Overstimulation Is Ruining Your Life! - 12 Ways To Take Back Control Of Your FOCUS | Johann Hari

1. 0:00 – 1:55

   The global attention crisis and the 12 worsening forces behind it

   1. JHJohann Hari0:00

      There's 12 factors that are making our attention worse. To pick one of the 12, technology is becoming more and more invasive with each year that passes. The food industry is making more invasive, more addictive food. We sleep less now than we did 10 years before, which is less than it was 10 years before. We've got to fight back. It's a very simple solution here. [upbeat music] We have a global attention crisis. This is a serious problem which is significantly worse than it was for previous generations. So there's lots of ways we know this, but there's 12 factors that have been proven to affect people's focus and attention, and there's good evidence that lots of those factors are getting worse and worse. I'm sure we're gonna talk about lots of them. And it's been interesting talking to people who read the book because different people are really picking up on different aspects of that because, precisely because this is a complex problem with complex causes that re- that require complex solutions. It's been fascinating to see different people kind of responding to different aspects of it in different ways. But I think most people can feel the truth of, of what's happening to us. You know, there's, for example, one small study found that the average college student now focuses on any one task for 65 seconds. In fact, the median amount of time they focus is 19 seconds, and the average office worker now focuses for three minutes. So it's like we're living in a culture that is pouring itching powder over us all the time. We can feel this, this dissolution happen. With each year that passes, things that require deep focus, like reading a book, become more and more like running up a down escalator. And I wanted to figure out, well, why is this happening to us? Particularly, why is this happening to our kids? It was actually something that happened with a, a young person I love that, that really spur- which we can talk about if you want, that really spurred me to start actually researching this. Why is this happening to us? And most importantly, how do we get our minds back? How do we restore our attention and focus?

2. 1:55 – 2:32

   Why parents feel alarmed: attention loss in adults and children

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:55

      What is happening to our kids, I think, concerns many parents because we sort of feel it happening to ourselves, that we can't focus as much as we used to. You know, that, that's a beautiful analogy. Reading a book can sometimes feel like running up a down escalator. I think that's a beautiful way to put it. I think who doesn't know that feeling when they're sat there trying to do something and they're just getting diverted to other things, and they're not able to do what they want. So why don't you tell us about, you know, one of these young folk in your life. You, you beautifully write about it in the book, but I think that's a great starting point.

3. 2:32 – 7:26

   From a childhood obsession to a fractured young adult: the Graceland turning point

   1. JHJohann Hari2:32

      You know, it's, it's funny, Rangan, 'cause for years I've been thinking of writing about this, and I put it off for lots of reasons. I think one of them is I kind of-- partly I was a bit scared of the subject, but also I, I would kind of reassure myself by saying, "Yeah, but every generation of human beings thinks this is happening," right? Every generation, they get older, their brains deteriorate a bit, and they blame, you know, they mistake the deterioration of their brain for the deterioration of the world, right? You can read letters between monks almost 1,000 years ago-

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:00

      Yeah

   3. JHJohann Hari3:01

      ... where they say to each other, "Oh, my attention ain't what it used to be." That's not an exact quote, but that's the gist of what they, what they said. But there was a moment when I thought, "I need to figure out if this is just the normal anxiety or if some deeper problem is going on here." And it started for me-- So I've got a godson. When he was nine years old, he, I never quite understood why, but he developed a freakishly intense obsession with Elvis for about two weeks in the way that nine-year-olds do, right?

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:26

      Yeah.

   5. JHJohann Hari3:26

      And it was so cute because he didn't know this had become like a cheesy cliché, so he was singing like Viva Las Vegas with all the kind of heart-catching sincerity of a little boy who thinks he's being cool. And he kept getting me to tell him the story of Elvis again and again and again, and I kind of tried to skip over the, the final act where it all goes wrong for Elvis. But one night when I was tucking him in, he looked at me very intensely and he said, "Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?" And I was like, "Yeah, yeah," in the way that you just tell children you'll do, you know, whatever. You, you know they're gonna forget it a week later. And he said, "No, do you really promise that one day you will take me to Graceland?" And I said, "Absolutely, I promise." And I didn't think of it again until everything had gone wrong. So t- 10 years later, Adam had-- he dropped out of school when he was 15, and, um, by the time he was 19, he was just... He seemed to spend all his waking hours alternating between WhatsApp, YouTube, and porn. He was constantly flicking between devices. It was very hard to get him to stay with a subject long. He was a very decent, kind, and intelligent person, but it's like his mind was whirring at the speed of Snapchat, where nothing, you know, still or serious could, could, could stay with him. And one day we were sitting on our sofas, and I was thinking, and I was watching him like this, and I was looking at my own phone much more than I wanted to. And I looked at him and I thought, "God, in the decade in which he's become a man, it feels like this fracturing has happened to so many of us." And I looked at him, and I suddenly remembered this moment 10 years before, and I said to him, "Let's go to Graceland." And he was like, "What do you mean?" And I'm like-- He didn't even remember this Elvis obsession.

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:05

      Oh.

   7. JHJohann Hari5:05

      I was like, "No, we, we're gonna go to Graceland. We'll go all over the South. We've got to break this numbing routine. But you've got to promise one thing, which is if I take you, you'll leave your phone in the hotel during the day. You won't be checking it all the time." And he-- I could see it sort of excited something in him. He said, "Yes, I'll do it." So we, two weeks later, we flew. We went to New Orleans first. And when we got to Graceland, so when you arrive at the gates of Graceland now, this is even before COVID, um, there isn't a guide to show you around anymore. What happens is they hand you an iPad, and you put in earbuds, and the iPad shows you around. So it says, you know, "Go left. In this room, this happened. Go right." And in every room you go into-

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:41

      Yeah

   9. JHJohann Hari5:41

      ... there's a digital representation of that room on the, on the iPad. So we're walking around Graceland, and I'm noticing that what's happened is everyone is walking around just staring at their iPad, right? They're all just looking down at the screen. And I'm trying to make eye contact with them to go like, "Oh, isn't this funny?"

   10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:56

       Yeah.

   11. JHJohann Hari5:57

       You know, we're the people who traveled 3,000 miles and looked around us, right? And one guy, finally I, I made eye contact with someone, and then I realized he'd only looked away from the iPad to take out his phone and take a selfie. And I was like, "Oof." So we're walking around, and I'm getting more and more like There's some tension building in me. And we got to the jungle room, which was Elvis' favorite room in Graceland. It's a fake jungle with, like, sagging, slightly, uh, uh, sagging fake plants that have seen better days.

   12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:23

       Yeah.

   13. JHJohann Hari6:23

       And we're in there, and there's a couple, a Canadian couple who were next to us, and the guy turned to his wife and he 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." And I sort of looked at him and I literally, I laughed, right, 'cause I thought he was, he was joking. And then his wife starts swiping back and forth. She's like, "Oh, yeah." And I said to him, "But sir, there's, there's an old-fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning your head because we're actually in the jungle room, right? You don't have to look at a digital representation of it."

   14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:56

       Yeah.

   15. JHJohann Hari6:56

       "We're, we're actually there." And they, like, sort of understandably thought I was a lunatic and sort of backed away and just left the room. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it, and he was just standing in a corner going through Snapchat. 'Cause from the minute we landed, he just had not been able to keep his promise. He was constantly on his phone. And I just got really angry and I just said, "You know, [clears throat] you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing you will miss out, right? You, you're not present at the

4. 7:26 – 9:54

   A three-year investigation: attention isn’t just ‘lost’—it’s being taken

   1. JHJohann Hari7:26

      events of your life." And he sort of stomped off. Um, so I spent the afternoon wandering around Graceland on my own and, and that night I went to the Heartbreak Hotel where we were staying, and I found him by the swimming pool, which is shaped like a guitar. And he was sitting, and where they play, uh, Elvis songs in a loop. And, and he was looking at his phone and he just said, "I know something is really wrong, but I don't know what it is." And that's when I thought, okay, I need to figure out what's happening here. So for the next three years, I ended up traveling all over the world-

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:56

      Yeah

   3. JHJohann Hari7:56

      ... interviewing the leading e- more than 200 of the leading experts in the world about what, what causes focus and attention to grow and what causes them to deteriorate. So, and just, it was partly meeting just experts everywhere from Miami to-

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:08

      Yeah

   5. JHJohann Hari8:08

      ... Moscow to Montreal, and also just going to places that have been very affected by attention in different ways, from a favela in Rio de Janeiro where attention had collapsed in a particularly disastrous way, to a, an office in New Zealand where they'd found an amazing way to restore people's attention. So it was really fascinating to start to look at this from all sorts of angles and directions, and to realize it's not that your attention collapsed. Your attention has been stolen from you by very big forces. And to get our attention back, we have to understand what's happening, and we have to respond in a variety of ways that are different to what we're doing now.

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:46

      There's, there's so many things about the story with your godson you just mentioned. One of the things you said was, "Something's happened in the past decade." That, that really struck me because, you know, you saw a kid with wonder and awe about Elvis and this kind of fantasy, this dream, "Hey, one day we're gonna go to Graceland." And then in the 10 years that followed, something happened. Of course, kids grow up. Kids, you know, they get new interests. But it is not that, is it? There's something more toxic and insidious that has happened there. The, the other thing that really struck me about that story was when you said you were there at Graceland, and he couldn't keep the promise that he'd made to you. I bet he wanted to. I bet he wanted to, with all his heart, keep that promise, but he couldn't, could he?

   7. JHJohann Hari9:48

      I think you're totally right. Uh, that's a really good way of putting it, 'cause he definitely was sincere. He wasn't lying.

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:54

      Yeah.

5. 9:54 – 17:10

   Moving beyond blame: not personal weakness, not just smartphones, and attention as a societal foundation

   1. JHJohann Hari9:54

      Um, and he was quite crestfallen that he couldn't keep this promise. And it was fascinating because, of course, it's tempting. We've got two quite simplistic stories about attention when we see this sort of problem, right? One is just to see it as purely a personal failing, which is how I thought about it in relation to myself. When I couldn't focus, I'd go into a sort of recriminatory dialogue with myself. I'd be like, "You're lazy. You're weak. You're not good enough." And we sort of do that with when we see kids that can't focus. We sort of like, "What's wrong with this child? Why are they being like this?" So that's one story, to see it as personal failing. And the other story, which is also overly simplistic, although it contains some truth, unlike the other one, um, is to see it just as a result of the rise of smartphones, right? It's like, oh, this-- I would say to myself, "Oh, my phone came along and hijacked me," right? "It just took me over." And actually, what I learned is something more specific than that is happening, um, and something more complex than that. So w- when it comes to tech, what's been done to us is, is more interesting than just the technology arrived. It's something specific about the technology, that I'm sure we'll talk about, that's doing this to us or that's primarily responsible for doing this to us. And then I learned, which was the thing that was much more surprising even than that, that actually tech isn't the biggest cause of these problems, I don't think. In fact, there's 12 factors. Tech is a big one. This specific element of tech is a big one. But actually it's only one aspect, and probably not the most significant. So it's really fascinating to realize this m- there's a much more complex picture going on here than, than, than just a personal failing or a single new invention.

