Hala Taha: [00:00:00] hey yap bam! Today on the podcast we're throwing it back to episode 217 with Johan Hari, first aired in April 2023 Johan is a New York Times bestselling author, journalist, and speaker known for his book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention. In this episode we talk about how modern life disrupts our focus and what we can do to reclaim it.

Johan explains how our diet, technology, and social media algorithms are stealing our attention and ultimately making us all so much more distracted and polarized. We also discuss potential government actions and their implications. like raising the social media age limit and banning TikTok. If you've ever struggled to maintain focus, this episode is packed with [00:01:00] insights and strategies to help you regain control of your attention.

Are you ready to get focused and productive? Here's Yohan Hari to show you how 

Johan, to kick us off, I want to go back to the beginning of your life. You were born in Scotland.

When you were a baby, your family moved to London and your father was a Swiss immigrant and a bus driver. Your mother was a nurse and later worked in shelters for survivors of domestic violence. And so from my understanding, there was nothing really academic about your background or your upbringing. And I wanted to know what inspired you to become a writer?

Johann Hari: Yeah, it's a difficult question. I was mostly raised by my grandmother whose job was to clean toilets. It was an amazing woman because my, my mother was ill and my dad was in a different country and I think the honest answer, someone said to me, If I want my child to be a writer, what should I do? And I said, horribly traumatize your child, right?

You know, I grew up in a family where there was a lot of addiction and mental illness, and the way I coped with that was by reading and writing [00:02:00] all the time. Right. So obviously that ended up being a very helpful adaptation for me much later in my life. So I think it was, it was probably that, but I was, you know, I was lucky my, my grandmother who would buy me any book I asked her to buy me, she worked incredibly hard.

So I think it was probably, it was probably that it's initially that reading and writing were kind of escape for me and TV. I also love TV. I think that's probably how it began. But yeah, I was the first person in my family to go to a fancy university or anything like that. 

It's funny if you, if you look at the home videos we have from when I'm a kid, it's a bit like a stereo and family guy in that like all my family have very working class accents. And even when I'm a two year old, I have this weird posture voice. So my grandmother's like, Johan, come on, we got to go. And I'm like, certainly grandmother, I shall be with you shortly.

And it's like, where did you come from? I have no idea. But I think partly that's Britain is a very, as you can tell from my Downton Abbey accent, I am British and, uh, Britain is very class laden society. I don't know. As, uh, even when I, as a young kid, I had this sort of weird [00:03:00] slight disconnect from my environment, but also love for the people in my environment.

So it's a bit of a mixed bag. 

Hala Taha: Yeah, you've done an incredible job. You're a three time, I think, New York Times best selling author. All of your books do incredibly well. And so after you wrote your first book about addiction, Chasing Scream, you wrote this book called Lost Connections, also was a best selling book, and it's about the world's growing rates of depression and anxiety.

And you released that book in 2018, and that was before the pandemic, and this topic of depression is so important. It's more important now than it even was three or four years ago since the pandemic. And the World Health Organization has actually reported a sharp increase in rates of anxiety and depression.

So I thought we could start the interview there really talking about that. When you were a teenager, you told your therapist that you felt like Pain was leaking out of you, and your therapist prescribed you medication, and you ended up getting more side effects from the medication than you had previously, and you still had your depression.

So, what did you learn about the myth of chemical imbalances in the brain [00:04:00] related to depression in this experience? 

Johann Hari: Well, I would pull back for a second and say, the reason I wrote Lost Connections is because there were these two mysteries that were really hanging over me that I didn't understand. The first is at the time I was 38, 39, and every single year that I've been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in the United States, in Britain.

And in fact, across the entire Western world. And so I was asking myself, well, why? Right? Why is it that with each year that passes, more and more people are finding it harder to go through the day? It seems strange. Why would that be happening? And, you know, you allude to, there was a more personal mystery for me, which is that I'd gone to my doctor, I'd explained, you know, that I was in a lot of pain and psychological pain.

And my doctor had said to me, well, we know why people get like this. Some people just have a chemical imbalance in their brains. You're clearly one of them. All you need to do is take some drugs and you're going to be fine. So I started taking a chemical antidepressant called Paxil. I felt significantly better at first, then the effect kind of wore off.

And I took higher and higher doses [00:05:00] until for 13 years, I was taking the highest possible dose and I was still quite depressed. So at the end of that, I was like, well, I'm doing everything that we're told to do. According to the story, our culture tells about depression. I'm still pretty depressed. What's going on here.

So I ended up using my training in the social sciences at Cambridge university to go on a really big journey all over the world. I traveled over 30, 000 miles. I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on depression and anxiety, what causes them and crucially how we solve them. And I learned just a huge amount from, from these people.

But the core of what I learned is there's actually scientific evidence for nine factors that can cause depression and anxiety. Some of them are in our biology. It's why, what my doctor told me was not completely wrong, right? Your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems, though they don't write your destiny.

And there are real brain changes that happen when you become depressed, that can make it harder to get out. But most of the factors that cause depression and anxiety. are not in our biology. They're factors in the way we live. And once you [00:06:00] understand that, it opens up a whole different set of solutions that should be offered to people, of course, alongside the option of, of chemical antidepressants.

Hala Taha: And I feel like what you're saying really alludes to something that you talked about in your TED talk that really illustrates what you were just saying, how it's more about your environment or external factors. You tell the story of this Cambodian man who had depression and they cured it with a, a cow.

So I'd love to hear that story. 

Johann Hari: I think this, this is particularly relevant to us now. So you think about the story I was told, which huge numbers of people watching and listening will have been told, which is there's just something wrong with your brain. And I stress again, that's not totally wrong. And chemical antidepressants do give some relief to some people.

As well as causing some negative side effects for others. But if that story was true, that it's just a malfunction in our brains. Why would depression and anxiety have doubled during COVID? It's not that all our brains suddenly began to malfunction. We know what happened. And there's a, in addition to a huge amount of the science that I [00:07:00] learned, there's a moment that it's really, this different way of thinking really fell into place for me.

And there was a moment in adjusting to this new story that where it felt very threatening, where you have to open up your story. So I went to interview a South African psychiatrist called Dr. Derek Summerfield, who's a great guy.

And he explained to me in 2001, he happened to be in Southeast Asia, in Cambodia, when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for people in that country. They'd never had them before. And the local doctors, the Cambodians were like, well, what are antidepressants? They'd never heard of them. And he explained and they said to him, we don't need them.

