YAPClassic: Johann Hari, How to Avoid Distraction and Reclaim Your Focus

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0:01:10 (gentle music)
0:01:20 Hey, yeah, BAM.
0:01:22 Today on the podcast,
0:01:24 we’re throwing it back to episode 217
0:01:29 with Johann Hari, first aired in April, 2023.
0:01:31 Johann is a New York Times bestselling author,
0:01:33 journalist and speaker known for his book,
0:01:37 Stolen Focus, Why You Can’t Pay Attention.
0:01:38 In this episode,
0:01:40 we talk about how modern life disrupts our focus
0:01:43 and what we can do to reclaim it.
0:01:46 Johann explains how our diet, technology
0:01:49 and social media algorithms are stealing our attention
0:01:53 and ultimately making us all so much more distracted
0:01:54 and polarized.
0:01:57 We also discuss potential government actions
0:01:59 and their implications,
0:02:01 like raising the social media age limit
0:02:03 and banning TikTok.
0:02:05 If you’ve ever struggled to maintain focus,
0:02:08 this episode is packed with insights and strategies
0:02:11 to help you regain control of your attention.
0:02:14 Are you ready to get focused and productive?
0:02:16 Here’s Johann Hari to show you how.
0:02:20 Johann, to kick us off,
0:02:22 I wanna go back to the beginning of your life.
0:02:24 You were born in Scotland when you were a baby,
0:02:26 your family moved to London
0:02:29 and your father was a Swiss immigrant and a bus driver.
0:02:31 Your mother was a nurse and later worked in shelters
0:02:33 for survivors of domestic violence.
0:02:34 And so, from my understanding,
0:02:36 there was nothing really academic
0:02:38 about your background or your upbringing.
0:02:42 And I wanted to know what inspired you to become a writer.
0:02:44 – Yeah, it’s a difficult question.
0:02:46 I was mostly raised by my grandmother
0:02:48 whose job was to clean toilets.
0:02:49 It was an amazing woman
0:02:50 ’cause my mother was ill
0:02:53 and my dad was in a different country.
0:02:55 And I think the honest answer,
0:02:56 someone said to me,
0:02:58 “If I want my child to be a writer, what should I do?”
0:03:01 And I said, “Horribly traumatize your child, right?”
0:03:01 You know, I grew up in a family
0:03:04 where there was a lot of addiction and mental illness.
0:03:06 And the way I coped with that
0:03:09 was by reading and writing all the time, right?
0:03:12 So obviously that ended up being a very helpful adaptation
0:03:13 for me much later in my life.
0:03:15 So I think it was probably that,
0:03:17 but I was lucky my grandmother
0:03:19 who would buy me any book I asked her to buy me.
0:03:21 She worked incredibly hard.
0:03:23 So I think it was probably that.
0:03:25 It’s initially that reading and writing
0:03:26 were a kind of escape for me.
0:03:28 And TV, I also love TV.
0:03:30 I think that’s probably how it began.
0:03:32 But yeah, I was the first person in my family
0:03:35 to go to a fancy university or anything like that.
0:03:37 It’s funny, if you look at the home videos
0:03:39 we have from when I’m a kid,
0:03:41 it’s a bit like a steering and family guy
0:03:44 in that all my family have very working class accents.
0:03:46 And even when I’m a two-year-old
0:03:48 they have this weird posture voice.
0:03:50 So my grandmother’s like, “Your hand, come on, we’ve got Igor.”
0:03:52 And I’m like, “Certainly grandmother,
0:03:53 I should be with you shortly.”
0:03:55 It’s like, “Where did this come from?”
0:03:57 I have no idea, but I think partly that’s,
0:04:00 Britain is a very, as you can tell from my Downton Abbey accent
0:04:03 I am British and Britain is a very class laden society.
0:04:05 I don’t know, even when as a young kid
0:04:08 I had this sort of weird slight disconnect
0:04:10 from my environment, but also love
0:04:11 for the people in my environment.
0:04:13 So it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
0:04:15 – Yeah, you’ve done an incredible job.
0:04:18 You’re a three-time, I think New York Times best-selling author.
0:04:20 All of your books do incredibly well.
0:04:22 And so after you wrote your first book
0:04:23 about addiction, Chasing Scream,
0:04:25 you wrote this book called Lost Connections,
0:04:27 also was a best-selling book.
0:04:29 And it’s about the world’s growing rates
0:04:30 of depression and anxiety.
0:04:33 And you released that book in 2018,
0:04:34 and that was before the pandemic.
0:04:37 And this topic of depression is more important now
0:04:41 than it even was three or four years ago since the pandemic.
0:04:43 And the World Health Organization
0:04:45 has actually reported a sharp increase
0:04:46 in rates of anxiety and depression.
0:04:48 So I thought we could start the interview there,
0:04:49 really talking about that.
0:04:52 When you were a teenager, you told your therapist
0:04:54 that you felt like pain was leaking out of you
0:04:57 and your therapist prescribed you medication
0:04:59 and you ended up getting more side effects
0:05:02 from the medication than you had previously
0:05:03 and you still had your depression.
0:05:06 So what did you learn about the myth of chemical imbalances
0:05:10 in the brain related to depression in this experience?
0:05:13 – Well, I would pull back for a second and say,
0:05:15 the reason I wrote Lost Connections
0:05:17 is ’cause there were these two mysteries
0:05:18 that were really hanging over me
0:05:20 that I didn’t understand.
0:05:23 The first is the time I was 38, 39,
0:05:25 and every single year that I’d been alive,
0:05:27 depression and anxiety had increased
0:05:29 in the United States and Britain,
0:05:31 and in fact, across the entire Western world.
0:05:33 And so I was asking myself, well, why, right?
0:05:36 Why is it that with each year that passes,
0:05:37 more and more people are finding it harder
0:05:38 to go through the day?
0:05:39 It seems strange.
0:05:40 Why would that be happening?
0:05:42 And, you know, you allude to,
0:05:44 there was a more personal mystery for me,
0:05:46 which is that I’d gone to my doctor,
0:05:49 I’d explained, you know, that I was in a lot of pain,
0:05:51 and psychological pain, and my doctor had said to me,
0:05:53 well, we know why people get like this.
0:05:56 Some people just have a chemical imbalance in their brains.
0:05:57 You’re clearly one of them.
0:05:59 All you need to do is take some drugs
0:06:00 and you’re gonna be fine.
0:06:01 So I started taking a chemical anti-depressant
0:06:02 called Paxil.
0:06:04 I felt significantly better at first
0:06:06 than the effect kind of wore off.
0:06:08 And I took higher and higher doses until for 13 years,
0:06:10 I was taking the highest possible dose
0:06:12 and I was still quite depressed.
0:06:13 So at the end of that, I was like, well,
0:06:15 I’m doing everything that we’re told to do
0:06:17 according to the story our culture tells about depression.
0:06:19 I’m still pretty depressed.
0:06:20 What’s going on here?
0:06:21 So I ended up using my training
0:06:23 in the social sciences at Cambridge University
0:06:25 to go on a really big journey all over the world.
0:06:28 I traveled over 30,000 miles.
0:06:30 I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts
0:06:32 on depression and anxiety,
0:06:35 what causes them and crucially how we solve them.
0:06:38 And I learned just a huge amount from these people,
0:06:40 but the core of what I learned is there’s actually
0:06:42 scientific evidence for nine factors
0:06:44 that can cause depression and anxiety.
0:06:46 Some of them are in our biology.
0:06:47 It’s why what my doctor told me
0:06:49 was not completely wrong, right?
0:06:52 Your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems,
0:06:54 though they don’t write your destiny.
0:06:56 And there are real brain changes that happen
0:06:57 when you become depressed
0:06:59 that can make it harder to get out.
0:07:01 But most of the factors that cause depression
0:07:04 and anxiety are not in our biology.
0:07:07 They’re factors in the way we live.
0:07:08 And once you understand that,
0:07:11 it opens up a whole different set of solutions
0:07:12 that should be offered to people, of course,
0:07:15 alongside the option of chemical antidepressants.
0:07:17 – Hmm, and I feel like what you’re saying
0:07:19 really alludes to something that you talked about
0:07:21 in your TED talk.
0:07:22 That really illustrates what you were just saying
0:07:26 how it’s more about your environment or external factors.
0:07:28 You tell the story of this Cambodian man
0:07:32 who had depression and they cured it with a cow.
0:07:34 So I’d love to hear that story.
0:07:37 And I think this is particularly relevant to us now.
0:07:39 So you think about the story I was told,
0:07:41 which huge numbers of people watching and listening
0:07:43 will have been told,
0:07:45 which is there’s just something wrong with your brain.
0:07:47 And the stress again, that’s not totally wrong.
0:07:49 And chemical antidepressants do give some relief
0:07:50 to some people,
0:07:53 as well as causing some negative side effects for others.
0:07:54 But if that story was true,
0:07:57 that it’s just a malfunction in our brains,
0:08:00 why would depression and anxiety have doubled during COVID?
0:08:01 It’s not that all our brains
0:08:04 suddenly began to malfunction.
0:08:05 We know what happened and there’s a,
0:08:07 in addition to a huge amount of the science that I learned,
0:08:09 there’s a moment that it’s really,
0:08:11 this different way of thinking really fell into place for me.
0:08:13 And there was a moment in adjusting to this new story
0:08:15 that where it felt very threatening,
0:08:17 where you have to open up your story.
0:08:19 So I went to interview a South African psychiatrist
0:08:22 called Dr. Derek Somerfield, who’s a great guy.
0:08:23 And he explained to me,
0:08:26 in 2001 he happened to be in Southeast Asia in Cambodia,
0:08:28 when they first introduced chemical antidepressants
0:08:30 for people in that country.
0:08:31 They’d never had them before.
0:08:34 And the local doctors, the Cambodians were like,
0:08:35 “Well, what are antidepressants?”
0:08:36 They’d never heard of them.
0:08:38 And he explained, and they said to him,
0:08:41 “We don’t need them, we’ve already got antidepressants.”
0:08:42 And he was like, “What do you mean?”
0:08:43 He thought they were gonna talk about
0:08:46 some kind of herbal remedy or something.
0:08:48 Instead, they told him a story.
0:08:50 There was a farmer in their community
0:08:51 who worked in the rice fields.
0:08:54 And one day he stood on a land mine left over
0:08:56 from the war with the United States
0:08:58 and he got his leg blown off.
0:09:00 So they gave him an artificial limb.