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee11:31

      Yeah, and I think your book does a, just a wonderful job at exploring an issue that is arguably one of the most important issues that we face. I really think it is, right? And, and I'll tell you why I think it is and why I think your book is probably gonna be one of the most important books in 2022. Because an inability to focus, like to me it, it goes beyond, "Oh, I, you know, I can't concentrate on this work project I'm trying to do," right? Yes, that can be frustrating. Or someone wants to read a book in their leisure time So they sit there for an hour and they keep rereading [chuckles] the same page-

   3. JHJohann Hari12:25

      Mm

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee12:25

      ... flicking to Twitter, flicking to ema- whatever, right? Most people have been in that position at one time or other. Not everyone, of course, but, but many of us. But it, it goes beyond that for me, right? Our ability to focus and put our attention where we want it to be, I think it's literally what underpins our experience of being human. Our relationships, our passions, our hobbies, you know, our interactions with others, our ability to know who we are. We need focus to be able to do that. Yet focus is something that very few of us have in the way that we would ideally want.

   5. JHJohann Hari13:12

      I think that's so important. The more I looked at this, the more I realized this is the foundational issue.

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee13:17

      Yeah.

   7. JHJohann Hari13:17

      If we don't deal with this, we can't deal with anything else. I think there's sort of two levels to that. One is there's just a purely personal level, right? If you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals in life. If anyone thinks about a time you've achieved a goal, right, whether it was being a good parent, setting up a business, writing a book, whatever it might be, that goal required a lot of sustained focus, right?

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee13:40

      Yeah.

   9. JHJohann Hari13:40

      If your focus breaks down, and I think there's good evidence our focus is breaking down, you're less able to achieve your goals for yourself, right? Which obviously is, is very h- uh, a very painful thing for a person to experience. Also, you're less able to form connections with other people. Sustained connections require lots of attention. To have a good relationship, you have to be able to pay attention, whether it's a friendship, a romantic relationship, whatever it is. You have to be able to pay attention to the other person. There's another layer to that, that which I think is as important, which is a collective layer, which is what happens to a society where most of its members are losing the ability to focus and pay attention. That becomes a society where collective problem-solving, where collective achievement of goals begins to break down. I don't think it's a coincidence.

   10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee14:24

       Yeah.

   11. JHJohann Hari14:24

       There are clearly lots of reasons. I don't wanna be simplistic about it. But I don't think it's a coincidence that this attention crisis is happening at the same time as one of the biggest crises in democracy, certainly the biggest crisis in democracy in our lifetimes, right? A society of people who can't focus will, will, will really s- will be drawn to simplistic solutions, angry solutions, won't be able to sus- follow through on things, and I think we're, we're seeing that. So there's both those levels.

   12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee14:50

       100%, and, and I'm sort of picking at your book because I underlined this, and I think the most important line in this book is on page 12: "People who can't focus will be drawn to simplistic, authoritarian solutions and less likely to see clearly when they fail." I sat and reflected on that because at the moment we're recording this in December 2021. There's all kinds of stuff going on in the world. There's all kinds of different, uh, opinions on how we should be best dealing with COVID, for ex- let's say. And we don't necessarily need to go down that rabbit hole, but what you see is a lack of nuance, a lack of respect for other opinions, an inability to see the other sides. I think there's many reasons for that. I think fear, um, which hijacks our rational brain. I think, you know, there are often good reasons in life to be afraid so we can take aversive action. But how many people at the moment are falling out with friends, family members, like proper fractures in their life? At some point, this will be over. Be careful how many friendships you leave on the curbside. Be careful how many of your family members you leave on the curbside just because they have a different opinion to you. And why I'm so passionate about this, particularly through the lens of your book, is I think you've nailed it with that line. I think, as I said already, Johann, it's about when we cannot pay attention and focus, I don't think we can be kind, empathetic, compassionate individuals.

   13. JHJohann Hari16:40

       I think you're totally right. Well, kindness and empathy are forms of attention, and if you're an addled individual whose ability to do that has broken down, you will be less kind. But I think on what you just said, Rangan, there's so many things that, um, that I learned a lot about for the book. So one is just the evidence that stress destroys your ability to focus and pay attention. I'm sure we'll talk about that. But another one is, um, you think about collective problems and collective solutions and, you know, why people are being so angry. I think it's worth thinking about because one of the factors

6. 17:10 – 27:41

   How platforms monetize distraction: design incentives, negativity bias, and manufactured anger

   1. JHJohann Hari17:10

      that ma- that's making us so-- anger itself damages your attention. We can talk about that. But one of the reasons that is making us so angry is also the factor, one of the factors that's destroying our attention. And one of the ways I understood this, I spent a lot of time talking to people in Silicon Valley who designed key aspects of the world in which we now live, in which our kids now spend so much of their time. The key aspects are social media apps and, and, and other aspects of the internet. And I remember certain moments with them, it was fascinating to realize, oh, even though they designed these things, they're not immune to these problems themselves. There's a wonderful man named Dr. James Williams, who was a Google engineer, who as subsequently was so horrified by what they were doing, has quit and become, I think, probably the most important philosopher of attention in the world at the moment. And when I went to go and see James in Moscow, he told me about this moment that was really important for him. He spoke at a tech conference, and he's speaking to the, exactly the people who are designing our world, right? And he said to them, "Is there anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're designing?" And nobody put up their hand. There's another moment with Tristan Harris, an amazing, also a Google engineer who's become a dissident, who said to me he had this moment when he was working on Gmail- Very early in Gmail, and they wanted to increase the number of users, but they particularly wanted to increase the number of times a day a user opened the app. I can talk about why if you want. And one of them, sitting in the Googleplex, one of his colleagues had an idea. He said, "Why don't we make it so that whenever you receive an email, your phone vibrates a little bit?" And everyone said, "That's a good idea." And a week later, Tristan was walking around San Francisco, and he just starts hearing these vibrations, like the chirruping of birds all around him, and he suddenly realizes, "Shit, we did that." And that was happening all over the world as a result of one-

   2. SPSpeaker18:59

      Yeah

   3. JHJohann Hari18:59

      ... colleague's decision. In fact, he calculated about a year later that they were responsible, that one decision was responsible for 11 billion interruptions every day to people's day. But the thing to understand about that, the reason this relates to what you're saying about anger, is obviously this is a huge debate about the design of these apps. But there was a moment it really fell into place for me, an understanding of this. Tristan and I were in, um, we were walking around San Francisco actually, and he said to me, "If you open Facebook now, Facebook will tell you loads of things, right? It'll tell you whose birthday it is. It'll tell you what you said on that day 10 years before. It'll show you photos of, that your friends have tagged you in." There's, there's one thing Facebook doesn't have. Facebook has no button that says, "I'd like to meet up with my friends. Is anyone nearby and wants to meet up?" Right? Now, the minute I say that, lots of people listening will be thinking, "Oh, that'd be a really handy button. I'd like to have that." So that would be very popular with its users. It's very technologically easy to design. Why does Facebook not offer it to you? If you follow the trail from that question, I think you begin to understand some of the reasons why we can't pay attention and we're so angry. So when you open Facebook, Facebook starts to make money in two ways. First way is very obvious. You see ads in your feed. Okay, we all get, we know how that works. Second way is much more important. Everything you do on Facebook is scanned and sorted by Facebook to figure out details about who you are. So let's say if you clicked that you like, I don't know, Kylie Minogue and Donald Trump, and you said to your mom that in a private message that you've just bought some nappies. Okay, Facebook knows this is probably a gay man. No disrespect to the straight fans of Kylie. I'm sure there are some. This is probably a right-wing person, and this is probably a person with a baby because they're talking about having nappies, right? So they, they're getting-- Imagine they've got tens of thousands of data points like you.

   4. SPSpeaker20:49

      Yeah.

   5. JHJohann Hari20:49

      Now, the reason they do that is because you are not the customer of Facebook. You are the product in Facebook. They sell that information about you to advertisers so the advertisers can target you better, 'cause if I'm an advertiser selling nappies, you don't wanna target to me. I don't have a baby. You don't wanna target to you. You don't have a baby anymore. Uh, you wanna target people who've got babies, right? [lip smack] So these are the two revenue streams for Facebook. That's all they're interested in. These are the two ways they make money. Now, imagine if they introduced that button that says, "Oh, I've got who's nearby and wants to meet up." If you push that button and it goes, "Oh, Bob's around the corner. I'll go for a pint with Bob," you'll shut Facebook and Bob will shut Facebook, right? That's a disaster for Facebook. They suddenly lose-

   6. SPSpeaker21:32

      Yeah

   7. JHJohann Hari21:32

      ... both their revenue streams. So their entire business model, all of that extraordinary, staggering engineering power, all the design of their algorithms is built around one thing: How do I keep you and your kids scrolling? That's it. That's their sole financial goal. Now, that obviously leads to inherently hacking our attention, and that's not the view of the dissidents. That's what the people at the heart of Facebook say. Sean Parker, the first really big investor in Facebook, crucial figure in the history of the company, said, "From the beginning, we designed it to invade your attention. We knew what we were doing, and we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our kids," right? That's what he said. Um, but that comes-- The reason this relates, so we can talk about how that affects our attention. It means that the whole of Facebook and all the other social media companies that have the same business model is designed to figure out how to invade your attention, and we can talk about the various techniques they use. But that also has another effect on exactly what you're talking about, about anger and one of the reasons why we're becoming so angry and so polarized. There's a, so Facebook's algorithms, like I say, only care about one thing. How do I keep you scrolling? They don't care if you feel good. They don't care if you feel bad. Not their interest. It's how do I keep you scrolling? So the algorithms are constantly figuring out, okay, what keeps people looking? What keeps people looking? And they, they bumped into, this was not the intention of anyone at Facebook, but they bumped into a quirk in human psychology, which is that we will stare at things that make us angry and upset longer than we will stare at things that make us feel good. Anyone who's ever been on the motorway and passed a car crash knows-

   8. SPSpeaker23:09

      Yeah

   9. JHJohann Hari23:09

      ... this effect. You stare longer at a car crash than you do at the pretty flowers on the other side of the road-

   10. SPSpeaker23:14

       Yeah

   11. JHJohann Hari23:14

       ... right? This is called negativity bias. There's loads of-

   12. SPSpeaker23:17

       Yeah

   13. JHJohann Hari23:17

       ... psychological research for it. 10 month, sorry, 10-day-old babies will stare longer at an angry face than a happy face. It's probably for a good reason in our evolution in that you wanna be vigilant to anger and danger, right? But this has an effect online that is catastrophic. It means that when the algorithms are trying to figure out, how do I keep Rangan scrolling? What they bump into is, if we show him things that make him feel good, he'll probably relax and is more likely to put down the app. If we show him things that make him feel angry and upset, he's more likely to keep scrolling. Now, that has an effect at two levels. There's a personal level and a bigger, a political level. At a personal level, imagine two teenagers who go to the same party, right? And get the same bus home. So one teenager on the bus home types, "That was a really nice party. I had a great time, and everyone looked good." And the other teenager puts a status update, "That party was shit. Kerry looked like an absolute slag." I've been reading my niece's Facebook, so I know. I've got, I'm a bit up on how they're talking. Uh-

   14. SPSpeaker24:18

       [laughs]

   15. JHJohann Hari24:18

       ..."Kerry looked like an absolute slag. Her boyfriend's a twat." Uh, you know, you can imagine, like a stream of anger. Facebook- Will figure out, 'cause it looks for angry versus happy words, calculates, it, it will put the happy status update into a few people's Facebook feed, but it will put that angry Facebook update into loads more people's feeds. Because they know the happy one, most people will go, "Oh, that's nice." But the angry one, people go, "How dare you call Carrie a slag? What are you talking about?" How-- You can see how it, it makes people more engaged. It makes them scroll longer. If it's enraging, it's engaging. Now, that's disastrous enough at the level of two teenage girls on a bus in Wythenshawe, right? But that is catastrophic at a political level where we're being fed things that are designed to make us angry.

