Johann Hari on Stolen Focus and Attention

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their

good Wolfe, thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode, who has been on before, is Johan Harry, a writer and journalist. He's written for The New York Times, Lamond, The Guardian and other newspapers, and his TED talks have been viewed over seventy million times. His work has been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey to Noam Chomsky to Joe Rogan. Hi, Johan, welcome to the show. I'm really glad to be back with you. Eric.

I'm so happy to have you on. As I've said before, you're one of my favorite guests, so I'm always happy when we get a chance to talk. I'm so pleased to hear that, and you're one of my favorite podcasts. I so well, thank you the marriage made in heaven and you can check. I don't say that to any other podcasts ses. I've never said that to podcast days before. So I would like everyone to scour the internet and confirm you're not my side piece poco a pocast. You're

the main guy, the main guy. We're going to get to your book Stolen Focus why you can't pay attention in just a minute. But before we do, let's start the way we always do, which is we start with that parable. There's a grandfather talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that

are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work

that you do. I'm very impressed that you can still say that story with animation, and because you know, you know, you've said it like more than four times, so I'm very impressed by that. You know, it's funny. I actually thought about that parable quite a lot when I was writing Stolen Focused. There was a particular moment when I

found myself thinking about it. So for the book, I took three months completely off the internet and with no smartphone, and I went to a place called Provincetown in Cape Cod. And honestly I didn't even think of it particularly as a kind of experiment. I thought of it as I can't bear that my attention is deteriorating, that with every year that passes, things that require deep focus feel more and more like running up and down escalator. I just

need a break. But it actually ended up giving me some useful insights, both about what we can do and the limits of some of the things we try to do. But I remember thinking a lot while I was there about the difference between a day that's filled we're looking at social media and a day that's filled with reading books that feeding yourself with these different forms of being

with the world. And I found myself thinking about Marshall mcluen's famous line, the medium is the message, which I had never really understood obviously here, but it's a kind of pliche. You hear people talking about it all the time, and for people who don't know. Marshall mcluen was a Canadian information the theorist who became very famous in the sixties partly by talking about this. And I read mccluen

while I was out there. I ordered it from a bookstore, physical bookstore, and I think what mccluen was saying, And there's actually a debate about what mcluen was saying, but the way the way I understood it is mccluen was arguing, when you absorb a medium, whether it's a book, television, or although of course mccluen I didn't see this, then social media it's like you're putting on a set of

goggles and seeing the world through that medium. So when you watch television, which of course mcluen was primarily thinking about. When you watch television, doesn't matter whether you watch Wheel of Fortune or The Wire, you are absorbing a view of the world where the world will begin to look to you like television. So you know, give the impression that the world is very fast, that it's very speedy.

Even just think about things like if you read novels that were written before the advent of cinema and television, the way they talk about memory is quite different to the way we talk about memory. You think about the concept of the flashback, which we have, right, which doesn't exist in the same way. Of course, people talk about human memory, but not in the same grammar that's created by television. Right. So when television comes along, it trains

us to see the world is shaped like television. But I thought a lot about what is the message hidden in the medium of the book versus the message hidden in the medium of social media. So if we think about let's say Twitter, right, it doesn't matter whether you're Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or Bubba the Love sponge. Right when you tweet, you are agreeing to a certain set of implicit ideas that are embedded in that medium. One of the ideas is the world can and should be

described in two characters. You can meaningfully describe a lot of the world in two characters. Secondly, what matters is that you respond to things very quickly. Thirdly, what matters is whether people immediately agree with what you have decided to say very quickly in two characters. The way you win at Twitter is if lots of people immediately agree with you, right, Or think about Instagram, what's the message

implicit in that? The message is What matters is how you look on the outside and whether people like how you look on the outside. We could go through you know, there's a message inplicit in Facebook that friendship, what human friendship is is to present the edited highlights of your life for others to view, and for you to view the edited highlights of their life. Have you to exchange likes and comments on these edited highlights right from There's

other messages implicit in it as well. So I thought about those messages, which of course I was suddenly deprived of when I was off the internet. Obviously, throughout my life I've read a huge number of books. But I was reading a lot of books, and I was thrilled that my attention went back to what it had been in my early twenties, really long periods of deep reading. And I thought, why do I feel so much better when I'm reading a book compared to when I'm on

social media? And I think it's partly because there's a message implicit in the printed book. Right, It doesn't matter what the book says that this specific book, there's a message in the form of the book which says, Firstly, it's worth just thinking about one thing for many hours. Slow down, right, think about you want to just glance the books behind me, You want to think about Joseph Stalin, you want to think about Columbia in the whatever it might be. It is worth taking many hours to think

about this one thing. Secondly, it is worth thinking about the internal lives of other people in great depth and realizing that other people have rich, complex internal lives like you. And it's worth spending your time with an object that is going to be saying the same thing a hundred years from now as it says today. Right. And I realized in some deep sense, I don't agree with the

messages implicit in the mediums of Twitter and Facebook. Right. Actually, very few things that are worth saying can be said in two characters. Actually, it really doesn't matter whether people agree with you immediately or not. In fact, most things worth saying will not be agreed with immediately. Probably if everyone agrees with you straight away, what you're saying didn't need to be said, right. I think about most of the people I admire, you know, whether it's Non Chomsky

or Joan Rivers. Actually a lot of people really didn't agree with them initially, right, and if you don't agree with them now. But also, very few things that are worth saying should be said immediately and at great speed. Actually, most important insights require you to slow down, think through the complexity of a situation. Not in every instance. There's value in some immediate responses. There's times when it's necessary. And I realized I kind of thought to myself, be

careful what mediums you expose yourself to. Be careful what technologies you expose yourself to, because over time, your consciousness will come to be shaped to a significant degree by the medium as you look at. Right, if you feed yourself very heavily with social media, you will begin to implicitly think of the world using those messages. You just can't be plugged into a reward system Oh my god,