0:09:01 And a couple of weeks later,
0:09:03 a couple of months later, I think it was actually,
0:09:05 he went back to work in the rice fields.
0:09:08 But apparently it’s super painful to work under water
0:09:09 when you’ve got an artificial limb.
0:09:11 And I’m guessing it was pretty traumatic
0:09:13 to go back to the field where he got blown up.
0:09:15 The guy started to cry a lot.
0:09:17 After a while, he just refused to get out of bed.
0:09:20 He developed what we would call classic depression.
0:09:23 This is when the Cambodians said to Dr. Summerfield,
0:09:26 “Well, that’s when we gave him an antidepressant.”
0:09:27 And he said, “What was it?”
0:09:29 They explained that they went and sat with him.
0:09:31 They listened to him.
0:09:33 They realized that his pain made sense.
0:09:34 He only had to speak to him for five minutes
0:09:36 to see why he felt so bad.
0:09:37 One of the doctors figured,
0:09:39 “If we bought this guy a cow,
0:09:41 he could become a dairy farmer.
0:09:42 He wouldn’t be in this position
0:09:43 that was screwing him up so much.”
0:09:45 So they bought him a cow.
0:09:47 Within a couple of weeks, he stopped crying.
0:09:49 Within a couple of months, his depression was gone.
0:09:50 It never came back.
0:09:52 They said to Dr. Summerfield,
0:09:54 “So you see, doctor, that cow,
0:09:55 that was an antidepressant.
0:09:56 That’s what you mean, right?”
0:09:58 Now, if you’ve been raised to think about depression
0:10:00 the way I was, that sounds like a joke.
0:10:01 I went to my doctor for an antidepressant.
0:10:03 She gave me a cow.
0:10:05 But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively
0:10:08 from this individual unscientific anecdote
0:10:10 is what the leading medical body in the whole world,
0:10:11 the one you just mentioned,
0:10:12 the World Health Organization,
0:10:14 has been trying to tell us for years.
0:10:17 If you’re depressed, if you’re anxious,
0:10:19 you’re not weak, you’re not crazy,
0:10:22 you’re not in the main, a machine with broken parts.
0:10:25 You’re a human being with unmet needs.
0:10:27 And what you need is practical help
0:10:29 to get those needs that everyone listening knows,
0:10:30 everyone watching knows,
0:10:32 that we have natural physical needs.
0:10:35 Obviously, you need water, you need food,
0:10:36 you need shelter.
0:10:38 If I took those things away from you,
0:10:39 you’d be in real trouble real fast.
0:10:42 But there’s equally strong evidence
0:10:45 all human beings have natural psychological needs.
0:10:47 You need to feel you belong.
0:10:49 You need to feel your life has purpose and meaning.
0:10:52 You need to feel that people see you and value you,
0:10:54 that you’ve got a future that makes sense.
0:10:56 And this culture we’ve created is good
0:10:59 and many things I’m very glad to be alive today.
0:11:01 But we have been getting less and less good
0:11:03 at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs
0:11:04 for a long time.
0:11:06 And then of course during COVID,
0:11:07 our ability to get our psychological needs
0:11:10 just fell off a cliff.
0:11:12 So when you understand depression in this more complex way
0:11:14 in relation to the scientific evidence
0:11:16 for these nine causes,
0:11:18 and you understand them as in part driven
0:11:21 by unmet psychological needs,
0:11:22 that’s important A, ’cause it’s true
0:11:24 and the science for it is overwhelming.
0:11:26 But B, because once you understand that,
0:11:29 it opens up a whole different set of solutions
0:11:31 that we can begin to offer people.
0:11:33 – Yeah, and I love what you’re saying.
0:11:36 It’s so interesting and related to these nine reasons
0:11:38 why we get depression.
0:11:39 You mentioned a bunch of them,
0:11:40 but you haven’t mentioned the loneliness.
0:11:43 And I feel like this one is really, really important
0:11:43 right now.
0:11:45 I recently had Scott Galloway on the show
0:11:47 and he talked about the loneliness crisis.
0:11:50 And he says, “Loneliness is gonna be the next cancer.”
0:11:53 And you say being lonely seems to cause as much stress
0:11:55 as being punched in the face.
0:11:56 So I want to start there.
0:12:00 What are some health concerns related to being lonely?
0:12:03 Because now people with all this disconnect from COVID,
0:12:04 more lonely than ever.
0:12:06 – So it’s a really important question.
0:12:08 Even before COVID,
0:12:11 we were the loneliest society in human history.
0:12:13 You know, there’s a study that asks Americans
0:12:14 how many close friends do you have
0:12:17 who you could turn to in a crisis?
0:12:18 And when they started doing it years ago,
0:12:20 the most common answer was five.
0:12:22 Today, the most common answer, not the average,
0:12:24 but the most common answer is none.
0:12:25 – Wow.
0:12:28 – I think the figure was that 41% of Americans
0:12:30 before COVID agreed with the statement,
0:12:33 “No one knows me well.”
0:12:35 What is life like when no one knows you well
0:12:37 and you have no one to turn to when things go wrong?
0:12:39 I spent a lot of time discussing this
0:12:41 with the leading expert on loneliness in the world.
0:12:43 And it was at the Chicago University,
0:12:45 an amazing man named Professor John Cassiopo,
0:12:47 who sadly died recently.
0:12:49 And I’ll never forget him saying to me one day,
0:12:50 “Why are we alive?
0:12:51 Why do we exist?”
0:12:53 One key reason is that our ancestors
0:12:56 on the savannahs of Africa were really good at one thing.
0:12:58 A lot of the time they weren’t bigger
0:12:59 than the animals they took down.
0:13:02 They weren’t faster than the animals they took down,
0:13:04 but they were much better at banding together
0:13:06 into groups and cooperating.
0:13:08 Just like bees evolved to live in a hive,
0:13:10 humans evolved to live in a tribe.
0:13:13 If you ever separate a bee from its hive, it goes crazy.
0:13:16 It goes, “Hey, why it doesn’t make sense outside a hive?”
0:13:18 We evolved to live in tribes
0:13:20 and we are the first humans ever
0:13:23 to try to disband our tribes and go out alone, right?
0:13:26 And it has disastrous effects on us.
0:13:28 If you think about the circumstances where we evolved,
0:13:29 if you were physically cut off
0:13:31 or separated from the tribe,
0:13:33 you were depressed and anxious for a really good reason.
0:13:35 You were in terrible danger.
0:13:36 You couldn’t protect yourself.
0:13:38 These feelings evolved, partly,
0:13:41 there’s other things going on with depression too,
0:13:43 but these feelings evolved as a signal
0:13:45 to say, “Get back to the tribe.”
0:13:47 And the reason this is so important,
0:13:48 I’m not interested in just saying,
0:13:49 “Oh, look, aren’t things bad, right?
0:13:52 That’s not my temperament, it doesn’t interest me.”
0:13:54 What’s important is that once you understand that,
0:13:55 it opens up solutions.
0:13:56 So I’ll give you an example.
0:13:59 One of the heroes of my book, Lost Connections,
0:14:01 is a wonderful man called Dr. Sam Everington.
0:14:03 He’s a family doctor in East London,
0:14:06 a poor part of East London where I lived for a long time,
0:14:08 though sadly he was never my doctor.
0:14:10 And Sam had loads of patients coming to him
0:14:12 with terrible depression and anxiety.
0:14:15 And like me, he’s not opposed to chemical anti-depressants.
0:14:16 He thinks they have some important role
0:14:19 to play for some people in reducing their pain.
0:14:21 But he could see a couple of kind of obvious things.
0:14:25 Firstly, usually chemical anti-depressants took the edge off,
0:14:26 but they didn’t solve the problem.
0:14:29 And secondly, most of his patients were depressed
0:14:31 and anxious for totally understandable reasons,
0:14:33 like they were really lonely.
0:14:36 So one day a woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham,
0:14:37 who I got to know later,
0:14:39 who’d been shut away in her home
0:14:42 with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years.
0:14:43 And Sam said to Lisa,
0:14:46 “Don’t worry, I’ll carry on giving you these drugs,
0:14:48 but I’m also going to prescribe something else.
0:14:50 I’m going to prescribe for you to come
0:14:53 and meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people
0:14:55 twice a week, here in the doctor’s offices,
0:14:56 not to talk about how shit you feel.
0:14:59 You can do that if you want, but that’s not the point of it.
0:15:01 What we want you to do is find something meaningful
0:15:03 that you can all do together.”
0:15:04 So the first time the group met,
0:15:07 Lisa literally started vomiting with anxiety.
0:15:09 It was just so overwhelming.
0:15:11 But the group starts talking, they’re like, “What could we do?”
0:15:13 And there was an area outside the doctor’s offices
0:15:16 that was just like scrubland, just empty scrubland.
0:15:18 So they were like, “We could turn that into a garden,
0:15:19 but these are inner city, East London people,
0:15:21 like me, they didn’t know anything about gardening,
0:15:22 but okay, we can do it.”
0:15:25 So they started to take books out the library
0:15:27 about gardening, they started to watch clips on YouTube.
0:15:30 They started to get their fingers in the soil.
0:15:32 They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons.
0:15:34 The way Lisa put it to me,
0:15:37 as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom.
0:15:39 There’s a lot of evidence that exposure to nature,
0:15:41 the natural world is really good for depression,
0:15:44 but they started to do something even more important.
0:15:45 They started to form a group.
0:15:47 They started to form a tribe.
0:15:49 They started to look out for each other.
0:15:49 If one of them didn’t show up,
0:15:51 the others would go looking for them and be like,
0:15:52 “Hey, what’s up?
0:15:54 How can we help you?”
0:15:56 This approach is called social prescribing.
0:15:59 It’s where doctors prescribe people to be part of groups.
0:16:01 There’s an emerging body of science about it.
0:16:01 It’s still pretty small,
0:16:03 but it’s emerging and quite persuasive.
0:16:06 For example, a small study in Norway
0:16:07 found that a social prescribing program
0:16:11 was twice as effective in reducing depression and anxiety
0:16:13 as chemical antidepressants.
0:16:14 I think for kind of obvious reason,
0:16:16 and this is something I saw all over the world
0:16:20 from Sydney to Sao Paulo to San Francisco.
0:16:21 The most effective strategies
0:16:23 for dealing with depression and anxiety
0:16:27 are the ones that deal with the underlying psychological reasons
0:16:29 why we feel so bad.
0:16:31 I would argue every single doctor’s office
0:16:32 in the United States
0:16:34 should have a social prescribing wing.