   16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee25:03

       Yeah.

   17. JHJohann Hari25:03

       It privileges anger. It's one of the reasons, not the only one to be sure, why we're seeing such extreme polarization, why, you know, I don't need to mention Trump and Brexit and Bolsonaro and all these factors that are going on. And anger itself harms your attention. It's harder to pay attention when you're angry.

   18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee25:21

       I mean, where to start unpacking that? [laughs] It's just so much, right? But a lot of people, I would say, I think most people if you ask them, "Is your phone hijacking your attention, taking you away from some of the things that you would probably rather be doing in your life?" I think a lot of people would say, "Yeah, yeah, I can sort of see that," right? "I can see that, but I can't, I can't resist." But some people would probably say, "You know, look, it's neutral," right? "I just go on to catch up with my friends," right? "There's, you know, what are you talking about? Like, I'm just popping on, see a few photos. Um, I like the, the influencers I follow. I like the content I'm getting from them." I find it hard to draw any other conclusion that for most of us, I think we're probably kidding ourselves that this is neutral. I think we like to think it is, but I honestly don't think it is. Like, I'm sure for some people I reckon they can. But I think for most of us, we don't realize how much our thoughts and emotions are being influenced. But there's a bit in the book, it was so powerful. I think you were talking about Tristan Harris r- in the early days at Google. I think it was Tristan. You were saying that he was saying that, "Man, I'm realizing that at Google here, we are literally influencing the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of one or two billion people." It's probably more now. What they decide to show you literally is influencing how we view the world. It's, you know-- So is it neutral? Can it be neutral for anyone, or is your research saying we are not aware of just how insidious this problem is?

   19. JHJohann Hari27:11

       Well, under the current design, it can't be neutral. So you think you go on to just see the images of, you know, your friends or whatever. But think about the 2016 presidential election of the t- in the United States. Of the 20 most shared stories in, on Facebook during that election, 19 of them were lies. They were not true. For example, the claim that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump. Completely untrue story. In fact, the Pope pretty candidly warned against Donald Trump, right? So of course you, you, you don't go on, most people do not go on

7. 27:41 – 35:11

   From personal hacks to systemic reform: changing the business model of social media

   1. JHJohann Hari27:41

      primarily to get news from Facebook. But you're scrolling down and you're receiving information that is designed to anger you, to shock you, to be surprising. But the most important thing I learned, and this is really interesting, if you think about, because I didn't wanna write a book about saying, "Okay, here ev- everyone, here's all these problems with your attention. We're screwed," right? 'Cause the truth is we're not. And one of the things that I-

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee28:03

      Yeah

   3. JHJohann Hari28:03

      ... I really left the book, um, with a feeling of optimism because these problems can be solved, but there have to be two levels of the solution. And in terms of can it be good, there is a world where it can be good, and we could get to that world. So you've gotta have two levels of solutions, right? One is purely personal. There are all sorts of things we can do to defend our own attention and focus, and I'm sure we're gonna talk about a lot of them, and I do lots of them, and it's improved my attention. But we also have to be honest with people. That will take you so far, and then you will hit a wall. Because at the moment, it's like we're living in an environment that is pouring itching powder over us all the time, and the people pouring the itching powder on us are going, "Do you know what, mate? Uh, you might wanna learn how to meditate. Yeah, then you wouldn't scratch so much," right? And it's like, all right. It's good to meditate. I'm in favor of it, but we've gotta stop the people who are pouring itching powder on us. And at first I was pessimistic 'cause I thought, "Okay, this, these forms of disruption to our attention are just inherent to social media. Social media ain't going away. Ugh, we're in real trouble." But actually, when I spoke to the people at the heart of this machinery, they explained to me that that is wrong, right? And there's a historical analogy that I think helps us to understand it. In the 19-- which was explained to me by Jaron Lanier, a brilliant Silicon Valley designer and musician.

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee29:14

      Yeah, he was in, uh, The Social Dilemma as well, wasn't he?

   5. JHJohann Hari29:17

      Love Jaron.

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee29:18

      Yeah.

   7. JHJohann Hari29:18

      Great guy. Great guy. I went to his house to interview him. Um, so Jaron pointed out this historical analogy that I then looked into a lot, which is in the 1970s, lots of people painted their houses with lead paint, right? And actually, most people had cars that took leaded petrol. And then it was discovered that in breathing in lead is devastating for children's ability to focus and pay attention. It radically lowers their IQ. It's awful. And so what did we do? We did not ban paint and petrol, right? You've got a house that's been painted, so have I. You know, uh, you drive a car that has petrol in it. What we did is we banned the lead in the petrol, and there's an analogy with how we can think about the factors that are destroying our attention, our individual attention, and our collective attention in social media. Now, there's a degree to which the invention of the smartphone would've increased distraction and disruption to some degree. But what we ended up with were models that were maximally designed to hack-

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee30:13

      Yeah

   9. JHJohann Hari30:13

      ... and invade your attention, right? Now, there are different models that we could choose that we can make these companies adopt. I spent a lot of time talking about this with many people, but one of them was Jef Raskin, who designed a key aspect of how the internet works. His, his dad, Jeff Raskin, was the guy who, um, designed the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. And Jef said to me, "It's a very simple solution here. You ban the current business model," right? So you take the current business model, which is all these social media sites, their model is surveil you, surveil you Build up a profile of you and sell your attention to the highest bidder, right? That's their business model. He says, "Just ban it. We don't allow leaded paint." There's all sorts of things as society we just say, "This is too harmful. We don't allow it." And I'm saying to Aza and lots of the other people, "Okay, but what happens when I open Facebook the day after a ban? Does it just say, 'Gone fishing,'" right? And they're like, "No." What happens then is they would have to go to a different business model, and there are all sorts of different business models they can adopt. Uh, to give you two obvious ones that everyone listening has some experience with, one is a subscription model, right? Could be that we pay 50p a month to be on Facebook, right? Or it could be a model very close to where we are now. There is a sewer. Everyone watching and listening, you're close to a sewer. Before we had sewers, we had feces in the street, and we had outbreaks of cholera. So we built sewers. We paid together to build sewers, and we own the sewers together 'cause we don't wanna go back to that world, right? Now, it may be that just like we own the sewage pipes together, we decide we want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the attentional and political equivalents of cholera. There's all sorts of different models, whether it's subscription, uh, public ownership, independent of the government. There's a whole range of ways we could do this. But the most important thing to understand is once we do that, the incentives when it comes to your attention can completely change. The incentive at the moment for all the social media companies has to be, doesn't matter whether they're run by nice people or horrible people, the incentive has to be, "How do I invade your attention? How do I keep and take as much of it as possible-

   10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee32:14

       Yeah

   11. JHJohann Hari32:14

       ... and sell it," right? Once you're no longer the product, once you're the customer, whether you're the subscriber or the owner collectively, the incentives completely change. Suddenly, instead of it being designed to hack your attention, it has to figure out, "Well, what does Rangan want? Oh, Rangan wants to be able to meet up with his friends. Let's introduce a button telling him where his friends are."

   12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee32:33

       Yeah.

   13. JHJohann Hari32:33

       "Rangan wants to be able to focus. Okay, let's redesign this in all sorts of ways which we can envision now," and that these people I'm talking about talk about, so that it's designed not to be a vacuum sucking out your attention, but a trampoline pushing your attention back into the world, right?

   14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee32:48

       Yeah.

   15. JHJohann Hari32:49

       But to get there, you have to change the business model. There is no way inside-- There is currently a fundamental clash between their business model and our-

   16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee32:59

       Yeah

   17. JHJohann Hari32:59

       ... desire to pay attention. Our distraction is their fuel, right?

   18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee33:03

       Yeah.

   19. JHJohann Hari33:03

       We need to break that connection, and I can talk about how we could do it, it practically as well, how we can all achieve that. Um, so it's important to talk about the individual things we can do, but we've got to talk about-

   20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee33:12

       Yeah

   21. JHJohann Hari33:12

       ... these bigger factors.

   22. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee33:13

       It's, what's it called? The attention economy, right?

   23. JHJohann Hari33:15

       Yeah.

   24. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee33:15

       That human attention is the product now.

   25. JHJohann Hari33:17

       Yeah.

   26. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee33:18

       Right? Was it not the, was it Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, who said, "We're competing with sleep," or, "Sleep is our only competitor"?

   27. JHJohann Hari33:26

       Yeah.

   28. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee33:26

       Something like that.

   29. JHJohann Hari33:27

       Yeah.

   30. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee33:28

       Which maybe was said in jest, but actually [chuckles] is, there's, there's some real alarming truth, isn't there? And, and I think, you know, Johann, as I, as I hear you talk, it, it's so clear that money is what realistically is what makes a lot of the world go round. So if the way that these companies are making money is based on having more and more of your attention, it, it, it's always gonna be like that. It, there's no way that will change unless they can make money in a different way. Because if they can make money a different way, it's like, "Oh, we don't need to, uh, ruin people's relationships, hijack their attention, get rid of their focus, steal their time away from their children, their hobbies, oh, because that's not gonna make us money." And that really is going to be that sort of societal change. And so part of the problem, I think, I think about this a lot. I'm, like, I'm a creator. I use these platforms. Um, the way I use them, I'm quite-- I'd like to think I'm intentional about. Um, but we're used to free, right? People are used to free. In this age of the internet, right, we are used to free. We want all our information. We want free news, free articles, free, uh, podcasts, free YouTube videos. And I think many of us don't realize, maybe there's a slow realization now that actually if you ain't paying, [chuckles] you know, as they say in the social media, you're, you're the product. Would you agree with that?
8. 35:11 – 40:21

   Why multitasking fails: the brain’s limits, switching costs, and measurable performance drops

   1. JHJohann Hari35:11

      It's coming at an enormous cost. And one of the people who helped me to understand this actually, uh, h- both his research and, and meeting him, it's an amazing guy named Professor Earl Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. I went to interview him at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And he said to me, "Look, there's one thing you need to understand about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one thing at a time." That's it, right? This is a fundamental fact about the human brain. The human brain has not significantly changed in 40,000 years. It's not gonna change on any timeframe we're gonna see. You can only think about one thing at once. But we have fallen for a mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at the same time, bit like my godson. But what happens when Professor Miller's colleagues get people into labs and test this? They look at, well, what happens when people think they're doing lots of things at once? And what they discover is, in fact, you're not doing lots of things at once. You're juggling between them. Your consciousness papers over it, gives a seamless impression of consciousness, but actually you're juggling very rapidly between them. So let's say, for example, I've left it in your kitchen, but I've got my phone over there, right? Let's imagine when you were talking, I just glanced at my text, right? My text. I've taken out my phone and glanced at my text. It feels like, oh, I can still listen to Rangan. It's, it's one second to glance at my text. But what happens is I'm focused on you. I glance at my text, and my brain refocuses. Oh, my friend Rob's texted me. Oh, his mom's got out of hospital. Right. And then I have to refocus on you, right? And it turns out this refocusing takes a significant amount-

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee36:41

      Yeah

   3. JHJohann Hari36:41

      ... of your mental bandwidth, and that's just one switch, right? And it comes with a whole series of costs that have been shown in labs. So one is, it just takes a certain amount of your brain power to do switching. Imagine I switch to text and then I'm like, "Oh, what was on Facebook? And what's on the TV in the corner over there? And what's..." You can see how that begins to jam up my, my mental bandwidth. Another way is when you're switching a lot, you start to make mistakes, and then you have to go back and correct your mistakes. That takes a certain amount of your time. Another effect that you get when you switch tasks a lot is an effect on your memory. To convert your experiences into memories takes a certain amount of mental power, and if that power is instead being deployed on constantly switching between things, actually you just remember less of what you experience.

