything between five minutes and a whole day. I will not sit down and watch a movie with my partner unless we both imprison our phones.

If anyone comes around for dinner, I will insist they imprison their phone. I use that lockbox for four hours a day, otherwise I would never have been able to write my book, Stolen Focus, right? And there's loads of things like that we can do in terms of changing what we eat and a whole range of other things. But you're right, and this is where Tristan, the layer that Tristan and other people who've been at the heart of Silicon Valley and are now trying to expose this are so important. At the moment, we are using technologies that are

extraordinarily sophisticated in figuring out how to get us to pick up our phone as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. And I can talk more about that if you like. And I know you have a lot of thoughts on this as well, Rich, and saying you cover a lot on the podcast, but we can deal with that, right? There's absolutely practical ways we can deal with that. I can talk about if you like. I'm conscious I'm giving long answers. Yeah, no, I definitely wanna get into that. But just in response to what you just said, it kind of dovetails into a conversation around flow as well,

which is the antithesis of this distracted state of multitasking. And as a parent of teenagers, I can tell you, it's like their kind of like default MO is to lay on their bed in their room. And there's an iPad, there's a laptop and there's a phone. And there's generally a FaceTime happening with one of their friends where,

I don't know if you know this, but like one thing teens do is they just have the FaceTime on in the background, especially during the pandemic. So they feel like they're with their friend and they're not even really interacting that much. It's just comforting to know like your friend is laying on their bed in their house. And every once in a while you can check in,

one of them's doing homework, the other one's watching the office and maybe playing a video. There's like all these inputs are happening at one while, the scrolling of course, and all of that. So, you know, I've witnessed firsthand, you know, this dynamic and it's hugely problematic because it is on some level implicitly informing them

that they can do all of these things well or fine at the same time, which is an illusion. And anybody who's tried to, you know, sit down and execute on a project, particularly creative people, I mean, the easiest example is writing a book. If you're in that state and you're focused and you are experiencing a certain level of flow

in that process, you're doing a painting or a sculpture or writing a song or whatever it is, and you get interrupted, that switch cost effect is very real. Like you've experienced that because it's not like, oh, I got interrupted. Even if it's someone knocks on your door and says, hey, can you, you know,

don't forget to go to the grocery store or whatever. The amount of time it takes to get back into that flow state you can't just switch it on and off. Like you, I mean, it's like a half an hour before you feel like you can tap into where you were before that seemingly innocuous interruption. Yeah, this is so important, Rich, and what you're saying is so right. And for people who don't know about flow states, everyone listening will have experienced a flow state in their lives. So a flow state is when you're doing something

and you really get into it. You get into the zone and your sense of time falls away, your sense of ego falls away and you're just in it. The way one rock climber put it is when you're in flow, you feel like you are the rock you're climbing. And flow is really important for the attention debate because flow is simultaneously the deepest form of attention we can provide. When you're in a flow state, your attention is fully on it. And once you get into it, it's the easiest form of attention

to provide, right? When you're in a flow state, it's not like memorizing facts for an exam. It's not like, okay, what is that? What's that? It's like a gusher of attention inside all of us. So obviously one thing I wanted to understand is, okay, if it's a gusher of attention inside all of us, where do we drill? How do we get it? So went to interview professor mahali cheek sent me hi you have no idea how long it took me to learn how to say that uh who was the the man who coined the phrase flow states in the 1960s a completely one of the most important psychologists of the last half century i would argue and he spent 50 years studying flow states sadly i think i did the last interview he ever did because he died shortly afterwards and um and professor cheek sent me hi he said to me many important things about flow but for me I think

there are three that would be really useful for your listeners and your viewers if they want to maximize their chances of getting into flow there's three things you can do I mean there's lots but I would say these are the three most important The first is you've got to choose one goal and filter out everything else you're trying to do, right? If you're trying to do more than one thing at a time, you won't get into flow. So you've got to narrow your focus. I want to paint this canvas. I want to climb this rock. I want to write this chapter. You've got to do one thing. The second thing is the goal you choose has got to be meaningful to you, right? So for you, it might be painting a canvas. For me, I can't paint for shit, right? I'm not going to get into

flow on that. For you, it might be going for a run. The only time I ever went for a run is when I once thought KFC was going to close and I got there and it was another hour to go. Waste of time that was. So different people will have different things that get them into flow. If you're trying to focus on something that is not meaningful to you, your attention will just slip and slide off it. And the third is it will really help if you choose something

that is at the edge of your comfort zone, at the edge of your ability. So let's say you're a middle talent rock climber, right? You don't wanna just climb over your garden wall. It's not going to get you into flow. It's too easy. Equally, you don't want to suddenly tomorrow climb Mount Kilimanjaro. It's going to be too overwhelming. You want to choose a slightly higher and harder rock face than the one you climbed last time. So if you do these three things, narrow down to one goal, make sure it's a meaningful goal, choose one at the edge of your comfort zone,

you'll maximize your chances of getting that deep gusher of attention. But even as I say that, Rich, you can see, like you're saying, how the environment in which we live is militating, step one, killing it, right? You've got to do one thing. If you're being constantly texted, there's a study by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon that found 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 many of us are never getting 23 minutes spare, right? You think about something as simple as someone texts you and they're pissed off you didn't immediately reply, and they go, but it would have only taken you two seconds. And one of the things I've been trying to educate people in my life is saying, you think it'll only take two seconds. Actually, it'll take me two seconds plus the 23 minutes it

takes me to get back to the focus I had before, right? If you and I were checking our texts now, I'd be going, while you were saying the really interesting things you just said, if I just glanced at my text, it feels like such a small thing. And then I'd have to focus on the text. Oh, my friend texted me and said that. Like what's Rich saying? And that incurs the switch cost effect and it kills flow. So this is, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, which means you have to exercise a lot of diligence

or to put it in the case. Like the way I do it is I sort of, I'm like, all right, I'm gonna work on this for a certain period of time. And then maybe I'll reward myself with, five minutes of checking messages to make sure the world didn't explode in the meantime. But going into that understanding that

even if that takes five minutes, it's not five minutes, it's like 35 minutes of distracted time. And am I willing to budget for that? Or is that cost too severe and at odds with the goal that I'm trying to achieve? I think that's such a good way of putting it. And what's happening is a cumulative effect, right? Where our attention is being degraded and degraded and degraded. And I think it's worth thinking about some of the other factors that people can do in their own lives. I think it'll be really relevant to a lot of your views. I mean, there's a big load of things we can do about childhood now,

straight away. I'd like to talk about them, but let's look at food for a second, right? So there's this really interesting movement that I know you know about called nutritional psychiatry of psychiatrists who are looking at how the way we eat profoundly affects the way our brains function. And there's three, I interviewed loads of these nutritional psychiatrists and other people who are experts on this. And there's kind of three big ways, there's actually more, but there's three particularly big ways in which the way we eat at the moment is damaging our ability specifically to focus and pay attention. So the first is very simple. So let's imagine you have

the standard British or American breakfast that you grow up, most people in our countries have. You eat in the morning sugary cereal and white bread or white bread with butter on it or whatever, stuff like that. What that does is that releases a huge amount of energy really quickly into your brain. It releases a lot of glucose. And at first it feels great. You're like, you woke up for the day. You suddenly feel like you're awake, you're alert, you're in it. But what happens is you get to your school desk or your kid gets to the school desk, you know, a couple of hours later, and you experience a huge energy slump because energy is released so quickly into your brain that it just crashes.

And when your energy crashes, you experience something called brain fog. Brain fog is when you can't really focus and pay attention. You're just very, very distractible and you need another sugary, carby treat to get your brain back. So the way we eat puts us on a roller coaster of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day that leaves us with these patches of brain fog that profoundly damage our ability to focus and pay attention. The way Dale Pinnock, one of Britain's leading nutritionists, put it to me is it's like we put rocket fuel into a mini, right? You know, those little British cars from the seventies. It'll go really fast for five minutes and then it just stops. So if you eat food like almost all our ancestors did, that releases energy steadily throughout the

day, you'll be able to pay attention much better. The second way in which the way we eat is damaging our attention is that for your brain to develop fully, you need certain nutrients. And our diets are lacking a lot of those nutrients. An obvious one that most people will have heard of are omega threes. And it turns out supplements just don't cut it, right? Your body doesn't metabolize supplements in the same way it metabolizes nutrients from real food. The third factor to me is actually the most disturbing, which is it's not just that our diets are lacking things that we need for our brains to function. Our diets also currently contain chemicals that act on us like drugs. So there was a study in Britain in a city called Southampton in 2007, where they got 297 kids and they split them into two groups. And the first group was just

given water to drink. And the second group was given water laced with food dyes that occur in the kind of food we get at the supermarket all the time, popular candies, that kind of thing. And then they monitor the kids. and the kids who were given the food dyes were significantly more likely to become hyperactive to manic struggle with attention and interestingly in britain in the european union we banned most of those food dyes in the united states they're still on the market i'm sure that's one reason why there's a significant gap between the united states and europe when it comes to things like attention problems in children so you can see how those factors,

again, there's a kind of doubleness to that. A lot of us can change the way we eat, but also the food industry needs to be challenged as well. So more of us can make those changes. Yeah, I mean, the food thing is something we've explored at length on this podcast many, many times and listeners are already kind of familiar with that landscape.