0:16:35 It’s free.
0:16:37 It costs literally nothing to get people to go gardening.
0:16:39 I mean, maybe I could buy some gardening supplies.
0:16:41 I tell you, it’s a lot cheaper
0:16:42 than massive amounts of drugs,
0:16:45 massive amounts of medicalization,
0:16:47 although there is some place for those things.
0:16:48 We’ve got to deal with the underlying causes
0:16:50 to stop people becoming depressed and anxious
0:16:52 in the first place as much as we can,
0:16:54 but we’ve also got to expand the menu of options.
0:16:55 We’ve got to be asking,
0:16:56 “Well, what’s the cow for this person, right?
0:16:58 What’s the solution?”
0:17:00 It’s cheaper and it’s more effective.
0:17:02 – Let’s hold that thought
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0:21:21 And I love that story because it seems
0:21:23 like there was a couple reasons why this worked.
0:21:26 One is like curing the loneliness
0:21:29 and finding friendships and common bonds with these people.
0:21:32 The second one was it’s almost like a future.
0:21:33 They’re planning this garden.
0:21:35 They have a goal to look forward to.
0:21:38 And I know from you that also without hope
0:21:40 you can get depressed.
0:21:42 If you don’t have a future that you’re looking forward to
0:21:44 you can actually get depressed.
0:21:46 So how should people navigate their fear
0:21:50 or lack of security of the future?
0:21:51 – As you were saying, I think you put that really well.
0:21:53 And I think, you know, as you were saying that
0:21:55 I was thinking about one group of people.
0:21:57 I think you can tell that for my book Lost Connections
0:21:59 like from my other books, I learned a huge amount
0:22:02 from interviewing scientists and experts.
0:22:03 But actually, particularly for that book
0:22:05 the people who taught me the most were group of people
0:22:07 who were not scientists.
0:22:11 In the summer of 2011 on a big anonymous housing project
0:22:14 in Berlin in Germany, a Turkish German woman
0:22:17 called Nuria Cengiz climbed out of her wheelchair
0:22:18 and she put a sign in her window.
0:22:19 She lives on the ground floor.
0:22:21 And the sign said something like
0:22:24 I got a notice saying I’m gonna be evicted next Thursday.
0:22:27 So on Wednesday night, I’m gonna kill myself.
0:22:29 Now this is a big anonymous housing project
0:22:31 like a housing project pretty much anywhere in the US.
0:22:32 No one really knew anyone.
0:22:34 It was in a very poor part of Berlin,
0:22:36 a place called Cotty for people who know it.
0:22:38 It’s in Kreuzberg.
0:22:40 And there were only really three kinds of people
0:22:41 who lived in this neighborhood.
0:22:43 There were recent Muslim immigrants
0:22:46 like this woman Nuria, there were gay men
0:22:47 and there were punk squatters.
0:22:48 And as you can imagine, these three groups
0:22:50 did not get along, but like,
0:22:52 no one really knew anyone anyway.
0:22:53 So people walked past Nuria’s window
0:22:55 and they’re like, why this woman’s gonna kill herself?
0:22:57 So they knock on her door.
0:22:59 They’re like, do you need any help?
0:23:01 And Nuria said, no, screw you, I don’t want any help.
0:23:02 I’m gonna kill myself.
0:23:04 And she shut the door in their faces.
0:23:05 But people outside her apartment
0:23:07 who’d never met started talking.
0:23:08 They were like, we’ve got to do something
0:23:09 to help this woman.
0:23:11 Everyone’s rent was going up
0:23:13 and lots of people were getting eviction notices
0:23:16 and everyone was worried that they would be next.
0:23:18 So one of them had an idea.
0:23:20 There’s a big thoroughfare that goes through
0:23:22 the center of Cotty, this housing project,
0:23:24 into Mitre, the center of Berlin.
0:23:27 And someone said, if we just block the road on Saturday
0:23:30 and have a protest, the media will come.
0:23:31 There’ll be a bit of a fuss.
0:23:34 They’ll probably let this woman stay in her apartment.
0:23:35 There might even be some pressure
0:23:36 to keep rents down for all of us.
0:23:37 Why don’t we do it?
0:23:40 So Saturday came and they built a little barricade
0:23:41 in the road and they protested.
0:23:44 And Nuria was like, I’m gonna kill myself.
0:23:45 I might as well let them push me
0:23:46 into the middle of the street.
0:23:47 So she gets pushed into the middle of the street
0:23:48 in her wheelchair.
0:23:49 She does some interviews.
0:23:52 The media shows up and it got to the end of the day
0:23:55 and the media go home and the police are like,
0:23:58 okay, you’ve had your fun, pack it up, go home.
0:24:00 But the people who lived in Cotty said,
0:24:01 well, hang on a minute.
0:24:04 You haven’t told Nuria she gets to stay in her apartment.
0:24:05 Actually, we want a rent freeze
0:24:07 for our entire housing project.
0:24:09 We’ll pack up when we’ve got that.
0:24:10 But of course they knew the minute they walked away
0:24:12 from this little barricade they’d built,
0:24:15 the police would just take it down and that would be that.
0:24:16 So one of my favorite people in Cotty,
0:24:18 a woman called Tanya Gartner.
0:24:20 She’s one of the punk squatters.
0:24:22 She wears tiny mini skirts even in Berlin winters.
0:24:24 Tanya is hardcore.
0:24:25 She had an idea.
0:24:26 She said, okay, everyone, here’s what we’re gonna do.
0:24:29 We’re gonna draw up a timetable
0:24:33 to man this barricade 24 hours a day until we get what we want.
0:24:35 We’re gonna have two people manning it the whole time.
0:24:38 And she went up to her apartment and she had a klaxon,
0:24:40 those things that make loud noises at soccer matches.
0:24:42 And she came down and she said, okay,
0:24:44 if at any point when we’re manning the barricade,
0:24:45 the police come to take it down,
0:24:48 let off the klaxon and we’ll all come down
0:24:49 from our apartments and stop them.
0:24:52 So people start signing up to man the barricade.
0:24:55 People who had never met and would never have met.
0:24:57 And you started getting these bizarre pairings.
0:25:00 So Nuriya, who’s a very religious Muslim in a full hijab,
0:25:03 ended up doing, I think it was the Thursday night shift
0:25:07 with Tanya, who is the opposite of a woman in a hijab.
0:25:10 The first few nights they were sitting there,
0:25:13 they were like, we’ve got nothing to talk about.
0:25:14 This is super awkward.
0:25:15 Who could be more different than us?
0:25:18 But as the nights went on, they started talking
0:25:20 and Tanya and Nuriya discovered
0:25:22 they had something incredibly powerful and common.
0:25:25 Nuriya had come to Berlin when she was 16
0:25:27 with her two babies and she was sent from her village
0:25:29 in Turkey to earn enough money
0:25:31 so she could send home for her husband.
0:25:33 So she turned up, she’s 16 year old,
0:25:36 she’s got these babies, she worked every job she could.
0:25:38 And when she almost had enough money
0:25:40 for her husband to come join her,
0:25:43 she got word from home that her husband had died.
0:25:44 She’d always told people in Germany
0:25:46 that her husband had died of a heart attack,
0:25:49 but sitting there in the cold in Kottie with Tanya,
0:25:51 she told her something she’d never told anyone
0:25:53 in Germany before, which was that her husband
0:25:55 had actually died of tuberculosis,
0:25:57 which was seen at the time as like a shameful disease
0:25:59 of poverty.
0:26:01 That’s when Tanya told Nuriya something
0:26:02 she never talked about.
0:26:04 She’d come to Kottie when she was even younger,
0:26:05 when she was 15.
0:26:07 She got thrown out by her middle class family
0:26:09 ’cause they hated that she loved punk.
0:26:11 And she found her way to Kottie, a squat there,
0:26:14 and six months later, she found herself pregnant.
0:26:16 Tanya and Nuriya realized
0:26:18 they had both been children with children of their own
0:26:20 in this place they didn’t understand.
0:26:22 They became incredibly good friends.
0:26:25 And these weird pairings were happening all over Kottie.
0:26:27 There was a young Turkish German lad called Mehmet.
0:26:29 They kept saying he’d be thrown out of school
0:26:31 ’cause they said he had ADHD.
0:26:32 And he got paired with this very grumpy
0:26:35 or German white guy called Dieter,
0:26:37 who said he didn’t believe in protest,
0:26:38 but in this case, he would make an exception
0:26:40 who started helping Mehmet with his homework
0:26:43 directly opposite this housing project.
0:26:45 There’s about, I think it was about a year
0:26:47 before the protest began,
0:26:49 a gay club opened called Zood Block,
0:26:51 which is run by a man I love called Rick Kudgstein,
0:26:53 who, to give you a sense of what this club is like,
0:26:55 it’s pretty hardcore.
0:26:57 The previous place he owned was called Cafe Anal.
0:27:00 I always thought you wouldn’t want to have a sandwich
0:27:02 from Cafe Anal, but.
0:27:03 So when it opened,
0:27:05 there’s a lot of very religious Muslims
0:27:05 in this housing project.
0:27:07 Some of them were really pissed off.
0:27:10 And in fact, the windows for the gay club got smashed.
0:27:12 When the protest began, Zood Block, the gay club,
0:27:15 gave all their furniture to build the barricade.
0:27:17 And after the protests had been going on for a few months,
0:27:19 they said, you know, you guys,
0:27:20 you should come and have your meetings in our club.
0:27:22 We’ll give you free food, we’ll give you free drinks.
0:27:24 And even the kind of progressive types
0:27:26 that Kotty were like, look,
0:27:27 we’re not going to be able to persuade
0:27:29 these very religious Muslims to come
0:27:32 and have meetings underneath like really obscene gay posters.
0:27:34 We’re not going to be able to do it.
0:27:35 It did start to happen.
0:27:37 The way one of the elderly Turkish German women
0:27:39 put it to me, Neriman Tanker,
0:27:42 she said to me, we all realized
0:27:46 we had to take these small steps to understand each other.
0:27:48 After the protest had been going on for a full year,
0:27:51 one day a guy turned up called Tunkai.
0:27:53 And Tunkai was in his early fifties at the time
0:27:55 and it’s clear when you meet him,
0:27:57 he’s got some kind of cognitive difficulties.
0:28:00 He showed up and he’d been living on the streets
0:28:02 for a short period and he started helping out.
0:28:04 He’s like, this seems interesting.
0:28:05 He started helping out.
0:28:06 And quite quickly, everyone loved him.
