How to Reclaim Focus in the Age of Distraction | Johann Hari | Good Life Project

We need an attention movement to reclaim our minds and I absolutely believe we can dothat.

We don't have to toleratethis.

We don't have to accept our minds and our children's minds being diminished in the way that they are rightnow.

These are relatively recentchanges.

They are not acts ofGod.

They're notmagic. They're things that have been done by humans and they're things that can be undone byhumans.

Hey, so long time listeners now I'm a little bit obsessed with the area ofattention.

I have come to believe over a period of years that the quality and richness of our lives is in no small part determined by the depth and quality of ourattention.

If it's massivelydistracted, perpetually spinning out focused onnegativity, that will also largely be the state of our lives regardless of the actual objective circumstance of ourlives.

And that is where we're going in today's powerful conversation with myguest, JohanHari.

So, Johan is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared everywhere from the New York Times to LeMans, theGuardian, and many other newspapers and mediaoutlets.

His TED Talks and now this viral video have been viewed something like 100 million times and his work has been praised by a broad range of people from Oprah Winfrey to knownChomsky.

He was the executive producer of the Oscar-nominated film The United Statesvs.

Billy Holiday and following an incident with his god son a few yearsback, he decided to turn his attention to the topic ofattention.

Exploring what attention actually is how it affects us are mental and physicalhealth, our relationship to careers andlives.

And what our ability to either harness or lose control of it is doing to us and also how our world technology and global enterprise have built models designed to effectively hijack ourattention, not in the name of the betterment of our lives or ofhumanity, but rather for their owngood.

And Johan goes deep into his research and ideas and the groundbreaking books stolen focus why you can't pay attention and we explore what he calls an attentional pathogenicculture, how it's making life both harder and sometimessadder.

Andimportantly, what we can do about it to reclaim our attention and in doing so we claim ourlives.

So excited to share this best of conversation withyou.

I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good LifeProject.

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Well, I want to dive in withyou.

The story that you tell about your three months inProvidence, I think is really powerful and I want to explore that a littlebit.

But there wasalso, it sounds like there was an inciting incident even before you decide to go deep into a tension and before you have this really fascinating three month experience inProvidence, which was the relationship with your godsson who had this sort of obsession with Elvis that I guess a little bit later in life when he was struggling a little bit led to this moment with you that awakened you to the fact that something's happening around here that even preceded this three month sabbatical andProvidence, talked me through that experience abit.

And just to say it's an easy mistake tomake.

It's ProvidenceTown, notProvidence.

It would have been much lessglamourous.

Oh, I gotit. I gotit. I gotit.

I gotit. I gotit. I gotit.

I gotit. But the other happensProvidence, RhodeIsland.

It's very nice and I disrespectthem.

Yeah,well, when he wasnine, my godsson developed this brief but freakishly intense obsession with ElvisPresley.

I never even discovered Harry found out who hewas.

And it was particularly cute because he didn't know that Elvis had become a cheesycliche.

So I think he was the last person in the history of Western civilization to do an entirely sincere impression ofElvis.

And when I talked to him in atnight, he would get me to tell him the story of Elvis's life again andagain.

And I tried to skip over the bit of the end where Elvis dies on thetoilet,obviously.

And one night I was tucking him in and I mentioned Graceland where Elvislived.

And he said tome, YoHan, will you take me to Graceland oneday?

And Isaid,sure, in the way you do with 90 year olds knowing next week it'll be Disneyland orwhatever.

And hesaid,no, do you reallypromise?

Do you swear one day you're going to take me toGraceland?

And Isaid, I absolutelypromise.

And I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years until so many things had gonewrong.

He dropped out of school when he was15.

And by the time he was19, he spentliterally, this is not anexaggeration, almostliterally, every waking moment alternating between his iPad and his iPhone and his life was just this blur ofWhatsApp,YouTube,pornography, the social mediasites.

And it was almost like he was kind of worrying at the speed of Snapchat where nothing still or serious could touchhim.

And one day we were sitting on my sofa just next to where I'm talking to younow.

And I'd been trying to talk to him all day and just nothing was getting anytraction.

And to be totally honest withyou, I wasn't that muchbetter.

I was staring at my owndevices.

And I suddenly remembered this moment all those yearsbefore.

And I said tohim,hey, let's go to Graceland and he looked at me completely blankly and didn't rememberthis.

And I reminded him and Isaid,no, let's break this numbingroutine.

Let's go all over thesouth.

But you've got to promise me onething, which is that when wego, you'll leave your phone in the hotel during theday.

And he thought about it and hesaid,yeah, I could see that breaking this routine really appealed tohim.

And I think it was two weeks later we took off from Heathrow in London to New Orleans where westarted.

And a couple of weeks later we arrived at the gates ofGraceland.

And when you getthere, this is even beforeCOVID, there's no one to show youaround.

What happens is they hand you an iPad and you put in some earbuds and the iPad shows youaround.

It says goleft, goright.

It tells your story about thatroom.

And everywhere yougo, the every room you gointo, there's a picture of that room on theiPad.

So what happens is everyone just walks around Graceland staring at theiriPads.

And I'm getting slightly irritated bythis.

And we got to the jungleroom, which was Elvis's favourite room inGraceland.

It's full of fakeplants.

And there was a Canadian couple next tous.

And the husband turned to his wife andsaid,honey, this isamazing.

Look, if you swipeleft, you can see the jungle room to theleft.

And if you swiperight, you can see the jungle room to theright.

And I laughed out loud ofit.

It waskidding. And I turned and watched themin.

They're just swiping back andforth.

And I leaned over and Isaid, buthey,sir, there's an old-fashioned form of swiping you coulddo.

It's called turning yourhead.

Becauselook, we're in the jungleroom.

You don't need to look at it on youriPad.

We're actuallythere. And they looked to me like I was completely deranged and backed out of theroom.

And I turned to my godson to laugh aboutit.

And he was standing in the corner of theroom, staring atSnapchat, because from the minute welanded, he couldn'tstop.

And I went up to him and I did something that's never a good idea withteenagers.

I tried to grab the phone out of his hand and Isaid, I know you're afraid of missingout.

But this is guaranteeing that you'll missout.

You're not showing up at your ownlife.

You're not present at your ownexistence.

And he stormedoff. So I wandered around him and fish on my own for the rest of theday.

And I found him that night at the heartbreak hotel where we were staying just down thestreet.

And he was sitting by the swimming pool and I went up to him and he was just kind ofscrolling.

He didn't look up atme, but Iapologized.

And he carried on staring atSnapchat, but hesaid, I know something's really wronghere.

And I don't know what itis.

And Irealized, we'd come away to try to deal with this crisis and beingpresent.

But that crisis waseverywhere.

It felt like there was noescape.

And that's when Ithought,okay, I need to figure out what's going onhere.

I need to investigatethis.

And it'sinteresting,right?

Because as youmentioned, you're observing that inhim.

But it's alsoyou. It's like we're all in this place where we're trying to figure it out from the inside looking at youknow, we're inside the jar and trying to read the label on the outside to a certainextent.

So I love thatanalogy. That's a brilliantanalogy.

That's an excellent way of puttingit.

Notmine, by theway. It's adifferent,Charlie.

Okay, I give him fullcredit.

Oh,interesting. I wish I'd known that when I was writing thebook.

I would have used it as aguideline.

So this sounds like a trigger or something atyou.

Not too long afterthat.

You take thistime, youknow, like you're in a point in your career where you've got a window where you cansay,okay, so let me actually run thisexperiment.

