 Hey, thanks for joining me for today's podcast. On the show today, I am in conversation with a brilliant writer and journalist called Johan Harry. He is an international best-selling author. I'm a great fan of his work. His previous two books called Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections are brilliant reads, but today we're in conversation about his latest book out this month called Stolen Focus. Here's the brilliant conversation. You're going to love it. Please leave a review or a comment if you enjoyed the show today. If you don't subscribe, think about doing that. Thanks for being here. Enjoy this conversation. Thank you. You know, you made a throwaway comment in the book. I just noted and highlighted it. You were talking about, you know, when you were sort of getting rid of the devices for your lockdown time at the beach house. You said something like, I wasn't trying to become Amish. I was just trying to, you know, practically get rid of the devices. And I thought to myself, I'm going to ask Johan, do you think about speaking to the Amish? Yeah, I've been to an Amish community. I went to one for my previous book Lost Connections because it was a fascinating experience. I went to, I spent some time in a place called El Cart Lagrange, which is about two hours out of Indianapolis in Indiana. And it's a weird experience going to the Amish. I made the mistake the night before I went of watching the Harrison Ford film Witness, which was a very bad idea. So it's very strange when you go to an Amish community. The reason I went there is because the Amish have very low levels of depression and very low levels of anxiety. And there are, it's not just that culturally they express that differently. There are actually pretty good biological proxies for depression and anxiety that we can measure, which are actually lower in communities like the Amish. I can talk about the details of that if you want. But the, yeah, it was fascinating. And there's lots of theories about why. And it comes back to what you were saying before. They have actual communities. I mean, there's lots of things I would criticize about Amish communities. I'm not idealistic about it, but lots of things, the way they treat women, the way they treat gay people. I'm not a fan of the Amish way of life, as you can imagine. It's not my bag. But there are lots of things about the way they live that make them significantly happier than we are. Sorry, go on. No, it's interesting. In terms of this attention thing, I wonder if there's anything to learn there, because they are not in this kind of device driven social media world. So there's a few things about that. I remember speaking to Amish people about that. And in fact, a doctor who worked with the Amish and none of their children present with what we regard as ADHD. And I was asking, well, why would that be? And the Amish just said, well, of course, we have some kids who don't want to sit still all day. We let them just go fishing and run around. Why would you try and get kids to sit still all day? Now, that's partly because the Amish don't put a very high premium on, in fact, don't put a premium on what we think of as high technical learning, that Amish people are not going to go unless they leave the Amish and not going to go and become professors of English literature or NASA engineers or whatever. So it's less important to them that they do more practice, not all of them, but most of them do more sort of physical and practical jobs. But I think it's partly that that they, they're actually in a funny way, more alert, or sorry, that in a funny way, they're more receptive to some natural differences in children. Not in every way, obviously, if your child's gay or whatever, they're not more receptive to that. But this variation, they're much more open minded and receptive about. I love the phrase in the book, Johan, surveillance capitalism. This phrase is not a phrase original to me. It's a phrase by a brilliant academic named Dr. Shoshana Zuboff, who's at Harvard. And this is so under voodoo doll metaphor. Can you say a bit about that? Yeah, yeah. So obviously, when you talk about problems, people having an attention of focus, a lot of us think immediately about technology and the changes in technology. What I learned is this is a bit more complicated than we think. These forms of technology are harming our attention, but it's not a lot of those changes are not inherent to the technology. They're about the financial incentives to the companies that currently design this technology. And one of the ways into understanding this, that helped me, which is a very simple question. So I went in and interviewed lots of the people who designed the social media world in which we live today, who now regret what they've done. It was an amazing moment where one of them, Google engineer named Dr. James Williams, was at a tech conference. And he's speaking to hundreds of people who are designing this world in which we are kids and everyone lives. And he said to them, is there anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're designing? Put up your hand. Nobody put up their hand, right? Another one of them, Tristan Harris, he worked on the Gmail team when Gmail was being designed. And one day, one of his colleagues said, oh, I've got an idea. Why don't we make it so that every time someone gets an email, their phone buzzes. So everyone thought that was a good idea. And Tristan remembers walking