But I think when you mentioned the dyes, that brings up this subject of sort of environmental pollutants in beauty products and things we put on our skin and how we cleanse ourselves and how we clean our houses and just, you know, what is in the air in general. And what's crazy, I did a podcast with a woman called Greg Renfrew, who is CEO and founder of a company called Beauty Counter.

And they have created this incredibly robust, successful company that produces beauty products for women that are all chemical free. And she came on and she's very well versed in the kind of legislative regulatory landscape regarding chemicals in consumer products. And it's quite shocking. And you talk about this in the book as well.

The fact that the burden of proof is reversed. Like we're allowed to put all of these crazy chemicals in all of these products and it's fine until proven harmful when in fact it should be the reverse. The burden of proof should be on the the corporation to prove that they're safe before they find their way into literally thousands of products and every year you know the number of like new chemicals that find their way into these products i mean i don't know what the numbers are but it's insane no it's real of all the causes that i write about in style and Focus, of all the 12 causes,

this is the one that most shocked me. And actually, I think might be the biggest. It might be 100 years from now when they look back and think, God, these people really struggle to focus. Why? This might be the single biggest reason why they realize that we struggle to focus. Professor Barbara de Manille, who's one of the leading scientists in France, she's won the Légion d'honneur, on her the highest civilian honor said to me it's not possible to have a normal brain today because of the level of the pollutants that we're exposed to and there's there's lots of these so there's another professor a brilliant professor called barbara mar in britain at the university of lancaster who's done all this research think about air pollution right very conscious of this

here in los angeles if you live in any major city, particularly bad here, you are breathing in air pollution that contains iron. And when you breathe it in, the iron goes straight to your brain, right? And there's nothing in human evolution that prepared us for inhaling iron. There's just no precedent for it. And what happens when you breathe in iron is it causes what Professor Ma calls a repeated chronic insult to the brain. It causes brain inflammation. There's research from all over the world now, from places like Mexico City, Barcelona, about the really harmful effects of this.

One study in Mexico City studied kids who lived in heavily polluted areas and kids who didn't, compared them. And the kids who lived in heavily polluted areas had already had plaques and tangles like dementia patients in their brains, right? This is a huge effect. And you're absolutely right about the way we have to deal with this. For almost all the other factors, in fact, for literally all the other factors, we've got those two levels of response. There's the individual

and the systemic, defense and offense. I'm afraid for this, you can buy the cosmetics of the woman you're advocating, which sounds very good. But for most of these factors, the solution has to be systemic. Just like you couldn't individually protect yourself from lead poisoning. We had to ban the lead. And you're right, Professor Bruce Lanphier,

who's a great guy at UBC, University of British Columbia, who I interviewed a lot in Horseshoe Bay. He's doing fantastic campaigning on this. People should go to his website, Little Things Matter. I think it's littlethingsmatter.ca, where they're doing fantastic work because you're totally right. At the moment, if I invent some new chemical,

I can just release it. And it's up to very poorly funded scientists to figure out if it's harmful, right? We don't do that with drugs. If I invent a new drug, I have to apply to the FDA. The FDA checked me. They don't do a great job, but they could do a better one. But the FDA do lots of checks to make sure that it's not going to poison and harm people, and then it gets released. So what Professor Lanphier argues, I think completely rightly, is that we need to have an equivalent to the FDA for industrial pollutants and chemicals, right? And we need to test the stuff that's already being used. Because, I mean, there's a chemical that's on most ring pull cans, that when monkeys are exposed to

that, it profoundly damages their working memory, their ability to do the equivalent of monkey attention. I mean, there's loads of chemicals that we're being exposed to that in tests on other animals, non-human animals, show profound harm. Now that we're being exposed to that in tests on other animals, non-human animals show profound harm. Now we don't test these things on human children for very good reasons. I'm not in favor of that. But you can see how we really need to deal with this.

This is urgent. Yeah, it is crazy that it isn't properly regulated. Crazy. And it's because we have a political system that is owned by corrupt interests, right? So we need to reclaim the political system and democratize it. Which is why I'm sympathetic to Bill Maher's dystopian,

pessimistic view on all of this, because the powers that be these large corporations, which include Facebook, Google, you know, the like, carry so much influence through lobbying, et cetera, that it becomes difficult to imagine that things can change. When I feel like that, and sometimes I do, maybe this will sound odd, I think a lot about my grandmothers. My grandmothers were the age I am now in 1963.

I loved my grandmothers. They were amazing women. They both lived to be 91. And in 1963, so one of them was a working class Scottish woman living in what we would call a housing project here in the United States. And the other was a Swiss peasant woman living in a wooden hut on the side of a mountain. In 1963, neither of my grandmothers were allowed to have bank accounts in their own name because they're married women. It was legal for their husbands to rape them as it was legal everywhere in the world for men to rape their wives. They had both left school when they were 13, even though the men in their family went on longer because no one gave a shit about girls learning anything my swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed

to vote right and i think about their lives when they're the age i am that's not some distant history i knew the i loved them and knew them incredibly well and that this is when they were the age i am now and i think about the gap from then to now i don't want to underestimate how much further we've got to go in achieving equality for women. But I think about, you know, my Swiss grandmother loved to paint and draw when she was a teenager.

They told her to shut up and get into the kitchen. My niece, Erin, is 17. She never knew my grandmother, sadly. When she loved to paint and draw, we didn't say shut up

and get into the kitchen. We started looking up art schools. Right? When people say, oh, the forces harming our attention are big and powerful. I totally agree with you. I've got to tell you, they're not a 10th as powerful as men were in 1963. Men controlled every country in the world, every company in the world, every police force. And they had ever since those things have been invented, right, apart from a few hereditary queens every now and then. And the women of that generation did not just say, oh, we're fucked then. How are we ever going to win this? They started where they stood. They fought at every level, in every office, every home, at national levels. And again,

I don't want to underestimate how further we've got to go, but what a staggering transformation now, even crazy sexist wouldn't suggest that my niece, it should be legal to rape her or that she shouldn't be allowed to have a bank account or she shouldn't be allowed to vote. I mean, even crazy, maybe the craziest incel says that, but you know, you'd have to go completely outside the spectrum of normal discussion, right? That happened in the space of a very short period of time historically, right? So absolutely, we can deal with these things. And I argue in the book that just like we needed and need a feminist movement for women to reclaim their bodies and their lives, we need an attention movement to reclaim our minds, right? We need to do lots of things as individuals, but we also need to realize this is being done to us. It is being done by really powerful forces

and we need to change the nature of our demand, right? Because at the moment, we're just blaming ourselves. Most people just blame themselves for their attention problems or ask for these tiny little tweaks. And I'm in favor of all the tweaks people ask for, but I think we need to realize we are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table, right?

We are the free citizens of democracies. We have dignity. We own our own minds and we can take them back if we want to. So let's talk about what those systemic changes would look like in the case of tech. You talk about these business plan modifications. Right now, these platforms are driven by an ad revenue model. So all the incentives are misaligned to capture and monopolize your attention to collect as much data as possible, as humanly feasible, as AI feasible

as they can to create this avatar of who you are so they can sell that information to advertisers to sell you products. And as a result of that, we're sort of captured by these devices and then kind of sold to the highest bidder. So untangling that knot would require dismantling that entire business model of it being driven by ad revenue and creating some different version,

whether it's a subscription model or whether these things that have become such gigantic behemoths should now be qualified as public utilities. They put that really well, Rich. So this took me a long time to get my head around. So I went to Silicon Valley and I interviewed lots of people who had been at the heart of this machinery.

And I remember Tristan, the moment with Tristan, when we were walking in San Francisco one day, I remember him telling me something that really haunted me. So for people who don't know, Tristan worked at the heart of Google. Right, we keep mentioning his name, but I keep thinking in the back of my mind, I'm not sure we've actually explained who he is

for people that don't know. So Tristan Harris worked at the heart of Google for many years. And initially he worked on the Gmail team when they were developing Gmail. And one of the things they were particularly keen on doing early in Gmail was getting people to use Gmail more often, right? Getting them to pick it up more often. I'll explain why in a little while.

One day sitting in the Googleplex, one of his colleagues said, I've got an idea. Why don't we make it so that whenever people get an email, their phone vibrates a little bit? And people standing around said, oh, that's a good idea. Let's do that. A few days later, they switched it on. A week later, Tristan was walking around San Francisco himself, and he starts hearing these vibrations everywhere, like a kind of bird song. And he realizes, oh, we did that. He realized that was happening all over the world. He calculated a little while later that that decision his colleague made so casually was causing 10 billion interruptions in the world to people's day every day. Think about the switch cost effect.

