Life Uncut podcast acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples today.
This episode is recorded on Gadigal Land of the Aurora Nation. Hi guys, and i'll welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura and I'm produce a Keisha and I'm filling in once again for Brittany Hockley, who is still not back yet, but she's coming, hopefully metaphorically and physically coming. Who knows where she is or what she's doing. I hope wherever she is she is coming. I'm not sure if she is on not either, Laura.
Before we get into today's episode, there is something it's hot on my tongue.
I've been thinking about it the entire weekend.
See the news about Nick Cannon having his tenth child.
I don't even know who Nick Cannon is alone? Do you really? Do you remember? And Mariah Carey's first husband, They've got twins together.
He had the humongous Mariah tattoo across his back.
Okay, I wish I was better informed. And now I feel like I've come to the podcast really poorly researched because you've thrown this spanner at me. I am going to do a live Google and I would encourage anybody else who feels equally as old as I do and has no idea who he's's talking about to do the same. I feel like Nick Kenned and I don't min this offensively.
I feel like he's more in your age is in mind? He's forty one.
He's like a comedian actor like TV host. Yes I know, yes, yes, Okay, now that I've seen a photo of him, very bad with names, very good with faces, I know exactly who he is.
Okay, Well, I put up a picture of him and also the Mariah tattoo on our Instagram stories.
If you know who I'm talking about, does he still have Mariah? That's that's always my question is like when you get a tattoo of like, for example, Kim Kardashian and Pete Davison, like is he going to keep? I mean, you don't know the answer to this. I actually did hear about this.
He got them branded which is like the burn and you can't get that. Okay, back to Nick anyway, Nick Cannon. Another wild story is that personally, I believe that reproductive scientists across the world need to study this men's sperm because I don't know what kind of superpowers they've got. But he has announced that he is about to have another baby to a woman that he already has two children to. Now you'd hear that, normally, you'd be like, yeah, cool, congratulations.
And he's where it gets a little spicier. Wait, so he has this will be his tenth child. Mm hmm okay, ten ten children? Ten how many different mums? Not that it's not that it's actually important, but it's good to note context.
I'll read through the names of them and their ages. So eleven year old Wins Moroccan and Monroe with Mariah Carey. Then there's five year old Golden Sagan, nineteen month old powerful Queen, and another on the way with Britney Bell.
How would you know, Like, how does one look at a newborn baby with a floppy neck and think that is a powerful queen?
You just know, you just know he has a newborn son named And I'm just journalistically reporting this legendary love with model pre Tacy.
What is his nickname, because that's a very long name to go into any sort of situation with Hello, my name is legendary love. Sounds like a good name for a song. Do you think he just calls himself lege.
Or maybe double L like els little L.
It does come from a rapper of a dad.
Where it does get slightly more spicy is that he's also got thirteen month old twins. He must have the twin Jeane, because he's got a couple of them, Zion and Zillion with Abby Della Rosa, who is also expecting another one of his children. So doing the math, there is a child Jew in somewhere like September October, and then there's another one Jew October November ish.
Wait, so twins, and then another one with completely different partners.
So he has twins to one of them who is also pregnant again, so she's having the third of his children. And then there is another woman who has two kids to him, not twins, who is also pregnant right now.
See this to me? At first I was like, ooh, spicy, but no, I reckon, they're just in a polyamorous relationship like this all sounds consensual because surely they would all know about each other. There's so many other children and siblings and half siblings going on. You kind of know that the other person exists already, don't you.
I mean you'd think, but I mean look at Closes Rastashian and Tristan Thompson, Like sometimes it's right under your nose and you just can't smell it.
I'm not sure.
I don't know if they're building some type of commune, but at this point, I'm convinced, like this man must not even need to have sex to get people pregnant.
Oh, I'm pretty sure he's still having a lot of sex.
So there's so many children. There's so many children, so many people getting pregnant. At the same time, he was reported saying that because this was last like December ish, that these two women both got pregnant, and he just said he was having a lot of fun.
And that's what you've come to learn on this this episode.
My favorite part of the entire story was that he did a pregnancy photo shoot, which you can imagine he'd be pretty good.
At by this point.
Right the comments underneath My favorite comment read.
Just DJ Karlid. I don't get it in all of these songs, he's like DJ CARLEYD. Not the one it's like brilliant. Like I find it so hard to laugh at any stories that center around kids, because as much as I think it's funny to laugh at him and not at him even you know, if it's all consensual and they're living their lives in whatever structure they feel makes it works for them, it's one thing for us to sit here and like look in and have a laugh.
But then I think there's kids at the bottom of the ears, and these kids, maybe they have atrocious names, but they didn't ask for that. I didn't ask for mine. We just get given it. The spelling of them keisha peas stupid Keshia, and there's no legendary love is probably going to be thinking the exact same thing when he grows up.
Ten kids laws, that's a lot of babies, that's a lot of remembering of birthdays. But one thing that is quite sweet is that he was quoted saying, I'm so excited about all of my kids constantly, from every aspect of it, from them getting Citizen of the Month awards in the first grade to the birth of the new ones.
Every day I just wake up excited as a father. That's amazing. There are people, there are men out there who have one child who are terrible dads, let alone someone who's got ten kids, and to be an active participant in active dad in all of their lives is pretty phenomenal. It seems like a full time job. Frank. And that's what one other person on Instagram wrote.
They said, dude, any there's only twenty four hours in a day, Like how I mean, he's having more sex than any of us.
Put it that way. I mean, to be fair, I haven't really seen anything that Nick Cannon has done in the last little bit. Has he done anything with everyone and taking care of children and getting no sleep? Okay, well, let's move on from Nick Cannon because I'm sure that there are still people who are confused as to who he even is. Let us tell you what today's episode is about. For anybody who is slightly confused. Today's episode,
we're talking to Yohani. Reproductive Sciences is On today's episode, we're studying the strength of these swimmers. We're talking about contraception. Sit take a seat. No, we are talking to Yohann Hari about something they think literally every single person struggles with at the moment, and that is keeping and maintaining attention. And why is it that we all feel so scattered and find it so hard to actually focus on any
one thing at anyone time. And I know that we've spoken a lot on the podcast over the last couple of years about burnout and overwhelm and social media and all of these contributing factors. But Johann Hari is an expert in attention as a subject. He's written a book
on it called Stolen Focus. And the thing I love so much about this conversation is that I think a lot of us feel guilty for the fact that we are so scabby, or we're so overwhelmed, or we're so we're spread so thin that we find it hard to concentrate on anyone's task. And this conversation with Johann was a real sort of eye opener that it's not necessarily your fault or my fault, but it's actually something that is being intentionally done to us, and our focus and
attention is being intentionally stolen. See what I.
Love about this conversation is that if I were to hear Oh, we're going to talk about focus and attention.
I don't have another attention totally.
I'm like, oh, that's a bit, you know, I probably I will be scattered halfway listening to it. Johanna is one of the funniest people I've ever heard, story like, and he does he practices what he preaches. He actually went on a three month no social media, no internet connection, no phone connection to study for this book and to really research it. I love that he just he puts his money where his mouth is. He really dives so deep into his subject matter.
He also has probably the funniest accidentally unfiltered story. Like we've heard a lot, We've heard a lot of accidentally unfiltered stories. This has got to be the fucking funniest story I have ever heard, to the point where we were both crying whilst it was being said. But also I was like, how is this going to offend anyone? In the first five minutes of this interview and we don't even care. It's so worth it, it stated. So even if that's all you listen to, it's brilliant.
If you don't like harsh language, maybe skip a little bit. But yeah, he's phenomenal, and I genuinely think this is one of my favorite guests that I've ever heard on Life one Card. I just think he's so so funny and entertaining and engaging, and like, I learn a lot from it without a feeling like I was sitting in a lecture theater.
So loved it. Well. Something that I wanted to talk to you about, Kesha, the question I had for you before we get into speaking to Johann. There is something that's been making the rounds on TikTok now because laugh on Cut is on TikTok. If you didn't know that, go and follow us. It's laugh on Cut podcast. I'm pretty sure where TikTok is now, but there has been a conversation and this was repurposed in news dot com today. You It is a young girl who is nineteen years old.
She's moved out with her boyfriend and instead of them moving out together and getting rooms together and sleeping in the same bed every single night, they've moved out and they have intentionally gotten separate bedrooms in the same house, and it has divided the internet.
Interesting can see why this would divide the internet because it's not very typical but I think she's a genius.
When you and your boyfriend finally move in together, but you want separate rooms so you can still have your own space and you decorate it how you want, she said while sharing footage of their adjacent rooms. Now, there are so many people commenting on this about Howard is a red flag. But I'm with you. I think that. Yeah, people are saying that this is like the beginning of the end.
Oh my gosh, in what way you're gonna start living like roommates because they technically are.
I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't fuck my roommates. I mean, like, by definition, they are roommates.
Which when you're in a romantic part when you live with a partner, you technically are just roommates.
Who sleep in the same bed. Like, No, you're not, No, Keisha, You're not just roommates who sleep in the same bed. Kesha's like, so I'm in a relationship with my house made at the moment, I'm absolutely not. He will not like me saying that normal his new girlfriend, who I know listens to the podcast. Okay, I don't know, Sorry, No, Okay. I think that the reason why this type and Look, we actually spoke about it on the radio this week
as well. There is so much stigma around couples who don't sleep in the same bed because I think we expect and we think it indicates that must mean that relationship has broken down, or that you don't love each other as much anymore, or the fact that you need your alone time at nighttime indicates that you're not happy together, or that you don't want to be together, And I just think it's such a fucking farce, Like there are so many people who are There's so many reasons why
couples don't sleep in the same bed together, and it doesn't have to just be that the relationship is falling down. If anything, could just be that they both want a good night's sleep, which makes the relationship better totally. I used to work in breakfast radio and a lot of the people that I worked with who worked similar hours, so we.
Were getting up anywhere between three and four o'clock in the morning, and a.
Lot of them would sleep in separate rooms to their partners.
But the one thing that I think they did really well was that they would do that Sunday to Thursday, and then they'd spend Friday and Saturday night in the same bed, so when they were waking up to go to work really early, they wouldn't disturb the other person. You also have your wardrobe separate, so that like they could get dressed and go to work and it just it wouldn't annoyed the other person and cause them to have bad sleeping patterns.
My grandparents to be married for sixty six years, but they don't actually like each other anymore, because anyone.
So in love, it's actually it's so beautiful to see them together. But they've slept in separate bedrooms for ages because one of them snored, and.
