How To Fix Your Focus & Stop Procrastinating: Johann Hari | E114

1. 0:00 – 2:43

   Intro

   1. SBSteven Bartlett0:00

      You're not being present in your life. You're not being present at all. Johann Hari, he's been on a journey to understand attention, and why we seem to have so little of it these days.

   2. JHJohann Hari0:10

      I know something's really wrong, but I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, "Are we having an attention and focus crisis? If we are, why is it happening? And most importantly, what can we do to get our brains back?" So you've got all these smart engineers, and they've got one incentive: how do I take Steven's attention the m- absolute most I can? We need an attention movement to reclaim our minds. If our goal is, as a country, to be a country that's innovative, my God, a country of people who can think is gonna be innovative. A country of addled people flicking between WhatsApp, Snapchat, and TikTok ain't gonna be a place full of innovation. Do you want your child to be able to focus? Do you want your child to be able to read books? Do you want your child to be able to think deeply? Of course you do. Okay, we've gotta fix the society and culture to give them those things, and we absolutely can change them.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett0:56

      Quick one. Can you do me a favor, if you're listening to this, and hit the subscribe button, the follow button, wherever you're listening to this podcast? Thank you so much. Today, one of my favorite ever guests on this podcast returns, and they return with a completely different conversation for you. Johann Hari. What he wrote about mental health and the causes of depression and anxiety and meaningful connection changed my life. It's probably the number one book I recommend and you've heard me recommend on this podcast, the book Lost Connections. But over the last several years, Johann's been on a completely different journey. He's been on a journey to understand attention and why we seem to have so little of it these days, but why it's so fundamentally important for our happiness, our success, and everything in between. We all know we're a generation that are glued to our screens and our phone. But what is the cost? What is the cost to things that actually matter? How do we change it? Why should we change it? Johann went on that journey. The most remarkable, entertaining, hilarious journey, and he's an unbelievable, maybe the best ever on this podcast, storyteller. You're gonna absolutely love this conversation. And entertainment aside, it might just change your life. So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Johann, first and foremost, thank you for coming back. I... It just dawned on me that you visited here more than any other guest.

   4. JHJohann Hari2:36

      Oh, I'm so chuffed to do that.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett2:36

      On this podcast, you now have... the record is three times. We've had guests on twice.

   6. JHJohann Hari2:39

      That mean I'm officially the king of your podcast?

   7. SBSteven Bartlett2:41

      You're the king of my podcast. And

2. 2:43 – 14:22

   Why did you write about focus

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:43

      my, my first question to you is, I know how talented you are at writing, and how, um, you could basically write about anything if you wanted to, because your books have been so successful. You're a very, very well-acclaimed, um, author. So, my first question is, and this is the question I asked myself when I received your book from your publisher, is, why did you decide to write about attention when you could've spent your life writing about anything?

   2. JHJohann Hari3:09

      Do you know, for years, I had this feeling, like, when I walked around, in my friends, in myself, something was going badly wrong with our ability to focus and pay attention. And every now and then, I would see small studies that seemed to suggest this was true. There's a study of American college students that found that now they only focus, on average, on any one thing for 65 seconds. There's a study of office workers that found, on average now, office workers only focus on one task for three minutes. But I thought, hmm, people have always felt their attention's getting worse, right? What happens as you get older, you know, your attention deteriorates, and you mistake your own deterioration for the deterioration of the world around you, right? You can read stories of monks in the Middle Ages, uh, letters they wrote to each other saying, "Oh, my attention isn't what it used to be. I'm worried about this." Right? So I- I just thought, "Uh, everyone thinks this." And then there was a- there was a moment that, for me, I thought, "I do think there's something deeper happening here." When he was nine, my godson, Adam, developed this brief but really freakishly intense obsession with Elvis. I never found out why. He must've seen him on- on YouTube or the telly or something, and he- he didn't know that, like, Elvis impersonation has become this cheesy thing, so he did it with this totally, like, heart-catching sincerity. He would sing Viva Las Vegas and Suspicious Minds and- and all the kinda Elvis classics. And, um, he kept getting me to tell him the story of Elvis, that Elvis is born in this little town called Tupelo in Mississippi, one of the poorest places in America. He's born and h- his twin brother died as he was being born, and as he was a little boy, his mother told him that if he looked at the moon and he sang, his little brother could hear him, so that's why he became... one of the reasons he became such a great singer. So I was telling my godson this story, and wha- and I- and I obviously told him that Elvis became really famous and bought this palace that he called Graceland. And one day, I was tucking- tucking him in, and he said to me, looked at me very intensely, and he said, "Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?" And I said, "Yeah, sure," in the way you do with little children. You're just like, you know they'll never... gonna forget it the next day. And he said, "No, do you really promise? Will you take me to Graceland?" And I said, "Yeah, I promise you." I didn't think about it again for 10 years, until really everything had gone wrong. So by the time Adam was 19, he'd dropped out of school when he was 15, and he was just spent... He seemed to spend just all his time alternating between his iPad, his laptop, and his phone. And he seemed to live in this kind of blur of WhatsApp and YouTube and porn. And it was like he had fragmented as a person. It was like he was kind of whirring at the speed of Snapchat, right? You- you couldn't have a conversation with him that lasted more than a few minutes. He was a very intelligent, decent nu- good person, but it was like nothing could gain any friction in his mind. And one day, we were sitting on my sofa.And I was looking at him doing this and I was thinking, "God, in the decade that you've become a man, this has happened to so many people I know." Okay, this is the extreme end of the spectrum, but I could feel it happening to myself, right? Things that require deep focus, like reading a book, obviously I still do that a huge amount, but it felt like with every year that passed, that was more and more like running up a down escalator, right? Some people can still get to the top, but... And the escalator's getting faster, right? And I was looking at him and I thought, "I have to break this routine. I can't bear to see this happen to him. I can't bear to feel this happen to myself." And I suddenly remembered when he'd been a little boy and I said, "You know what? Let's go to Graceland." And he looked at me like, "Well, what are you talking about?" He didn't even remember this Elvis obsession. And I was like, "No, no, I'll take you to Graceland. Let's go. Let's just leave. But I'll take you on one condition, which is that when we go there, you leave your phone in the hotel when we go out, right? Because I can't take you there and just you be looking at your phone the whole time." So two weeks later we flew, we went to New Orleans first, but we left from Heathrow and we, and we, we, we flew out to the south. And when you arrive at the gates of Graceland now... This is pre-COVID, I imagine it's worse now, but when you arrive at the gates of Graceland, there isn't a physical guide to show you around anymore. What happens is they give you an iPad and you put in, uh, little, uh, earphones, and the iPad shows you around. So you, you look at the iPad and it says, "Go left." And then there's an actor telling you, like, "In this room," and it explains all these things. Um, and in each room you're in, there's like a representation of that room on the iPad. So what happens is people walk around Graceland staring at their iPad, right? So I'm walking around surrounded by this kind of United Nations of blank-faced people from like Korea and Canada and everywhere else. And no one is looking at the thing they've traveled to see, right?

   3. SBSteven Bartlett7:48

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JHJohann Hari7:48

      And I'm getting more and more, like, tense as I'm watching this and, and I'm trying to make eye contact with someone to go like, "Oh," you know, someone... I'm waiting for someone else to look up and go, "Look, we're the people who traveled 3,000 miles and actually looked at the thing we traveled to." And finally, I did make eye contact with a guy and I smiled and I was about to say exactly what I just said, and then I realized he'd only taken the earphones out and put down the iPad so that he could take out his phone and take a selfie. And I was feeling more and more tense. And finally we got to the Jungle Room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland. It's just a kind of fake jungle with loads of fake plants. And there's this couple next to me, and the man turned to his wife and said, "Honey, look, this is amazing. 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." She goes, "Oh, wow." And so she's swiping left and right on her iPad. And I look at this guy and I said, "Right, but sir, there's an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It's called turning your head because we're actually in the Jungle Room, right? You, you don't need to look at a digital representation of it. We're literally here. Look, it's in front of you." And of course this couple thought I was insane (laughs) , not, possibly not unreasonably, and they, they walked off. And I turned to my godson to kind of bond with him and laugh about, "Well, isn't this mad?" And he was just standing in a corner looking at Snapchat ph- because the minute we l- we landed, he just was on his phone constantly. And I remember when I said to him, "I thought you said you weren't gonna use your phone," he said, "Oh, I thought you meant I won't take phone calls. I can't not use social media," right? (laughs) And it was, he said it with a kind of baffled sincerity as if I was asking him to hold his breath or something. I got really angry and I said to him, "You know, you're frightened of missing out, but what this is doing is it's guaranteeing you miss out. You're not being present in your life. You're not being present at all." And he kind of stormed off. Again, not unreasonably. I was being a bit angry. And so I stomped around Graceland on my own for a while and then that night I found him. We were staying in the Heartbreak Hotel, which is across the street from Graceland, and I found him. There's a swimming pool that's shaped like a guitar where they play Elvis songs in a constant loop and I saw him sitting there looking at his phone and I went up to him. And I realized, like a lot of anger, my anger at him was really anger at myself. I could feel these pressures happening to me. I could feel my own attention and focus fragmenting. And he, he just looked at his phone and he said, "I know something's really wrong, but I don't know what it is." And that's when I thought, "Okay, I need to look into, are we having an attention and focus crisis? If we are, why is it happening? And most importantly, what can we do to get our brains back?"