he got five likes and I got one. You can't be plugged into a machinery like that without starting some level psychologically to try to compete in the architecture of that machinery. And this is a very pompous way of putting it. But I want my mind to be shaped like a novel, not like a TikTok feed, not like a Twitter feed. I don't want to be thinking in tiny pellets of anger and snark. I want to be thinking in rich, complex ways about the inner lives of

other people over many hours, many days, many months. I want to be thinking in a sustained way. So I want to feed my sentences. Of course, not just to books. There's ore many other ways of feeding yourself in that way. At the moment, we're feeding ourselves very heavily with something that contains messages but I think are not You can say they're not true, but their value judgments that's a

harder thing to say. That contain value judgments that I think are profoundly destructive to the human psyche and destructive to human society actually in ways that I'm sure we'll talk about, which is not to say that all social media is bad, and I'm sure we'll get to that as well. But I thought about that very parable when I was thinking this through, what have I been feeding myself with? And how do I feel when I feed myself with that versus how do I feel when I

feed myself with slower, deeperforms of media. Yeah, that's great. I really cut that part of your book. Actually, the way you said it was I realized one of the key reasons why social media makes me feel so out of joint with the world is that I think all these ideas, the messages implicit in these mediums are wrong and that I just bam, it hit me. I was like, that's exactly it. Like, I'm the same way I do not believe the world can be explained in two under

an eighty characters. You know, there's another thing that makes me think of I don't know who said this, but they said the least viral thing you can say is I don't know, And I was like, it's one of my favorite phrases, right, I don't know, you know, like there's a curiosity that I don't know, there's an openness that I don't know. I love that. That's so brilliant.

I remember seeing on the news a few years back, I forget what it was, one of the rolling news channels, and they were talking about something that happened between Israel and the Palestinians, presumably one of the wars that was happening, and they said, tweet us with your views of the Israel Palestine conflict. And I thought the idea that something

is complex and fraught with complexity and ambiguity. If you think that anything worthwhile can be said about Israel, Palestine and children eating characters, I don't want to hear what you have to say about it, right, Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that you said that struck me as we were talking about social media and you described the phrase that I've tried to say this in a lot of different ways, but I never said it as well as

you did. What I'm about to read, because when we talk about being on social media all the time, I've talked about well, I feel distracted, I feel sort of edgy, I feel kind of scattered, I feel tired, in a way I don't know. But what you said was I understood why when I felt constantly distracted, I didn't just feel irritated. I felt diminished. And I was like, that's the word I've been looking for for what too much

time on social media makes me feel. It's not just scattered, that's part of it, but diminished, Like I have less to offer the world than I did before that, And I actually I am just inside like shrunken by taking part in that medium you want expressing, and the media's medium says they are currently structured and they could work differently.

We can talk about that. You're consenting to a whole set of ideas that people like you and me don't agree with and would never dream of teaching to our children, right, You would never want to communicate your children what matters in life. Matters in life is to say things really quickly, really confidently, really aggressively, and to immediately obsess on how many people agree or disagree with the thing you said, extremely confidently, really quickly. A dream of teaching the children.

I love that I would. I would regard someone who taught their children those messages as abuses too strong a word,

but as really harming their kids. Right, and this fits with a wider issues, you know, Eric, which is, of course, this is one dimension of a much wider crisis, a crisis in which we are all being diminished, which is for a long time, I thought when I felt my own attention fraying, when I saw it happening to lots of people I knew, and I said to them in a very smug way, which some of my friends have reminded me of recently, every generation thinks this, right, everyone thinks.

You know, you get older, your brain deteriorates, and you blame the deterioration of your brain. You mistake the deterioration of your brain for the deterioration of the world. Right. You know, you can find letters from monks nearly a thousand years ago writing to each other going, well, my attention ain't what it used to be. Right. It's not

exact quote, but that's the gist of it. But then, actually, I traveled all over the world, and I interviewed the leading experts on attention of focus, and I went to places that have been profoundly affected by changes and attention. From our favela in Rio, where attention had collapsed in a particularly disastrous way to a company in New Zealand that found a really interesting way to restore their workers attention.

And actually, based on everything I saw in the evidence, I think there is good evidence that we really are in a serious attention crisis. That this is somewhat analogist to the obesity crisis or the climate crisis. That's something as a professor Sooner Layman, who are interviewed in Copenhagen in Denmark, said to me when he sawt he he did the first study that proved our collective attention span. It's been shrinking, he said to me when he saw

the data, God, damnit, something really is happening here. And you can see this in a whole array of forms. And I learned that there's there's actually scientific evidence for twelve factors enhanced or degrade attention, and I was really surprised that actually tech is only one of them. That tech I do not think is the biggest, And actually it's a narrower aspect of technology that is causing this problem. Then we sometimes think it's a very deep contribution to

the problem. But I think we need to reframe how we think about attention across the board, and we need to reframe how we think about the tech component as well. Excellent, Well, thanks for leading us kind of back into the book. And as you say, your point is in the book that there are these deeper forces at work that are damaging our attention, and the attention is actually something really really important. Right, So first, maybe say why to you attention is a thing that is so important to try

and preserve. I think there's kind of two levels to thinking about that. So one is at personal level. The level of the individual attention is generally defined. It's a definition that goes back to William James, the founder of American psychology in the late nineteenth century. An incredible, man,

is your ability to selectively attend to stimuli in your environment. Right. So, I'm sitting in a room talking to you, But if I really tried, I can hear my heater over there, and I can see that the light is flickering in the corner because I need to change the bulb over there, and I can see all my books around me, I can see my television there. I'm selectively attending to you. I'm talking to Eric. I'm filtering all that out. Now.