And you effectively go and you take a sabbatical and you spend three months with drawn fromtechnology.

Really experience it like what is thislike?

What is it doing to and forme?

Tell me about that experience abit.

When I came back fromMemphis, I was so horrified that I justthought, youknow, I was in this luckyposition.

One of my books was being made into afilm.

So I had somemoney. And I justthought, I can't take thisanymore.

And the stories I had in myhead, so my own ability to focus have been gettingworse.

It felt like with each year thatpassed, things that require deep focus like reading abook, having properconversations, watching longmovies, things that are so deep to my sense ofself, we're getting more and more like running up and downescalator.

You know what Imean? I could still dothem, but they're getting harder andharder.

And I just thought I can't take thisanymore.

And because the stories I had in my head about why my own attention had been gettingworse, at the time where I later realized these were in fact wrong or huge loavessimplified, I basically had twostories.

Oneis, Ithought,well, you're justweak.

You don't have enoughwillpower.

Why aren't you strongenough?

Why can't you resistthis?

Andsecondly, Ithought,well, someone invented the smartphone and that screwed meover,right?

So if those are the two stories you have in yourhead, there's a kind of logicalsolution.

Use your willpower to separate yourself from thesmartphone.

So I decided to go for three months to a place called Provincetown in CapeCod, which if people who don't know it is a little kind of gay resorttown, it's the kind of place where more than one person makes a full-time living by dressing asUrsula, the villain from the littlemermaid, a greatplace.

And I left myphone, my internet enabled phone and my internet enabled laptop in in Boston and I literally got a boat to fleethem.

And lots of things happened in those three months inProvincetown.

There were some ups anddowns.

But the thing that most surprisedme, youknow, I was nearly40.

Ithought,well, maybe I just gotolder.

Maybe that's why my attention isn'tgood.

My attention went back to being as good as it had been when I was17.

I could read eight hours aday.

I was stunned by the level ofimprovement.

I later learned there were actually many things that changed in Provincetown that that boosted myattention, not just separating myself from thetechnology.

But so I remember thevery, I remember the last day I was in Provincetown goingto, what's itcalled, LongPoint, which is where the lighthouseis.

And looking back over the whole of Provincetown and thinking about this time and thinkingabout, youknow, I would say to anyonelistening, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proudof, whether it's starting abusiness, being a goodparent, learning to play theguitar, whatever itis, that thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of focus andattention.

And when you're focus and attention breakdown, your ability to solve your problems breaksdown, your ability to achieve your goals breaksdown.

And what I felt like I'd got back in Provincetown was the sense of my owncompetence.

I felt competentagain, like I could follow through onthings.

I rememberthinking,well, why would I ever go back to how I livedbefore?

Why would I ever go back tothat?

And I wentback, I got very sick on the ferryback.

It was a quite choppyjourney.

And I got my phone back and I got my laptopback.

And within amonth, I was80% back to where I'd been before Iwent, not I never went entirelyback.

And I only really understood why when I went to Moscow inRussia, to interviewDr.

JamesWilliams, who had workedat, he had been a senior strategist atGoogle, was appalled by what they were doing to ourattention.

Left and became my radar either leading philosopher or attention in theworld.

He was living in Moscow because his wife works for the World Health Organizationthere.

And he said tome,look, the mistake you've madehere, youham, is it's like you thought the solution to air pollution was for you personally to wear a gasmask,right?

Now, I'm not opposed to gasmasks, I've lived inBeijing, I'd wear a gasmask, but it's not the solution to airpollution.

The solution for air pollution is to go to the source of thepollution.

And it took me a long time to really absorb the lesson of what he'dsaid, but eventually I was able to expand my understanding of what's happening based on partly on what hesaid.

Yeah, Imean, it's tellingthat, youknow, you have thisexperience, you awaken to the fact that there are all thesebenefits.

And being fullyaware, you go back and within a matter ofweeks, sort of back into like this inroutine, it really does describe the experience I think so many of us have where even knowing what's going on doesn't necessarily allow us to remedy theproblem.

There's a phrase that you describe living in an attentional pathogenicculture.

What do you actually mean bythat?

Well, that was a phrase that was used to me by Professor JoelNeg, who's one of the leading experts on children's attentionproblems.

And he was posing as a question that we should ask if we're living in attentional pathogenicenvironment.

So, I think what he was doing was making a play on there's a concept that's very well established in science that the contemporary in the contemporary UnitedStates, we have what's called an obesahogenicenvironment.

If you look at a picture of a beach in the United States in1960, it looks really strange to usnow.

I just say to bet I'm Google them because everyone is what we would call slim orbuff.

And you think of us where where's everyoneelse?

And then you look at the evidence and there were almost no obese people in 1960 in the UnitedStates.

And then a whole series of changes in the environmenthappened.

And I'm tired food supply systemchanged.

We built cities as impossible to bike and walk around and we became more stressed that makes peoplecomfy.

So, we created what's called an obesahogenicenvironment.

In the contemporary UnitedStates, it's easy to become obes and hard to avoidit.

And I think what Professor Neg was doingthere, I need to obviously talked about the analogy with obesity is something similar is happening to ourenvironment.

So, to understandthis, I end up going on this big journey all over the world from Miami to Melbourne toMontreal.

And I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts in the world about attention andfocus.

So, what I learned from them is there's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make itworse.

And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely rising in recentyears.

These include aspects of ourtechnology, some aspects notall, but they also go way beyondthem.

The food weeat, the sleep we don'tget, the air webreathe.

There's an enormous array of factors that are bearing on ourattention.

And this is why the book is called StolenFocus.

Because I realized our attention didn'tcollapse.

Our attention has been stolen from us by these bigforces.

But once we understand thoseforces, we can begin to deal with them and there's sort of two levels at which we have to deal with them that I talkabout.

Yeah, I think it also makes sense for us to talkabout.

When you thinkabout,okay, so there are these 12 differentfactors, many sort of almost on the systemic level or their things that are part of our built environment in no small part thesedays.

What I want to ask alsois, why do we care aboutthis?

So when we're talking aboutattention, we're talking about attention being stolen fromus.

When we're talking about the fact that we live in a world where it's getting harder and harder and harder tofocus, what is the effect ofthat?

What's the effect on our mentalhealth, ourrelationships, ourcreativity, ourproductivity, ourperformance, our humanity atlarge.

Why do and should we care so much aboutthis?

Well, to stay withDr.Williams, who Imentioned, who's done brilliant work onthis, he argues there are three layers ofattention.

I would argue there are four and I put this to him and heagreed.

So the first level is the one that we think about most of the time when we think about beingdistracted.

And he calls it ourspotlight.

So your spotlight is your ability to filter out all the other things around you and narrow down to onething.

So in the room I'm innow, I can see out thewindow, I can see the street if I just turn my headslightly.

There's a television in myroom, it's not switchedon.

Somewhere in this room there is myphone, it might be flashing up little messages forme.

I'm filtering all of that out and I'm listening toyou.

What did he just askme? Ohyeah, he asked me aboutattention,right?

So that's the most common form of attention that we think aboutspotlight.

It's your ability to achieve your immediatetasks.

So let's say I have here a can of Cokezero, but it's nearlyempty.

So let's say Isell, could we pause for a second and go to thefridge?

And I go to the fridge to get another Cokezero, but on the way there I get a text fromsomeone, I look atit, I forget why I went there and I come back without a can of Cokezero.