We've already got antidepressants. And he was like, what do you mean? He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy or something. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day he stood on a landmine left over from the war with the United States.

and he got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial limb and a couple of weeks later, a couple of months later, I think it was actually, he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's super painful [00:08:00] to work underwater when you've got an artificial limb. And I'm guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back to the field where he got blown up.

The guy started to cry a lot. After a while, he just refused to get out of bed. He developed what we would call classic depression. This is when the Cambodians said to Dr. Summerfield, That's when we gave him an antidepressant and he said, what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him.

They realized that his pain made sense. He only had to speak to him for five minutes to see why he felt so bad. One of the doctors figured if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, he stopped crying.

Within a couple of months, his depression was gone. It never came back. They said to Dr. Summerfield, so you see doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right? If you've been raised to think about depression the way I was, that sounds like a joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant, she gave me a cow.

But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively from this is that Individual [00:09:00] unscientific anecdote is what the leading medical body in the whole world, the one you just mentioned, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the main a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with with unmet needs.

And what you need is practical help to get those needs met. Everyone listening knows, everyone watching knows, that we have natural physical needs. Obviously, you need water, you need food, you need shelter. If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast. But there's equally strong evidence All human beings have natural psychological needs.

You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has purpose and meaning. You need to feel that people see you and value you, that you've got a future that makes sense. And this culture we've created is good at many things. I'm very glad to be alive today, but we have been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs for a long time.

And then of course, during COVID our ability to get our psychological [00:10:00] needs just fell off, met, fell off a cliff. So when you understand depression in this more complex way, in relation to the scientific evidence for these nine causes, and you understand them as in part driven by unmet psychological needs, that's important, A, because it's true and the science for it is overwhelming, but B, because once you understand that, it opens up a whole different set of solutions that we can begin to offer people.

Hala Taha: Yeah, and I love what you're saying. It's so interesting and related to these nine reasons why we get depression. You mentioned a bunch of them, but you haven't mentioned loneliness. And I feel like this one is really, really important right now. I recently had Scott Galloway on the show and he talked about the loneliness crisis.

And he says, Loneliness is going to be the next cancer. And you say being lonely seems to cause as much stress as being punched in the face. So I want to start there. What are some health concerns related to being lonely? Because now people with all this disconnect from COVID, more lonely than ever. 

Johann Hari: So it's a really important question.

Even before [00:11:00] COVID, we were the loneliest society in human history. You know, there's a study that asked Americans, how many close friends do you have who you could turn to in a crisis? And when they started doing it years ago, the most common answer was five. Today, the most common answer, not the average, but the most common answer is none.

I think the figure was that 41 percent of Americans before COVID agreed with the statement, no one knows me well. What is life like when no one knows you well and you have no one to turn to when things go wrong? I spent a lot of time discussing this with the leading expert on loneliness in the world and it was at the Chicago University, an amazing man named Professor John Cassiopo who sadly died recently.

I'll never forget him saying to me one day, why are we alive? Why do we exist? One key reason is that our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. A lot of the time they weren't bigger than the animals they took down, they weren't faster than the animals they took down, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating.

Just like bees [00:12:00] evolved to live in a hive, Humans evolved to live in a tribe. If you ever separate a bee from its hive, it goes crazy. It goes haywire. It doesn't make sense outside a hive. We evolved to live in tribes and we are the first humans ever to try to disband our tribes and go alone, right? And it has.

Disastrous effects on us. If you think about the circumstances where we evolved, if you were physically cut off or separated from the tribe, you were depressed and anxious for a really good reason. You were in terrible danger. You couldn't protect yourself. These feelings evolved partly, there's other things going on with depression too, but these feelings evolved as a signal to say, get back to the tribe.

And the reason this is so important, I'm not interested in just saying, Oh, look, aren't things bad, right? That's not my temperament. It doesn't interest me. What's important. is that once you understand that, it opens up solutions. So I'll give you an example. One of the heroes in my book, Lost Connections, is a wonderful man called Dr.

Sam Everington. He's a family doctor in East London, a poor part of East London where I lived for a long time, though sadly he was never my [00:13:00] doctor. And Sam had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety. And like me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants. He thinks they have some important role to play for some people in reducing their pain.

But he could see A couple of kind of obvious things. Firstly, usually chemical antidepressants took the edge off but they didn't solve the problem. And secondly, most of his patients were depressed and anxious for totally understandable reasons, like they were really lonely. So one day a woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham, who I got to know later, who'd been shut away in her home with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years.

And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs. But I'm also going to prescribe something else. I'm going to prescribe for you to come and meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people twice a week here in the doctor's offices, not to talk about how shit you feel. You can do that if you want, but that's not the point of it.

What we want you to do is find something meaningful that you can all do together. So the first time the group met, Lisa literally started vomiting with anxiety. It [00:14:00] was just so overwhelming, but the group starts talking. They're like, what could we do? And there was an area outside the doctor's offices that was just like scrub land, just empty scrub land.

So they were like, we could turn that into a garden, but these are inner city, East London people like me. They didn't know anything about gardening, but okay, we can do it. So they started to take books out the library about gardening. They started to watch clips on YouTube. They started to get their fingers in the soil.

They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons, the way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom. There's a lot of evidence that exposure to nature, the natural world, is really good for depression, but they started to do something even more important. They started to form a group.

They started to form a tribe. They started to look out for each other. If one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking for them, be like, Hey, what's up? How can we help you? This approach is called social prescribing. It's where doctors prescribe people to be part of groups. There's an emerging body of science about it, it's still pretty small, but it's emerging and quite persuasive.

For example, a small study in Norway found that a social prescribing program [00:15:00] was twice as effective in reducing depression and anxiety as chemical antidepressants. I think for kind of obvious reason, and this is something I saw all over the world from Sydney to Sao Paolo. To San Francisco. The most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the underlying psychological reasons why we feel so bad.

I would argue every single doctor's office in the United States should have a social prescribing wing. It's free. It costs literally nothing to get people to go gardening. I mean, they've got to buy some gardening supplies. I tell you, it's a lot cheaper than massive amounts of drugs, massive amounts of medicalization, although there is some place for those things.

 We've got to deal with the underlying causes to stop people becoming depressed and anxious in the first place, as much as we can. But we've also got to expand the menu of options. We've got to be asking, well, what's the cow for this person, right?

What's the solution? It's cheaper and it's more effective. 

 [00:16:00] And I love that 

Hala Taha: story because it seems like there was a couple reasons why this worked. One is like curing the loneliness and finding friendships and common bonds with these people. The second one was it's, it's almost like. a future. They, they're planning this garden. They have a goal to look forward to.