Think about what that's doing to people's attention, right? And he becomes more and more uncomfortable. And he initially spoke out within Google. He believed he could persuade people within Google. He worked unbelievably hard at that. And he was very brave in speaking out because Silicon Valley is full of people desperate to get into Google. And here he was. It would be like an ExxonMobil exec

standing up in 1978 and saying, "'Hey guys, I think we're gonna melt the Arctic here.' Right? It was incredibly brave. Well, they gave him this sort of lip service role as ethics officer. I don't know exactly what the title was. Yeah, design offices.

Yeah, and he would offer up all these ideas to sort of align Google's mission with a higher ethic. But obviously, all of those ideas are in counterpoint to the objectives of the company itself. But that's exactly it. What he realized was, it's not that they're evil people. It's not they're bad people. He realized he was bumping up against just a very clear logic. So, let's think about Facebook or TikTok or whatever one we want to talk about, right? The business model is extremely simple. Every time you pick up their phone and start to scroll, they make more money, right? That's it. So all of their algorithms, all of their engineering genius,

all of these super smart people, all of that human intelligence is applied towards one thing, figuring out how do we get Rich to pick up our app more often, and how do we get him to scroll as long as possible, right? And how do we get Rich's kids to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible? That's it. That's how they make money. Just like the head of KFC, all he cares about in his capacity as the head of KFC is how much fried chicken did Rich eat yesterday, right? All these companies care about is how often, how frequently you pick up your phone and how long you scroll. So everything is designed around these two goals. That's how it works.

And of course, that means they develop hundreds of techniques to figure out how to hack your attention. And this isn't just the view of dissidents like Tristan. This is what they say, right? Sean Parker, one of the biggest initial investors in Facebook said, we designed it 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. We now know the leaked data, leaked internal research from Facebook shows they know they're destroying our collective attention. They're destroying our political attention. We can talk about that more. They know they're doing it and they're destroying our collective attention. They're destroying our political attention. We can talk about that more. They know they're doing it and they're continuing to do it. And the solution to this, as you outline, Rich, you know, at first when it was explained to me,

it seemed almost like weirdly simple, right? Because for so long I thought, oh, the problem is the existence of the smartphone. I was saying the problem isn't the existence of the smartphone. The problem is that these devices are currently designed to maximally invade your attention, but they don't have to be designed like that. Just like we have paint that doesn't have lead in it. You could have social media that is not designed to maximally invade your attention. And I remember one of the people who really helped me to understand this. I was talking to Aza Raskin one day. So Aza invented a key part of how many

websites work in the world called Infinite Scroll. His dad, Jeff Raskin, invented. So Acer invented a key part of how many websites work in the world called Infinite Scroll. His dad, Jeff Raskin, invented the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. And Acer said to me, look, the solution here is really simple. You've got to ban the current business model. That is the equivalent of lead in the lead paint. Just ban it. Just say a business model that is premised upon figuring out the weaknesses in your attention in order to hack it and sell it to advertisers. It's just inhuman. It's like lead in lead paint. It's leading to all sorts of individual disasters for our attention. And it's leading to collective political disasters for our attention. Just ban it. And I remember when he said this to me and lots of other people who I interviewed, who'd been at the heart of Silicon Valley and still are,

people who I interviewed who'd been at the heart of Silicon Valley and still are. I'm just saying to them, well, I don't understand. Well, let's say we do that. What happens the next day when I open Facebook? Would it just go, sorry guys, we've gone fishing? And they said, of course not. What would happen is these companies would be forced to move to a different business model. And absolutely everyone listening to this podcast has an experience of the two alternative business models. So one is very simple subscription. We want to know how HBO and Netflix work. You pay a little bit and you would get access. Or another option is one that literally everyone has access to, which is think about the sewers. Before we had sewers, we had shit in the streets,

we got cholera. So we all pay to build the sewers together and we all own the sewers in common. You own the sewers where you live. I own the sewers where I live along with all the other citizens of where we live. It may be that like we currently own the sewage pipes together, that we want to own the information pipes together. Because at the moment, we're getting the kind of equivalent of cholera for our attention. The most important thing to understand is when you move to this different business model, all the incentives change. At the moment, the incentive is how do we get Rich to scroll as often as possible? How do we get his kids to scroll as

often as possible? Because you're not the customer. You're the product they sell to the real customer who are the advertisers. But if you move to this different business model, suddenly all the incentives are different. Suddenly they're not, how do we invade Rich's attention? We're like, oh, Rich is our customer now. What does Rich want? Oh, Rich wants to be able to pay attention. Let's design it to help him do that. I'm gonna play a little bit of a counterpoint

to this devil's advocate, because take Netflix, for example, subscription model, yet their primary objective remains to endeavor to get you to spend as much time on their platform as possible. That's still the case, regardless of whether there's advertisers involved. So it's very interesting. If you talk to Netflix people, I've got a new streaming series that just came out on Roku narrated by Samuel L. Jackson called The Fix. So I spent a lot of time talking to various streamers about this. What they care about is not quantity of engagement,

but quality of engagement. So think about if you've got an HBO subscription, I subscribe to HBO because I love Mare of Easttown, not because I watch HBO five hours a day. I don't watch HBO five hours a day. Subscription services prioritize quality of engagement. So what they want is some shows that people really love which is very different to quantity of engagement netflix doesn't care if you're watching it six

hours a day or one hour a day they care if you resubscribe and you're more likely to resubscribe if it makes you feel good because there's certain good quality brand leading excellent shows so you can see how that's very different and the same way think about the changes that would happen in facebook if we move to a subscription-based model or a kind of public ownership independent of government model. And it would be important that it was independent of government. So at the moment, what Facebook cares about is Facebook has won if you spend six hours a day looking at it, right? That's the goal, right? Think about something as simple as face-to-face engagement, right? We know there's, right? Think about something as simple as face-to-face

engagement, right? We know there's overwhelming evidence. It's a bit of a no-shit Sherlock finding, but there's overwhelming evidence. People feel good when they look into each other's faces. They feel better when they're actually face-to-face with each other. We've all learned this through the pandemic, how painful it is to be deprived of that. And they feel less good when they interact through screens, right? Okay, we know that. At the moment, Facebook is all geared towards getting you to interact through screens, right? They do not want you to meet up. It's a disaster for them if you meet up. If you and me are chatting to each other through the Facebook algorithm, they're learning more information about us to sell to advertisers. If you say, hey, Johan, do you want to go for a hike? And I go for

a hike with you, and we put our phones down, they lose that data, they lose that information, they lose that revenue stream. So at the moment, Facebook is designed to militate against face-to-face contact and to maximize screen-based contact. Now imagine that you and me suddenly became the customers or the owners of Facebook, right? Through subscription or public ownership. Suddenly, Facebook has a completely different calculation, right? It's like, oh, we want to keep Johan and Rich subscribing to Facebook. What could we offer them that would make them want to keep using our service? We could put in a button that says, which of my friends are nearby and want to meet up? And you could mark you want to meet up and I could mark I want to meet up. So it gets to a Thursday afternoon, you know, you've finished your work

for the day, you go, oh, I want to meet up with someone, push the button. Oh, Rich is around, Joe's around, let's go for a hike, right? Now you can see how that would mean we would spend less time on Facebook. I'd see you wanted to go for a hike, go, oh, let's meet up, right? It would be less time, but we'd be happier with the product. We'd have greater quality of engagement with the product, right? So that's why subscription services are always concerned about quality, not quantity of engagement. Of course, there's some interaction.

Yeah, I get that, I get that. It would be the quality of the experience that you experience when you're on the platform makes it worth spending however much every month. But the bigger piece being that it obviates all of this data tracking and avatar building around what your preferences are and where you go

and all of that so that it could be sold. And that of course, augers all kinds of privacy concerns, et cetera, which become bigger issues that extend beyond just our addiction to our phones. Yes, exactly. I think you're totally right. And a key thing to understand is at the moment, we're in a race, right? You've got these 12 factors that are invading our focus and our attention. And many of them on the current trajectory are going to get worse if we don't act. So think about Paul Graham, one of the leading investors in Silicon Valley,

said that the world will be more addictive in the next 40 years on the current trajectory than it was in the last 40 years. Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to your kid than Facebook, right? So that's one side of the race. On the other side, we've got to have a movement of all of us saying, no, you don't get to do this to us. You don't get to do this to our minds. You don't get to do this to us. You don't get to do this to our minds. You don't get to do this to our kids' minds. This is not a good life. We don't want to live in a society where people are constantly switching, switching, switching,

where we can't have deep conversations. We can't read books. We can't slow down and think deeply. We absolutely can get to a society where we have restored our ability to focus and pay attention. I went to places that had taken huge steps towards that, New Zealand, France, all sorts of places, but we have,

it won't happen if we don't fight for it, right? And of course, I mean, peacefully fight for it, not violently. We have to take on these forces because the current trajectory, you know, Professor Suna Lehman, who's a professor in Denmark, who did the first study proving that our collective ability to pay attention really is getting worse. And when I went to interview him in Copenhagen, a few days before there had been this photo that came out. And it's a picture, a lot of viewers will have seen it. It's a picture of Mark Zuckerberg.