That would be an interruption to myspotlight, my ability to achieve my immediate short-termgoals.

That's one level ofattention, obviously a very important one and I think it's pretty obvious to everyone that that's being hugelyinterrupted.

The average American office worker now focuses on any one task for only threeminutes.

But abovethat, there's another level of attention thatDr.

Williams calls your starlight and your starlight isn't your ability to achieve your immediatetasks, but your ability to achieve more medium to long-termgoals, like say I want to set up abusiness, I want to write abook, whatever it mightbe.

He calls it your starlight because when you're traveling in thedesert, if you don't have a compass orGPS, you look to the stars and you remember that's the direction you're traveling in and I think that's clearly being disrupted aswell.

Abovethat, there's another level which he calls yourdaylight, which is how do you even know what your long-term goalsare?

How do you know you want to set up abusiness?

How do you know what the businessis?

How do you know you want to write abook?

How do you know what you care about enough to write abook?

You want to be a goodparent?

How do you know what it means to be a goodparent?

It's called your daylight because you can see a scene most clearly when it's flooded withdaylight.

And he argues that our short-term and long-term attention is being so disrupted that it's damaging our ability to even formulate ourgoals.

To know what you want todo, you've got to have periods ofrest, ofmind-wondering, of reflection and we're just being denied those things at themoment, most ofus.

And I would argue there's a layer of attention even beyondthat, which I would call our stadiumlights.

And that's our ability not just to achieve our own long-termgoals, but our ability as a society to see each other and formulate collectivegoals.

Thinkabout, I don't think it's a coincidence that we're having ahuge, the biggest crisis in democracy across the world since the 1930s at the same time as we're having this huge crisis and our ability to payattention.

Clearly, it's not the only factor there's lots of things goingon.

But a society of people who can't payattention, can't thinkclearly, can't listen to other people on the otherside, will become morebrittle, moreangry, morebitter, especially if we're interacting through mechanisms that are designed to make us angry as social media as we can talk about thatmore.

So I would argue all of these fourlayers, when you think about it in this four-layermodel, you begin to see why it's notjust,oh, I'm a bitdistracted, I couldn'tquite, youknow, couldn't quite finish reading this long magazinearticle.

This affects every layer of your life and the society'slife.

Now that makes a lot of sense tome.

What popped into my head as you're sharing thatis, so I'm a long timemeditator.

My mindfulness has been my practicefor, youknow, the over adecade.

And somewhere along theway, the phrase meta-attention or meta-awareness came into the conversation for me and it's always been described then and when I have experienced it as the ability to almost zoom the lens out and becomeaware, attentive to where your attention actually is at any given moment intime, which gives you the sense of agency and intentionality to then choose whether that's where you want it to be and redirect it if youwant.

Where does the concept of meta-attention or meta-awareness fit into thatframework?

Well, I think what you're describing is really important and I have lots of thoughts aboutit.

So for all of the 12 factors that I write about installed of focus that are harming people's arrability to focus and payattention, I would argue there's two levels at which we have to respond toit.

There are all sorts of things that we can do as individuals to protect ourselves and our children a lot of the book is about children to defend ourselves against these forces that are doing this to us and I'm passionately in favor of those individualchanges.

They can make a realdifference.

Meditation is an excellent example of one of those individualchanges.

I also want to be really honest with people in a way that I think most attentionbooks,frankly,aren't.

Those things are really important but they will only get you so far because at the moment it's like we'reliving, it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then leaning forward andgoing, heybuddy, you ought to learn to meditate then you wouldn't scratch so much and you want togo,okay, I'll learn tomeditate, that is hugely valuable but you need to stop pouring itching powderon, youknow,right?

And so we need to have this otherlevel.

I think of it as defense andoffense.

We need to defend ourselves and our children as much aspossible.

Meditation is a terrific tool along withlots, dozens of others I talk about in the book but we also need to go on offense and gains the factors that are doing this to us and that can sound very fancy but I give lots of practical examples of places that actually did that and are doing that now in the world that we canfollow.

And we'll be right back after a word from oursponsors.

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So let's dive into those the bigger systemic factors also and then we'll loop around to some of the things that we can actuallydo, some of theinterventions, the way that we can engage withthis.

But when you talk about and use the word stolen in the title of your book is you described because there's something bigger happening that is has the the sensation of this being taken from us on a largerscale.

You've referenced technology and it's not justtechnology, it's the entiremodel, the business model that's built around the way that we interact withtechnology.

So take me deeper into that and how you see it really having a deleterious effect on our tension and then in turn the way that we actually are able to engage with in liberallives.

Yes, there's lots that you've put thereon.

There's a lot of layers tothis.

So let's look at an obvious example that it will be playing out for virtually everyone who's listening today unless they're veryfortunate.

I went to interview a man named Professor Earl Miller at MIT who's one of the leading neuroscientists in theworld.

And he said tome, there's one thing you need to understand about the human brain more than anythingelse.

You can only consciously think about one or two things at atime.

That'sit. This is a great youknow, metro-tentionalinsight.

That'sit. This is a fundamental limitation of the humanbrain.

The human brain has not significantly changed in 40,000years.

It's not going to change on any timescale.

Any of us are going tosee.

You can only think about one or two things at atime.

But what's happened is we've fallen for a massdelusion.

The average American teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the sametime.

So what happens is scientists get people intolabs, not justteenagers, adults aswell, older people aswell.

And they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at atime.

And what they discover is always thesame.

You can't do more than one thing at atime.

What you do is you juggle very quickly betweentasks.

Your consciousness papers overit.

You don'tquite, you're not aware ofit.

But you'reswitching. You'reswitching,switching,switching.

What did he just askme? What was that on the televisionnow?

What's this messageon?

What'sthat?Wait, what did he just ask meagain?

You'rejuggling. And it turns out that juggling comes with a really bigcost.

The technical term for that cost is the switch costeffect.

When you try and do more than one thing at atime, you will do all the things you're trying to do much lesscompetently.

You'll make moremistakes.

You'll remember less of what youdo.

You'll be lesscreative.

And this sounds like a smalleffect.

It's a really bigeffect.

I'll give you an example from a small study that's back by a very small study that's back by much wider body ofevidence.

Hewlett-Packard, the printercompany, got a scientist in to study their workforce and he split the workers into twogroups.

And the first group wastold, just get on with your task whatever it is and you're not going to beinterrupted.

And the second group wastold, get on with your task whatever itis, but you're going to have to answer a heavy load of email and phonecalls.

And at the end ofit, this scientist tested the IQ of both these smallgroups.

The group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher than the group that had beeninterrupted.

To give you a sense of how big that effectis, if you or me got stoned togethernow, you're inColorado, it'slegal.

If we sat down and spoke to Fatsblifttogether, our IQs would go down in the short term by fivepoints.

So in the shortterm, you'd be better off sitting at yourdesk, getting stoned and not beinginterrupted, then sitting at yourdesk, not getting stoned and being interrupted all thetime.

Now to beclear, you'd be better off neither getting stoned nor being interruptedobviously.

But you get a sense of how big this effectis.

This is why Professor Miller said tome, we live in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of all theseinterruptions.

But what you're getting at in yourquestion, which is so important is we are currently using technology that is designed to maximally interruptus.

This isn't myview. Listen to SeanParker, who is one of the biggest initial investors inFacebook.

Hesaid, we designed Facebook to maximally distracts people and invade theirattention.

We knew what we were doing and we did itanyway.

God only knows what it's doing to our children'sbrains.

