Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Johann Hari: Stolen Focus, Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again | E217

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

When Johann Hari was a teenager, he told his therapist that he felt like pain was leaking out of him. After he received medication to fix his brain's chemical imbalance, he still found himself feeling lost. Johann made it his mission to educate people about depression and anxiety as a bestselling author and speaker. In this episode, Johann discusses how we can overcome disconnect with one another. He also breaks down his newest book Stolen Focus, the war on distraction, multitasking, and how we can maintain our attention and focus in the modern age. Johann Hari is a New York Times bestselling author, journalist, and speaker. He has written 3 best-selling books that have been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah To Elton John. Johann studies topics like depression, addiction, and anxiety, and in his latest book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention, he discusses how we – as individuals and as a society – can get our focus back.  In this episode, Hala and Johann will discuss:  - Why Johann became a writer - How a cow cured a man’s depression - Why depression and anxiety doubled during Covid - The “switch-cost effect” of multitasking - Johann’s thoughts on ADHD - How the food we eat affects our attention - Why Johann uses a phone “jail” - Fighting the War on Distraction - And other topics… Johann Hari is the author of three New York Times best-selling books that have been translated into 40 languages and been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah to Noam Chomsky, from Elton John to Naomi Klein. He is the Executive Producer of an Oscar-nominated movie and an eight-part TV series starring Samuel L. Jackson. His latest book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention, was published in January 2022 and received rave reviews everywhere from The Washington Post to the Irish Times to the Sydney Morning Herald. It has been a best-seller on three continents. Johann’s TED talks have been viewed more than 93 million times. The first is named ‘Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong’. The second is entitled ‘This Could Be Why You Are Depressed or Anxious’.  Resources Mentioned: Johann’s Website: https://johannhari.com/ Johann’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/johannhari101 Johann’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johann.hari/?hl=en Johann’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JohannHari.Page/ Johann’ Book Stolen Focus: https://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Focus-Attention-Think-Deeply/dp/0593138511 LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘masterclass’ for 25% off at yapmedia.io/course. Sponsored By:  Elo Health - Go to https://elo.health/ and enter code YAP for 50% off your first month GoBox Studio - Go to https://goboxstudio.com/shop/?ref=yap and use coupon code YAP for a 10% discount More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com   Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review - ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala Learn more about YAP Media Agency Services - yapmedia.io/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Shopify. Shopify simplifies selling online and in-person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com-profiting. Think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is. That thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. When your ability to focus and pay attention breaks down, your ability to achieve your

goals diminishes, your ability to solve your goals diminishes. Your ability to solve your problems diminishes. If you can't pay attention, you're going to be diminished and hobbled at every stage in your life. If you're struggling to focus, if your kids are struggling to focus, it's not your fault, it's not their fault. Your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some very big and powerful forces, and we need to realize, you know, we're not medieval peasants, begging at the court of King Muskin, King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from their tables. We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds.

And together we can take them back if we want to. What is up, young and profitors? You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcasts, where we interview the brightest minds in the world, and unpack their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your daily life. I'm your host, Hallitaha. Thanks for tuning in and get ready to listen, learn, and profit.

Yo Han, welcome to Young & Profiting Codcast! I'm really happy to be with you, hooray! I am excited as well. So young and profitors for those who don't know, Johan Haare is a New York Times bestselling author, journalist and speaker. He's written three bestselling books that have been praised by a broad range of people from Oprah to Elton John, Johan studies topics like depression, addiction, anxiety, and in his latest book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention, he discusses how we as

individuals and as a society can get our focus back. In today's episode, Johann and I will discuss the most common reasons people develop depression and how we can overcome disconnect with one another. We'll also dive into his newest book, Stolen Focus, and talk about the war on distraction, why we shouldn't multitask, and how we can maintain our attention and focus in the modern age. So let's get started, Johann to kick us off. I want to go back to the beginning of your life. You were born in Scotland, when you were a baby,

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

I was mostly raised by my grandmother, whose job was to clean toilets. There was an amazing woman, because my mother was ill and my dad was in a different country. And I think the honest answer, if someone said to me, if I want my child to be a writer, what should I do? And I said horribly traumatise your child, right?

You know, I grew up in a family where there was a lot of addiction and mental illness. And the way I coped with that was by reading and writing all the time, right? So obviously that ended up being a very helpful adaptation for me much later in my life. So I think it was, it was probably that, but I was, now I was lucky, my grandmother, who would buy me any book I asked her to buy me. She worked incredibly hard. So I think it was probably, it was probably that, it's initially that reading and writing were kind of escape for me and TV, I also love TV.

I think that's probably how it began. But yeah, it was the first person in my family to go to a fancy university or anything like that. And it's funny, I think it's also a thing, it's funny if you look at the home videos we have from when I'm a kid. It's a bit like a steering and family guy and that like all my family have very working class accents. And even when I'm a two year old,

they have this weird partial voice. So my grandmother's like, your hand, come on, we got a gore. And I'm like, certainly grandmother, I should be with you shortly. It's like, where is this up from? I have no idea, but I think partly that's Britain is a very, as you can tell from my down-to-nobbie accent, I am British, and Britain is a very class-laden society.

I don't know, is a, even when it is a young kid, I had this sort of weird, just like, disconnect from my environment, but also love for the people in my environment, so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Yeah, you've done an incredible job. You're at three times, I think, New York Times' best-selling author. All of your books do incredibly well. And so after you wrote your first book about addiction, chasing screen, you wrote this book called Lost Connections,

also was a bestselling book. And it's about the world's growing rates of depression and anxiety. And you really set book in 2018. And that was before the pandemic. And this topic of depression is more important now than it even was three or four years ago since the pandemic. and this topic of depression is more important now than it even was three or four years ago since the pandemic.

And the World Health Organization has actually reported a sharp increase in rates of anxiety and depression. So I thought we could start the interview there really talking about that. When you were a teenager, you told your therapist that you felt like pain was leaking out of you and your therapist prescribed you medication and you ended up getting more side effects from the medication than you had previously and you still had your depression. So what did you learn about the myth of chemical imbalances in the brain related to depression in this experience? Well, I would pull back for a second and say the reason I wrote Lost Connections is because there were these two mysteries that were really hanging over me that I didn't understand. The first is the time I was 38, 39 and every single year that I'd been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in the United States in Britain

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

a chemical imbalance in their brains. You're clearly one of them. All you need to do is take some drugs and you're gonna be fine. So I started taking a chemical anti-depressant called Paxill. I felt significantly better at first than the effect kind of wore off.

And I took higher and higher doses until for 13 years I was taking the highest possible dose and I was still quite depressed. So at the end of that, I was like, well, I'm doing everything that we're told to do according to the story our culture tells about depression. I'm still pretty depressed. What's going on here? So I ended up using my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to go on a really big journey all over the world.

I traveled over 30,000 miles. I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on depression and anxiety. What causes them and crucially how we solve them. And I learned it just a huge amount from these people. But the core of what I learned is there's actually scientific evidence for nine factors that can cause depression and anxiety. Some of them are in our biology. It's why what my doctor told me was not completely wrong, right? Your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems, though they don't write your destiny. And there are real brain changes that happen when you become depressed that can make it harder to get out. But most of the factors that cause depression and anxiety are not in our biology.