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee37:22

      Yeah.

   5. JHJohann Hari37:22

      The fourth effect is that you, you become much less creative, because creativity requires the space to let your mind wander. When you let your mind wander, you think back over things without e- even feeling effortful. You think back over the experiences you've had. You know, you connect different things together. That's how new ideas pop together. That's where creativity comes from. If your mind is jammed up with switching, you, you become significantly-

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee37:45

      Yeah

   7. JHJohann Hari37:45

      ... less creative. But it was striking to me when I, when I first heard him say that, I thought, "That sounds persuasive, but this must be a fairly small effect, right?" Then I looked at some of the research on this. It's quite striking. I'll just give you two quick examples. Hewlett Packard, the printer company, commissioned someone to do a small study where they split a group of their workers into two, and the first group was told, "Just do your task and we won't interrupt you." And the second group was told, "Do your task," and they were, they were interrupted by texts and emails. Heavily interrupted. And then at the end of this, they tested the IQ of both groups. The group who'd only done one thing at a time tested on average 10 IQ points higher than the group that had been distracted. To give you a sense of how big 10 IQ points is, if you and me sat here now and got stoned together, our IQs would drop by five points. So-

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee38:34

      Wow

   9. JHJohann Hari38:34

      ... being chronically distracted is twice as bad in the short term for your IQ as getting stoned. You'd be better off sitting at your desk, um, doing one thing at a time and smoking a spliff than sitting at your desk trying to do lots and lots of things and being constantly interrupted and not smoking a spliff. So another study, uh, not that either is good, uh, for your attention and concentration obviously. Um, the, the-- There was another study at Carnegie Mellon University. They got 138 students and they split them into two groups. They gave them all the same exam. First group was told, uh, "Just do the exam in normal exam conditions."

   10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee39:07

       Yeah.

   11. JHJohann Hari39:08

       And the second group was told, um, "You can have your phone on and you can send and receive texts." Now you'd think the second group would do better 'cause they could've cheated, right? They could've texted someone and asked for the answers. In fact, the second group did on average 20% worse, because being interrupted, being disrupted ruins your ability to pay attention and really damages your ability to think clearly, and we are all losing that 20%. This is why Professor Miller said to me, we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation at the moment. And if you look at it, one of the things that was really striking to me, the, one of the implications of that, let's say you look at your screen time at the end of the day on your iPhone, and it says you spent three hours that day on the phone. If those three hours were spread throughout the day, in fact you were losing way more than three hours in stolen focus.

   12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee39:55

       Yeah.

   13. JHJohann Hari39:56

       Because, uh, this guy called Michael Posner did a study that found if you're interrupted, it takes on average 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus you had prior to your interruption. But most of us are almost never getting those 23 clear minutes.

   14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee40:09

       Yeah. Uh, it, it just-- We're, we're operating, so many of us, as a kind of low-grade version of who we could be.

   15. JHJohann Hari40:18

       Exact- That's a brilliant way of putting it. That's exactly right.

9. 40:21 – 1:00:24

   The Provincetown experiment: radical pre-commitment to break the cycle

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee40:21

      You know, we- we've, we're downgrading who we are, and we're so used to it that we think it's normal, right? But it's not normal. I think it's a great time for you to tell me about the eight-foot chair-

   2. JHJohann Hari40:34

      [laughs]

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee40:35

      ... on the beach in Provincetown. Because when I read that yesterday afternoon, I was sitting in bed just reading it, and I, I just stopped and I-- It just made me smile. It made me think. I sent you a text. I said, "I'm just thinking about that eight-foot chair on the beach."

   4. JHJohann Hari40:51

      [laughs]

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee40:52

      Uh, so tell me about that-

   6. JHJohann Hari40:52

      Yeah

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee40:53

      ... 'cause I think it plays in beautifully to this.

   8. JHJohann Hari40:55

      So yeah, when I came back from Memphis, I was so appalled at myself 'cause I realized how much of my anger at my godson was anger at myself, right? I could feel so many things that were so important to me, like reading books is such a crucial part of who I am and how I engage with the world. I could feel those things becoming harder, and I just thought, "Okay, I have to just break this." I was still in that psychology of thinking about this as primarily a personal failing. So I decided to do something really drastic. It was n- not long after I came back from Memphis, just a few weeks, that I was suddenly like, "Right, I'm gonna do this." So I announced to all my friends triumphantly that I was gonna go away for three months with no internet-connected phone and no laptop that could get online. I was like, "I've had it. I'm through. I can't-- I'm just tired of being wired in this way."

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee41:45

      What, what did they say?

   10. JHJohann Hari41:47

       Uh, it was a mixture of some people were envious. Some people were quite panicked for me. They kept saying things like, "But what if the..." 'Cause I was saying, "I'm not gonna take a smartphone." They'll be like, "But what if there's an emergency and people need to contact you?" And I was like, "I'm not the president of the United States. What's gonna hap- What, someone's gonna invade Ukraine and I have to give orders, do I?"

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee42:04

       [laughs]

   12. JHJohann Hari42:04

       Like it's, I'm not that important, right? What's, what's gonna happen? I, I had a-- It's funny. To, to buy an-- I bought the only phone you can buy in the US that can't get onto the internet. Ironically, I had to buy it online, and it's a, it's a giant, it's called the Jitterbug, and it's, uh-- I can still picture it. And it's a giant, um... It's got huge buttons, and it's designed for old people. H- And it's got an emergency button on it for if you fall over, it'll call the nearest hospital immediately.

   13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee42:28

       [laughs]

   14. JHJohann Hari42:29

       Uh, so I thought, "Oh, great. If I, you know, there you go. Emergency. If I fall over, I've got that option." Um, so I rented a little part of a beach house in a place called Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. Um, and I left my phone and my, uh, my smartphone and my- ... laptop with my friend in Boston, and I, I got the boat over. And this is an extreme-- This was a very extreme form of a technique, a personal technique people can use called pre-commitment. So pre-commitment is a technique. All of us have goals for the future we want to achieve that we know we might crack on. So for me, a very simple one would be, I don't want to eat Pringles all the time because they make me fat, right? So what I used to do is buy Pringles and go, "I'll put them in the cupboard and I just won't eat them," right? Which, of course, everyone who's ever bought Pringles knows is physically impossible. Actually, my nephew told me recently that I look weirdly like the Pringles man, which is actually true. But, um, but so the, a form of pre-commitment is most very simple. When you're in the supermarket, don't buy the Pringles, right? So you're planning ahead, thinking about your own fallibility, and you go, "Okay, I'm gonna pre-commit. I'm just not gonna have Pringles in my house," right? To make me look slightly less like the Pringles man. Um, this was an extreme form of pre-commitment, right? Uh, and there's all sorts of forms of pre-commitment we can talk about people can integrate into their everyday lives that can help them. But, um, so I remember taking the ferry from, from Boston to Provincetown and feeling this incredible kind of lightness, and I found myself thinking about the first time I ever saw a mobile phone. I c- I could picture exactly where it was. It was 1994, 'cause I know how old I was, and I was on the top deck of the 340 bus in Wealdstone in North London coming home from school, and someone had a mobile phone, and he was talking on it, and everyone turned and looked at him, and he was talking really loudly, and someone said to him, we broke the, the first rule of public transport in Britain, where we, someone addressed a stranger and just said, "Mate, you're a wanker." Right? And that's how we felt when mobile phones first arrived. And I remember the very first email I ever sent as well and feeling this weird anticlimax. It was in 1999. I remember thinking, "God, if you'd told me then that when I was, you know, 40, I would-- some mutant form of these two things would be so powerful over us that I would be fleeing on a boat, [chuckles] I would've thought you were completely deranged," right? It was a very strange thing. So I arrived in Provincetown, and I was there for three months, and it, it, it was really transformative for me in all sorts of ways, that experience.

   15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee45:03

       Yeah.

   16. JHJohann Hari45:06

       I mean, part of it was just as simple as, um, when I arrived-- I mean, a lot of the things that happened there only made sense to me 'cause I interviewed all these experts afterwards. But if you think about it in relation to what Earl Miller told me at MIT about how destr- disruption and distraction destroy your ability to focus and pay attention, there's something about, for the first time in more than a decade, I was just doing one thing at a time.

   17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee45:31

       Yeah.

   18. JHJohann Hari45:31

       Right? Just an incredible mental relief of doing one thing. Even just something as simple as I got the news once a day 'cause I went to the little shop there called Essentials, and I bought The New York Times, and I read it, and then I didn't know what happened in the news until the next day, right? And that summer, there were a lot of big news events, and I thought, "God, normally I'm absorbing this drip feed that causes panic to me."

   19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee45:55

       Yeah.

   20. JHJohann Hari45:55

       And so there were, there were all sorts of initial forms of relief, uh, and lots of other things that we can talk about.

   21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee46:01

       Y-y-you, you know, th-this, your, your experience in Provincetown, as I read it, I imagine a lot of people will read it and go, "Oh, if only. If only." I think people, we know what constantly being connected is doing to, to us. Everyone does, really. You know, m-many of us do, right? There, there were so many aspects of that. You know, one, one of the key points I took from it is that y- I think you said somewhere, Johann, that you went there to learn how to focus, but you ended up increasing your ability to think?

   22. JHJohann Hari46:46

       It was a really odd thing because I had all sorts of ups and downs in Provincetown, but there was a, a moment it, it-- This really changed, especially when I learned more about it later, this phenomenon. It changed how I think about what attention actually is. Um, so I-- There's, there's a kind of metaphor that has dominated how people think about attention in the Western world for more than 100 years now. It was created by a man named William James, the kind of father of modern American psychology, and he said attention is like a spotlight, right? So the kind of definition of attention that he gave is attention is your ability to selectively attend to things in your environment. So you think about where we're sitting now, the podcast studio where we're sitting, right? I'm looking at you, you're looking at me. You're-- We're paying attention to each other's words.

   23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee47:29

       Yeah.