That's what theysay. And it's really important to understand this mechanism because actually it should really give ushope.

The way Big Tech want us to think about this debateis, are you pro tech or are you antitech?

Right? And ofcourse, we're not going to give up ourtech.

We're not going to join theRMS.

Nor would I want us to no disrespect to any armaged people who arelistening.

I guess they're cheating if theyare.

That's not thedebate. The question isnot, are you pro tech or antitech?

The questionis, what tech designed for what purposes working in whoseinterests?

So at themoment, social media has been designed around one particular businessmodel.

It does not have to work thatway.

So I interviewed loads of people in Silicon Valley who designed key aspects of thetechnology.

Us and our kids use all thetime.

Right? And it took a long time for them explaining it for me to really understandthis.

So let's say anyonelistening, if you don't doit, but if you open Facebook now or TikTok orTwitter, any of the social mediaaccounts,apps, they start to make money in two ways straightaway.

The first way is reallyobvious.

You seeads,okay, everyone listening knows how thatworks.

The second way is much moreimportant.

Everything you do on those apps is scanned and sorted by the artificial intelligence algorithms of those apps to build up a picture of who youare.

So let's say that you clicked that youlike.

I don'tknow. BettMiddler, BernieSanders, and you tell your mom you just bought somediapers.

Okay, so it figures out you like Bett Middler and you're aman.

You're probablygay. You like BernieSanders.

You're probably leftwing.

And you're talking about buyingdiapers, you must have ababy.

So they're building up a portrait ofyou.

They've got tens of thousands of data points likethat.

They know who youare. And that's partly so they can sell you toadvertisers, yourattention.

They want to sell all this information so advertisers can target you because you are not the customer of theseapps.

You are the product they sell to the real customer who's theadvertiser.

But moreimportantly, they're also learning the weaknesses in yourattention.

So they can keep feeding you the things that will keep you scrolling because the more frequently you pick up your phone and the longer youscroll, the more money theymake.

So all these engineers in SiliconValley, all thesealgorithms, all this engineering genius is built towards onething.

Figuring out how can I get you to pick up your phone as often as possible and scroll as long aspossible.

But what's important to understand is social media doesn't have to work thatway.

There's a different way social media canwork.

It's entirelyachievable.

And there's an analogy in American history that really helped me to think about thisalternative.

And you'll rememberit.

I remember it from when I was akid.

So not that longago, the standard form of gasoline in the United States was leadedpetrol,right?

Leadedgasoline. And a bit before mytime, people used to paint their homes with leadedpaint.

And it was discovered that exposure to lead is incredibly bad for your brain and particularly bad for children's ability to focus and payattention.

So whathappened? A group of ordinarymoms, it was mostlymothers, banded together andsaid, why are we allowingthis?

Why are we allowing these companies to ruin our children'sbrains?

It'scrazy. And it's important to notice what they didn'tsay.

They didn't say so we'reanti-gastole.

They didn't say so we'reanti-paint.

They didn't say banal gasoline and banalpaint.

That would have beenridiculous.

Theysaid, let's ban the specific component in the gasoline and in the lead that is harming ourkids'attention.

Theyfought. They fought foryears.

Theysucceeded. As aresult, theCDC, the Center for DiseaseControl, has calculated that the average American child is three to five IQ points higher than they would have been had lead not beenbanned.

So you cansee, tome, this is a really importantmodel.

We identify something in the environment that's banning ourattention.

We banned together to act on thescience.

We get rid of that component while retaining the good stuff that was around thatcomponent.

In the sameway, so AizaRaskin, who invented a key part of how the internet works isdad, Jeff Raskin invented the Apple Macintosh for SteveJobs.

Aiza said tome, youknow, there's an equivalent to the lead in the leadpaint.

Hesaid, ban the current business model for socialmedia.

What the kind of fancy term for it is surveillancecapitalism.

Hesaid, just say that amodel, a business model that is based on trackingyou, surveilling you in order to figure out the weaknesses in yourattention, hackthem.

That's justinhuman. Don't allowit.

And lots of people had to say this to me before I really absorbedit.

And I remember saying toAiza,okay, let's imagine we dothat.

We ban the current businessmodel.

And I open Facebook the nextday.

Would it justsay, youknow,sorry, everyone we've gonefishing.

Hesaid, of coursenot. What would happen is they'd have to move to a different businessmodel.

And everyone listening has experience of the two different businessmodels, almosteveryone.

The first issubscription.

Okay, everyone knows how Netflixworks.

You pay a smallamount. You getaccess.

Anothermodel, think about thesewers.

Before we hadsewers, we had feces in thestreet.

We gotcholera. So now we all pay for the sewers to be built andmaintained.

And we all own the sewerstogether.

You own the sewers inBoulder.

I own the sewers in London and LasVegas.

The cities where Ilive.

We own the sewers in the places where welive.

It may be that just like we want to own the sewage pipestogether, we want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the equivalent of cholera for ourattention.

Now, whatever the alternative business model we choose is the important thing to understand is all the incentiveschange.

At themoment, the incentives for social media companies are to figure out how do we get you and your kids to pick up your phone as often as possible and scroll as long aspossible.

But in these differentmodels, suddenly you become thecustomer.

They have togo, what does Johanwant?

Oh, turns out Johan wants to be able to payattention.

Let's design our app not to hack hisattention, but to heal hisattention.

Oh, turnsout, Johan wants to meet up with his friends offline because people feel good when they look into each other's eyes rather than scroll it stirring throughscreens.

Okay, let's design it to help people meet up offline rather than to prevent them from meeting uplike, that's incredibly technologicallyeasy.

My friends in Silicon Valley could do thattomorrow.

The key thing is we have to get the incentives right to doit.

And we can dothat,right?

There's no more floodedpain.

Just to say one last thing onthis, JamesWilliams, I mentioned before said tome, the axe existed for 1.4 million years before anyone thought to put a handle onit.

The entire internet is existed for less than 10,000days.

We can get this stuff right if we wantto.

When you describe it thisway, it all makessense.

And I think we all feel like we've been living in that matrix for like a chunk of timenow.

And our attention is the bigcommodity.

And because that leads to the accumulation of information which creates identity profiles and there's a value inthat.

When you look at Silicon Valleythough, so this is not a newproblem.

This is something that's been talked about for yearsnow.

And there have been from what Irecall, people who've tried tosay,well, let's offer an alternative tothis.

Let's offer a platform where we can buildcommunity.

And it's not about you being theproduct.

It's not about stealing yourattention.

It's not about selling your data and serving upads.

And it's never entirely caughton.

I'm actually thinking about podcasting rightnow, which may be the most successful version ofthis.

So what's happening in the world of podcasting right now is the original model that really built out this still rapidly growing space was adbased.

Now we're seeing that on any on a much more frequentlevel, offering subscriptions to listeners has become a really growing part of the business model in the podcastingworld.

And part of that promiseis, youknow, like you will get an ad freefeed, youknow,basically, youknow, like we're not going to serve anything else intoit.

And the latest data that I'veseen, youknow, from all the insider stuff is that somewhere between three and eight percent of listeners actually would raise their hand tosay, I will pay to opt out of that experience where my attention is beinginterrupted.

And the other 90 something percent aresaying, I would rather have my attention interrupted and notpay.

So what's going onhere?

Because there are we are being offered alternativemodels.

But the vast majority of people are still not saying yes toit.

Is that because we just don't realize what the cost is to uspersonally?

I think there's a fewreasons.