They're factors in the way we live. And once you understand that, it opens up a whole different set of solutions that should be offered to people of course alongside the option of chemical and tea depressions. And I feel like what you're saying really alludes to something that you talked about in your TED talk that really illustrates what you were just saying how it's more about your environment or external factors. You tell the story of this Cambonian man who had depression and they cured it with a cow. So I'd love to hear that story. I think this is particularly relevant to us now. So you think about the story I was told, which huge numbers of people watching and listening

will have been told, which is just something wrong with your brain. And a stress again, that's not totally wrong, and chemical antidepressants do give some relief to some people, as well as causing some negative side effects to others. But if that story was true, that it's just a malfunction in our brains. Why would depression and anxiety have doubled during COVID? It's not that all our brains suddenly began to malfunction. We know what happened, and there's an addition to a huge amount of the science that I learned. There's a moment that it's really, this different way of thinking really fell into place

me, because it felt very threatening when I began to learn this, right? When I had that story that there was just something wrong with my brain. Well, there isn't a story that worked well for me, right? Didn't reduce my depression ultimately. At least I felt like I knew where I was, right? And I've been told it by a trusted authority figure who was very well-meaning. And there was a moment in adjusting to this new story that where it felt very threatening, where you have to open up your story. And there was a further moment where it began to fell into place for me. So I went to interview a South African psychiatrist called Dr. Derek Summerfield, who's a great guy. And he explained

to me, in 2001, he happened to be in Southeast Asia in Cambodia when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for people in that country. They'd never had them before. And the local doctors, the Cambodians, were like, well, what are antidepressants? They'd never heard of them. And he explained, and they said to him, we don't need them, we've already got antidepressants. And he was like, what do you mean? He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy or something. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields.

And one day, he stood on a land mine left over from the war with the United States. And he got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial limb, and a couple of weeks later, a couple of months later, I think it was actually, he went back to work in the rice fields, but apparently it's super painful to work under water when you got an artificial limb, and I'm guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back to the field where he got blown up. The guy started to cry a lot after a while, he just refused to get out of bed. He developed what we would call classic depression. This is when the Cambodians said to Dr. Summerfield, well that's

when we gave him an antidepressant and he said what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense. He only had to speak to him for five minutes to see why he felt so bad. One of the doctors figured, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much. So they bought him a cow

within a couple of weeks. He stopped crying. When the couple of months his depression was gone, it never came back. They said to Dr. Summerfield, so you see Dr. that cow. That was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right?

Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way I was, that sounds like a joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant, that's what you mean, right? Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way I was, that sounds like a joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant, she gave me a cow, but what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively from this individual unscientific anecdote is what the leading medical body and the whole world, the one you just mentioned, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years, if you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the main, a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is practical help to get those needs met. Everyone listening knows, everyone

watching knows that we have natural physical needs. Obviously, you need water, you need food, you need shelter. If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast. But there's equally strong evidence, all human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has purpose and meaning. You need to feel that people see you and value you, that you've got a future that makes sense.

And this culture we've created is good at many things. I'm very glad to be alive today, but we have been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs for a long time. And then of course during COVID, our ability to get our psychological needs just fell off a cliff.

So when you understand depression in this more complex way in relation to the scientific evidence for these nine causes, and you understand them as impart driven by unmet psychological needs. That's important, A, because it's true in the science for it is overwhelming. But B, because once you understand that, it opens up a whole different set of solutions

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

And he says loneliness is going to be the next cancer. And you say being lonely seems to cause as much stress as being punched in the face. So I want to start there. What are some health concerns related to being lonely? Because now people with all this disconnect from COVID more lonely than ever. So it is really important question. Even before COVID, we were the loneliness, society, and human history. There's a study that asked Americans, how many close friends do you have who you could turn to in a crisis? And when they started doing it years ago, the most common answer was five. Today, the most common answer, not the average, but the most common answer

is none. Wow. I think the figure was that 41% of Americans before COVID agreed with the statement, no one knows me well. What is life like when no one knows you well and you have no one to turn to when things go wrong? I spent a lot of time discussing this with the leading expert on loneliness in the world and it was at the Chicago University, an amazing man named Professor John Cassiopo, who sadly died recently, and I never forget him saying to me one day, why are we alive? Why do we exist? One key reason is that our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing.

A lot of the time they weren't bigger than the animals they took down, they weren't faster than the animals they took down, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating. Just like bees evolved to live in a hive, humans evolved to live in a tribe. If you have a separate a bee from its hive, it goes crazy, it goes haywire, it doesn't make sense outside a hive. We evolved to live in tribes, and we are the first humans ever to try to dis live in tribes and we are the first humans ever to try to disband our tribes and go alone, right? And it has disastrous effects on us. If you think about the circumstances where we evolved, if you were physically cut off or separated from the tribe, you were depressed and anxious for a really good reason. You were in terrible danger.

You couldn't protect yourself. These feelings evolved partly, there's other things going on with depression too, but these feelings evolved as a signal to say, get back to the tribe. And the reason this is so important, I'm not interested in just saying, oh look, aren't things bad, right? That's not my temperament, it doesn't interest me. What's important is that once you understand that, it opens up solutions. So I'll give you an example. One of the heroes in my bloke loss connections is a wonderful man called Dr Sam Everrington. He's a family doctor in East London, a poor part of East London, where I live for a long time, though sadly he was never my doctor. And Sam had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety. And like me, he's not opposed to chemoclantic depressants. He thinks they have some important role to play for some people in reducing their pain. But he could see a couple of kind of obvious things.

Firstly, usually, chemical antidepressants took the edge off, but they didn't solve the problem. And secondly, most of his patients were depressed and anxious for totally understandable reasons like they were really lonely. So one day a woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham, who I got to know later, who had been shut away in her home, crippling depression and anxiety for seven years. And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs, but I'm also going to prescribe something else. I'm going to prescribe for you to come and meet with a group of other

depressed and anxious people twice a week here in the doctor's offices not to talk about how shit you feel. You can do that if you want, but that's not the point of it. What we want you to do is find something meaningful that you can all do together. So the first time the group met, Lisa literally started vomiting with anxiety. It was just so overwhelming. But the group starts talking, they're like,

what could we do? And there was an area outside the doctors offices that was just like scrub land, just empty scrub land. So they were like, we could turn that into a garden. But these are inner city, east London people like me, they don't know anything. So they were like, we could turn that into a garden. But these are inner city East London people like me, they don't know anything about gardening. But okay, we can do it. So they started to take books out the library about gardening,

they started to watch clips on YouTube, they started to get their fingers in the soil, they started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. The way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom. There's a lot of evidence that exposure to nature, the natural world, is really good for depression, but they started to do something even more important. They started to form a group. They started to form a tribe. They started to look out for each other.

