Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Stolen Focus with Johann Hari

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers lose focus every three minutes. We tend to think of things like this as inevitable and we personalize them, we create little narratives about personal failure or a lack of willpower. But this isn’t really the case. The problem is systemic, and in his latest book, Lost Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – And How to Think Deeply Again, author and journalist Johann Hari explains why everything we think we know about this crisis of attention is wrong — and why we need an attention revolution. Johann Hari is also the author of the books Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, as well as Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Before we get started on this episode, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. It really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. And as always, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. It helps keep this podcast free and sustainable. So please, if you can, go there to donate. Thank you. We live in such an individualistic culture

that presented with problems, we usually blame ourselves as individuals. And certainly even someone with a more left analysis like mine, when my attention got worse, I would blame myself. I'd tell you you're not strong enough, your willpower isn't strong enough, you're being weak, you're being undisciplined. But actually, what I learned is that your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen by very big and powerful forces and I really think we have to shift our psychology in this we are the free citizens of democracies we own our own minds

and we can take them back from the motherfuckers who've stolen them you're listening to Upstream Upstream Upstream Upstream a podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Have you noticed that it's

getting harder and harder to pay sustained attention to any single thing in your life? Constant distractions, phone chimes, notifications, texts, Hulu. It's overwhelming, but it's also unfortunately a normal part of everyday life. In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only 65 seconds at a time, and office workers lose focus every three minutes. We tend to think of these things as inevitable, and we personalize them. We create these little narratives about personal failure or our lack of willpower. But this isn't really the case. The problem is systemic.

And in his latest book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again, author and journalist Johan Hari explains why everything we think we know about the crisis of attention is wrong and why we need an attention revolution. Johan Hari is also the author of the books Chasing the Scream, The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, and Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression

and the Unexpected Solutions. Welcome, Johan. Good to meet you. Oh, hi, Bella. I'm so happy to be with you. Yes, and we always start by asking folks to introduce themselves. So I'm wondering, how might you want to introduce yourself today for this show? Oh, you see, British people, this is much harder. You know, there's a thing, I live half the year in the US normally, and there's a question that Americans ask all the time that I have never heard a European or a British person ever ask, right? And it's charming when Americans do it. The question is, what's your story, right? Which is a question that all

Americans have an answer to. And the only context where I can imagine a British person saying, what's your story, would be in the context of a police interrogation. It'd be an extraordinarily aggressive question. What's your story? I can't imagine it in French or German. Quelle est ton histoire? It would be very aggressive. So this is a much harder question to answer for a British person than you think.

But I'm a British journalist. I've written some books. I wrote a book about addiction and the war on drugs called Chasing the Scream. I wrote a book about depression called Lost Connections. And I have a new book out called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention, which is about the kind of deep systemic structural forces that are invading our attention and how we can build a movement to get our brains back. attention and how we can build a movement to get our brains back. Yes. And I have been deep into that book and it's been just a trip to read while looking at my own relationship to my phone, my own relationship to reading, to uninterrupted time and all the things. So really happy to talk with you about this. So focusing on that book, Stolen Focus, what were the

stories or experiences or concerns or facts that led you to want to write about that topic? For a long time, I had this sense that my own attention was getting worse. And I would meet up with my friends and pretty much everyone would complain about this over time. But for a long time, I told myself, you know, every generation thinks this, right? You can read letters from monks almost a thousand years ago where they write to each other and one says to the other, my attention ain't what it used to be, right? That's not an exact quote, but that's the gist of what they said. But then I kept seeing these very striking facts. The average American college student now focuses on any one task for 65 seconds. In fact, the median amount of time they focus is 19 seconds. The average American office worker now focuses on any one task for three minutes.

I felt uncomfortable, but I still resisted investigating it. And then there was a moment in my life where something shifted. So I've got a godson, and when he was nine, he developed this brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He would run around singing like Viva Las Vegas and Suspicious Minds, and it was especially cute because he didn't know that had become like a cheesy cliche. So there was this kind of heart-catching sincerity. He was probably the last person who will ever do a sincere impression of Elvis Presley, a non-ironic one.

And he kept getting me to tell him the story of Elvis's life. And I kind of tried to skip over the ending where he dies on the toilet. And I remember one time when I was tucking him into bed, he looked at me very intensely and he said, Johan, will you take me to Graceland one day? And in the way you do with children, I just said, yes, of course, knowing that he'd forget it like a week later. And he said, no, do you really promise that one day you will take me to Graceland? And I said, yeah, I promise. And it didn't cross my mind again until 10 years later when so many things had gone wrong. He had dropped out of school when he was 15 and he was basically spending his life just alternating between his iPad, his

iPhone and his laptop. And his life was just this blur of WhatsApp and YouTube and pornography. And it was like his mind was sort of whirring at the speed of Snapchat where nothing still or serious could touch him. And one day we were sitting on my sofa and I was trying to talk to him and he's a lovely person. And it was like nothing, it was like I couldn't get any traction. And I was feeling disgusted at myself

because I was sitting there looking at my own phone. And I suddenly remembered this moment all those years before. And I said to him, hey, let's go to Graceland. And he was like, what are you talking about he didn't even remember this promise I've made but when I told him about it he was like I could see that the idea of breaking this numbing routine appealed to him but I said there's a condition I'll take you to Graceland in fact we'll go to loads of places in the south but in return you've got to leave your phone in the hotel when we go out.

Otherwise, it will drive me insane. He promised he would. So a few weeks later, we flew from Heathrow to New Orleans. We went there first. And when we arrived at the gates of Graceland in Memphis, this is even pre-COVID. There isn't a physical guide anymore. What happens is you arrive and they give you an iPad and you put in earbuds and the iPad guides around. So it says go left, go right. And it tells you about the room you put in earbuds and the iPad guides you around. So it says go left, go right,

and it tells you about the room you're in. So what happened is we're walking around Graceland and everyone is just staring at the digital representation of the room they're in on their iPad. And I'm getting more and more tense. And we got to the jungle room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland. And there's a Canadian couple next to us and the husband turned to his wife and he said, honey, this is amazing. Look, if you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right. And I laughed. I thought he was joking. I looked at him and then him and his wife are just standing there swiping back and forth. He goes, wow, you can. And I turned to them and I said, yeah, but sir, there's an old

fashioned form of swiping you could do. You could just turn your head because like we're actually in the jungle room, right? You don't have to look at a digital representation of it. We're actually, we're there. And they sort of look at me and go back to looking at the iPads and I go, no, no, really, we're in the jungle room.