0:28:08 He’s got amazing.
0:28:08 He’s so funny.
0:28:10 He’s got an amazing energy about him.
0:28:12 He loves hugging people.
0:28:13 And everyone loved him.
0:28:15 The elderly Turkish German women,
0:28:17 the gay men, the punks, everyone loved Tunkai.
0:28:18 And by this point,
0:28:19 a lot of the people who live in Kottie
0:28:21 are construction workers.
0:28:23 This barricade they built was like a permanent structure
0:28:25 with a roof and rooms.
0:28:26 It’s really nice.
0:28:27 And when they realized Tunkai was homeless,
0:28:29 they said, you should come and live here.
0:28:30 We really like you.
0:28:31 We don’t want you to be homeless.
0:28:32 Come and live with us.
0:28:35 So he moved in and became a much loved part
0:28:36 of the Kottie protest.
0:28:40 And nine months later, the police came to inspect.
0:28:41 They would do this every now and then.
0:28:44 And Tunkai doesn’t like it when people argue.
0:28:45 He thought the police were arguing.
0:28:47 So he went and tried to hug one of them,
0:28:49 but they thought he was attacking them
0:28:50 so they arrested him.
0:28:52 That was when it was discovered.
0:28:54 Tunkai had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital
0:28:58 at the other side of Berlin in Charlottenburg for 20 years.
0:29:00 It literally in a padded cell a lot of that time.
0:29:03 No one, almost no one ever came to see him.
0:29:04 And one day he had escaped.
0:29:05 He was on the streets for a little while
0:29:06 and found his way to Kottie.
0:29:10 So the police took him back to this psychiatric hospital
0:29:11 at the other side of Berlin.
0:29:14 At which point the entire Kottie protest
0:29:16 turned into a free Tunkai movement.
0:29:19 And they descended on this psychiatric hospital
0:29:20 at the other side of the city.
0:29:22 And I remember these psychiatrists being like,
0:29:24 what is this?
0:29:26 They’ve got this guy who they’ve had shut away for 20 years
0:29:27 who no one cared about.
0:29:29 And suddenly they’ve got these women in hijabs,
0:29:33 these very camp gay men and these punks demanding his release.
0:29:35 But I remember one of the women who lives at Kottie,
0:29:39 a woman called Uli Hartman said to the psychiatrist,
0:29:42 but you don’t understand, you don’t love him.
0:29:43 He doesn’t belong with you.
0:29:46 We love him, he belongs with us.
0:29:48 And they were like, oh right, so you want to look after him?
0:29:50 She’s like, no, no, we don’t want to look after him.
0:29:53 He looks after us, he’s part of us.
0:29:55 And many things happened at Kottie.
0:29:57 They got Tunkai back, he lives there still.
0:30:01 They got a rent freeze for their entire housing project.
0:30:03 They then launched a referendum initiative
0:30:05 to keep rents down across the whole of Berlin.
0:30:07 It got the largest number of written signatures
0:30:08 in the history of Germany.
0:30:10 And it led to a rent freeze being introduced
0:30:11 for the whole of Berlin.
0:30:14 But the last time I saw Nuria, the woman who started all this
0:30:16 by putting that sign in her window,
0:30:17 she said to me, look, I’m really glad
0:30:18 I got to stay in my neighborhood.
0:30:19 That’s great.
0:30:21 I gained so much more than that.
0:30:25 I was surrounded by these incredible people all along.
0:30:27 And I would never have known.
0:30:30 And I thought a lot in Kottie about Neriman,
0:30:32 another one of the Turkish-German women.
0:30:33 She said to me, you know, when I grew up in Turkey,
0:30:35 I grew up in a village.
0:30:37 And I called my whole village home.
0:30:38 And then I came to live in the Western world.
0:30:40 And I learned that here,
0:30:43 what you’re meant to call home is just your four walls.
0:30:44 And if you’re lucky, your family.
0:30:46 And then she said, this protest began.
0:30:48 And I started to think of this whole place
0:30:50 and all these people as my home.
0:30:53 And she said, she realized, in some sense,
0:30:55 in this culture, we are homeless.
0:30:56 Our sense of home is not big enough
0:30:58 to meet our need for feeling we belong.
0:31:01 But there’s a Bosnian writer called Alexander Heyman
0:31:03 who said, home is where people notice
0:31:05 when you’re not there.
0:31:07 By that standard, a lot of us are homeless.
0:31:10 And I remember one day I was sitting outside Zabloch,
0:31:11 the gay club with Tanya.
0:31:14 She said to me, she was explaining to me what they’d done.
0:31:15 And she said, when you’re all alone
0:31:17 and you feel like shit,
0:31:19 you think there’s something wrong with you.
0:31:22 But what we did is we came out of our corner crying
0:31:24 and we started to fight.
0:31:26 And we realized we were surrounded
0:31:27 by people who felt the same way.
0:31:30 So I can give you lots of very targeted advice.
0:31:32 And the book Lost Connections is full of this advice.
0:31:34 But the best advice I would give you
0:31:36 is Tanya’s advice.
0:31:38 Don’t sit in your corner alone crying,
0:31:40 thinking there’s something wrong with you.
0:31:42 There’s nothing wrong with you.
0:31:44 There’s something wrong with the way we’re living.
0:31:47 Come out of your corner crying and start to fight.
0:31:48 That’s the advice I would give.
0:31:51 – So, so touching and inspirational.
0:31:52 I really, really love that story.
0:31:55 And I think it’s a good place in the interview
0:31:56 to transition to stolen focus.
0:31:59 And I think the way that I’d like to transition
0:32:02 since we’re talking about this topic of loneliness,
0:32:04 do you think we’re innovating ourselves
0:32:06 into isolation right now?
0:32:08 – I wouldn’t call it innovation,
0:32:09 but I think we are isolating ourselves.
0:32:12 So for my book, Stolen Focus,
0:32:13 I wrote it for a very personal reason.
0:32:16 I could feel my own attention was getting worse.
0:32:17 And each year that passed,
0:32:19 things that require deep focus
0:32:21 that are really important to me,
0:32:23 reading books, watching movies,
0:32:25 having long conversations with my friends,
0:32:27 we’re just getting harder and harder.
0:32:30 And I could see this happening to lots of people I love,
0:32:32 particularly the young people I love.
0:32:34 And I would say to anyone listening,
0:32:35 think about anything you’ve ever achieved
0:32:37 in your life that you’re proud of,
0:32:38 whether it’s starting a business,
0:32:41 being a good parent, learning to play the guitar,
0:32:43 whatever it is, that thing that you’re proud of
0:32:46 required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention.
0:32:47 And when your ability to focus
0:32:50 and pay attention breaks down or diminishes,
0:32:52 your ability to achieve your goals diminishes,
0:32:54 your ability to solve your problems diminishes,
0:32:56 you feel worse about yourself
0:32:58 ’cause you actually are less competent.
0:33:00 So attention is our superpower.
0:33:01 If you can’t pay attention,
0:33:03 you’re gonna be just diminished
0:33:05 and hobbled at every stage in your life.
0:33:07 And when you get your attention back,
0:33:09 you’re gonna be vastly more effective.
0:33:10 So obviously I wanted to understand this
0:33:12 so a bit like we lost connections,
0:33:13 I ended up going on this really big journey
0:33:16 all over the world from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne.
0:33:19 I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts
0:33:20 on attention and focus.
0:33:21 And what I learned is there’s actually
0:33:23 scientific evidence for 12 factors
0:33:25 that can make your attention better
0:33:26 or can make your attention worse.
0:33:28 And loads of the factors that can make
0:33:30 your attention worse have been hugely rising
0:33:31 in recent years.
0:33:32 Some of them are in our technology.
0:33:34 It’s certainly not all of our technology.
0:33:37 A lot of them are things I’d never even thought of.
0:33:39 The food we eat is really affecting our ability
0:33:41 to focus and pay attention.
0:33:44 There’s just so many factors that we can go into.
0:33:45 Either way, our offices work.
0:33:48 There’s a huge array of factors.
0:33:49 But the key thing I learned is,
0:33:51 if you’re struggling to focus,
0:33:52 if your kids are struggling to focus,
0:33:55 it’s not your fault, it’s not their fault.
0:33:57 You know, your attention didn’t collapse.
0:33:59 Your attention has been stolen from you
0:34:01 by some very big and powerful forces.
0:34:02 But once you understand what those forces are,
0:34:04 you can begin to protect yourself as an individual
0:34:05 to some degree.
0:34:06 And as a society,
0:34:09 we can begin to protect ourselves even more.
0:34:10 – Yeah, so in the book,
0:34:12 you talk about this concept
0:34:15 of attentional pathogenic culture.
0:34:18 So I’d love to understand what that is
0:34:20 and how our environment is actually shaping
0:34:22 our inability to focus right now.
0:34:25 – Yeah, that’s a phrase that comes from Professor Joel Nigg,
0:34:27 who’s the leading expert on children’s attention problems,
0:34:30 arguably in the world in the United States, certainly.
0:34:31 And he said to me,
0:34:34 we need to ask if what we’re living in now
0:34:35 is an attentional pathogenic environment,
0:34:37 by which he means an environment
0:34:39 that is systematically undermining
0:34:40 our ability to focus.
0:34:41 That can sound very fancy,
0:34:43 but I’ll give you a specific example
0:34:44 that I’m sure be playing out for you.
0:34:45 He was playing out for me and I’m sure we play out
0:34:47 for literally everyone listening today.
0:34:49 I’d be amazed if there’s an exception.
0:34:50 Some people have it worse than others, of course.
0:34:53 I went to MIT to interview one of the leading neuroscientists
0:34:56 in the world, an amazing man named Professor Earl Miller.
0:34:57 And he said to me,
0:34:59 there’s one thing you need to understand
0:35:02 about the human brain more than anything else.
0:35:04 You can only consciously think
0:35:06 about one or two things at a time.
0:35:07 That’s it.
0:35:10 This is a fundamental limitation to the human brain.
0:35:13 The human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years.
0:35:15 It isn’t going to change on any time scale.
0:35:16 And if us are going to see,
0:35:18 you can only think about one or two things at a time.
0:35:21 But what’s happened is we’ve fallen from mass delusion.
0:35:23 The average teenager now believes
0:35:26 they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time.
0:35:28 And the rest of us are not far behind them.
0:35:30 So what happens is scientists like Professor Miller
0:35:31 and scientists all over the world
0:35:34 get people into labs, younger and older people,
0:35:35 and they get them to think they’re doing more
0:35:37 than one thing at a time and they monitor them.