One of them didn't show up. The others would go looking for them and be like, hey, what's up? How can we help you? This approach is called social prescribing. It's where doctors prescribe people to be part of groups. There's an emerging body of science about it. It's where doctors prescribe people to be part of groups. There's an emerging body of science about it. It's still pretty small, but it's emerging and quite persuasive. For example, a small study in Norway found that a social prescribing program

was twice as effective in reducing depression and anxiety as chemical antidepressants. I think for kind of obvious reason, and this is something I saw all over the world from Sydney to South Pauloolo to San Francisco. The most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the underlying psychological reasons why we feel so bad. I thank you every single doctor's office in the United States should have a social prescribing wing. It's free. It costs literally nothing

to get people to go gardening. I mean, they've got to buy some gardening supplies. I tell you, it's a lot cheaper than massive amounts of drugs, massive amounts of medicalization, although there is some place for those things. The way I think of it is we've got to massively expand the menu of options for depressed and anxious people. We've got to deal with the underlying causes to stop people becoming depressed and anxious

in the first place as much as we can, but we've also got to expand the menu of options. We've got to be asking, well, what's the cow for this person, right? What's the solution? It's cheaper and it's more effective. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. Young and profitors, do you have a brilliant business idea but you don't know how to move forward with it?

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but I've definitely noticed a major improvement since I started feeding him Nom Nom. And the best part, they offer a money back guarantee. If your dog's tail isn't wagging within 30 days, they'll refund your first order. No fillers, no nonsense, just nom nom. Go right now for 50% off your No Risk 2 week trial at trinom.com-shap. That's trinom-n-o-m.com-shap for 50% off trinom dot com slash yep. Yeah, and I love that story because it seems like there was a couple reasons why this worked. One is

like curing the loneliness and finding friendships and common bonds with these people. The second one was it's it's almost like a future they they're planning this garden they have a goal to look forward to and I recently spoke to Benjamin Hardy he came on the show episode two or six and he's got this new book called future self and he says the first and most fundamental threat to your future self is not having hope for your future without hope the present loses meaning without hope you don't have clear goals or sense of purpose and I know from you you, that also without hope, you can get depressed. If you don't have a future that you're looking forward to, you can actually get depressed.

So how should people navigate their fear or lack of security of the future? As you were saying, I think you put that really well. And I think, as you were saying that, I was thinking about one group of people, I think you can tell that firm, I've got lost connections like from my other books. I learned a huge amount from interviewing scientists and experts, but actually, particularly for that book, the people who taught me the most were group people

who were not scientists. It's okay, I'll tell you their story. Yeah. In the summer of 2011, on a big anonymous housing project in Berlin in Germany, a Turkish German woman called Nurya Chengice, climbed out of her wheelchair and she put a sign in her window, she lives on the ground floor. And the sign said something like, I got a notice saying I'm going to be a victed next Thursday, so on Wednesday night, I'm going to kill myself. Now this is a big anonymous housing project, like a housing project pretty much anywhere in the US. No one really knew anyone, it was in a very poor part of Berlin,

place called Kotty, for people who know it, it's in Croixburg. And there were only really three kinds of people who lived in this neighborhood. There were recent Muslim immigrants, like this woman Nuria, there were gay men, and there were punk squatters. And as you can imagine, these three groups did not get along, but like, no, we're really near anyone anyway. So people walked past Nuria's window and they're like, why are these women going to kill herself? So they knock on her door? They're like, do you need any help? And Nuri

said, no, screw you, I don't want any help, I'm going to kill myself. And she shut the door in their faces. But people outside her apartment who'd never met started talking, they were like, we've got to do something to help this woman. Everyone's rent was going up and lots of people were getting eviction notices and everyone was worried that they would be next. So one of them had an idea. There's a big thoroughfare that goes through the centre of Cotty, this housing project, Intermitter, the centre of Berlin. And someone said, if we just block the road on Saturday and have a protest, the media will come, they'll be a bit of a fuss, they'll probably let this woman stay in her apartment,

there might even be some pressure to keep rents down for all of us. Why don't we do it? So Saturday came and they built a little barricade in the road and they protested and Nuria was like, I'm going to kill myself. I might as well let them push me into the middle of the street. So she gets pushed into the middle of the street in her wheelchair. She does some interviews. The media shows up. And it got to the end of the day and the police select,

the media go home and the police select, okay, you've had your fun, pack it up, go home. But the people who lived in Cotty said, well, hang on a minute, you haven't told Nuriye she gets to stay in her apartment. Actually, we want a rent freeze for our entire housing project. We'll pack up when we've got that. But of course, they knew the minute they walked away from this little barricade they'd built, the police would just take it down and that would be that. So one of my favorite people in Cotty, a woman called Tanya Gardner, she's one of the punk squatters. She wears tiny mini skirts, even in Berlin, winters, Tanya's hardcore. She had an idea. She said, okay, everyone, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to drop a timetable to man this barricade 24 hours a day, until we get what we want. We're going to have two people manning it the whole time. And she went up to her apartment and she had a, a claxon, those things that make loud noises at soccer matches. And she came down, she said, okay, if at any point when we're manning the barricade, the police come to take it down, let off the claxon and we'll all come down from our apartments and stop them. So people start signing up to man the barricade. People who had never met and would never have met. And you started getting these bizarre pairings. So Nuria, who's a very religious Muslim

and a full hijab, ended up doing, I think it was the Thursday night shift, with Tanya, who is the opposite of a woman in a job. The first few nights they were sitting there, they were like, we've got nothing to talk about. This is super awkward, who could be more different than us. But as the night is went on, they started talking and Tanya and Nuria discovered they had something

incredibly powerful and common. Nuria had come to Berlin when she was 16 with her two babies. She was sent from her village in Turkey to earn enough money so she could send home for a husband. So she turned up, she's 16 year old, she got these babies, she worked every job she could. And when she almost had enough money for a husband to come join her, she got word from home that her husband had died.

She'd always told people in Germany that her husband had died of a heart attack, but sitting there in the cold in Kotti with Tanya, she told her something she'd never told anyone in Germany before, which was that her husband had actually died in tuberculosis, which was seen at the time as like a shameful disease of poverty. That's when Tanya told Nuri something she never talked about. She'd come to Kotti when she was even younger when she was 15. She got thrown out by her middle-class family because they hated that she loved punk. And she found her way to Kotti, a squat there, and six months later,

she found herself pregnant. Tanya and Nuria realized they had both been children with children of their own in this place. They didn't understand. They became incredibly good friends. And these weird pairings were happening all over Coty, there was a young Turkish German lad called Mehmet. They kept saying he'd be thrown out of school

because they said he had ADHD. And he got paired with this very grumpy or German white guy called Dieta, who said he didn't believe in protests, but in this case he would make an exception who started helping Mehmet with his homework. Directly opposite this housing project, there's about, I think it was about a year before the protests began, a gay club open called Zudblock, which is run by a manor, a manor-loved corporate coach, Danyu. To give you a sense of what this club is like, it's pretty hardcore. The previous place he owned was called Cafe Anor.

