 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. His work has been praised by Oprah Winfrey and Joe Rogan and I understand why when I read his books and so will you when you read his latest book Stolen Focus. It's a book about how our focus has been stolen and our attention is being raided by corporations that are doing that for profitable gain, financial profitable gain and how it's in their vested interests never to lose our focus and never to lose our attention. Johan speaks about how he had the idea for the book or he was motivated to write the book after an interesting experience he had with his godson at Graceland, Elvis's home in Memphis of all places. It's a fascinating conversation for a good hour or so where he spoke about phrases in the book like surveillance capitalism about our hypervigilance that's been triggered by the theft of our attention and our focus and what we can do about it and how this is affecting us in ways none of us are fully aware of is 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. Thanks Johan thanks for being on the show today. Hey you're very stylish looking house I'm always impressed by people like tidy houses. Yeah this is my office we've got a big old farmhouse so I was able to just for my own space and keep it relatively tidy and work on the background looking effective rather than a virtual zoom background which can look terrible as you know. Yeah yeah yeah it never looks good does it? Listen I love the book thanks for bringing this out. I wanted to ask you I know it seems a simple question but why did you choose to write about this? I'm intrigued by how do you know what to choose to write about at any given time as an author because there's a difference between what you might enjoy and what other people might enjoy reading right because you often want people to read the book so how do you manage that how did you choose to write about this? For me for all my books because I spend such a long time on my books because my method is to travel all over the world and interview people related to the subject in all sorts of different places for me there's got to be a question that I want to know the answer to that at the start I don't know the answer to right and obviously I have I don't start as a completely blank slate I've got some ideas I've got my own theories but so with my first book Chasing the Scream we'd had a lot of addiction in my family I wanted to know well what causes addiction why do we go to war against people with addiction and that seems like such a disaster what are the actual alternatives in practice for my book about depression lost connections I wanted to understand why depression and anxiety going up so much right what's going on and with this book for a long time I'd had a sense that people's ability to focus and pay attention was getting worse but for a really long time I also told myself look every generation thinks that right you can read letters from monks a thousand years ago where they say oh our attention ain't what it used to be right that's not an exact quote but that's the gist of it right but but I've been wondering about this I've wanted to look into science but I was I was wary of it I thought you know is this going to be right and then there was this sort of precipitating event that happened to me where I thought oh you know what I do need to look into this I've got a godson who when he was nine he developed this brief but weirdly intense obsession with Elvis and everyone understood how he found out about Elvis but he started you know singing Blue Moon and Viva Las Vegas and suspicious minds all the time and he didn't know that that had become a kind of cheesy style so he was doing it with a kind of heart-catching sincerity and he kept getting me to tell him the story of Elvis from the beginning I skipped the bit at the end where he dies on the toilet obviously but and and what in telling the story of Elvis I mentioned that he built this palace called Graceland and one day I was tucking my godson in and he said to me yo ham will you take me to Graceland one day and I said yeah yeah of course in the way you do with small children when they ask you things and he said no do you really promise and I said yeah I promise and I didn't think about it again until 10 years later when a lot of things had really gone wrong so when when my godson was was 15 he dropped out of school by the time he was 19 he he just seemed to spend all his time alternating between his phone his ipad and his laptop and and his life seemed to be just a blur of like whatsapp uh snapchat and porn and and and it felt like he was fracturing as a person and in that decade in which he had become a man that was the extreme end of the spectrum but it felt like that had happened to a lot of people that it felt like with every year that passed things that required deep focus like reading a book are more and more like running up and down escalator some of us still do them but it seems to be getting harder and harder and I was sitting on my sofa with with my godson and I was looking at him just flicking between these devices I was trying to get a conversation going but it was like his his mind was sort of almost whirring at the speed of snapchat like nothing could gain any traction for very long and and and I could feel that happening to me it wasn't as extreme as it was for me as it was for him but and in one day I just thought we had to break this routine I said to him let's go to Graceland right he didn't even remember this Elvis obsession but I was like no seriously let's go to Graceland wow and and he said he all right and so I said I'd take him to the american south but there was one condition which is he had to agree that when we were there he would leave his phone in the hotel right he wouldn't just go around constantly texting and snapchatting and everything and he absolutely promised so we went there we went to New Orleans first but when we arrived at the gates of the gates of Graceland when you get