0:35:39 And what they discover is always the same.
0:35:41 You can’t do more than one thing at a time.
0:35:45 What you do is you juggle very quickly between tasks.
0:35:47 You’re like, what did you just ask me?
0:35:48 What is this message on WhatsApp?
0:35:50 What does it say on the TV over there?
0:35:51 What is this message on Facebook?
0:35:53 Wait, what did you just ask me again?
0:35:54 So we’re constantly juggling.
0:35:58 And it turns out that juggling comes with a really big cost.
0:36:01 The technical term for it is the switch cost effect.
0:36:03 When you try and do more than one thing at a time,
0:36:05 you do all the things you’re trying
0:36:07 to do much less competently.
0:36:08 You make more mistakes.
0:36:10 You remember much less of what you do.
0:36:12 You’re much less creative.
0:36:13 And remember when I first learned this,
0:36:14 not just from Professor Miller,
0:36:17 but from a deep dive into a lot of the science
0:36:18 and the scientists involved.
0:36:20 I remember thinking, okay, I’ve got it.
0:36:21 I get it. It’s bad.
0:36:22 I can see I’m doing it.
0:36:24 But it’s like a little niggling.
0:36:25 It’s a minor thing.
0:36:27 The evidence suggests this is a really big thing.
0:36:29 I’ll give you an example of a small study
0:36:31 that’s backed by a wider body of evidence.
0:36:33 Hewlett Packard, the printer company,
0:36:35 got a scientist in to study their workers
0:36:37 and he split them into two groups.
0:36:39 And the first group was told,
0:36:41 get on with your task, whatever it is,
0:36:42 and you’re not gonna be interrupted.
0:36:43 Just do what you gotta do.
0:36:44 And the second group was told,
0:36:46 get on with your task, whatever it is.
0:36:47 But at the same time,
0:36:50 you gotta answer a heavy load of email and phone calls.
0:36:52 So pretty much how most of us live.
0:36:53 And at the end of it,
0:36:56 the scientists tested the IQ of both groups.
0:36:58 The group that had not been interrupted
0:37:01 scored on average 10 IQ points higher.
0:37:03 To give you a sense of how big an effect that is,
0:37:04 if you and me sat down now
0:37:06 and smoked a fat split together and got stoned,
0:37:09 our IQs would go down in the short term by five points.
0:37:11 So in the short term,
0:37:12 being chronically interrupted
0:37:15 is twice as bad for your IQ as getting stoned, right?
0:37:17 You’d be better off sitting at your desk,
0:37:19 smoking a split and doing one thing at a time,
0:37:20 than you would sitting at your desk,
0:37:22 not smoking a split and being constantly interrupted
0:37:23 by text and email.
0:37:25 Now, I want to be clear,
0:37:26 you’d be better off neither getting stoned
0:37:27 nor being interrupted.
0:37:28 Don’t want to get the wrong idea.
0:37:31 But you can see, this is why Professor Miller said,
0:37:35 we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation
0:37:36 as a result of being constantly interrupted.
0:37:38 And this has huge implications for entrepreneurs,
0:37:40 people listening, right?
0:37:43 A lot of work is systematically degrading
0:37:47 the intelligence and the capacities of their workers, right?
0:37:49 So you might text someone who works for you
0:37:51 and be annoyed they didn’t, or Slack them,
0:37:53 or whatever, send them a message on Slack,
0:37:54 and be annoyed they didn’t get back to you immediately.
0:37:56 You think, well, it would have only taken them 10 seconds
0:37:57 to reply.
0:38:00 In fact, a study by Professor Michael Posner
0:38:02 at the University of Oregon,
0:38:03 found if you’re interrupted,
0:38:06 it takes you on average 23 minutes
0:38:08 to get back to the level of focus you had
0:38:10 before you were interrupted.
0:38:13 But most of us never get 23 minutes, right?
0:38:15 So we’re constantly operating at a lower level.
0:38:17 You think so, it doesn’t just take 10 seconds
0:38:18 to respond to that Slack message.
0:38:21 It takes 10 seconds plus the 23 minutes
0:38:23 it takes you to refocus your mind.
0:38:25 Since my book came out, people keep sending me job ads
0:38:28 that say things like must be a good multitasker.
0:38:30 You may as well say must be a chronic stoner
0:38:32 for all the good you’re gonna get out of that worker, right?
0:38:35 One of the things I learned from my book
0:38:37 that emerges from when you do a deep analysis
0:38:40 of the study of the science of attention
0:38:44 is our idea of productivity has gone badly wrong.
0:38:46 We think the productive worker
0:38:48 is the worker who you can interrupt at any moment.
0:38:50 We think a productive worker is a worker
0:38:51 who works to the point of exhaustion.
0:38:53 In fact, that ruins their attention,
0:38:56 ruins their creativity and capacity to think.
0:38:57 I mean, there’s many factors we can go into
0:38:59 but then consciousness is a long answer.
0:39:00 Yeah, so I really learned
0:39:02 that we need to deeply rethink a lot
0:39:04 of what we think we know about attention.
0:39:07 – Yeah, there were so many interesting things
0:39:08 about multitasking in your book
0:39:09 that really sparked my interest.
0:39:12 One of them was that you found a study
0:39:15 where the average adult who works in an office
0:39:18 can only really spend three minutes on anyone task,
0:39:19 which to me was just like,
0:39:21 what are we getting done in three minutes?
0:39:23 Like absolutely nothing, right?
0:39:25 And then also like the word multitask
0:39:28 was actually coined by computer scientists in the ’60s
0:39:30 to describe the function of computers
0:39:31 with multiple processors.
0:39:33 And we don’t have multiple processors.
0:39:35 We’re not actually designed to multitask.
0:39:37 So all that was super interesting.
0:39:41 One like sort of random question that really came up
0:39:44 when I was thinking about multitasking
0:39:47 was this trend of ADHD that’s going on on the internet.
0:39:48 I don’t know if you’re aware of this,
0:39:52 but on TikTok, on Instagram Reels,
0:39:54 everybody is talking about ADHD
0:39:58 and a lot of young Gen Zers especially,
0:40:00 they are claiming they have ADHD.
0:40:02 And to me, it feels a little bit like an excuse
0:40:05 for the reason why they can’t pay attention at work,
0:40:06 pay attention at school, why their room is messy,
0:40:07 for example.
0:40:09 And it just seems like everybody’s coming out
0:40:12 of the woodwork saying they have ADHD.
0:40:13 And your work made me realize
0:40:16 that maybe we’re all just trying to battle
0:40:19 this crazy environment and getting symptoms
0:40:21 of what we think is ADHD.
0:40:24 But really it’s just our natural brains
0:40:26 just doing either a good job or a bad job
0:40:27 of managing our environment.
0:40:29 So I was curious to know your thoughts on that.
0:40:31 – Yeah, I mean, I have a chapter about ADHD
0:40:33 and I interviewed a huge number of scientists about it.
0:40:36 And I think there’s a lot of truth in what you say.
0:40:39 So some people are more sensitive to these problems
0:40:41 because of their genetics.
0:40:43 But they’re actually just more severely affected
0:40:45 by the thing that’s affecting everyone.
0:40:48 The way one person, Chris Macogliano,
0:40:50 who’s an educator who works with children
0:40:51 with educational challenges,
0:40:54 said to me, ADHD people are just like canaries
0:40:55 in the coal mine.
0:40:56 They’re slightly more affected,
0:40:58 they’re effected a little bit earlier.
0:41:00 But essentially the same thing’s happening for them.
0:41:02 My worry is I interviewed this guy
0:41:03 called Professor Nicholas Dodman.
0:41:05 This is gonna sound like a joke, it’s not.
0:41:07 He’s a professor at Tufts University
0:41:10 who pioneered diagnosing ADHD in dogs
0:41:11 and giving them riddle-in.
0:41:13 So I went to interview him, he’s a super nice guy.
0:41:15 And I expected that he would say,
0:41:18 oh, look, these dogs,
0:41:19 they’ve got something biologically wrong with them
0:41:21 that has to be fixed with riddle-in.
0:41:22 In fact, he was very honest.
0:41:24 Dogs need to run around for five hours a day.
0:41:27 Almost no American dog, except for farm dogs, gets that.
0:41:28 They don’t like being shut inside.
0:41:31 They don’t like being left alone, they’re pack animals.
0:41:32 So he gave me an example of a dog
0:41:34 that had ADHD and inverted commas,
0:41:35 ran around all the time.
0:41:38 Then it went to live on a farm and it was completely fine.
0:41:39 So he said, look, of course,
0:41:42 I’m medicating them in an imperfect situation.
0:41:44 They’ve got frustrated biological needs,
0:41:46 is the phrase he used.
0:41:47 And when I give them riddle-in, is it ideal?
0:41:48 No.
0:41:49 What’s the alternative?
0:41:50 The dog’s just gonna be going crazy.
0:41:52 Now, that to me is a pretty honest way
0:41:54 of talking and thinking about it.
0:41:55 I don’t think it’s a good solution,
0:41:56 by the way, I don’t agree with him,
0:41:58 although I like him as a person.
0:42:00 But I think there’s something like that.
0:42:01 That’s not everything that’s going on.
0:42:02 There really are some people
0:42:05 who are more genetically sensitive to these problems.
0:42:08 But you’re right, if you look at all the factors
0:42:10 that are affecting our ability to focus
0:42:12 and pay attention that I write about, there’s 12 of them,
0:42:14 you think about the fact that the way we eat
0:42:17 is profoundly affecting our focus and attention.
0:42:18 ADHD levels go massively up
0:42:21 when schools put in vending machines,
0:42:25 where kids are consuming more shitty sugar and processed food.
0:42:26 You think about sleep.
0:42:29 If you stay awake for 19 hours,
0:42:31 your ability to focus suffers as much
0:42:33 as if you got legally drunk.
0:42:37 And yet children sleep 85 minutes less than they did in 1945.
0:42:40 One of the leading experts on sleep in the entire world,
0:42:43 Dr. Charles Sizler at Harvard Medical School said to me,
0:42:44 even if nothing else had changed,
0:42:47 except that children and adults sleep so much less,
0:42:50 that alone would be causing a huge crisis
0:42:51 in attention and focus.
0:42:54 The way our schools work is causing these problems.
0:42:58 And of course, our kids are using technologies
0:43:01 at the moment specifically designed
0:43:03 to hack and invade their attention.