I thought you wouldn't want to have a sandwich from Cafe Anor, but when it opened, there's a lot of very religious Muslims in this housing project. Some of them were really pissed off. And in fact, the windows for the gay club got smashed. When the protest began, Zoodblock, the gay club gave all their furniture to build the barricade. And after the protest had been going on for a few months, they said, you know, you guys, you should come and

have your meetings in our club, we'll give you free food, we'll give you free drinks. And even the kind of progressive types that Kati were like, look, we're not going to be able to persuade these very religious Muslims to come and have meetings underneath, like really obscene gay posters, we're not going to be able to do it. It did start to happen. The way one of the elderly Turkish German women put it to me, Neremen, Tankeir, she said to me, we all realized we had to take these small steps to understand each other. After the protest had been going on for a full year, one day a guy turned up,

called Tankei. Tankei was in his early 50s at the time and he is clear when you meet him, he's got some kind of cognitive difficulties. He showed up and he'd been living on the streets for a short period, and he started helping out. He's like, this seems interesting, he started helping out, and quite quickly everyone loved him. He's got amazing, he's so funny, he's got an amazing energy about him,

he loves hugging people, and everyone loved him, that elderly Turkish German women, the gay men, the punks, everyone loved Tunkai. And by this point the gay men, the punk, everyone loved Tankay. And by this point, a lot of the people who live in Kottia construction workers, this barricade they'd built was like a permanent structure with a roof and rooms. It's really nice. And when they realized Tankay was homeless,

they said, you should come and live here. We really like key. We don't want you to be homeless. Come and live with us. So he moved in and became a much loved part of the Kottie protest. And no months later, so he moved in and became a much loved part of the Cotty protest. And no months later, the police came to inspect. They would do this every now and then.

And Tunkai doesn't like it when people argue. He thought the police were arguing. So he went and tried to hug one of them, but they thought he was attacking them so they arrested him. That was when it was discovered. Tunkai had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital at the other side of Berlin in Charlottesburg for 20 years. It literally in a padded cell a lot of that time. Almost no one ever came to see him. And one day he had escaped, he was on the streets for a little while and found his way to Coty. So the police took him back to the psychiatric hospital

at the other side of Berlin, at which point the entire Coty protest turned into a free Tung Kai movement. and they descended on this psychiatric hospital at the other side of the city and I remember these psychiatrists being like what is this? They've got this guy who they've had shut away for 20 years, you know, one cared about and suddenly they've got these women in his jabs, these very camp gay men and these punks demanding his release but I remember one of the women who lives at Kotie, a woman called Uly Hartman, said to the psychiatrist, but you don't understand, you don't love him. He doesn't belong with you. We love him. He belongs with us. And they were like, oh right, so you want

to look after him. She's like, no, no, we don't want to look after him. He looks after us. He's part of us. And many things happened at Cotty. they got Tonkai back, he lives there still. They got a rent freeze for their entire housing project. They then launched a referendum initiative to keep rents down across the whole of Berlin. It got the largest number of written signatures in the history of Germany, and it led to a rent freeze being introduced for the whole of Berlin. But the last time I saw Nuria, the woman who started all this by putting that sign in her window, she said to me, look, I'm really glad I got to stay in my neighborhood, that's great. I gained so much more than that.

I was surrounded by these incredible people all along, and I would never have known. And I thought a lot and Kotie about, Nairimun, another one of the Turkish German women. She said to me, you know, when I grew up in Turkey, I grew up in a village, and I called my whole village home. And then I came to live in the Western world and I learned that here, what your meant to call home is just your four walls. And if you're lucky your family. And then she said, this protest began, and I started to think of this whole place and all these people as my home. And she said she realized, in some sense, in this culture, we are homeless. Our sense of home is not big enough to

me and need for feeling we belong. There's a Bosnian writer called Alexander Heyman who said, home is where people notice when you're not there. By that standard, a lot of us are homeless. And I remember one day I was sitting outside the block the gay club with Tanya. She said to me, she explains me what they done and she said, when you're all alone and you feel like shit, you think there's something wrong with you. But what we did is we came out of our corner crying and we started to fight. And we realized we were surrounded by people who felt the same way. So I can give you lots of very targeted advice and the book,

Lost Connections is full of this advice. But the best advice I would give you is Tania's advice. Don't sit in your corner alone crying, think there's something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. There's something wrong with the way we're living. Come out of your corner crying and start to fight. That's the advice I would give. So, so touching and inspirational, I really, really love that story. And I think it's a good place in the interview to transition to stolen focus. And I think the way that I'd like to transition, since we're talking about this topic of loneliness, do you think we're innovating ourselves into isolation right now?

I wouldn't call it innovation, but I think we are isolating ourselves. So for my book Stalin focus, you know, I wrote it for a very personal reason. I could feel my own attention was getting worse. And each year that passed, things that required deep focus that are really important to me, reading books, watching movies, having long conversations with my friends, we're just getting harder and harder. And I could see this happening to lots of people I love,

particularly the young people I love. And I would say to anyone listening, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is. That thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. And when your ability to focus and pay attention breaks down or diminishes, your ability to achieve your goals diminishes, your ability to solve your problems diminishes, you feel worse about yourself because you actually are less competent. So attention is our superpower. If you can't

pay attention, you're going to be just diminished and hobbled at every stage in your life. And when you get your attention back, you're going to be vastly more effective. So obviously, I wanted to understand this a bit like we lost connections, ended up going on this really big journey all over the world from Miami, to Moscow, to Melbourne, I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus on what I learned is there's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make your attention worse and loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely rising in recent years. Some of them are in our technology, it's certainly not all of our technology.

A lot of them are things I'd never even thought of. The food we eat is really affecting our ability to focus and pay attention. There's just so many factors we can go into. Either way, our offices work. There's a huge array of factors. But the key thing I learned is if you're struggling to focus, if your kids are struggling to focus, it's not your fault. It's a struggling to focus. It's not your fault, it's not their fault. You know, your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some very big and powerful forces, but once you understand what those forces are, you can begin to protect yourself as an individual

to some degree, and as a society, we can begin to protect ourselves even more. Yeah, so in the book, you talk about this concept of attentional pathogenic culture. So I'd love to understand what that is and how our environment is actually shaping our inability to focus right now. Yeah, that's a phrase that comes from Professor Joel Nigg, who's the leading expert on children's attention problems, arguably in

the world in the United States, certainly. And he said to me, we need to ask if what we're living in now is an attentional pathogenic environment environment by which he means an environment that is Systematically undermining our ability to focus that can sound very fancy, but I'll give you a specific example But I'm sure we playing out for you is playing out for me I'm sure we play out for literally everyone listening today I'd be amazed if there's an exception some people have it worse than others of course I went to MIT to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world an amazing man named professor Oh Miller and he said to me there's one thing you need to understand about the human brain IT to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, an amazing man named Professor Earl Miller.

And he said to me, there's one thing you need to understand about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is a fundamental limitation to the human brain. The human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years. It isn't going to change on any time scale, and if I was going to see, you can only think about one or two things at a time. But what's happened is we've fallen from mass delusion.

The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time and the rest of us are not far behind them. So what happens is scientists like Professor Miller and scientists all over the world get people into labs younger and older people. And they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time, and they monitor them. And what they discover is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you juggle very quickly between tasks. You're like, what did you just ask me? What is this message on WhatsApp? What does it say on the TV over there? What is this message on Facebook? Wait, what did you just ask me again? So we're constantly juggling. And it turns out that juggling comes with a really big cost.