And everyone in the room is wearing a virtual reality headset for the metaverse, except for Mark Zuckerberg and everyone in the room is wearing a virtual reality headset for the metaverse except for Mark Zuckerberg who's the only person walking freely and Professor Lehman said to me this is a vision of where we'll we're headed if we don't fight back right a world where you've got an elite who are becoming extremely rich of manipulating us us. And this is not just true of the tech industry, food industry. We talked about people who manufacture these pollutants, many other factors. And then a kind of mass who are degraded, as Tristan put it, you know, where we upgraded technology and downgraded humans. People are degraded, debased, their ability to pay attention is invaded. We don't have to accelerate. We don't have to accelerate

towards that future. We don't have to accept. We don't have to accelerate towards that future. We don't have to accept that future. There is another future we can choose where there are very practical changes that are not crazy, wild-eyed, utopian solutions, very practical things that are being done in different parts of the world where we can choose to live in a slower,

saner way where deep focus is possible. And I think we have to choose it and fight for it. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's a battle that has to be waged on so many different fronts and the war that's being fought is something that is challenging to get your head around because it's not just like lead in gasoline or don't drink and drive.

It is a more kind of amorphous situation that infects our lives in so many different ways. Because it's like the addictive aspects of tech, the fact that our privacy concerns are invaded. Like all there's so many, it's like, it's a lot of different tiny little things that add up to a very big thing. So the business model, all of it,

all of these different things. So for the average human being, who's like, I really don't like that I'm distracted and I'm worried about my kid. And this is something worth being concerned about and fighting for, like, how do I even wrap my head around, like what the solution would be or how I get involved in participating in this?

Well, it's more like feminism. If you think about my grandmothers, right? Like I mentioned, 1963, my grandmother's lives were profoundly disfigured by sexism. They never got to be the people they could and should have been, right? Because they were denied systematically opportunities to develop themselves because they were women.

And feminism, male power ran and runs through the whole society, right? At every level. They were, you know, every institution in that society that my grandmothers faced. But my grandmothers had a pre-feminist consciousness, right? They hated what had been done to them. They were really pissed off. Their brothers got to have decent lives and they didn't. But they just thought that's the way of the world, right? That's just, that's how it's always been. That's the way of the world.

They didn't have a sense that this was something that was done to them that could have been different. And then of course, we have a movement that raises people's consciousness that says to them, no, this didn't have to happen to you. This wasn't inevitable, right? Actually, look, we can change this if we want to. And we have to challenge power at all sorts of levels. And I think we have to do something similar with attention. So let's think about an example, something I think that will really connect with a lot of your listeners and viewers, Rich. Let's think about the aspects of childhood, right? So the last quarter of Stolen Focus

is about the ways in which our children's ability to focus is being catastrophically degraded, right? And I think most people listening can see that happening around them in really disturbing ways. And this is not just the same old, oh, every generation thinks the next generation's got a problem.

Professor Larry Rosen did lots of research where they just look at college students, these college students, and discover they just can't focus for more than a few minutes, right? I interviewed a professor at Harvard who was talking about a specific book, a little book that we were discussing. And he said, oh, I used to give this to our students

to read every term. And it carried on. And later on, I went back and said, oh, why used to give this to our students to read every term. And it carried on. And later on, I went back and said, oh, why don't you give it anymore? Is that writer Thomas Kuhn is his name? Has he gone out of fashion? And he said, no, they just can't read it anymore. You can't give, it's like 100 pages. So they just won't read it.

We give them short articles. We give them podcasts. I was like, shit, that's Harvard students, right? You suddenly, one of those moments, there were several moments where I kind of thought, oh shit, does this mean like no one can focus anymore if you go to places where you expect there to be these pockets of focus and they aren't there. So if we look at children,

because I think this is an area where we could get the biggest and quickest consensus on one of the changes that has to happen to get our attention back. I don't think it's a coincidence that we've had an explosion in children's attention problems at the same time as we've had a profound transformation in the nature of childhood itself.

And I tell the story of this in the book through one of the heroes of the book and one of my heroes, a woman called Lenore Sganazzi, who you should totally have on the podcast, by the way. So Lenore grew up in Chicago, in a suburb of Chicago in the 1960s. And from when she was five, in the morning, she would leave the house on her own and walk to school, which was about 15 minutes away. And she would generally bump into the other five-year-olds who were also walking to school on

their own. When they got to the school, there was a 10-year-old boy whose job was to help the five-year-olds cross the street, right? She was going to school, she would leave When they got to the school, there was a 10 year old boy whose job was to help the five year olds cross the street, right? She would go into school, she would leave at three o'clock and she would wander around the neighborhood on her own, play with the other kids, they'd make up games,

figure out whatever they wanted to do. And she would find her way home at five or six when she was hungry, right? Now you remember that was your parents' life. That was my parents' childhood, right? That was mine too. You know, I'm a little, I'm older than you, but yeah. I would just like go, leave, you know,

leave the house in the morning and just be back by dinnertime and ride my bike around and do whatever, who knows what was going on. And then in the space of one generation, all of that ended. By the time Lenore had her own kids and she was living in Queens in New York in the 1990s, she was expected to walk her kids to school and wait at the gate when they were ready to come

back, right? By 2003, only 10% of American children ever played outside without adult supervision. And of that 10%, I think they got an average of 12 minutes a week. So effectively, long before COVID, childhood became a phenomenon that happened entirely behind closed doors, right? And it turns out that childhood that you had contains all sorts of things that are really important for children to learn attention and focus. One, again, it's a bit of a no shit Sherlock insight, is exercise, right? Children need to run around. We are the first human society ever that has tried to get children to sit still for eight hours a day it's no one's ever tried to do it because it's so obviously foolish the evidence is overwhelming kids who can't pay attention the single best thing you can

do is let them go and run around right we've stopped children from physically roaming around but there's much more than that people like dr isabel Benke, great Chilean scientist, have shown when children play freely with each other, they learn how to deploy their attention. They learn what they find interesting. They learn how to make things happen with other kids. They learn how to get other kids to pay attention to them, how to tolerate waiting for your turn, all sorts of things that are completely essential for attention. And we took that away. Now kids do play, but they play supervised by adults telling them what to do. And that's the equivalent,

it's like the difference between processed food and whole foods, right? Supervised play where adults tell them what to do doesn't cut it, right? Yeah, you have that example of that classroom where they would allow them free time to play and the kids didn't know what to do because they were waiting for somebody to tell them

what that play should look like. It was heartbreaking. But the reason why Lenore is, this is not just a sad story, but Lenore is one of the heroes of the book, one of several kind of heroes who are building the solutions. And there's many others, a guy called Andrew Barnes in New Zealand, who found a way to restore attention at work,

a whole range of people. But the reason Lenore is one of the heroes is because Lenore runs a group called Let Grow that is, I think, the solution to this problem or the beginnings of the solution to this problem. So Lenore was horrified by this change that happened in childhood. She could see why it was harmful.

And initially, she just tried to persuade individual parents to let their kids play outside. So she would go to them and she would often ask them a question like, tell me about something you loved doing when you were a kid that you don't allow your own child to do. And people would say, I went into the woods, I rode my bike by the cliffs.

We can all think of something, right? But she found individual persuasion doesn't do it. Cause if you're the only parent letting your kid out, they get frightened, you look crazy. And actually, sometimes people ring the police, right? If they see children on their own now. So what she did, she runs this amazing group called Let Grow. I really recommend every parent and grandparent go to letgrow.org. What they do is they go to whole schools and whole communities and persuade the entire community to give their children increasing levels of independence, which rise up to playing freely with other kids on their own out of their homes.

And I think of all the conversations I had for the book, there were loads that were really moving. I think the most moving was with a 14-year-old boy in Long Island who was part of a Let Grow program. So this boy, he was a big, strong boy. He was taller than me, big, strong boy. And until this program had begun, I think just over a year before, he had never been allowed out of his house, right? On his own, ever. I asked him why. His parents didn't even let him go for a jog around the block. I asked him why. And he said, my parents, I'll never forget this phrase. He said, my parents were afraid of all these kidnappings. To give you a sense, this boy, he lives in a town where the olive oil store is across the street from the

French bakery, right? And he had a level of fear that it'd be appropriate if he lived in Syria. And then this program began. And he started to play outside his home with his friends and asked him how it felt to just be out of his home and he described how they played with each other and then they they went into the woods and they built a fort together and he said with real shock he said our cell phones don't work in the woods and we still go there as if that was some mind-blowing thing and watching this boy speak maybe it sounds melod, but it really did feel like watching a child come to life, right? I thought about all the kids I know who never get to go out and do

anything. The only place we let our children explore anything is on Fortnite or World of Warcraft. We can hardly be surprised they become obsessed with them. And Lenore was with me that day when I spoke to that boy. And when he left, she turned to me and she said, think about human history, all of human history. Young people had to go out and explore. They had to hide, they had to seek, they had to hunt, they had to build things. And then we took all that away from them. And those boys, given just a tiny little sliver of freedom, what did they do? They went and built a fort. This is so deep in human nature. Now, I would argue every single school in the United States should have a Let

Grow program. This costs nothing. It's free, right? It's one of the lowest hanging fruit things we can do to restore attention. And it's particularly important because if kids don't learn to pay attention, they're going to struggle their whole lives with it. If you don't learn it in childhood and adolescence, it's gonna get much harder for you. But we can hardly be surprised our kids are surprised with their devices if that's the only interesting thing in their life, if that's the only zone of freedom they ever get, right?