When your attention breaks down. The average American college student, according to a small study, now focuses on any one task for sixty five seconds. In fact, the median amount they focus is nineteen seconds. And the average office worker now focuses on anyone task. According to Professor Gloria Marks's research, I interviewed her, the average office work enough focuses for three minutes. So you've got people whose entire working lives have dissolved into a sort of hail storm of tiny,

little three minute chunks. Now, when that happens, it becomes much harder to formulate and achieve your goals in life. Right, pretty much anything anyone wants to achieve. Anyone listening, think about something you're proud of having achieved in your life. That achievement, whether it's being a good parent, or setting up a business, or writing a book, whatever it might be learning to play the guitar, that achievement took a

lot of sustained attention and focus. And if your attention breaks down, your ability to achieve goals across the board breaks down, your abilities from connections with other human beings degrades. So does that level to it, Then there's a social level to it, which is a society of people whose attention breaks down will find it much harder to solve their collective problems, to identify the collective problems and solve

that collective problems. I don't think it's a coincidence that this attention crisis is occurring at the same time as a really significant crisis in democracy across almost all the world's democracies. Now. Don't have a simplistic about this. There's many factors that are contributing to this democratic crisis and the kind of rocking and royaling of our democracies. But I think one factor is we can't pay sustained attention to problems. We can't listen to other people because listening

requires sustained attention. And when we can't pay attention, and there's lots of research on this, we look for more simplistic solutions. We zone out complexity, We become more shallow, we become more angry and irritable. I think you can see these things happening. So individuals who can't focus face

real problems. Society is comprised of individuals who can't focus face real problems, and I think you can see that is playing out all around us and then I think the core message from there is that, yes, there are some things that you as an individual can do to work on to improve your ability to pay attention, and we're going to talk about some of those things, but that this is a bigger problem, it's a more systematic problem, and that yes, you can make some changes individually, but

you may only get so far with it. So share a little bit more about that. When I struggled to focus and pay attention, I would go into a very negative dialogue with myself. I would say, Oh, you're weak, you're lazy, you're not disciplined enough, funny enough. I had a kind of little epiphany about this when I went to interview a man called Professor Roy Baumeister very early in the research for the book. Is at the University of Queensland, and the Professor Baumeister is the leading expert

on willpower in the world. He wrote a book called Willpower. People listening will probably know his famous experiment, the marshmallow experiment. So I go to see him and I said, don't think you're writing a book abou attention. This needs to be a problem here. And he said to me, you know it's funny. You should say that, because I just find I can't really pay attention anymore. I I just spend loads of time on my phone playing video games, and I'm sort of listening to him and say this,

and I'm like, I didn't say this. So I was like, didn't you write a book called Willpower? I was like, Jesus, it's even happening to you, right. So I would go into sort of negative self recrimination and I would seek purely individual solutions. And I tried many individual solutions that I learned about based on the evidence, many of which helped me significantly. But I had an interesting moment. Obviously,

I gave you an extreme act of willpower. I literally gave away all my internet connected devices for three months, and that led to all sorts of positive improvements. And then at the end of those three months, I thought, well, I've cracked the code here. I'm going to rediscipline and integrate all these insights and within a few months have been reunited with my devices. I was as bad as I've ever been, and I went to Moscow to interview

Dr James Williams. Totally incredible. I think, arguably the most important philosoper of intention in the world. Today. He's a former Google engineer who left and did a PhD on attention at Oxford, And James said to me, what you got wrong by just trying to get out your own devices for three months is what you've done is a bit like thinking that the solution to air pollution is for you individually to wear a gas mask two days a week. Right now, He's not opposed to gas masks, right.

If I lived in Beijing, I wear a gas mask. In fact, the air pollution is so bad here in London, there's an argument for wearing them here, but we all know that's not the solution, right The solution is to actually deal with the source of the air pollution. And for me, what I learned is there need to be two levels of our response to this attention crisis. One level has to be individually protecting ourselves, right, and that's very important, and I talked about lots of ways we

can do that. I'm strongly in favor of that, But I really worry about the fact that almost all the books about how to cope with these problems end there, right, because the truth is we're living in an environment that is pouring itching powder on us all the time, and what's happening is it's like the forces that are orwing inching powder honors, lean down and go. You know, you might want to learn how to meditate, then you wouldn't scratch so much. Right now, you can see we through

that analogy. No, we need to stop these people pouring itching powder honors and sometimes, and I know that can sound a bit abstract, will get into lots of very concrete ways of both individually and collectively. We can deal with some of the twelve forses that are invading and destroying our attention. But I think we need to understand this in a more truthful and complex way than we have up to now. I think we've had a very simplistic approach. I certainly had a very simplistic approach about

self blame, self criticism. I also think it can be slightly false to present it as conscious that even the way I've just put it to you is slightly simplistic, because sometimes it's gonna be framed us there's an individual solution and then there's these huge, grand political solutions. But actually the big solutions only happen if enough of us as individuals banned together and demand them right it's not. We don't wait for a messiah to suddenly deliver us

from these collective problems, right, We'll wait forever. The collective solutions come from us individually, persuading each other and standing together, as we've seen with pretty much every positive change that's ever happened in history, right, every positive political change that's ever happened. Yes, So what conscious of all the things I've just says can sound rather abstractive. We don't give concrete examples, and I'm sure we'll get to those concrete examples.

But you're absolutely right to raise right at the start. And I think one of the reasons why I'm so uncomfortable with simply giving the individual solutions, even though they have been hugely beneficial to me and will be beneficial to everyone listening if they do them, is this concept. It was thought off by the blossopher Lauren Berlance. He

called it cruel optimism. A cruel optimism is where you take something with a really big social cause, like obesity, depression, attention problems, or addiction, and you offer people, in a very upbeat tone, a really simplistic solution. Hey, you can't focus, I've got great news. I've got the solution for you. You You just need to do ten minutes of this kind of meditation every morning. You're going to be fine, right, And it sounds very kind. You're off bring the person

a solution. But the reason it's cruel is because although meditation has lots of positive effects, some in favor of it. I do it myself, but the vast majority of people, that's not going to solve the problem. Right. It will help, it's a good thing to do. But if you sell that as the solution and they try it and the individuals still can't focus, what they think is there's something really wrong with me. Right. What the cruel optimism whispers

is the problem is in the system. The problem is in you, and that needs to all sorts of harm, and it takes us away from the bigger solutions. This chapter was a challenging one for me because I didn't know the term cruel optimism. Actually, I'm happy to have a term for something that I wrestle with in my own life in the work that I do, because there are times that a lot of what we do is

putting out individual solutions to individual suffering and challenges. And at this discussion with my son, who's much more of a systematic activist type guy, you know, And so he'll say it's a way bigger problem than that, and I'll go, I agree, it is a way bigger problem. And you know, to use your analogy, still got to figure out how to put on the gas mask, you know, You've still

got to do that. But the cruel optimism part is kind of, like you say, is this idea of giving people it's just really easy to solve your problems and all you gotta do is do this. The self help industry is known for basically saying I'll tell you to do something when you do it, instead of you turning back to me and saying the problem is with your method. The way it's all structured is the problem is about the person who's trying the method. It's almost a four

proof way to keep people coming back. You know. It's so interesting because this is something I wrestle with in a similar way, and obviously I thought about it very deeply and talked to a lot of people about it for the book, and the way I came to think about it was the alternative to cruel optimism is not pessimism.