The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you do all the things you're trying to do much less competently. You make more mistakes. You remember much less of what you do. You're much less creative. And remember when I first learned this, not just from Professor Miller,

but from deep dive into a lot of the science and the scientists involved. I remember thinking, okay, I've got it, I get it, it's bad, I can see I'm doing it, but it's like a little niggling, it's a minor thing. The evidence suggests this is a really big thing, I'll give you an example of a small study that's backed by a wider body of evidence. Hewlett-Packard, the printer company, got a scientist into study their workers and he split them into two groups. And the first group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is, and you're not going to be interrupted, just do what you got to do. And the second group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is, but at the same time, you got to answer a heavy load of

email and phone calls, so pretty much how most of us live. And at the end of it, the scientist tested the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher to give you a sense of how big an effect that is. If you're me sat down now and smoked a fat split together and got stoned, our IQs would go down in the short term by five points. So in the short term, being chronically interrupted is twice as bad for your IQ as getting stoned, right? You'd be better off sitting at your desk, smoking a spliff and doing one thing at a time, than you would sitting at your desk, not smoking a spliff and being constantly interrupted by text and email.

Now, I want to be clear, you'd be better off neither getting stoned nor being interrupted or letting me get the wrong idea. But you can see this is why Professor Miller said, we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted. Now, this has huge implications for entrepreneurs, people listening, right? living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted. Now, this has huge implications for entrepreneurs, people listening, right? A lot of work is systematically degrading the intelligence and the capacities of their workers, right?

So you might take someone who works for you and be annoyed, they didn't, or slack them or whatever, send them a message on slack and be annoyed, they didn't get back to you immediately. You think, well, they would have only taken them 10 seconds to reply. In fact, studied by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon, found if you're interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes

to get back to the level of focus you had before you interrupted. But most of us never get 23 minutes, right? So we're constantly operating at lower level. But you think so? It doesn't just take 10 seconds to respond to that Slack message. It takes 10 seconds plus the 23 minutes, right? So we're constantly operating at lower level. But you think so, it doesn't just take 10 seconds to respond to that slack message. It takes 10 seconds plus the 23 minutes, it takes you to refocus your mind. Since my book came out, people keep sending me job ads that say things like, must be a good multitasker. You may as well say, must be a chronic stoner, but all the good you're going to get out of that worker, right? One of the things I learned

for my book that emerges from when you do a deep analysis of the study of the science of attention is our idea of productivity has gone badly wrong. We think the productive worker is the worker who can interrupt at any moment. We think a productive worker is a worker who works to the point of exhaustion. In fact, that ruins their attention, ruins their creativity and capacity to think. I mean, there's many factors we can go into, but I'm conscious of a long answer. Yeah, so I really learned that we need to deeply rethink a lot of what we think we know about attention. Yeah, there were so many interesting things about multitasking your book that really sparked my interest. One of them was that you found a study where the average adult who works in an office

can only really spend three minutes on anyone's task, which to me was just like, what are we getting done in three minutes? Absolutely nothing, right? And then also the word multitask was actually coined by a computer scientist in the 60s to describe the function of computers with multiple processors. And we don't have multiple processors. We're not actually designed to multitask.

So all that was super interesting. One like sort of random question that really came up when I was thinking about multitasking was this trend of ADHD that's going on on the internet. I don't know if you're aware of this, but on TikTok, on Instagram, Reels, everybody is talking about ADHD and a lot of young Gen Zers especially.

They are claiming they have ADHD and to me, it feels a little bit like an excuse for the reason why they can't pay touch and at work, pay attention at school, why the room is messy, for example. And it just seems like everybody's coming out of the woodwork saying they have ADHD and your work made me realize that maybe we're all just trying to battle this crazy environment and getting symptoms of what we think is ADHD. But really, it's just our natural brains just doing either a good job or bad job of managing

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

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

This is going to sound like a joke, it's not. He's a professor at Tufts University, who pioneered diagnosing ADHD in dogs and giving them riddle in. So I went to interview him, he's a super nice guy. And I expected that he would say, oh look, these dogs, they've got something biologically wrong with them that has to be fixed with Ritalim. In fact, he was very honest. Dogs need to run around for five hours a day,

almost no American dog except for farm dogs gets that. They don't like being shut inside, they don't like being left alone, they're pack animals. So he gave me an example of a dog that had ADHD and invertebrates of commas, ran around all the time, then it went to live on a farm and it was completely fine. So he said, look, of course, I'm medicating them in an imperfect situation. They've got frustrated biological needs as the phrase he used. And when I give them Ritaline, is it ideal? No. What's the alternative? The dog's just going to be going crazy. Now that

to me is a pretty honest way of talking and thinking about it. I don't think it's a good solution, by the way, I don't agree with him, although I like him as a person, but I think there's something like that. That's not everything that's going on. There really are some people who are more genetically sensitive to these problems, but you're right. If you look at all the factors that are affecting our ability to focus and pay attention that I write about this, 12 of them, you think about the fact that the way we eat is profoundly affecting our focus and attention. ADHD levels go massively up when schools put in vending machines where kids are consuming more shitty sugar and processed food. You think about sleep. If you stay awake for 19 hours, your ability to focus suffers as much as if

you got legally drunk. And yet children sleep 85 minutes less than they did in 1945. At one of the leading experts on sleep in the entire world, Dr. Charles Seisler at Harvard Medical School said to me, even if nothing else had changed, except that children and adults sleep so much less, that alone would be causing a huge crisis and attention and focus. The way our schools work is causing these problems.

And of course, our kids are using technologies at the moment specifically designed to hack and invade their attention. I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing people who design key aspects of the world in which we now live. And there's an amazing guy called Dr. James Williams, who used to be at the heart of Google and is now, well, for reasons I'll explain, he quit. One day, he was speaking at a tech conference and the audience was literally the people who designed the stuff that people listening now are using today. And he said

to them, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, please put up your hand and nobody put up their hand. That's one of the reasons he quit and became I would argue the most important philosopher of attention in the world at the moment. So we've got to understand at the moment, I can go into more detail on this, but at the moment, the technologies we use are designed by social media companies

to maximally hack and evade us in our children's attention. That technology does not have to be designed that way. At the moment, we have technology working against us in the interest of a tiny number of tech billionaires. We could have technology that works for us in our interest to help us achieve our goals. That's absolutely achievable. The technology exists to do that. It requires a different kind of change that we can talk about. So just related to your ADHD question, can it be a coincidence that all these changes have happened and far more people are experiencing problems with attention and all that's going on is there's something genetically wrong

with them. No, that's not the case, right? That is not true. Even for the people who are more genetically sensitive, as Dr, sorry, as Professor Joel Nigg, the leading children's attention expert says, even for people who are more genetically sensitive, genes interact with the environment. Your genes are switched on and off by interaction with the environment. I'm not against giving stimulants to add to stimulant drugs to adults. That's fine. I would even recommend it to some adults for some things. I'm much more cautious about giving them to children.

I'm not saying I would never do it, but I think we need to be really careful, not least because there's literally no long-term research on beyond 18 months of what it does to them, and there's some worrying findings in animal studies about what it does to them. That's not dealing with the problem. We've got to deal with the actual causes of the problem. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Hear that sound, young and profitors?