And I know from you that also without hope, you can get depressed. If you don't have a future that you're looking forward to, you can actually get depressed. So how should people navigate their fear or lack of security of the future? 

Johann Hari: Uh, as you were saying, I think you put that really well, and I think, you know, as you were saying that, I was thinking about one group of people, I think you can tell that for my book Lost Connections, like for my other books, I learned a huge amount from interviewing scientists and experts, but actually, particularly for that book, the people who taught me the most were a group of people who were not scientists.

 In the summer of 2011 on a big anonymous housing project in Berlin in Germany, a Turkish German woman called Nuria Cengiz climbed out of her wheelchair and she put a sign in her [00:17:00] window. She lives on the ground floor and the sign said something like, I got a notice saying I'm going to be evicted next Thursday, so on Wednesday night I'm going to kill myself.

Now this is a big anonymous housing project, like a housing project pretty much anywhere in the US. No one really knew anyone. It was in a very poor part of Berlin, a place called Kotti, for people who know it, it's near Kreuzberg, it's in Kreuzberg. And there were only really three kinds of people who lived in this neighborhood.

There were recent Muslim immigrants, like this woman, Nuria, there were gay men, and there were punk squatters. And as you can imagine, these three groups did not get along, but like, no one really knew anyone anyway. So people walk past Nuria's window and they're like, Whoa, this woman's going to kill herself.

So they knock on her door. They're like, do you need any help? And Nuria said, no, screw you. I don't want any help. I'm going to kill myself. And she shut the door in their faces, but people outside her apartment who'd never met started talking. They were like, we've got to do something to help this woman.

Everyone's rent was going up and lots of people were getting eviction notices and everyone was worried that they would be next. So one of them had an idea. [00:18:00] There's a big thoroughfare that goes through the center of Kotti, this housing project, into Mitte, the center of Berlin, and And someone said, if we just block the road on Saturday and have a protest, the media will come, there'll be a bit of a fuss, they'll probably let this woman stay in her apartment, there might even be some pressure to keep rents down for all of us, why don't we do it?

So Saturday came and they built a little barricade in the road and they protested and Nuria was like, I'm gonna kill myself, I might as well let them push me into the middle of the street. So she gets pushed into the middle of the street in her wheelchair, she does some interviews, the media shows up.

And it got to the end of the day, and the police are like, the media go home, and the police are like, okay, you've had your fun, pack it up, go home. But the people who lived in Kotti said, well hang on a minute, you haven't told Nuria she gets to stay in her apartment. Actually, we want a rent freeze for our entire housing project.

We'll pack up when we've got that. But of course they knew the minute they walked away from this little barricade they'd built, the police would just take it down and that would be that. So one of my favorite people in Cotty, a woman called Tanya [00:19:00] Gartner. She's one of the punk squatters. She wears tiny mini skirts, even in Berlin winters, Tanya is hardcore.

She had an idea. She said, okay, everyone, here's what we're going to do. We're going to draw up a timetable. To man this barricade 24 hours a day until we get what we want. We're going to have two people manning it the whole time. And she went up to her apartment and she had a, um, a klaxon, those things that make loud noises at soccer matches.

And she came down, she said, okay, if at any point when we're manning the barricade, the police come to take it down, let off the klaxon and we'll all come down from our apartments and stop them. So people start signing up to man the barricade, people who had never met and would never have met. And you started getting these bizarre pairings.

So Nuria, who's a very religious Muslim in a full hijab, ended up doing, I think it was the Thursday night shift, with Tanya, who is the opposite of a woman in hijab. The first few nights they were sitting there, they were like, We've got nothing to talk about. This is super awkward. Who could be more different than us?

But as the nights went on, they started talking [00:20:00] and Tanya and Nuria discovered they had something incredibly powerful in common. Nuria had come to Berlin when she was 16 with her two babies. And she was sent from her village in Turkey to earn enough money so she could send home for her husband. So she turned up, she's 16 year old, she's got these babies, she worked every job she could.

And when she almost had enough money for her husband to come join her, she got word from home that her husband had died. She'd always told people in Germany that her husband had died of a heart attack. But sitting there in the cold in Kotti with Tanya, she told her something she'd never told anyone in Germany before, which was that her husband had actually died of tuberculosis, which was seen at the time as like a shameful disease of poverty.

That's when Tanya told Nuria something she never talked about. She'd come to Kotti when she was even younger, when she was 15. She got thrown out by her middle class family because they hated that she loved punk. And she found her way to Kotti, a squat there, and six months later, she found herself pregnant.

Tanya and Nuria realized they had both been children with children of their own [00:21:00] in this place. They didn't understand, they became incredibly good friends. And these weird pairings were happening all over Kotti, there was a young Turkish German lad, called Mehmet. They kept saying he'd be thrown out of school because they said he had ADHD.

Then he got paired with this very grumpy old German white guy called Dieter, who said he didn't believe in protests, but in this case he would make an exception. He started helping Mehmet with his homework. Directly opposite this housing project, there's a, about, I think it was about a year before the protests began.

A gay club opened called Zud Block, which is run by a man, a man I love called Rick Kudstein, who to give you a sense of what this club is like, it's pretty hardcore. The previous place he owned was called Cafe Anal. I always thought you wouldn't want to have a sandwich from Cafe Anal. But when it opened, there's a lot of very religious Muslims in this housing project.

Some of them were really pissed off. And in fact, the windows for the gay club got smashed. When the protest began, Zud Block, the gay club, gave all their furniture to build the barricade. And after the protests have been going on for a few months, they said, you know, [00:22:00] you guys, you should come and have your meetings in our club.

We'll give you free food. We'll give you free drinks. And even the kind of progressive types at Kotti were like, look, we're not going to be able to persuade these very religious Muslims to come and have meetings underneath like really obscene gay posters. We're not going to be able to do it. It did start to happen.

The way one of the elderly Turkish German women put it to me, Neriman Tanker, she said to me, we all realized we had to take these small steps. to understand each other. After the protest had been going on for a full year, one day a guy turned up called Tung Kai. Tung Kai was in his early 50s at the time and he, it's clear when you meet him he's got some kind of cognitive difficulties.

He showed up and he'd been living on the streets. for a short period. And he started helping out. He's like, this seems interesting. He started helping out. And quite quickly, everyone loved him. He's got an amazing, he's so funny. He's got an amazing energy about him. He loves hugging people and everyone loved him.