That is literally the foundation as to why they've been
together for sixty six years. I actually have friends who have done something similar where when they've brought like because obviously things change so much when you have kids, but when they've had their first baby, they started sleeping in separate rooms because it just worked for them in terms of getting more sleep, especially because sleep is such a priority and such a rarity when you're in that period of life, and that it's something that's just continued for them.
But I remember when she first told me that she was sleeping in a separate room to her partner, and in my mind, because we're so conditioned by what is the normal thing for a relationship, I was like, oh my god, red flag ding ding ding, they must be on the rocks. But really they're in such a great place. It's just the fact that it's not how I view relationships. It's not what I would necessarily want for my relationship.
And I think we often impose what we think is the right way to do something on how somebody else is living and how they are navigating their relationship. Do you remember in.
Sex and the City when they spoke about secret single behavior. To me, this feels like the best amalgamation of both, where you're in a relationship, but you can also do those things where you just want that time to yourself to like watch the show the partner's gonna hate.
Maybe if you want to be done.
I don't know, do your face stuff, Like just do the stuff that you don't want to do in front of your partner. If you have your own bedroom, you can do that any night of the week.
Oh it's not just that. I think about this and I'm like, if I could go back and redo things, if I could go back and have my own bedroom in my house. Very expensive in bondying. Yeah, bedrooms are like, look to get a two bedroom. Alola was sleeping in a hallway for a really long time because we couldn't afford anything else. But if we could, let's say we were booge enough to have enough bedrooms for everyone, I would one hundred percent. You don't have to share a
wardrobe with anyone. You don't have to like navigate who's gonna put their shoes wear. You don't have to worry about like all your shit in the bathroom getting moved around, or having to compromise to have your own space and your own things, and just cuddle when you want to cuddle, and then as soon as it's sleep time to be like, please don't touch me anymore or breathe on me, or make those Why does it sound like you're playing tennis with your mouth and your sleep. We just got into
Laura's therapy session just so we all know. Now, are we moving into a four bedroom house? It's gonna be great. I've got my own bedroom. No, But I think if you can afford it, what a fucking awesome way to move into if you want to, if you want it, what an awesome way to start living with someone, especially if it's you've just started living with them, so you don't have to make the full plunge or make all the compromises. You can have sleepovers when you want to
have sleepovers. You get your own space. I actually think it's genus. I think it's genius.
And also you can play like which better we're you're gonna have sex in tonight?
Like keep it interesting. Like my only question would be like, at what point, if any point, do you then migrate into the same bedroom, Like at what point do you go, oh, Okay, we've done enough, this is this is enough time that we've had our own space. We're gonna now move in together, but actually move into the same room, Like do you
do it in baby steps? Is it that you've just moved in together, but you've kept separate rooms and then the next time you move you move into the same room, Because that's really like compiling all your shit together.
Well, I think it's like, if you got used to doing the whole separate thing and you really liked it, why would you feel the need to come to merge.
This could be a forever thing, could it? Though? Because society says it shouldn't be. It could be. Who are we to young? There? Young? All right, let's get into favorite part of every episode, and that is accidentally Unphil said, produce a keisha. You can kick it off today, all right, this one.
I can actually see this happening to you if I'm being honest, So it reads. I purchased my first vibrator online, thinking it would be a bit more discreet of an option than going into a store. I picked out the one I had my eye on, and I was so excited for it to arrive. Weeks went by and it still hadn't arrived. Turns out it actually went missing in the post.
And when that happens, you have to submit an.
Inquiry to Australia Post detailing and I literally mean detailing to the exact.
Point what was in the parcel. I really just hope wherever it ended up it was being put to good use.
Oh Blair, having to write to oz Post, you just say vibrator, You just say, you know what, do you just own it?
It's a vibrator and I want it because they're very expensive.
I mean, you do want it, but do you feel comfortable enough writing Hey, my vibrator slush dildo got lost in the mail. Have you seen it floating around? It could be bouncing down the street.
Is a better question. If a vibrator rocks up and the package is damaged, like it looks like it's been opened, because you know, sometimes they open it and go through it, would you still want to use it or would you be like, absolutely not. It's it's not like. I don't mean like someone from a Strainger post pulled it out and had to go and tell you no. I just mean they opened it, looked inside and then they were like, oh, that's a vibrator, closed it back up, and sent it
on its merry way. I'm usually all about like the five second rule. There are exceptions, and this is one of them. Okay, well, very very coincidentally, and I swear we didn't plan this, but mine is also a vibrator story. My daughter loves to put treasures inside her glittery seed handbag. That sounded very strange when I said this had to do with vibrating. She's a little pirate, okay, But also I can relate to this because Marley's three and she
likes to pack it. She likes to pack a suitcase. Mommy, I'm taking my suitcase and it's just like a kid's handbag. And she puts like a couple of lego blocks and like some sort of half massacred crosskit in there. It's just the essentials, yeah, for a day out. So this one day at the park, my beautiful two year old was busy making friends, as she usually does. She was dressed as a bloody, puffy fairy unicorn thing with chul
and glitter glare. I saw her in a little huddle with other girls around the same age as her, and I thought nothing of it except how sweet it is that she's making friends. That was until one of the mums sheepishly walked over to me and said, um, I think your daughter might have packed something she shouldn't have in her handbag today. My little girl had popped the lipstick vibrator that was sitting on my bedside table into her bag, had taken it to the park, and had
showed her adoring peers. I didn't even know what to say to this woman. As she handed me my vibrator. I turned bright red, yanked the vibrator out of her hands, and told my daughter we were going to get some ice cream and some chips, and we've never been back to that park again. Here's my question. Would you pick up someone's vibrator and hand it back to them or just say to little girl, go and give that to your mummy, Laura. This is the same question as the
one before. You don't touch other people's vibrators. I'm all about recycling and all about reusing, but there are exceptions, and this is one of them. I have a question. This is going out okay, if you're sitting in the car, I want to know your answer to this. Please write in. Would you ever use somebody else's vibrator that you're not sexually active with, like a friend, or your mum, or your sister, just someone else's. Would you ever use a
recycled vibrator that's been disinfected like Kishi? If I brought mine over and I was like, hey, it's been through the dishwasher, would you use it over my dead body? We are close. I want to know you're close. I don't ever need to be that close to you. What if it was like a dire situation where you really need a vibrator? You know what, I'll call Nick Cannon. I'm gonna go manual. I'm gooing Manuel on this one.
No.
Like again, I say this a lot. I don't like to yuck a yum, but that is fucking yuck. I want to know, would you, oh, look, maybe do you know what actually though, like I wouldn't like like if it was I don't know if they would never be a situation where I would need to like we I'm never gonna have a situation where I'm like on a girl's weekend away and I'm like, hey, guys, sorry didn't bring my vibrator and Brittany goes, don't worry, I disinfected
mine this week. Like it's never gonna happen. But like it just reminding myself when I packed for Laura's hens, don't worry about bringing make sure you clean up the dishwasher before we leave. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like it's not as disgusting as we make it out to be. It's what I'm saying.
Well, the thing that actually just popped into my mind was, you know, like, if you have sex toys and you break up with the person, or.
You might just be using them with a casual whoever, do you then use them with the next casual person.
I've done it.
So this person involuntarily used a sex toy that you used with someone else and they didn't even know about it. And I bet you didn't even disinfect I did clean it. I did what was I'm not a fucking what just whated and down was some toilet paper? What do you mean soap with special like sex toys? So okay, that's different. When you said soap, I was like washing things with soap doesn't make it hygienic. It came in the packet like it was a freebie that got thrown in. That was the King Jelly lot.
Mine didn't get lost in the mails, so it came in the bag it maybe that Maybe that's another question, like can you use a sex toy with more than one person?
That's another ask on Quick. I'm writing that in for this week's ask on cut. Can you use a sex toy with your ex and then with a new partner without telling them that you used it with your ex? Oh that's a biggie all right. On that note, you get like a fake packet to open it up from and be like this brand new babe. Let's get into the chat with Johann Harry.
Johann Harry is an author of three New York Times best selling books. Ted Talks have been viewed more than eighty million times. The first his names Everything You Know about Addiction is Wrong. The second is titled This Could Be Why You are depressed or anxious? And his latest book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention, was published in January this year and has been a best seller on three continents. I mean, talk about an overachieva Joanne, Welcome to life on cut hooray.
I'm so to be with you guys.
Also, I like that it's very early in the morning and we forced a coke zero upon you.
No, no, no, my god, I've already had two. Right.
Excitement that was shown was really I like that.
I think the biggest division between human beings is not like a theist versus religious people, or left wing versus right wing. It's fucking morning people versus everyone else. One of my exes he used to wake up every morning at five am without an alarm clock. I'd be like, what are you? What is this exa happening?
And then it's surprising, but well not surprising that it didn't work out. And that's probably was the real wedge in the relationship. We start every.
Single one of our interviews the same way, and that is by asking you to divulge your most embarrassing story.
Do you have an accidental unfiltered So when I arrived.
At your offices ten minutes ago, the first thing I saw was a copy of the book The Art of Happiness by the Dala Lama, which reminded me of the time the diala a Lama called me fat. It turns out it turns out he's a complete fucking bitch. Who knew it was? It was genuinely traumatic. So when I was was a baby journalist, there must have been like twenty five inexplicably I got sent to it. I know, this gets so much fucking worse. It was. It was horrendous.
So I got sent to interview the Diala Lama, right, and everyone who into used the dial Alarma just says, you know, your holiness, you're the greatest person I've ever met. Can I rent a flat somewhere in your asshole for the next time? And you know, I really admire the Dilarma. I admire the resistance to the Chinese occupation to bet all sorts of things about him. But I think when you interview a powerful person, you know, if your journalist, your job is to challenge them in some way. So
did some digging. I was like, oh, it's the dial Alarm I ever done anything wrong. Turns out he thinks disabled people are being punished for what they did in a previous life.
Yeah, exactly.
He says that, you know, he's very anti gay. You shouldn't use the other holes is an actual quote from the dial Alarma, and you know, using the other holes is one of my hobbies. So I was watching it and so I thought, okay, I'll challenge him a bit right started to go to interview him. He gave a speech first, if I remember rightly, and afterwards I'm sort of taken backstage. And the first twenty minutes we're talking about stuff we really agree on, you know, like the
Chinese occupation to Bet, which is indeed horrific. And then I started asking him the kind of more challenging questions and he started pretending he didn't speak English. He literally goes like, I I don't won't to do Zach said, because I don't understand this this quick, And I'm like, I just saw you get English. We've been talking in English for like twenty I know you can. And he's literally just refusing to answer, just pretending he doesn't understand
what I'm saying. I'm sort of pushing him and pushing him in his like goons. I'm sure that's not their official job title. But he's like people are like standing in the corner looking quite pissed off, and I thought, God, they're going to throw me out. So I thought, I'll bring it back to something where we agree. And I said, you know, your holiness, you've always been very critical of income inequality in the West, And he said, yeah, I don't see why we why we need so much money?