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your computer, tablet, smart TV, and my personal favorite way to learn is their audio mode to listen on the go. That way, I can multitask while I learn, get unlimited access to every class. And right now as the app listener, you can get 15% off when you go to masterclass.com, slash profiting. That's masterclass.com-profiting for 15% off an annual membership. Masterclass.com-profiting. I do want to dig in on a few things that you said for sure. So you mentioned diet and sleep at a high level, but I'd love if you could really explain to us what the food that we consume

or our sleeping habits do to our focus. So this is really fascinating new movement called nutritional psychiatry that looks at how the food we eat affects our mental states, it relates to depression, which we were talking about earlier, and all sorts of things, and particularly attention. So I interviewed loads of these nutritional psychiatry, so really interesting people, fascinating. And there's lots of ways in which the way we eat is affecting our attention,

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

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

you experience brain fog. You just can't think or pay attention very well. Until you have another sugary car, be snack and then you spike up again and then you crash again, the way Dale Pinnock, one of the leading nutritionists in Britain put it to me, is the way we eat put cells on a rollercoaster, energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day. Whereas if, for example, you had for breakfast oatmeal with blueberries, that releases energy much more steadily, You won't have those spikes and troughs that cause patches of brain fog. So you think about that or you think about

sleep which you mentioned, you know, there's a brilliant sleep scientist at the University of St. Paul called Professor Roxanne Prichard, who really helped me to explain this. There's many elements to sleep, but this is one that really clarified it for me. The whole time you're awake, your brain is building up what's called metabolic waste. She calls it brain cell poop, which helped me to make sense of it. And when you go to sleep, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open and a watery fluid washes through your brain and carries this brain cell poop out of your brain down into your kidneys and eventually out of your body. If you don't get eight hours sleep a night, your brain doesn't get the chance to clean itself. Literally the next day your brain is clogged up, right?

This is one of the reasons why you struggle to pay attention. When you're tired, 40% of Americans sleep less than seven hours a night. You're going through constantly with your brain literally clogged up. In fact, there's just been a big study release that showed that people who sleep less are far more likely to get dementia, which this is probably a factor in. So you can see when you look at these factors, and it's interesting because for all of the, obviously again, as with depression, I wrote the book Some Solutions Oriented Person, right? I want to think, okay, the only, to me, the benefit of understanding what's causing these problems is, okay, if you understand a problem, you're better equipped

to solve it. So with all of the 12 factors that I write about in stolen focus that are harming our attention, I think there's two levels of which we've got to deal with them. I think of them as defense and offense. There are loads of things that we can all do at an individual level to defend ourselves and our children against these factors. Give you an example of one over in the corner there,

I have something called a K-safe. I should totally abort shares in this company before my book came out because they didn't really well. It's plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial at the top and it locks your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. I used that three hours a day to do my writing. I went sit down and watch a film with my partner unless we're both in prison our phones in the phone jail. I would have my friends round for dinner unless everyone agrees to put their phone in the jail.

And when we're getting over some, I'm like, the pleasures of attention are so much greater than whatever shitty Instagram update you're about to get. And as soon as the phones lock away, they see it. So there's loads of things like that, a couple of dozens of things like that in the book. But I want to be really honest with people

because I do not feel most people talking about attention are leveling with people. I am passionately in favor of these individual changes. They will make a big difference. On their own, they're not gonna totally solve the problem because at the moment, it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then leaning forward and going,

hey buddy, you should learn how to meditate then you wouldn't be scratching all the time and you wanna go, screw you, I'll learn to meditate. That's very valuable, but you need to stop pouring this inching powder on me. We need to go on offense Against the forces that are doing this to us. It's the food industry against big tech We need to of course we want lots of tech of course. We want food. I love food as you can tell from my chins We want these things. We want them to work for is not a game stars There's for all of these 12 factors,

there's a degree of individual protection and a degree of social regulation, but these people won't do it on their own, right? And there's an example, you're too young to remember this, but some people listening or remember it. And there's certainly, if you ask your parents, they'll remember it.

It's a great example of how we did this in the recent past. When I was a kid, the dominant former gasoline in the United States, the UK everywhere, was leaded gasoline. And it was discovered, obviously, when it's in the gasoline, it's in the air, everyone was breathing in lead. And it was discovered that exposure to lead

is really bad for your brain and particularly bad for kids' ability to focus and pay attention. So a group of ordinary moms, what used to people at the time called themselves housewives in the late 70s, banded together and said, why the hell are we allowing this? Why are we allowing these companies to screw up our kids' brains, right? And it's important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, so let's ban cars. Just like, obviously I'm not saying let's get rid of tech, right? Love tech. What they said is let's deal with the specific element of the petrol that's screwing up our kids'

brains and replace it with a kind of petrol that doesn't. And it followed the classic pattern of all political movements that were described by Gandhi. First they ignored them, then they laughed at them, then they fought them, then they won. As everyone listening knows, there's no more leaded petrol. As a result, the Center for Disease Control has calculated the average American child is three to five IQ points higher than they would have been Have we not ban ledded petrol now to mean that's a great model you identify a thing in the environment that is screwing up kids Attention, you can't protect yourself against led if it's in the air I mean I suppose we could have gotten their kids to wear gas masks, but how effective is that not very so you deal with it in the

Environment now there are lots of things we can do to protect ourselves, but we've also got to realize there are elements of our technology that we can get rid of and replace with aspects of our technology that work for us not against us. I go through and look, and I went to places that began to do it from France to New Zealand, but to do that, we've got to shift our psychology. We've got to stop blaming ourselves. We should certainly implement individual changes, but we should realize that's not the only thing that we should do. And we need

to realize, you know, we're not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Musking, King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from their tables, right? We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds. And together we can take them back if we want to. Yeah, I would love this and I want to dig deep around this a level. So you are alluding to tech social media, I think, is one of the main culprits of especially people my age losing their attention, I think. And in your book, you talk about this infinite scroll invented by Azaraskin, which basically enables us to just continually just stay on social media forever. So I'd love to understand, like, what is the, what's like an alternative business model for social

media that actually doesn't totally steal our focus? Is there an alternative business model for social media? Is really my question. I think it's gone to the really important question. There's three possible business models for social media. The one we have at the moment, I just explain it. And I realized actually, you know, it's funny, from interviewing people in Silicon Valley and spending so much time interviewing people at the heart of the machine, I realized I was incredibly naive before. So the way they kept explaining it to me, it took me a while to get it, because it seemed too simple, too obvious. Anyone listening? If you open Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram now, and begin to scroll, those companies begin to make money out of you in

two ways. The first way is really obvious, you see ads. Okay, you don't need me to explain that. Second way is much more important. Everything you ever like, don't like, saying your open or private messages, is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out what makes you tick, to figure out what you like and don't like. And they're figuring that out, primarily for one reason. They're figuring out what will keep you scrolling. Because every time you open the app and start to scroll, they begin to make money, because you see ads, the longer you scroll, the more money they make, because you see more ads and they learn more about you, and every time you close the app, those revenue streams

disappear. So all of this genius and Silicon Valley, when it's applied to social media, all this AI, all these algorithms are geared towards one thing and one thing only. Figuring out, how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. That's it. Just like the head of KFC, all he cares about in his professional capacity is how often did you go to KFC this week and how big was the bucket you bought, all they care about is maximise and is hijacking your attention, maximising scrolling. So the current business model, the technical term for it, which comes from Professor Shoshana Zuboff at Harvard,

is surveillance capitalism. You seem to get it for free, but in return, they surveil everything you do, and you're not the customer, famously, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, they've got customer service departments. You can't phone them, I can't phone them, we're not the customers.