around San Francisco a few weeks later and just hearing buzzing everywhere and realizing that buzzing was happening all over the world. And there was a moment when this became clear for me. And it comes from asking, Tristan Harris asked me a really simple question, right? So you open Facebook, anyone listening, you can do it now. And Facebook will tell you loads of things. It will tell you your friend's birthdays. It will tell you what you were saying five years ago. It will tell you if there's been a terrorist attack and people have checked in. What it won't do is there is no button that says, I'd like to meet up with people, or any of my friends, free and want to meet, right? Now, that would be a really popular button, right? Everyone listening, you think, oh, we've all had moments when we wanted to know that, right? Why does the market not provide it? Why is there no such button? If you follow the trail from that question, I think you understand a lot about what's been happening to our attention and focus. So when you open Facebook, Facebook makes money in two ways. One is a very obvious way in your feed, you see advertising. Okay, we all understand how that works. But the second way is more subtle than it's exactly what you ask about. And it was explained to me by Aza Raskin, whose dad Jeff Raskin invented the Apple Macintosh and Aza himself has invented a key device that actually transforms how the internet works. I can talk about it if you want, but he said, we've got to understand this. When you say or do anything on Facebook, or indeed any of the social media sites, what happens is everything you say is scanned and sorted, right? So let's say I like, you know, you say you like Kylie Minogue and Donald Trump, actually I can't imagine there's much of a Venn diagram there, but whatever, and you message your mum and say you've just bought nappies, right? Okay, so all of those things are gathered and sorted. Okay, so this is a person with a child, this is a person who's probably gay and if it's a man and this is a person who likes Donald Trump, okay, they gather constantly gathering, not that they're right heterosexual men like Kylie, so I don't mean to disrespect any Kylie fans out there. So the is gathering a picture of who you are, and it's got thousands and thousands of data points, right? Why is it doing that? The way Aza puts it is it's like they're creating a voodoo doll of you. They're gathering every little toenail clipping and everything and it starts off as just a normal doll and it becomes more and more like you, right? Why do they do that? Is so they can sell that information to advertisers so that the advertisers can target you, that's why they do it, right? That's actually their most valuable asset. An advertiser selling nappies doesn't want to put an ad in my feed, I don't have babies, right? They've wasted their money. They want to be targeting, targeting, targeting. Now every time you put a Facebook down or switch your phone off, Facebook is losing money, right? So their entire business model has to be how do we figure out how to keep you scrolling as long as possible? That's their business model. The same way that the KFC business model is how do we get you to eat fried chicken? The Facebook business model is how do we get you to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling? How as Sean Parker, one of the early investors in Facebook said, we spent our time figuring out how can we maximally hack people's attention? We knew what we were doing and we did it anyway, right? So once you understand that, you can see one of the key reasons why these things are invading our attention. It's not, there's some degree to which the technology of the smartphone would always have increased our distraction a bit, right? But what we've ended up with our business models, which are maximally designed to hack our attention, to figure out maximally how to distract us, I can talk about what the various methods they use are. But the most important lesson of that is it doesn't have to be that way. There are other business models that we could force these companies to adopt by regulation that would mean that instead of being a sort of attention draining Facebook, we could have an attention restoring Facebook. Yeah. Did you see the Netflix social dilemma? Yeah. So lots of the people I interviewed, I was interviewing them before and during the make of that documentary, I didn't actually know the documentary was being made until quite a while into writing my book. Yeah. So, I mean, the social dilemma looks at various forms of harm in a good way, I think, various forms of harm that have been caused by social media. It doesn't talk that much about attention, which is what I'm trying to hone in on in my book Stolen Focus, but I'm really glad that that documentary has brought some of the people whose stories I tell in the book to a much wider audience, people like Tristan Harris, who is one of the people I most admire, who was at the absolute heart of this machinery, saw what it was doing to people and really thought, you know, I have to warn people. In a funny way, so slightly, maybe it's pretentious metaphor, but I do think of them as a bit like Robert Oppenheimer who invented the nuclear bomb, seized the first explosion in Los Alamos and is like, oh, he thinks of that the Hindu, the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu text and says, you know, I am become God destroyer of worlds and