The alternative cruel optimism is to level with people about the layers of the problem and to explain to them there's always things you can do as an individual, even if you are in solitary confinement and you've been put there for a crime you didn't commit in you're there for sixty years, even there, you can do something right.

Primo Levi of course writes about this sort as Victor Frank or even people in the concentration camps who are entirely at the mercy in one sense of these monstrous what the Nazis had some agency in their own minds of nowhere else. So there's always things individuals can do, even if the mare gin is very small. But you want to also explain to people the truth, which is

there are many layers to this. One layer to which you can respond is the individual level, and that will get you a certain way right, And there are other levels where you also cann exercise power. Now you can some powers and individual And I'm conscious that this can all sound a bit abstract. So if it's like I'll give you a very specific example of a problem which has both an individual and collective solution, I think so I'll go for a real low hanging fruit one one

that I think everyone will get immediately. So I went to interview Professor Earl Miller, m i t one of the leading neuro scientists in the world, and he said to me, look, there's one thing, more than anything else that you've got to understand about the human brain. You are only able consciously to think about one thing at a time. That's it. The human brain has not significantly changed in forty years, ain't going to change on any time scale we're going to be around for This is

just a limitation of your brain. But we have fallen for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at once. And what Professor Miller's colleagues found when they get people into the labs, not just teenagers, and they get them to think they're doing lots of things at the same time, is they discover that in fact, when you do that, you're juggling, right, You're switching very rapidly between us. So let's say somewhere

in this room there's my phone. Let's say that while you were talking, I just glanced at my text messages for a moment, and I glanced back at you. What happens in that moment is my brain is focused on you, then it refocuses on the text message I write my friend Rob message me. Okay, that's what that means. Then I have to refocus on you. And that process that juggling incurs a cost is called the switch cost effect. Right.

It takes a certain amount of your brain power. Now it doesn't sound like much, but in fact, switching in this way incurs for really quite significant costs. The first is there's just a certain amount of brain power and the switching itself that you lose. The second is that as you switch, you make more mistakes, and then you have to go back and correct your mistakes for obvious reasons.

The third is you remember less of what you experience because encoding your experiences into memory takes a certain amount of mental energy that's just diminished if your brain is doing other stuff. And fourthly, this is more medium to long term effect. You become significantly less creative. Creativity comes from your mind wandering, thinking back over all the experiences you've had, and bringing together, popping together two ideas that

have not previously been brought together. All of those things diminished. Now this can sound like a small effect. In fact, the evidence is pretty shocking on this. Actually, I'll give you just a small example. Hewlett Packard, the printer company, did a small study where they got a scientist to split a group of their workers into two groups. And the first was told, just do whatever your task for

today is and we're not going to interrupt you. And the second task was told do whatever your task is for the day, and they were heavily interrupted with texts and emails. Then at the end of it they tested the i Q of both groups. The group that was not interrupted tested is having ten i Q points higher than the group that was interrupted. To give you a sense of how big that effect is, if you or me got stoned, now, if we smoke cannabis together, our

i Q would dropped by about five points. So being severely distracted it has doubled the degrading effect on your attention, at least in the short term. As smoking cannabis, you will be better off sitting at your desk smoking a spliff and doing one thing at a time than sitting at your desk being constantly distracted and not smoking cannabis. It was a similar study by Carnegie Mellon University, they split under thirty eight students into two groups. They both

did the same exam. One group was told do the exam in normal exam conditions, and the second group was told, you can leave your phone on and you can receive and send text messages. Now you'd expect instinctively the second group to do better because they could have cheated, right, they could have texted people and ask for the answer. In fact, the group that had texts on did twenty less well on average than the group that did it in exam conditions. Now we are all losing that of

our brain power throughout the day. Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you're interrupted, it takes you twenty three minutes to get back to the same level of focus that you had before the interruption. But most of us never get twenty three minutes without being interrupted, so we're constantly the way Professor Miller said it to me at m I T S, we live in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation. Now there's both

personal and collective solutions to that. So there's lots of personal solutions that obviously I write back in Style of Focus to give you a very obvious one. You can't see it here, Eric, but in the corner of my room over there, I've got white plastic tim to safe. It's called a case safe. Case Safe should start paying the commission because I recommended get every that. It's very simple.

It's plastic safe. You take the lid off, you put your phone in it, you put the lid on, you turn the dial, and it will lock your phone away from between five minutes and a week whatever you tell it to lock it away for. Every day, I put my phone in that case safe for four hours, so I just get space to properly think without being interrupted. So that's an obvious individual solution, one of many individual

solutions to this this problem. But there's a reason why we also have to think at this collective level because a lot of people, when they've heard what I just said, I put my phone away for four hours a day, will experience me saying that as a bit like if I'd gone up to a homeless person and said, hey, buddy, do you know what would make you feel much better? It would be if you went into that fancy restaurant over there and you had a really nice dinner. You

feel much better. Right. The homeless person entirely understandably would say screw you. They won't like me, and lots of people hearing that will go, yeah, I'd love to not be interrupted, screw you. I can't do that, right. And there's a place that dealt with this, and there's lots of places that have dealt with this. Give an example

of one that I went to. So in France, they had a huge debate about what they called la burnout, which I don't think you need me to translate, and under pressure from labor unions, the French government appointed a guy called Bruno met Ling, who was the head of Orange, they're leading telecoms company, to investigate this, figure out what's

going on. So met Ling did all this research and he discovered that thirty of French workers felt they could never stop checking email or turn off their texts because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night and they would get in trouble if they didn't answer. So they were never mentally unplugging, they were never physically unplugging. Right, They were in this constant ratchet.