The elderly Turkish German women, the gay men, the punks, everyone loved Tunkai. And by this [00:23:00] point, a lot of the people who live in Kotti are construction workers. This barricade they built was like a permanent structure with a roof and rooms. It's really nice. And when they realized Tunkai was homeless, they said, You should come and live here.

We really like you. We don't want you to be homeless. Come and live with us. So he moved in and became a much loved part of the Kotti protest. Nine months later, the police came to inspect. They would do this every now and then. And Tunkai doesn't like it when people argue. He thought the police were arguing.

So he went and tried to hug one of them, but they thought he was attacking them, so they arrested him. That was when it was discovered Tunkai had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital at the other side of Berlin in Charlottenburg for 20 years. It literally in a padded cell a lot of that time. No one, almost no one ever came to see him.

And one day he had escaped. He was on the streets for a little while and found his way to Kotti. So the police took him back to this psychiatric hospital at the other side of Berlin. At which point the entire Kotti protest Turned into a free Tunkai movement and they descended on this [00:24:00] psychiatric hospital at the other side of the city.

And I remember these psychiatrists being like, what is this? They've got this guy who they've had shut away for 20 years, who no one cared about. And suddenly they've got these women in hijabs, these very camp gay men and these punks demanding his release. But I remember one of the women who lives at Cotty, a woman called Uli Hartman said to the psychiatrist, But you don't understand.

You don't love him. He doesn't belong with you. We love him. He belongs with us. And they were like, oh, right. So you want to look after him? She's like, no, no, we don't want to look after him. He looks after us. He's part of us. And many things happened at Kotti. They got Tunkai back. He lives there still. They got a rent freeze for their entire housing project.

They then launched a referendum initiative to keep rents down across the whole of Berlin. It got the largest number of written signatures in the history of Germany, and it led to a rent freeze being introduced for the whole of Berlin. The last time I saw Nuria, the woman who started all this by putting that sign in her window, she said to me, look, I'm really glad I got to stay in my [00:25:00] neighborhood.

That's great. I gained so much more than that. I was surrounded by these incredible people all along, and I would never have known. I thought a lot in Kotti about Neriman, another one of the Turkish German women. She said to me, you know, when I grew up in Turkey, I grew up in a village and I called my whole village home.

And then I came to live in the Western world and I learned that here, what you're meant to call home is just your four walls. And if you're lucky, your family. And then she said this protest began and I started to think of this whole place All these people is my home. And she said she realized, in some sense, in this culture, we are homeless.

Our sense of home is not big enough to meet our need for feeling we belong. There's a Bosnian writer called Alexander Heyman, who said, Home is where people notice when you're not there. By that standard, a lot of us are homeless. And, I remember, one day I was sitting outside Ziploc, the gay club with Tanya, She said to me, she was explaining to me what they'd done.

And she said, when you're all alone and you feel like shit, you think there's something [00:26:00] wrong with you. But what we did is we came out of our corner crying and we started to fight. And we realized we were surrounded by people who felt the same way. So I can give you lots of very targeted advice and the book Lost Connections is full of this advice, but the best advice I would give you.

Is Tanya's advice. Don't sit in your corner alone crying. Think there's some thinking. There's something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. There's something wrong with the way we are living. Come out of your corner crying and start to fight. That's the advice I would give. 

Hala Taha: So, so touching and inspirational.

I really, really love that story and I think it's a good place in the interview to transition to stolen focus. And I think the way that I'd like to transition, since we're talking about this topic of loneliness. Do you think we're innovating ourselves into isolation right now? 

Johann Hari: I wouldn't call it innovation, but I think we are isolating ourselves.

So for my book, Stolen Focus, you know, I wrote it for a very personal reason. I could feel my own attention was getting worse. And each year that passed, things that [00:27:00] require deep focus that are really important to me, reading books, watching movies, having long conversations with my friends. We're just getting harder and harder.

And I could see this happening to lots of people I love, particularly the young people I love. And, you know, I would say to anyone listening, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention.

And when your ability to focus and pay attention breaks down or diminishes, your ability to achieve your goals diminishes. Your ability to solve your problems diminishes. You feel worse about yourself because you actually are less competent. So attention is our superpower. If you can't pay attention, you're going to be just diminished and hobbled at every stage in your life.

And when you get your attention back, you're going to be vastly more effective. So obviously I wanted to understand this a bit like we lost connections. I ended up going on this really big journey all over the world from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne. I interviewed over 200 of the [00:28:00] leading experts on attention and focus.

And what I learned is. There's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make your attention worse. And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely rising in recent years. Some of them are in our technology. It's certainly not all of our technology.

A lot of them are things I'd never even thought of. The food we eat is really affecting our ability to focus and pay attention. There's just so many factors we can go into. The way our offices work, there's a huge array of factors. But the key thing I learned is if you're struggling to focus, if your kids are struggling to focus, it's not your fault, it's not their fault, you know, your attention didn't collapse.

Your attention has been stolen from you by some very big and powerful forces. But once you understand what those forces are, you can begin to protect yourself as an individual to some degree. And as a society, we can begin to protect ourselves even more. 

Hala Taha: So in the book, you talk about this concept of attentional pathogenic culture.

So I'd love to understand what that [00:29:00] is and how our environment is actually shaping our inability to focus right now. 

Johann Hari: That's a phrase that comes from professor Joel Nigg, who's the leading expert on children's attention problems, arguably in the world, in the United States, certainly. And he said to me, we need to ask if what we're living in now is an attentional pathogenic environment, by which he means an environment that is systematically undermining our ability to focus.

That can sound very fancy, but I'll give you a specific example. that I'm sure will be playing out for you, is playing out for me, and I'm sure will be playing out for literally everyone listening today. I'd be amazed if there's an exception. Some people have it worse than others, of course. I went to MIT to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, an amazing man named Professor Earl Miller.

And he said to me, there's one thing you need to understand about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is a fundamental limitation to the human brain, The human brain has not changed significantly in 40, 000 years, it isn't going to change on any time scale any of us are going to see, you can only think about one or two things at a [00:30:00] time.

But what's happened is we've fallen from mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time and the rest of us are not far behind them. So what happens is scientists like Professor Miller and scientists all over the world get people into labs, younger and older people, and they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time and they monitor them.

And what they discover is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you juggle very quickly between tasks. You're like, what did you just ask me? What is this message on WhatsApp? What does it say on the TV over there? What is this message on Facebook? Wait, what did you just ask me again?