0:43:05 I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley
0:43:08 interviewing people who design key aspects of the world
0:43:09 in which we now live.
0:43:13 And there’s an amazing guy called Dr. James Williams,
0:43:15 who used to be at the heart of Google and is now,
0:43:17 well, for reasons I’ll explain, he quit.
0:43:20 One day he was speaking at a tech conference
0:43:22 and the audience was literally the people who designed
0:43:24 the stuff that people listening now are using today.
0:43:26 And he said to them, if there’s anyone here
0:43:29 who wants to live in the world that we’re creating,
0:43:34 please put up your hand and nobody put up their hand.
0:43:35 That’s one of the reasons he quit
0:43:37 and became, I would argue, the most important
0:43:39 philosopher of attention in the world at the moment.
0:43:41 So we’ve got to understand at the moment,
0:43:42 I can go into more detail on this,
0:43:45 but at the moment, the technologies we use
0:43:47 are designed by social media companies
0:43:48 to maximally hack and invade us
0:43:50 and our children’s attention.
0:43:51 That technology does not have to be designed that way.
0:43:55 At the moment, we have technology working against us
0:43:57 in the interests of a tiny number of tech billionaires.
0:44:00 We could have technology that works for us
0:44:02 in our interest to help us achieve our goals.
0:44:03 That’s absolutely achievable.
0:44:05 The technology exists to do that.
0:44:07 It requires a different kind of change
0:44:08 that we can talk about.
0:44:11 So just to relate it to your ADHD question,
0:44:15 can it be a coincidence that all these changes have happened
0:44:17 and far more people are experiencing problems
0:44:20 with attention and all that’s going on
0:44:21 is there’s something genetically wrong with them?
0:44:23 No, that’s not the case, right?
0:44:24 That is not true.
0:44:26 Even for the people who are more genetically sensitive,
0:44:29 as Professor Joel Nigg,
0:44:31 the leading children’s attention expert says,
0:44:33 even for people who are more genetically sensitive,
0:44:35 genes interact with the environment.
0:44:37 Your genes are switched on and off
0:44:39 by interaction with the environment.
0:44:41 I’m not against giving stimulants to add stimulant drugs
0:44:43 to adults, that’s fine.
0:44:45 I would even recommend it to some adults for some things.
0:44:48 I’m much more cautious about giving them to children.
0:44:50 I’m not saying I would never do it,
0:44:52 but I think we need to be really careful,
0:44:54 not least ’cause there’s literally no long-term research
0:44:57 on beyond 18 months of what it does to them
0:45:00 and there’s some worrying findings in animal studies
0:45:01 about what it does to them.
0:45:02 That’s not dealing with the problem.
0:45:06 We’ve got to deal with the actual causes of the problem.
0:45:09 – We’ll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
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0:50:02 I do wanna dig in on a few things that you said for sure.
0:50:07 So you mentioned diet and sleep at a high level
0:50:09 but I’d love if you could really explain to us
0:50:11 what the food that we consume
0:50:15 or our sleeping habits do to our focus.
0:50:17 – So this is really fascinating new movement
0:50:19 called nutritional psychiatry
0:50:22 that looks at how the food we eat affects our mental states
0:50:24 it relates to depression, which we were talking about earlier
0:50:26 and all sorts of things and particularly attention.
0:50:28 So I interviewed loads of these nutritional psychiatry
0:50:31 so really interesting people, fascinating.
0:50:33 And there’s lots of ways in which
0:50:34 the way we eat is affecting our attention
0:50:35 but I’ll give you an example,
0:50:36 I go through lots in the book,
0:50:38 example one, I think again,
0:50:41 not all but a lot of people listening will be experiencing.
0:50:43 So let’s say you have the standard American breakfast
0:50:45 what I had this morning in fact,
0:50:48 which is either sugary cereal or white bread
0:50:50 that’s been toasted and buttered.
0:50:53 What that does is it releases a huge amount of energy
0:50:54 really quickly into your brain.
0:50:56 It releases a lot of glucose, which is great.
0:50:59 You’re like, whoa, I’m awake, I’m ready for the day.
0:51:01 But it’s released so much energy so fast
0:51:03 that a few hours later you’ll get to your desk
0:51:05 and you’ll have a huge energy slump.
0:51:06 And when your energy slumps in your brain,
0:51:08 you experience brain fog.
0:51:10 You just can’t think or pay attention very well.
0:51:12 Until you have another sugary Carby snack
0:51:15 and then you spike up again and then you crash again.
0:51:16 The way Dale Pinnock,
0:51:18 one of the leading nutritionists in Britain put it to me,
0:51:20 is the way we eat puts us on a roller coaster
0:51:24 of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day.
0:51:25 Whereas if for example,
0:51:27 you had for breakfast oatmeal with blueberries,
0:51:30 that releases energy much more steadily.
0:51:33 You won’t have those spikes and troughs
0:51:35 that cause patches of brain fog.
0:51:35 So you think about that
0:51:37 or you think about the sleep which you mentioned.
0:51:39 You know, there’s a brilliant sleep scientist
0:51:41 at the University of St. Paul called
0:51:43 Professor Roxanne Prichard,
0:51:44 who really helped me to explain this.
0:51:45 There’s many elements to sleep,
0:51:47 but this is one that really clarified it for me.
0:51:49 The whole time you’re awake,
0:51:52 your brain is building up what’s called metabolic waste.
0:51:53 She calls it brain cell poop,
0:51:54 which helped me to make sense of it.
0:51:56 And when you go to sleep,
0:51:59 your cerebral spinal fluid channels open
0:52:01 and a watery fluid washes through your brain
0:52:04 and carries this brain cell poop out of your brain
0:52:07 down into your kidneys and eventually out of your body.
0:52:08 If you don’t get eight hours sleep a night,
0:52:11 your brain doesn’t get the chance to clean itself.
0:52:13 Literally the next day, your brain is clogged up, right?
0:52:14 This is one of the reasons
0:52:16 why you struggle to pay attention.
0:52:17 When you’re tired,
0:52:20 40% of Americans sleep less than seven hours a night.
0:52:22 You’re going through constantly
0:52:25 with your brain literally clogged up.
0:52:26 In fact, there’s just been a big study release
0:52:28 that showed that people who sleep less
0:52:30 are far more likely to get dementia,
0:52:33 which this is probably a factor in.
0:52:35 So you can see when you look at these factors
0:52:38 and it’s interesting because for all of the,
0:52:40 obviously again, as with depression,
0:52:42 I wrote the book, some solutions oriented person, right?
0:52:44 I wanna think, okay, to me,
0:52:46 the benefit of understanding what’s causing these problems
0:52:47 is, okay, if you understand a problem,
0:52:49 you’re better equipped to solve it.
0:52:51 So with all of the 12 factors
0:52:53 that I write about in stolen focus
0:52:54 that are harming our attention,
0:52:57 I think there’s two levels of which we’ve got to deal with them.
0:52:59 I think of them as defense and offense.
0:53:02 There are loads of things that we can all do
0:53:03 at an individual level to defend ourselves
0:53:05 and our children against these factors.
0:53:07 Give you an example of one, over in the corner there,
0:53:08 I have something called a case safe.
0:53:10 I should totally have bought shares in this company
0:53:12 before my book came out because they’re doing really well.
0:53:14 It’s plastic safe, you take off the lid,
0:53:17 you put in your phone, you put on the lid,
0:53:18 you turn the dial at the top
0:53:20 and it locks your phone away for anything
0:53:22 between five minutes and a whole day.
0:53:24 I use that three hours a day to do my writing.
0:53:26 I won’t sit down and watch a film with my partner
0:53:29 unless we both imprison our phones in the phone jail.
0:53:30 I will have my friends round for dinner
0:53:32 unless everyone agrees to put their phone in the jail.
0:53:33 And when we get nervous, I’m like,
0:53:36 the pleasures of attention are so much greater
0:53:39 than whatever shitty Instagram update you’re about to get.
0:53:41 And as soon as the phone is locked away, they see it.
0:53:42 So there’s loads of things like that.
0:53:44 I go through dozens of things like that in the book.
0:53:46 But I want to be really honest with people
0:53:49 because I do not feel most people talking about attention
0:53:51 are leveling with people.
0:53:53 I am passionately in favor of these individual changes.
0:53:55 They will make a big difference.
0:53:57 On their own, they’re not going to totally solve the problem
0:54:00 because at the moment, it’s like someone is pouring
0:54:02 itching powder over us all day
0:54:03 and then leaning forward and going,
0:54:05 “Hey, buddy, you should learn how to meditate.”
0:54:07 Then you wouldn’t be scratching all the time.
0:54:10 And you want to go, “Screw you, I’ll learn to meditate.”
0:54:11 That’s very valuable.
0:54:14 But you need to stop pouring this itching powder on me.
0:54:17 We need to go on offense against the forces
0:54:18 that are doing this to us.
0:54:21 Against the food industry, against big tech.
0:54:22 Of course, we want lots of tech.
0:54:23 Of course, we want food.
0:54:25 I love food, as you can tell, from my chins.
0:54:27 We want these things.
0:54:29 We want them to work for us, not against us.
0:54:31 There’s, for all of these 12 factors,
0:54:33 there’s a degree of individual protection
0:54:36 and a degree of social regulation.
0:54:37 But these people won’t do it on their own, right?
0:54:39 And there’s an example.
0:54:40 You’re too young to remember this,
0:54:42 but some people listening will remember it.
0:54:45 And certainly, if you ask your parents, they’ll remember it.
0:54:46 This is a great example of how we did this
0:54:47 in the recent past.
0:54:50 When I was a kid, the dominant former gasoline
0:54:53 in the United States, the UK, everywhere,
0:54:55 was leaded gasoline.
0:54:58 And it was discovered, obviously, when it’s in the gasoline,
0:55:00 it’s in the air, everyone was breathing in lead.
0:55:02 And it was discovered that exposure to lead
0:55:03 is really bad for your brain
0:55:06 and particularly bad for kids’ ability
0:55:08 to focus and pay attention.
0:55:09 So a group of ordinary moms,
0:55:11 what used to people who, at the time,
0:55:13 called themselves housewives in the late ’70s,
0:55:14 banded together and said,
0:55:16 “Why the hell are we allowing this?
0:55:17 “Why are we allowing these companies
0:55:19 “to screw up our kids’ brains, right?”
0:55:21 And it’s important to notice what they didn’t say.
0:55:23 They didn’t say, “So let’s ban cars.”
0:55:24 Just like, obviously, I’m not saying,
0:55:26 “Let’s get rid of tech, right? I love tech.”