So I think we've really got to do with this. Does that ring true to you, Rich? Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think that there's that narrow window of time where brain plasticity is at its peak. And that's the same moment where these young people are inuring themselves to habits around technology that are basically destroying that ability to concentrate

before they even get out of the gate and have opportunities to deploy it. And I think in the case that you just explained, what I was thinking about was the broader conversation and issue, which is this fear-based society that is driven by media and technology because those platforms are incentivized to provoke fear. So you have a kid who's afraid to go outside,

whose relationship with the outside world is that of somebody who lives in Syria, who has an irrational fear of being kidnapped, driven by his parents, I'm sure telling him it's not safe. So where's that coming from? Well, that's coming from media and technology, right? So the downstream implications of that is that the kid has an unhealthy relationship

with the world. And I think all of this is being fomented by COVID, which is enhancing this idea that the world is a scary place, that if you go outside and you're not wearing a mask, you could die. Like for a young person, that relationship with the external world is really off the rails right now.

It's so many ways. And a lot of your book was written kind of, you've put sort of pandemic pieces into it, but really my sense was that the gravamen of it was researched and written in kind of a pre-pandemic state. I feel like all of these issues that you address in the book are really even further complicated by what we've experienced these last two years.

It really prepared me, also the last bit of the book is about COVID, but it really prepared me. I think the research I did before prepared me to understand something that happened to all of us under COVID. So I remember at the start of the pandemic, I was actually very ill at the start of the pandemic. I caught COVID before it was fashionable. And I remember very early, lots of people saying, those of us who did not have to do the heroic work of emergency workers

and so on, saying, oh, we're going to be shut in our homes for a while. I'm going to read Tolstoy. I'm going to learn French on Duolingo. And you will have noticed no one read Tolstoy. No one learned French, right? In fact, people Googling, how do I get my brain to work increased by more than 300%. And I think there's a reason why, there are many reasons why,

but I think one reason why I think is really worth thinking about. So I had interviewed, and I will stress she was not talking about COVID, this is before COVID, but I interviewed Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris, who's now the Surgeon General of California. And she said something to me that really helped me to understand this. She's done a huge amount of work on the research on the ways in which stress alters attention. And she said to me, imagine one day you're walking down the street and out of the blue, you were attacked by a bear and you survive. In the weeks and months that

follow, something completely involuntary will happen to your attention. You're going to find it harder to say, read a book, because part of your brain will just be scanning the horizon for dangers, right? Something came out the blue, so what else is going to come out the blue and attack me? So your brain is scanning. It's called vigilance, right? Your brain is more vigilant to risk and danger. Okay, now imagine the bear attacked you again. A bear comes back and attacks you again, right? Likely, and you survive again. In the aftermath of that, you're likely to go into a state called hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is where you can't focus on things that are in front of you

because your brain is so primed for risk and danger. Kids who've been through severe trauma very often are in a state of hypervigilance, right? And there was a child psychiatrist in Australia, in Adelaide called Dr. John Giordini, who said something to me about this that helped me to think about this. He said, you know, deep focus is this that helped me to think about this. He said,

you know, deep focus is a really good strategy when you're safe. Sit down and read a book, you'll grow, you'll know more stuff, you'll be smarter. Deep focus is a really dumb strategy if you're in danger. You'd be a fool to sit, you know, at the Battle of the Somme reading a novel, you're going to be shot, right? So when we're plunged into unsafe situations, our attention will flip, right? It's not that you're not paying attention, but you're paying attention to the detection of risk. And I think in a situation where we're in with COVID, there's lots of things that have happened that affected our attention, but the bear came back, right? The bear came back twice more times. I think anyone who's struggling to focus in a global pandemic, I would say, it's not your fault, right?

Actually, what your brain is doing is trying to protect you from risk. There's the risk of the virus. There's the risk of the changes to our lives, which have been unprecedented and extremely weird and disorientating. There's the risk of our sense of the future being profoundly disrupted. There's lots of other factors that have played out as well that we can talk about. So I think what's happened is we've been plunged into a state of hypervigilance. I also think that can help us to understand more widely about

what stress in more normal times does to our focus. Stress really damages your ability to pay attention, which is why I go through lots of things in the book that we can do to reduce stress both individually and collectively, because anything that reduces stress improves the ability to focus deeply. Yeah. Can I mention something you mentioned before though, Richard, because you come back to, it was another thing you said about the way technology encourages this fear. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah. Because it's really important to understand this. Of all the things I learned, this to me was one of the most revelatory and helped me to understand a lot of the things

that have happened in the world in the last five years. So this, to a large degree, not entirely, but to a large degree, is the result of what we were talking about in relation to the business model. So we've got a business model where the algorithms are all primed to figure out what will keep Rich scrolling, right? That's it. That's all the algorithm is detecting, constantly figuring it out. What kind of posts keep Rich scrolling and what kind of posts make Rich put down the app, right? Constantly figuring that out. And unfortunately, and this was not, to be fair to them, the intention of anyone at Facebook, TikTok, any of these sites, those algorithms bumped into a deep human psychological truth that's actually been known about by psychologists for more than 100 years,

which is called negativity bias. It's very simple. You will stare longer at something that makes you angry and upset than you will at something that makes you feel good. Anyone who's ever seen a car crash on the highway knows how that works. You stared longer at the mangled car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. This is very deep in human nature. Eight-week-old babies will stare longer at an angry face than a happy face. It's probably for a very good reason in our evolution.

Our ancestors who were looking out for risk got to be our ancestors and the other ones got eaten. That's a slightly crude way of putting it, but you know what I mean. But when you have a business model designed to keep people scrolling that bumps into negativity bias, it discovers, it produces a horrific outcome. So let's imagine two teenage girls

who go to the same party and leave to go home on the same bus. And one of them does a status update where she says, that was a great party. I had a great time. Everyone looked good. And the other teenage girl goes,

Karen was a fucking skank at that party and her boyfriend's a prick and just does a rant against everyone there, right? The algorithm scans, it looks for words relating to anger and outrage. It'll put the first update into some people's feed. It'll put the second update into way more people's feed because it knows if it's enraging, it's engaging,

it will keep people scrolling. More people go, what do you mean Karen's a skank? You're a skank. You can see how the conversation will go. Now that is bad enough at the level of teenage girls on, you know, we can see what's happening to teenage girls' mental health. Professor Jean Twenge has done very good research on this. But think about that effect when it's applied to a whole society, right? When we are all plugged

into machinery that makes us angrier and angrier and angrier. We know what the effect is because we just have to turn on the news, right? We've become a society where we can't listen to each other, where we are constantly screaming at each other, where everyone is, you know, the center is collapsing and people are going to greater and greater extremes. When Brazil elected a far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who's destroying the Amazon rainforest, which will affect us all, his supporters on election night outside at the rally, they chanted Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, because they knew that the algorithms had privileged Jair Bolsonaro, boosted him, massively helped him, and had been one of the key factors, not the only one, in his election.

So you're totally right that negative, not the only one, in his election. So you're totally right that negative... And not only do we know this from the scientists who studied it, we know it from Facebook themselves. After the Brexit referendum in Britain, where Britain shockingly voted to leave the European Union, Facebook got their own internal data scientists, and after the election of President Trump, Facebook got their own internal data scientists to figure out, did we play a role in the polarization and the damage to collective

attention that led to this? And what did they find? Their own data scientists talked about all these factors and they said, it was really striking what they said, they said that it was inherent to the current business model to drive polarization and make people angrier. And the only solution was for them to abandon the current business model. They even warned a third of all the people in Germany who had joined neo-Nazi groups had joined because Facebook's algorithm had specifically recommended it. You might want to join, it said, followed by a neo-Nazi group. Now, even when they were told that, Facebook haven't significantly changed their model, right? So they're not going to change it on their own any more than the lead industry was one day going to

go, you know what, guys, I think we've just made enough money. Let's not poison kids anymore. They had to be made to do it by a movement. We've got to make these forces, of course we can protect ourselves as much as possible. We've got to stop these forces. Cause you can again see how you as an individual can opt out of that. I can go to Provincetown for three months, but I'm still living in a society where everyone else is being made angrier

and angrier and angrier, right? So even if you can individually protect yourself, if the effect on the society is so catastrophic, then you've got to be engaged in collective action as well. Yeah, education is such a big piece in this. When you were telling that story, I was reflecting on when Zuckerberg went to testify before Congress and I can't remember which Senator

or Congressman asked him like, how do you make your money? Like they don't even understand what the model is, let alone have the tools or experience to figure out what's so terribly wrong about what's happening right now so that we can course correct it. Yeah, but the thing to understand about that is Rebecca Solnit, the writer said,

"'Politicians are weather vanes "'and it's our job to be the weather,' right? "'Of course, these imbecile senators senators who are asking these ludicrous questions. I mean, it was literally almost like, I can't get into my phone. Can you tell me the code was the level of the questioning? They're never going to. But think about every change that's ever happened. It didn't happen because people at the top suddenly had some awakening one day.