there there isn't a physical guide who shows you around anymore this is even before Covid what what happens is they hand you an iPad and you put in headphones and the iPad shows you around so it says you know go left in this room this happened go right and there's in each room there's you're in there's a representation on the on the iPad of that room so what happens is everyone walks around Graceland just staring at their iPad so I'm walking around surrounded by these sort of blank a kind of united nations of blank faced people right and I'm trying to make eye contact with someone to go like isn't this funny like we're the people who travel 3 000 miles and we're the ones who actually looked up to see the place we came to right and there was one guy who after I've been there quite a while he made eye contact with me and I was about to say something and then I realized he'd only looked away from the iPad so he could take out his phone and take a selfie and in the end me and my godson we got to the jungle room which was Elvis's favorite room in the mansion it was it was kind of lots of fake plants and stuff and this couple next to me this Canadian couple were there and the husband turned to his wife and he said honey this is amazing look if you swipe to the left you can see the jungle room to the left and if you swipe to the right you can see the jungle room to the right and I sort of looked him and the wife's just sitting there swiping back and I said but so there's an old fashioned form of swiping you could do called turning your head because we're actually in the jungle room right you don't have to look at a digital representation of it we're actually there right and and they looked at me like I was completely mad and hurried out of the room and I turned to my godson who was next to me actually was just in the corner of the room but to kind of laugh about it but he was just looking through snapchat because from the moment we landed he'd just broken his promise he was constantly on his phone and I just really lost it I was like you know you're afraid of missing out but this is guaranteeing you're missing out look none of these people know how to be present with the things that are right in front of them and he stormed off as well and I wandered around Graceland on my own and that night I found him we were staying in the heartbreak hotel which is just across the street from Graceland and I found him by the guitar shape swimming pool and and he was sitting there looking at his phone and and I kind of realized like a lot of anger my anger at him was partly anger at myself um because I could feel these trends bearing on me as well and I remember him just looking at his phone and saying I know something's really wrong but I don't know what it is and that's when I thought yeah I need to investigate this I need to find out if this is a real crisis if it is what's causing it and is our attention really getting worse I think the evidence shows very clearly it is I can talk you through that and then most importantly well what do we do about it how do we get our brains back what is it in you Johan because even in your other books what is it in you that makes you want to chase that down because it's it's beyond journalistic to me when I read your writing it feels to me um an empathy a concern that you have it's not sociological journalistic that's in the mix but it seems to me that you have this concern I picked that up a lot in the book with your writing and your interviews is that are you aware of that inside you the energy like that you that triggering moment of grace line you thought I've got to chase this down it comes out of a concern to me that you're writing I know you're a journalist in your background but there's huge empathy and humanity in your writing oh that's really nice of you to say that I think I think I think the honest answer is I grew up in a very violent and mad family and environment and obviously that can affect people in all sorts of different ways but um I think some people who grow up in families where through no point of their own the adults are not capable of being adults or not or fully capable of being adults what it can do is produce people who from a very early age think I have to build solutions right and it can make you a very solution-oriented person and it can make you you know if you don't have adults you can solve problem look of course it can have all sorts of effects I don't want to and of course I'd much rather not have experienced childhood trauma it's not I'm you know I'm not saying it's a good thing but I think it partly can make you solution-oriented also it can just make you how would I put it that Rumi the 14th century Persian poet said the wound is where the light enters you which I really love and I think what it can do is if you've had an experience of extreme vulnerability or being in danger or not being cared for I think what it can do is make you very sensitive to other people who are in that situation and it can make you it can make you less inclined to just ignore that or yeah clearly it doesn't have that effect on everyone and I don't want to overstate this I've got lots of um uh unappealing parts of my character as well but but I do think I think probably that's where it comes from yes definitely comes through in your writing I'm intrigued too about you interview people in person rather than like this on a phone call obviously that's intentional why is that lots of people um say to me you know sorry for this book for example I traveled all over the world yeah over 250 of the leading experts in the world about right tension and focus and I went from a crazy mixture of people um and places I want to go to places not just experts although they were extremely important but um you know just places that have been affected by tension in interesting ways from favela in Rio de Janeiro where attention had collapsed in a particularly disastrous way to an office in New Zealand where they'd pioneered a really