0:55:29 What they said is let’s deal with the specific element
0:55:31 of the petrol that’s screwing up our kids’ brains
0:55:33 and replace it with a kind of petrol that doesn’t.
0:55:34 And it followed the classic pattern
0:55:37 of all political movements that were described by Gandhi.
0:55:40 First, they ignored them, then they laughed at them,
0:55:42 then they fought them, then they won.
0:55:45 As everyone listening knows, there’s no more leaded petrol.
0:55:48 As a result, the Center for Disease Control
0:55:50 has calculated the average American child
0:55:52 is three to five IQ points higher
0:55:55 than they would have been had we not banned leaded petrol.
0:55:56 Now, to me, that’s a great model.
0:55:58 You identify a thing in the environment
0:56:00 that is screwing up kids’ attention.
0:56:03 You can’t protect yourself against lead if it’s in the air.
0:56:04 I mean, I suppose we could have everyone
0:56:05 could have got their kids to wear gas masks,
0:56:07 but how effective is that? Not very.
0:56:09 So you deal with it in the environment.
0:56:11 Now, there are lots of things we can do to protect ourselves,
0:56:14 but we’ve also got to realize there are elements
0:56:16 of our technology that we can get rid of
0:56:18 and replace with aspects of our technology
0:56:20 that work for us, not against us.
0:56:22 I go through the book and I went to places
0:56:24 that have begun to do it from France to New Zealand.
0:56:27 But to do that, we’ve got to shift our psychology.
0:56:29 We’ve got to stop blaming ourselves.
0:56:32 We should certainly implement individual changes,
0:56:34 but we should realize that’s not the only thing
0:56:35 that we should do.
0:56:36 And we need to realize, you know,
0:56:40 we’re not medieval peasants begging at the court
0:56:42 of King Musk and King Zuckerberg
0:56:45 for a few little crumbs of attention from their tables, right?
0:56:48 We are the free citizens of democracies
0:56:51 and we own our own minds.
0:56:53 And together, we can take them back if we want to.
0:56:54 Yeah, I love this.
0:56:56 And I want to dig deeper on this level.
0:57:00 So you are alluding to tech.
0:57:03 Social media, I think, is one of the main culprits
0:57:07 of especially people my age losing their attention, I think.
0:57:10 And in your book, you talk about this infinite scroll
0:57:12 invented by Azar Raskin,
0:57:15 which basically enables us to just continually
0:57:17 just stay on social media forever.
0:57:19 So I’d love to understand, like, what is he?
0:57:23 What’s like an alternative business model for social media
0:57:27 that actually doesn’t totally steal our focus?
0:57:30 Is there an alternative business model for social media?
0:57:31 Is really my question.
0:57:33 I think you’ve gone to the really important question.
0:57:36 There’s three possible business models for social media.
0:57:39 The one we have at the moment, I’ll just explain it.
0:57:41 And I realized actually, you know, it’s funny
0:57:42 from interviewing people in Silicon Valley
0:57:43 and spending so much time interviewing people
0:57:45 at the heart of the machine.
0:57:48 I realized I was incredibly naive before.
0:57:50 So the way they kept explaining it to me,
0:57:51 it took me a while to get it
0:57:53 ’cause it seemed too simple, too obvious.
0:57:54 Anyone listening?
0:57:57 If you open Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram now
0:57:59 and begin to scroll,
0:58:02 those companies begin to make money out of you in two ways.
0:58:04 The first way is really obvious, you see ads.
0:58:05 Okay, you don’t need me to explain that.
0:58:07 Second way is much more important.
0:58:10 Everything you ever like, don’t like,
0:58:12 say in your open or private messages
0:58:13 is scanned and sorted
0:58:16 by their artificial intelligence algorithms
0:58:18 to figure out what makes you tick,
0:58:21 to figure out what you like and don’t like.
0:58:24 And they’re figuring that out primarily for one reason.
0:58:27 They’re figuring out what will keep you scrolling
0:58:29 ’cause every time you open the app and start to scroll
0:58:31 they begin to make money ’cause you see ads.
0:58:33 The longer you scroll, the more money they make
0:58:36 ’cause you see more ads and they learn more about you.
0:58:38 And every time you close the app
0:58:39 those revenue streams disappear.
0:58:41 So all of this genius in Silicon Valley
0:58:43 when it’s applied to social media
0:58:45 or this AI or these algorithms
0:58:47 are geared towards one thing and one thing only.
0:58:50 Figuring out how do we get you to open the app
0:58:53 as often as possible and scroll as long as possible.
0:58:54 That’s it.
0:58:55 Just like the head of KFC,
0:58:57 all he cares about in his professional capacity
0:58:59 is how often did you go to KFC this week
0:59:01 and how big was the bucket you bought?
0:59:05 All they care about is maximizing your attention,
0:59:06 maximizing scrolling.
0:59:08 So the current business model,
0:59:09 the technical term for it
0:59:12 which comes from Professor Shashana Zuboff at Harvard
0:59:14 is surveillance capitalism.
0:59:15 You seem to get it for free
0:59:18 but in return they surveil everything you do
0:59:20 and you’re not the customer.
0:59:23 Famously, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram
0:59:25 they’ve got customer service departments.
0:59:26 You can’t phone them.
0:59:27 I can’t phone them.
0:59:28 We’re not the customers.
0:59:29 You’re the product they sell
0:59:31 to the real customer who’s the advertiser.
0:59:33 They break up and fragment your attention
0:59:35 to sell it to advertisers.
0:59:36 That’s how they make money.
0:59:37 So that’s the first model, right?
0:59:38 You seem to get it for free
0:59:40 but you pay with your attention.
0:59:42 You also pay by our politics becoming screwed up
0:59:44 and all sorts of other things that we can talk about
0:59:46 and being much more likely to become depressed
0:59:48 and all sorts of other things that we can talk about.
0:59:49 That’s model one.
0:59:50 The alternative models,
0:59:52 everyone listening pretty much
0:59:54 will have an experience of the other two.
0:59:55 They’re pretty simple.
0:59:57 One of them is subscription.
0:59:59 So we all know how HBO and Netflix work.
1:00:00 You pay a certain amount
1:00:03 and in return you get access to the product.
1:00:05 The key thing is subscription
1:00:07 completely changes the incentives.
1:00:09 At the moment, they’re not thinking,
1:00:11 hey, what does Bob want?
1:00:12 When Bob is a Facebook user
1:00:14 or Instagram or TikTok or whatever,
1:00:15 they’re figuring out,
1:00:17 how do we hack and invade Bob’s attention
1:00:19 to keep him scrolling as long as possible
1:00:22 to sell his attention to the advertisers?
1:00:23 ‘Cause you’re not the customer
1:00:25 but suddenly in a subscription model,
1:00:26 you are the customer.
1:00:28 Suddenly they have to go, oh, what does Bob want?
1:00:31 Turns out Bob feels like shit when he spends all day
1:00:33 scrolling through photos of his friends
1:00:34 that have been edited to make them look
1:00:35 much more attractive than they really are.
1:00:37 But Bob feels good when he meets up with his friends
1:00:39 offline and looks into their eyes,
1:00:40 comes back to what we were talking about
1:00:42 in relation to loneliness.
1:00:45 Okay, let’s design our app to maximize
1:00:47 Bob meeting up with other people offline.
1:00:49 Let’s design it so he can indicate he’d like to meet up.
1:00:50 How?
1:00:52 Bob turns out Jenny’s up the block.
1:00:55 Sorry, Jenny in the block, that’s J.Lo reference.
1:00:56 Turns out Jenny’s around the corner
1:00:57 and she’d like to meet up too.
1:00:59 Why don’t you go for a coffee?
1:01:01 You could design the app in five minutes to do that, right?
1:01:02 My friends in Silicon Valley,
1:01:05 you could design it in all sorts of ways
1:01:09 that are designed to enhance our goals for our life,
1:01:11 not get us to put our goals aside
1:01:13 so we spend hours mindlessly scrolling, right?
1:01:15 That’s one alternative model.
1:01:16 Well, the third model is something
1:01:19 that literally everyone are listening, has experience of.
1:01:20 Think about the sewers.
1:01:23 Before we had sewers, we had feces in the street,
1:01:25 people got cholera, it was terrible.
1:01:29 So we all pay to build and maintain the sewers together.
1:01:31 You own the sewers in your town,
1:01:32 I own the sewers in mine,
1:01:33 along with everyone else who lives here.
1:01:36 And we all have invested interest
1:01:39 in having a functioning sewage system.
1:01:41 And we all pay for it together.
1:01:44 Now, it might be that like we own the sewage pipes together
1:01:45 ’cause we don’t wanna get cholera,
1:01:47 we might wanna own the information pipes together
1:01:49 ’cause we’re getting cholera for our attention
1:01:51 and our politics.
1:01:52 Okay, now you’d wanna make sure
1:01:54 that was independent of the government.
1:01:56 We wouldn’t want President Trump or President Biden
1:01:58 or any political figure to control it,
1:01:59 but it’s perfectly good model for that.
1:02:02 I’m British, that’s the model of the BBC.
1:02:04 Every British person who has a television
1:02:06 pays a fee to the BBC
1:02:07 and it is independent of the government.
1:02:08 It’s not perfect,
1:02:11 but it’s the most trusted media organization in the world.
1:02:14 But whatever alternative model you use,
1:02:16 the key thing is about changing the incentives.
1:02:19 The truth is, as long as the longer you scroll,
1:02:20 the more money they make,
1:02:21 they’ll just get better and better at it.
1:02:23 As my friend, Tristan Harris,
1:02:24 who used to work at the heart of Google,
1:02:26 said when he testified before the Senate,
1:02:28 you can try having self-control,
1:02:30 but every time you do,
1:02:34 there are 10,000 engineers on the other side of the screen
1:02:37 working very hard to undermine your self-control.
1:02:38 I’m not saying you can’t do it, you can,
1:02:41 but the game is rigged against you.
1:02:43 And the way I think of it is we’re in a race.
1:02:45 For almost all of these 12 factors
1:02:46 that I write about in stolen focus
1:02:48 that are harming our attention,
1:02:51 they’re poised to become more powerful if we don’t act.
1:02:54 Paul Graham, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley,
1:02:56 said the world is on course to be more addictive
1:02:59 in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40.
1:03:02 Just think about how much more addictive TikTok is
1:03:04 to your kids or to you than Facebook was.