Imean, it's a bit likesaying, why should we deal with the obesity crisis because only a few people shop at WholeFoods,right?

It'slike,yeah, we've got a societywhere, youknow, half of all Americans have less than $600 in savings through no thought of their own because that money was transferred to therich.

So do they choose to prioritize the tiny amount of money they have on avoidingads?

Well,no, because they don't have that muchmoney, youknow.

So I think if you had a situation where wealth was distributed more evenly and people had the society's wealth was distributed reasonably as it used tobe.

We'd already be forcing the nostalgic about thepast, particularly around race because there were many thingswrong.

But think about look at the distribution of wealth in the 1950s in the United States between the working class middle class andrich, it was verydifferent.

So, why do you think that tells you people don't have very much money and they've got other priorities and they're not wrong to have otherpriorities.

They've got to feed theirkids,right?

So I don't think that tells you verymuch.

What we've got now is a source ofpollution.

And the solution to that is not tosay,well, let's just develop this little bubble overhere, which isn'tpolluted.

The solution is to deal with the source of thepollution,right?

Soyeah, I think that's a very important factorthere.

And I also think this is really important that we get this right now because at the moment we're in arace, if you look at all of the 12 factors that I write about installing focus that are undermining ourattention, many ofthem, notall, many of them are poised to get much more powerful across my lifetime inyours.

PaulGraham, one of the biggest investors in SiliconValley, said the world would be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40 on the currenttrajectory.

Think about how much more addictive TikTok is thanFacebook.

Now imagine the next crack like it's this iteration of TikTok that will be in themetaverse.

So that's one side of therace.

You've got these factors that are going to become more invasive if we don'tact.

On the other side of therace, we've got to have a movement of all of us sayingno,no, you don't get to do this tous.

No, you don't get to hack and invade us and ourchildren.

No, we don't toleratethis.

No, this is not a goodlife.

No, we choose instead a life where we can thinkdeeply, where we canfocus, where we can payattention.

Andagain, it requires a shift infocus.

Youknow, we are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from histable.

We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and we can take them back both at the individual level to somedegree, but more at the collectivelevel.

And that requires many collective changes that go significantly beyond that certainly a very important part of that is dealing with the current businessmodel, which is explicitly designed to hack and invade our attention and needs to bestopped.

And we'll become more sophisticated if we don'tact.

But there'smany, many morefactors.

And it's important to say this is not pie in thesky.

I went to places that deal with dealt with a lot of theseproblems.

So let's think about anotherexample.

It's related to what we're talkingabout, the switch costeffect,right?

So inFrance, in2018, they were having a huge crisis of what they called LaBernat, which I don't think I need totranslate.

And the French government under pressure from laborunions, and they would never have done it without laborunions, pressuringthem, set up a government inquiry to figure out why the hell is everyone so burnedout.

And what they discovered is that35% of Frenchworkers, but they could never stop checking their phones or their email because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night if they didn't answer they'd be introuble.

Youknow, Imean, I remember when we werekids, the only people who were on call weredoctors,right?

And they went on call all thetime.

We've gonefrom, youknow, almost nobody being on call to almost half the economy being on call all thetime.

And I can give those people in thatposition, all the lovely self-help lectures in the world about the benefits of unplugging and sleep and all thosethings.

They can't doit,right?

That's not a lovely liberating piece ofadvice.

It's a cruel taunt to say that tothem, which is why we need to build the collectivesolution.

So what the Frenchgovernment, labor unions then pressure the French government to introduce a legal reform which has beenintroduced.

I went there just afterwards to France before the plagueobviously.

So every French worker now has a legal right to disconnect and it just stipulates in the law very clearly your work hours have to be defined in yourcontract.

And you have the legal right when you leave work to not check your phone or your email until you come into work the next day or onMonday,right?

So it's just restoring to people what your parents and my parents took for granted that when you finish work you finishwork,right?

Now you can see how that's one of the many collective changes I advocate for installingfocus.

It won't happen unless we fight forit.

It only happen in France because French workers fought forit.

That frees people up to make a lot of the individual changes that they need tomake.

So there's a complex relationship between the individual changes and the collectivechanges.

And to just advocate the individual changes in the absence of this collective layer which is what pretty much all other attention books do is to medishonest.

It's a form ofprivilege,right?

Most people can't do that on theirown.

They can't do what I did in provincetown.

They can't gothrough. It's my family can't dothat.

I couldn't do that until I had the freakish luck of what of my books being made into amovie.

That's why we have to collectively change the way we live in targeted ways that deal with the factors that are undermining ourattention.

Yeah, I mean it's so powerful to zoom the lens out likethat.

And we'll be right back after word from oursponsors.

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You made a point also that said basically it's not necessarily about dismantling theold.

It is about reimagining something that is so much qualitatively more appealing and better that when we step into that container the way that it makes us feel we don't want to step back out into it and I recall the teachings of Jean Sharp who was this professor emeritus who passed a few years ago in his 90s who sort of did a lot of the seminal research on nonviolent political revolution and wrote this book called From Dictator to Democracy that became the handbook for so many revolutions around theworld.

And one of his principles was you need to get really clear on what the qualities of this new thing are and then don't message down with the old whatever you picture as the oppressor like the central mission cannot be to topple the currentdictator.

It's got to be to reimagine something that is so much more desirable and appealing and then rally people to build that that so many people start to move into this newsolution, this newstate, this new container that the pillars that supported the old simply disintegrate and whether it remains in name only or not you don't really care about you know the focus needs to be on where are we moving to and so many of us are focusing on how do we change the old or how do we dismantle how we topple it and it's a really important distinction tomake.

I love that and it's particularly relevant at the moment because for an Russian activist I literally talk about Jean Sharp for obvious obvious reasons but the I think that's fascinating and absolutely right and if we think about them as pillars that we want to move to so I give you an example I love the way you frame that it's really important and I give you an example of one of the core pillars so the last I guess quarter of the book is about our children because if kids don't form attention they're going to really struggle when they're older to do it right it's still possible but it'll be harder so building children who can pay attention is absolutely fundamental to getting this right and I go through lots of things that are bearing on our children the food that's currently being fed to our children is profoundly harming their attention children sleep 85 minutes less than they did a century ago that profoundly harms their attention the way our school system is designed is catastrophic if you wanted to design a school system this is not the fault of teachers or who never liked it if you wanted to design a school system that would destroy children's attention you would build one around memorizing completely pointless things for meaningless tests that make them stressed out and actually it's appalling we can talk about all of that but I would actually go to the biggest thing which is so there's been a huge increase in children's diagnosed attention problems for every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old there's now a hundred children who've been identified with that problem and all sorts of things are going on obviously the business model that we've just talked about in terms of many many things but I actually think there's one big overarching thing that we particularly can fix and cost nothing and is I really really recommend it and I think we can do this absolutely in the in the short to medium term so one of the heroes of my book is a woman called a linoa scanazi and she's the hero not because she identified the problem that's easy she's the hero because she built the solution and one that every parent and grandparent can follow listening so linoa grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the 1960s and for when she was five years old every morning she left the house on her own and walked to school which was 15 minutes away and she would generally bump into all the other five six seven eight year olds who were walking to school because everyone walked to school on their own in her neighborhood and indeed across the United States at that time it was completely normal when linoa would get to near the school there was a busy road so there was a 10 year old boy whose job was to help the five year olds cross the street and then when she finished school at 3p.m.

she would leave and play freely in the neighborhood for a couple of hours and then she would find her way home when she was hungry again that's what everyone in the neighborhood did by the time and I'm sure that's what your childhood was likeright?