   5. SBSteven Bartlett10:22

      And what did you discover in terms of the stats, facts, and figures around the attention crisis? Is th- is it a real thing? Is it, is it happening? And, and linked to that, I guess, what is the... What are we losing because of the attention crisis?

   6. JHJohann Hari10:35

      Yeah, so, so I ended up traveling all over the world. I interviewed 250 of the leading experts in the world about attention and focus. And I went to just places that have been really differently affected by this, so from Moscow to Miami, eh, from a, a favela, a slum in, in Rio de Janeiro where attention had collapsed in a particularly disastrous way to an office in New Zealand where they'd discovered this amazing way to restore people's attention. And what I learned is, so the best way we could know if attention has collapsed would be if for the last 150 years, every year scientists had given the same kind of attention test to people, and then we'd be able to track it that way. No one did that, so that, that, we don't know that. But I do think there's another way we can reasonably conclude that this is a real crisis. So there's scientific evidence for 12 different factors that affect attention and focus that either boost it or trash it. And there's good evidence that a lot of these factors have been rising throughout your lifetime and my lifetime. So I think it's fair to conclude, therefore, that we are facing a real crisis. And there's various pieces of evidence that do show collectively our attention span really is shrinking. So I th- and I think that leads to, um, we've gotta understand what's happening to us in a very different way, because when I felt my attention fraying, my main response was to go into, you know, just self-criticism. Just go, "You're weak, you're lazy, you're not good enough."

   7. SBSteven Bartlett11:59

      Mm-hmm.

   8. JHJohann Hari11:59

      "Why aren't you strong enough to resist these forms of distraction?" And actually, when you know that this is happening to almost all of us-

   9. SBSteven Bartlett12:04

      Mm-hmm.

   10. JHJohann Hari12:05

       ... or in fact, these factors are bearing on all of us, right? They're affecting some of us differently. That made me realize, you gotta think about this in a, in a different way. So there was a guy I went to interview, one of the leading experts on children's attention problems in the world. A guy named Professor Joel Nigg, who's, uh, in Portland in Oregon. And he said to me, "Look, think about obesity, right? If you look at a beach, uh, a photograph of a beach in Britain in 1970, or in the US anywhere, everyone is, by our standards, either slim or buff. There's nobody who's what we think of as fat, right? No one. It's really weird. And it's not that the fat people just stayed at home, right?" What happened is, if you look at 1970, there was almost no obesity in the Western world. And then certain sc- absolutely crucial changes happened in the way we live, right? Our food supply changed. People used to eat fresh and nutritious food. We moved to heavily processed and ultra-processed food, which affects your body in a very different way. And our cities completely changed. So you used to be able to bike and walk to work, to places you wanted to go. In a lot of our cities, that's now impossible. And as a result of these two big changes, and some other ones, actually stress, right? The more stressed you are, the more you want it comforting. As a result of these big changes, obesity exploded. So it's not that individuals got, like, weak or whatever we might, you know, whatever the stigmatizing things people say about-

   11. SBSteven Bartlett13:23

       Mm-hmm.

   12. JHJohann Hari13:23

       ... overweight people. Um, what Professor Nigg said is something very similar is happening with attention. There are changes in the way we live that are pouring acid on everyone's ability to pay attention. Um, the way he put it, the kind of technical term is that we have a- an attentional pathogenic culture, a culture in which it is very hard for all of us to form and sustain deep focus. This is why, um, activities that require deep forms of focus, like reading a book, have just fallen off a cliff, right, in the last 20 years. Uh, so what we've got to do is, there are, there's two levels of response. One is there are individual responses. There are changes we can all make in our lives. Obviously I talk about this a lot in the book Stolen Focus about this. There are changes we can all make in our lives. There are also big changes we need to make as a society. So we need to come together and demand changes in the society that would make it possible for us to make a lot of these positive changes we wanna make. So there's these two layers. I mean, I know there's a lot there to unpack, but...

3. 14:22 – 22:09

   What is the cost of losing our attention?

   1. JHJohann Hari14:22

   2. SBSteven Bartlett14:22

      Mm-hmm. Okay. So if we were to agree that, um, attention has decayed, what I'm, what I really wanna know is, um, like, so what? What, what is the cost to my life outside of the fact that I might not have as engaging relationships? Is there any other cost to my productivity, to, um, anything else that really, really matters to me?

   3. JHJohann Hari14:39

      Yeah. This is such an important question. I think there's two sort of levels we need to think about it. The first is, as an individual, if you can't focus and pay attention, your ability to achieve your goals across the board diminishes, right? So, you wanna set up a business, you wanna write a book, you wanna learn how to play the guitar. All of those things become much harder if you can't focus and pay attention, if you're constantly pulled away by the, you know, pings in your phone. Or let's say you wanna be a good parent. If you're constantly pulled away from that, if you're constantly distracted, your ability to do that... So any goal you have in your life is diminished if you can't pay attention. And so that's the personal layer. There's also just a collective and social layer. If you live in a society where people can't pay attention, if you're surrounded by people who can't pay attention, our ability to solve our collective problems, and we're facing a lot of collective problems at the moment, also breaks down. So attention is crucial for achieving goals and problem-solving. And to me, those are the, two of the most important things in life, right? And you went to the other one, just being present with people, right?

   4. SBSteven Bartlett15:45

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JHJohann Hari15:45

      You know, if you can't be present with people, if you think about my godson, you can't form the deepest relationships. You know, if most of us think about, if I said to you, "Now what's a moment that's been deeply meaningful to you in, you in your life?" It'll be a moment, v- very likely when you are paying attention and other people are paying attention to you, right?

   6. SBSteven Bartlett16:03

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JHJohann Hari16:03

      It's a moment of shared focus, a moment of meaning. Um, we can't do that if we can't pay attention.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett16:09

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JHJohann Hari16:09

      So you become a sort of stump of yourself. There's a, you know, you can sense that you might have been more. It chokes off growth. And there's, there's kind of, there's, there's a few ways of thinking about this. There's a, an amazing expert on attention called Dr. James Williams, who I interviewed in Moscow. He's a former Google engineer who said that there's a few kind of different types of attention that we seem, and we seem to be losing all of them. So the first type of attention is called your spotlight, right? So let's say there's a fridge in the corner of this room. Let's say, uh, I wanna go and get two drinks from that and bring it to the people in the other room, right? So my spotlight is that I've got an immediate task, go and get the drinks, take them to the people in the other room. Now, if I'm constantly interrupted, if I'm constantly checking my texts, I might get to the fridge, get a load of texts, forget, "Why did I go there again?"

   10. SBSteven Bartlett16:53

       (laughs)

   11. JHJohann Hari16:53

       The guys in the other room are saying, "Where the hell's Johann? Why has he not brought us this stuff?" So your spotlight is your ability to home in on an immediate task, right?

   12. SBSteven Bartlett17:01

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JHJohann Hari17:02

       That is obvious, we can all see how that's been disrupted. I can talk more about that if you like. Then there's what he calls your starlight, which is your more medium-term goals. So a medium-term goal might be, you know, a goal that you obviously had a few years ago, "I wanna start a business." Right? That's a medium-term goal. It's called starlight 'cause when you're not sure where you are, you look up at the stars and you're like, oh, you orientate yourself by the stars, right? That is being disrupted. If your life is full of distractions, if your m- consciousness is hijacked by really petty goals or goals that are someone else's goals, like social media, you, you can't, you lose, you begin to lose your ability to formulate. It's not just that you can't achieve the short-term tasks, you lose your ability to achieve your longer-term tasks. And the third form is what James calls, Dr. Williams calls your daylight, which is, how do you even know that you wanna set up a business? How do you even know what it means to be a good dad? How do you know what it means to have a good life, right? For, to be able to see clearly, a room has to be flooded with daylight.And it's not just that we're losing our short-term attention, it's not just that we're losing our medium-term attention. When those things happen, y- y- you have less ability to make sense of your own life. You know, he compared it to, on the internet, a denial-of-service attack, where when someone wants to take down a website, they get, you know, many thousands of computers to log on simultaneously, and the computer crashes. It's like we're experiencing that. We're so overloaded, that your sense of like, "W- who am I? What do I wanna do?" If your, if your life is atrophied into 65-second and three-minute chunks, how do you build a sense of where you wanna go and who you wanna be? You, you begin to feel lost in your own life, and I think you can see that happening to lots of people.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett18:43

       I certainly can. And as you were saying that-

   15. JHJohann Hari18:44

       Do you feel that for yourself, Stephen?