interesting way that restores people's attention and I think it's a combination of reasons um and I think it helps to think about during COVID nobody has said oh great another zoom meeting I guarantee no one listening has heard those words and the truth is if you interview someone of course everyone I interviewed I could have interviewed over zoom or Skype or whatever or phone um and the truth is and all journalists know this if you interview someone by zoom you get about 10 percent of what you get when you meet the person in the flesh partly because um you you're not really meeting them I'm not saying there's no value to these things of course and of course the pandemic would have been even harder to get through without them but but absolutely you you get you get a sense of the person I I find when I I mean there were a few people I interviewed for zoom for this project very few I would say maybe 10 percent of the 250 experts and the truth is I can't remember the ones I interviewed over zoom I mean I can go and read the transcript and I'm like oh yeah they said that right but the ones that I interviewed face to face I know them I can picture them I have a sensory memory of them and they were much more candid and open with me um so I think it's it's for all those reasons um that that it was yeah and it's almost just very often it's in the silences it's in the it's as you're walking out the door they go oh you know there's this other thing you can't leave a silence on zoom they just think the zoom is broken right very often the way you you you want people to continue is um I mean a technique is to kind of posh a word for it but like one you know if you ask someone a question and they give you a short answer if you just carry on looking at them and you carry on nodding you know rather like you're doing right now you know especially in person they'll just there's a pressure to carry on talking if you just leave silences people will often not every time but people often lean in and fill the silence so for me that's a really important and I think I don't know maybe this is a wanky I hadn't thought of it this quite this way before but I think the best way to go on an intellectual journey is to go on a physical journey I think there's something about because apart from anything else you know it took me three years to research this book just like it took me three years for each of my previous books and there's something about as well so let's imagine I've done them all on zoom I could have interviewed everyone on zoom in the space of two months right but there's also the thinking time of like oh so um I could name anyone from the book but let's choose a random one a guy called Professor Marcus Rycall who is an amazing professor in St. Louis, Missouri so I went to St. Louis, Missouri to interview him and then from there I remember right I went to Montreal to interview a load of other experts and even just leaving the interview with him having a day to wander around St. Louis then the time to get get to Montreal all that time I was thinking about him and that interview and processing that interview interesting and in a way that I could have just you know shut the interview you know click end meeting and then teleport effectively to Montreal but I wouldn't get that thinking the thinking time is as important for me as the and and we live in for the reasons I write about in the book we live in a culture that's chronically depriving people of thinking time and space to think and actually just on a journey there's just inevitably space to think right there's more than there is if I just stayed at home. I was saying the other day to my online mentorship tribe around the world that I speak to on zoom twice a month I was speaking to them about the decline of servant leadership in our world and trying to speak about that term that idea and that I think the world is shifting globally from you know self-serving leadership to servant leadership though it's not a mainstream term now I know and one of the things I was aware of is that one of the reasons why I think that has declined is because as you say as a baby boomer I'm 64 I grew up in proper community a bit like your Swiss childhood experiences where we were kind of all raising each of the skids any parent could clip anybody's kid around the ear they're all being jail now but back then it would my mother would thank people for clipping me around the even the local copper could do that and then the guy at the local store get my parents you know stuff on tick or on the slate as we say in England he also entered into the economy of community and did the best you could and then you know the cup of sugar metaphor literally that's what we did as kids I remember all of us my siblings going around borrowing stuff and people borrowing stuff from us something about that face-to-face communal physical involvement that you speak about a lot I know in Lost Connections I grew up in that and of course I realized my kids and my grandkids I've got eight grandkids are not growing up in that I can't find it anywhere so the face-to-face thing that you talk about I completely get that I as you describe it to me I'm thinking yeah the awareness that you're having a face-to-face is more than just the time you with that person it's on your mind during before during and after in the way you say the thing you're describing I think you're so right the thing you're describing it has all sorts of effects but one is relates to children's ability to pay attention so for every child who was diagnosed with attention problems when I was seven years old there's now a hundred children attention problems and there's been this huge rise in children struggling to pay attention at exactly the same time I think not by coincidence that childhood has been radically transformed so and I think there's there's evidence for five factors in this transformation of childhood that are that are severely harming children's ability to develop focus and attention I tell the