OK, niceout. So by the time linoa was a mother in in Queens in New York in the 1990s that hadended.

In fact by 2003 only10% of American children ever played outdoors without an adult supervising them and I think the10% that did get to play outside got like 12 minutes a week so it justended.

Childhood became something even long before COVID although COVID accentuatedthis.

Childhood became something that happened entirely behind closed doors and almost entirely under adult supervision and it turns out that childhood we've lost contained all sorts of things that were essential for developing attention and focus in the healthiest possible way to give you a real no-shit Sherlock example exerciseright?

The evidence is overwhelming we mentioned Professor Joel Nigg the brilliant children's attention expert before kids who get to run around for more brain connections and compare attentionbetter.

The single best thing you can do for children who can't pay attention is let them go and run around and comeback.

We are the first human society ever to try to get children to sit still for eight hours aday.

It's madnessright? But actually there's something even more important so in that free play when children are playing freely with each other without adults standing overthem.

Dr Isabel Benke the great Chilean scientist has done a lot of good work onthis.

It turns out when children play freely they develop all sorts of things that are really essential forattention.

They learn what intereststhem.

That's really important forattention.

They learn how to persuade other kids to pay attention to what intereststhem.

They learn how to take turns paying attention to the things the other kids want them to pay attentionto.

They learn how to takerisks, how to deal withanxiety, try and climb thetree, you go toohigh, you getanxious, you realise yousurvived, dealing with anxieties essential for having a healthy sense ofattention.

We took all that away and Lenore could see this was a disasterright?

She was ahead of the game on thisone.

And at first she thought well the solution is kind of obvious I just need to persuade parents to let their kids playoutdoors.

So she would say to parents tell me about something you did when you were a kid that you don't allow your own children to do and people their eyes would light up the face to ride my bike in thewoods.

What comes to mind foryou?

Just like running rightoutside.

I mean spending time out innature, you know that was everyday.

Just like you described with very much mychildhood.

And as a parent now I see as much as I value that and trying it's so different because even as a parent though when you try and introduce these ideas and create the space for it and like literally build it in there are so many other forces that sayno, you know that's actually not the way we do this thing called childhood rightnow.

Exactly so what Lenore discovered is exactly that insight that you're saying which is it doesn't actually work to just persuade individual parents because if you're the only parent who lets your child out they get scared you look crazy and haven't actually often people call thecops.

And so Lenore began to run an organization calledLetGrow.

It'sLetGrow.org. I really recommend everyone goes tothem.

Obviously I write about her in thebook.

And what LetGrow do is they go to whole schools and whole neighborhoods and they persuade everyone to give their kids increasing levels of independence that build up to letting their kids play outside in restoringchildhood.

So I went to a lot of LetGrow programs and I think of all the hundreds of conversations I had for stolenfocus.

I think probably the most moving was a LetGrow program in LongIsland.

I spoke to a 14 year oldboy.

He was a big strong 14 year oldboy.

He was taller than me and I'm not particularlyshort.

And until this program had begun nine months before he'd never played outside his home without anadult.

His parents wouldn't even let him go for a rumour on theblock.

I asked him why and hesaid, oh my parents are afraid of all these kidnappings hesaid, this boy lives in a town where the French bakery is across the street from the olive oil store and he had a level of fear that would be appropriate if you lived in Ukraine rightnow.

And then this LetGrow program began and he started to play outdoors with hisfriends.

I asked him what hedid. Hesaid, we played ball games and basketball first but then he said we decided to go into the woods and hesaid, he said there's a realwar.

Hesaid, our cell phones didn't have any signal in the woods and we still wentthere.

And Isaid, what did you do in thewoods?

And hesaid, we built a fort with our own hands and now we go and sit in the fort and we build otherthings.

And maybe this sounds melodramatic but it really felt like I see was describingthis.

It felt like watching a child come tolife.

And I thought about how many kids I know who the only place they ever get to explore anything is on fortnight and world of warcraft andminecraft,right?

We could hardly be surprised they become so obsessed withthem.

And Lenore was with me that day and when that boy left she turned to me and shesaid, think about human history and humanprehistory.

I think we're not meant to use that term but you know what Imean?

All throughout humanhistory, children had to go out andexplore.

They had to map theterritory.

They had tohunt. They had toseek.

They had to buildthings.

And what we did is we took all that away and that boy given a tiny little sliver offreedom.

What did hedo? He went into the woods and he built a fort because it's so deep in humannature.

And when we take that away from ourchildren, we've psychologically and physically confined our children and ofcourse, if anything good can come out of the horrors of the last twoyears, I think we can realize that we're not going to be able to doanything.

We're not going to be able to doanything.

We're not going to be able to do anything to doanything.

We're not going to be able to doanything.

We're not going to be able to do anything to doanything.

We're not going to be able to doanything.

We're not going to be able to do anything mixed with each other at the absolute top of the society's priority list and everything else can comelater.

But what we cansee, I think we can allsee,okay, confining our kids for two years is terribly harmthem.

Well, that should lead us tothink,okay, confining our kids before that was really harmingthem.

And now we can restore childhood of obviously installing focus that advocate many things we need to do to restoreattention, many individual goals and collectivegoals.

One of them is we have to restore human childhood because at the moment our kids are not getting a childhood that our ancestors would even recognize as a humanchildhood.

And this is reallyachievable.

This is something I have gone on the most left-wing radioshows, which I'm sure you can get so much closer to mypolitics.

And I've gone on the most right-wing Fox Newsshows.

And I've got to tell you everyone has enthusiastically agreed withthis,right?

We can do this every school in the United States should have a let-growprogram.

It costs literallynothing.

This isfree,right? We can dothis.

And this is so important for restoring attention because if we don't do it now and the kids don't get a sense of attention when they'reyoung, what are we setting them upfor?

Yeah, I mean what you're really talking about is an attention revolution starting withkids, youknow, and planting those seeds early in life because if we don't plantthem, what's the net effect on theirlives?

And then if you if you zoom the lensout,right?

What's the net effect onsociety?

What's the net effect on theworld?

What's the net effect on just our ability to live in flourishes human beings morebroadly?

And it sounds on the onehand, you'relike, we're just talking about attentionman.

Andlike, now you're talking about the future of the humancondition.

And the answer is yesand, youknow, like it is that central to our ability to experience life the way that we want to experiencelife.

And yet it's something that I feelis, youknow, we've been evicted from her own lives through the deviceof, youknow, like attention and it's sort of a moment to step back intothat.

What you're really talking about isyes, they're all the individualthings.

You list a bunch of them in your book and we see them espoused in a lot of differentplaces, but going all the way back to the being of a conversationwhere, youknow, you talk about a sandwich pouring itching powder onyou,like, or if you're in like a place where the the air is so toxic tobreathe, it's we need upstream solutionsnow.

Youknow, not instead of the immediate what am I going to domyself, but in addition to and I think that's a lot of the power of the worth that that this book is about and this topic is about and that you've been doing is assuming the lensout, but also doing it in a practical way andsaying, here areexamples.

This is the way it's beendone.

This is why it matters and this is change that it'smaking.

I think that's critical for this moment in timefor, youknow, for all ofus.

You actuallywrite, there's a line where youwrite, we all have a choice now between two profoundforces, fragmentation orflow.

Fragmentation makes yousmaller,shallower,angrier.

Flow makes youbigger,deeper,calmer.