   16. SBSteven Bartlett18:45

       Oh, 100 fucking percent. And as you were saying that, I was reflecting on, um, how difficult I find it to just sit with my girlfriend and just like pay attention and, and just c- try and connect with her, like, "How has your day been?" without devices and screens. And there was a, there was a big change we made together where we kind of made a rule that we would exclude devices from certain parts of our lives, so we don't have them in the bedroom if we're in, if we're in bed together, we don't have devices in there. And, um, there'll be some times where we commit to putting the phones away and doing something, sometimes for seven hours. So it'll be like, sh- she'll say to me, "I wanna do this special type of dance that I've never done before." Right? So put the phones away. And as I'm doing it, especially at the start as we're doing this like, it's called contact dance she wanted to do with me, where you always maintain one point of contact, I was just thinking about my phone. And then, uh, you know, e- e- I think we get into hour five and six, and I'm still thinking about my phone. And it's funny, because I'm not being present. I'm not a- I'm actually kind of like complying with what she wants to do, so that I can get back to my phone. And I find that really, really sad, and it's actually, it, I can see how it would jeopardize the chance of a really meaningful connection in modern relationships, where you're never really connected. I think a lot of relationships are actually more connected on social media than they are in, in real life. And I wonder if that's had an adverse effect on the success of relationships, this, uh, this, this absence of focus and attention.

   17. JHJohann Hari20:10

       I think you've, you've, there's so many important things in what you just said. So, what you've, um, built for you and your girlfriend there, your first response is a good first response, which is, um, for, uh, at an individual level, there's big collective ones as well, but at an individual level, a good response is what's called pre-commitment. So what you do is you said, you and your girlfriend say, "We're gonna put our phone away for seven hours." Right?

   18. SBSteven Bartlett20:31

       Mm-hmm.

   19. JHJohann Hari20:32

       So you say it in advance. And there's a, a woman called Professor Molly Crockett at Yale University who I interviewed who's kind of an expert on, on pre-commitment. So pre-commitment is, we all know there's all sorts of things you wanna do, that you know you might crack and give in later and not achieve them, right? So, I don't wanna eat any Pringles, right? 'Cause they make me even fatter than I am, right?

   20. SBSteven Bartlett20:52

       Mm-hmm.

   21. JHJohann Hari20:52

       So the best form of pre-commitment is when I go to the supermarket, don't buy the Pringles, right? 'Cause I buy the Pringles, I tell myself, "Oh, I'll just have, I'll have five tonight." And of course, you get to 2:00 AM, you wake up, you're fucking chugging them like Homer Simpson, right? So the for- one form of pre-commitment there is, A, don't buy the Pringles, B, tell everyone you're not gonna buy the Pringles, 'cause even just articulating your goal out loud makes you more likely to achieve it. So you've got one form of pre-commitment there, right?

   22. SBSteven Bartlett21:17

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JHJohann Hari21:17

       You've said, "Okay, we're gonna say to each other, we've got seven hours now, we're gonna put the phone away." So that's a really good model of, of pre-commitment. But also, you've, you've got to one of the challenges with that, which is your, you know, your, your, you feel like your consciousness has been hijacked by, by these technologies. And it was really interesting researching this, because a lot of people, when I say I've done a book about attention and focus, they say, "Oh, you've written a book about tech." Actually, tech's only about 20% of what's going on, I think. Although it's a, a very important 20%. And, and it was really interesting researching this, 'cause actually it's not, most of the problem is not inherent to the technology. It's the result of something else, which is actually more fixable, because you and me, we're not gonna give away our phones, nor would, nor should we, right? We're not gonna abandon this technology. We could make the technology work for our attention rather

4. 22:09 – 32:41

   Social Media and the part it plays

   1. JHJohann Hari22:09

      than against it. So I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing the people, a lot of the people who designed the world in which we now live, right? And really feel bad about it. And they are, they have all the problems that you, me, and everyone watching have. There was a really interesting moment. James Williams, the Google engineer who I just mentioned, there was an incredible moment when he spoke at a tech conference. So he's speaking entirely to se- really influential designers who are making the stuff that we're all using. And he said to them, "Is there anyone here in the audience who wants to live in the world that we're creating? Put up your hand." And not one of them did. Another one of them, Tristan Harris, an amazing f- dissident in Silicon Valley who also worked for Google, he worked on the Gmail team when they were designing Gmail and, you know, spreading it to the whole world. And one day he was in the Googleplex and one of his colleagues said, "Oh, I've got an idea." Okay, they were trying to figure out, figure out how to get more and more people to use Gmail more. So one day he had an idea, he just said, "Why don't we make it so that every time someone gets an email, their phone vibrates?" And everyone on the team said, "Oh, that's a good idea." And Tristan a week later was walking around San Francisco and just heard these vibrations everywhere, and thought, "Shit, we did that." And that's happening everywhere. Within a few months, he did a calculation, there were 11 billion distractions every day being caused by his company, right? So, these people are really open to, there's a big, obviously a big debate about this, but there was a moment, and there's lots of things to say about it, and lots of techniques these social companies use to maximally hijack your attention, and we can talk about those techniques, and I think there's loads we need to learn about that. But actually, to me, the most important thing, the root of this is to understand that social media doesn't have to work that way. And the moment that really helped me to understand it, 'cause I was really struggling with getting my head around that, if I open Facebook, it'll tell me all sorts of things. It'll say, "Oh, it's y- your mate Rob's...... birthday today. Um, "This is something you said five years ago." There's been a terrorist attack and you're, "Look, these people have marked themselves as safe." It'll do all, tell you all sorts of things. What it won't do is something that actually lots of people would really love. There's no button on Facebook that says, "I'd like to meet up with my mates. Who's free now? Who's nearby and available?" Right? Now, that's technologically unbelievably easy. Facebook could design that in an hour, right? That would be really popular. I'm sure everyone listening thinks, "Yeah, that'd be a really handy thing to have." Um, it doesn't exist. Why does the market not provide it? If you follow the chain from why the market doesn't provide it, I think you begin to understand some of the ways our attention are being invaded and how we can get it back. So, when you open Facebook, Facebook makes money in two ways. First way is very obvious, you see ads. We all understand how that works. The second way is much more valuable to Facebook. Everything you do on Facebook, everything you like, everything you dislike, everything you message to people is scanned and sorted by their AI technology to build a profile of you, right? So, let's say that you like Kylie Minogue, Donald Trump, and you message your mum going, "I've just bought a load of nappies," right? Okay, so the AI's figuring out, "Okay, this person's probably gay." No disrespect to the heterosexual-

   2. SBSteven Bartlett25:20

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JHJohann Hari25:20

      ... fans of Kylie probably out there. This person's gay, they're quite right-wing, and they've got a baby, 'cause why would they be messaging about nappies, right? So, think about thousands and thousands of data points like that. It's building up a very complicated and detailed profile of you, which it then sells to advertisers so they can target you. Because if you're an ad, if you're s- making nappies, you don't wanna send an ad to me. I don't have any children. You've wasted your money. You wanna target your advertising. So Facebook is making money every moment you open it, Facebook makes money through those two revenue streams. And every time you put the, you, the Facebook app down or you shut your phone off, Facebook loses money, right? Or they don't make the money they would make if you carried on scrolling, right? That's it. That's their business model is, simply that. Once you understand that, you can see why there's no button that says, "Who's available and wants to meet up now?" 'Cause if you push that button and it said, "Oh, Joe's round the corner, I'll go for a coffee with Joe-"

   4. SBSteven Bartlett26:14

      Hmm.

   5. JHJohann Hari26:15

      ... you and Joe would sit opposite each other and talk to each other, right?