I mean I remember when we were kids, the only people who were on call were the prime minister and doctors, and even doctors weren't on call constantly. Right now, almost half the economy spends their time on call. So Mettling proposed a very simple solution that was then passed into law. It's called the right to disconnect. It's very simple, says two things. One, you have a right to have legally defined work ours, written work hours that are stipulated to

you before you start work. And you have a right outside of those work hours to not have to check your email on your phone. So I went to Paris spoke to lots of people about this. Big companies now get fined rent to kill. When I was just before I was there, got find seventy euros because they criticized a worker for not checking his work email an hour after his work hours had ended. Right now, you can see how that is a collective solution that was fought

for by French workers through their labor unions. They have very powerful unions in France because they banned together. That was fought for by ordinary French workers. There is a collective solution that frees up individuals to make individual solutions. Sometimes it's framed as individuals versus collective solutions. But actually the collective solutions make it possible to make individual changes.

There's many examples like this. I think that's an example of problem individual solution, collective solution, and people can see how the collective solution adds an extra layer that we can't get to a lot. Maybe some people listening will be so powerful in their workforce that they can go to their boss and go, you know what, I'm just not checking my email after I leave at five pm. But the vast majority of people are not going to be in that position, right. That's why you have to

have a collective fight, not just an individual fight. And I think the way you explain that is really really good, and it kind of sort of leads us into one of the more you called it I think controversial parts of the book, which is a discussion between you and another previous guests of the show, near Al about this right, because what he's saying is, look, there's do not disturb button on your phone. There's a way to turn off

all these notifications. You can just very easily go do this, right, And then your point is, and there's a lot of nuance going to be lost in this, So I encourage people before you say anything about this, you should read the whole section. And I know, Johan, you posted the interview or conversations between you guys on your website, So I'm not trying to foment a debate between two people here in any way, shape or form. But it's an important part of the book, which is he says, the

tools are there, it's your responsibility turn them off. And you, as you just eloquently said, not everybody can do that, right, And so I think what you said is really great, which is we got to look at the layers here, right, Because I know there are people coaching clients I've worked for before who could go to their boss and say, look, I'm just not going to be answering emails overnight. And

they could do that. They choose not to do that because some of its culturally condition, but some of it is as NEAR would say, it's their internal trigger, it's their own anxiety like to be connected. I gotta know what's going on. I gotta know what's going on. So

I think both things can be true. But I think what you're pointing out is that for a lot of us, and this gets to I think the cruel optimism bit too for a lot of people, these strategies and solutions that will work, they might work, and for many people they won't work at all, and the people that do are often very privileged. You know. I think you just put that really well, and I'm grateful to Near for engaging with me. And there's a lot in what he says that I agree strongly with. But I felt two

levels of discomfort. So Near talks a lot about well. The phrase he used to me is people should just push the fucking button. Right, They've got a button on their phone that they can turn up on the notifications. He says, this is actually really simple, right, people should just push the fucking button. That kind of thing, and I want to be fatting in There are some collective solutions that Near is in favor of. He's not entirely focused on the individual. I think the collective solutions he

proposes are very small, but there are some. But there are two levels at which I was uncomfortable with what he said. One is the cruel optimism element that we've talked about, and it's interesting he he uses an analogy that I think is really interesting and revealing. When Near as a child he was obese, which is very surprising when you see him now, because he's like, he looks quite buff to me now. And he overcame his obesity by realizing that he was emotionally eating to deal with distress,

and he overcame that, right. And he extends that analogy in a way that will be extendable for some people. And I think he over extends it in a way that becomes cruel optimism. If we look at the obesity crisis. You know, if you look at a photograph of a beach in the United States in nineteen seventy, everyone is what we would call slim or buff, right, everyone. There's no fat people on the beach, right, And that's not that the fact people were hiding away. There was almost

no obesity in nineties seventy, right, And what happened. The average American is getting twenty two pounds. And that's not because they all individually failed or individually ate their feelings. It's because our entire food supply system change in ways that causes obesity. It's because the way our cities work essentially impossible to walk or bike around many American cities. I spend a lot of my time in Las Vegas

try walking anywhere in Vegas. It's impossible. Right. So there's one level of which I feel it's overly simplistic and it's cruel optimism. But there's a second level at which I'm uncomfortable with it, which I discussed with him. And to be fair, people should listen to his response, which is posted on the book's website, Stolen Focus book dot com, because I don't feel like it can entirely fairly summarize

his argument. But Near wrote this book saying you can get control of your attention really easily, you know, push the fucking button, that kind of thing. And to be fair, proposes various techniques, all of which I'm in favor of, and I discussed some of them in Stolen Focus. But he wrote a book before that, a book called Hooked. So Near as a tech designer, and he wrote a book called Hooked, which, as he describes it, as a cookbook for tech designers to figure out how to manipulate

human behavior. So a typical headline on his website giving advice to people was want to hook your users, drive them crazy? Right, And in Hooked he describes a series of very powerful techniques which he describes as designed to hook people, to create very strong cravings in them. And this has been a very influential book. The head of Microsoft held it up and told all her workers to

read it. Lots of apps have been designed using this advice. Right, And what I felt very uncomfortable with is he writes this book saying, hook your users. I have seen kids in my life become hooked by precisely the techniques that near has advocated. And then when they do become hooked, he says, well, you could just solve it real easily,

just sort yourself out, push the fucking button, right. And to me, there's a disparity between the thinness of the personal solutions he advocates and the power of the big invasive forces he advocates. Right, So he talks about these very powerful techniques of reinforcement that are applied to two people, the cravings to use his words drive them crazy, and then his solutions and things like picture yourself as a leaf on a river meditating. I mean, there's a real

disparity between these things, and you can see how. And I want to be clear, I do not believe this is conscious on his part. I don't think it is mendacious or anything. But you can see how this is how big tech wants us to think about our attention problems. Right. They drive us crazy and then they tell us, well, what's wrong. We've given you the tools to solve the problem. Just push the fucking mutton right, And sorry to keep repeating that phrase. The reminds me there's a great Israeli

pop song called push the Mutton. Um to me, that disparity makes me very uncomfortable, and as Dr James Williams said to me, it lets the people who are doing this to us off the hook. Yeah. Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts on that. One is I agree with you. I mean I often when I'm working with a coaching client, I'll have somebody say something like, well, I didn't write today because you know, I was just gonna watch one episode of my favorite show on Netflix.