And entirely understandably, they walk off assuming I was a mad person. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it. And he was just standing in the corner, looking at Snapchat, because from the moment we landed, he couldn't keep his promise. He was constantly looking at it. And I walked up to him and I really got angry. And I said, you know, I know you're afraid of missing out. But this is guaranteeing you'll miss out. You're not being present at your own life. And I tried to snatch the phone off him and he stormed off. So I kind of wandered around Graceland and Memphis on my own for the day. And that night I went to the Heartbreak Hotel,

which is where we were staying. And I found him, there's a big swimming pool that's shaped like a guitar where they play Elvis in a constant loop. And I was, and I went up to him and I apologized for snapping and he was just staring at his phone and he said, look, I know something is really wrong, but I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, God, I need to look into this more. So I ended up going on a big journey all over the world from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne to interview over 200 of the leading experts about what boosts focus and what causes it to degenerate. And that's what really led to the book. to degenerate. And that's what really led to the book. Wow. And yeah, there was so much, the stories were really powerful in the book and that you just shared. And also, yeah, the facts that you shared earlier and a couple others that really touched me. One of them was that we are exposed to 10 times the artificial light than people were 50 years ago, that folks rarely get one hour of uninterrupted time in their day. And reading for pleasure is at its lowest point ever. And then one more is that one in four car accidents are from phone distracted drivers. So these were some ways that you really brought those points

alive to me. Yeah. What I came to believe, based on all these experts I met, is that we are living in a profound attention crisis, which is analogous to the climate crisis in many ways. There's scientific evidence for 12 different factors that can cause your attention to degrade, and many of them have been supercharged in the last few years, in recent times. And what I concluded is that this is a deep systemic crisis that requires systemic solutions. We've been encouraged, and we live in such an individualistic culture that presented with problems, we usually blame ourselves as individuals.

And certainly even someone with a more left analysis like mine, when my attention got worse, I would blame myself. I'd say, you're not strong enough. Your willpower isn't strong enough. You're being weak. You're being undisciplined. And when I saw it in my godson, who I love, or in lots of people, I would be angry with them, right? But actually what I learned is that your attention didn't collapse your attention has been stolen by very big and powerful forces of which tech is a big one but it's not the biggest actually and it's one specific aspect of tech that is doing this to us so yeah it required me to really shift my perspective and I think about it a lot in relation to the climate crisis, partly because we can't deal with the climate crisis if we can't pay attention. And if our individual and collective

and societal attention has been absolutely raided, we're not gonna be able to deal with any big struggle. Because if you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals. That's true of you as an individual, it's true of us as a society. And the collapse of our attention has been a collapse of the achievement of goals while we're raided by people who are achieving much more pernicious goals. So I thought about in relation to climate crisis in that sense, but also, you know, everyone listening to your podcast knows that unregulated capitalism is pushing us beyond ecological boundaries, beyond the boundaries of what the planet can do without being radically destabilized in its climate, right? I know you're

very active in the brilliant donut economics movement. And what I learned is that unregulated capitalism will also invade our attention in catastrophic ways. It won't just damage the planet and the capacity for a stable ecosystem. It will also damage our ability to think and pay attention in really profound ways, partly to do with tech, but actually many other causes that are not to do with tech. Yeah. One of the quotes from your book is when our attention breaks down, our ability to problem solve breaks down. And that really was a big point to me. And, and also, you know, this show is about going from the challenges of our time upstream to the root causes. And I really saw your whole book as a journey upstream. And, and really that causality

is a ball of yarn that once you pulled on one thread, you've realized how interconnected it was to so many other causes. And, you know, you have food and our diets in there, pollution, medications, right? And then, of course, technology, some of the root causes. So let's focus on this piece here around our ability to problem solve. Why is it that if our attention breaks down, we have a harder time focusing? And like, why would that be related to addressing climate change and the other challenges we face right now? So I'll give you an example. I went to MIT to interview an incredible man named Professor Earl Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. And very early in our

conversation, he said, look, you need to understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else. You can only think about one thing consciously at a time. Right. That's it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not significantly changed in 40,000 years. It ain't going to change on any time scale any of us are going to see. You can only think about one thing at a time. But we have fallen for a mass delusion, which is that we can actually think about many things at a time. In fact, the average teenager now believes

they can follow seven forms of media at the same time. So what Professor Miller's colleagues do is they get people into labs and they get people to think they're doing lots of things at the same time. And what they discover is, in fact, you can't do lots of things at the same time. What you do is you juggle rapidly between them. Your consciousness kind of papers over it to give a seamless impression, but actually you're juggling. And that comes with a huge cost to your ability to think, to remember what you do,

to absorb it. And there's been lots of studies that look at this, but I'll just give you two very quick examples. Hewlett Packard, the printer company, commissioned a scientist to do a small study where he split their workers into two groups. And the first group was told, just do whatever task you have to do and you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told, do whatever task you've got to do, but you've got to also answer email and phone calls. And they were given quite a heavy load of email and phone calls. And then they tested the IQ of both groups. were given quite a heavy load of email and phone calls. And then they tested the IQ of both groups. The group that was not interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher than the group that was not interrupted. To give you a sense of how big that is, if you or me got stoned now, if we

spoke to a fat spliff together, our IQ would go down by about five points. So at least in the short term, it was twice the effect of getting of getting stoned you'd be better off sitting at your desk doing one thing at a time and getting stoned than sitting at your desk not getting stoned and trying to do many things at a time right that's how big the detriment to your ability to think and pay attention is there was a different study by carnegie mellon university their human computer interaction lab they got 138 students and they got them all to sit the same exam. And half did the exam in normal exam conditions. And the other half were told, you can have your phone on

and you can send and receive texts if you want. Now, you would expect the second group to do better because they could have cheated, right? In fact, the second group did on average 20% worse. Because when you are interrupted, it degrades your cognition. You have to focus and refocus. There's a guy called Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon who found that if you're interrupted, it takes on average 23 minutes