You're the product they sell to the real customer who's the advertiser. They break up and fragment your attention to sell it to advertisers. That's how they make money. So that's the first model, right? You seem to get it for free, but you pay with your attention.

You also pay by our politics becoming screwed up and all sorts of other things that we can talk about of being much more likely to become depressed and all sorts of other things that we can talk about. That's model one. The alternative models, everyone listening pretty much will have an experience of the other two.

They're pretty simple. One of them is subscription. So we all know how HBO and Netflix work. You pay a certain amount and in return, you get access to the product. The key thing is, subscription completely changes the incentives. At the moment, they're not thinking,

hey, what does Bob want? When Bob is a Facebook user or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, they're not thinking, hey, what does Bob want? When Bob is a Facebook user or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, they're figuring out, how do we hack and invade Bob's attention to keep him scrolling as long as possible, to sell his attention to the advertisers? Because you're not the customer, but suddenly, in a subscription model, you are the customer. Suddenly they have to go, what does Bob want? Tens out, Bob feels like shit when he spends all day scrolling through photos of his friends that have been edited to make them look much more attractive than they really are. But Bob feels good when he meets up with his friends offline and looks into their eyes, comes back to what we were talking about in relation to loneliness.

Okay, let's design our app to maximize Bob meeting up with other people offline. Let's design it so he can indicate he'd like to meet up. How Bob turns out Jenny's up the block. Sorry, Jenny in the block, that's J. Lay reference. Turns out Jenny's around the corner and she'd like to meet up too. Why don't you go for a coffee? You could design the app in five minutes to do that, right? My friends in Silicon Valley, you could design it in all sorts of ways that are designed to enhance our goals for our life, not get us to put our goals aside so we spend hours mindlessly scrolling, right? That's one alternative model. Well, the third model is something that literally everyone are listening has experienced of. Think about the sewers. Before we had sewers, we had feces in the street,

people got cholera, it was terrible. So we all pay to build and maintain the sewers together, you own the sewers in your town, I own the sewers in mine along with everyone else who lives here. And we all have invested interest in having a functioning sewage system, and we all pay for it together. Now it might be that like we own the sewage pipes together because we don't want to get cholera, we might want to own the information pipes together because we're getting cholera for our attention and our politics. Okay. Now you'd want to make sure that was independent of the government. We wouldn't want President Trump or President Biden or any political figure to control it, but there's perfectly good model for that.

I'm British. That's the model of the BBC. Every British person who has a television pays a fee to the BBC and it is independent of the government. It's not perfect, but it's the most trusted media organisation in the world. But whatever alternative model you use, the key thing is about changing the government. It's not perfect, but it's the most trusted media organization in the world. But whatever alternative model you use, the key thing is about changing the incentives. The truth is, as long as the longer you scroll, the more money they make, they'll just get better and better at it. It's my friend Tristan Harris who used to work

at the heart of Google said when he testified before the Senate, you can try having self-control, but every time you do, there are 10,000 engineers on the other side of the screen working very hard to undermine your self-control. I'm not saying you can't do it, you can, but the game is rigged against you. And the way I think of it is we're in a race. For almost all of these 12 factors that I write about in stone and focus that are harming our attention, they're poised to become more powerful if we don't act. Poor Graham, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, said the world is on course to be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40.

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

Of course, we choose a life with lots of tech, but we also choose a life where we can think deeply, where we can read books where our children can play outside Now if we want that we can get it. I've seen the science of how we get it I've been to places that have begun to do it, but you don't get what you don't fight for We've got to decide that we value attention if we value it and we fight for it And of course, I mean peacefully for it. I mean if we fight for it we can get it right the science is very clear But it won't happen by magic. Yeah.

I'm so, so glad that I asked that question because it was such a good response. And I have so many young listeners who are change makers, so smart, are new entrepreneurs. And I feel like I'm just really happy they got to absorb that from me. So let's wrap this up. I want to talk about really quick, the impact as an individual and society that we have when it comes to the lack of focus or having focused. So as an individual, having focused what is enabled to do in terms of your goals as a society, having focused now, having focused what are the implications and then we'll wrap it up.

It's a really important question. And I think it's worth diving a bit into one particular mechanism in social media that is harming individual's ability to change their lives and harming our society's ability to change their lives. So, what we were talking about at the moment we got this model, the longer you scroll the more money they make. So, all the social media companies, understandably, set up their algorithms to scan human behaviour and figure out, okay, what makes people scroll longer? And this wasn't the intention of anyone, any of these companies, but they bumped into an uncomfortable truth about human nature. There's many good things about human nature, but this is an uncomfortable one. The fancy term for it is negativity bias. It's very

simple. People will stare longer, something that makes them angry and upset, then it will it's something that makes them feel good. If you've ever seen a car crash on the highway, you know what I mean, you stare longer at the mangle car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. I'd like to think you find what I'm saying interesting, but if someone on the other side of the room right now started to have a fight, you would turn and look at the fight, right? This is very deep in human nature. 10-week-old babies stare longer

and angry face than a smiling face. And it's probably deep in our evolution, our ancestors who weren't looking out for risk and danger, probably got eaten. I mean, that's a slightly crude way to put it, but you know what I mean. So that's always been a little part of human nature. But when it combines with algorithms

that are designed to keep you scrolling and figuring out, step ahead of you, what am I going to feed you, what am I going to feed you? It leads to a horrific outcome. So, picture two teenage girls who go to the same party and leave to go home on the same bus. And they both open TikTok and one of them does a video going, that was such a great party, we danced all night, what fun loved it. And the other girl opened her phone and says, Karen was an absolute ho at that party and her boyfriend's a prick and just doesn't angry denunciation

of everyone at the party. The algorithms are always scanning for the kind of language you use. And they'll put the first video into a few people's feeds, but they'll put the second video into far more people's feeds. Because if it's in raging, it's engaging. What do you mean, Karen's a scank? You're a scank, you can imagine people start to fight, they start to argue. Now, that dynamic is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls on a bus. We all know what's happening to teenage girls levels of anxiety. But now imagine that happening to a whole society, where the kind, decent people are muffled and pushed to the back,

and the angriest, meanest, cruelest people are given a megaphone. Except you don't have to imagine it, because we've been living it. We've been living it for the last 10 years, and don't take my word for it. In the aftermath of the election of President Trump and the victory of Brexit in my own country, Facebook secretly set up a group of its own data scientists

to figure out what's going on here. Are we playing a role in creating this rage? And their own data scientists found that their current business model inherently promotes anger and rage. In fact, they discovered that a third of all the people in Germany who joined neo-Nazi groups joined because Facebook specifically recommended it. You might want to join it said, followed by a neo-Nazi group. And that's not because anyone at Facebook is a neo-Nazi, it's because the fundamental business model

was promoting rage and anger. So there's lots of reasons why we need to deal with this business model. A life where you're angry and been constantly prompted to be jealous, angry, mean, and rewarded for being mean and angry. Open a Twitter account, say loads of nice things about people, you'll get no traction. Open a Twitter account and stop being vile and mean. You'll get traction. To live in that environment is disastrous for individuals, it's depressing, horrible, it makes the person being mean, less happy, and of course it makes the people receiving meanness less happy.