   6. SBSteven Bartlett26:17

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JHJohann Hari26:18

      Well then, you're not on Facebook. They're losing money. Their entire business model, as Sean Parker, who was one of the first investors in Facebook, said, "Our whole business model was to hack people's attention. We knew we were doing it and we did it anyway." So they have the most sophisticated engineers in the world specifically working to figure out maximally how to hack your attention. But the thing that blew my mind about this, 'cause you can get into... Okay, you talk about that, and very often this is framed as, "Oh, okay, so is this an anti-tech or pro... Are we pro-tech or anti-tech? Are we..." It's completely wrong way to think about it. The question is not are you pro-tech or anti-tech? The question is, what tech working in whose interests, right? Because that business model, which is designed has to be about fracking your attention, that's, that's the only way it can work, is not the only business model for these companies, right? So let's say Aza Raskin, one of the, who designed key aspects of the internet that we now use, amazing guy, said to me, "We should just ban that business model, right? A business model that is based on tracking you, surveilling you, invading your attention, and selling that attention to the highest bidder, that is just an inhuman way of doing it. It's like lead in paint. Ban it." So I said, "Well, what..." to all these people, "What happens the day after we ban it, right? So what, do I open Facebook and it just says, 'Sorry, closed'?"

   8. SBSteven Bartlett27:39

      Hmm.

   9. JHJohann Hari27:39

      No. What would happen is all these companies would have to move to other business models which already exist. So one model might be subscription.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett27:45

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JHJohann Hari27:45

       You know, like Netflix, we all know how subscription works. Or it might be that we choose to own it together. Somewhere beneath where we're sitting, there's a sewer, right? We own that sewer. You and me as taxpayers own that sewer together. 'Cause when we didn't have sewers, we had shit in the street and we got cholera and people died. And then together we built the sewers and together we own and maintain the sewers 'cause it's important for all of us. Now, it might be we wanna say, "Just like we own the sewer pipes together, we might wanna own the information pipes together,"' cause at the moment we're getting the equivalent of cholera for our attention, right? But the key thing about that is when you move to these different models, instead of you being the product, right... Today, you're not the customer of Facebook. You're the product they sell to advertisers. If we move to those different business models, suddenly you're the person they wanna please, right?

   12. SBSteven Bartlett28:31

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JHJohann Hari28:31

       If you wanna pay attention, they could start desi- redesigning Facebook in all sort of ways, sorts of ways, very practical ways, I can tell you about lots of them, that are designed not to hack your attention, but are designed to heal your attention, are designed to make your life better.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett28:45

       Do you know what's really interesting? So obviously, my background is social media. So, um, been knee-deep in this industry for a long, long time. And in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg wro- wrote a letter where he said, and he posted it on his Facebook saying, um, "We've done some studies, we've spoken to some people, and we've discovered that the timeline is bad for you. It's net negative, predominantly because of these highly addictive, very short viral videos." Gonna put my hands up, that was part of the company I built's business model. We were, we built, we had huge, huge Facebook pages, some of which had tens of millions of followers. And we knew that if we wanted a ton of views, which would result in a ton of followers, we had to post very, very short, highly engaging short videos. Facebook, that year, changed the timeline. They killed that bit, that part of our business model where these, like, super addictive viral videos would no longer work. And in their little statement, they said, "The things that will now work are any content that gets people to basically just have conversation with each other." So we then tested that, and BuzzFeed tested that as well. BuzzFeed posted some things and discovered that if your post is dis- discussion-worthy, it will now do better. And so as Facebook were apparently trying to do the right thing, um, which cost them that year their revenues, I believe, went down that year. Their stock price definitely did, and they pointed to, "Listen, we made these changes to our, to our timeline, our newsfeed, to try and make it more healthy."... something else emerged. And that thing, which is now the dominant force, is called TikTok. And TikTok took the place of short, addictive as fuck, you don't even know you're scrolling videos. And the way that I know it from my social media background, that TikTok have fully owned that space is simple. On my TikTok now, say I have 100,000 followers, a video can get 1,000 views or a million views. The variance of viewership is extreme. What that means is, they al- the algorithm is just taking the most addictive things and saying, "Fu- fuck everything else." It's like, "I'm not gonna show your followers or the, the Discovery feed the thing you posted that wasn't addictive, I'm just gonna grab the viral stuff that's super short and put that in the feed." So, now, you know, I was talking to some of my colleagues today. Fortunately, I don't actually use TikTok. Like, I don't use it myself. I have a TikTok, but I don't use it myself to engage with friends. And every single one of my friends, some of them are sat in this room now, some of them are downstairs, they describe their relationship with TikTok as, like, as if it's heroin. Like, I've never heard a social network described in such a way. My friend, Ash, who's, like, 35, he goes, "I'll just touch the app," and he goes, "An hour's gone." And he's like, "I've never seen anything like it." So, if Facebook change, what I'm, my point here is that some- I've seen how someone who, else who just doesn't give a fuck will come and occupy that space, make a billion dollars, and, um, and run off. And so I'm like, oh, you know?

   15. JHJohann Hari31:36

       But this is why we need... You're totally right. This is why we need to look at the business model for social media and whether we allow it or not. Of course, think about lead paint again, right? So, presumably there was a market leader in lead paint-

   16. SBSteven Bartlett31:46

       Hmm.

   17. JHJohann Hari31:47

       ... in the '70s. And let's say the response to lead paint just would go, "You, this individual company, needs to stop manufacturing lead paint."

   18. SBSteven Bartlett31:53

       Mm-hmm.

   19. JHJohann Hari31:54

       Of course, someone else would have just come along and made med- lead paint. That's not the solution, right?

   20. SBSteven Bartlett31:57

       Yeah, yeah.

   21. JHJohann Hari31:57

       Solution is to say, "No, no one can put lead in paint," right? Which is not to say there can't be social media. There absolutely can. Social media has lots of great things about it. But it's about saying, do you have a business model that is designed about maximally invading people's attention?

   22. SBSteven Bartlett32:11

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JHJohann Hari32:12

       Or do you have a business model that's about, uh, giving people what they want? Most people do not want... Like you were saying, your friends, they push the button and it's gone for an hour. Most people don't want that, right? Most TikTok users, I mean, I think about my niece who's using TikTok all the time, she doesn't want that either. So, at the moment, we have a model that's about hacking people and giving them what they don't want to sell them to advertisers.

   24. SBSteven Bartlett32:33

       Mm-hmm.

   25. JHJohann Hari32:33

       When you get rid of that business model, which they won't do spontaneously-

   26. SBSteven Bartlett32:36

       Mm-hmm. 100%, yeah.

   27. JHJohann Hari32:36

       ... we have to make them do it, right? That, i- it produces a completely different dynamic.

5. 32:41 – 36:19

   Flow States

   1. JHJohann Hari32:41

   2. SBSteven Bartlett32:41

      I, so I'm keen. So you put your ph- I, I read in the book, you li- basically put your phone in a box and then escaped without the phone. You, you must have been more productive than ever because of this thing that people describe called being in the flow state, right? I imagine if I'm distraction-free, then I would be in that flow state longer. I, I, I heard about this concept of a flow state, uh, maybe about a year or two ago. And then I, I could, I could relate to it because I've had those moments in my work, or when I'm doing a certain activity, specifically more like monotonous activities or repetitive activities, where you get into that state of flow where you, you're almost doing it without thinking. What is flow? And how do you find it? And what is the power of being in one's flow state?

   3. JHJohann Hari33:19

      So, a flow state is when you're, um, everyone listening will have experienced it at some point in their life. A flow state is when you're doing something that's really meaningful to you, and you really get into it. And your sense of time falls away, your sense of ego falls away, and your attention to it just feels effortless, right? So, a, one rock climber put it, it's like you get into flow in rock climbing when you feel like you are the rock you're climbing, right? So, we all will have had moments of flow in our lives. What's really important about flow in relation to attention is this is a power, this is a capacity that all human beings have. And it's a capacity where you can pay attention to something deeply, but it doesn't feel like an effort, right? It's not like studying for an exam where you're like, "Oh, okay, so Napoleon was born then... Okay." You know, you, you can, you can pay attention that way, but that's an effort. Flow is like a gusher of attention that is inside all of us that, that we can pay. So, obviously Mihaly spent... Professor Csikszentmihalyi spent, spent 40 years of his life, more than, uh, actually 50 years of his life studying flow states. How do they happen? How do we maintain them? What ruins them? And, and he discovered lots of amazing things about it. He discovered that actually flow states are really essential for having a good life, of feeling competent, for, for good mental health. And he discovered, I mean, he made lots of discoveries, but for me, there were three really important things he discovered about how to get into a flow state. Firstly, you have to choose one goal. If you're trying to do lots of things at the same time, you will not get into flow. I can explain why later, but it's really important. You have to choose one thing, right? The second thing you have to do is you have to choose a goal that is meaningful to you. If it's not meaningful, you'll never get into flow on it. For me, it would be writing, right? But everyone will have something. And thirdly, you need to choose something that is ideally at the edge of your abilities. So, let's say you're a rock climber. Let's say you're a medium talent rock climber, right? If you just clamber over garden wall, you're not gonna get into a state of flow. Equally, if you suddenly try and climb Mount Kilimanjaro, it's gonna be overwhelming, you're also not gonna get into a state of flow. What you wanna do is choose something that's a little bit harder than the thing, the time you did last time, right? So, flow begins at the edge of your abilities. So, you want those, those three things. One clear goal, it's gotta be meaningful to you, and it's gotta be at the edge of your abilities. If you do that, you m- there's no guarantee, but you maxi- massively increase your chance of getting into flow, which is this form of deep, meaningful attention. But Mihaly also made a discovery, he discovered this in the late '80s, that, um, there's something that absolutely consistently ruins flow...... which is being interrupted, being distracted, right? It just kills flow dead, which kills the deepest form of attention. And I think we're really living, uh, and Mihaly thought, we're really living with a crisis of flow states now.