to get back to the same level of focus you had before the interruption. And most of us never get 23 minutes clear, right? So the way Professor Miller put it to me is we are living in a permanent storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted. Now, the reason this relates to global warming and the climate crisis in many ways, but I just said to anyone listening, think about any time you've ever achieved anything in your life. It will definitely have been because

you paid a lot of deep and sustained attention to something, right? That's the only way we can achieve things as human beings, individually and collectively. And when that breaks down, and I believe it is breaking down and it is quite rapidly breaking down, just your ability to identify a goal and work towards it begins to atrophy so that's of course true of a local goal i want to read this book which like you said is a goal that's collapsing for people you know i want to set up this campaign group that you can see that but you can also see how that's happening at a much bigger level we're facing so many kind of unprecedented tripwires and trapdoors as a species, and we're not dealing

with them. There's many structural reasons why we're not dealing with them. I don't want to be simplistic about this. The attention crisis is only one of them. But to me, the attention crisis is a foundational one because Dr. James Williams, who's one of the most brilliant thinkers about attention in the world, when I interviewed him in Moscow said to me, it's a bit like, imagine you're driving somewhere because you've got to do something, and someone throws an tension in the world, when I interviewed him in Moscow, said to me, it's a bit like, imagine you're driving somewhere because you've got to do something, and someone throws an enormous bucket of mud all over your windshield. It doesn't matter what you've got to do when you get to your destination. The first thing you need to do is clean your windshield, because you're not going

to get there if you don't clean the windshield, right? So that goal has to come before all your other goals. In a similar way. An adult species who can't focus and pay attention and indeed are communicating through mechanisms that distort your attention and promote anger and misinformation, that is not going to be a species that can solve a crisis as enormous as the climate crisis. Does that ring true to you? Absolutely. And in reading your book, I became more aware of multitasking and monotasking. And you're absolutely right how if you slow down your noticing, then you can see how when you multitask, you do have to stop and start and remember what you were doing. And it is

fractured. It's fractured attention and focus and ability to work. So yeah, one invitation is to go into the new year with more monotasking for all of us. And then the other interesting and related area that you touch on is around empathy. And so not just our cognitive and IQ ability, but what is the fracturing of our attention doing to our ability to listen to one another and to empathize. And you tell this really interesting story in the book of you're in a cafe, I believe, and you see two gentlemen and they're chatting and you listen to the ways that they're speaking with one another and you connect it with two people reading their Facebook updates to one another. Like one reads, like is basically sharing as if it were on Facebook. And then the next

person shares as if they were on Facebook. And then the next person shares as if they were on Facebook. And you say that there's broadcasting, but not receiving. And so that really stood out to me as like, how are we communicating? So I wonder if you could speak more about how the attention crisis is impacting empathy, connection, maybe encouraging divisiveness, even the negativity bias piece around the anger and resentment that you just brought up. If you could just speak a little bit more about that, I found that really interesting. Yeah. So if you think about empathy, and there's a wonderful guy called Professor Raymond Maran, who I interviewed in Toronto, who's done fantastic work on this. Empathy is a deep form of attention. You have to really engage with someone and imagine what it's like to be them,

which requires an enormous amount of attention and effort. And he's done really interesting research about how reading novels significantly boosts your attention because when you read a novel, you're simulating what it's like to be another person in a much more effective way than like actual what we call virtual reality. You're really imagining in a complex way over many hours the internal lives of other people which is then a transferable skill when you actually meet other people narcissism is a distortion of attention I think it's when attention gets closed in on your own ego in that moment you're describing I was in a place called cafe heaven in provincetown in cape cod because I spent three months totally off the internet there for the book and there were these

two young men who came in and it was very clear they'd met on an app I was pretending to read David Copperfield I was blatantly eavesdropping the whole time I think they figured out about halfway through that I was eavesdropping on them as well but um and they'd very clearly met on an app they'd not met before and it was really interesting because they spoke to each other for a long time and never, almost never asked each other any questions. They just monologued at each other. It was quite painful to listen to. At one point, one of them mentioned that his brother had died and the other one didn't even say, oh, I'm so sorry. He just carried on talking about himself. And I think we've all seen

the rise of that behavior. I'll try not to mention the name of your former president, but the normalization of extreme narcissism and indeed the celebration of it is something that we've obviously seen exalted even to the White House and that is a product of this but you mentioned this thing called negativity bias which is important to think about and helps us to understand another reason why I think we're not dealing with the climate crisis at the moment in the way that we should be so all the social media we currently use is designed around one economic model, which is very simple. Whenever you open Facebook, whenever you open Twitter, whenever you open Instagram, those companies make money in two ways. The first way is really obvious that you see ads. We all know how that works. The second way is much

more important and valuable to them. Everything you do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their algorithms to build up a very detailed profile of who you are. So let's say that you click that you like Bette Midler, Donald Trump, and you say to your mother, you've just bought some diapers. Okay. So the app has figured out if you're a man and you like Bette Midler, you're probably gay. You like Donald Trump, you're clearly right wing and you've bought diapers, you've got a baby. Okay, they've got tens of thousands of data points like this. They know a lot about who you are. And the reason they do that is because you are not the customer of Facebook. You are the product of Facebook. They sell this information about you to advertisers so advertisers can target you. Because if I'm selling diapers,

there's no point targeting me. I don't have a baby. They want to target people who've got babies to give one example, right? So every time you close Facebook, they lose both of these revenue streams. It's an absolute disaster for them. So all of their apps, all of their engineers, all of their algorithms are geared towards one thing. How do I keep Della scrolling? How do I stop Della putting down the phone? That's it. In the same way that the CEO of KFC, all he cares about is Della going to eat some KFC.