Fragmentation shrinksus.

Flow expandsus. And I think we're feeling that tension right now and that it's aboutlike, what are we going to choose for ourkids, for ourcells, for our world movingforward?

It feels like an inflection point tome.

I thinkthat's, I love the phrase evicted from our ownlives.

I wish I'd thought of thatmyself.

That'sbrilliant.No, you'reright.

We've been so taught to thinkabout, and I used to think thisway.

Imean, it was recently as when I started working on thebook, we've been taught to think of these problems as an individualpathology,right?

Either it's a flaw in our child's biology or it's a flaw in our own adultwillpower.

Now there are real biological contributions for somekids, but this is a much bigger picture that requires a much biggersolution.

And if you're struggling to focus and payattention, it's not yourfault.

This is happening to almost all ofus.

It's happening for reasons that are entirelycomprehensible, that have been demonstrated by scientists that are relativelyuncontroversial.

And you're right that what we lose when we loseattention, we lose manythings, but we lose the ability to thinkdeeply.

And if you can't think deeply and you can't solveproblems, Imean, think about the fact thatwe, this is an inflection point for manyreasons, but youknow, we are facing an unprecedented series of tripwires and trap doors as aspecies,right?

Think about how urgently we need to deal with the climatecrisis.

Youknow, a species of people who can't think beyond a few minutes and spend their time screaming each other on social media is not going to deal with the climatecrisis.

You've seen the our ability to deal with our collective problems has profoundly broken down in recentyears.

Youknow, I travel all over the US for my work for research and it's really frightening the degree of polarization and rage that has taken over thesociety.

It is reallyfrightening.

Imean, I was in Vegas during theelection.

And itreally, this maybe this soundshyperbolic, but what the US has increasingly reminded me of is Northern Ireland as it used to be when I first started going there 20 yearsago, which is a highly tribalized society where everyone's trying to figure out what tribe do you belong to in NorthernIreland?

Everyone's trying to figure out it's less bad now than it used tobe, but are you a Protestant or are you aCatholic?

It was an old jokehere, you'd say I'm an atheist and theygo,yeah, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholicatheist,right?

And the US is really becoming like that and there's lots of these underlyingmechanisms.

So if you think about another reason why we need to deal with the business model for social media is deeply related tothis.

It's something that we now know Facebook itself knows from the leaked documents that we got thanks to Francis Houganese to workthere.

So to understandit, you have to slightly unpack something because I would argue it's not just that individual attention that's beingdestroyed, it's our collective attention that's beingdestroyed.

She has to understand thismechanism.

So torecap, we currently have a business model social media companies do that means the longer you scroll and the more often you pick up yourphone, the more money theymake.

So the systems are designed to figure out what will keep you scrolling and to feed you whatever will keep youscrolling.

This next bit wasn't the intention of anyone at Facebook or TikTok or any of theseplaces, but those algorithms that werescanning,okay, what keeps peoplescrolling, bumped into an underlying human truth that's actually been known about by psychologists for almost 100years.

It's called negativitybias.

It's reallysimple. Human beings will stare longer at something that makes them angry and upset than something than they do at something that makes them feelgood.

If you've ever seen a car accident on thehighway, you know exactly what Imean.

You stared longer at the mangle car wreck than you did at the lovely pretty flowers on the other side of thestreet.

This is very deep in humannature.

10-week-old babies will stare longer at an angry face than a happyface.

But when this combines with algorithms that are designed to keep youscrolling, it leads to a horrificeffect.

So picture two teenage girls who go to the same party and leave and go home on the samebus.

And one of them doesn't update where theysay, I had a really nice time at thatparty.

It wasgreat. Another onegoes, Karen was a total skank at that party and her boyfriend is an asshole and just does an angryrant.

So the algorithms are constantly scanning for the kind of language youuse.

And it'll put that first status update into a few people'sfeeds.

It'll put the second status update into way more people'sfeeds.

Because if it's inraging, it'sengaging.

It'll keep peoplescrolling.

Peoplego, what do youmean, Karen's askank?

You're askank. You can see how itworks.

Now that is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls at aparty,right?

We all know what's happened to the anxiety levels of teenagegirls.

But when that's applied to a wholesociety,well, we don't have to imagine it because everyone listening has watched the news in the last fiveyears,right?

And Facebook's own after the election of Trump and the victory ofBrexit, Facebook set up an internal inquiry of its data engineers to figure out how we played a role in thispolarization.

And we now know what the engineers found because it wasleaked.

They've course kept itsecret.

And the engineers came back andsaid, the growth of Facebook under the current business model is inherently tied topolarization.

It is inherently driving the societyapart.

And the only solution is for Facebook to abandon its current business model and move to a different businessmodel,right?

And the Wall StreetJournal, when they reported onthis, out of a dry line where theysaid, Mark Zuckerberg asked that he never be brought any report like this everagain,right?

So they know what they're doing and they know theeffects,right?

Thinkabout, youknow, the genocide inBurma, Myanmar against the Muslimminority, theRahinger, the UN warned that Facebook's algorithms had pumped up the hateful messages about the Rahinger and fueled thatgenocide.

Think about what happened in Brazil when JairBolsonaro, the far right leader was elected outside hissupporters, the night of theelection, chantedFacebook,Facebook,Facebook, because they knew one of the key factors were hewon, not the onlyone, ofcourse.

And even if the only effect was that it got Jair Bolsonaroelected, youknow, Bolsonaro has accelerated the destruction of the Amazonrainforest, which will massively accelerate the climatecrisis, which will affect every single person listening to thispodcast.

And it didn't only happen inBrazil, it happened in countries as different asBrazil, Britain andBurma.

The fact that it's happeningeverywhere, the same kind of polarization tells you that there are similar underlyingmechanisms.

So it's not just that we have to deal with this business model because it is harming our individualattention.

As Facebook's own data scientistsaid, it is causing such polarization that it's destroying our ability to collectively pay attention to ourproblems, to talk to eachother, to listen to each other and to solveproblems.

Youknow, I think a lotabout, youknow, you'll rememberthis, I remember it well as akid, the ozone layercrisis,right?

So younger listeners might not rememberthis, but in the80s, there was a chemical called CFCs that were in hairsprays andfridges, and we loved our hairsprays in the 80s that were going into the atmosphere and it turned out they werecausing, they were damaging the ozonelayer, which was a protective layer of ozone that surrounds the planet and protects us from the sun'srays.

And it was causing a hole in the ozone layer above theArctic.

So whathappened? That science wasdiscovered.

It was explained to the public who were able to distinguish the truth from nonsense lies conspiracytheories.

The public pressured their political leaders all over theworld, very different kinds of governments from Margaret Thatcher to the communist SovietUnion, or in response to that pressure banned CFCs and now the ozone layer ishealing,right?

Now, I do not believe if the ozone layer crisis happened now that we would respond in anything like the sameway, I think you would get some people who would do the right thing and say act on the science and they wear little ozone layer badges on their lapels and they build a whole identity aroundit.

You would get other people who wouldsay, how do we even know the ozone layerexists?

How do we even know it'sthere?

Maybe George Soros made the hole in the ozonelayer, maybe evil Jewish space lasers made the hole in the ozonelayers, all sorts of mad filth would start beingsaid, and we would just not be able to act atall.

So it's really important that I don't want to be nostalgic about the80s.

There are a lot of things wrong with the80s, but we've got a deal with these mechanisms because if we don't deal withthis, wecan't, how can we get anythingdone,right?