1:03:07 Now imagine the next crack-like iteration
1:03:08 of TikTok in the metaverse,
1:03:10 and that’s true in the food industry,
1:03:12 it’s true in lots of factors that I write about.
1:03:14 On the other side of the race,
1:03:17 I would argue there’s gotta be a movement of all of us
1:03:21 saying no, you don’t get to do that to me,
1:03:22 you don’t get to do that to my brain,
1:03:24 you don’t get to do that to my child.
1:03:27 Of course we choose a life with lots of tech,
1:03:30 but we also choose a life where we can think deeply,
1:03:33 where we can read books where our children can play outside.
1:03:35 And if we want that, we can get it.
1:03:36 I’ve seen the science of how we get it,
1:03:38 I’ve been to places that have begun to do it,
1:03:40 but you don’t get what you don’t fight for.
1:03:42 We’ve got to decide that we value attention.
1:03:44 If we value it and we fight for it,
1:03:47 of course I mean peacefully fight for it, I mean,
1:03:49 if we fight for it, we can get it, right?
1:03:50 The science is very clear,
1:03:52 but it won’t happen by magic.
1:03:55 – Yeah, I’m so, so glad that I asked that question
1:03:57 because it was such a good response.
1:03:59 And I have so many young listeners
1:04:03 who are change makers, so smart, are new entrepreneurs.
1:04:05 And I feel like I’m just really happy
1:04:07 they got to absorb that from you.
1:04:10 So let’s wrap this up.
1:04:14 I want to talk about really quick the impact
1:04:17 as an individual in society that we have
1:04:20 when it comes to the lack of focus or having focus.
1:04:22 So as an individual having focus,
1:04:25 what is it enabled to do in terms of your goals?
1:04:28 As a society, having focus, not having focus,
1:04:29 what are the implications?
1:04:30 And then we’ll wrap it up.
1:04:32 – It’s a really important question.
1:04:34 And I think it’s worth diving a bit
1:04:37 into one particular mechanism in social media
1:04:40 that is harming individual’s ability to change their lives
1:04:43 and harming our society’s ability to change their lives.
1:04:44 So like we were talking about,
1:04:46 at the moment we’ve got this model,
1:04:48 the longer you scroll, the more money they make.
1:04:50 So all the social media companies understandably
1:04:53 set up their algorithms to scan human behavior
1:04:56 and figure out, okay, what makes people scroll longer?
1:04:59 And this wasn’t the intention of any of these companies,
1:05:02 but they bumped into an uncomfortable truth
1:05:03 about human nature.
1:05:04 There’s many good things about human nature,
1:05:06 but this is an uncomfortable one.
1:05:08 The fancy term for it is negativity bias.
1:05:09 It’s very simple.
1:05:11 People will stare longer,
1:05:13 something that makes them angry and upset
1:05:15 than it will at something that makes them feel good.
1:05:17 If you’ve ever seen a car crash on the highway,
1:05:18 you know what I mean.
1:05:20 You stared longer at the mangled car wreck
1:05:21 than you did at the pretty flowers
1:05:22 on the other side of the street.
1:05:24 I’d like to think you find what I’m saying interesting,
1:05:26 but if someone at the other side of the room
1:05:28 right now started to have a fight,
1:05:29 you would turn and look at the fight, right?
1:05:31 This is very deep in human nature.
1:05:34 10-week-old babies stare longer at an angry face
1:05:36 than a smiling face.
1:05:37 And it’s probably deep in our evolution.
1:05:39 Our ancestors who weren’t looking out
1:05:41 for risk and danger probably got eaten.
1:05:42 I mean, that’s a slightly crude way to put it,
1:05:43 but you know what I mean.
1:05:45 So that’s always been a little part of human nature.
1:05:48 But when it combines with algorithms
1:05:50 that are designed to keep you scrolling
1:05:52 and figuring out a step ahead of you,
1:05:53 what am I gonna feed you?
1:05:54 What am I gonna feed you?
1:05:56 It leads to a horrific outcome.
1:05:59 So picture two teenage girls who go to the same party
1:06:02 and leave to go home on the same bus.
1:06:03 And they both open TikTok.
1:06:04 And one of them does a video going,
1:06:06 “That was such a great party.
1:06:07 We danced all night.
1:06:08 What fun loved it?”
1:06:10 And the other girl opens her phone and says,
1:06:12 “Karen was an absolute hoe at that party
1:06:14 “and her boyfriend’s a prick
1:06:16 “and just does an angry denunciation
1:06:17 “of everyone at the party.”
1:06:19 The algorithms are always scanning
1:06:21 for the kind of language you use.
1:06:23 And they’ll put the first video into a few people’s feeds,
1:06:25 but they’ll put the second video
1:06:27 into far more people’s feeds.
1:06:29 ‘Cause if it’s enraging, it’s engaging.
1:06:31 What do you mean Karen’s a skank?
1:06:31 You’re a skank.
1:06:33 You can imagine people start to fight.
1:06:34 They start to argue.
1:06:35 Now that dynamic is bad enough
1:06:37 at the level of two teenage girls on a bus.
1:06:38 We all know what’s happening
1:06:41 to teenage girls’ levels of anxiety.
1:06:43 But now imagine that happening to a whole society
1:06:47 where the kind, decent people are muffled
1:06:51 and pushed to the back and the angriest, meanest,
1:06:54 cruelest people are given a megaphone.
1:06:55 Except you don’t have to imagine it.
1:06:56 ‘Cause we’ve been living it.
1:06:58 We’ve been living it for the last 10 years.
1:06:59 And don’t take my word for it.
1:07:03 In the aftermath of the election of President Trump
1:07:05 and the victory of Brexit in my own country,
1:07:09 Facebook secretly set up a group of its own data scientists
1:07:11 to figure out what’s going on here.
1:07:14 Are we playing a role in creating this rage?
1:07:16 And their own data scientists
1:07:18 found that their current business model
1:07:20 inherently promotes anger and rage.
1:07:23 In fact, they discovered that a third of all the people
1:07:26 in Germany who joined neo-Nazi groups joined
1:07:29 because Facebook specifically recommended it.
1:07:33 You might want to join it said, followed by a neo-Nazi group.
1:07:35 And that’s not ’cause anyone at Facebook is a neo-Nazi.
1:07:37 It’s ’cause the fundamental business model
1:07:39 was promoting rage and anger.
1:07:42 So there’s lots of reasons why we need to deal
1:07:44 with this business model.
1:07:45 A life where you’re angry
1:07:49 and being constantly prompted to be jealous, angry, mean
1:07:52 and rewarded for being mean and angry.
1:07:53 Open a Twitter account.
1:07:55 Say loads of nice things about people.
1:07:56 You’ll get no traction.
1:07:59 Open a Twitter account and stop being vile and mean.
1:08:00 You’ll get traction.
1:08:03 To live in that environment is disastrous for individuals.
1:08:06 It’s depressing, horrible.
1:08:09 It makes the person being mean, less happy.
1:08:12 And of course it makes the people receiving meanness less happy.
1:08:13 That’s disastrous at an individual level.
1:08:16 But my God is it disastrous at a societal level.
1:08:19 And we’ve got a lot of stuff we need to do as a society.
1:08:21 We’ve got a lot of things we need to deal with.
1:08:23 And we’re not going to be able to solve those problems.
1:08:25 Think about the ozone layer crisis.
1:08:27 When I was a kid, it was discovered there’s a layer
1:08:30 of ozone that protects the planet from the sun’s rays.
1:08:32 And when I was a kid in the 80s, it was discovered
1:08:36 that there was a chemical, a kind of chemical called CFCs
1:08:38 that was in hairsprays that was causing a hole
1:08:39 in the ozone layer.
1:08:40 And we loved our hairsprays in the 80s.
1:08:41 So this was a big deal.
1:08:42 (laughing)
1:08:44 It was discovered it was melting the Arctic.
1:08:46 And look at what happened next.
1:08:49 That science was explained to ordinary people.
1:08:51 Ordinary people absorbed the science.
1:08:53 They distinguished the science from lies,
1:08:55 conspiracy theories, nonsense.
1:08:58 And all over the world, people pressured their politicians
1:09:01 to take action to ban CFCs.
1:09:02 And it succeeded.
1:09:03 They banned CFCs as a result
1:09:05 that was reported a couple of weeks ago.
1:09:07 The ozone layer has almost completely healed.
1:09:09 I don’t think anyone listening thinks
1:09:10 that would happen now.
1:09:12 We would get some people who wore an ozone layer badge
1:09:14 and argued for the right things
1:09:17 and probably glued themselves to stuff to make it happen.
1:09:19 And then you’d have a load of other people who’d say,
1:09:21 “Well, how do we even know the ozone layer exists?”
1:09:23 Maybe George Soros created the ozone layer.
1:09:25 Maybe the Jews created it.
1:09:28 I mean, people would just go into a kind of madness
1:09:31 and bigotry and we would scream at each other about it
1:09:32 and nothing would get done.
1:09:35 So it’s not just our individual attention
1:09:36 that’s being harmed.
1:09:37 It’s our collective attention,
1:09:41 our ability as a society to focus on things and solve them.
1:09:43 We can’t, an individual who can’t pay attention
1:09:45 is going to really struggle to achieve their goals.
1:09:47 And a society that can’t pay attention
1:09:48 is going to struggle to achieve its goals.
1:09:49 And we’re seeing that.
1:09:51 I don’t think it’s a coincidence
1:09:53 that we have this huge crisis of attention
1:09:56 at the same time as the biggest crisis in democracy
1:09:58 all over the world since the 1930s.
1:10:01 So attention can seem like a pretty small subject
1:10:02 when you first look at it.
1:10:03 But when you follow the threads,
1:10:05 you realize it affects every aspect of our lives
1:10:07 and it affects the whole society.
1:10:10 Dr. James Williams, who I mentioned before said to me,
1:10:11 imagine you’re driving somewhere
1:10:14 and someone threw a huge bucket of mud over your windshield.
1:10:16 It doesn’t matter what you’ve got to do
1:10:18 when you get to your destination.
1:10:20 The first thing you’ve got to do is clean your windshield
1:10:22 ’cause you’re not going anywhere if you don’t sort that out.
1:10:24 And he said the attention crisis is a bit like that.
1:10:26 Whatever you want to do in your life,
1:10:27 if you don’t get your attention right,
1:10:28 good luck getting there.
1:10:31 (upbeat music)
1:10:34 (upbeat music)
1:10:36 (upbeat music)
1:10:40 (upbeat music)
1:10:50 [BLANK_AUDIO]