That's it. That's all he cares about, right? Might be a nice person, might be a nasty person, doesn't matter. All Facebook care about is how long will Della scroll this week and of course all the rest of us. And so the algorithms are designed to find the content that people share that will most keep people engaging and scrolling. But those algorithms, this wasn't the intention of anyone at Facebook or

YouTube or any of these other apps, but those algorithms bumped into an uncomfortable human truth. It's one that psychologists have known about for a long time. It's called negativity bias. Anyone who's ever seen a car accident on the freeway knows what negativity bias is you will stare at something shocking and upsetting Longer than you will stare at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street This is just a universal human truth 10 week old babies will look at angry faces longer than they look at smiling faces Probably it has a good reason in our evolution Our ancestors who were looking out for the danger got to be our ancestors. The ancestors who were like, oh, these flowers are so pretty and just stared at that

probably didn't get to be our ancestors, right? But for whatever reason, this is a deep human truth. Now that becomes very problematic when it meets a business model that is based solely on increasing scrolling. Because what it means is the algorithms will select for things that make you angry, upset, and outraged over things that make you feel good. So imagine two teenagers who go to the same party and they leave and they get the same bus home. And one of the teenagers says, that was a great party. I had a great time. Everyone was nice. And the other teenager says, Karen was a complete hoe at that party. You know, Peter stank. The house was like, it just goes into a stream of abuse towards the people there.

The algorithm will select that first status update will go to a few people, but the second status update will go to far more people because the algorithm scans for angry and outraging words, because it knows more people will engage with that, which will keep them on the app longer. More people will go, why are you calling Karen a hoe? Screw you. And then other people will go, Karen is a hoe. You can just see the argument. Sorry, I spend a lot of time with my niece looking at her social media, which is why I'm uncomfortably plugged into teenage girls' insults to each other. Now that's bad enough at the level of just, you know, a house party for teenagers, but we've all socially been plugged into that for a really long time, right? We are

plugging into polarization and rage-making machines, which Facebook's own internal research has shown is destroying our collective attention, our ability to come together as a society and think sanely. Facebook's own internal research found that a third of all the people who joined neo-Nazi groups in Germany joined because Facebook's algorithms specifically recommended that they join them. You might want to join, it said, followed by a neo-Nazi group, right? Because again, neo-Nazi groups, it's enraging, right? It boosts engagement. So, you said, followed by a neo-Nazi group, right? Because again, neo-Nazi groups, it's enraging, right? It boosts engagement. So, you know, a lot of my book, Stolen Focus, is about individual attention, but a lot of it is about our collective attention and our ability to

do things together. And they are being systematically trashed in really dangerous ways. I think a lot about the ozone layer crisis. I think you're clearly younger than me, Della, I'm 42. And I remember when I was a kid, the ozone layer crisis came along think you're clearly younger than me, Della, I'm 42. And I remember when I was a kid, the ozone layer crisis came along, which for people who don't know, it was discovered that a chemical called CFCs was damaging the ozone layer, which is a layer around the earth that protects us from the sun's rays. And there was a hole in the ozone layer above the Arctic. And I remember being terrified when I was a child learning about this. the Arctic. And I remember being terrified when I was a child learning about this. And what happened?

What happened is the science was explained to ordinary people. People were able to distinguish the scientific truth from lies. They then pressured their governments to act. And even awful right-wing governments like Margaret Thatcher's and George Bush Senior acted. They banned CFCs. As a result, the ozone layer is now healing. I am certain that wouldn't happen now. You would get one group of people who would absorb the science. They wear little representations of the ozone layer on their clothing. You'd get another group of right-wingers who would spray hairsprays at the sky saying, fuck you, ozone layer will own the libs. You'd get people saying, how do we even know the ozone layer exists? You know, maybe George Soros made the hole in the ozone layer. You just get,

the conversation would just collapse into a kind of polarized madness where we couldn't collectively act to solve the problem. So we need to deal with these underlying systemic reasons that are doing this. And social media doesn't have to work that way. I can talk more about that if you like. Yes, no, I'm excited to talk more about that. And just to put some other words on these root causes that you're describing, because you bring them in in the book. So this can be called the attention economy. That idea of attention is what is being mined or being grown or commodified. And engagement is what is making theed or being grown or commodified. And engagement is what is making the money.

And then also surveillance capitalism. And that's really that creating of the profile and the surveilling. But anything more you want to say about when you go upstream to those root causes, anything else about surveillance capitalism, the attention economy, consumer capitalism as well. Just folks listening are really interested in economics. I'm wondering if you could add more to those phrases so that we really understand them. Yeah, I just want to give credit that the surveillance capitalism is a phrase that comes from the brilliant Harvard academic Professor Shoshana Zuboff. Yeah. So in terms

of the economics, there's a very deep cause that I really wrestled with throughout the book and I think is really important. And I want to explain it because I found it the most challenging of the causes. And I think it's the one that speaks most to the brilliant broader work that you do, Della. So I went to interview a man called Professor Suna Lehmann in Copenhagen in Denmark, who was the first scientist to prove that our collective ability to pay attention is getting worse. And he did it partly because he himself was worried about his own attention. He's got these lovely little sons, and every morning they come and jump on his bed. And he noticed that absolutely instinctively,

he would not reach for them, he would reach for his phone, even though he loves his sons much more than he loves his phone. And he began to wonder, well, is this change really happening? What's going on here? And he started with doing a small study that then opened onto a bigger study with really big, I think, implications for our economy. So the first study they did was really simple. Anyone who's on Twitter will know that Twitter has what are called trending topics. For the lucky people who are not on Twitter, I'll just explain what that means. Twitter's algorithms are scanning everything people say on Twitter, looking for new topics that lots of people are talking about. So if tomorrow, I don't know, Justin Bieber fell into a hole, the phrase Bieber in a hole would trend on Twitter,

right? Because everyone would start talking about, oh, Justin Bieber fell into a hole. I hope he doesn't fall into a hole, by the way. This isn't some wish fulfillment. So they had this idea, well, we could look at trending topics over time to see if people are collectively talking about any one thing for the same amount of time, more or less. So what they discovered is in 2013, a topic would trend on Twitter. Any topic that trended on Twitter would be discussed for 17.5 hours on average, right? So lots of people would talk about this one thing like Bieber in a hole for 17.5 hours. By the time you got to 2016, the average trending topic would only be talked about for 12 hours, quite a significant fall in a short period of time. But they were like, at first, the scientists, including other scientists

who were involved in this, like Dr. Philip Steen, who's in Berlin, who I interviewed. They were like, oh, maybe this is just a phenomenon of Twitter, right? So they then looked at lots of online data sets, like what people search for on Google, what people discuss on Reddit, a whole range of things. And what they discovered was for almost everything online, the only exception was Wikipedia, for almost everything online, the graph looked exactly the same. People were talking about any one thing less and less. But they're still thinking, you know, this is relatively new. Could there be something else going on? Which is when they made a really important breakthrough, which has the economic implication, I think. So Google Books, as you know, has scanned books going back, you know, many hundreds of years. And they trained a

computer to go through books in the past for every decade since the 1880s to scan for new phrases. It's effectively like identifying trending topics in the past. So think about a phrase like no deal Brexit, right? No one had ever said the words no deal Brexit before 2016. No one will ever say them again now, apart from historians. It's just a phrase that emerged and then went away. Or think about the Harlem Renaissance. It was a phenomenon that emerged, and now we talk about it as a historical phenomenon. We can all think of phrases like this. So they basically train the algorithms to figure out when a new topic emerged in the past, how long did people talk about it for? And what they discovered was really weird.