We each only have one stomach, and then said, except you, you clearly have at least three. I'm like, this man is meant to love blades of grass and rocks? Is he fat shaming me? Is this what's happening? Am I being fat shamed by a living God?
Right?
And it was not my finest moment in Joe Listen. I said, well, you're quite fat as well. So after they basically threw me out, and so after when I let what I read about this right, I got the world's first of a Buddhist death threat, which I'm really proud of. They were like, are we going to kill you? And I was like, I wrote back and said, you're going to have at least five fucking lives as a
woodlouse now because you sent this emi. But it was genuinely it's not look at look at that beneficent, smiling face. Now imagine you're going you're fat bitch, right that that is what happened to me.
He uses other holes as it was horrible to someone who pretended as though he didn't know what you were saying.
Every fucking word that I said to him.
Now that we have offended anybody who is quite the fan of the Dalai Lama.
Right, Like the thing is it's precisely because he's so admirable that it's quite upsetting, but also it's quite nice because it's a reminder you know, everyone is flawed, you know, even the most admirable people. So it's actually a nice little lesson in life about like sometimes you know you identify an unpleasant characteristic in yourself, you're like, oh God, and I that kind of person you are? No, everyone's a cunt sometimes, right. Sorry. Kevil in Australia, using that word.
My mother is Scottish, so I know that this is the only place in the world that uses the sea word in the same way as Scottish people.
I don't know if we do. I don't know if it's good because I am frequency. I mean, it is what ten am in the nine thirty nine thirty The sea words a big words bring out for breakfast.
You see in Scotland. So if you said to my mother, I don't know how to get to the post office, she going, so got left it here doning about one hundred yards, you'll see a bunch of cunts standing there gore right where they are? What done? You'll see another bunch of cunts. That's the post office, right, and there would be no insult to any of those people. That's just that's just a neutral word meaning person or thing, right, So I know it is a bit misogynistic and so
we should we should read it. And I have tried to explain this to the people of Scotland, but they sadly called me a Yeah.
Now, the reason why you were actually it's not just the reason why you're here, but it's one of the reasons why we wanted to speak to you. You spent quite a bit of time by yourself in Provincetown talk to us about why and what was the instigator for this trip and why it was so special.
Yeah. So I noticed my own ability to focus and pay attention was getting worse, you know, with each year that passed. It felt like things that require deep focus that are so important to me, like reading books, watching films, having proper long conversations were getting more and more like running up and down escalator, do you know what I mean? Like I could still do them, but it was like the escalator was getting faster and I was having to
run faster to get there. I noticed this happening to lots of people around me, and there was this moment which set me on the road to Provincetown where I sort of realized I could see the facts. Right. The average office worker now focuses on only one task for only three minutes. I said that to someone the other day, and they said, how do they get a whole three minutes? Every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when when I was seven years old, there's now one
hundred children who've been identified with that problem. But I think I was quite afraid of looking into it. To be honest, I think because I was quite embarrassed. I thought, well, there's something wrong with me, so why would you try and figure out the problems? Obviously just weak, you're not good enough, right.
Ignorance is bliss? Yeah, yeah, exactly, or even the question of like well, I mean it's pretty easy, like just pay more attention, or just be more focus, have more willpower, have more self control. Like that's the kind of I think a lot of initial thoughts. We blame ourselves more than external forces one hundred percent.
And I had, you know, it's so funny you say that, because very early on in the research for the book, I went to interview the leading expert on willpower in the world, and an amazing scientist called Professor Roy Baumeister
who's at the University of Queensland here in Australia. And I said to me, and I'm thinking of writing this book about why people can't focus because I interview huge numbs of scientists in my books and I'm being interested in what's going on and obviously how your science could help us to understand it. And he said to me something like these out words are in the book he says, saying like, Oh, it's interesting you say that, because I've found I can't really focus. I just play games on
my phone phone a lot. Now I just kind I'm sort of sitting there and I'm like, the fuck.
See if you have problems with this, we are author.
He wrote a book called Willpower. He's literally the leading expert of the world of willpower. I'm like, I rememberlieve that a to be thinking, oh fuck, what do we do? But actually the solution does not like primarily and individual willpower. Be Sorry, there was this Just to go back to your initial question, because what set me on the road to it, there was one experience that really was like, Okay,
I have to investigate this. I've got a godson, and when he was nine he developed this brief but very intense obsession with Elvis Presley, and it was super cute because he appeared to genuinely not know that impersonating Elvis had become a kind of cheesy cliche. So I think he was the last person ever to do a totally sincere impression of Elvis. So it was completely adorable when he would do like suspicious Minds or Rubellas Vegas, and
when he used to tack him in. He would get me to tell him the story of Elvis's life over an over again. Obviously I skipped a bit at the end where of this shit himself to death on the toilet, and one night I mentioned just in passing, I mentioned Graceland, where Elvis lived, and his eyes lit up and he said to me, John, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I was like, sure, the way you do with nine year olds, know next week it'll be Lego Land.
Or Lapland, or we're ever going to have to actually see it exactly.
It's like it's like promising.
I'm still holding onto the pink convertible car that my dad promised me when I was nine, and I never got the cruelty, the cruelty, the trauma that he inflicted.
Exactly, that trauma will, no doubt if harm your attention.
And it's another that's a whole other episode.
He kept sort of going, no, no, do you swear you'll take me to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely promise. And I didn't think at that moment again for ten years until so many things had gone wrong. So he dropped out of school when he was fifteen. By the time he was nineteen, he spent literally all his waking hours. I know that sounds like in saturation. It's not alternate between his iPad, his iPhone, and his laptop, and his life was just this kind of blur of WhatsApp, YouTube, porn.
And when you talk to him it was almost like he was kind of whirring at the speed of snapchat. You know, it felt like nothing still could get through to him. And one day we were sitting on my sofa in London, and all day I was trying to talk to him, and I just I just couldn't. It was like, you know, throwing sticks into a really fast moving river. You just couldn't get any traction with him. And to be totally honest with you both, I wasn't I wasn't that much better, right. I was staring at
my own devices and I was hating this experience. And I suddenly remembered this moment all these years before, and I said to him, Hey, let's go to Graceland. This is no way to live. Let's break this numbing routine. Let's go on a big road trip all over the South. But as immediately thought ahead, you've got promise me one thing if we do it, which is that if we go, you'll leave your phone in the hotel during the day, because there's no point going if you're just gonna stare
at your phone the whole time. And he took him. He didn't like the way he was living either. He took a moment, he thought about it, and he said, yeah, let's do this. I'll do it. Okay, I promise you, I'll do that. Let's do it. And I think it was literally like it was two or three weeks later. We took off from Heathrow to We went to New Orleans first, and a couple of weeks after that we got to the Gates of Graceland. And when you get there, now this was even before COVID, there's no one who
shows you around. What happens is they hand you an iPad and you put in earbuds and the iPad shows you around. Right, It kind of says, go left, go right, your tour guide exactly. Every room you're in, it like exactly like a tour guide. It tells you the story about that room, and every room you go in, there's an image of that room on the iPad in front
of you. Right. So we're walking around Graceland and I sort of note I was getting a bit pissed off because I'm started to notice what happens is everyone just walks around staring at the iPad, right. They're just sort of staying and then sometimes people do look up. They look up to take out their phones, take a selfie pose, they put their phone away, and then they go back to staring at the iPad. And I'm getting a little bit annoyed, but not like massively, but just like feeling
a bit out of sorts about it. And we got to the Jungle Room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland. It's got loads of fake plants in it and I never forget them. There was a middle aged Canadian couple next to us, and the man turned to his wife and he said, honey, this is amazing. Look. If you swipe left, you can see the Jungle Room to the left, and if you swipe right, you can see the Jungle
Room to the right. And I thought they were kidding, right, So I laughed and I turned and looked at them, and they were just swiping back and forth. And I leaned forward and I said, but sir, there's an old fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning your head, because you realize we're actually in the jungle room. You don't have to look at a picture of it on the internet. We're literally there. It's all around you.
And they looked at me like I was completely arranged and back to out the room and I turned to my godson to laugh about it, and he was standing in the corner staring at Snapchat, because from the minute we landed he just couldn't stop. He couldn't stop. And I went up to him, and I did think it's never a good idea with teenagers. I tried to grab the phone out of his hand. I said to him, I know you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out. You're not showing up at
the events of your own existence. You're not present at
your own life. This is no way to live. And he stormed off, understandably, and I wandered around Memphis on my own that night, and I found him later by the guitar shapes swimming Paul in the Heartbreak Hotel where we were staying, and he was sitting with his feet in the pool and he was looking at his phone and I apologized to him for getting so angry, and he didn't look up from a snapchat, but he said, I know something's really wrong here and I don't know
what it is. And that's when I thought, I need to stop putting this off. I need to figure out what's actually because it was like, it was like we went away to escape this problem of distraction, but there was nowhere to escape to because it was everywhere, right, And that's why that was the start of me really going on this big journey all over the world.
And why Provincetown? What was it about going there that you thought if you say it's everywhere, it's going to follow you regardless. What was it about going and spending time especially there, or what were the rules that you had for yourself health in doing this that was different.
So at the start of working on my book, style and focus, I thought, well, it's obvious what the problem is here. I'm weak, I'm not good enough. I need to use my willpower. And someone invented the smartphone and that fucked me over, right, So I thought, okay, if these are the two problems and the solution is kind of obvious, right, I'll use my willpower to separate myself
from the phone. So I was in this very lucky position that one of my previous books got made into big Hollywood film, so I had a load of money for the first time in my life. I thought, fuck out, I'm just gonna go away. So I booked a room in a beach house in Provincetown, which is a bit like Byron Bay. Basically, it's on the tip of Cape Cod.
It's a much gayer version of Byron Bay. It's the kind of place where there's more than one person who owns a full time living by dressing as Ursula, the villain from The Little Man Made and singing songs about kind of lingers.
Right, that's amazing.
It's paradise.
I would hate.