So we're constantly juggling. And it turns out that juggling comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. When you try and do more than one thing at a time. You do all the things you're trying to do much less competently. You make more mistakes. You remember much less of what you do.

You're much less creative. And I remember when I first learned this, not just from Professor Miller, but from deep dive into a lot of the science and the scientists involved, [00:31:00] I remember thinking, okay, I've got it. I get it. It's bad. I can see I'm doing it, but it's a, it's like a little niggling. It's a minor thing.

The evidence suggests this is a really big thing. I'll give you an example of a small study that's backed by a wider body of evidence. Hewlett Packard, the printer company, got a scientist in to study their workers and he split them into two groups. And the first group was told Get on with your task, whatever it is, and you're not going to be interrupted.

Just do what you got to do. And the second group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is. But at the same time, you got to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls. So pretty much how most of us live. And at the end of it, the scientists tested the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher.

To give you a sense of how big an effect that is, if you and me sat down now and smoked a fat spliff together and got stoned, our IQs would go down in the short term by 5 points. So in the short term, being chronically interrupted is twice as bad for your IQ as getting stoned, right? You'd be better off sitting at your desk, smoking a spliff and doing [00:32:00] one thing at a time, than you would sitting at your desk, not smoking a spliff and being constantly interrupted by text and email.

Now, I want to be clear, you'd be better off neither getting stoned nor being interrupted. Don't want to get the wrong idea. But you can see, this is why Professor Miller said we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted. Now this has huge implications for entrepreneurs, people listening, right?

You know, a lot of work is systematically degrading The intelligence and the capacities of their workers, right? So you might text someone who works for you and be annoyed. They didn't or Slack them or whatever. Send them a message on Slack and be annoyed. They didn't get back to you immediately. You think, well, it would have only taken them 10 seconds to reply.

In fact, a study by professor Michael Posner at the university of Oregon 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 most of us don't get Never get 23 minutes, right? So we're constantly operating at a lower level, but you think, so it doesn't just take 10 seconds to respond to that Slack [00:33:00] message.

It takes 10 seconds plus the 23 minutes it takes you to refocus your mind. Since my book came out, people keep sending me job ads that say things like must be a good multitasker. You may as well say must be a chronic stoner for all the good you're going to get out of that worker. Right? One of the things I learned from my book that emerges from when you do a deep analysis of the study of the science of attention.

Our idea of productivity has gone badly wrong. We think the productive worker is the worker who you can interrupt at any moment. We think a productive worker is a worker who works to the point of exhaustion. In fact, that ruins their attention, ruins their creativity and capacity to think. I mean, there's many factors we can go into, but the unconscious is a long answer.

Yeah, so I really learned that we need to deeply rethink a lot of what we think we know about attention. 

Hala Taha: Yeah. There were so many interesting things about multitasking in your book that really sparked my interest. One of them was that you had a, you found a study where the average adult who works in an office can only really spend three minutes on any [00:34:00] one task, which to me was just like, what are we getting done in three minutes?

Like absolutely nothing. Right. And then also like the, the word multitask was actually coined by a computer scientist in the sixties. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To describe the function of computers with multiple processors. And we don't have multiple processors. We're not actually designed to multitask. So all that was super interesting.

One, like, sort of random question that really came up when I was thinking about multitasking was this trend of ADHD that's going on on the internet. I don't know if you're aware of this, but on TikTok, on Instagram Reels, everybody is talking about ADHD. And a lot of. Young Gen Zers especially, they are claiming they have ADHD and to me it feels a little bit like an excuse for the reason why they can't pay attention at work, pay attention at school, why their room is messy, for example, and it just seems like everybody's coming out of the woodwork saying they have ADHD and your work made me realize that Maybe we're all just trying to battle this crazy [00:35:00] environment and getting symptoms of what we think is ADHD, but really it's just our natural brains just doing either a good job or bad job of managing our environment.

So I was curious to know your thoughts on that. 

Johann Hari: Yeah. I mean, I have a chapter about ADHD and I interviewed a huge number of scientists about it. And I think there's a lot of truth in what you say. So some people are more sensitive to these problems because of their genetics, but they're actually. Just more severely affected by the thing that's affecting everyone.

The way one person, Chris McCogliano, who's an educator who works with children with educational challenges, said to me, people, ADHD people are just like canaries in the coal mine. They're slightly more affected. They're early, they're affected a little bit earlier, but essentially the same thing's happening for them.

My worry is, I interviewed this guy called professor Nicholas Dodman. like a joke. It's not. He's a professor at Tufts university who pioneered diagnosing ADHD in dogs. And giving them riddle him. So I went to interview him. He's super nice guy. And. I expected that he would say, Oh look, these dogs, they've got [00:36:00] something biologically wrong with them that has to be fixed with Ritalin.

In fact, he was very honest. Dogs need to run around for five hours a day. Almost no American dog except for farm dogs gets that. They don't like being shut inside. They don't like being left alone. They're pack animals. So he gave me an example of a dog that had ADHD and inverted commas, ran around all the time.

Then it went to live on a farm and it was completely fine. So he said, look, of course I'm medicating them in an imperfect situation. They've got frustrated biological needs is the phrase he used. And when I give them Ritalin, is it ideal? No. What's the alternative? The dog's just going to be going crazy.

Now that to me is a pretty honest way of talking and thinking about it. I don't think it's a good solution, by the way. I don't agree with him. Although I like him as a person. I think there's something like that. That's not everything that's going on. There really are some people who are more genetically sensitive to these problems.

But you're right, if you look at all the factors that are affecting our ability to focus and pay attention that I write about, there's 12 of them. You think about the fact that the way we eat is profoundly affecting our focus and attention. ADHD levels go [00:37:00] massively up when schools put in vending machines.

Where kids are consuming more shitty sugar and processed food. You think about sleep. If you stay awake for 19 hours. Your ability to focus suffers as much as if you got legally drunk, and yet children sleep 85 minutes less than they did in 1945. At one of the leading experts on sleep in the entire world, Dr.

Charles Seisler at Harvard Medical School said to me, even if nothing else had changed except that children and adults sleep so much less, that alone would be causing a huge crisis in attention and focus. The way our schools work is causing these problems. And of course, our kids are using technologies at the moment, specifically designed to hack and invade their attention.

I spent a lot of time at Silicon Valley, interviewing people who design key aspects of the world in which we now live. And there's an amazing guy called Dr. James Williams, who used to be at the heart of Google and is now. For reasons I'll explain, he quit. One day he was [00:38:00] speaking at a tech conference and the audience was literally the people who designed the stuff that people listening now are using today, and he said to them, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, please put up your hand and Nobody put up their hand.