6. 36:19 – 41:02

   What is the harm of interruption?

   1. JHJohann Hari36:19

   2. SBSteven Bartlett36:19

      What is the harm of interruption? I, I, I read in your book about the, the, the decaying creativity and the time it takes to get back into the task once you've done it, but is there a more sort of, um, con- consequential?

   3. JHJohann Hari36:32

      So if you wanna understand, and this might sound when I first describe it like a small effect, I'm gonna explain how big it is afterwards because it doesn't feel big when you're doing it. So I went to interview, uh, one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, a man named Professor Earl Miller, who's at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Professor Miller said to me, "You have to understand one crucial thing about your brain, my brain, everyone's brains. You can only think consciously about one thing at a time. This is just a fundamental limitation of the human brain. Human brain hasn't changed in 40,000 years, it ain't gonna change anytime soon, you can only think about one thing at a time." But we have fallen for a mass delusion. So the average teenager, according to a study by Professor Larry Rosen, believes they can now follow seven forms of media at the same time. So what happens when you believe you're, you're, you're doing lots of things at once? So they get people into labs, they get them to do- think they're doing lots of things at once and see what happens, and it turns out there are four really big costs that happen. So the first is what's called the switch cost effect. So let's say my phone is outside this room, but let's say I have my phone in my pocket, right? Let's say you were just talking, you spoke for a minute or two, what you said was really interesting. Let's imagine that I'd just taken out my phone and glanced at my text messages for a few seconds while you were doing that, right? The kind of thing that happens all the time. You think, "Oh, I've just taken two seconds and I'll..." In that moment, I have to refocus my brain, "Oh, um, Jess texted me. Oh, right, so that must mean that her mum needs... Oh, right, okay, yeah, got it." And then I have to refocus on you, "Wait, what was Steven just saying again?"

   4. SBSteven Bartlett38:07

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JHJohann Hari38:07

      Seems like a small effect, it's not. I'll talk about how much it is in a minute. The, the s- the second, uh, cost it, it brings in is you start to make mistakes when you're switching between things. It massively increases your error rate. So say that I'm, I don't know, doing my tax return and I look at my tax and I go back to my tax return. I'm much more likely to make mistakes, and that means I have to go back and correct my mistakes. The third effect is on your memory. So to translate your experiences into memories takes mental effort, right? Takes a certain amount of brain power. If your brain is instead just jammed up with all this switching, the evidence shows you're significantly less likely to just remember what happened. You're less likely to remember any of it. And the, the third effect is on your creativity. So when you just have time to think, your brain naturally wanders and it will roam over, you know, things people have said to you in your life, moments you've had, um, things you've read, a whole range of things, and it'll start to make connections between those things. That's actually what creativity is. It's when two ideas that have never been put together go together and pop, right? You know this much better than me.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett39:12

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JHJohann Hari39:12

      But when your brain is jammed up with switching, it just doesn't get the space to do that, right? And I've heard that. I remember thinking, speaking to Professor Miller, who's an amazing man, and just thinking, "All right, I get that. But that's quite small, right?" When I looked at the studies, I was quite struck. Hewlett-Packard, you know the people who make printers?

   8. SBSteven Bartlett39:30

      Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   9. JHJohann Hari39:30

      Although fucking printers always jam in my experience.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett39:32

       Yeah (laughs) .

   11. JHJohann Hari39:32

       But anyway, Hewlett-Packard did a quite small experiment with their workers. So they split them into two groups, and the first group was told, "Just do whatever task you've gotta do today and you're not gonna be interrupted." And the second group was told, "Just do your task today," and they were interrupted with emails and texts, right? What was described as a heavy amount of emails and texts. And then they just tested their IQ after either not being distracted or being distracted. What they found is the people who had been distracted tested at having 10 IQ points lower than the people who had not been distracted, right? Because it makes you less intelligent. Constantly switching, the strain of that makes you less intelligent. And to give you a sense of what 10 IQ points means, if you or me smoked a spliff now together, our IQ would drop by about five points. So it's double, just being heavily interrupted is, has doubled the effect on your intelligence and attention as getting stoned. So you would be better off sitting at your desk doing one thing and smoking a spliff than sitting at your desk not smoking a spliff and being interrupted all the time. There's a guy called Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon who found that if you are distracted and pulled away, it takes you twent- and go back to the task you were doing originally, it takes you 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus as you had before, right? So we're all, our focus is being stolen. The book is called Stolen Focus for this reason. Our focus is being stolen by these forces. That's just one of the 12.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett40:59

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JHJohann Hari40:59

       There's loads of them, but w- we've got to understand this.

7. 41:02 – 53:54

   The lack of sleep we all seem to be getting

   1. JHJohann Hari41:02

   2. SBSteven Bartlett41:02

      Um, the other point, aga- so, you write about it in this book, which is, I was surprised you linked to attention, because it wasn't an obvious link to me, was about sleep and, and the decay in, um, our sleeping health over decades. And y- you write that we're sleeping less than ever before and we're having worse sleep than ever before. My sleep is fairly good, but it, I think it's decaying. I'd say it's decaying. Um, I sleep with my phone in my bed, first thing I do when I wake up in the morning. Um, actually, as I'm opening my eyes, I'm thinking about where I need to put my hand to get the phone. Like, I'm, I'm visualizing where I think I left it, and my brain always knows. My brain's like, "It's over by your right h- your right ear."

   3. JHJohann Hari41:44

      Yeah, yeah.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett41:45

      It always knows where it is. And then I wake up, I look at WhatsApp, bum, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, hundred notifications, hundred things. Um, I, phw- what's the, you know, what's the cost of this type of behavior, which I think a lot of people will resonate for? And what is the like macro trend in sleep health?

   5. JHJohann Hari42:02

      Yeah, this is one of the 12 causes I write about in Stolen Focus that really, uh, the evidence was quite shocking, actually. So I interviewed lots of experts, but I interviewed arguably the leading expert in the world on sleep, a man named Dr. Charles Czeisler, who's at Harvard Medical School. He's taught everyone from the Boston Red Sox to Secret Service about, about sleep.And he started to make this breakthrough in 1981. So, he, w- when Charles was at, uh, medical school, he was taught that, um, basically when you're asleep, your brain is just inert. It's not doing much. So, he starts doing this research, nothing to do with sleep. It was, it's not really, doesn't really matter what it was about, but it was about the time of day that a p- the body releases a particular hormone. And to study that, he had to keep people awake in a lab, right? For quite long periods of time. So, he's working with them and he's got all sorts of techniques for keeping them awake, like attention techniques. And he was just immediately struck when he was doing this, how quickly and how dramatically people's attention and ability to think deteriorated as they stayed awake longer. If you're awake for 19 hours, which doesn't feel like very long, you, your attention and ability to think is the same as if you were legally drunk.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett43:09

      Right. (laughs)

   7. JHJohann Hari43:10

      Right? So your, your attention, r- things that would take a fraction of a second when you're refreshed and alert, he was discovering if you were awake for just a day, were taking 12 seconds. A staggering increase in your ability to think. So he started to think, "Oh, I should study sleep. I should look into this." And he began to do a series of hugely groundbreaking research on sleep. What he did is he pioneered putting together two bits of technology. There's a kind of technology that can scan your eyes to see what you're looking at, and obviously there's PET scans and things that can scan your brain and see what's happening in your brain. So he put this together and he looked at people who were tired, not that tired, but tired, um, to see what they were looking at and what was happening in their brain as they looked at it. And what he discovered is that you, when you're tired, you can appear to be awake, as awake as you and me seem now. You can be looking at people, you can be talking, but parts of your brain have literally gone to sleep. It's called local sleep because it's local to one part of the brain, right?