spends a lot of the rest of his life trying to reduce and contain nuclear weapons and indeed abolish nuclear weapons, which is what we should do. And in a way, a lot of these tech people I got to know feel similarly. And there's all sorts of ways in which this is hacking and invading our attention. I'll give you an example of one that I learned about quite early on in the research for the book that's really led me to make a lot of personal changes, but also really kind of haunted me because when you know about it, you see it happening all around you. I went to MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to interview a man named Professor Earl Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. And Earl said to me, you need to understand one thing about the human brain above everything else. You can only think about one thing at a time. Consciously, that's it. You need to know one thing at a time. This is just the structure of the human brain. It's been changed in 40,000 years. It's not going to change any time soon. You can think about one thing at a time. But the evidence shows that the average teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at the same time. But what Professor Miller explained to me is when you think you're following seven things at a time, your consciousness papers over it. It seems like you really are doing that. But actually what you're doing is you're juggling. You're switching very rapidly between tasks. And that comes with a large series of costs. So the first is called, and we know this because they get people in labs and they get them to try to do more than one thing at a time and they observe it. So one of the costs is what's called the switch cost effect. So let's say I'm talking to you now. I don't know where my phone is. It's somewhere behind me. But if I just glanced at my phone, let's say I've got a text and I've got a text. I glanced at my phone. While you were speaking, I could have glanced at my phone. You wouldn't have known. Would have taken two seconds to glance at that. And I glanced back at you. What happens in that moment is I focus on the text. I've gone, oh, wait, what's my friend Rob saying? Why is he texting me? Oh, right. I got it. I reply to that later. I switch back to you. I'm like, wait, what did Paul just say? What's he saying? So that takes up a significant amount of your mental bandwidth that could have been spent on thinking about, oh, I want to tell Paul this interesting thing that I learned. And oh, actually, when I text Rob back, I want to tell him this interesting thing. That's wasted mental energy. The second way that it drains your focus and attention is you start to make mistakes. So if you're switching between things, you're much more likely to make mistakes and then you have to go back and correct those mistakes. The third way is that when you're distracted, you will remember much less of what you experience because it takes mental energy to transfer, translate your experiences into memories. And if your mind is jammed up with, or what was that just on WhatsApp? What did the other person say on WhatsApp? What's happening on the tally over there? Wait, who just emailed me? You're just jammed up, jammed up, jammed up. You're much less like your memory deteriorates. Also, the fourth effect is that your creativity diminishes. Creativity comes from when you have the mental space for your mind to just wonder and to make connections between, oh, someone said this to me once and I was that and I read this and combining things in new and interesting ways. But when your brain is just jammed up, in the medium or longer term, you discover you'll be much less creative. So this constant switching is making us less effective. We make more mistakes. We remember less and we are less creative. And this isn't like some small effect. There was a small study by Hewlett Packard, the people who make printers, printers that always get jammed up in my experience. And they split workers into two groups. And the first group was told, just do whatever your task is at the moment and you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told, do whatever task you've got to do at the moment. But they were interrupted with a heavy amount of texts and emails. And at the end of it, they measured their IQ. And what they discovered is the people who were not distracted had performed on the IQ test 10 points better than the people who'd been chronically distracted. To give you a sense of how big that is, when you get stoned, your IQ dips by five points. So it's double the effect of getting stoned. So you and I would be better off now sitting at our desks and smoking a fat spliff and doing one thing at a time than we would sitting at our desk, not getting stoned and just being distracted by emails. There was a study at Carnegie Mellon University that they got 138 students and they split them into two groups. And the first group was told, they were all given the same exam to do. And the first group was told, do your exam in normal exam conditions. And the second group was told, do the exam and you can check your texts if you want. Now you'd think the second group would do better because they could text to people and cheat it, right? Actually, the group that had their phone switched on did 20% worse on average than the people who were not distracted. We're all losing an enormous amount of mental energy and bandwidth all the time because of this constant distractions that