He, that's one of the reasons he quit and became, I would argue, the most important philosopher of attention in the world at the moment. So we've got to understand at the moment, I can go into more detail on this, but at the moment, the technologies we use are designed by social media companies to maximally hack and invade us and our children's attention.

That technology does not have to be designed that way. At the moment, we have technology working against us in the interest of a tiny number of tech billionaires. We could have technology that works for us in our interest to help us achieve our goals. That's absolutely achievable. The technology exists to do that.

It requires a different kind of change that we can talk about. So just to relate it to your ADHD question, can it be a coincidence that all these changes have happened? And far more people are experiencing problems with [00:39:00] attention, and all that's going on is there's something genetically wrong with them.

No, that's not the case, right? That is not true. Even for the people who are more genetically sensitive, as Doctor, sorry, as Professor Joel Nigg, the leading children's attention expert says. Even for people who are more genetically sensitive, genes interact with the environment. Your genes are switched on and off by interaction with the environment.

I'm not against giving stimulants to add stimulant drugs to adults. That's, that's fine. I would even recommend it to some adults for some things. I'm much more cautious about giving them to children. I'm not saying I would never do it, but I think we need to be really careful, not least because there's literally no long term research on beyond 18 months of what it does to them, and there's some worrying findings in animal studies about what it does to them.

That's not dealing with the problem. We've got to deal with the actual causes of the problem. 

Hala Taha: I do want to dig in on a few things that you said for sure. So you mentioned [00:40:00] diet and sleep at a high level, but I'd love if you could really explain to us what the food that we consume or our sleeping habits do to our focus. 

Johann Hari: So there's this really fascinating new movement called nutritional psychiatry that looks at how the food we eat affects our mental states.

It relates to depression, which we were talking about earlier. and all sorts of things, and particularly attention. So I interviewed loads of these nutritional psychiatrists who are really interesting people. Fascinating. And there's lots of ways in which the way we eat is affecting our attention, but I'll give you an example.

I go through lots in the book. I'll give you an example of one. I think again, not all, but a lot of people listening will be experiencing. So let's say you have the standard American breakfast. What I had this morning in fact, which is Either sugary cereal or white bread that's been toasted and buttered.

What that does is it releases a huge amount of energy really quickly into your brain. It releases a lot of glucose, which is great. You're like, Whoa, I'm awake. I'm ready for the day. But it's released so much energy so fast that a few hours later, you'll get to your desk and you'll have a huge energy slump.[00:41:00] 

And when your energy slumps in your brain, you experience brain fog. You just can't think or pay attention very well until you have another sugary snack and then you spike up again. And then you crashed again. The way Dale Pinnock, one of the leading nutritionists in Britain, put it to me is the way we eat puts us on a rollercoaster of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day.

Whereas if, for example, you had for breakfast oatmeal with blueberries, that releases energy much more steadily. You won't have those Spikes and troughs that cause patches of brain fog. So you think about that, or you think about sleep, which you mentioned, you know, there's a brilliant sleep scientist at the university of St.

Paul called professor Roxanne Prashad, who really helped me to explain this. There's many elements to sleep, but this is one that really clarified it for me. The whole time you're awake, your brain is building up what's called metabolic waste. She calls it brain cell poop, which helped me to make sense of it.

And when you go to sleep, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open and a watery fluid washes through your brain and carries this brain cell poop out of your brain, down into your [00:42:00] kidneys, and eventually out of your body. If you don't get eight hours sleep a night, your brain doesn't get the chance to clean itself.

Literally the next day, your brain is clogged up, right? This is what, one of the reasons why you struggle to pay attention when you're tired. 40 percent of Americans sleep less than seven hours a night. You're going through constantly with your brain literally clogged up. In fact, there's just been a big study release that showed that people who sleep less are far more likely to get dementia.

This is probably a factor in. So you can see when you look at these factors and essentially, because for all of the, obviously, again, as with depression. I wrote the book because I'm a solutions oriented person, right? I want to think, okay, the only, to me, the benefit of understanding what's causing these problems is, okay, if you understand a problem, you're better equipped to solve it.

So with all of the 12 factors that I write about in Stolen Focus that are harming our attention, I think there's two levels of which we've got to deal with them. I think of them as defense and offense. There are loads of things that we can all do an individual level to defend ourselves and our children against these factors.

[00:43:00] Give you an example of one over in the corner there. I have something called a K safe. I should totally have bought shares in this company before my book came out because they're doing really well. It's plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone. You put on the lid, you turn the dial at the top and it locks your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day.

I use that three hours a day to do my writing. I won't sit down and watch a film with my partner unless we both imprison our phones in the phone jail. I won't have my friends around for dinner unless everyone agrees to put their phone in the jail. And when people get nervous, I'm like, the pleasures of attention are so much greater than whatever shitty Instagram.

update you're about to get and as soon as the phone's locked away, they see it. So there's loads of things like that. I go through dozens of things like that in the book, but I want to be really honest with people because I do not feel most people talking about attention are leveling with people. I am passionately in favor of these individual changes.

They will make a big difference. On their own, they're not going to totally solve the problem because at the moment, It's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then leaning forward and going, Hey, buddy, you should [00:44:00] learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't be scratching all the time and you want to go, screw you.

I'll learn to meditate. That's very valuable, but you need to stop pouring this itching powder on me. We need to go on offense against the forces that are doing this to us. Okay. It's the food industry against big tech. We need to, of course we want lots of tech. Of course we want food. I love food. As you can tell from my chins, we want these things.

We want them to work for us, not against us. There's, for all of these 12 factors, there, there's a degree of individual protection and a degree of social regulation, but these people won't do it on their own, right? And there's an example. You're too, too young to remember this, but some people listening will remember it.

And then certainly if you ask your parents they'll remember it. It's a great example of how we did this in the recent past. When I was a kid, the dominant form of gasoline in the United States, the UK, everywhere, was leaded gasoline. And it was discovered, obviously, when it's in the gasoline, it's in the air, everyone was breathing in lead.

And it was discovered that exposure to lead is really bad for your brain, and particularly bad [00:45:00] for, um, Kids ability to focus and pay attention. So a group of ordinary moms, what used to people who at the time called themselves housewives in the late seventies, banded together and said, why the hell are we allowing this?

Why are we allowing these companies to screw up our kids brains? Right. It's important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, so let's ban cars. Just like, obviously I'm not saying let's get rid of tech, right? I love tech. What they said is let's deal with the specific element of the petrol that's screwing up our kids brains and replace it with a kind of petrol that doesn't.