For every decade since the 1880s, the graph looked exactly like the graph on Twitter. We talk about any one thing less and less and less, which is really weird at first. Why would that be? Why would it be that with each decade that passes, our collective attention on any one thing is declining? This is way before the invention of even computers, right? So there's a big debate about this, and it's not resolved. And there's lots of things going on. Some of it seems to be about just an increase in exposure to information. The way Professor Lehman put it to me is it's like we're being sprayed with a fire hose of information all the time. But I think there's a deeper reason, which totally relates to donut economics and the amazing work that Kate Raworth and other people

have done. I interviewed a guy called Thomas Hilland Erickson, who's one of Norway's leading social scientists. And he said to me that he thinks this is a product of the system of economic growth. He said, obviously, we all know the way we judge success in this society, most people judge success in the society is whether people deliver economic growth. If a president delivers economic growth, he's more likely to be reelected. If a CEO's company grows, he's more likely to get bonuses and remain as the CEO. And Professor Erickson said to me, look, there's two ways you can secure economic growth, right, as a head of a country or as a company. The first is you can identify a new market and meet that market.

And of course, that happens sometimes. But the second way is you can identify an existing market and get people to consume more within that existing market. So if I can get you to watch television and tweet about it at the same time, I've doubled the amount of advertising that you're exposed to. If I can get you to eat much more than you do now, I've secured economic growth. This is one reason why the average american has gained 22 pounds since 1960 right it's a machinery which is designed to behave in this way and my instinct and it's not as confident as the some of the other conclusions i reached in the book but i think the system of economic growth under which we live has certain imperatives to it. And one of them is that we need to consume more and we need

to speed up, right? That speeding up is what's driven that curve since the 1880s, that catastrophic curve where we're talking and focusing less and less. And I think a big part of what I argue in the book is we need to have a movement to deal with the deep root causes of our attention crisis. And there are many things that movement needs to focus on. But I think sooner or later, that movement will have to confront the concept of economic growth. We cannot grow infinitely.

Well, you can't grow infinitely on a finite planet anyway, as you know very well, and as Fahli Mowat famously said. But also, there's a limit to how fast we can go, right? There are studies, for example, of teaching people speed reading. And what they all find is you can train pretty much anyone to speed read, but if you do it, they just understand less and less and remember less and less of what they do. There's limits to what the human mind can do. And I think this system of

economic growth is obviously pushing the planet beyond those limits, but it's also pushing us as our minds beyond those limits. We talk faster than we did in the 1950s. We walk fast, significantly faster. In the last 20 years in cities, we walk faster than we did 20 years ago. There's been this huge acceleration of life that comes with a cost. And one of the interesting things about COVID and the kind of disaster we've all lived through and are living through, there's many aspects of COVID that have damaged people's attention. And I can talk about some of them, but it's been a really interesting moment in which it was the first time ever as a society in more than a hundred years, we decided collectively to slow down and put something ahead of the concept of economic growth.

And there've been other experiments with this. So I spent some time in New Zealand with a company that moved to having a four day week for the same amount of pay as five days. And it was really fascinating spending time with that company because they actually achieved more in four days than they had in five. Because when you slow down, your attention heals and you can actually do things, right? It was fascinating spending time with all the workers for this company, Petrol Guardian. So yeah, there's all sorts of evidence that slowing down boosts our attention and focus. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Johan Hari, author of Stolen Focus. We'll be right back

for the second half of our show. The Mississippi Delta Shining like a national guitar I am following the river Down the highway to the cradle of the civil war I'm going to Graceland Memphis Tennessee I'm going to Graceland She comes back to tell me she's gone As if I didn't know that As if I didn't know my own bed As if I never noticed

The way she brushes her hair from her forehead She said, loose in love It's like a window in your heart Everybody sees you're blown apart Everybody feels the wind blow I'm gonna Graceland Memphis Tennessee I'm gonna

Graceland And there's a girl in New York City She calls herself the human trampoline And sometimes when I'm falling, stumbling, tumbling in turmoil I say, whoa, is this what you mean? She says we're bouncing into Graceland I see loose in love, it's like a window in your heart Everybody sees you're blown apart Everybody feels the wind blow

I'm gonna Graceland Memphis, Tennessee I'm gonna Graceland That was Paul Simon's Graceland, performed here by the tallest man on earth. Now back to our conversation with Johan Hari, author of the book Stolen Focus. Let's return to that idea that you shared at the beginning around this time, as you said, we need a movement to regain our attention instead of personal actions.

And I loved how you did bring in all the ways that people are trying to battle their phones, such as locking it in a case with a timer and all sorts of things. So if you could touch briefly on that point around the personal versus the systemic, which is a really big theme for the podcast, particularly in line with climate change and how we address many challenges. And particularly this idea of cruel optimism. It was a phrase or a frame I hadn't heard before. So why systemic? Why do we need to move in that direction? So I think there's two levels at which we have to tackle this crisis. So there are things we can do as individuals. And it's important to stress that there are lots of

changes I have made that have improved my attention but I think we've just got to be honest with people that will only get you so far because this is a systemic problem that's happening to everyone and at the moment it's a bit like someone is pouring itching powder on us all day and then that person is leaning forward and going, hey, buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch so much. And you want to say, fuck you. Stop pouring itching powder over me. Then I'll learn to meditate. Right now, which is not to say there isn't real value in meditation. There is. But so there are lots of personal individual things that people can do as isolated individuals. And I'm very happy to talk about them and many of the things that I do in relation to that. individuals and I'm very happy to talk about them and many of the things that I do in relation to that. But I really worry about stressing that because of this issue about what's called cruel