we don't even think of as distractions. The way Professor Miller put it to me, we live in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation, right? Well, how's it all come down for you Johan at this stage after the research and the book in terms of your own focus and attention and the new habits you tried to adopt in the beach house. What have you retained of all that? Have you changed in any major ways with how you interact with your devices, social media and so on? So I think there's two ways we need to respond to this crisis. There's individual responses and there's a lot we can do there. But I also think we need to be honest with people which is that individual solutions will only get us so far and that's why we need another level which is collective responses where together we band together as citizens and demand because what's happening at the moment is it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then the people who pour itching powder over us are saying, you know, you might want to learn to meditate, you wouldn't scratch so much and it's like, all right, mate, fuck you, stop pouring the itching powder on me, then I'll learn to meditate, which is not to say there isn't some value in meditation, right? So there's all sorts of individual things we can do. I don't know if you can see in the corner of my room there, there's a little white safe, can you see it? That's called a K safe. The way it works is it's plastic safe. You lift up the lid, you take it off, you put your phone in it, you put the lid back on, you twist the dial at the top and it will lock away your phone for anything between five minutes and a week. And you know, if there was an emergency, I could smash it, I could just throw it on the floor, but then I had to buy another K safe. And what that does, so I put my phone in that four hours a day, so I can just read and think, now I know that's an incredible luxury, I've got a job where I can do that. A lot of people don't. So there's loads of things like that that I do that have really helped. But I'm very wary of, you know, there's the structure of self-help books, which is where the writer goes, Dear reader, I had this problem like you. I went on this journey, I did the following five things and now dear reader, you can do it too, and then you'll be set free. And the truth is, at the moment, we live in a culture that means a lot of people cannot do the things that would improve their ability to focus and pay attention. And some of them very simple things like the scientific evidence is overwhelming. If you want to improve your attention, you should sleep more. We are chronically underslapped. Only 15 percent of people wake up feeling refreshed, right? 15 percent. But a lot of people, quite rightly, would hear me say that and go, I mean, to them, it's like, I've gone up to a homeless person in the street and gone, do you know what, mate? You know what made you feel much better would be if you went into the Ritz over there and had a really nice dinner, you'd feel better then. And quite understandably, the homeless guy is going to fuck you. I know that would make me feel better. I can't do that, right? In a similar way, there's a huge gap at the moment between what we feel, what we know we should do and what we feel we can do. And there's all sorts of practical things we can do to close that gap. I'll give you an example of something I mean, I go through lots of them in the book, but in France in 2016, they had a big problem with Le Burnout, which I don't think I need to translate. And loads of people were just, you know, being burnout workers. And the French government under pressure from trade unions set up a commission headed by Bruno Metling, who was the head of Orange, their biggest telecom company. And he discovered 35% of French workers, but they could never turn off their phone or put it on silent because they were worried about their boss messaging them and them missing it. So they could never unwind. They were never waving their kids. When you and me were kids, the only people who were on call were the prime minister and doctors. Now half the economy is on call. So Metling recommended in the French government introduced what was called a legal right to disconnect. It's very simple. Everyone has a right to legally defined work hours. And they have a right outside those work hours to not have to check their phone or answer their email. So once Paris spoke to people about this, you know, companies now get fine. So Renterkill got to find 70,000 euros for telling off a worker for not answering his emails an hour after he clocked off work, right? So you can see how that makes it possible. There's no point giving people sweet self-help lectures about, oh, you'd feel much better if you unplugged. If they can't do it, right? We have to give people the social and practical means to do the things they know would make them better. Now there's lots of things that will improve people's attention that they may not know about. And obviously I talk about them in the book as well. But actually a lot of the things people know already they need to do, it's just that we need to change the society so that it is actually possible for people to do that. I think you had some version of this quote in your book that I think was attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the beginning of apartheid when he observed that there are so many people drowning in the river. You can only