so you're absolutely right that experience you have so 10 percent of children now ever play outdoors without adult supervision 10 percent and that 10 percent the average time they spend outdoors I think is something like 12 minutes a week so childhood has gone from being something that happened out in the open then happens almost entirely behind closed doors or under closed adult supervision and in the book I tell the story of an amazing woman called Lenore Schnazzi who so Lenore Lenore was a kid in a suburb of Chicago in the early 1960s and when she was five years old she would leave her house on her own and walk to school which was 15 minutes away she'd just catch up with her friends on the way there when they got to the school there was a 10 year old boy whose job was to be the lollipop man to walk the smaller kids across the road she would go into the school then she would leave school on her own and wander around the neighborhood for a few hours kids were just spontaneous they invent games sometimes they play ball games sometimes they invent their own games and then she'd make her make her way home for five or six o'clock when she was hungry that was how everyone's childhood was in the early 1960s and that's what my parents childhood was like that was what human childhood had always been like with a handful of exceptions like plantation slavery monstrous exceptions and that was childhood by the time Lenore by the time you got to the 1990s and Lenore had her own kids childhood had been completely transformed right no one let their children play outdoors and Lenore got involved in this controversy because so one day she took her son Izzy when he was nine on holiday to Mexico and they were in a resort and for the first time and she noticed that he would just run down every morning and the kids would meet up meet up with other kids in the resort and they would just play spontaneously all day and her son it was the first time she didn't have to jolt her son out of bed in the morning he would just and she suddenly rose but for the first time he was getting a taste of what she got for her entire childhood when he came when they came back to New York Lenore her son wanted a little bit of independence so one day he suggested to his mom that they lived in Queens suggested that his mother take him to Bloomingdales which is in Manhattan and leave him there and he could find his own way home so they sat on the floor of the map and they planned it all out and and and she did it and it was a catch in her heart as she left him and an hour later he came home all sweaty and happy and you know feeling really grown up and she was a great thing so she wrote she was a journalist she wrote an article saying what a great you know other parents might want to consider doing this and what happened to Lenore next was insane so she was described by several newspapers and TV shows as the worst mother in America wow she was put on TV shows where she was next to a parent whose child had been murdered as if those were equally likely scenarios that your child would be murdered and your child will be able to get the subway you know a few stops from Bloomingdales and but it led to actually this incredible experience for Lenore because she was well what happened to the culture because all these people saying she was America's worst mother had themselves experienced the kind of childhood she had experienced she's like what happened to parenthood and it's not that the world got more dangerous murder rates massively fell during that time they fell for adults and children and today your child is three times more likely to be hit by lightning than to be killed by a stranger so she's like well what's what's going on here right and she began she's set up an amazing group called let grow which is about restoring childhood and children's ability to play but the reason why I tell this story in my book about attentions is what I learned is there's scientific evidence for 12 different factors that are causing this attention crisis that have got us to the point where the average American college student now focuses on any one task for 65 seconds and the average office worker now focuses for only three minutes and one of those factors is the physical and psychological confinement of our children which is causing it's partly due to the way our school system runs which is terrible and harming attention we can talk about that but this factor you've raised which is really important one there are loads of ways in which it damages attention the first is really basic and obvious exercise right when you kids get to run around which they naturally want to do it causes their brain to grow bigger and to have more neurons physically prevent children from exercising right the second is the skills that children learn in play so think about when Lenore was in that neighborhood just wandering around at the edge of five and from then on what's she learning when she plays with the other kids she's learning how to make things happen right you have to suggest a game that the other kids go along she's learning how to persuade the other children and she's learning how to cope with disappointments sometimes the kids don't want to play the game you suggest sometimes you're going to lose the game she's learning a whole these are and these are not incidental skills as Dr Isabel Benke the Chilean expert on play put it to me you learn how to learn in playing right this is this isn't some some additional add-on this is how we learn to learn everything else we learn is built on this baseline of what children learn when they're playing the third factor is it helps you to cope with anxiety and kids who don't get to play are much more anxious because they they're not they haven't learned that experience of oh I try that it won't work okay I'll cope with disappointment this way and that the fourth is that children learn what they're what they're inherently interested in by running around and playing you know some kids learn that