optimism. This is a phrase that was created by a brilliant historian of France, an American historian of France called Lauren Berlant. And cruel optimism is where you take something with a really big cause, like obesity, depression, addiction, attention problems, which are caused largely by big social forces. And you say to people, hey, I've got a solution for you. You can't focus? Spend 10 minutes on this meditation app. You're going to get your brain back. And it sounds like optimism because you're saying I've got a solution here. But actually it's cruel because while it might give some relief and that's worth doing, and I'm in favor of meditation, it won't solve the problem, right? And because you've set it

up as the solution, it's cruel because then the individual will blame themselves. When that doesn't work, they'll go, well, I did the thing that's meant to solve the problem. There must be something really wrong with me because look, I use the meditation app. I use it for an hour a day. I still can't pay attention because of course you're being invaded, right? So the alternative to cruel optimism is not pessimism. We absolutely don't want that. The alternative to cruel optimism is authentic optimism, where you honestly describe the scale of the problem and we build collective solutions to build with those problems. So that can sound a bit fancy, a bit abstract. So I'll give you a

very concrete example of a place that did that. In France, in 2018, they had a big problem with what they called Le Burnout, which I don't think you need me to translate. And the French government was hugely pressured by labor unions, because unlike in the United States the French did not allow labor unions to be dismantled by corporate forces they're highly organized in their workforce and labor unions said look this is a problem and to the government you've got to find a solution so the French government set up a commission led by a man named Bruno Mettling who's the head of Orange which is their is one of their biggest telecoms companies. And Metling did all this research and he discovered that 35% of French workers felt they could never turn off their phones because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night,

or they could be emailed at any time of the day or night. And if they didn't answer, they could be in trouble, right? I remember when I was a kid, the only people who were on call were like the president and doctors, and even doctors weren't on call all the time, right? Now, 35% of the economy lives on call all the time. And of course, it makes people exhausted and strung out. And you can give those people all the lovely self-help lectures you want about, you would feel so much better if you switched tasks less, if you slept more. And to them, that won't be helpful advice. That will be like a taunt, right? Because they can't do that. So Bruno Mettling recommended, and again, thanks to huge pressure from the organized workers of France, the French government introduced into law something

called the right to disconnect. It's very simple. Every worker has two legal rights. You have a right to your work hours to be written down in your contract, and you have a right to not have to check your phone or your email outside those hours. So when I went to Paris to investigate this, there was, just before I went, Rent-A-Kill, the pest control company, had been fined 70,000 euros because they tried to get one of their workers to check his email an hour after he'd left work, right? Now you can see how that's a collective change we can all fight for, which frees people up to make the individual changes they want to make. But you can't make that change on your own if you're one of those 35% of workers. If you're the only person in the workforce who goes, I'm just, you know, I'm not looking at my email after

5pm, sorry, you don't pay me for this. Of course, you're then at a disadvantage. But if we all band together as workers and do that, of course, this can be dealt with. So that's one of many, many examples of how we can collectively take on the forces that are invading our attention. Yes. So just uplifting those two that you've just mentioned, the right to disconnect, and then previously, you've mentioned the four-day work week. And another that I want to bring in is this one around changing where revenue comes to from technology. So this was a really important point in the book that I found was, if right now, engagement is what creates money, and ads and ad revenue, what if it switched to a subscription service? Like what if Instagram or

Facebook, you paid a subscription, then it would be essentially we are the customers and it ought to work for us. So just anything else you'd like to say by way of the systemic interventions for tech? This was the most revealing thing to me because very often, you know, people will talk about, and I would have talked before I did the research for the book about oh the ways in which smartphones for example affect your attention and we sort of blame the technology which is precisely the way Mark Zuckerberg and the other people involved want us to think about this they want this to be framed as a pro-tech or anti-tech argument because we're not going to all convert to join the Amish and we're not going to give up our phones. So that argument entirely is rigged in

their favor because it will mean we blame ourselves. The debate is not pro-tech or anti-tech. It's what tech working in whose interests for what purposes? Because at the moment, our tech runs on a model that is specifically designed to hack your attention and maximally invade your attention. This is what they say. Sean Parker, one of the key first 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 kids' brains. That's what he said, right?

But that is not the only way that these apps can work. As Dr. James Williams said to me, the axe existed for 1.4 million years before anyone thought to put a handle on it. The internet has existed for less than 10,000 days. We can absolutely change the way these things work. And when I was speaking to people about, okay, we've got this model at the moment that's designed to maximally hack our attention. What are the other ways it could work? I remember this moment, I was talking to Asa Raskin, who invented a key part of how the internet works. His dad, Jeff Raskin, invented the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs, designed it. And Asa said to me, look, it's kind of simple. You've got to ban the current business model,

said to me, look, it's kind of simple. You've got to ban the current business model, right? A business model that's based on tracking you to figure out the best way to hack your attention and then selling that to the highest bidder. Just ban it, right? There's a historical analogy. In the 1970s, it became undeniable that the lead that we used to paint our homes, it was lead paint and leaded gasoline, were having a horrific effect on people's ability to pay attention and think, particularly children. So what did we do? We didn't ban paint, we didn't ban gasoline, we banned leaded paint and leaded gasoline in the same way we can ban that particularly harmful aspect of social media. Now, when Asa said that to me, I was like, okay, but let's imagine we do that. What happens the day after we've done that?