rescue so many without going upstream to find out who's pushing them in. That's what I love too about your other books, especially Lost Connections, this awareness that we are being pushed in but we are unaware of it and that the government that is encouraging us to behave a certain way are often handing love with those that are making us behave a certain way, as you said, the itching powder analogy. So what I love about your writing and again in Storben Focus is this going upstream, your whole approach, which I love you on, is you go upstream and you establish without any doubt a cause-and-effect relationship. That's what I think your huge gift to us as a writer is as well. All the things that just you quote to me now, it is it so builds and lares itself on this awareness that this is an undisputable issue, here's why it's happening, here's what we could therefore do about it. I feel so, I was going to ask you too, for I'll let you go, I feel hopeful when I read your books only because I feel I get it. You've given language to something I couldn't articulate, I can now see the narrative and I can see the cause-and-effect of what's happening upstream that's making us keep having to rescue people, but rescuing people is exhausting and we're going to lose people. Many are going to drown, we can't get to them all in time as I know you talked about a lot and lost connections. So are you hopeful for the future in light of what you've studied and researched? I'm really moved by what you just said, thanks Paul. I think a lot, when I think about hope I think a lot about my grandmothers. So I loved my Scottish grandmother, so I had two grandmothers, one was a working-class Scottish woman and one was a Swiss woman who lived on a farm in a mountain, so it should be what would then have been called a peasant. And I loved both my grandmothers, I was basically raised by my Scottish grandmother and when I think about, should we be hopeful, I think about the fact that my grandmothers were the age I am now in 1962. In 1962, neither of them were allowed to have bank accounts because they were married women. It was legal for their husbands to rape them, it was legal for their husbands to beat them in practice because the police never did anything about domestic violence. My Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote. They had both left school when they were 13, even though the men in their family stayed on at school because no one gave a shit about girls going to school. My Swiss grandmother loved to draw, she loved painting, but people were like, what the fuck are you doing, shut up, you're going to be a wife, put that away. At that time, 4% of members of parliament were women. In the entire world, there were no women who ran a company, a police force, a country. Men essentially controlled every single institution of power in the entire world and had since those things were created. And then I think about my niece, who's 17 now. My niece loves to draw and paint. And when we realised she could do that, everyone was like, oh great, go to art school, brilliant. Even crazed sexists wouldn't dream of suggesting that for girls like my niece, we should go back to what my grandmother's faced when they were the age I am now. I mean, if someone said that we should legalise rape within marriage, or we should ban women from having bank accounts, or we should take the vote away from women. I mean, even the outer edge of bonkers, misogynists don't say that, right? What happened? What changed? Those things didn't change because people, someone in power just handed it down, right? They changed because lots of women and some sympathetic men just banded together and said, we're not going to fucking take this anymore. Enough, right? Enough of this. And it was a long, hard fight. And I know how irritating it would be for women to hear me mansplaining this. We're not even halfway through the fight, right? And I think that about all sorts of things. You know, I'm gay. And I'm 42. I've seen changes I wouldn't even have dreamed of when I was a teenager. And I think a lot about another friend of mine, Andrew Sullivan, who lots of your listeners will know his work is a brilliant writer, journalist. In 1994, Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive. It was the height of the age crisis. As far as he knew there was no help in sight is best friend Patrick had just died of AIDS. And Andrew thought he had a couple of years to live. So he decided he quit his job. He was the editor of the New Republic magazine. He quit his job. And he went to a little place called Provincetown in Cape Cod to die. And he decided that before he died, he was going to do one last thing. He was going to write a book about a crazy utopian idea that no one had ever written a book about. And he thought, well, I'll never live to see this idea put into practice. No one alive now will ever see it put into practice. But maybe somewhere down the line, someone's going to pick up this book. The book he wrote was called Virtually Normal. And the idea he advocated was gay marriage. And when I get depressed, I think God were up against these powerful forces. I tried to imagine going back in time to 1994 to Provincetown and saying to Andrew, okay, Andrew, you're not going to believe me. But 26 years from now, 26 years from now, A, you're going to be alive. That would have blown his mind. B, you'll be married to a man. That's going to be legal. And C, I'll