I should have gone into the Dilama dressed as Ursula. That would have really fucked with him. But if I ever do it again, I will. And I booked this room and I went there, and I had no smartphone, and I had no laptop that could get online. My friend Mtiat has gave me his broken old laptop that been able to get online for years, and I had
three months completely offline. I didn't have any access to the Internet at all, and loads of things happened in that month, but the biggest thing that amazed me was, I Mean, the other thing I thought before I went was, well, maybe my attentions getting worse because I'm getting older. I was nearly forty when I went, And the most striking thing was how much and how rapidly my attention came back. My attention went back to being as good as it
had been when I was seventeen. I could read for like eight hours a day, I could have really long conversations quite quickly. That desperate kind of hunger for the distractions, the kind of pings and paranoias of the way we live,
really washed out, like a tide that had gone. And I later realized actually, because after that I went on this big journey, I interviewed over two hundred the leading scientists in the world, from Moscow to Melbourne to Miami who've studied why our attentions getting worse, and they've actually shown that there's scientific evidence for twelve factors that can
make your attention better and make your attention worse. Some of them are in our tech, but actually most of them are not they're much bigger factors in the way we live. I'm sure we'll get to some of them. And I realized actually a lot of them had changed in Provincetown. It wasn't just the lack of the tech. But I remember on the last day I was there,
there's a point at the edge of Provincetown. It's just beyond the lighthouse where you can go on a boat, and I remember going there and looking out over I hadn't gone anywhere for three months, right, and looking out over this landscape where i'd been, where my mind had really been for three months, and thinking this is amazing. Why would I ever go back how I lived before? Right?
I loved this? And the next day I got the ferry back to Boston and I got my phone and my laptop back from my friend Joleen, And within two months I was eighty percent back where i'd been. I didn't ever go quite back as far, and I was like, ah, And then I felt this kind of renewed wave of shame, like, well,
what happened? Right? And that was when I realized, Oh, I need to understand in a deeper way what's happening and build more sustainable solutions than just Look, detoxes are great, but they're not the solution.
And I think that's what everyone does, right people you see it, they go, I'm having a weekend off social media, as though that's the solution to cleansing whatever feelings it is. You know, sometimes people feel overwhelmed by using social media or overwhelmed by their phones. But it's this idea that a twenty four hour step away is going to solve all the problems. But the problems are actually a lot more.
It's just intertwined in the way that we live our lives rather than it being just a once off detox.
Yeah. And I think for all of the twelve factors that are harming our attention that I write about in my book Style and Focus, I learned from this journey that there's sort of two levels of which we've got to tackle them. I think I think of them as defense and offense. There are loads of things that we can do as individuals to defend ourselves and our children from these forces that are stealing our focus. Right. I'm
sure we'll get to lots. I go through dozens in the book, but I'll give you an example of one I have at home a so called a K safe. It's a plastic safe. I don't get an commission for this, by the way, it's a bit like AVC salesperson by saying it's a plastic safe. In the show Note, you take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial, and it locks your phone away for anything between five minutes and
a whole day. Right. I won't sit down and watch a film with people unless that everyone puts their phone in the phone jail. We'll have my friends around for dinner unless we all in prison our phones. And it's very hard at first, and I felt that difficulty myself.
If to say to people, you know, 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 focus and attention break down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down, your ability to solve your problems breaks down. You feel worse about yourself
actually because you are less competent. Right, And when you start to get your attention back. Even beginning in these very small ways. It's initially anxiety provoking, and then you feel the tremendous pleasure. Just the pleasure of sitting and having dinner with your friends and them actually listening to you and you actually listening to them is such a profane and pleasure that it quite quickly people want to
expand the spaces in which they can do that. So that's one level of which we've got to respond defense, right, and we can talk about lots of other ways people can defend themselves. But I want to be really, really honest with people, because, to be candid, I don't think most books about attention are being honest with people. I am passionately in favor of these individual changes. They will
make a big difference. They go a long way, but on their own they're not going to solve this problem because at the moment, it's a bit like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then leaning forward and going, you know what, mate, you might want to learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch so much, and you want to go, well, fuck off, I'll learn to meditate. That's really valuable, But you need to stop
pouring this itching powder on me. Right, So we've got to actually deal with the factors together collectively that are doing this to us. Because you know, this didn't happen because you failed, and you failed, and I failed and our kids failed. Right, this happened because of very big social forces. But these social forces, they are not inevitable.
Right.
Dr James Williams, who'd been at the heart of Silicon Valley, a key figure in Silicon Valley, was horrified by what they were doing, quit and became, I would argue, the most important philosopher attention in the world. He said to me, Look, the acts existed for one point four million years before anyone said, guys, should we put handle on this thing.
The entire Internet has existed less than ten thousand days. Right, we can sort the shout if we want to, and not just the tech element, the other eleven components as well. We can deal with these things, but a lot of them have to be dealt with through collective action together, some of them can be dealt with individually, and a lot of them have to be dealt with at a kind of collective level.
Well, you know, in when I was because I listened to your book.
Weirdly enough, I am a podcaster, so I like listening and I listened to your audio book and something that I just found insanely relatable that you spoke about when you went to Provincetown was one of the things that happened to you in one of the first days that you were there, and it was that immediate, I guess anxiety of when you tap your pocket or when you check your hand and you're like, where the fuck is
my phone? And at the time, I thought, I go through that literally anytime I cannot find my phone, to the point where I then get my Apple Watch to ping it.
So I can go and find it. It's because it's just an extension of us, like we're so used to constantly having it as like a body part almost, so you're like sometimes even wake up and I'm like, why is it in my bed? But it's in my bed, you know, so's my child, and then there's my phone next to me in between.
Us, and it's so As one of the scientists who made an incredible breakthrough and understanding this professor Suner Layman, who I interviewed in Copenhagen in Denmark. The reason he started researching this is because he loves his sons, and every morning his sons would come and jump in the bed, and instead of turning to these lovely creatures or he loves, he would instinctively reach for his phone and look at it first, and he was like, what am I doing?
But so many of us do it, and that's We're all doing it, and we almost justify it to ourselves in terms of like, well, I'm just going to check in, or I'm just going to check my emails, or I'm just going to check I don't know, my Instagram, my comments, whatever, that small thing is that we think we just need to check. But it's the constantness of it, Like, what's the difference if those comments are checked at the end of the day collective once, rather than that being checked,
you know, all the time throughout the day. What I always find interesting is and something that I'm so guilty of is I might be in the middle of a task, whether it be writing or researching for the podcast, or doing something for my other business, and just the distraction of getting a message or just the distraction of you know, I'll quickly tap into Instagram for a second. What impact
does that have. So if you're focused on a task and then you you know, quickly check out of that task and then go back to it, what impact does that have on your ability to actually complete whatever it is that you're supposed to be given your focus to.
Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon did a study, really shocking study found if you're interrupted, and it could be something as small as a text message. So let's say you get text message, it takes you twenty seconds to look at it. It takes you, on average twenty three minutes to get back to the level of focus
you had before you were interrupted. So you think, oh, I'll answer my friends text message will take twenty seconds very much, I'll take you twenty three minutes plus twenty seconds, right, But most of us, of course, are never getting twenty three minutes spare, So we're constantly operating at this lower level of cognitive ability. And so one of people who most help me to understand this is an amazing man name Professor Earl Miller, who I went to interview at
MIT in the US. See he's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. And he said to me, look, there's one thing you've got 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 forty thousand years. It's not going to change on any time scale any of us are going to see. But what's happened is
we've fallen for a kind of mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time, and that the rest of us are not that far behind them. So what happens is scientists like Professor Miller, scientists all over the world, they get people into labs 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 you can't do more than one thing at a time. What
you do is you juggle very quickly. You're like, wait, what did you just ask me? What's that message on WhatsApp? What does it saying on the TV there? What's this? What's this message on Facebook? Sorry? What did you ask me? Again?
And the overwhelm and that burnout that then comes from that feeling of like never actually being able to complete a task because it's like this constant feeling of being overwhelmed and stressed out because there's so many plates spinning.
Well, the technical term for that, the kind of fancy term for that, is the switch cost effect. So there's a cost switching between tasks. So when you're switching rapidly between tasks, the evidence is very clear, you remember much less of what you do, you make far more mistakes, you're much less creative. Evidence is that it's huge. I give you an example of a small study. It's backed by a wider body of evidence. Hewlett Packard, the printer company.
They got a scientist in to study their workers, and he split them into two groups. And the first group was told, just get on with your task, whatever it is, and you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is, but you're going to have to at the same time onto a heavy load of email and vocals. So pretty much how most of us work. And at the end of it, the scientists tested the IQ of both groups.
Group that had not been interrupted scored on average ten IQ points higher than the group that had to keep your sense to that big That is, if we all smoked a fat splift together now and got stoned. If we did that now instead of waiting far now, our IQs would go down in the short term by five points. So being chronically interrupted is twice as bad in the short term for your IQ as getting stones.
Right, if that's some pretty bad conversations being markedly, if you were a.
Chronic stoner, or if you were getting absolutely hammered, it would be different, right, But you can see you you'd be better off sitting at your desk doing one thing at a time, a smoking a spliff. Then you would sit at your desk, not smoking a spliff and being constantly interrupted. Now, to be clear, you'd be better off
neither getting stoned nor being interrupted. Don't want to get the wrong idea, but this is why Professor Miller said to me, we're living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted.
Always joking like amongst our team that we are scatterbrains. You know that we kind of can't keep on the one train of thought thriving chaos.
Say that we thrive in chaos. We don't, We say our job. We don't thrive in chaos, but it's constantly chaos and we survive. It's probably more the saying.
Yeah, that's so interesting. So why do you think you say that?
Oh, because it's just a it's a war cry to get through the day, really, I think. But no, we work very much in a digital space, so a podcasting is very much an audio digital medium. A lot of the work that we do and how we connect with our communities is via social media platforms, but it is without having one designated person who takes care of just
the customer service side. In terms of like the huge community of emails or messages that need to be responded to, it kind of always feels like a constant barrage.
And it is.
As much as there's incredible aspects of that which we are so grateful for, there are some aspects of that which make it really hard to kind of hone in and get and feel accomplished in like the to do list as well.
Yeah, and I've always put it down to the fact that that's our personalities. But what I loved hearing you say was that our inability to not pay attention to the one thing at the one time, it wasn't entirely our own faults, and that social media has. These big companies of social media have a lot to be accountable for.