Then I was going to write. I was like, that is never going to work. Like, there are people who are incredibly smart, people who are sitting around and their thing they're thinking and spending lots of energy on is how do I get that guy not to turn it off after this one show? So you are fighting a

losing battle if you structure things that way. I mean, another example doesn't apply exactly, but it does have some relevance, which would be it's a whole lot harder to stop snorting cocaine if you're you know, at a crack house, right, Like it's just when somebody wants to get sober. We try and remove our elves, you know, but as we're saying, we can't really remove ourselves. The vast majority of people can't do what you did, which was go away for

three months, and even you can't do that all the time. Right, That's a that's a pretty rare, rare thing. So I agree with you about that general idea that we've got these really smart, powerful forces that are that are going against us. And I had another point that is now gone to me, and is how how apropos is thatses

of destruction? I think that's really important what you've just said, And it was really interesting one of the things I took from many things I learned, but partly from my conversations with Near the way Near I think we'd like to frame this. Perhaps that's unfair the way I think a lot of big tech we'd like to frame this. Near may disagree with this. Is I think they want us to frame this debate as a debate between being pro tech or anti tech, right, and I'm sure my

book will be described as anti tech. I'm not anti tech at all. The question isn't pro tech or anti tech. The question is what tech working in whose interests, with what goals? And to understand that, I think it's worth just unpacking a bit what I'm getting at, because what I learned is we could have social media that worked on very different principles. We currently have a model of social media that is designed to maximally hackn invade your attention.

That's not my view, that's not the view of Silicon Valley dissidance. That's the view of Facebook. Right. Sean Parker, one of the first investors in Facebook, said, when Facebook was being designed, we designed it to figure out how we could maximally take your your attention. We knew what we were doing. We did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our kids brains. That's what one of the key big is in the history of Facebook

is saying. And we now know from the leaked Facebook memos by Francis Howgan they were saying many other things like that, internally, and there was a moment this really fell into place for me. Over many years, I interviewed lots of times. Tristan Harris is a very well known former Google engineer who now is a kind of outspoken critics of the current business model that social media companies were adopting. It's a moment that really stayed with me

that Tristan said. This is not a moment I'll get to. But Tristan worked on the Gmail team when they were trying to figure out very early in Gmail, where they wanted to maximize. Obviously want to increase their user base, but they also wanted to increase the number of times a day someone used Gmail for reasons I'll get to. And one of his colleagues, they were sitting in the Google Plex, and one of his colleagues had an idea. He just said, why don't we make it so that

every time someone gets an email, their phone vibrates. And everyone said, that's a good idea. And a week later, Tristan was walking around San Francisco and it just hears these vibrations everywhere, like the chirruping of birds, and he realizes, ship we did that, and that's happening all over the world everywhere. In fact, he later calculated about a year later that that decision at that time was causing eleven billion interruptions to people's day across the world. It actould

be much higher now. It staggering. So Tristan said to me one day, as a toy to Triestan about many different aspects of this, And Tristan said to me, today, ask yourself something really important. Open your phone, open Facebook, and Facebook will tell you lots of things. It will tell you whose birthday is, who tagged you in a photo, what you said on the exact same day ten years before, whatever it might be. There's one thing Facebook will never tell you. There is no button on Facebook that says

something like I'd like to meet up with people? Are any of my friends nearby? Right? Any of them want to meet up? There's no such button. Now, as soon as I say that, everyone listening to this is on Facebook would think that would be a really nice button to have, right, That would very clearly be a popular option. Why does Facebook not provide that? When you follow the trail from that, I think you begin to understand what's

being done to us and some of the solutions. So every time you open Facebook, they make money two ways. One is very obvious. You scroll down your feed, you see advertising. We all understand how that works. Second way is more subtle and much more important. Everything you do on Facebook is scanned and sorted to build a profile of you. So let's say you click that you like I don't know Bette Midler, Donald Trump, and you say in a message to your mother that you just bought

some diapers. Okay, Facebook now knows you're probably a gay man, no disrespect to the straight people who like bet Midler. You're probably a conservative, and you've probably got a baby because you're talking about diapers. And now they've got tens of thousands of data points like that about you. They know a lot about you. They then sell that portrait of you two advertisers. So those advertisers can take your attention, right, because if I'm selling diapers, I don't want to market

to everyone. There's no point showing an ad about diapers to me. I don't have a baby, right. They want to show it to someone who's got a baby. So that's the really valuable part. Okay, Now imagine that they did invent that button. The button that says, which of my friends are available and want to meet up? If you push that button, it guys are Dave's up the road. I'll go for a drink with Dave. You would close Facebook and Dave would close Facebook, and you would look

into each other's is and you would talk. Right, the things that make us feel good as human beings. That's a disaster for Facebook because they lose both those revenue streams, right, they immediately lose them. They want you to be maximally interacting through their device because that's how they harvest the information about you to sell your attention to advertisers. So all of their machinery or the engineering genius they use, all of their algorithms, is all designed for one goal,

one purpose. How do I keep you Eric from scrolling and scrolling and never putting that phone down? Right, that's the maximal goal that they want, because that's how they maximize their profits. That the entire model is based on the principle that your distraction is their fuel. Right, it is an attention harvesting model. But the important thing to understand is, as lots of dissidence in Silicon Valley explained to me, social media doesn't have to work that way