be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States quotes from this book you're writing, when it makes it mandatory for every state in the United States to introduce gay marriage. And the next day, you'll be invited to a White House lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to have dinner with the president, to celebrate what you and so many millions of other people have achieved. Oh, and by the way, that president, he's going to be black, right? Every aspect of that would sound like the most ridiculous, it'd be like me going poor. Okay, so 26 years from now, a trans president is going to invite us to smoke crack with her in the Oval Office, right? I mean, not that we want that. I mean, the trans president, yes, not the crack. I mean, no disrespect to anyone who does want the crack. I'm not judging. The incredible changes happen when enough people band together in a spirit of love and compassion, not a spirit of rage and hatred, a bit of love and compassion and appeal to other people and don't give up, right? So I'm optimistic in the sense that we're facing all sorts of trapdoors and tripwires as a species. There are many crises ahead of us. But there are solutions to these problems, right? Some of them are difficult and challenging. But there are solutions to these problems, whether it's our attention crisis. Okay, we can, I feel that I learned from the experts what the 12 causes of this crisis are. They are solvable, right? Some of them are solvable in very simple personal ways. And some of them are solvable in social ways. Well, the climate crisis, okay, this is a big crisis with potentially terrible consequences. And in fact, not potentially already with terrible consequences. But there are solutions to that. I actually think we won't be able to solve the climate crisis. If we don't solve our attention crisis, because species full of people who can't focus can't solve problems. But these things are solvable. And human beings respond to solutions when they're presented to them in a spirit of love and compassion. So yeah, I'm not mindlessly optimistic, it's going to require a huge amount of work. There's always a possibility that that work doesn't get done. And then we'll be in real trouble. And there are some crises that don't get solved. And you end up with tragedies. But I think my grandmother's they never met my niece. But I think they would be really proud if they saw her life. And they would be really glad that things got better. Yeah. And you know, that's that that's got a lesson in it for all of us. Love that. That's a great response. Hey, how can my listeners find you? Well, if you want to know more about the book, if you go to stolenfocusbook.com, you can see where to get the audio book, the ebook and the physical book. It'll also be in all, so that's a good bookstores. It'll even be in shipbook stores if you go into them. And not that there is such a thing as a shipbook store. And and if you want to know about my other books, if you go to johannhari.com, you can see stuff about them. And on the website for the book, you can so I said again, on the website for the book, you can see you can listen to audio of all the experts we've talked about for free. And you can listen to audio with the Amish, actually, my friends in the Amish and lots of other people that we've talked about. Yeah, funny, you just reminded me as one of the guys, what was his name comes to me in a second. But one of the Amish guys I interviewed. So when when you remember the Amish, one of the reasons why the Amish is never designated as a cult and is not a cult is that when you're 16, you have to leave. They make you leave for two years and you go and live in what they call the English world, which is the wider world. And then you have to decide whether you want to come back or not. And then an 80% decide to come back and 20%. No, but you can still come and visit if you but you can never again be an Amish if you don't come back. And this process is called going on rum springer. That's the the phrase is because they had dramatic rates. And I remember one of them said to me, I've always wanted to launch a brand of rum called rum springer, like an Amish brand of rum. I thought it was a genius. They're quite funny. Yeah, they're witty. Listen, thanks for your time. I really appreciate it. I'm a huge fan of huge respect for you. I think you're a great writer, my friend, and a genius and a beautiful human being too. I really appreciate the work you're doing. I'm really grateful to engage you with the book so deeply. And I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time. Let's hope keep in touch hopefully. Thanks, Johan. Cheers. Oh well, my friend. Speak soon. Thanks so much, Paul. Cheers, mate. Bye. Thanks, bye. Hey, thanks for being here today. Thanks for listening or watching this conversation with Johan. I hope you enjoyed it. Leave a comment if you did. Let's stay connected. Maybe you don't subscribe and you'd like to do that. Just hit the subscribe button and make that happen. Help me spread the word. If you think this podcast channel would be of interest to other people in your world, maybe help me put the word out and let people know if you feel without value to the world. Again, a huge thank you to you all for being here. This conversation, as you just heard and saw, was about focus and attention. Two things I highly value you giving in my direction. So thanks again for being here. Speak to you all soon. Thank you.