   24. JHJohann Hari47:29

       But if we could zone out a bit, I could be thinking about the cameras over there. I could look at them. How do they work? I could think about your colleague who's sitting in the corner, very nice. She's looking at the laptop and figuring out how to do it. There's plants behind you. There's all sorts of things I could be thinking about in my immediate environment, but I'm selectively attending to you. My spotlight is on you and your questions and answering them as best I can, right? So that is, and that is an absolutely crucial form of attention, and that form of attention is being disrupted in ways we've been talking about and many other ways that we haven't got to yet. And that's what I thought, I thought that's all attention was, right? So I thought-- So when I went to Provincetown, a big part of why I went was I wanted to read lots more books, right? I had this big pile of books, and I did in fact read lots of books. I read War and Peace. I read all these things I've been putting off for ages. Um, about a month into it, maybe a little bit more, maybe five weeks, I started, um, I started taking these long walks. Up to then, when I went for walks, I'd brought with me an iPod, which is funny 'cause I remember when iPods came out, they seemed so futuristic, and people would-

   25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee48:30

       Yeah

   26. JHJohann Hari48:30

       ... like look at it like I had something from Noah's Ark or something. 'Cause, well, obviously 'cause it wasn't internet connected, but I'd load it, I'd loaded, put loads of audiobooks onto it. Every time I put it on, I, I had to put on my headphones as well, my noise-canceling headphones, and the headphones would always say Searching for Johann's iPhone. Searching for Johann's iPhone. And then in a sort of sad-sounding voice it would go, "iPhone cannot be found." And I was like, "God, that is how it feels," right?

   27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee48:54

       [laughing]

   28. JHJohann Hari48:54

       But, um, it-- And in fact, I think it might even have said, "Connection cannot be made," which is an even more sinister-sounding sentence. But, um, and then one day, I just thought, "Oh, do you know what? I'm not gonna take my, the tenth audiobook of the month. I'm not... Leave it. I'm gonna leave my audiobook. I'm just gonna go for a walk." And Provincetown has these incredible beaches, and I just walked. I ended up walking for, like, five hours, and I suddenly-- And I'd started taking these longer and longer walks every day, where I was not deploying my spotlight at all, right?

   29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee49:21

       Yeah.

   30. JHJohann Hari49:21

       I was just letting my mind wander completely freely, and I suddenly felt much more creative and open. All sorts of things were combining in my mind in interesting ways.
10. 1:00:24 – 1:02:32

    A second kind of attention: mind-wandering, creativity, and restoring the ‘full symphony’ of thought

    1. JHJohann Hari1:00:24

       I could read like I did when I was in my early 20s, but all, basically all day if I wanted to with-- and retain so much more of what I was learning. So you're absolutely right when you talk about there's two layers to this. There's the personal and there's the collective, right? And people often try and play them off against each other.

    2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:00:40

       Yeah.

    3. JHJohann Hari1:00:40

       And I'm just like, obviously we need to do both, and obviously some people have a greater margin to make personal changes-

    4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:00:46

       Yeah

    5. JHJohann Hari1:00:46

       ... than others. And I'm conscious, of course, uh, so when I talk about Provincetown, I, I try to be very careful about this because to a lot of people- Hearing me say that will feel a bit like as if I've walked up to a homeless-- If they think that that's the advice I'm giving them is to do that, they'll feel a bit like I've walked up to a homeless person in the street and said, "Mate, do you know what would make you feel much better would be if you went into The Ritz over there and you had a really nice steak? Don't you think that'd make you feel better?" And the homeless person will entirely understand and go, "Well, screw you. I'd love to do that. I can't do that."

    6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:01:16

       Yeah.

    7. JHJohann Hari1:01:16

       And at the moment, we live in a gap between what many of us want to do and what many of us feel we can do. And together, we can close that gap. So some of that is about empowering people in their everyday life to know more about these factors that are invading our attention, of which tech is only one of the 12, um, and, and, and empower them to fight back at a personal level, and there's all sorts of techniques. I, I'm gonna give you a very simple example. I have, um, in my office and in my flat, a, what's called a K Safe. It's very simple. It's a little plastic safe. You take the lid off, you put your phone in it, you put the lid on, you turn a dial at the top, and you, it'll lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a week, right? Every day I lock my phone away for four hours a day. Every day, just so I can get clear-

    8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02:00

       Really? Every day?

    9. JHJohann Hari1:02:01

       Every day without fail. Not at the moment 'cause I'm doing book promotion, but in normal-

    10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02:03

        Can, can you hack it if you need to? If you need-

    11. JHJohann Hari1:02:05

        I mean, if there was a fire, I could smash it. I could just throw it on the floor or-

    12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02:08

        No, but there's no easy way to put a code in and go, "Oh, you know what?"

    13. JHJohann Hari1:02:10

        No, no, there's no way you can get it out. I mean, you could smash it and buy a new K Safe. It wouldn't be that difficult to smash it if I just-

    14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02:14

        How do you spell that? K-A-

    15. JHJohann Hari1:02:15

        Just K hyphen Safe.

    16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02:17

        Wow.

    17. JHJohann Hari1:02:17

        Right? Uh, so there's, uh, I'm gonna send you one to thank you for doing this interview.

    18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02:21

        [laughs]

    19. JHJohann Hari1:02:21

        Uh, so there's, so there's all sorts of personal techniq- techniques like that, right? Everyone should buy a K Safe, right?

    20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02:26

        Can I give one to my wife?

    21. JHJohann Hari1:02:27

        I will definitely-

    22. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02:28

        [laughs]

    23. JHJohann Hari1:02:28

        Exactly. You can hand it to her without judgment.

    24. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02:30

        She might edit that out, actually.

    25. JHJohann Hari1:02:31

        [laughs]

11. 1:02:32 – 1:07:36

    Practical defenses and collective protections: KSafe tools and the ‘right to disconnect’

    1. JHJohann Hari1:02:32

       Um, so there's definitely, uh, all sorts of personal techniques like that. But a lot of people, again, will hear that and go, "Right, but I can't do that." So I wanna talk about a collective solution that would help make it possible for many people to do that. It's a collective solution we can all fight for together. Um, in France in 2018, they had a big problem with what they called le burnout, which I don't think I need to translate.

    2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02:55

       [laughs]

    3. JHJohann Hari1:02:56

       And the French government, under pressure from trade unions, uh, got a guy called Bruno Mettling, I apologize for my appalling accent to all French people, um, who's the head of Orange, their biggest telecom company, one of the biggest, and they basically said, "Figure out what's going on," right? So he does this commission, he looks at all sorts of things, and he discovered 35% of French workers felt they could never unplug because their boss could text them at any time of the day or night, and they would get in trouble if they didn't respond, right? So I remember when we were kids, the only people who were on call were the prime minister and doctors, and even doctors weren't on call all the time, right? Now, almost half the economy is on call, right? Which means you can never just totally switch off and spend time with your kids. You can never just be in the bath and completely relax. You can-- you wanna read a book, but you're being pulled away by this fear, right? So the f- Mettling recommended, and the French government introduced into law, very simple reform. Everyone in France has a legal right to disconnect. Just means two things. One is you have a right to written and defined work hours, and you have a right to never have to check your phone or take work calls outside those legally defined work hours. So I went to Paris to look into this. Big companies get fined. When I was there just before, Rentokil got fined 70,000 euros 'cause they told off a worker for not checking his email an hour after he'd finished work. 70,000 euros straight away fined, right? So you can see how that's a collective reform that won't ha- won't just be handed down. We have to fight for it together. But if we get that, that's a social change that makes it possible for people to begin to make these individual changes. 'Cause at the moment, there's no point giving someone in that position, um, a self-help talk if they literally can't do it, right? Now, there will be some things almost everyone can do, but that's a really big thing, not being able to never check your phone. We've got to free people up to do the things they need to do. We've got to have, um, in the same way that obviously women had to have and still have to have a feminist movement to demand their right to their bodies and their lives, I think we need to have-

    4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:04:56

       Yeah

    5. JHJohann Hari1:04:56

       ... a movement to protect our attention collectively, right? To take on the forces that are stealing our attention and reclaim it from them. And that's, goes way beyond tech, right? Bosses, that's not a tech thing, right? I mean, obviously the smartphone has enabled it, but that's about our bosses interfering in our lives and effectively getting us all to work overtime all the time.

    6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:05:14

       Yeah. I, I, I love those kind of systemic solutions. I, I give lots of talks to companies on wellness and how to change culture at work, and quite a few times I talk to senior management and say, "Listen, guys, if you wanna send an email at 10:00 p.m. to people who work underneath you or who report to you," is probably a better way of, of saying it, um, maybe that works for you. Make sure you tell them clearly that they're not expected to look at it, that you don't expect a response. And there's even these programs now. You talk about collective, um, you know, collective action we can do. There are programs that I think some companies now bring in where-- 'cause some people like to work at different times, right? You know, we've got the freedom now with the internet. One of the great things about it, which again, can go the other way and interfere with other aspects of our life, is that while people do have a bit of autonomy as to when they do certain things, so someone may want to finish off their work emails one evening, and they can press send, but it doesn't go out. It doesn't, it doesn't get delivered to the, uh, colleague's inbox till, you know, 8:30 the following morning. So they're not even gonna see it, even if they are looking. So I think those things are, are, are pretty good. I, I find that idea of a K Safe interesting because on one level it's kinda like we want our smartphones, and again, there's so many benefits of them [chuckles] but we want them so much that we're not gonna downgrade and get a dumb phone or be more intentional with our use, which I know is very, very difficult. We're physically gonna buy something to put it in a bank, but we can't-- Do you know what I mean?

    7. JHJohann Hari1:06:57

       Yeah.

    8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:06:57

       It's kind of something- I think it says something about where we've got to as a society, doesn't it?

    9. JHJohann Hari1:07:02

       I think it, it, it reminds me a lot of what Tristan Harris said when he testified before the Senate. He said, "Look, you can try having self-control, but every time you open these apps-

    10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:07:10

        Yeah, I get it

    11. JHJohann Hari1:07:10

        ... there are 10,000 engineers at the other side of the screen trying to break your self-control." So we have to have both those mechanisms. Or think about y-y-- essentially you were talking about talking to bosses. So there's l- there's lots of factors in the way we currently work, and actually this begins with our kids at school. The way our schools work is destroying children's attention.

    12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:07:29

        Oh, man.

    13. JHJohann Hari1:07:29

        We could talk about that, but-

    14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:07:30

        We could do two hours on that alone.

    15. JHJohann Hari1:07:32

        Yeah, I know. This makes me so angry.

    16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:07:34

        A lot of thoughts on it.

    17. JHJohann Hari1:07:34

        Yeah. The last quar- as you know, the last quarter of the book is about-

    18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:07:36

        Yeah

12. 1:07:36 – 1:21:40

    Work redesign to restore attention: four-day weeks, reduced stress, and better productivity

    1. JHJohann Hari1:07:36

       ... how we're destroying our kids' attention, and actually tech really isn't the biggest part of that. But the, the, um, in terms of bosses, it's really interesting 'cause I was thinking as you were saying that about an amazing man I got to know, um, named Andrew Barnes, who did a really interesting experiment with his company. Andrew is British originally, and he worked in the City of London, the financial sector, um, in 1987, just after they deregulated all, so the big banks. So you remember, like-

    2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:08:04

       Yeah

    3. JHJohann Hari1:08:04

       ... from when we were kids, people shouting each other across the, you know, stock exchange floor going, "Sell! Sell! Sell!" right? With big hairsprayed hair. He was that guy, right? One of them. And in that world, um, as they would have put it, this is not the way I would put it, you were, you know, a wuss if you came to work later than 7:30 in the, in the morning, and you were a pussy if you left before 7:30 p.m., right? And so for half the year, Andrew would leave for work in the dark and get home in the dark. And, uh, he, he said to me he missed the feeling of the sun on his face. He never saw his children. He had to build a relationship with his children many years later. It was exhausting. It hugely depleted him. And he made this really bold decision to just leave, right? But a lot of people stayed. But even after he left, he, he went to Australia and then New Zealand and built a very successful series of companies. But he always remembered that feeling of just exhaustion and depletion. [lips smack] And one day in 2017, he was on a plane, and he was reading a business magazine, and he just happened to read this, uh, uh, a report about a study that showed the average worker sits at their desk for eight hours a day but is only actually focused on their work for three hours a day. And he was really struck by this, right? He thought, "God, that, that's, you know, that's bad for everyone," right?