It's not all your fault, right, you didn't design this environment in which we live. So let's look at one of the twelve factors that you brought up, one of the twelve factors that are harming our focus. And they go really widely, from you know, the food we eat, to the way our kids' schools work. There's a whole range of things. But let's home in on this one, because I think you're totally right. It's the one that
we think of most. I actually don't think it's the biggest, interestingly, but it's definitely very big, and it's the one we think of the most when we think about this problem. And I spent a lot of time trying to understand this by interviewing people in Silicon Valley, a lot of whom are designed the world in which we live, right. It was so interesting to see how haunted they are
by what they've done. So, for example, I mentioned before doctor James Williams had been a key figure in Silicon Valley. He had this moment that really haunted him if speaking at a tech conference and the audience were literally the people anyone listening. Your kids are using stuff designed by the people who were in that audience today, right, And he said to them, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we've created, please put up your hand. Not one person put up their hand.
Not long afterwards he quit, who will? I can't do this anymore? This is immoral? Right?
When you say this is immoral, what is the moral?
Yeah?
Exactly, what's the part that's I mean, you know, and I think so many of us have seen documentaries like The Social Dilemma or you know, we've tapped into the fact that there are problematic aspects of social media of how it sucks us of not just our attention but with our money in many ways. But what is it about it that is immoral?
Yeah? So this is so important because the way big tech want us to think about this debate is are you pro tech or you anti tech? And when you hear that, you're like, oh, well, I'm not going to join the Armish. I'm not going to give up my technology. I guess that must be protech, right, no hate the Armish? Exactly if.
People who believe.
Exactly exactly. I once spent a week in an Amish community and I made a terrible mistake for a previous book. I made the terrible mistake the night before.
I'm about to say that was a terrible mistake.
No, no, well, actually they were quite nice. But the night before I made the terrible mistake of watching the Harrison Ford film Witness, which really scared the show out of me, because the Armish are not good people in that film. The real Armish are much better. No, but that's not the debate. We're all pro tech, right. The debate is what kind of tech do we want, designed for what purposes, working in whose interests?
Right?
Which is sound a bit fancy, So just unpack it a bit if that's okay. So anyone listening, if you open Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, any of the mainstream social media apps, now they start to make money out of you immediately in two ways. First way is really obvious, you see advertising. Okay, no one needs me to explain that. Second way is much more important. Everything you do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure
out who you are. Constantly harvesting information about you. So let's say you've said that you like I don't know Scott Morrison, Bet Midler, and you told your mummy you just bought some nappies, right, okay, so it knows you like Scott Morrison. You probably write wing. You like Bet Middler. If you're a man, you're probably gay. No disrespect to any straight man you like Bet Midler. I don't believe
there are any, but if there are. And you've told your mommy you bought nappies, okay, you've got a baby. So it's harvesting all this information about you, right, partly because it wants to sell that information to advertisers, but mainly because it's figuring out what the weaknesses and your attention are. It's figuring out what is it that keeps you as an individual scrolling for a super simple reason. And it's had to be explained to me by so many people in Silicon Valley before I really got it
understood how simple it was. In a way, every time you pick up your phone and start scrolling, those companies begin to make money. The longer you scroll, the more money they make. Every time you put the app away. Their revenue stream disappears. Did so for your kids? Right, every time your kids open the app, they start to
make money. The longer they scroll, the more money the company makes, because obviously the longer you scroll, the more ads you see, and the more information they harvest about you to sell to the advertisers. So all of this genius in Silicon Valley, all these algorithms, or this AI or this incredible engineering power, all of it is good at the moment towards one thing, figuring out how do we get you and your kids to pick up your phone as often as possible and scroll as long as possible.
Just like I know the head of KFC, all he cares about He might as an individual, care about something else, but in his job, all he cares about is how many times did you go to KFC today? And how big was the bucket you bought? All they care about is how often and how long did you scroll?
That's it, right, And these are some of the smartest people in the world. And I think this goes back to what you said earlier, this idea of offense and defense. Sure we can have some defenses against that, but it's a hard one to unpack because when you're like well, we don't have to be black and white with this. Obviously everybody is pro tech. But if everybody is pro tech, how do we then have an offense to these massive
tech companies. How do we then collectively turn around and say, well, we're not happy with this, but we still want all the other stuff you know that you've created that's free.
Yeah, and it's such an important question. My friend tis Stan Harris always says, who'd been at the heart of Google is now? I would argue the most important dissident speaking out against this what they're doing, says, you know, you can try having self control, but every time you do, there's ten thousand engineers at the other side of the screen working really hard to undermine your self control. So I think you've gone to exactly the most important question.
There are loads of things we can do as individuals. You've gone to the heart of it, and I think we want to understand one of the things we need to do now to deal with this, one of the twelve factors that are harming our attention. I think there's an analogy in the history of Australia that I think you can probably just about remember. I can remember that.
I think shows us the way forward. So when we were kids, the most common form of petrol, in fact, by far the most dominant form of petrol in Australia and in Britain across the world was leaded petrol. Right, I can remember the smell of that.
I can remember moment unleaded petrols where it.
Came from, exactly right. And a bit before our time, people used to paint their houses a lot with lead paint, right, And it had been known going right back to the nineteen twenties that exposure to lead really screws up your brain and in particular harms children's ability to focus and pay attention. In fact, there was an amazing scientist named Dr Alice Hamilton who in the nineteen twenties said there was an alternative to leaded petrol even then, so don't
introduce leaded petrol. If it's in the petrol, it'll get in the air, everyone will be exposed to it. It'll be really bad for people's brains. And she was kind of man explained out the room, and they introduced leaded petrol. And by the time you got to the late seventies the early eighties, the science was just totally undeniable that this was really harming children's ability to focus right, and
has all sorts of other terrible effects. So what happened was a group of ordinary Australian mums what we used to call back then housewives, banded together and said, well, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing these for profit companies to screw up our kids' brains? This is crazy, especially when there's an alternative that works just as well and doesn't do that right. And it's really important to notice what those mums didn't say. They didn't say,
so we're anti petrol, get rid of it. They didn't say get rid of paint. No one should paint their houses anymore, in the same way no one could say we're anti tech. Right. What they said is, let's deal with the specific aspect of this that is so harming us. So they said, let's ban leaded petrol. Right, And these mums they fought, and they fought and they were ridiculed and it you know, it's a bit like that thing Gandhi said with every political movement, First they ignore you,
then they fight you, then you win. Right, And that's what happened, and everyone listening knows these mums. They won. We don't have leaded petrol anymore. As a result, the Center of Disease Control says the average child is three to five IQ points higher than they would have been had we not got rid of lead right now, and we all have better attention as a result. Right if we still had lead in the air, our attention would
be even worse than it is now now. You can see to me, along with the individual forms of defense, and I talk about lots of them in the book, that's a really great model. You identify the specific element that's fucking with our brains, and you get rid of that specific element while keeping all the good stuff. We still have petrol. We stand paint right with a room that's been painted, just not with leaded paint, right, just
not recently. And to me, so what I wanted to figure out was, with all these people in Silicon Valley who were at the heart of the machine, what's the equivalent of the lead in the lead paint for this problem? Right there was a moment it really fell into place for me. Hainsfeed Asaraskin, who invented a key part of how most websites work. His dad, Jeff Raskin, invented the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs and ASA said to me, look, there's an exact equivalent to the lead in lead paint.
You've got to ban the current business model for social media. And I was like, well, what do you mean? And he said, past laws that say a business model that is based on secretly tracking you in order to figure out the weaknesses and your attention, that is just fundamentally immoral. It's like lead in lead paint. It's screwing up our kids' brains. We won't allow it. Let's imagine we do that. The day after we do that, what would happen when I
opened Facebook? Would it just say sorry, everyone, we've gone fishing? He said, of course not. What would happen is they'd have to move to a different business model. And everyone I'm listening, almost everyone will have experience of the two different business models. So the first alternative is a subscription model. Everyone knows how Netflix works. You pay a certain amount, you get access, right, so it maybe that we'd want to pay a small amount to social media companies in
order to get access. Key thing to understand is at that point all the incentives change. Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, you are not their customer. You are the product they sell to their real customer. Who are the advertisers? So all of their intentions towards you are figuring out, how do we hack your attention and focus and your kid's attention of focus to get you to scroll as much as possible? Pick up your phone. You want to know why your phone's in your bed. One reason is because they've been
unbelievably good at making you desperately crave that feedback. Right, But if you become the customer, suddenly all the incentives change. Suddenly they're not like, oh, what does she want in order to how can we hack her in order to sell her to advertise? It's something like what does she want? It turns out she feels good when she meets up with her friends and looks into their eyes. We've will
learned the importance of that in the last two years. Okay, let's design our app not to get her to doom scroll as much as possible. Let's design the app to maximize contact between people offline. Let's design it to say, Oh, your friend Hannah's around the corner. She's selected on a button she wants to meet up. Why don't you go for a drink with her. The technology exists to do that as easily as the technology exists right now, my friends in Silicon Valley could design that in five minutes.
The key thing is the incentives aren't there. So that's one alternative business model. We'll think about another one which literally everyone listening has experience of. Before we had sewers, we had FECs in the street. People got cholera. It was terrible. So we all paid to build the sewers, and we all own and maintain the sewers together. Right. You own the sewers in Sydney, own the sewers in London.
So just like we want to own the sewage pipes together, it might be we want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the equivalent of cholera for our attention. But the key thing is, for as long as the longer you scroll, the more money these companies make, they will just carry on being unbelievably good at it, right,
and they'll get better and better at it. Paul Graham, one of the biggest investors in Silicon mailing, said the world will be more addictive in the next forty years on the current jectory than it was in the last forty Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to your kid than Facebook. So imagine the next crack like iteration of TikTok in the metabus. So that's one side
of the race. Right on the other side of the race, there's got to be a movement of all of us saying no, no, you don't get to do this to us and our kids, just like those mums with the lead paint. No, we're not going to tolerate this. That's not a good life. No, this is not how we want some cost we want technology. Of course there are moments of speed, but we also want moments of thought and contemplation and rest. We want children who can play outside,
who can read books. Right, we can get to that better future, but we won't get there if we don't fight for it.
Do you think as well with this though? And I mean I love the analogy of the lead paint, but in terms of like how simple that was to be able to pin in and go and to really go. Okay, that's the problem. It's that one element, It's that one ingredient that's causing an issue. I guess the issue with social media is that it and especially social media, it's so abstract to so many people. I mean, especially the
people who are doing the legislations around it. You know, so many of us and we work in a digital space and I still don't fully comprehend how it works. But I know it benefits me in lots of ways. It benefits me from a business, from an advertising perspective, it benefits me from keeping connected. And I know it's negative, but without really understanding the nuances of how the platforms have been created, and I think that there is kind of a lack of transparency from the people who sit
at the top, like an intentional lack of transparency. Totally that that's kind of what stops people from collectively going we don't want this. You know, individually we're all like, yeah, we're not happy, but collectively, no one really knows where to start.