to think about an analogy. Lots of older listeners will remember, until the eighties, we used to use leading gasoline. I can remember the smell of it right from when I was a kid. We also used to earlier than that entered in the seventies, we used to paint our homes with lead paint. And then it was discovered that inhaling lead inflames the brain and causes is catastrophic for people's attention, particularly children's attention. It can actually be disinhibiting to the

point of violence for some people. So what do we do. We banned lead in paint, and we banned leading gasoline. You will notice I'm in a room that has been painted, right, You're in a room that's been painted. We still paint our homes, We still have gasoline in our cars. It's just not leaded paint and leaded gasoline. In the same way, it may be that we decide that the current model is the equivalent of leading gasoline. Someone called Asa Raskin really helped me to think about this. As a designed

that key part of how the Internet works. His dad, Jeff Raskin, was the guy who designed the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs, and ASA said to me, we should just ban the current business model. We should just say a business model premised upon surveiling you in order to figure out how to hack your attention and sell that attention to the highest bidder is anti human and unacceptable. It's like leaded pain, and we do not tolerate it.

And I said to him and lots of other people who advocate this approach, well, okay, but what would happen if I opened Facebook the day after we banned it, where they just be a little notice saying sorry, we've gone fishing. And he said, no, of course not. What what what happen is they would moved to a different business model, and there's plenty of other business models they can move to. Subscription is an obvious business model. You pay a certain amount to HBO and you get HBO or one of them.

Maybe you know, everyone listening to this will be somewhere close to a sewer right now. Before we had sewers, we had feces in the street and people got cholera and it was a disaster. So together we funded the building of sewers, and together we own the sewer pipes.

They're collectively publicly owned, right it. Maybe we want a model of public ownership independent of government, which would be very important, where we say, just like we own the sewage pipes, we want to own the information pipes, right we want to own the means by which we communicate. The reason this is so important is if we moved to a different model, the incentives for the design of

social media completely change. If at the moment, you're not the customer, you're the product they sell to the real customer, the advertiser. But under a subscription model or a public ownership model, you become the person they want to serve. So they're not saying how do we hack Eric to sell his attention? They're saying what does Eric want? How Eric wants to spend time with his friends. Let's give him button that will tell him where his friends are.

Eric wants to be able to focus. Let's warn him every time he gets a link from us that he thinks it will only to take a few seconds, it actually takes twenty three minutes before you'll get back to what he's doing. There's a thousand ways which are not technologically hard. They could be designed by Tristan and his friends in in a day that would transform it. So instead of being designed to hack your attention, it could

be designed to heal and aid your attention. Instead of being a vacuum sucking up your attention, it could be a trampoline sending you back into the world. Right. But for that to happen, we need to change the busins model, and they're not going to change it on their own right. We need to make in the same way that companies that made lead pay and a letter gasoline they were never going to give up their model right without being made to do it by movements of ordinary citizens. Does

that ring true to you er? Totally? Yeah, that makes complete sense. I love that analogy because, as you said earlier, it's easy for this to all start to sound anti tech, and that's not what it is. And I think the leaded gasoline model and the leaded paint model really makes a lot of sense because it's saying like, yeah, we still want the benefits that social media gives us hundred and we can we all know the benefits of that.

Think about something as simple as I'm gay, right, And I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who as a gay son um. You know, he's like fifteen, and he can find other gay people incredibly easily in a way that like it was really I mean that's partly the social advances and actually of gay people, but also this technology makes it possible to find for him to find other gay kids in a way that was

unthinkable for me. Right, we can all think of an enormous number of bans as we want to keep the positive steps but not the disastrous ones, and there are ways we can do that. And again that's where someone like near in my view, or that he would disagree, I think, frames the debate in a false way where you know it's not protech or anti tech is what tech? Right?

Comes back to what tech in whose interests? At the moment, we have tech that doesn't work in your interests on my interests, right, it works an interest of very small number of people who want to harvest our attention, which is having disastrous effects. I don't want us all to convert to become the Amish, right to my id of hell. Right, I don't want to go Hell's going too far, but it would be awful, right, But under no means stor

we want to renounce these things. And of course there's some degree to which these technologies would have increased distraction, but to have them maximally designed to harvest and invade attention is a disaster. There's so many different directions we

could take this and somewhat limited on time. But I think the other thing to speak to how your book isn't anti tech or the messages in anti tech, is you make the point of this attention span dwindling has been going on for quite some time, and that you know, largely what several people that you talked to and studied sort of showed was if you want to make people's ability to focus on one thing smaller so that we focus on more and more things, all you have to

do is just keep feeding more information into the system. And that did not start with technology. That's been going on for a while. You know, the more things we have to focus on that get put in front of us,

the less time we spend with any of them. This was sobering but also in some ways empowering, and I fell into place to me when I went to cyping Hagen in Denmark and interviewed Professor Sooner Layman, who's professor of applied mathematics at the Technical University of Denmark and Professor Lehman did a really important study with many other scientists, some of whom I interviewed, like Dr Philip Stein in Berlin, which was the first study that showed that our collective

attention span genuinely has shrunk, and it found something really important in relation to what you just said, Eric. So the way they did it initially is so soon I was worried about his own attention. That's how it began. Like me, I wanted to figure out, what is this just a kind of grumpy old man thing or is something really changing. They started by doing a very small study that opened up into a much bigger technique that

was much more revealing. So initially so they wanted to look at collective attention and initially they just looked at Twitter. And anyone who's on Twitter will know that Twitter has something called trending topics, where it's the AI is scanning too, and the algorithms are scanning to see what topics are being most discussed that day, whether it's I don't know, if Justin b fell over somewhere or whatever. You know, we could all think of things and it will show

the most discussed things on Twitter that day. They looked at data on Twitter between twenty sixteen, and they want to just started with a very simple question, how long did a trending topic get discussed for on Twitter? And in with the earliest data they looked at, on average, a trending topic was discussed for seventeen point five hours. By the time you got to a trending topic was only discussed for twelve hours. So collectively we were talking

about any one thing less than in the past. But they're like, okay, well that maybe that's just a phenomenon of Twitter that they looked at. Many websites read it. They looked at Google searches, things people search for on Google, and across the board, with one exception Wikipedia, the graph looked exactly the same. People were talking about one topic for less and less. But then they did something to me much more interesting. So there's a way they discovered.