   8. SBSteven Bartlett44:06

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JHJohann Hari44:07

      Which is kind of mind-blowing. This h- helps to explain why attention degrades so rapidly when you're asleep. And I was trying to figure out, well, why is that? What's going on there? I mean, it's also important to bear in mind, this is one of the ways we know attention has got worse. There's good evidence that sleep has dramatically deteriorated. We sleep on average an hour less than people did in 1942. And children sleep 80 minutes a night less than they did a century ago. So it's a staggering, there's been a 20% decline in adult sleep in the last century. Incredible figures. And when you look at them, they're kind of mind-blowing. Um, only 15% of people wake up feeling refreshed. So I wanted to understand why is this, right? Why, why does sleep affect our attention so much? One of the people I interviewed about this and, and looked at her research very carefully is an amazing woman called Professor Roxanne Prashad, who's at the University of Minneapolis, where I interviewed her. She explained to me when you don't sleep, your body interprets it as an emergency. It says, "Something's really wrong here, right? He's not sleeping. Why isn't he sleeping?" So it has all sorts of physiological and psychological effects. It raises your heart rate. It makes you crave more sugar and fast food 'cause it'll release glucose quickly. Uh, it makes your heart beat faster, and it shuts down a lot of the creative parts of your brain, a lot of the more fertile parts of your brain, 'cause like, it's an emergency.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett45:26

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JHJohann Hari45:26

       You haven't got time to worry about that, you know? But what's happening is lots of us effectively live in a bodily emergency. 23% of British people sleep for five hours a night on average. Staggering figures. And the reason this is so important is partly the bodily emergency, and it's partly that what Dr. Czeisler had been taught at medical school much earlier was wrong. Sleep is not a passive process. Sleep is an incredibly active process. The way Roxanne put it to me, Professor Prashad, is when you're sleeping, you're repairing. Your brain is rinsed with a, a, a, a watery fluid that carries away metabolic waste. It takes it down to your liver and gets rid of it. Your brain repairs itself in sleep. The longer you sleep, the better and deeper the repairs are. I mean, there are lots of other things that happen in sleep that I talk about in the book as well. Um, we're not re- giving ourselves time to repair. We're not giving ourselves time to rest. And as a result, we're, we're going around groggy. Uh, our brain isn't functioning to its full potential. So I remember saying to Dr. Czeisler, you know, "Okay, so we know that sleep's got worse. We know that sleep is crucial for attention. Um, does that mean it is true to say that we have got an attention crisis?" And he said, "Even if nothing else had changed in society," and this is only one of the 12 changes, "even if nothing else had changed in society, that alone would be a guarantee that we had an attention crisis."

   12. SBSteven Bartlett46:47

       So what do we do about it? I, I'm that person. I'm the pathetic, um, s- I have pathetic sleeping habits for sure, for sure. Um, so what, what can I do about it? You know, removing my phone from the bedroom aside, the government or society collectively deciding that, um, we should, they should impose better professional, um, laws so that people aren't as interrupted, you know, when they could be sleeping, et cetera. What else can I do on a real practical level to...

   13. JHJohann Hari47:14

       So yeah, at a personal level, there's plenty of pre-commitment you can do. So I would recommend that you get a kSafe. Do you know about them?

   14. SBSteven Bartlett47:20

       Oh, is that like a safe that my phone goes in?

   15. JHJohann Hari47:22

       Yeah.

   16. SBSteven Bartlett47:22

       And it's

   17. JHJohann Hari47:22

       Yeah, so basically it's a plastic safe with a lid at the top. You take the lid off, you put your phone in it, you turn the dial at the top, and it'll lock away your phone for anything you set it to between five minutes and a week. And if there's like a fire or something, you could easily smash it, but then you have to buy another iPho- uh, buy another kSafe, right? Um, so I would say an hour before you go to bed, put your phone in the kSafe, and, and then you can't... a- again, it's pre-commitment. You're binding yourself so that when you're lying there in bed and your mind's racing, you're like, "Oh shit, I forgot that email." Too late. You can't check it. That's what I do, massively improved my sleep. So it's partly that, that's one of the individual changes. There's also big tips, and this is one thing I recommend to you. So I went to New Zealand to meet a guy called Andrew Barnes. So Andrew, uh, grew up here in London and in the '80s, he, in 1987, he worked in the City of London, the financial district, uh, just as the whole thing was deregulated. So the whole thing blows up. You know, you've probably seen on the news these images of like men in suits and lots of hairspray, like shouting at each other, "Buy, buy. Sell, sell." Um, he was one of those guys, right? And in that world, uh, he was a young guy then, e-In, in that world, you, you know, this is the word, language they would have used, it's not my language, you were a fool if you came to work later than 7:30 in the morning, and you were a pussy if you left before 7:30 at night, right? So, for half the year, Andrew never saw the sun, 'cause he would head, you know, he'd leave at 6:00 in the morning in the dark, and he would get home at 9:00 in the morning and, uh, 9:00 at night in the dark. He didn't have a good relationship with his children. He had to build that as an adult. He, w- this thing just consumed him, and he didn't like it. And wisely, he quit, and he went to live in Australia and then New Zealand, and he became a very successful businessman there. And one day, in 2018, Andrew was on a plane, and he was reading a business magazine. And he saw these quite shocking figures, which are accurate, that basically, they had done productivity research, and they'd discovered the average worker sits at their desk for eight hours a day, this is pre-COVID, obviously, sits at their desk for eight hours a day, but they are actually only concentrating on their work for three hours a day. Right? Which are amazing figures, right?

   18. SBSteven Bartlett49:28

       Wow.

   19. JHJohann Hari49:29

       Bad for everyone. Bad for the worker, their life is passing them by. Bad for the employer, you know, they're not getting good value out of their employees. And Andrew did this, Andrew remembered this, these moments when he was working in the city and he was exhausted and run down, and he wasn't having a life, and he thought, "Maybe my workers are just really tired. Maybe that's part of what's going on." So, he had this, this idea just came to him, he said, "If I said the company's gonna move to a four-day week instead of a five-day week for exactly the same amount of money, and in return, let's say my workers match this three hours a day, in return, if my workers just did 45 minutes more every day of actually concentrating, 'cause they were better rested and so on, that would make up that- then we'd be in the same place, for four hours, four days a week versus five." So, Andrew organized a conference call. He had, uh, everyone on it, uh, and he said, "From now on, I'm gonna pay you all the same, but we're gonna move to four days a week. We're gonna try it for three months and see if it works. If it works, we'll carry on doing it." Um, Andrew's head of HR literally fell over, right? (laughs) Was like, "What is this?" Right? And people, even the people who were gonna be the beneficiaries, and they were all the beneficiaries, but even the, kind of, lower-level staff were like, "Is this a trick? What's, what's going on? How is this gonna work?"

   20. SBSteven Bartlett50:42

       Mm-hmm.

   21. JHJohann Hari50:42

       So, they spent a few months preparing. It actually made them all think about productivity more. "How are we gonna make ourselves more productive?" They came up with all sorts of strategies. Some of them really simple things, like, you know, everyone has a little pot on their desk, you can put a white flag in it. When you've got the white flag, that means you don't wanna be interrupted. Things like that. And they tried it. And, uh, I, I spent, uh, I interviewed everyone who worked in their office in Rotorua, and this, uh, experiment was studied by Dr. Helen Delaney, who's at the University of Auckland Business School. And what they found is the company achieved more in four days than they had in five. Right? Productivity massively went up. Stress massively went down. Social media use at work massively went down. And it was fascinating talking to the staff there ab- about what they did. One of the things they did is they just slept more. Some of them didn't take five days, uh, didn't take four days, what they did is they did five days, but they did six hours a day instead of eight hours a day. They slept more, they rested more, they were able to switch their brains off from work, which if, if you're going and going and going, is very, very hard to do. And I remember interviewing them and thinking, "Can this be true?" Actually, lots of places have done these experiments with four-day weeks. I mean, a lot of tech companies are offering it now as an inducement. But a lot of places did these experiments. So, Microsoft in Japan went to a four-day week, their productivity went up by 40%. Toyota in Gothenburg moved all their mechanics to a six-hour day, and they produced 114% more in f- in six hours than they had in eight. Profits went up by 25%. In a way, it sounded too good to be true, right? And I went to interview this guy, uh, Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who's at the University of Stanford, who's an expert, one of the leading experts in the world on organizational behavior. And I was saying, "Well, how can that be?" And he said, "Look, it's not that difficult. Ask any sports team, do you want your team to go onto the pitch exhausted, worn out? No. Every sports fan wants their team to go onto the pitch well-rested, well-slept." You know? So, that experiment, again, we want to always think about it at these two levels. What can individuals do? There's a lot. And there's the collective level, where we can make it possible for people to make more personal changes. (page turns)