It happened because ordinary people made them do it, right? Think about, you know, again, when I get pessimistic about this, I'm conscious that we're talking a lot, I do talk a lot about individual changes in the book as well. I'm conscious we're talking a lot about these big changes, which is absolutely the right place to drive the conversation. And I'm conscious that can make a lot of people feel, you know, people listening and watching don't need me to tell them. We're in a culture where it's very hard

for us to do anything collectively. And I mentioned my grandmothers, but I would give another example that I go to a lot when I feel pessimistic about this. So great friend of mine is the writer, Andrew Sullivan. He's the Andrew that you're- Yeah, in Providence Town. I was like, that's definitely Andrew Sullivan. And he the Andrew that you're- Yeah, in Providence Town. I was like, that's definitely Andrew Sullivan.

Yeah, and he's an amazing person. And so in 1994, Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive at the height of the AIDS crisis. When as far as he knew that was a death sentence. There was no one thought there was any hope in sight. His best friend, Patrick had just died of AIDS. And Andrew thought, well, I'm going to die in a couple of years. He quit his job.

He was the editor of the New Republic magazine. And he went to Provincetown to die. And he decided that before he died, he was going to do one last thing. He was going to write a book about a crazy utopian idea that no one had ever written a book about before. And he was like, look, I'm never going to live to see this idea put into practice no one alive today is ever going to live to see it but maybe someone somewhere down the line will pick up this idea the idea that andrew wrote the first book to advocate for is gay marriage and when i get depressed i imagine going back in time to

provincetown to 1994 when and was writing his book, Virtually Normal, and saying to him, okay, Andrew, you're not going to believe me, but 26 years from now, A, you'll be alive. That would have blown his mind. B, you'll be married to a man. That's going to be legal.

C, I'll be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States quits this book you're writing now, when it makes it mandatory for every state in the United States to introduce gay marriage rights. And the next day, you'll be invited to a White House lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to have dinner with the president to celebrate what you and everyone and so many other people have achieved. Oh, and by the way, that president, he's going to be black, right? It would have sounded like preposterous like me saying to you so rich 26 years from now we'll be invited to smoke crack with a trans president in the oval office right

it would have seemed not that we want that i mean the trans president yes not the crack you know but you can you can see how that would have seemed ludicrous then it happened it happened because enough people banded together they fought for it they appealed to other people in a spirit of love and compassion. And I absolutely, this is an easier fight than that. We had 2000 years of homophobia that had to be overcome. These problems are really recent, right? And homophobia, dreadful though it is, affects a very small minority of people.

This stuff affects everyone to some degree, right? So the potential coalition is everyone everyone to some degree, right? So the potential coalition is everyone except Mark Zuckerberg, right? That's a pretty big coalition. I absolutely believe we can do this. And I think we need to do it because these trends are getting worse, right? Do we want to be in a position where a few years from now, we look back nostalgically on the time when the average American office worker focused on only one task for three minutes, right? There's a limit beyond which we can't go. So I am optimistic about the capacity to fight back on this, but we have to decide to do it, right? It's not going to just passively happen. No attention Messiah is going to come to save us. We have to do this

ourselves. Yeah, beautifully put, but I think it's important to understand that there is a level of apathy around this because it's almost as if we've been all cajoled into this waking dream. Like we've all voluntarily signed up for this level of enslavement. And many of us are only nominally conscious

of what's even happening, let alone the dangers that this presents. And I think there's a lot of people who are just like, I don't care. Like, I just like to scroll. It's the only thing in my life that gives me any kind of satisfaction because my job sucks and I'm at home

and I'm on Zoom all day and I can barely pay my bills. And I just wanna be able to go on Facebook or go on Reddit and join my community where I feel like I'm part of something because otherwise I feel terribly alone. I think this, you know, Mark Maron, the comedian said every Facebook status update could be boiled down

to the underlying sentiment. Will someone somewhere please acknowledge I exist? And I think you've gone to a deeper layer of the conversation. I'm really glad you bring that up Rich. And this relates to the book we talked about last time, a previous books, chasing the scream and lost connections, which were about addiction and depression.

Right, there's this irony with lost connection and what you're talking about now, because what's driving all of this is this desire to be connected. And it is that impulse that ultimately is driving us apart and putting distance between us and the connection that we seek. I think what we're getting

is a kind of parody of connection. So I went to the first ever internet rehab center in the world. It's outside Spokane in Washington State. It's called Restart Washington. It's a great place. And I spent a lot of time talking. They get all kinds of people there, but they disproportionately get young men.

And they're often young men who become obsessed with either porn or multiplayer online role-playing games. And I was essentially speaking to these young men and then later going out with Dr. Hilary Cash, who's the co-founder of this place. And her saying to me, you've got to ask yourself, what do these young men get out of these games?

They're getting something they used to get from the society, but they no longer get, right? They're getting a sense they physically roam around, right, as we said, young people don't get that, particularly during COVID, but even before. They get a sense they're good at something. We have created a society where young men are made to feel incompetent by the school system. They don't feel they're good at anything. And they get a feeling that people see them, right? Other people are watching you when you're playing the game. It's a profoundly lonely

society. 41% of Americans agree with the statement, no one knows me well. But I think what they're getting is a kind of parody of connection. And it was interesting talking to her about this after I've been speaking to these young men about how they're obsessed with porn. Because in a way,

I think the relationship between social media and social life is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex, right? I'm not anti-porn. Porn will meet a certain basic itch. But if your entire sex life consisted of jerking off over porn, you'd be going around kind of pissed off and irritated a lot of the time because we didn't evolve to jerk off over screens. We evolved to actually have sex. And no one feels, you know, satisfied after they've spent an hour looking at porn compared to how they feel after an hour of having sex, at least if it goes right. And in a similar way, there's a misalignment between us. This appeals to the part, just like porn appeals to the part of us that wants to

have sex. This stuff appeals to the part of us that is craving connection, but it offers us a kind of misaligned parody of it. But this connects to a wider thing that the first thing you and I ever talked about, Rich, when we first met, which is about addiction, right? So the deeper thing you're getting at, those people saying, this is all I've got. I think that's really true,

which is why part of what's happening is that this technology addiction is a symptom of what I would argue all addiction to some degree. The core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be, right? That's true whether you're addicted to gambling, heroin, alcohol, whatever it might be. And we've talked before, but I think it's worth thinking about this in relation to, so obviously I wrote a book called Chasing the Scream and I gave a TED talk about this, that we had a lot of addiction in my family, which is why this was so important to me. And the three years I spent researching addiction, which actually started exactly 10 years ago, which blows my mind. My whole attitude towards addiction

was profoundly transformed by a scientist I got to know and love, a man named Professor Bruce Alexander. So let's talk about, let's choose heroin addiction because that was close to me. If you had asked me when I started doing the research for Chasing the Scream, what causes heroin addiction?

I would have looked at you like you were a fool and I would have said, well, Rich, the clue's in the name, right? Obviously heroin causes heroin addiction? I would have looked at you like you were a fool and I would have said, well, Rich, the clues in the name, right? Obviously heroin causes heroin addiction. We've been told this story for a hundred years. It's become totally part of our common sense. It was, I mean, I thought I'd literally seen it play out in front of my eyes. We think if we kidnapped the next 20 people to walk past the studio here in LA and we injected them all with heroin every day for a month, like a villain in a Saw movie, at the end of that month, they'd all be heroin addicts

for a simple reason. There's chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically crave. And at the end of that month, they'd have this tremendous physical hunger for the drug, right? That's why we call it being hooked, right? It's a craving for the chemical hooks. It turns out that's true.

Chemical hooks are real, but they're a very small part of what's going on in addiction. And one of the ways we know that, there's many reasons, but this was discovered by a man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who I interviewed in Vancouver, who changed my life actually. And Professor Alexander explained to me,

this story we have in our heads about addiction that is caused primarily or entirely by the chemical hooks comes primarily from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple experiments. Your viewers can try them at home if they're feeling a little bit sadistic. You probably shouldn't.