I think that's totally right. There's a different historical analogy that makes me helps me to think about that, and it will sound a bit odd for a moment, but I really loved my grandmother's I was raised by my Scottish grandmother and my mom was ille when I was a kid, and my dad was in a different country, and my grandmother's with the age I am now in nineteen sixty two, right, and in ninety six, So one of them was a Scottish, working class Scottish woman living
in a kind of housing project, and my Swiss grandmother was a peasant living in a what's what they would have called her then, in a wooden heart on the side of a mountain. Right. And in nineteen sixty two, neither of my grandmothers were allowed to have bank accounts because they were married women. They were added to bank accounts in their own name. It was legal for their husbands to rape them, as it was legal everywhere in
the world for men to rape their wives. My Swiss grandmother wasn't allowed to vote because she was a woman, right, And I'm very conscious of a man man's blaming this to you know this much better than I do. But I think about my grandmother's lives then and how enormous the challenges that face them were, right, And then I think about my niece Erin, who's just about to turn eighteen.
My Swiss grandmother, she loved to paint and draw. And when she liked to paint and draw, they when she was a girl They would just say, what the fuck are you doing, Get into the kitchen, that's your job. My niece, when she loved to paint and draw, we started googling art schools. Right now, I don't want to underestimate how much further we've got to go in achieving
liberation for women. But even the craziest misogynists wouldn't say, well, Erin shouldn't be allowed to have a bank account, it should be legal for men to rape her, and she shouldn't be allowed to vote. Even the most barking, mad you know figure doesn't say that, right. That transformation happened because loads of women just said I'm not fucking taking this anymore. You're not going to treat me like that.
And if I think about my grandmother's in nineteen sixty two, it's not like they had a script, right, it was like, oh, we'll do the following twelve point program, and you know, and that had to fight had to happen at every level as well. It had to happen every family, in every workplace, in every in parliaments everywhere, right, And I think this is a bit like that, the attention fight.
I don't want to overestimate the power else. There's a lot of differences as well, but in the same way, the fight for attention has to happen in your most intimate spaces, in your bed, right, You've got to have that fight for attention. You are going to have it at your kid's schools, You've got to have it at you know, at a national level. So it's got to happen at lots of levels. But sometimes people say to me, totally understandably, but big tech is so powerful, how we
going to take this on? And I would say to them, You're absolutely right. It's a big fight. We've got ahead of us, and the other eleven factors are big as well. But big tech is not one hundredth as powerful as men were in nineteen sixty two, right when these women that I knew and loved were the age I am now, men controlled literally everything, right, It's not an exaggeration. They controlled every country, almost every company in the world, every police force, every.
Army, and it wasn't in their interest to change anything until they were forced to change something exactly.
You know, Rebecca Sonat, a brilliant American writer, says, you know, politicians or weather veans, it's our job to be the weather. Right, They'll be as good as we make them. The changes that happen will be as good as the ones that we organize and demand right now. Of course we do that at an individual level and a collective level. But yeah, like the lead industry, they were never going to go, you know what, guys, We've made enough money, let's stop
sucking up kids' brains. Right, They we're never going to do that, right, They had to be made to do it. We have to make these companies do it when it comes to big tech and across the board all these other things. But we can totally that can I talk about just I think it were particularly relevant to your audience. There's another way in which this is harming us that I think is really worth thinking about. It's particularly catastrophic
for teenage girls. The design of the machinery is driven by just one idea, which is, how do we get people to scroll longer and longer and longer. Right, So the algorithms, all the computers are set up to figure out, okay, track everything and figure out what it is that keeps people scrolling, right, and those algorithms. This wasn't anyone's fault. They didn't design it that way, but they just stumbled
across an underlying truth about human psychology. Right. The kind of fancy term for it is negativity bias, but it's very simple. Everyone will have experienced it. You will stare longer at something that makes you angry or upset then you will at something that makes you feel good. If you've ever seen a car crash, you know exactly what I mean. Right, you stared longer at the mangled car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers side.
We said this about comment sections. You know, you could receive one hundred good comments on something, or even five nice comments on something you won't. They will not even reach you. But if you receive one thing that hurts you, that makes you feel invalidated or question your sense of self, that will rock you. Whereas the compliments, the niceties, everything else, it's as though they don't even exist because we can be so negatively good.
That's a really powerful example of negativity bias, and it's very deep in human nature. Ten week old children will stare longer at an angry face than a smiling face. It's probably for a good reason. O're eating our evolution, our ancestors who weren't watching out for the scary shit, probably got eaten and didn't get to be our ancestors. Right, And there's a slightly crude way of putting it, but
you see what I mean, right. But the problem is probably is when you combine two things, a business model designed to figure out what keeps you scrolling plus negativity bias. Right. So what these algorithms discovered is best way to explain. It's picture two teenage girls who go to the same party and go home on the same bus, and one of them does a little video for TikTok status update whatever, and they say, what a nice party, I had a
great time. Everyone looked good. You know, we danced this or that whatever, Right, And the second girl does a video or update where she goes, Karen was a right skank at that party her boyfriend's and asshole, I spent too much time counseling my niece on her TikTok.
So it's so true, Yes, she got the spicy ta, so doesn't angry.
Imagine that girl does an angry denunciatory rant, right, So the algorithm is scanning to look at the kind of words you use, and it will put that nice video that nice Data's update into a few people's feeds, right, But the second update it will put into far more people's feeds because it knows if you see something angry and what do you mean, Karen's a scank, You're a fucking scant. You can see how that triggers an argument that causes engagement.
Right.
I fucking love this because we see this and we've had this conversation internally. In regards to influencers, I think a lot of influencers engage outrage culture. They get really angry, and often it's around things that you should be angry about, but they will verbalize how angry they are as a way of growing their following because it is a really fucking great tactic. People love to see someone angry and outraged about an injustice, and we are so much more
willing to follow that. To get on board with that. It is a crusade. It is a plight rather than following someone who you know is just happy. Not that we need to be happy all the time or positive, That's not what I'm saying. But it is a tool, and I don't think people are aware that it's actually a tool that some people and influencers have clocked into as well.
Those influencers are consciously or unconsciously learning the rules of the system they're operating in rightly. So just like the teenage girls on the bus, an influence is going to clock if I do all these nice posts. If I say, oh, look, I read this nice book and wasn't it lovely? You know, you're not going to get much traction if you go have you seen what this bitch did? Right, It's going to get a lot of traction. So I feel it happening to myself. I don't look at social media now,
I've got an assistant. I give my tweets to do. It sounds very grand, because I feel myself becoming cruder and nastier when I'm on it, because you see, oh, I said this nice thing and it looked like hardly anyone noticed, and I said this nasty thing, and look now people are talking about me. There's some degree to which this is just human psychology. But we're operating in a machinery that it's super charging the worst of our psychology, right, and that doesn't have to happen. We can't change the
negativity bias. That's just a natural part of human psychology. But we can stop the machines fucking jabbing a knitting needle that are at our negativity bias all the time. Right, So if we change the business model and the way we've talked about, you get out of that trap. Right in a subscription model and I want to make you angry something, they're like, oh, you want to feel good, Let's start giving her feedback where she feels good, not feedback that makes it angry, upset, and hostile. Right.
See.
I also think that there's like a whole other elements to this, And Johanna, I know that this is something that you are extremely well researched in, and that is our brains and the way that they work in a similar way to how drug addiction works with social media. You know, we now have so much research that shows us that when we post something on social media that gets likes and gets comments and gets any type of interaction,
we get a release of dopamine in our brains. And that's the same thing that goes up when you take just about any illegal drug. And so not only do we have these massive tech companies that have designed these algorithms to keep us scrolling and keep us engaged. We also have our own brains that are being programmed and kind of rewired that every time we post something that might create you know, outrage culture as we're talking about, we get more interaction and so we get more of
that dopamine being released into our own brains. So it's kind of like a storm in a tea cup of all of these different factors with how our brains are working in terms of social media.
It's interesting though, the irony in that which I find is that all of that comes down to this want for connectedness, if this want for like being part of a community, to feel validated, to be liked by your friends. You know, a lot of that is what it's geared around. It's still feeling like you're part of a community, but we almost are lacking connection because of it. At the same time.
Well, I think about that. It's such an important point, and I thought about this a lot because one of the places that we clarified my thought on this is I went to the first ever Internet rehab center in the world.
There is a rehab center for the Internet. Well, not for the Internet. I'm addicted to the Internet.
Oh that's amazing, you know, it's funny when I arrived that. It's just outside Spokane in Washington State. And I remember when I arrived there, it's in a clearing in the woods. I got out the car absolutely instinctively, I looked at my phone was really pissed off. I had no signals. Ah fuck, you're in the right place, right, So I
went in and this was this is pre COVID. They get all kinds of people there, but they disproportionately get young men who'd become obsessed with online multiplayer role playing games. Then it was World of Warcraft, it'd be Fortnite now. The woman who runs co founded the clinic and co runs it is an amazing person called Dr Hillary Cash. This place is called Restart Washington. And remember how saying to me afterwards, well, you've got to ask yourself, what
are these young men getting out of these games. What they're getting is the kind of parody of the things they've lost. So let's think about that. They're getting a sense that they're physically moving around, Right, young men don't leave the house, but to getting sense they're physically moving around, they're getting a sense that people see them. Right, we are even before COVID, we were the loneliest society and human here. Right, at least when you're playing the game,
someone's seeing you visibility exactly. Oh, they're getting a sense they're good at something, and they.
Can be the version of themselves they want to be. They cannot create who they are, the way they look, how they present themselves. Someone who's an introvert can be an extrovert in that environment one percent.
And they're also getting a sense they're getting better and better at something. But what doctor Cash said to me is they're getting these are unparaphrasing, but they're getting a kind of parody of those things. Right. Well, I thought about this a lot because the young men were often addicted both to these games and to pornography. Right, I'm thinking you have to talking to them in a way. I think the relationship between social media and social life
is a bit like the relationship between pornography and sex. Right. If your whole sex life consisted looking at porn, you would go around feeling pissed off and inadequate all the time, because that's not what we evolved to do. We evolved to have sex.
Right.
In the same way, if your life consists of staring at people through screens. It's it's like a sex life. The consists only a pornography. It's not meeting your deeper knee as a human being. Right, Everyone listening knows they have physical needs. You need food, you need water, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you be in real trouble, real fast. But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs.