You can do this by looking at public in the past. So as you know, Google books are scanned books going back as long as there ever been books, and what you can do is you can train an algorithm to read through those books and detect the equivalent of trending topics in the past. The fancy term for it is detecting end grams, So there's plenty of phrases that pop up in the language, get to intensely discussed for a while,

and then disappear again. Think about no deal Brexit. No one had ever said the phrase no deal Brexit before, no one will ever say again, apart from historians ten years from now. Or think about the Harlem Renaissance as a huge we can all think of something, right, so you can look at how quickly did topics emerge and how quickly did they vanish in the past. It's a very clever technique and what they discovered was really striking.

They looked at books for every decade since the eighteen eighties, and since the eighties the graph looked almost exactly like the graph on Twitter. With each decade that passed, people were folks sing collectively together, but the less and less time. And this is a really interesting phenomenon, which again suggests it's way too simplistic to think this problem is just

the Internet. Now, clearly, the Internet and particularly the business model that drives the dominant falls of the Internet, has clearly accelerated this trend, and there's good evidence for that. But it also shows there's something deeper going on, and I spent a lot of time trying to think about what this is. Some of that is technological advance, and it appears by the way that we're doing all sorts

of things faster. There's evidence that we speak faster than we did in the nineteen fifties, there's evidence that we walk faster than we did in the all sorts of forms of acceleration going on. One British writer Robert Colville has talked about how we live in the great acceleration and we know the effects that acceleration has on attention. You can even look at just studies as simple as training people to speed read. You can train almost anyone

to read significantly faster. But what happens is they understand less, they remember less, and they think in a much more shallow way about what they've read. Is a bit of a no ship shell loock finding. But it helps, by analogy, for us to think about what's happening to all of us with acceleration. And there's a big debate about what's driving this acceleration. And I offer this more tentatively than I offer some of the other conclusions that I put

forward in this conversation or in the book. But I spoke to a lot of people like Professor Thomas hilland Ericson in Norway and Professor Jason Hickel, who's now based in Spain, argued that part of what's happening is probably linked to the broader economic model we have of economic growth. So as Professor Ericson, who is one of the leading social scientists in Norway and one of the most prestigious in the world, said to me, if you have an economy,

so we have a model based on economic growth. As everyone knows, if a company grows, we reward the CEO. If it shrinks, we punish the CEO if the country's economy if the next election, If the economy grew, President Biden will have a much better chance of re election. If it shrank, his re election will be less likely if he runs again. And Professor Erickson said to me, if you have to deliver growth all the time, since we live in a growth machine, there's really two ways

you can deliver growth. One is you can discover a new market, and clearly that you know does happen. But the other way is you can get an existing market to consume more rapidly. So think about something as simple as if I can get you to watch television and tweet about it at the same time, I've doubled the amount of potential advertising you're exposed to. You see it

on the TV, and you see it on Twitter. So he argues that economic growth built into economic growth is an inherent rapid acceleration of the experience of life, and the way Sooner Layman put it to me, they who did the studies, but there's just got to be a limit to how much speed we can tolerate without causing a profound degeneration in our ability to think. Now, offer that more tentatively, because that seems to me very plausible. It's hard to know how you could design a counter

factual to look into that. Given that every economy in the world, I mean, you could sort of talk about Bhutan a bit, you could talk about some economies that have tried to extract themselves in the growth economy. That's a very very hard comparison point. So my instinct is I believe that we are going to have to build in addition to having all sorts of individual defenses for our attention. I think, just like women had to build a feminist movement to to reclaim control of their bodies

and their lives, and indeed still need that movement. I think we're going to need something like an attention movement to reassert control of our minds to resist many of these forces that are invading our attention. And my hunch, which could be wrong, is that somewhere down the line and attention movement would have to bump into the logic of economic growth, and we'd have to think about that now.

I also think there are very and this I feel more confident of, there are other very good reasons to think about moving beyond the model of economic growth, to do with the climate crisis and so on. We can talk about that another time, and there's people much better qualified to talk about it than me. But my hunches

will end up bumping into that topic. But I feel like that's if we're thinking about the layers of the debate and the discussion, that's like ten layers up from where we are right that, because if you've got my case safe at the lowest level of the debate and debatem economic growth is the highest, highest, highest level. And I think we're so far from thinking about this is a collective problem that requires collective solutions that I feel like, let's put a peg in that and debate it ten

years from now if we've got a really good movement going. Yeah, well, Johanna, I could do this with you for hours and hours, and you and I are going to continue a little bit more in the post show conversation, and one of the things that we're going to talk about is is mind wandering good for you? Or is mind wandering bad for you? Because you hear both these and you actually summarized it in one sentence as I was saying to you before, I love the way you look at these

different things. We're gonna talk about that as well as I'd like to explore your three main goals you would see in a movement to reclaim our attention would focus on listeners. If you'd like to get access to the post show conversation, you can go to one you feed dot net slash joint here the rest of this conversation with Johan and I lots of other post show conversations and all kinds of other goodies like add free episodes. So that's when you feed dot net slash joint. Johan.

Thank you so much for coming on. It is always such a pleasure. I always love talking to Eric, and I'm meant to say all my publishers will taste me. Yes. Anyone who wants to know where to get the audio book, the book called the physical book, and we can get it from any good bookshop or indeed any shitty bookshop. I bet you can go to www dot stolen focus book dot com and you can also on the website you can hear what lots of prominent people have said about the book, and you can listen to audio of

loads of the experts that we've talked to. You can listen for free to the audio with them and that conversation I had with Near and many other that we were talking about. They've got a little bit contentious. And you can find out loads of other good stuff about the book. Yep. And we'll put a link in the show notes, so if you just click on now, it'll take you right there. Also. All right, thank you, Johan,

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