And I open Facebook. Does it just say, sorry, everyone, we've gone fishing? He said, of course not. They would have to move to a different business model. You mentioned one subscription. We all know how that works. Like Netflix or HBO, you pay a small amount and it would be smaller than we pay for Netflix. And in return, you get access to these apps. Or another model would be one that everyone listening has close to them. Everyone you get access to these apps. Or another model would be one that everyone listening has close to them. Everyone listening is close to a sewer. Before we had sewers, we had shit in the streets, we had cholera. So together, we all paid for the sewers to be built, and we all own them and maintain them together. Now, it might be in the same way that we own the sewage pipes

together, we want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the attentional equivalent of cholera. Now, obviously, you want to have protections there. You wouldn't want the government to control it. That would not be a good idea. But we can all imagine what Donald Trump would have done if he controlled Facebook. You don't want it to be an independent model, a bit like the BBC, which is not perfect, but it's a lot better. But whatever alternative model we adopt, the incentives are completely different under that different model. So if we subscription or public ownership, the people who control these apps and websites are no longer saying, well, how do I maximally

invade Della's attention? They're saying, what does Della want? Oh, Della wants to be able to see her friends. Let's introduce a button that will tell her which of her friends are nearby and want to meet up. Oh, Della wants to be able to pay attention. Okay, let's redesign the whole thing, not to hack people's attention, but to begin to heal people's attention. Now that different Facebook, that's not a vacuum sucking up your attention, but a trampoline helping it. That's not difficult technologically to design. It's just that the incentives are not there now to do it's just that the incentives are not there now to do it and these companies will never reform themselves in the same way the lead industry was never going to just say oh well let's stop selling lead paint right of course not they had

to be made to do it and the only thing that will ever make them do it is an organized movement of people determined to protect their attention and their children's attention we've got to take on this core issue, not least because these apps aren't even going to remain at the current level of invading our attention. They are only going to get more and more sophisticated. Facebook has already patented, they don't use it yet, but a way of reading your emotions through the camera on your laptop and your phone, right? They will become more, they're trying to build the metaverse, a much more sophisticated form of Facebook. As the Silicon Valley investor, Paul Graham says, on the current trajectory, the world will become more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40

years. So in a way, I think we're in a race. To one side, you've got these increasingly invasive technologies and the other 11 factors that I write about in style and focus that are invading our attention that are getting higher and higher and on the other side we need to have a movement of people who are determined to defend our ability to pay attention and think and our children's ability to pay attention and think if we don't have that movement they'll win by default and they'll invade us more and more and my worry is that this is a bit like the obesity crisis and the climate crisis. The harder in you get, the further in you go, the harder it is to find your way back. If our attention gets even worse, it becomes harder both personally and collectively to summon the attention to fix the problem. Do you see what I mean? Absolutely. And I really appreciated the way you brought up collective stories that have made

changes. So you mentioned the sewage story, the ozone story, and also lead. I really appreciate how you brought up those stories that change has happened due to collective action. And what you're saying to also around this personal versus systemic and really the book, I really saw the connections between stolen focus and lost connections and chasing the book, I really saw the connections between Stolen Focus and Lost Connections and Chasing the Scream. So I'm wondering if you could just take a moment to share how those three books are connected, maybe how they build on one another and particularly Lost Connections, if folks haven't heard of that, just what were some of the things that you learned about mental health and addiction and economics as a result that related to this whole conversation? That's interesting. No one's asked me that in any of my

interviews yet. I wrote Chasing the Screen because there was a lot of addiction in my family. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And so I wanted to understand addiction. And then I wrote Lost Connections because I'd been quite depressed myself. And what I learned with all of these three phenomena is we have been taught to think of all of these problems as purely individual problems, right? We've been told these extraordinarily simplistic stories, addictionism, moral failing, which isn't just simplistic, it's wrong, or depression is purely a result of a biological malfunction. There are some biological contributions to depression that's important to stress, but that's only one part of a

much bigger picture. And with attention, we've been taught to see it just as a kind of form of weakness, or just purely a response to one new invention. And with all three of them, I learned that in fact, this thing you think of is a purely individual problem is largely a response to big changes in the way we live. Think about depression. Depression has doubled in the last 18 months. Now no one hearing that has any difficulty understanding why. We all know what we've just lived through and yet we had 40 years before that where we were told that depression was purely a biological malfunction, right? Just a chemical imbalance in your brain. But what happened in the last 18 months

is not some enormous spontaneous chemical imbalance in everyone's brains. What happened is a huge imbalance in the way we live. And this is what the World Health Organization was telling us for years before that. You know, if you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the main biologically broken, a machine with broken parts. In the main, you're a human being with unmet needs. We should not say there isn't a real biology of depression. There aren't real biological contributions that absolutely are, and chemical antidepressants give some relief to some people, which is valuable. But this is a much deeper and bigger story. And so I think with all of them, it was about trying to restore the social and our social

understanding of what's going on here. You know, when I was a kid, Margaret Thatcher very famously said, there's no such thing as society. There's only individuals and their families. And it's a sign of how deeply that view prevailed, not just in Britain, but all over the world or over the Western world, that we could have something that's so obviously related to social causes. Think about something as obvious as going into the pandemic, 60% of Americans through no fault of their own had less than $500 in savings for if a disaster came along, right? Because where's that money gone? It's been transferred to the rich, right? The five heirs to

the Walmart fortune who are heirs. They've done nothing even to earn it, own more than the bottom hundred million Americans. If you've only got $500 in savings through no fault of your own, so one car accident, one problem with your kid's teeth, one, you know, can just knock you out, of course you're going to be much more likely to be depressed and anxious. And then you're told a story, oh, by coincidence, while everyone became more financially insecure and inequality exploded, purely by coincidence, everyone's brain started to malfunction, right? What a funny coincidence. You can see how these overly simplistic biological narratives rather than one that acknowledges that biology is part of the picture but also part of a bigger

picture you can see how these overly biological stories this isn't anyone's intention but their ways of profoundly depoliticizing people's distress and i think what we've been told are these extremely depoliticized stories about incredibly political phenomena in the deepest sense, political phenomena, responses to the way the society is structured, whether it's addiction, depression, attention problems. So yeah, to me, it's about trying to say, yeah, Margaret Thatcher was really, really wrong. I mean, my whole life has been about saying Margaret Thatcher was wrong, but in this respect as well.

Yeah, if we had a drinking game for Upstream and everyone took a shot every time they heard Margaret Thatcher was wrong, but in this, in this respect as well. Yeah. If we had a drinking game for upstream and everyone took a shot, every time they heard Margaret Thatcher, it would be a fun game. Have you ever seen the clip? Margaret Thatcher don't want to jump. Do you know about this? No, no. Everyone should watch it. It's the, it's perhaps the only clip in existence where I almost feel a sliver of human sympathy for Margaret Thatcher than I remember everything she ever did. But I've told my friends, if I'm ever in a coma and they're trying to decide whether to switch me off, they have to prop open my eyes and play me this clip.