You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need feel people see you and value you. You feel got a future that makes sense, and interacting through screens has many great things about it. But if it takes too much of your life, your psychological needs aren't met. Look, if interacting through screens met our psychological needs, we would all have
been completely fine in the last two years. Right Instead, I never once heard anyone say the sentence hooray another zoom call. Right ever? Right, Because this way of being, while it has many benefits and should be part of our lives, if it's everything, is not meeting your deep in ees. So I think you've got to ask as well, what are the unmet needs that we have that are making us turn to this Because it looks like the things we've lost. Oh, we've got less friends than we had,
but here's some Facebook friends. You've lost status in the society and the economy, but here's a status update. It looks like the things you've lost. But it's not the things you've lost. It's not It's like giving a sex style person porn. It's it's not going to solve the problem. Right.
I even remember when MySpace first started, and I'm like, Okay, I'm the top, a bit older than you, but like you look at people and you'd be like, how many friends have they got? Who's in their top friends list? You know, I still do that. We still go on Instagram and we go how many followers has that person got? How many comments did they get on their new version of it?
But I think I just want of thinking about what are the wider So there are all sorts of other changes that are happening that are making us more vulnerable to that thing you're describing, right, that thing or how many follows is this person got mindlessly scrolling for hours and hours. Anyone listening who struggled to focus in a pandemic, stop blaming yourself right. In fact, you'd be a very weird person if in a situation of unprecedented danger you
were able to focus right. And this is true so many of the things that I write about in stolein focus. It's called stolen focus because your focus didn't collapse, you'll lose it, exactly, it was stolen from you by these big forces. A lot of the elements. Anything that reduces stress improves attention. So I talk about lots of ways we can reduce stress, lots of things that have been done across the world to reduce stress in all sorts of places. So that's one example, but there's so many.
I mean, it was so weird doing this research because there were so many things I had never even thought about that hugely affected. I'd never thought, for example, about how food might affect my attention right. As you can tell from my chins, I'm a bit of a junk food addict and the three stomachs I had. I had a real low point in my life, and it was Christmas Eve two thousand and seven. It based it's so sad. It was Christmas Eve. At lunch time, I went to
my local KFC. I used to live in brit Lane in East London, and I went and I said my standard order, which is so disgusting I won't repeat it. And the guy behind the counter said, oh, Yohan, I'm really glad you're here. I was like, all right, and he went off behind where they fried the chicken and the chips something, and he came back with all the members of staff and they have bought me a massive Christmas card in which they've written to our best customer,
and they've all written these persons. And one of the reasons my heart sunk is I thought, this isn't even the fried chicken shop I come to the most. How can this be happening to me? It was Actually I didn't go back there for ages. And then about a year later I bumped into the guy by the counter and he said, you didn't come back your hand. We assumed you'd had a heart attack. Anyway, it was a terrible So so when I talk about the element with food, I say this with no sense of superiority at all,
but so sorry. It was so awful heart attack. I was very fat at the time, but as various living deities happened. So there's this really fascinating movement called nutritional psychiatry amte loads of them. So they're studying how the ways we eat affect the ways we feel and are capacities of our minds and our brains. And they taught me that there's loads of ways in which the way we eat is harming our attention and folks. It's I give the example of one. There's lots that go through
in the book. So let's say you have the standard Australian, British American breakfast. You have sugary cereal or white bread with butter toasted or whatever.
Right, pichapetta does like some white bread as don't have bird seed, just inalized white eat bread. Have the good bread.
I'm one hundred percent with you, and I'll be I'll see you in the cardiac ording forty years time. But the will be the ones chickens will be the one getting KFC from here when you have that. What it does is it One of the reasons it feels so good is it releases a huge amount of energy really quickly into your brain. So you're like, I'm awake, the day has begun. Right, a huge amount of glucose in
particulars released in your brain. But what's happened is it's released so much energy so quickly that an hour, an hour and a half later, you'll be sitting at your desk, your child will be sitting at their desk, and you'll get a huge energy slump. And what you get then is what's called brain fog, where you just can't focus very well. Your just your at tension isn't as good until you have another sugary carbe treat.
Right.
So, the way Dale put it to me is the way we eat puts us on a roller coaster of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day, spike crash, spike crash, which gives you these long patches of brain fog. Whereas if you eat food that releases energy more steadily, like you had oatmeal with blueberries something I've never tried. What that would do is it would release energy much
more steadily throughout the day. Right, the way Dale put it to me, at the moment we're putting rocket of fuel into a mini right, it'll go really fast for five minutes and then it will just stop. Whereas if you put in the fuel it's designed to take, you'll go for longer with your attention. So there were so many things like that where I just thought, God, I'd never I'd never thought about that. It never even crossed my mind that there's there's so many of these components.
It was fascinating just going on this journey into the science of it and realizing, Oh, there's so much that's affecting our attention and these things combined. So we all know, a day you haven't sleapt is the day that you're going to be so much more tempted by that, you know, scrolling through a scrolling scroller. Day when you've eaten badly, you haven't slept, you're very stressed out. So a lot of these factors have been combining. I think it's why
attention has really suffered during the pandemic. A lot of them have been combining and combining in complicated ways. But once you understand what these twelve factors are, then you can begin to defend yourself as an individual, you can defend your kids a bit, and then we can begin to take on these bigger, bigger forces.
What are just I mean, obviously we focused on social media and on not just social media but your phones in general for so long because I think it's the one that is so obvious, like it's the one that really seems to on a day to day affect people. We've covered food. What are the other really important factors that influence the way that someone can concentrate or their ability to have focus?
So I think there's lots, and if it's okay, rather than just kind of summarizing lots some bit weird, I'll don't home in on one that I think I'll be really relevant to a lot of your audience as well. One of the heroes of my book is a woman called Leonor's Gnazi. Leno is one of my heroes because she's the kind of person. You know, it's very easy in life to describe problems right. Lenai is one of
those people who build solutions to things right. Lenare grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the nineteen sixties, mid nineteen sixties. I think she won't tell me her exact age. I've never been I've unpushed her on it. And from when she was six years old, Lenore used to leave home on her own at eight am and walk to school on her own, and generally she would jump into all the other kids who were walking to school because in the mid nineteen sixties, everyone everywhere in
the world walked to school. Ask your parents, that's what they did, right, And when school ended at whatever it was, three o'clock, her and her friends would leave on their own, wander around the neighborhood freely, and find their way home when they were hungry. Right. By the time Lenore was a mother in the mid nineties, she was living in Queens in New York. That had ended. You were meant to deliver your child like a package to school and be waiting there at the gate when they came out.
In fact, by two thousand and three, only ten percent of American children ever played outside without an adult. And obviously it completely ended during COVID. Right, And it turns out that childhood we've lost contained a huge number of things that were incredibly important for children to develop attention. To give you a real no shit sher loot one exercise right, Children who get to run around can focus
much better. As Professor Joel Nigg, the leading expert on children's attention problems in the United States, explained to me, children who get to exercise develop more brain connections. Their attention is better. The single best thing you can do for a child who's struggling to focus is let them go and run around. We are the first human society ever in the history of our species to try to get kids to sit still for eight hours a day. It's bonkers, right, But even beyond exercise. This is one
of the key elements to this. How this is this transformation is harmed attention is that we've deprived children of free play. When children play freely with other children, they develop all sorts of skills that are extremely important for focus and attention. One is they learn how to take risks. Right, you climb the tree, you get quite high up, you're scared, but you didn't die. You find your way down, you break.
A leg, you get over, and your mom doesn't take your hospital too. So that's just the nineties.
You take it. You, That's why you've got that mysterious limb y. You take all these risks with other kids. Socially, if you've got adults standing over you telling you what to do, you don't do that. And if you don't develop those skills of taking risks, realizing your competent, building up your competence, you'll be anxious all the time. It's one of the reasons We've got so many anxious children now,
and anxiety destroys attention. As we all know. Anyone so I had any anxiety knows that you can't pay attention.
We have so many anxious parents though, as well, and I think so much of that comes from the fact that we are so aware now of what can go wrong. Every day we are bombarded by what can go wrong, how your kid can die, what horrible thing can happen to them, And we live in this constant protection mode, which is why all these other things have been impacted.
And I think, you know, maybe back in the day and there was an ignorance almost you know, bad things would happen maybe in another community or another town, never in our town, and so you lived in this ignorance is kind of bliss. And as we've become more exposed to the news, as we've become exposed to terrible things that have happened through social media, we go, fuck, that could happen to us, and everyone's well got smaller because of that.
I think it's a really good way of putting it. And so Lena was trying to think about what do we do about that? Right, And at first she thought, what the solution's obvious. And she discovered also by the way she learned the science, that there's loads of other benefits to free play that boost attention. So she was like, what can we do? And then she at first she thought, well,
the answers really obvious. I'll just let my kid out to play, But she quickly discovered if you're the only parent letting your kid out to play, they get scared. You look nuts. Actually often people call the police now, right, So she's like, that's not solution. So Lenor began to run a group called let Grow. It's letgrow dot org that everyone listening, I really recommend you go to it.
And what they do is they go to whole groups and whole communities and whole schools and they persuade everyone to give their kids increasing levels of independence that build up to playing outside. And I think of all the conversations that have per stolen focus, I think probably the most moving was with fourteen and you're a boy in Long Islands just before COVID here who This is a big, tall,
strapping boy. He was taller than me and until this program had begun nine months before, he had never played outside without an adult watching it. He'd never gone outside of his house without an adult, right. I asked him why and he said, oh, my parents are afraid of all these kidnappings. He lived in a town where the French bakery was across the street from the olive oil store, and he had a level of fear that would be
appropriate if he lived in like Ukraine. Right now, right, But then this program began and I said what did you do? And he said, I me and my friends. We started to play in the street boll games. And I said, oh, and I never forget away said it? He said it, and he said it, and then we started to go into the woods and he leaned forward and said, even though our cell phones don't have any reception in the woods, he said, like that was like
some explosive relation. And I said, what did you do in the woods and he said, oh, we've built a fort and now we're building an even bigger fort. And I said, I was speaking to this boy. Maybe this sounds over the top, but it was like watching him come to life. Right. I thought about how many kids I know who never get to explore anything except on Fortnite we can have surprise. They're obsessed with it and Lenor was with me that day, and when he left,
she turned to me. She said, you know, think about human history. For all of human history, human beings, when they were young, they had to go out, they had to explore, They had to figure out how things worked, They had to map the territory and the space of basically one generation, we took all that away from them. It stunted them physically, It stunted their attention, It stunted their ability to function in the world. And that boy, given a tiny little sliver of freedom, what did he do.