   22. SBSteven Bartlett52:53

       Quick one. I can't talk about Huel enough in my life, especially right now. And it's really interesting, because what we tend to see at this time of year is the first thing that goes is our diet, quickly followed by our fitness. And we see that in the data across multiple surveys. People in the fourth quarter of the year start indulging a little bit more, which is totally fine, and they start exercising a little bit less, which is totally fine. However, a really useful crutch during this period where the seasons have changed and we're starting to behave a little bit differently is making sure your fridge is stocked with things that are nutritionally complete, healthy, and that are gonna be convenient for you to consume without compromising your health. And that is where, ladies and gentlemen, Huel comes in. And they now have four brand-new flavors. They have the salted caramel flavor, absolutely love. They have the cinnamon swirl flavor, the number one new flavor, in my opinion, which is really surprising. Iced coffee caramel, and they have the strawberries and cream flavor. If you're gonna try any of the new flavors, please do try the cinnamon swirl and let me know what you think. It's an absolute unexpected champion of the

8. 53:54 – 1:00:17

   The importance of reading physical books

   1. SBSteven Bartlett53:54

      new flavors. (page turns) Writers. You're a writer. That's one thing you talk about, you talk about why reading is important, and there's been a d- macro decay in our reading. And I was, I, as I read that, I thought, "Why, why, why is reading so important?" What role does reading play? We all consume information digitally now. Why do we need to go back to reading stuff?

   2. JHJohann Hari54:16

      I think there's a few reasons. Um, and it's not, again, not a snooty thing at all. Um, so you're absolutely right that reading has mass, reading books has massively declined. Um, 57% of Americans now never read a book in any given year. It's the first time in the history of the American republic that's the case. We're, we're still a bit better than that in Britain, but not, not by much.And there's several people who really helped me to understand this and what that, what that's doing to us. Now, it's partly a symptom of our declining attention and partly a cause of it, and I talk a bit about how. So, I interviewed a woman called Professor Anne Mangon, who's at Stavanger University in Norway, who's a professor of literacy and probably the leading expert in the world on, on these questions. And she explained lots of things, but there's one very simple one. You can do studies, there've been loads of studies showing this now. So, you get group of people, you split them randomly into two. The first group, let's say you could do it with my book, you give one group of people my book on the iPad, like your iPad there.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett55:11

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JHJohann Hari55:11

      And the other group you give the physical book, right? And then you go back to them a week, a month, a year later and you just ask them questions about the book. And it turns out, invariably, the people who've read it on the screen remember significantly less and understand significantly less of what they read. This is a very well proven effect, it's called screen inferiority. It's such a big effect that if you take a, a 10-year-old child, it's the equivalent of two-thirds of their progress in reading in a year is lost when they're reading on a screen. It's, that's how, that's how much it diminishes our ability to think. And it seems to be there's lots of, there's a big debate about why. But when you read... Let's say, um, you know, we opened the BBC News site now and you and me read the same story. When we read on a screen, what we tend to do is read in a sort of skimming Z pattern, you sort of skim key words, right? Vroom, vroom, vroom. Um, when you read a book, generally we read linearly. We read from left to right, you know, and you keep going. But part of the problem is if you spend too much time reading on screens, when you read a book, you start doing that when you read books and it screws with your ability to read books. But the truth is I think it's something more subtle, right? So, there's this, Marshall McLuhan was this kind of professor in the '60s who, who said this famous thing that I never understood for years. He said, "The medium is the message," right? And what, what he meant was, when a new medium comes along, he was talking about television, so a new way of telling stories and thinking about the world comes along. You know, you can turn on your television and you can watch The Wire or Wheel of Fortune or anything in between, right? The medium of television itself has a message in it, right? Irrespective of the show you're watching on the television. So, the medium of television, the message is the world is very fast, it's all happening at the same time. Uh, y- we can all think about things you get from watching TV, the way you feel if you wa- And I love TV. Things you feel when you, when you watch TV. But I think there's a medium in the message of social media, right? So, let's think about Twitter. When you open Twitter, doesn't matter if you're Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders or, I don't know, Bubba the Love Sponge, right? There is a message you are absorbing about how the world should be. I would say the message is, firstly, the world should be interpreted and thought about very quickly, right?

   5. SBSteven Bartlett57:31

      Mm-hmm.

   6. JHJohann Hari57:31

      Quick, quick, quick. It should be interpreted very briefly, anything worth saying can be said in very short little bursts.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett57:38

      It's binary.

   8. JHJohann Hari57:39

      A- exactly. And what matters, the thing that is most important is whether people immediately agree with this very fast, very short thing you've said, right? That is the message hidden in the medium of Twitter, right? Think about Instagram. What's the message hidden in the medium of Instagram? It's, um, what really matters is whether you look good and whether people like how you look, right? That's it. That's the message. Th- What's the message in Facebook? Uh, the message is, okay, friendship, which is the most precious human thing, friendship is looking at other people's photographs of their life, that you should narrate your life to your friends through images and crave their likes. And that that's what friendship is, mutually watching each other's carefully collected paparazzi images of each other and liking them. Now, I think all those messages are wrong. A- that is a terrible way to live your life, right? It is not true that life should be interpreted quickly, that what... M- Actually, if people immediately agree with what you're saying, what you're saying probably didn't need to be said at all, right? Um, yeah, I like pretty people, Instagram, fine, okay. But if that's the thing that you overweight your life towards, something's really gone wrong. And friendship, a true friendship is nothing like a Facebook friendship. But think about the message... The reason I say this in relation to reading is, think about the message in the book, right? The printed book. What does a printed book say to you? Firstly, the world is complicated and you might wanna take a good bit of time to think about one thing. Secondly, it says, um, you should slow down. Slow down. Look at this thing that will be saying the same thing 100 years from now as it says right now, right? And, and thirdly, it says, you might wanna spend time thinking about the inner lives of other people, because the inner lives of other people are really interesting and you'll find that they're like you in some ways and unlike you in others, right? So, I would say take care what technologies you absorb, because over time your consciousness will come to resemble those technologies. You know, you, you wanna have had a life of meaning and purpose where you engage with complex things, where you showed empathy, where you showed love. These are not, these are things that the current model of social media absolutely militates against and that books help with. They don't, they're not the sole, you know, they're not the sole solution, there's lots of things going on, but I, I deeply believe in the medium of the book.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:05

      I completely agree. One of the, the re- When I s- started writing my book, I thought it was insanity, the concept of a book, because I'd grown up in that social media era-

   10. JHJohann Hari1:00:11

       Mm-hmm.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:11

       ... where you get instant feedback, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the, like, really profound things I discovered with

9. 1:00:17 – 1:05:07

   Negativity bias

   1. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:17

      a book is because there's no comment section-

   2. JHJohann Hari1:00:21

      (laughs)

   3. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:21

      No, like, really. I think about a book, if it had a comment section below it, the comment section for a book exists on some, a website a million miles away maybe in reviews, and I really never look at them. So when someone's consuming it, they don't get to develop their opinion based on consensus below.

   4. JHJohann Hari1:00:36

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:36

      And I've noticed this so many times on Instagram, if I post something and the top comment takes on a certain narrative, everyone below will follow. So, if the top... So, I'd do a post-... people see it as, take it as it is. You can then see the behavior of them, like going into the comments section, and the minute a certain narrative emerges, which people find interesting, everyone follows that narrative. And then if you, I've done it before, like many years ago, re- just remove that comment or hide it, the- the narrative below changes, and you can see people actually deciding what they think of what you're saying or whether it's right or wrong based on the consensus below.