And it followed the classic pattern of all political movements that were described by Gandhi. First they ignored them. Then they laughed at them, then they fought them, then they won. As everyone listening knows, there's no more leaded petrol. As a result, the Center for Disease Control has calculated the average American child is three to five IQ points higher than they would have been had we not banned leaded petrol.

Now, to me, that's a great model. You identify a thing in the environment that is screwing up kids attention. You can't protect yourself against lead if it's in the air. I mean, I suppose we could, everyone could have got their kids to wear gas [00:46:00] masks, but how effective is that? Not very. So you deal with it in the environment.

Now, there are lots of things we can do to protect ourselves, but we've also got to realize there are elements of our technology that we can get rid of and replace with aspects of our technology that work for us, not against us. I go through the book and I went to places that have begun to do it from France to New Zealand.

To do that, we've got to shift our psychology. We've got to stop blaming ourselves. We should certainly implement individual changes, but we should realize that's not the only thing that we should do. And we need to realize, you know, we're not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Musk and King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from their tables, right?

We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and together we can take them back if we want to. 

Hala Taha: Yeah. I love this and I want to dig deeper on this a level. So you are alluding to tech, social media, I think is one of the main culprits of especially people [00:47:00] my age losing their attention, I think.

And in your book, you talk about this. infinite scroll invented by Azza Raskin, which basically enables us to just continually just stay on social media forever. So I'd love to understand, like, what is the, what's like a alternative business model for social media that actually doesn't totally steal our focus?

Is there an alternative business model for social media is really my question. 

Johann Hari: I think you've gone to the really important question. There's three possible business models for social media. The one we have at the moment, I'll just explain it. And I realized actually, you know, it's funny from interviewing people in Silicon Valley and spending so much time interviewing people at the heart of the machine, I realized I was incredibly naive before.

So the way they kept explaining it to me, it took me a while to get it because it seemed too simple, too obvious. Anyone listening, if you open Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram now and begin to scroll, those companies begin to make money out of you in two ways. The first way is really obvious, you see ads.

Okay, you don't need me to [00:48:00] explain that. Second way is much more important. Everything you ever like, don't like, say in your open or private messages is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out what makes you tick, to figure out what you like and don't like. And they're figuring that out primarily for one reason.

They're figuring out what will keep you scrolling because every time you open the app and start to scroll, they begin to make money because you see ads. The longer you scroll, the more money they make because you see more ads and they learn more about you. And every time you close the app, those revenue streams disappear.

So all of this genius and Silicon Valley, when it's applied to social media, all this AI, all these algorithms, are geared towards one thing and one thing only figuring out, how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible? That's it. Just like the head of KFC. All he cares about in his professional capacity is how often did you go to KFC this week and how big was the bucket you bought all they care about is maxima is.

Hijacking your attention, [00:49:00] maximizing scrolling. So the current business model, the technical term for it, which comes from professor Shoshana Zuboff at Harvard is surveillance capitalism. You seem to get it for free, but in return, they surveil everything you do. And you're not the customer, famously TikTok, Facebook, Instagram.

They've got customer service departments. You can't find them. I can't find them. We're not the customers. You're the product they sell to the real customer who's the advertiser. They break up and fragment your attention to sell it to advertisers. That's how they make money. So that's the first model, right?

You seem to get it for free, but you pay with your attention. You also pay by our politics becoming screwed up and all sorts of other things that we can talk about and being much more likely to become depressed and all sorts of other things that we can talk about. That's model one. The alternative models.

Everyone listening, pretty much, will have an experience of the other two. They're pretty simple. One of them is subscription. So we all know how HBO and Netflix work. You pay a certain amount and in return, you get access to the product. The key thing is [00:50:00] subscription completely changes the incentives. At the moment, they're not thinking, Hey, what does Bob want?

When Bob is a Facebook user or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, they're figuring out how do we hack and invade Bob's attention to keep him scrolling as long as possible. To sell his attention to the advertisers because you're not the customer, but suddenly in a subscription model, you are the customer.

Suddenly they have to go, Oh, what does Bob want? Turns out Bob feels like shit when he spends all day scrolling through photos of his friends that have been edited to make them look much more attractive than they really are. But Bob feels good when he meets up with his friends offline and looks into their eyes, comes back to what we were talking about in relation to loneliness.

Okay. Let's design our app to maximize Bob meeting up with other people offline. Let's design it so he can indicate he'd like to meet up. Oh, Bob turns out Jenny's up the block. I'm sorry, Jenny in the block. That's JLo reference, but turns out Jenny's around the corner and she'd like to meet up too. Why don't you go for a coffee?

You could design the app in five minutes to do that, right? My friends in Silicon Valley. You could design it in all sorts of ways [00:51:00] that are designed to enhance our goals for our life. Okay. Not get us to put our goals aside. So we spend hours mindlessly scrolling, right? That's one alternative model. Well, the third model is something that literally everyone are listening has experience of.

Think about the sewers. Before we had sewers, we had feces in the street, people got cholera. It was terrible. So we all pay to build and maintain the sewers together. You own the sewers in your town. I own the sewers in mine, along with everyone else who lives here. We all have a vested interest in having a functioning sewage system and we all pay for it together.

Now it might be that like we own the sewage pipes together because we don't want to get cholera. We might want to own the information pipes together because we're getting cholera for our attention and our politics. Okay, now you'd want to make sure that was independent of the government. We wouldn't want President Trump or President Biden or any political figure to control it.

But there's a perfectly good model for that. I'm British. That's the model of the BBC. Every British person who has a television pays a fee to the [00:52:00] BBC and it is independent of the government. It's not perfect, but it's the most trusted media organization in the world. But whatever alternative model you use, the key thing is about changing the incentives.

The truth is, As long as the longer you scroll, the more money they make, they'll just get better and better at it. As my friend Tristan Harris, who used to work at the heart of Google said, when he testified before the Senate, you can try having self control, but every time you do, there are 10, 000 engineers on the other side of the screen, working very hard to undermine your self control.

I'm not saying you can't do it. You can, but it's the game is rigged against you. And the way I think of it is we're in a race for almost all of these 12 factors that I write about in Stolen Focus that are harming our attention, they're poised to become more powerful if we don't act. Paul Graham, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, said the world is on course to be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40.

Just think about how much more addictive TikTok is to your kids or to you than, than Facebook was. Now [00:53:00] imagine the next crack like iteration of TikTok in the metaverse. And that's true in the food industry, it's true in lots of factors that I write about. On the other side of the race, I would argue there's got to be a movement of all of us saying, no, you don't get to do that to me.