    4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:09:18

       Yeah.

    5. JHJohann Hari1:09:18

       It's bad for the individual because their life is passing them by. It's bad for the employer, you know, they're not getting good value. And he had an idea. He thought about the exhaustion he'd experienced, and Andrew had an idea. He said, "Well, if this is true of my workers," he ran a company called Perpetual Guardian. They manage wills and trusts. It employs 240 people. Andrew asked himself, "Well, if that's true that my workers are exhausted and therefore can't focus, if I gave-- if we moved to a four-day week, but we had exactly the same pay," so we went from five days a week to four days a week. "If that increased the amount they paid attention just 45 minutes a day, then we'd be-- it would have paid for itself, the experiment," right?

    6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:09:58

       Yeah.

    7. JHJohann Hari1:09:58

       It would have-- we'd be producing as much in four days as five. So he organized a phone call with his whole company, and he announces, "Good news, everyone. We're gonna move from five days a week to four days a week. You don't have to-- I, I'm gonna pay you exactly the same. We're gonna try it for three months and see what happens." His head of HR literally fell over, right? And people were like, "Is this some kind of trick? What's going on here?" So I s- I interviewed everyone who worked in one of their o-

    8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:10:18

       He needed, he needed your phone that if you, if you fall over-

    9. JHJohann Hari1:10:21

       [laughing]

    10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:10:21

        ... you can press the button, right?

    11. JHJohann Hari1:10:22

        The Jitterbug. Exactly. If only he'd had the Jitterbug, how much safer he would have been. But the, um-- So I interviewed everyone who worked in their office in Rotorua, which is a t- little town in New Zealand, uh, which weirdly stinks of farts 'cause they've got a lot of sulfur. But very nice town other than the absolutely abhorrent smell. Um, and it was fascinating talking to the people there about how it changed their lives. In some ways, what they said was just very obvious. So Amber, who worked there, she took her daughter out of daycare one day, just spent an extra day every week with her daughter. Um, Eleanor, who worked there, she just slept much more. Uh, another one of them just did a lot of decompressing doing DIY. So this experiment was studied very carefully by, um, Dr. Helen Delaney at the University of Auckland Business School. And what they found was, um, productivity, attention at work went up by 30%. They achieved more in four days than they had in five.

    12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:11:17

        Wow.

    13. JHJohann Hari1:11:17

        Right? Because stress went down, social media use went down. One of the things people spent more of their time doing was sleeping more. I'm sure we'll talk about that. Absolutely essential for attention. Um, and so they've now moved to-- This is now permanent. They now permanently work four days a week. And in a way, I remember when I first learned about that, and I interviewed Andrew and all these people, thinking, "That feels almost too good to be true." Then I went to Stanford to interview Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who's a expert on organizational behavior. And he said to me, "Look, if you wanna understand why that w- if you wanna understand why that worked, it's kind of obvious. Ask any sports fan, do you want your team to go onto the pitch absolutely exhausted? No. You want your team to go onto the pitch really well-rested, really up for the game. Why would it be different for everything else, right?" And it, it was-- And of course, there's been, now been lots of experiments in a four-day week, and they pretty consistently find the same thing.

    14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:12:10

        Yeah.

    15. JHJohann Hari1:12:10

        Um, Microsoft in Japan went to a four-day week. Their productivity went up by 40%. Toyota in Gothenburg in Sweden went from their engineers having an eight-day, eight-hour day to a six-hour day, and they produced 125% more than they had before. Um, so you can-

    16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:12:27

        Do, do we know the impact on their happiness and their well-being? Because we often, it speaks to what we were saying about tech, we often have to justify these things, don't we, through the lens of the capitalist culture. It's gonna make more money. It's gonna make you more productive, right? And of course, for a business, if they're gonna pay people the same, they have to know that it's not costing them. But if we just extend that, I don't know if you looked at the research. Well, yes, they're more productive. They've got an extra day off now a week.

    17. JHJohann Hari1:12:53

        I think you're absolutely right that as it happens, this made them more productive. But even if it didn't make them more productive- I would be in favor of it.

    18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:13:01

        Yeah.

    19. JHJohann Hari1:13:01

        Right? Because actually, life is not all about work.

    20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:13:04

        Yeah.

    21. JHJohann Hari1:13:04

        Right? And even if they were less productive, and the evidence shows quite clearly they weren't, but even if they were, life is not to be atrophied on cons- work is an important part of life and a hugely valuable part of life, but it is not everything. And especially since we're now all on call all the time, this has hugely imbalanced the way we live. And, and I find this very challenging. It's... You know, I work very obsessively.

    22. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:13:28

        What do you do when writing a book? 'Cause you, you write incredibly detailed, in-depth books, right? What's your process? When you are at your best as a creator, as a writer, when you're just sort of, "I've got it. I'm nailing it. I'm just-- I just wanna keep typing," what does that kind of day look like for you?

    23. JHJohann Hari1:13:46

        So it's interesting. This relates to another thing that I learned a lot about. Um, I kind of understood this part of my behavior much better after I'd interviewed the, the leading expert in the world on this. So for me, when work is so much about getting into a flow state, and everyone listening will have experienced a flow state at some point in your life.

    24. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:14:06

        Yeah.

    25. JHJohann Hari1:14:06

        So a flow state is when you're doing something that is meaningful to you, and you just get really into it, and in that moment, time seems to fall away, your ego seems to fall away, and attention comes effortlessly, right? You're just in it. And, um, I interviewed the leading expert on flow states, the man who first coined the phrase, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, uh, in Claremont in California, who sadly died recently.

    26. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:14:30

        Yeah. Wow, you got to interview him. I've written about him loads like you.

    27. JHJohann Hari1:14:32

        Lovely man.

    28. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:14:32

        It's just, you got to meet the guy. Wow.

    29. JHJohann Hari1:14:34

        Such a great man. And it was th- I think-

    30. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:14:35

        Ah.
13. 1:21:40 – 1:43:31

    Flow states and meaningful goals: how deep focus becomes effortless

    1. JHJohann Hari1:21:40

       And this is one of the ways in which what we're doing in our school system is such a disaster. 'Cause what we've done is we've restructured the school system even more than it was before around meaningless and arbitrary tests, right? I remember at school when you had to learn for tests, and you'd say, "Why are we learning this?" And they'd say things like, "Because you have to," or, "Because there'll be a test on it." And I'd be like, pfft. Uh, when I was a kid, I could read at home all day. In school, I couldn't read. I would've been diagnosed with ADHD today 'cause it was just meaningless to me.

    2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:22:10

       Yeah.

    3. JHJohann Hari1:22:10

       I hated it. I was like, I will, I refuse to learn something I, where I'm not told what the meaning of this is, right?

    4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:22:16

       Yeah.

    5. JHJohann Hari1:22:16

       Uh, but we've restructured the entire school system. So in 2002, George W. Bush passed a thing called the No Child Left Behind Act, which massively restructured American schools around rote learning and testing. And in the four years that followed, ADHD diagnoses went up by 23%. Children can't pay attention to things that are meaningless to them. We've created an arbitrary school system that is, um, extraordinarily boring to them. It's one of many changes in childhood that have damaged children's attention. It's only one, and it's only one of the harms in, in, in education. But does that ring true to you, Rowan?

    6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:22:51

       So, so much. I mean, I struggle with the school system. Now, before I give my opinion, like, I wanna just acknowledge that kind of teachers-

    7. JHJohann Hari1:23:04

       Are heroes

    8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:23:04

       ... are heroes.

    9. JHJohann Hari1:23:05

       And they were the first people to warn about this. They were the people who pushed back first against this arbitrary testing. They were the heroes of fighting against this.

    10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:23:12

        Yes, I think-

    11. JHJohann Hari1:23:12

        And they're still fighting against it through their unions.

    12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:23:14

        A- and I think a lot of, you know, teachers are doing their very best-

    13. JHJohann Hari1:23:19

        Of course

    14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:23:19

        ... in a system, a lot of the time that's working against them. And of course, there are exceptions. There are pro- there are probably lots of schools who are, um, bucking the trends. But [sighs] we're not speaking about sleep yet, right? And I think this plays into this. So what I have seen in education through my kids but also through my friends' kids, uh, and I really feel that it, it does start in some primary schools, but in secondary schools as well. I'll tell you one thing I'm seeing at the moment is there's just too much pressure on kids, right? So there, there's a couple of things that really bother me about schools. Um, one is a fear-based approach to, you know, behavior, learning. Like, if you don't do this, we will punish you, right? I was even thinking-- I was talking to my wife the other day about detentions.

    15. JHJohann Hari1:24:22

        Ugh.

    16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:24:22

        It's like n- I mean, I grew up in a system where there were detentions. And, you know, the secondary school where my son goes, for example, there are detentions. And he's a bit freaked out sometimes about, "Oh, I don't wanna do something that's gonna get me in trouble, that get me in a detention." I'm thinking, w- how is that helpful for kids, right? How is that helpful? And I'm, I'm gonna invite a teacher, I'm gonna try and find a teacher to talk to on the show soon 'cause I wanna, I wanna hear another perspective on this, where what do people feel that detentions do? 'Cause I think it's like, well, if you don't do things the way we've said you're gonna do them, we are going to punish you. It's like, well, does that really work? You know, does fear, um- And potentially making you feel bad in front of your colleagues, which can potentially lead to shame and all kinds of other things. How helpful really is that? That's one thing that, that bothers me

    17. JHJohann Hari1:25:16

        But we know that anxiety and stress ruin your ability to focus-

    18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:25:19

        Okay

    19. JHJohann Hari1:25:19

        ... and pay attention, right?

    20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:25:20

        Yeah.

    21. JHJohann Hari1:25:21

        We know it for adults and kids.