And if I don't even slightly smile, they should be like, guys, Johan's gone, switch it off. So basically it's a clip where it's about five years after Margaret Thatcher stopped being prime minister. And she was really insane by this period. I mean, she was quite insane from the beginning, but she got crazier and crazier as time went on. And she's being interviewed by this very smiley, banal Swedish journalist. And she does this long interview and then the Swedish journalist goes, you know, Lady Thatcher, with all of my interviews, we do a small thing at the end. with all of my interviews, we do a small thing at the end. We ask everyone we interview not to speak, but just to do a small jump up into the air. And Margaret Thatcher pauses and she says,

certainly not. I wouldn't dream of doing something so stupid. And then there's like five minutes in which the Swedish interviewer is trying to persuade Margaret Thatcher to do a jump. And it goes on and on and on. She goes, but it's just a small jump. And Margaret Thatcher is refusing ever more aggressively. And then the Swedish journalist goes, well, when he was a guest on our program, Mikhail Gorbachev did it. And Margaret Thatcher just goes, what a stupid, it's a stupid thing to ask. Foolish, stupid.

And it's hilarious and joyful clips. Everyone should watch it. All the people that I interview, I ask them to do something for me. It's kind of a gimmick on my show. And it's to make a jump. Just to stand up and make a jump up in the air. I shouldn't dream of doing that.

Why should I? Well, I see no significance whatsoever of making a jump up in the air. I think it's a silly thing to ask. I think it's a puerile thing to ask. So just want to close by, I want to uplift two quotes from Lost Connection since you brought that in. One of them, it's not serotonin, it's society. It's not your brain, it's your pain. And we need to move from focusing

on chemical imbalances to focusing on power imbalances. And we haven't even touched on it, but I know that the book really brings in ADHD, which a lot of folks may think of when they think of attention and ability to focus. So you'll have to read the book to learn more there. But I want to close with the personal. So I'm wondering, you know, since you've gone on this journey, and your time in Provincetown, so you mentioned you spent three months without your devices, and really beautiful to read about that experience for you. But yeah, how where have you come personally, your relationship with your own devices, and maybe with movements? Like, is there anything you've

gotten involved with personally and maybe what inquiry is this leading for you next yeah that's that's such a good question i mean i'm working on a few i'm always working on a few books because the expensive bit of what i do is the travel so i'm writing a book about two very contradictory or what sound like very incompatible subjects i'm writing a biography of noam chomsky with his cooperation. And I'm writing a book about Las Vegas and a series of crimes in Las Vegas. There was once an Onion story, a joke about the idea of Chomsky doing a Vegas residency. And I feel like I basically inhabit that Onion story now in my head. But in terms of my own behavior, it's funny, I feel like I can say this on this podcast in a way I can't say in some forums. When I talk about the changes I've made, I'm just very acutely conscious. It feels to me cruel because I'm incredibly

privileged, right? And grew up in a privileged family. My dad was a bus driver, but you know, my books have sold well. So I have an incredible margin to change my life now in a way like my sister, who's a struggling single mom. She doesn't have that margin. And it feels cruel for me to go, well, I do the follow-up. I sleep much more. It just sounds, it makes me sound like a dick, but so I can tell you, I sleep much more. Sleep is absolutely essential to attention. There's a chapter about that. And sleep has collapsed in our society. We sleep 20% less than we did a hundred years ago. You know, I have a, like you mentioned, I have a plastic safe. I lock my phone away in for four hours a day. There's a whole range of personal, I have a, like you mentioned, I have a plastic safe. I lock my phone away in for four hours a day. There's a whole range of personal changes I've made. But at the moment, a lot of us

live in a gap between what we want to do for our attention and what we can do in the current social configuration we live in. And the job of activism is to close that gap. So for me, I'm really interested in thinking about, you know, I slightly jokingly in the last chapter say we need an attention rebellion, but I really do think that. And I think we need to build a movement. And there are sort of elements of this movement already in place. There's some really good work being done in Silicon Valley by the Center for Humane Technology. There's good groups working on different aspects of the attention. And I end the book with lots of activist groups that people can fight for but I don't think we yet have one of the reasons I've written style and focus is I don't think at the moment people see this as a political issue yeah I think

they see it as a personal failing they see it as a problem with their willpower and our job is to explain the deep cause it's funny whenever I think about willpower I think about this really sobering moment I had really early in the research for the book, where I went to interview a man who a lot of your listeners will have heard of called Professor Roy Baumeister, who's at the University of Queensland in Australia. And he's the leading expert in the world on willpower. Anyone who's heard of the marshmallow test, he's the guy who invented that. He wrote a book called Willpower, right? So I go and interview him. And I said, oh, you know,

I'm thinking of writing a book about attention. I'm just doing research on this and how attention seems to be declining. And he said, yeah, you know, it's strange you should say that because I found I can't really pay attention at the moment. I just spend hours playing video games on my phone and I'm sort of sitting there and I was like, oh my god, I wanted to go, wait, didn't you write a book called Willpower? I was like, fuck if even you can't, if you're just sitting there going, well, I just play video games all day. I was like, oh my

god, is this happening to literally everyone, right? So, I mean, for myself, a big part of what's changed is actually I don't chastise myself now with my own attention. Because I don't get into a, you know, ah, you're not good enough. It's actually more like, oh, okay, like everyone else, you're being hacked and invaded. That's good to know, right? And I really think we have to shift our psychology in this. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies. We own our own minds and we can take them back from the motherfuckers who've stolen them. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Johan Hari, author of the book Stolen Focus.

Anyone who'd like more information about where to get the physical book, the e-book, or the audiobook, you can go to www.stolenfocusbook.com, where you can also find what a range of people like Naomi Klein have said about the book, and listen for free to the audio of the experts that Johan has been talking about. Thank you to the tallest man on earth for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was written by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit

Independent Arts and Media, any donations that you make to Upstream are tax exempt. Upstream is also made possible with ongoing support from the incredible folks at Guerrilla Foundation. For more from us, please visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a five-star rating and review. It really helps get Upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears. Thank you. Even though we know it's not right We will dance and sing all night

Ding dong the witch is dead Witch oh witch the wicked witch Ding dong the witch is dead The wicked witch is dead Ding dong, the witch is dead Witch, oh witch, the wicked witch Ding dong, the witch is dead The wicked witch is dead Ding dong, the witch is dead Witch, oh witch, the wicked witch We'll see you next time.