You don't get to do that to my brain. You don't get to do that to my child. Of course, we choose a life with lots of tech, but we also choose a life where we can think deeply, where we can read books, where our children can play outside. Now, if we want that, we can get it. I've seen the science of how we get it.

I've been to places that have begun to do it, but you don't get what you don't fight for. We've got to decide that we value attention. If we value it and we fight for it. Of course, I mean, peacefully fight for it. I mean. If we fight for it, we can get it right. The science is very clear. But it won't happen by magic.

Hala Taha: Yeah. I'm so, so glad that I asked that question because it was such a good response. And I have so many young listeners who are change makers, so smart, are new entrepreneurs, and I feel like I'm [00:54:00] just really happy they got to absorb that from you. So let's wrap this up. I want to talk about really quick.

The impact as an individual and society that we have when it comes to the lack of focus or having focus. So as an individual having focused, what is it enabled to do in terms of your goals as a society, having focused, not having focused, what are the implications? And then we'll wrap it up. 

Johann Hari: It's a really important question, and I think it's worth diving a bit into one particular mechanism in social media that is harming individuals ability to change their lives and harming our society's ability to change their lives.

So like we were talking about, at the moment we've got this model, the longer you scroll, the more money they make. So all the social media companies, understandably, set up their algorithms. To scan human behavior and figure out, okay, what makes people scroll longer? And this wasn't the intention of anyone, any of these companies, but they bumped into an uncomfortable truth about human nature.

There's many good things about human nature, but this is an [00:55:00] uncomfortable one. Uh, the fancy term for it is negativity bias. It's very simple. People will stare longer, something that makes them angry and upset than it will at something that makes them feel good. If you've ever seen a car crash on the highway, you know what I mean.

You stared longer at the mangled car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. I'd like to think you find what I'm saying interesting, but if someone on the other side of the room right now started to have a fight, you would turn and look at the fight, right? This is very deep in human nature.

Ten week old babies stare longer at an angry face than a smiling face. And it's probably deep in our evolution. Our ancestors who weren't looking out for risk and danger probably got eaten. I mean, that's a slightly crude way to put it, but you know what I mean? So that's always been a little part of human nature, but when it combines with algorithms that are designed to keep you scrolling and figuring out a step ahead of you, what am I going to feed you?

What am I going to feed you? It leads to a horrific outcome. So picture two teenage girls who go to the same party and leave to go home on the same bus. And they both open Tik Tok and one of them does a video going that was [00:56:00] such a great party. We danced all night. What fun, loved it. And the other girl opens her phone and says, Karen was an absolute hoe at that party and her boyfriend's a prick and just does an angry denunciation of everyone at the party.

The algorithms are always scanning for the kind of language you use. And they'll put the first video into a few people's feeds, but they'll put the second video into far more people's feeds. Because if it's enraging, it's engaging. What do you mean Karen's a skank? You're a skank. You can imagine people start to fight, they start to argue.

Now that dynamic is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls on a bus. We all know what's happening to teenage girls levels of anxiety. But now imagine that happening to a whole society, where the kind, decent people are muffled and pushed to the back, and the angriest meanest, cruelest people are given a megaphone, except you don't have to imagine it because we've been living it.

We've been living it for the last 10 years and don't take my word for it. In the aftermath of the election of President Trump and the victory of Brexit in my own [00:57:00] country, Facebook secretly set up a group of its own data scientists To figure out what's going on here. Are we playing a role in creating this rage?

And their own data scientists found that their current business model inherently promotes anger and rage. In fact, they discovered that a third of all the people in Germany who joined neo Nazi groups joined because Facebook specifically recommended it. You might want to join it said, followed by a neo Nazi group.

And that's not because anyone at Facebook is a neo Nazi. It's because the fundamental business model was promoting rage and anger. So there's lots of reasons why we need to deal with this business model. A life where you're angry and being constantly prompted to be jealous, angry, mean, and rewarded for being mean and angry.

Open a Twitter account, say loads of nice things about people. You'll get no traction. Open a Twitter account and start being vile and mean. You'll get traction. To live in that environment is disastrous for individuals. It's [00:58:00] depressing, horrible, it makes the person being mean less happy, and of course it makes the people receiving meanness less happy.

That's disastrous at an individual level, but my God is it disastrous at a societal level, and we've got a lot of stuff we need to do as a society, we've got a lot of things we need to deal with, and we're not going to be able to solve those problems. Think about the ozone layer crisis, when I was a kid, it was discovered there's a layer of ozone that protects the planet from the sun's rays.

It's disastrous. And when I was a kid in the 80s, it was discovered that there was a chemical, a kind of chemical called CFCs that was in hairsprays that was causing a hole in the ozone layer. And we loved our hairsprays so this was a big deal. It was discovered it was melting the Arctic. And look at what happened next.

That science was explained to ordinary people. Ordinary people absorbed the science. They distinguished the science from lies, conspiracy theories, nonsense. And all over the world, people pressured their politicians To take action to ban CFCs and it succeeded, they banned CFCs as a result. There's reports a couple of weeks ago, [00:59:00] the ozone layer has almost completely healed.

I don't think anyone listening thinks that would happen now. We would get some people who wore an ozone layer badge and argued for the right things and probably glued themselves to stuff to make it happen. And then you'd have a load of other people who'd say, well, how do we even know the ozone layer exists?

Maybe George Soros created the ozone layer. Maybe. The Jews created it. I mean, you just, people would just go into a kind of madness and bigotry and we would scream at each other about it and nothing would get done. So it's not just our individual attention that's being harmed. It's our collective attention, our ability as a society to focus on things and solve them.

We can't, an individual who can't pay attention is going to really struggle to achieve their goals. And a society that can't pay attention is going to struggle to achieve its goals. And we're seeing that it's not, I don't think it's a coincidence. that we have this huge crisis of attention at the same time as the biggest crisis in democracy all over the world since the 1930s.

So attention can seem like a pretty small subject when you first look at it, but when you follow the threads, you realize it affects every aspect of our [01:00:00] lives and it affects our whole society. Dr. James Williams, who I mentioned before, said to me, imagine you're driving somewhere and someone threw a huge bucket of mud over your windshield.

It 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. Cause you're not going anywhere. If you don't sort that out. And he said, the attention crisis is a bit like that. Whatever you want to do in your life. If you don't get your attention, right.

Good luck getting there. 

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