You take a rat, you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will try both. It'll almost always prefer the drug water and it'll almost always kill itself by overdosing within a couple of weeks. So there you go. That's our story. The rat tries the drugs, gets adapted to the chemical hooks, wants more and more of them, kills itself. But Professor Alexander came along in the 70s and said, hang on a minute, you put the rat alone in an empty cage. It's got nothing that makes life

meaningful for rats except these drugs. What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of friends, they've got loads of cheese, they can have loads of sex, they've got loads of colored balls, anything a rat finds meaningful in life is there in Rat Park. And they got both of friends they got loads of cheese they can have loads of sex they got loads of colored balls anything a rat finds meaningful in life is there in rat park and they got both the water bottles the normal water and the drug water and of course they try both this is the fascinating thing in rat park they don't like the drug water they hardly ever use it none of them ever use it compulsively none of them ever overdose so you go from almost 100% compulsive use and overdose when they don't have the things that make life worth living to no compulsive use and overdose when they do have the things

that make life worth living. This is why I talk about how the opposite of addiction is connection. But if we apply that to what you're talking about, you're absolutely right. There's a lot of people who are in the equivalent of that first cage. The only thing they've got in this analogy, they're in the isolated cage and they've got not the drug water, but the phone, right? Which at least is something, some connection to the world, right? So you're absolutely right. We've got to deal with these factors around the technology and the wider factors that are lowering our immune system that could resist the technology. But we've also got to deal with a society where most people don't want to be present,

right? Where everyone watching knows they have natural physical needs. Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast. But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And this culture we built is good at lots of things.

I'm glad to be alive today, but we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs. And of course that will create a culture where a lot of people can't bear to be present and they will look for ways to not be present. And for some of them, it'll be opioids. We can look at where are the places that have the highest level of opioid addiction. There are places where there is depression is highest, where people have been deprived of their needs most. For some people, it'll be porn. For some people, it'll be obsessively being on TikTok. For some people, it'll be cocaine. But we have to get

to the core of why they don't want to be present in their life. All addiction is a symptom of a wider problem, right? So I think you're absolutely right. It's why in a way, I think stolen focus needs to be put together with my previous book, Lost Connections, and the one before that, Chasing the Scream. It's why I sort of think of them

as a kind of weird trilogy, which makes me sound like I'm saying I'm George Lucas, which I know sounds weird. But you know what I mean? I think there's connections between all of these things. Yeah, I mean, there is a matrix there. Mental health, addiction, and our ability to be present in our lives,

which is what focus is in many ways or a subset of it is, yeah, are certainly interdependent. But can I come back to something you said before though, which is just one, promise a very short thing. You said that people are apathetic and I totally understand why you say that. I think it's slightly different. reminds me something the writer season son tag said once she was talking about compassion fatigue in um she was talking about the history of when

people see uh photographs of atrocities in wars right and a lot of people say oh you know at first when people saw images from auschwitz they were completely shocked but now we we've got compassion fatigue from looking at these images and she, it's not the compassion that causes the fatigue. It's the sense that there's nothing you can do about it. If you think there's nothing you can do about it, then you become apathetic and numb. But if you feel that you can do something about it, actually you get as upset as the first time you saw it, right? And the same way, so I think you're right that we're apathetic, but we're apathetic because we don't feel we have any agency. And I'm trying to say to people,

we absolutely do have agency over this. I think the agency issue is important. I mean, I think, how do I say this? I think your analogy to Rat Park and addiction with respect to people's relationship with technology is apt. Although I would push back a little bit. And I think I did last time we talked about addiction. You know, I think that the Rat Park study

and analogy is limited in certain respects. I think addiction is a lot more complicated than that. I mean, everyone agrees with that. Yeah, of course. Like it's too simplistic to say, all right, if I'm feeling connected to people, then I'm not gonna choose cocaine. Like I've spent 25 years in recovery

and have seen a lot of people who work very hard to create those connections that have been lost and still struggle and relapse and don't find their way back. Totally, and it's not just about being connected to people, it's being back connected to all of your psychological needs. Yes, but I do think you're absolutely correct in that people feel like they don't have agency

and part of that lack of agency is being fueled by a lack of opportunity. So layered on top of that COVID and all the kind of duress that that has exposed us to, I think there's legions of people out there who feel somewhat hopeless and really struggle to find something that they can connect with that gives their life

a sense of meaning, purpose and direction. And it's tricky. People say, I don't know what my passion is. I don't know what my purpose is. I try meaning, purpose and direction. And it's tricky. People say, I don't know what my passion is. I don't know what my purpose is. I try this, I try that, I can't really find it. It's very difficult to guide that person. And I think it's somewhat, what's the right word? Not irresponsible, but just sort of like insufficient

to just say, well, try a bunch of things, or, you know, I trust you that you'll find it. And I think what happens over time with COVID really truncating people's ability to kind of explore other avenues for their life is that there is a sense of desperation that ensues that makes it even more difficult to lift yourself out of that fog or put the phone down or stop playing the game or get off the porn.

And it becomes this prison that becomes very difficult for people to break out of. I think that's true. And I think we have to look at the deeper reasons for that. So if we think about, you just talked about a really important one rich which is about our ability to create meaning and find meaning and i think there's a kind of structural thing that's happening to us which is the profound corrosion of our ability to to construct meaning

i wrote about this in in lost connections i know we touched on it a little bit last time we spoke but everyone knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right? As you can see from my chins, I'm not immune to that myself. But a kind of junk values have taken over our societies and our minds and made us mentally sick. There's a guy called Professor Tim Kasser, who's at Knox College in Illinois, retired now,

who did loads of research on this. So for thousands of years, amazing research on it. For thousands of years, philosophers said, if you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're going to feel like shit, right? It's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that's basically what he said. But weirdly, nobody had scientifically investigated this

until Professor Kasser did a huge amount of research into it. And he discovered that the philosophers were right, that the more you think life is about money and status and showing off, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by a really significant amount. But what's happened is as a society, we have become much more driven by those beliefs in the last 40 years, right? I mean, they dominate things like Instagram. Think about the values of Instagram, what they are, the implicit values of Instagram. But they dominate the whole society. You know, you talk to kids, what's your goal?

I want to be a billionaire. What do you want to be a billionaire? Just want to be a billionaire, right? We've been taught, it's almost like we've been fed a kind of KFC for the soul. We've been trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places through working

hard at jobs we don't like, to buy shit we don't need, to display it on social media to make people jealous. And so people have been given a script for how to be happy, right? That's what we're told makes you feel good. They do it. It doesn't make them feel good. And they're like, well, there must be something wrong with me because I'm doing the stuff you're meant to do to be happy. And at some level, we know this isn't true, right? No one watching thinks they're going to lie on their deathbed and think about all the likes they got on Instagram and all the shoes they bought, right? That's not going to be, you're going to think about moments of love and meaning and connection. But something that really helped me during COVID was learning from an experiment that Professor Kasser did with a colleague of his,

Nathan Dungan. And it's something I really recommend everyone do if they're interested in that rediscovery of meaning that you're talking about that's so important. There's lots of things we can do about this, but this is one example. So Nathan was and is a financial advisor in Minneapolis. And he was, so he advises people on like household budgets. And he was contacted one day by a school, a kind of middle-class high school in Minneapolis. And they said, look, we've got a real problem. We need some help. The kids at that school were becoming obsessed with getting the latest Nike sneakers, the latest iPhone, and often their parents couldn't afford it. And the kids were just losing their shit if they couldn't get it, right?

And they said, will you come in and explain budgeting to these kids? So he came in and quickly realized these kids didn't give a shit about budgeting, right? He would explain budgeting. They'd be like, yeah, whatever. I need the iPhone, right? So what he did was a different experiment.

He learned about Professor Kasser's work and teamed up with him. And they did this really interesting experiment. They got the kids and their parents to come to meetings. I think if I remember rightly, it was once every couple of weeks for six months. And the first time they met, they literally said to them,

just write a list of everything you've got to have. And they didn't define what that meant. People said, what does it mean? They said, whatever you think that means. And of course, everyone says first you need food, you need a house, whatever, home. But quite quickly, people started to name things you haven't got to have, like the latest iPhone, the parents would often name things that no reasonable person has to have, right? Then they said to them, describe how your life would be different if you got this thing.

So let's say the kids who talked about Nike sneakers, how much they wanted the Nike sneakers. What's interesting is none of the kids gave the apparent reason for Nike sneakers. None of them said, oh, I'm a basketball player and I want to be able to jump high. No one said that. They said things like, well, if I got the sneakers, people would envy me, right? People want me to be in their group, right? It doesn't take long to get people to say this out loud before they realize, oh, who put that idea in your head that having a shitty little blue tick on your shoe means you deserve to have friends, right? But what's the most interesting bit was what happened next, where they said to them, okay, write about, just discuss among yourselves and write about a moment in your life when you've had a sense of meaning and purpose. Different people name different

things, right? We can, I'll just say anyone watching just picture something now. And they talked about it, whether it was taking their kids to the beach, writing, playing music, whatever it might be. And then they said, well, how can you build more of your life around these moments of meaning and purpose and less around the junk values,

which I think a bit like junk food, that we're kind of inculcated in in this culture all the time. And what was fascinating was, so they just met every couple of weeks and talked about their progress in moving away from the junk values and towards meaningful values. And what they found was just having these conversations,

we don't have these conversations very often in our culture, just having these conversations led to a marked move in people's values, right? It really worked. And the reason I mentioned that in relation to what you're saying, Rich, is throughout COVID, in fact, before COVID, but during COVID as well. So once a month, I have two of my friends and first day of the month, we just have these conversations. We talk about what happened in the last month that was meaningful and what were times when you were diverted onto junk values and what in the next month do you want to look for? And obviously,

we've been doing it on Zoom because of the plague. And even now, I really feel it. I've got this book that just came out, right? And I can totally feel there's two sets of values I can get into. I can get into, oh, I think the things I learned for Stolen Focus will help people, right? And I think if other people learn about this, we can change things and make the world better. When I think about that, I feel really good. I think, yeah, you know, I met these amazing people. I just told Rich about Lenore.