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

from the sun's rays. And when I was a kid in the 80s, it was discovered that there was a chemical, kind of chemical called CFCs that was in hair sprays that was causing a hole in the ozone layer. And we loved our hair sprays in the 80s, so this was a big deal. It was discovered it was melting the Arctic. And look at what happened next. That science was explained to ordinary people. Ordinary people absorbed the science.

They distinguished the science from lies, conspiracy theories nonsense, and all over the world, people pressured their politicians to take action to ban CFCs. And it succeeded. They banned CFCs as a result that's reportched a couple of weeks ago, the ozone layer has almost completely healed.

I don't think anyone listening thinks that would happen now. We would get some people who wore an ozone layer badge and argued for the right things and probably glued themselves to stuff to make it happen. And then you'd have a load of other people who'd say, well, how do we even know the ozone layer exists? Maybe George Soros created the ozone layer. Maybe the Jews created it. I mean, you just, you, people would just go into a kind of madness and bigotry and we would scream at each other about it and nothing would get done. So it's not just our individual attention that's being harmed, it's our collective attention,

our ability as a society to focus on things and solve them. We can't, an individual who can't pay attention is going to really struggle to achieve their goals and a society that can't pay attention is going to struggle to achieve its goals and we're seeing that it's not, I don't think it's co-incidence, that we have this huge crisis of attention at the same time as the biggest crisis in democracy all over the world since the 1930s. So attention can seem like a pretty small subject when you first look at it. But when you follow the threads, you realize it affects every aspect of our lives. And it affects our whole society. Dr. James Williams who I mentioned before said to me, imagine you're driving somewhere and someone threw a huge bucket of mud over your windshield.

It doesn't matter what you've got to do when you get to your destination. The first thing you've got to do is clean your windshield because you're not going anywhere if you don't saw that out. And he said the attention crisis is a bit like that. Whatever you want to do in your life, if you don't get your attention right, good luck getting there. Yeah. Well, Johan, I want to be respectful of your time. I know you have to run. This conversation was so insightful and eye-opening. I'm very happy that you came on and you did such a great job. So thank you so much. Where can our listeners find more about you? Can they find your books? I'd love for you to share. Thank you so much. And you've asked really great questions.

I really enjoyed this conversation. So you can go to my website. It's J-O-H-A-N for November, N for November, H-A-R-I dot com. And you can find the audiobook, e-book, physical book for all three of those, or to the, that's probably the best place to go. You can watch my TED Talks, you can see loads of other things. You can get the link to the documentary, I made with Samuel L. Jackson and the Oscar nominated film that I made. I was executive producer of, or you can go to the specific website. So we were talking about loss connections. So the website for that is thelossconnections.com.

You can take quiz there to see how much you know about the causes of depression. You can listen to audio or loads of the people that we talked about. For the most recent book, it's www.stolenfocusbook.com where you can did the same. Amazing. Thank you so much, Johan.

Can't wait for you to come on again. I'd love to. Hooray. Yo Han had super fun energy. I love talking to him and I love the topic of today's episode. It was the first time Yo Han came on yet, but I highly doubt it will be the last time. If you're struggling to focus and pay attention, Yo-han says it's not your fault. As you learn today, things like the food we eat and our phones have essentially stolen

away our attention. When it comes to social media, the algorithms are working against us. They figure out what keeps us hooked and the longer we scroll, the more money they make. You know, I was watching an IG reel the other day talking about taking a social media hiatus. And it reminded me of this episode. There was a couple really interesting comments

and somebody mentioned that they think that there should be a national day of rest where all social media sites are required to shut down. I thought that was pretty interesting. And then another person chimed in and asked a question, if social media sites were banned for a period of time, how many people would want them back? And this really got me thinking, it's probably like when we were all asked to work from home during the pandemic.

At first most of us hated it, but then we realized it had its advantages. We didn't really know what we were missing, and now a lot of us could never go back to the office five days a week. And while all this is just daydreaming, real government officials are paying attention. For example, Congress is twang with raising the age minimum on social media from 13 to 16, and actually going to enforce it. As of today's recording, Biden just got the power from the US House panel to ban TikTok in the US if he chooses to do so. And of course, that decision will have little to do with the mental health of our society, and more to do with our beef with China.

But nonetheless, removing TikTok will remove a ton of distractions, especially for our younger generations. It was also pretty interesting to learn how Johan related our lost focus as the root cause, for not being able to work together on massive issues like climate change. The ability to think deeply is a necessary tool in the fight for climate justice. We need to be able to think of creative solutions

and re-imagine the systems that harm the planet for capital gain. We have a crisis of attention and we have a climate crisis. They're both similar because they're both about pushing people beyond their limits and pushing the natural world beyond its limits. Johan told us about Dr. James Williams. He's the guy that formerly worked at Google and

was horrified and sick with guilt at what they were doing to our attention. He quit and now today he's the most popular philosopher of our attention in the world. Dr. Williams argues that there are three layers of attention and Johan argues that there's also a fourth. The first layer is what Dr. Williams calls your spotlight. That's your ability to filter out all the noise around you and achieve an immediate task. The next level up is what he calls your starlight and that's about your ability to achieve a longer term goal like write a book, run a campaign, be a good parent, or whatever it may be. The next level up is your daylight. That's your ability to figure out your long-term goals.

How do you know what book you wanna write? How do you know you wanna run a campaign? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? To know these things, you have to have periods of rest and reflection and time for deep thought. And if you're constantly jammed up and unable to stop and think, you don't get an opportunity to do that.

Then Yo-Han argues there's a fourth layer and he calls this stadium lights. It's our ability to formulate and achieve long-term collective goals, to see each other, to be forward-looking, to see the truth, to think clearly as a society, which is necessary to combat a crisis as complex as climate change. I really do believe that we're at the start of a new revolution when it comes to social media. Many of us are starting to wake up and realize that the most popular social media sites thrive on stealing our attention, polarizing us, and monetizing our data.

All while making us feel depressed and insecure most of the time, it's just all gotten to a really unhealthy place. Try your best to use social media to your advantage. Use it as a creator and not a consumer. Use it to grow your business and share your knowledge and avoid doom scrolling at all costs. Thanks so much for listening to Young & Profiting Podcast. If you listen learned and profited, drop us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform.

You guys can also find me on Instagram at Gap with Hala or LinkedIn. You can search my name. It's Halataha. If you like watching your podcast, you can also catch us on YouTube. We've got all of our video podcasts uploaded over there. Thanks so much to my executive producer Jason, assistant producer Amelia, audio engineer Dego, ad-ops lead, Critty, and the whole gang. I really appreciate everything that you guys do at Yat Media for us. This is your host, Halataha, signing off. Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative? I'm Gretchen Ruben, the number one best-selling author of the Happiness Project. And every week, we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben

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