    22. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:25:21

        If, if you're worried about it, um, how are you gonna be focusing properly? How are you gonna really be creative? How are you gonna get into flow, right? If part of your brain is worried about doing something wrong because then I'm going to get in trouble. So I think there's still a hangover from older ways of, uh, educating. And I'm looking at this through the lens of someone who's, you know, I've got 20 years experience as a medical doctor. I'm hugely passionate about health and wellbeing, like you write a lot about this kind of stuff. And the other thing that I've seen creep in over the past couple of years is tech. And I, you know, of course, there are benefits with technology, and, you know, you beautifully explain in the book how we can be using technology to help us, you know, enhance our humanness. But here's the problem I see, right? If kids are being-- if, if kids are coming back stressed out, they've got a ton of homework because it's important to do lots of homework and hit these targets when you're 11 or 12 for some reason. Um, and then your homework is either on a screen, or to look at it or to do it, you have to go onto your Google Classroom on a screen. Well, I know full well what looking at a screen in the evening does to your melatonin levels. This is a hormone in your body. It shifts it. It delays the onset. So if kids are looking at screens in the evening doing their homework, they are not going to sleep well. So they are going to be knackered the next day. They're gonna not be able to pay attention. They're more likely to get a detention. They're more likely to make poor food choices. They're gonna be bet- they're gonna be less able to emotionally regulate. So, you know, I'm going on a bit of a rant here. I don't mean to, but-

    23. JHJohann Hari1:27:15

        No, you're 100% right

    24. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:27:16

        ... I'm so passionate about this that I honestly don't feel sometimes that someone steps outside it and looking at the big picture going, "Wait a minute. What are the..." So when I see a patient, Johann, the way I approach it is, okay, there's all kinds of things that are going on, and I try and f- I try to think clearly and go, "Okay, Rangan, there's, there's infinite things that you could do with this patient, but what are the key upstream things that if you turn that lever-

    25. JHJohann Hari1:27:42

        Mm

    26. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:27:42

        ... you're gonna eliminate by default-

    27. JHJohann Hari1:27:45

        Mm

    28. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:27:45

        ... some of the downstream ones?" And I would say for a school, get the homework off the screens, right? Y- y- we're now, we're now in the, um, winter in the UK. It gets dark at 4:30, right? On an evolutionary level, as it gets dark, we don't wanna be looking at screens. But every kid who has homework on screens, right? And let's not even come into phones and potentially gaming in the evening, what that's doing, right? I, I'm not advocating we go back to times where screens don't exist, but I think these kids are young, right? W- we all want, all parents, all teachers want the best for their kids. Looking at screens in the evening, giving the homework on screens, it is absolutely not going to help them. And you, you, you, as a, as a culture, if you talk about that with your kids, if you say, "No, you know what? We don't need to give it in this way. We're gonna give the homework in the old-fashioned way," I think by default, without doing anything else, you improve sleep quality, you improve attention, you improve focus, and you probably reduce detentions as well.

    29. JHJohann Hari1:28:50

        You're totally right, but I would go even further. I would say in terms of looking at the big picture, let's look at the country in the world that has the most literate children and the lowest levels of diagnosed attention problems anywhere in the world. It's Finland. How does their school system work? Children in Finland don't go to school at all until they're seven.

    30. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:29:07

        Yeah.
14. 1:43:31 – 2:10:34

    Childhood under pressure: testing, fear-based schooling, screens, and the collapse of free play

    1. JHJohann Hari1:43:31

       Yeah, and there's-

    2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:43:31

       Culturally, we have to address that.

    3. JHJohann Hari1:43:32

       Exactly. And particularly for adults, there's healthy pressure and then there's stress. You and I experience healthy pressure around our work.

    4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:43:38

       Yeah.

    5. JHJohann Hari1:43:38

       It's great. I feel a little bit of pressure in this interview to do a good job. But-

    6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:43:41

       You're doing a great job, by the way.

    7. JHJohann Hari1:43:42

       Oh, thank you. There's a difference between that and, and, and stress, right? Um, which is where you feel overwhelmed by the pressure you experience. And, um- It was really interesting. I spent a lot of time talking to experts about stress and what we can do about, uh, do about this, and it was-- One of the people who most taught me about this was an amazing woman called Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, who's now the surgeon general of California, the most important medical officer in the state.

    8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:44:07

       She wrote a book on childhood trauma, right?

    9. JHJohann Hari1:44:08

       Yeah, The Deepest Well, yeah.

    10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:44:09

        Yeah.

    11. JHJohann Hari1:44:09

        Which is w- uh, Nadine is a completely amazing person. Um, and I spent a lot of time discussing stress with Nadine, and she made a kind of breakthrough on understanding this in relation to children. Now, the thing she was looking at was very extreme, but it, it helps us to understand milder forms of stress. So Nadine grew up in Palo Alto, and, um, every day when she left school, she felt this anxiety 'cause the way she would put it, she didn't know whether she was coming home to nice mom or scary mom because her mother was a, an amazing woman in many ways but had paranoid schizophrenia. And so you can imagine it was a very challenging childhood.

    12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:44:45

        Yeah.

    13. JHJohann Hari1:44:45

        And Nadine coped by being like a absolute grade A student. She went to Harvard, and then when she left Harvard, she went to work in Bayview, which is a very poor part of the San Francisco Bay Area, the poorest part, 'cause she wanted to give back. And, um, I mean, it's a really frightening area. You know, the very first day she's there, a 17-year-old got shot right next to her. Um, so there's a lot of stress and anxiety in Bayview through no fault of the people who live there. Um, and Nadine starts working with kids there. She's working in a clinic with kids, and she notices that their diagnoses of ADHD are just off the scale, like so much worse than in wealthy areas. She's like, "Well, what's going on here? This is-- We need to figure this out." And so Nadine's looking into it more and more, and she decided to do, uh, a, a study where she looked at, um, all the kids who worked there and assessed the level of trauma they'd experienced. They did very detailed interviewing and analysis of their backgrounds. And what she found is kids who were experiencing four severe forms of stress were 32.6 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than kids who were experiencing no forms of stress, right? No severe forms of stress. 32.6 times. I mean, that's a staggering figure. Subsequent studies have found-

    14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:45:59

        Yeah

    15. JHJohann Hari1:45:59

        ... sort of a, a similar effect as, uh, uh, a large effect that, that stress causes attention problems. Now, that's true for the kids in Bayview, but that's true for all of us. And one person who really-- She, she helped me to understand it. There was another person who did as well, uh, particularly made a breakthrough with me. I remember Nadine saying to me w- I was asking her, "Well, why is stress so bad for our attention?" And she said, "Look, imagine you were attacked by a bear. Imagine tomorrow, you know, a bear savages you." Not very likely in Greater Manchester, but maybe they escaped from the zoo, right? Um, in the aftermath of that, something will happen to your attention. It will flip. So it will flip from your normal attention, where hopefully you can focus on the things in front of you, to a state called vigilance, where you are scanning the horizon for other bears, right? You're just-

    16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:46:46

        Yeah

    17. JHJohann Hari1:46:46

        ... it's a involuntary physical response. You are scanning for dangers. Okay, now imagine you're attacked by a bear again. You go into a state called hypervigilance, where you are just constantly on the lookout for risk and danger. Now, many people live in that state of hypervigilance. Think about something as, as, as, um, simple as if you're a skin- single mother and you know that one thing goes wrong and you're in real financial trouble. Your child loses their shoe. What are you gonna do? The washing machine breaks. What are you gonna do? You go into a state of vigilance. It's not that you're not paying attention. It's that you're paying attention to scanning for risks, right? And there was a child psychiatrist-

    18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:47:21

        Mm-hmm

    19. JHJohann Hari1:47:21

        ... in Adelaide in Australia, Dr. John Jureidini, who said to me, "You know, deep focus is a really good strategy when you're safe," right? Sitting down and reading a book is a great thing to do when you're safe.

    20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:47:32

        Yeah.

    21. JHJohann Hari1:47:33

        If you're stressed and in danger, deep focus is a very foolish strategy. If you're sitting in Bayview and you could get shot at any moment, sitting down and reading a book is y- you, you're smarter to be scanning for who might shoot you, right? You c- and I think what's happened is, of course, that's a very extreme form of stress, but a lot of us are living in a s- much greater state of vigilance than we need to be.

    22. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:47:55

        It's as if the way we feel is a signal, right? So if you can focus deeply on something, I guess it's, in many ways, at least at that moment in time, you feel relatively safe 'cause you're able to switch that off and focus. And so maybe some people who are struggling to focus and have their attention where they want to, maybe it's not a failing of them. Maybe it's not that they need to work on their attention. Maybe that is a completely appropriate response to the state of their lives.

    23. JHJohann Hari1:48:31

        100%. This is-

    24. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:48:31

        Right?

    25. JHJohann Hari1:48:32

        I'll give you just an extreme example. Nadine was working with a, a, a boy who, she obviously didn't tell me his real name, but I'll call him Robert, who, um, was brought in. So he had been diagnosed prior to working with Nadine with ADHD, and, uh, his attention wasn't getting any better, and he said he didn't like being given these stimulant drugs. So Nadine starts to interview Robert and his mother in great detail. She, she starts asking, "Well, when did it begin, these attention problems?" It turned out, in Robert's case, it took a while for the story to come out, and it was a horrendous story. Um, one day, Robert's mother had come home and found her boyfriend sexually abusing him in the shower. And Robert's mother had herself been sexually abused and groomed as a child, and she felt she couldn't challenge this man, so she did something she felt really ashamed of. She sent him away to live with his dad. But he would come home every weekend, so of course, he was seeing this person who'd sexually abused him every weekend. And of course, he goes into a state of vigilance, right? He's really scared for very good reasons. He's, that, that fear is a necessary signal. It was communicating something to us that that child was in real danger. But of course, that signal was misread. Of course, I'm not saying all diagnoses of, of ADHD are like this. But in that instance, that, that child was profoundly misread. Um, and I think we're doing that a lot.

    26. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:49:48

        Yeah.

    27. JHJohann Hari1:49:48

        A lot of these signals. I'll give you another example. This sounds like a joke. I assure you it's not. I went to interview a man called Nicholas Dodman Um, who is the pioneer of diagnosing dogs, cats, and walruses with ADHD. So one day, uh, a, a beagle named Emma was brought to, to see Dr. Dodman. He's a British, um, veterinarian, but he lives in, in, um, Connecticut. And so owner brings in Emma the beagle and says, "I've got a problem. My dog just runs around all the time and just barks madly whenever I leave the dog." So, uh, Nicholas Dodman assigned the, the dog to a parenting class. Um, parenting. Sorry, I'll say that again. Uh, Nicholas Dodman sends the owner and the dog to training classes. And the training helps a little bit, but the dog still barks all the time, runs around a lot. So he diagnosed the dog with ADHD, which he was the kind of pioneer of applying these categories which had formerly only been applied to humans, to non-human animals. Uh, so he prescribed Ritalin for the dog. The dog stopped running around all the time, was much more kind of docile. Um, and the owner was really happy. And I remember interviewing Dr. Dodman, who's been a real pioneer of doing this with all sorts of animals. He gives, um, Prozac to polar bears to stop them pacing about. I mean, there are parrots on Valium thanks to him. There are walruses on antipsychotics. Um, half of all American zoos now admit they drug their animals to make them more quiescent. Um, it's a bit like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but actual cuckoos, right? And I interviewed him. Before I went to interview him, I thought he would say, um, "Oh, these animals have a genetic problem analogous to, you know, the humans we diagnose with this, and that's why I'm diagnosing them." To be totally fair to him, and I, I actually quite liked him as a person, he said, "No, of course not. The polar bear is really unhappy and pacing around because it wants to live in the Arctic where it would walk 20 miles a day, and we put it in a tiny little cage." That dog, dogs are meant to have at least three hours a day off leash. No American dog, no British dog, or virtually none get that, right? He, the, he used this phrase that really stayed with me. He said, "They've got frustrated biological objectives." And he gave me an example. There was a dog that had, uh, that would be diagnosed with ADHD in this mad world, uh, that was running around all the time. Uh, its owners lived in a tiny apartment in Manhattan, and then they moved to a farm out in Upstate New York. The dog stopped exhibiting all these signs of attention problems. Um, and I think that phrase, frustrated biological objectives, is really important.

    28. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:52:20

        Yeah.