Lenore's an amazing person. I feel really glad. I hope people go and look up Lenore and join her group, right? That makes me feel good. Or I can get into who's buying the fucking book. What do the reviews say? Who are the famous people who tweeted about it, right? And when I get into that zone, I feel like shit, even when the news is good. Right. Even when it's like, oh, your book's selling really well. Oh, this famous person

just tweeted about it. Even then I feel like shit because that's a junk value, right? It's not, it doesn't mean anything, right? Whereas the meaningful stuff is, oh, this person might be helped by this thing. That's meaningful. Right. The ego stuff is not gonna help me. But the problem is the ego stuff and the junk value stuff is so intoxicating.

It has the pull and the allure of the junk food where the fruits and the vegetables don't give you, they don't, there isn't like, that magnetic pull to them. And that's the war that you have to wage. And that's the battle. I think there's two layers to that, isn't there? You're totally right.

There's a degree to which this is just a perennial human problem that will always exist, right? There's always the temptation of ego and the temptation of, you know, meaning, right? More meaningful things. But I also think that the way professor casser put it to me is we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life right there's all this evidence exposure to advertising makes you more egotistical right and we are

bombarded with advertising you know uh more 18 month old children know what the mcdonald's m means they know their own last name in this country right so? So you think about from when we're very young, we're fed this script. So there's a degree to which it's a perennial human problem. It will always be a problem and always a struggle. But then in the environment in which we currently live, we're fucking loaded towards the bad choice, right? Whether it's junk food,

the constant distraction or the junk values. We're living in an environment that is pushing us in so many ways towards the things that at some level we know are not good for our attention or the junk values. We're living in an environment that is pushing us in so many ways towards the things that at some level we know are not good for our attention, our depression, our addiction. Yeah, well, let's pivot. We gotta sort of land this plane in a few minutes here.

So let's pivot to some things that people can do who are struggling with this. And I think this is a universal thing, especially parents who are watching their kids and feel powerless around like, how do I get my kid to put this thing down and get them outside? How do I take better control of my own habits?

We can fight the war on the systemic front, but what can I do now and today that could improve the quality of my life? So yeah, maybe some things that people can take home and implement. So I go through dozens of things in the book. I would say, buy a K-safe. These people should still be paying me commission

because like- They should make a special Johan Hari K-safe that's like branded for you. With my face on it, genius, I love that. Yeah, buy a K-safe and crucially model the good behavior for your kids, right? Every night, all of you sit down for dinner and all of you put your phones in the K-safe, right? And lock it away for an hour.

It's really difficult at first, right? I won't watch a film with my boyfriend unless we're both in prison on phones, like I said before. But I tell you what, the pleasures of focus. Teenage daughters, Johan. They can take an hour.

I've got my niece, believe me, I've had this fight with her. But the pleasures of focus are so much greater than the pleasures of this bullshit, right? It's a muscle you have to strengthen. So I say buy Ksafe, install Freedom on your laptop. It will cut you off either from specific websites. Say you've got a problem with Twitter

or from the entire internet. I've got Twitter permanently blocked on my phone. I can never look at it. I have an assistant where if I want to send texts, I tweet, I send them to hers. I treat it like a radioactive zone, like Chernobyl or something. I don't go near it, right?

Or very rarely. I say buy it, install freedom on your phone, change the way you eat. If you eat oatmeal in the morning, your attention will be much better than if you eat my preferred breakfast of a sausage and egg McMuffin, right? So change the way, prioritize sleep, right? Sleep is the single best thing you can do for your attention. When you're sleeping, you're repairing, let your brain repair. Massively prioritized sleep. There's, Dr. Seisler told me a really interesting piece of research that's really helped me. It's called, it's about, it's something he discovered. It's called the second surge of energy.

So human beings evolved so that when it gets dark, we get a surge of energy. And you can see the obvious reason in evolution. You're out, it gets dark, you get a surge of energy and you can see the obvious reason in evolution you're out it gets dark you get a surge of energy you'll be able to get back to your cave better than if you didn't right if you didn't get that surge of energy but problem is because of artificial light we now control the light right so we control when it gets dark so if you lie in your bed like most 90% of americans look at a glowing screen within two hours of going to sleep. What that means is you're lying in your bed and you switch off your phone and it suddenly gets dark. What your body hears is it got dark. Give him a surge of energy. He needs to get back to his cave. Your body doesn't know you're already in your cave. You're in your bed, right? So really

restrict the amount of artificial light you are exposed to in the two hours before you go to sleep. And the way I discipline myself to do that is I put my phone in my case safe sorry to bore on about this but because if i'm lying there in bed and i'm like oh shit there was that one email i should have answered it it's very hard in that moment to restrain yourself if you've locked the phone away you'd either go i want email i guess i'll have to answer it tomorrow morning then you know not the end of the world right i'm not the president of the united states i don't need to give orders if russia invades uk right? The world can wait for me. I would say that. I mean, obviously I go through many, many things, but yeah, there's all sorts

of things, very practical changes that we can make in our lives right away that can do that. I would say when you get, when you can't focus, don't go into the spiral of recrimination that I used to do. Why are you lacking in willpower why aren't you strong enough instead create the conditions for a flow state right set yourself aside from it create the conditions for a flow state that we talked about before so there's all sorts of really big changes that we can we can make in our own individual lives that will hugely help and the great thing about that is it's it's a bit like the pleasure you get when you lose weight, which is you really start to see the benefits, right? You see the benefits very quickly. And the pleasures of focus are so great. You get to have proper conversations where you look into people's eyes and listen to them. You get to read books. You get to think

deeply about the world. You get to let your mind wander. And when your mind wanders, it processes things that happened in the past, anticipates the future. It makes sense. It's these connections between things. These are such deep human needs that we've been deprived of. People can feel this is stunting our lives.

And when you try the alternatives, even tentatively, it's hard, right? I talked about the crash I hadn't promised out. It's hard. But when you get through that initial hump, that challenge, the benefits are enormous. Focus is essential to having a good life. If you're starved of focus,

like we said before, it's so much harder to achieve your goals in life. Attention is like a form of light that illuminates your life. When you get to it, it's an amazing feeling. Beautifully put. Hooray. I love it. One thing though,

can somebody please invent a better dumb phone than the Jitterbug? Because I would buy that thing, right? Like somebody, like all I want on my phone, I need to be able to make phone calls. I would like to listen to audio books, podcasts and music and maybe like a map for navigation. And that's maybe kind of it.

So like no app store, it doesn't seem that hard. You can sort of do that with your smartphone now. If you install- All these ho do that with your smartphone now. If you install all these hoops that you got to jump through, it's like it's set up like, oh, lock it in here. And it's insane that we have to do all of these things to protect ourselves from ourselves. I totally agree.

And to be fair to the jitterbug, it will alert the nearest hospital if you fall over. You left that out, that crucial factor. I did actually weirdly feel safe, even though I have never fallen over obviously, cause I'm like 43, I'm not 90. But yeah, so don't diss the jitterbug too hard. I mean, I think there's a lot of people out there

that would buy a phone like that. That there's like a couple of things that you kind of, in a utilitarian way, you kind of need, but without all the stuff that's driving us mad. Totally agree with you. Yeah. There must be lots of inventors who watch your, you have lots of tech, but without all the stuff that's driving us mad. Totally agree with you. Yeah. But there must be lots of inventors who watch your, you have lots of tech or big tech audience.

I don't know. Maybe somebody's already invented it and I just don't know about it. We should go on Shark Tank and pitch it. There you go. I know Mark Cuban, we can do it. Okay. Are you going back to Vegas?

Let's just end this with like, you've been living in Vegas? I spent a lot of the pandemic in Vegas. I'm writing a book about a series of crimes that are happening in Vegas. I've been researching it for 10 years. Happening now or did happen? I'm not meant to talk about it too much. I'll get tased by my publishers if I talk about it,

but it's a series of horrific crimes that have been happening for some time in Vegas. And I've been researching it for 10 years. That gives you a sense of how long. And it's been a very weird place to spend the pandemic. I was saying to you before, because partly because you're surrounded by people whose response to a global pandemic is to say,

well, this is the perfect time to go to Vegas. So, I mean, I love Vegas. It's an incredible place. And the people there who I'm writing about are people who are very close to my heart and very special people to me. So it's been some of the most amazing people I've ever met. And so yeah, I'm going to Vegas tomorrow.

I'm flying back to Vegas. It's a Viva Las Vegas, baby. I would need a case safe for my soul. When you finish that book, come back and talk to me. We can do Vegas. Yeah, absolutely. Brilliant. Thanks, Rich.

It's always a joy to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thank you. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources

related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts,

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which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake,

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Plants. All right. Hooray!