If we can't talk to eachother, listen and thinkrationally, we'rescrewed.

Yeah, youknow, I think at the end of the day comes down to something I say on a fairly regularbasis, attention islife, the quality and depth of ourattention.

I think in no smallpart, theterms, the quality and depth and lift of our lives individually andcollectively.

I think this is really what you're speaking to and coming at from all these differentangles.

And alsosaying, it's not just aboutyou.

Yes, there are things that you can do in your individuallife, but let's zoom the lens out and let's talk about collectively what's really going on here and let's do somereimagining.

I definitely encourage folks to dive into this piece of work because it really lays out in a lot of detail in yourbook, which really going in also offers a whole bunchof,like, and it's not fatalisticalso.

It says this is a toughmoment, but there's hope and there are things that we can do and there are examples outthere.

Oh, I'm profoundly optimistic that we can do withthis.

And when I getpessimistic, sometimes people say tome,look, these forces are reallypowerful,right?

I always say tothem, it's my soundstrange, but when they say that tome, I think a lot about my grandmothers who I loved verydeeply.

Youknow, my grandmothers with the AGM now in1963, one of them was a working class Scottish woman living in what in the US we'd call a housingproject.

And the other one was a Swiss woman living in a wooden heart on the side of amountain.

And in1963, when they were the AGMnow, neither of them were allowed to have bank accounts because they were marriedwomen.

Their husbands had to control the bankaccount.

It was legal for their husbands to rape them as it was legal in every country in the world for a man to rape hiswife.

And my Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed tovote.

She didn't get a vote until1970,right?

And I think about their lives and how disfigured their lives were by sexism andmisogyny.

My grandmothers never got to have the lives they should havehad.

Youknow, my Swiss grandmother loved to paint and draw and they told her to shut up and get into thekitchen.

And then I think about my niece'slife.

Now, I don't want to underestimate how far we've got togo, how much backlash ishappening.

But when my niece loved to paint anddraw, we didn't tell her to shut up and get into thekitchen.

We started googling artschools,right?

Even thecraziest, deranged right-wing congressman for some crazy place wouldn't dream of saying that it should be legal for my niece to be raped and she shouldn't be allowed to have a bank account and she shouldn't have thevote,right?

That would beunthinkable,right?

And so when people say tome,look, these forces you're saying we have to take on a reallypowerful, I say toyou, I say tothem, you're damnright, they're not 100th as powerful as men were in1963.

Men controlled literally every institution of power in theworld, everycompany, everycountry,everything,right?

And they had ever since those institutions had beencreated, except for a few hereditary queens along theway,right?

The women of that generation did not giveup, they got up and they fought and they said we're not going to take thisanymore.

And I argue in thebook,although, stressagain, there are dozens of things we can do as individuals rightnow, individuallives, and I'm strongly in favour of all of that and I talk aboutit.

I argue that to deal with this in the medium to longterm,we, just like we needed a need of feminist movement for women to reclaim their bodies and theirlives, we need an attention movement to reclaim ourminds.

And I absolutely believe we can dothat.

We don't have to toleratethis, we don't have to accept our minds and our children's minds being diminished in the way that they are rightnow,right?

These are relatively recentchanges.

They are not acts ofGod, they'renot, youknow,magic, they're things that have been done by humans and they're things that can be undone byhumans.

But this won't happen byaccident.

If we just donothing, if all of us donothing, but these forces will continue to pillage and radars and they'll get better and better atit, and they're already pretty damn good atit,right?

But they're notgods,right?

Max Lackaberg is a rather weakened mediocreperson,right?

Wecan, no disrespect tohim, he's not thedevil, but he's also not thatimpressive.

We can push back against this if we wantto,right?

We can absolutely deal withthis, but we have to understand the 12 underlyingcauses, obviously we've touched on afew.

We have to deeply understandthem, we have to follow the example of those mothers who didn't allow their kids to be poisoned withlead,right?

There was a lot oflead, the lead industry was reallypowerful.

They didn't justsay,oh,well, what can wedo?

Let's individually try to dust our homesmore.

They took on these forces and as aresult, youknow, theywon,right?

We can win thisone, but we have tofight.

Elizabeth Warren saidonce, you don't get what you don't fightfor.

And of course she meant peacefullyfighting, whether you agree with Elizabeth Warren's politics ornot, the principle is absolutelyright.

You don't get what you don't fightfor.

Yeah, powerfulpoint. It feels like a good place for us tocome, full circle now conversation aswell.

So as we zoom the lens out a little bit and sit here in this container of good lifeproject, if I offer up the phrase to live a goodlife, what comesup?

To live a goodlife, you have to have a mixtureof, youknow, we want speed and buzziness indistraction.

That's a healthy part oflife, but you have to have space to think deeply and reflect andrest.

Youknow, think about something as basic as we sleep20% less than we did a centuryago,right?

We're denying ourselves even the most basic physical need forsleep,right?

Which is having a disastrous effect on her attention asDr.

CharlesSeisler, are the medical school said tome, even if nothing else hadchanged, but that we sleep20% less than we usedto, that alone would be causing a huge crisis in our attention andfocus.

So a good life is a life where we have depth as well as busy moments of excitement andspeed,right?

I'mnot, I'mnot, youknow, telling everyone to go into their room and read a book all thetime, we want to haveboth.

Almost everyone wants to haveboth.

They want to be able to think deeply and they want to have moments of fun and buzz andspeed,right?

And we've gone way too far towards everything being vastacceleration, constantswitching, and we canrecalibrate, and we have torecalibrate.

Thankyou. I really enjoyedthis.

Thank you somuch.Hey, before youleave, if you love thisepisode, say if that you'll also love the conversation that we had with AdamGazzali,Neurosign, to spet the way our brainworks, the way itfunctions, the way it holds onto certainexperiences,emotions,trauma, day-to-daylife, how we focus and don'tfocus, and also the interesting research that his lab is doing on psychedelics and how it affects our brains and our emotions and our mental and physicalhealth.

You'll find a link to Adam's episode in the shownotes.

This episode of Good Life Project was produced by Executive Producers Lindsey Fox andme, JonathanFields, editing helped by AlejandroRamirez, ChristopherCarter, crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Dell for her research on thisepisode.

And ofcourse, if you haven't already doneso, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listeningapp.

And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring orvaluable, and chances are you did since you're still listeninghere, would you do me a personalfavor, a seven-secondfavor, and shareit?

Maybe on social or by text or byemail, even just with oneperson.

Just copy the link from the app you'reusing.

And tell those youknow, those youlove, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a littlebetter, so we can all do it better together with more ease and morejoy.

Tell them tolisten. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations becomeaction, that's how we all come alivetogether.

[Reclaiming Our Minds: A Call for an Attention Movement]-[How to Reclaim Focus in the Age of Distraction | Johann Hari]

📋 Summary

The Crisis of Stolen Focus: Reclaiming Our Minds

The Anatomy of the Crisis

The Four Layers of Attention

The Business Model of Distraction

Moving from Defense to Offense

Conclusion: Choosing Flow over Fragmentation

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Reclaiming Our Minds: A Call for an Attention Movement]-[How to Reclaim Focus in the Age of Distraction | Johann Hari]

📋 Summary

The Crisis of Stolen Focus: Reclaiming Our Minds

The Anatomy of the Crisis

The Four Layers of Attention

The Business Model of Distraction

Moving from Defense to Offense

Conclusion: Choosing Flow over Fragmentation

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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