He went into the woods and he built a fort. Because it is so deep in human nature, these impulses. So I would argue every there's lots of things we need to do to restore attention. One is we need to give our children a childhood that our ancestors would have recognized as a human childhood. We need to restore human childhood. Every school in Australia should have a let Grow program. This is free, it costs nothing. It unites people who are really left wing and really right wing
and everything in between. We can do that right, that doesn't cost anything. And if one good thing can come out of COVID, this has been a terrible tragedy and millions of people across the world have died. But we can all see. Whatever you think about the restrictions, and I was broadly in favor of them, we can all see that shutting our kids away for two years has
catastrophically harmed them. Okay, well, if shutting our kids away during COVID harmed them, which we can all see, we should be able to see that shutting them away before COVID, which by any historical standard is what we were doing, that was also really harming them. And if part of the legacy as we re emerge is that we learn how to let our children grow again, grow physically, grow a sense of attention. And like you said that, you were talking about the kind of fear people feel, which
is totally understandable. And Leonor said to me, you know, look, you can tell people the statistics, and the statistics are really coming there, even more striking in Australia. But your child is significantly more likely to be hit by lightning than be kidnapped by a stranger. Right, And if someone said to you, I'm not going to let my kid out because I'm worried they might get hit by lightning. You'd think they were completely deranged, right, But Lane said,
it doesn't work. It's not how human psychology work. It doesn't work explaining statistics to people. Statistics worked, no one would buy lottery tickets and Las Vegas would be a you know, empty town in the desert. Right. What works
is getting people to try. Their kids going out and their son, who they've been worried about being so anxious and fragile, comes back and he's a bit sweaty, and he can see he's had this adventure and he's sort of squirrel and tried to climate try and they're like, oh, that's my boy, that's the child I want. It's those moments of transformation that people get when their children start to actually grow. That's what makes them want to do it. So you've just got to get parents to try this.
Trying to argue against the fear just increases the fear. Well, you've got to give them as a sense, your child doesn't have to be like this because they can see. People can see how unbelievably anxious children are at the moment. Right, this is a key element of what we can what we can do. It's one of the kind of one of several really big changes I argue for in the book, along with lots of individual changes.
Johannah, thank you so much for coming and being a part of the podcast. I could speak to you for literally whole day.
Oh this has been so to joy. Thank you so much.
You are a joy.
And I forgive you for presenting the face of mynmosis.
Did you get this from our book swop?
It was literally was the very first thing I saw when I walked through the door was an image of the deal Alama. So I forgive you.
Sorry, I'm sorry for the trauma that brought up, but I'm very glad that you got to share that on the podcast. But please tell everyone where they can find you. I mean, you can get your books from all good bookstores, from all good audio places.
To get them from ship bookstore. Your bookstore is not good enough do that. But so where can people find If they go to www dot stolenfocusbook dot com, they can see where to follow me on social media. I will not see you back, sorrysteg Semi. There they can see where to get the audiobook, the ebook or the physical book. They can see what people like Oprah and Hillary Clinton and lots of other people have said about the book. I love being able to say that.
I'll all the links in the show notes as well, so you can just tap that way.
I got in trouble at the end of a podcast a couple of and maybe a year and a half ago now, I was interviewed by the Sama guy. He was fifty this is relevant and at the end he said to me, so, what's your Facebook? And I said it? And he said what's your Twitter? And I said it? And he said what's your Instagram? And I said it. He said what's your Snapchat? And I said, I am a forty three year old man. The only forty three year old men on Snapchat are definitely pedophiles, right, Why are they there?
He was like, I want Snapchat?
Why he didn't laugh at all? And I've got this really bad thing where when someone doesn't laugh at joke, I tell I lean into it. So I said, you know that show To Catch a Predator, the American Showman the Catfish pedophiles, I said, the next season of To Catch a Predator, they should just go up to adult men in the street and say, what is your Snapchat handle? And if they have one, immediately fucking arrest them in the van. Right Anyway, he didn't laugh at that. Later
I go look him up. He's quite big on snapchat. So so now my bar for all interviews is do I get through them without accidentally accusing the person interviewing me of being a pedophile? And I'm friends, have we met that low bar?
I lie that that's it? How can I offend someone on this interview today?
Exactly?
You know what you got to do that You've got to have the extra dreams and the lows, otherwise you don't get cut through. You don't want everyone to like you. Shot of whiskey? Wasn't that that someone said that I did?
That interesting?
When I don't want to be everyone's cup of tea, you want to be someone's shot of whiskey. I love that. I was a terrible Instagram quote. I think I read during a breakup once and I was like, yeah, fuck you, I'll post that.
I love that. That's so good.
Thank you so much, it's been the best.
Oh what a pleasure. Cheers, Thanks so much.
All right, You know that we never finish our episodes without our suck and our sweet, our highlight and our low light of each and every week. And I just asked produce a Keisha what her suck was, and then she almost vomited. So I'm really frightened about what this is. Like fully gagged into the microphone. We had to start again.
I said, I that was genuinely an accident, and I didn't actually feel that one coming, But it is related to my suck.
Two weeks ago, I got on the podcast and I said that my suck for the.
Week was that I had been really, really sick, and the main symptom that I had was that I was super nauseous and really fatigued. Anyway, it turns out through the week, I found out that I got three parasites.
Wait what did you call them? It was like they thought it was an amoeba amibas that it wasn't an Amba the great Amima twenty three three parasites. You really did take a few things home from Bali you shouldn't have.
But anyway, so the suck comes into it because I found this out on the Monday, and I got sent away to go and get the medicine to treat the worst of the three, the other.
Two to keep the final ones keep the other two, just get rid of the bad one.
I think the two of them will fix themselves up, but one of them needs medicine. And I went to maybe three or four different pharmacies and they were like, hey, this medication has been out of stock for more than three months in all of Australia.
And I thought, well, that's not good.
But it was a moment where I went, you know what, this is the first time this has ever happened to me, which makes me so grateful to live in Australia because we're never in the position where we're out of medication or.
Do you know why they don't have it here? It's because no one's been traveling, so no one's needed medication for a fucking rogue a meeba from Bali who knows anyway, So that is the suck. Still don't have the medicine for it.
So I'm still getting like a lot of the side effects of feeling really really sick all the time.
So yeah, apologies for that, but my sweet is a bit related to that.
So at the moment, they've got me on some other things to treat the other ones, and I can't drink at all, which makes it sound like I'm a massive party girl.
Who drinks a lot, which is only on weekends, which is only two of my seven days a week. Don't judge me on weekends. I like to have a good time.
But as a part of that, I've kind I feel as though I've kind of hit reset because I was like, all right, we just need a month of chill.
Okay, we need to.
I spent my first Saturday night in the house not doing anything in as long as I can remember. I have watched so much more Netflix, and it's been a real, like wholesome, good for my body time. So that is my sweet is that I'm starting to feel like I'm doing things to get my body back on track.
And surely that's going to have good outcomes. What I like about this, though, is that you're health forced you to spend a Saturday night in and so you're choosing to see the silver lining. Yes, you're forced in buying a meeba against your will, and you're seeing the bright side of things. That's the positivity I like to hear. I like to find the silver lining in life. Okay, my suck for the week is that we drove down to Molliwook. We're gonna have a weekend away with the
girls and we did. I mean that was sweet. We had a weekend away with the girls. Except I've had this very annoying cold not COVID PCR test says it's not COVID for like the last week, so I was like half blast. So I didn't really feel like I got to enjoy it as much as I would have. But on the way back from Mollimook, we stopped and
we visited my mum, who lives in Woollongong. And when we stopped out, you know, like in the car, how some things are automated and it's like lots of pressure in back tire or you're you're really driving different cars. Your oil needs must be nice. Mine just has flashing lights on the dashboard and it's like engine not HoTT Mine was like lots of pressure and back tire. We were like, ah, yeah, whatever. It always tells us there's things wrong that I'm wrong when they're not wrong. Oh no,
there was something wrong. We had a completely flat tire and we're driven for over an hour with a completely flat tire. God like nothing, and I was up your car. I was like wondering where the car was going down the fucking freeway. What did you not notice? So anyway, we stopped and I learned that I'm very good at jacking a car up it's done, and Matt's not very good at jacking a car up. And that was like a real moment of just like I felt like a
powerful queen validation. You know, when I was eighteen, I got my first flat tire. I just moved to Queensland nineties.
I didn't know anybody and I had to change a car tire only to get like a couple hundred meters down the road.
Via a YouTube video. You couldn't get everything from YouTube. I told myself how to be a jurey designer because of YouTube and a podcast. You actually do you can learn anything from YouTube. My sweet for the week, I have a couple of sweets, so I'm going to rattle off two of them. One is that our merch finally dropped just in time for summer. I hope you guys. Are I enjoy your jumpers? The nights are still cold. Yeah, and it's also not like it's not a hot I'm wearing it right now.
Yeah.
You wouldn't let me wear it because if I went to put the same one on but we thought we'd looked silly. I was like, we can't have matching uniforms, but no, the jumpers are here. They are beautiful. They are the perfect perfect temperature for between seasons. Highly recommend
going and getting one. Also, five dollars from every single merch jumper is going towards Deadly Connections, which is we interview Karlie on the podcast from Deadly Connections charity and what that is is a non for profit organization run by the Indigenous community for Indigenous people, so it is an amazing cause. Also, my other sweet for the week is that I finally got a copy, a hard copy printed copy of our fucking book and I am so excited. Life on cart Well Domination twenty twenty four.
Hang on, we just need to get Delilah in the Rain to the Go Away to give context to this. The very first copy that Britain Laura got of the book. The first time they'd seen the book, they were going to take pictures with it.
I hadn't even seen it, and then it saw the inside of Delilah's mouth. It was an unbelievable case of my dog ate my homework. And that was the very first book that ever got printed. It got absolutely fucking annihilated. She loved it, she devoured it. But anyway, guys, that book is coming out in October, So if you haven't gone and gotten your pre order copy yet, please go and get yourself a copy. We don't know how many we're gonna need before they sell out, so jump on.
You can pre order it from the website. We'll put all the details in the show notes. And that is it from us. And you know the drill? Do you, Keisha? Do you know the drill? Mate? I've been feeling in for three weeks. Now, Tell your mom, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend, and share the love because we love love. I mean it is friends plural, but that's okay. Tell your friend, just one friend. It's to your friend. Fuck tell you won't tell you that
you don't. Tell your friends and share the love because we all love