   6. JHJohann Hari1:01:11

      But I think it's even, I think you're absolutely right, Stephen. I don't know enough about comments sections, but I think in terms of commentary online, it's actually even worse than what you just said in a lot of cases. Uh, and this is an effect, of all the effects I learned about in the book, this is one of the ones that s- that I think is most harmful. Remember what we were saying before, which I know you know very well, that thing about the business model is to keep people scrolling, right? The minute you stop scrolling, they lose money. All their algorithms are designed with literally one goal, what will keep you scrolling? That's it. That's the goal, right? So as the algorithms and the AI were figuring out what keeps people scrolling, they bumped into, they uncovered a human quirk, which is not the intention of anyone at Facebook or YouTube or any of these places, which is, it's called, it's a very well-documented psychological phenomenon called negativity bias, which is basically means we will stare at something negative longer than we will stare at something positive. Anyone who's ever been driving down the motorway and passed a car crash knows exactly what I'm talking about. You stare at the car crash longer than you stare at the pretty flowers on the other side of the road, right? And this is, and this is, negativity bias goes very deep. Ten-week-old babies will stare longer at an angry face than a smiling face. But when this meets algorithms designed to maximize the harvesting of attention, this produces a catastrophic effect. And this was, this is not my view, this is what Facebook itself found in its own internal research, which we've now had leaked. So imagine, uh, imagine this at both a personal level and a political level. So imagine a teenager, group of teenagers go to a party. One of them goes home, and on the bus on the way home they say, "That was a really lovely party. I enjoyed it. Everyone looked great, and they were so nice." Another teenager from the same party posts, um, "God, Karen looked like a right slag tonight. Uh, her boyfriend, Jim, is a twat." What does the algorithm do? The second one is more like the car crash. People will stare at it longer. The algorithm will promote it in the feed. It will put it much higher. The nice one, that's gonna be way down if anyone sees it, right?

   7. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:13

      Yeah.

   8. JHJohann Hari1:03:13

      Now, that's disastrous enough at the level of teenagers who've gone to a party. Now imagine at a political level. We don't have to imagine it. Everyone listening remembers who Donald Trump was. So what happened in the 2016 election, what happened in, what's happening all over the world every day, all the time on politics, is we are being stoked to be more angry all the time. The algorithms select for anger 'cause anger will keep you scrolling, right? And that is destroying our ability to solve problems. And this is not just my view. In the wake of the victory of Brexit and Donald Trump, Facebook internally set up a group of its own data scientists called Common Ground, and we now know what they found because it was leaked. And what their own data scientists said is the Facebook model and the wider business model of social media inevitably causes division and polarization, that this was having catastrophic effects. It's partly what fueled the genocide in Myanmar, uh, Burma. Um, and th- this was in- it was actually very striking the way they put it, this was inherent to the Facebook business model, and the only alternative was for Facebook to abandon its business model and adopt what they called an anti-growth model, where they said, "We won't grow as a company, but we won't set the c- world on fire," right? And there was a very dry, th- The Wall Street Journal, who got leaked it, they said, their news story said, "After he received this report, Mark Zuckerberg asked that he never be brought any reports like this ever again," right? So, you know, they know what they're doing. The business model, th- they're tied to their business model. They're only gonna stop doing it when we make them. But this machinery that is amping us up into anger is just, at a personal... Firstly, it destroys attention. When you're angry, it's much harder to pay attention. We all, we've all had that experience, but there's good science for it as well. But also, it's- it's devastating for the society, a- and we- we've got to deal with that.

10. 1:05:07 – 1:13:41

    Angry humans in an angry machine

    1. JHJohann Hari1:05:07

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:07

       I remember doing a study in, I think it was 2017, can't remember the year, when Trump got elected, which I presented to Coca-Cola, where I looked at Hillary Clinton's online reach on Crimson Hexagon versus Trump's, and it was like 12, he was reaching 12 times, 12 to 15 times more people with his message because it was centered in, like, really polarizing, inflammatory stuff, and the algorithm is just sending that.

    3. JHJohann Hari1:05:27

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:27

       Whereas indifference just doesn't move on social media. It's like a tree falling in the forest with no one there.

    5. JHJohann Hari1:05:32

       Well, not even indifference, reasonable arguments. (both laughing)

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:34

       Yeah. Who cares, you know? Like, who's that gonna bang with? It doesn't resonate with anybody, so the tribe can't pick it up and move it for you. So you're right, like, the fear and anything sort of polarizing moves really, really well.

    7. JHJohann Hari1:05:43

       But I would still argue, I think this is a really important point and I thought a lot about it when I was working on Stolen Focus, I think there are obvi- a- and I know you know this much better than I do, there are huge other human motivators than fear and anger that we can, uh, that we can build algorithms around, right? So-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:01

       More compelling than fear, though?

    9. JHJohann Hari1:06:04

       Oh, uh, at the moment, precisely because this rage can be drilled into and monetized, that's why we need regulations to stop that hacking of the worst aspect of our characters. Which is not to say there aren't legitimate things to be angry about, there are. And building algorithms around better things, right? And- and that's why, you know, people in favor of progressive change, like ending racism in policing-

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:28

        Mm-hmm.

    11. JHJohann Hari1:06:28

        ... which is an urgent cause, actually, the- the emotion we appeal to most is not rage. The emotion we appeal to most, those of us who believe in that cause, is hope and love and empathy, right? The very, why, why, if you look at, even if you think about left-wing anger versus right-wing anger, why do these algorithms boost right-wing anger much more than left-wing anger? And this, again, this is leaked by Facebook, we know this.It's 'cause ultimately, when you're in favor of progressive change, you can't just be angry. You have to have a hopeful vision of the future. Do you-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:04

        Mm-hmm.

    13. JHJohann Hari1:07:04

        ... see what I mean?

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:04

        Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

    15. JHJohann Hari1:07:05

        And we can build this machinery around encouraging and rewarding hope. At the moment, we have it, we are all plugged in to what Maggie Haberman, the New York Times journalist, called an anger-based video game. Right?

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:16

        Mm-hmm.

    17. JHJohann Hari1:07:16

        That's basically what Twitter is, and f- and Facebook. There's an amazing study by the Pew Research Institute that found that for every word of moral outrage you add to a Facebook status update, you double the likes and shares, right?

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:29

        100%.

    19. JHJohann Hari1:07:29

        The words that most supercharge sharing and views on YouTube are "hates", "destroys", and "obliterates". Right? Now, that is a machinery, if you plug people into that anger-based machinery for large parts of the day, the anger doesn't go away when they put the phone down, right?

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:47

        Mm-hmm.

    21. JHJohann Hari1:07:47

        It's not like a release valve. It's like a, it's like taking a, an, um, uh, you know, a, a drug that amps you up, right? And you're seeing that, and that is degrading our individual attention, 'cause angry people pay attention much less well. Uh, it's degrading our ability to think, but it's also degrading our collective attention, right? You see this how we're tribalizing around COVID. You can see this in all sorts of ways, the ways we're tribalizing and turning on each other about things that, actually, we have perfectly sensible solutions to.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:14

        Do you think, though, it's, it's anger-based machinery, or do you think it's plugging angry humans into machinery? Because I, I think, I think if you just create an algorithm which just, which had no bias at all, and you said, um, you know, "Our objective as YouTube is to show you things that you click on more," it would, it would only take a couple of days for everyone's algorithm to be programmed to show them fearful things. Because, as you said, about the, the, the fear bias we have, and the prehistoric evolutionary reasons why we would wanna know that there was a lion behind the rock, versus want- caring if there was a- an ant behind the rock, that ev- eventually, because we are fear, uh, avoiding humans, we would, we, we basically would train in any algorithm eventually just to show us the scary shit.

    23. JHJohann Hari1:08:56

        So, there, there are definitely a- and Tristan Harris, I talk to him a lot about this, the former Google engineer, there are lots of alternative ways you can structure these apps, right? So, to give an obvious one, you could just turn off the YouTube recommendations. It's not like before they existed, we were all going, " (gasps) What will I watch next? What will I do?" We weren't suddenly lost. Just as Tristan says, just turn it off. If the only way it can work is that it fucks people up, turn it off. We don't need it. It's not that important. Or an alternative is you, and there are all sorts of other ways the other ones could be structured, so Twitter, uh, and we don't have to think hypothetically, Twitter used to be chronological, right? If you followed 200 people and you opened Twitter, the first thing you would see is the most recent thing that one of the 200 people you, you follow posted, right? You'll notice Twitter doesn't do that anymore. It now has an algorithm that selects precisely for the things we're talking about. Means Twitter has become even more toxic and even more hateful, and it went, wasn't that good at the start, right?

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:49

        Mm-hmm.

    25. JHJohann Hari1:09:50

        Um, so again, just go back to the chronologic, even just going back to the chronological algorithm, you need a lot more changes than that, that in itself-

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:56

        You're right.

    27. JHJohann Hari1:09:57

        ... would be better.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:57

        You're right. Mm-hmm.

    29. JHJohann Hari1:09:57

        So, there's all sorts of algorithms-

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:59

        H- you'd have to do it to every technology company, though, because-

Episode duration: 1:38:09