    29. JHJohann Hari1:52:20

        We are the first human society in the last 100 years ever to think you can make small children sit still for eight hours a day. That is an insane-

    30. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:52:29

        Yeah
15. 2:10:34 – 2:24:53

    Stress, sleep deprivation, and ‘Rat Park’: rebuilding the conditions for attention—and a movement to defend it

    1. JHJohann Hari2:10:34

       Yeah. I think that's, I think you've just put that really well. You should also have Bruce Alexander, who did the Rat Park experiment on your podcast. He's one of the most amazing people I've ever met. Um, but so d- uh, I came to Rat Park because, um, we had a lot of addiction in my family, and still do. And, um, I, I thought I understood the addiction that I'd seen close to me. So if you'd asked me when I started doing the research on addiction years ago, um, i- in fact, I started doing it exactly 10 years ago. If you, if you'd asked me then what causes, let's say, heroin addiction, 'cause that's something close to me, I think I would've looked at you like you were thick, and I would've said, "Well, heroin causes heroin addiction," right? [chuckles] Obviously, the clue's in the name, right? So we've been told this story for 100 years. It's become a hund- you know, deeply part of our common sense. It was certainly part of mine. Um, which is that we think if we kidnapped the next 20 people to walk past your house, and like a villain in a horror film, we injected them all with heroin every day, three times a day for a month. At the end of that month, they'd all be heroin addicts for a simple reason. There's chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically crave, right? And at the end of the month, they'd, they'd have this tremendous physical hunger for heroin, right? For the hooks in the drug. That's why we call it being hooked, right?

    2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:11:58

       Yeah.

    3. JHJohann Hari2:11:58

       Now, that story is, has some truth in it, but it turns out it's a very small part of what's going on with addiction. And the first thing that alerted me to the fact there was something wrong with this story we've been telling is when lots of doctors here in Britain explained to me, look, if I get hit by a truck and I get taken to hospital and I break my hip, it's quite likely I'll be given diamorphine for the pain, right? Diamorphine is heroin. It's much better heroin than you'd ever score in the streets, right? 'Cause it's medically pure heroin. Anyone listening who's got a nan who had a hip replacement, your nan was probably given quite a lot of diamorphine-

    4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:12:32

       Yeah

    5. JHJohann Hari2:12:32

       ... right? Heroin. If what we think about addiction is right, that it's caused primarily or entirely by exposure to the chemical hooks, what should be happening to these people in British hospitals who are being given-

    6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:12:42

       Yeah

    7. JHJohann Hari2:12:42

       ... potent amounts of heroin? Significant numbers of them should be leaving and trying to score on the streets. There's been studies of this. It, it never happens, right? I remember when I learned that just thinking, "Well, that can't be true." How could you have a situation where you've got someone in a hospital bed who's been given quite a lot of potent heroin, they don't become addicted, and you've got someone shooting up in the alleyway outside who does become addicted? How can that be? And I only began to understand it when I went to Vancouver to interview an incredible man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who really changed my life and has changed the life of many people. So Professor Alexander explained to me this story we've been told, that addiction is caused primarily or entirely by the chemical hooks, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. Your viewers can try them at home if they feel a bit sadistic. Don't actually try them at home, but you could if you wanted to. Um, you take a rat, you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles. One is just water, the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself within a couple of weeks. So there you go. That's our story. The rat's exposed to the chemical hooks. It wants more-

    8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:13:48

       Yeah

    9. JHJohann Hari2:13:49

       ... and more of them, and it dies. But in the '70s, Professor Alexander was working on the downtown east side of Vancouver, which is an area with a lot of people with addiction problems, where I've spent a lot of time. I just thought, "Yeah, it doesn't seem to ring true to me." So he decided to do a variant of this experiment. He built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats, right?

    10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:14:08

        Yeah.

    11. JHJohann Hari2:14:08

        They've got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex. They've got loads of cheese. They've got loads of colored balls. Anything that makes life meaningful for rats It's there in Rat Park. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water, and of course, they try both. They don't know what's in them. This is the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don't like the drugged water. They hardly ever use it. None of them use it compulsively. None of them overdose. So you go from almost 100% compulsive use and overdose when they don't have the things that make life worth living-

    12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:14:37

        Yeah

    13. JHJohann Hari2:14:37

        ... to no compulsive use or overdose when they do have the things that make life worth living. There's lots of human examples, but what I took from this is the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. Valuable though that is to many people, the opposite of addiction is connection. And I think you see this with, with so many of the things we've been talking about in relation-

    14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:14:54

        Yeah

    15. JHJohann Hari2:14:54

        ... to attention, right? Um, we, we have a profoundly lonely society. We have a society where we've been taught to value the wrong things, to think life is about status and money. We have a society where most people don't have control over their work and are humiliated and controlled at work. A society like that is gonna have a bank of unhappiness and distress, which is roughly analogous to a depleted immune system. And so it means that when something that comes along that just gives momentary relief, I got a like on Facebook, um, I want a Big Mac, you know, a whole ra- even saying that made me want a Big Mac. Um, a whole, you know, w- when things come along that, that give you a moment of relief in a landscape that is sort of dry and parched of, of, of the things we need, we will be much more drawn to them, just like the rats in the isolated cage were much more drawn to the heroin than the rats who lived in Rat Park. We talked about Finland, right? We talked about how in Finland they, they have the lowest levels of children diagnosed with attention problems in the world. And we talked about that in relation to schools, which is important. Their schools work differently to ours. But it's also just their society works differently.

    16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:16:04

        Yeah.

    17. JHJohann Hari2:16:04

        It's a much more equal society. Uh, it's a society, uh, with much more financial security for people at the bottom who are not humiliated. Society where people have more control over their work. There's certainly problems in Finland. It, it's not paradise. But it's much more like Rat Park than, than we are, right? So the more we can make our society strong, the more we can have societies of people who are connected to other human beings. And there's all sorts of very practical ways we can, we can do this that I've written about. The more we build up an immune system-

    18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:16:34

        Yeah

    19. JHJohann Hari2:16:34

        ... that can defend us against attacks on our attention. Of course, you've got to do both. You've got to strengthen the immune system, and you've got to deal with the virus to extend this analogy. You've got to do both, right? But at the moment, we're strengthening the virus and weakening the immune system, right? We're-- And this is one of the things that's so important to me about this subject, 'cause you could listen to everything we've said and think, "This is bad. We've got to deal with it somewhere down the line." We are in a race at the moment. The factors that are making our attention worse are increasing. Think just about technology to pick one of the 12. That technology is becoming more and more invasive with each year that passes. Facebook has already patented technology that could read your emotions through your webcam and, and adjust accordingly their algorithms, right? Um, Paul Graham, one of the leading, um, investors in Silicon Valley, said the world will be-- In the absence of regulation, the world will be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40 years, right? So that, and that's just one of the causes. The food industry is making more processed-

    20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:17:35

        Yeah

    21. JHJohann Hari2:17:35

        ... more invasive, more addictive food. We could talk about all of these 12. Most of them are increasing, right? We sleep less now than we did 10 years before, which is less than it was 10 years before, which is less than it was 10 years before. So the way I see it is we've got a race with two sides. We've got these invasive forces, and then at the other side, we've got to have a movement of people taking on the forces that are stealing our focus, right? And to do that, I think about two things. First thing, we've got to change our own psychology. We've got to stop asking for tiny little tw- only for tiny little tweaks. We are not medieval peasants living at the court of King Zuckerberg, begging for little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds, and we can reclaim our minds. And I know that might sound a bit fancy or abstract or... When I think about that, I think about something very direct in my own family and almost certainly in your family and the family of everyone listening. So I think about my grandmothers, right, who I loved, who I knew very well. My Swiss-Scottish grandmother basically raised me. Um, so my grandmothers were the age I am now, 42, in 1963. Both of them had left school when they were 13, even though the boys in their family went on to school longer 'cause no one gave a shit about girls learning anything. Um, my, my S- one of them was a working-class Scottish woman and, uh, who was living in a Scottish tenement, and one of them was a, what would've been called then a Swiss peasant living on a, a wooden, in a wooden hut on a mountain in Switzerland. Um, in that year, neither of them were allowed to have bank accounts in their own name 'cause they were married women. It was legal for them to be raped by their husbands. In practice, it was legal for their husbands to beat them up because the police never did anything about domestic violence. In the entire world, there was not one woman who ran a country, a police force, or a company. Not one, right? That had been the case ever since countries, companies, and police forces were invented. There'd never been a woman running them, right? Never. Apart from occasionally a hereditary queen, right? Um, my, my, my Swiss grandmother, she loved to draw and paint, and she was told, "What are you doing this for? Shut up. You get married. Stop doing it." Right? Now, I think about my grandmothers in that year when they're the age I am now, not so long ago, and then I think about my niece, who lives not very far from where we are now, who's 17. When she started to draw, and she was really good at it, we were like, "You should go to art school."

    22. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:20:06

        Yeah.

    23. JHJohann Hari2:20:06

        Now, even the craziest sexist wouldn't suggest women shouldn't be allowed to have bank accounts or-- My Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote in 1963, right?

    24. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:20:15

        Yeah. It's not that long ago, is it?

    25. JHJohann Hari2:20:16

        It's not that long ago. It's, I, I, I knew my grandmothers extremely well. It's two generations back, right? Now, how did we get, and we've still got a long way to go, of course, on achieving equality and freedom for women, but And I'm conscious that all the women listening, it's very aggravating to hear a man mansplaining this. But the, the-- how did we get from my grandmother's lives to my niece's life, right? Which is an enormous improvement. Doesn't go far enough, but is an enormous improvement. It didn't happen because people just, uh, uh, the men in power just handed it down one day. They went like, "Oh, let's stop being like this," right? What happened is ordinary women, and some sympathetic men, banded together and said, "We're not taking this shit anymore. You're not treating us like this anymore." And they fought, and they fought, and they fought, and they're still fighting, right? And it led to an extraordinary array, array of changes. Every piece of progress, I would just urge people, if their grandmothers are still alive, sadly mine aren't, to talk to their grandmothers about what life was like for them and compare it to the women you know now. But you just-- there are so many positive changes that have happened that happen because ordinary people band together and demand it. There's nothing else that's gonna save our attention. No Messiah is coming for us. No political leader is gonna do this on their own. We have to protect our minds and our children's minds, and we have to do that by taking on the forces that are destroying our attention and focus. And if we don't do that, we, we've really got a choice between a movement that defends it or ongoing-- The way Tristan Harris put it to me, the alternative is the downgrading of human beings and our minds, right? We've upgraded technology and downgraded humans. Now, we can allow that to continue, but we need to know that is a choice. If we don't, there's no guarantee that if we fight, we'll win. But if we don't fight, we won't win, right? Elizabeth Warren, American politician, said, "You don't get what you don't fight for," right? And of course, I mean peaceful fighting. Um, w- we've got to fight against these forces 'cause they're not gonna give up, right?

    26. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:22:15

        Yeah.

    27. JHJohann Hari2:22:15

        The question is whether we're gonna match them. And we are-- And if it seems like that's a really big thing, and it is a big thing, and people say to me sometimes, "But big tech is so powerful," I say to them, "Big tech ain't a hundredth as powerful as men were in 1963." Men controlled literally everything, right?

    28. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:22:33

        Yeah.

    29. JHJohann Hari2:22:33

        Every single institution of power in every country in the world. Women could easily have said then, " [sighs] We're never gonna win. Look at w-

    30. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:22:41

        Yeah

Episode duration: 2:26:22