they're the class joker some kids learn that they're good at football some kids learn that they're you know like little science experiments whatever it is but if you're deprived of play if you're managed all the time you don't get to do those things you don't get to find out what you're good at and it's when you discover meaning that you can begin to pay attention this thing's meaningful to you you can pay attention to it and we've stripped all these things out of children's lives right and that's a key reason why our children are really struggling to focus and pay attention because this this common phrase now of on the spectrum seems to be what we're using about lots of these kids which may or may not be a valid diagnosis it may be much more to do with what you're talking about in the book that their focus has been stolen and hijacked rather than there's some autistic trait that needs to be diagnosed and the moment they're given that label and that paraphernalia kicks in it kind of begins to set a precedent for the trajectory of their lives it may be much more to do with what you're talking about don't you think yeah so it's important to stress that autism is a real thing and yeah huge strength as well as causing some drawbacks but but I think you're absolutely right what we what we've started doing with children is we profoundly pathologize difference right and all we even all we pathologize perfectly normal reactions right 73 only 73% of elementary schools in the United States have any kind of recess or what we call playtime right now those kids aren't malfunctioning when they want to run around what's crazy is our system is malfunctioning because we we act like it's normal to get a child who's six years old to sit still for eight hours a day that's crazy a tree hen system yeah exactly that's the the lunacy in it and I think you're right that there's you know I don't want to take this analogy too far but there's a guy I interviewed really made me think about this and it's called Professor Nicholas Dobman and he's a veterinary professor of veterinary science at Tufts University and one day about 20 years ago an owner of a dog came to see him because he was a consultant veterinary consulting dog was called Eagle and Emma she was a beagle and the owner said I've got a real problem my dog won't pay attention to anything my dog runs around all the time and my dog barks a lot what can I do so initially Professor Dobman assigned the owner and the dog to a training class but but it didn't make much difference it was a little bit but not much so at that point Professor Dobman you're going to think I'm joking about this I'm not diagnosed the dog with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin for the dog at which point a few months later the owner comes back and says it's great my dog doesn't bark anymore my dog doesn't run around all the time and and Nicholas Dobman is a pioneer of he's been called the the pied piper of drugging animals so he's been a huge pioneer of the extension of what used to be thought of as human psychiatric concepts to animals so he is partly due to his pioneering work that half of all zoos in the United States now admit that they drug their animals for example there was a polar bear called Snowball who used to pace all the time and Professor Dobman pioneered just giving the polar bear massive massive amounts of Ritalin and Prozac and the polar bear stopped pacing all the time and when I went to see Professor Dobman I thought ahead of time he would say to me about what he calls animal ADHD a lot of what people say about human ADHD I thought it's oh this is just a genetic problem and so on actually to be fair to him he was much more he had a much more sophisticated way of thinking about it he said I said Emma the Beagle do you think you've solved that problem do you think you've solved the problem for Snowball the polar bear he said of course not polar bear in the wild spends all day roaming around they walk right dozens and dozens of miles a dog is meant to have two hours off leash every day at least right these animals don't get that he said of course I'm dealing with a phenomenon that is a product of captivity right it's not some underlying you know biological problem and and I was really I thought it was really interesting because I started to ask myself well he used this phrase which is a lot of these animals have frustrated biological needs right so for example you tell me about another dog that was a sort of ADHD dog in inverted commas that lived in a tiny apartment in Manhattan ran around all the time chased its own tail and then was sent to live on a farm and mysteriously enough the ADHD disappeared when it could run around a farm so I started asking myself how much of the pathologization of children's attention problems now is analogous to Emma the Beagle not all of it is there are some people who as a result of their biological makeup are somewhat more likely to have attention problems than others so you don't want to entirely it's not entirely a result of the environment or not purely in it result of the environment but I think you can see very clearly that a lot of this is a response to the crazy way we expect children to live and there's a wonderful doctor called Sammy Tamimi in Lincoln here in Britain very moving he's a child psychiatrist and he took over a practice in Lincoln maybe uh when did Sammy start 15 years ago and he took over 27 kids who've been diagnosed with ADHD and were being drugged with Ritalin there's a very powerful stimulant drug and remember him describing to me a few of his cases there was a boy called Michael who was 11 so when he overtakes over these 27 cases he interviews all the kids right and their parents to sort of see if they should continue or whether he should pursue other solutions his boy called Michael what happened is he was playing up at school that's not his real name obviously he was playing up at school he was kicking off he was refusing to pay attention and Sammy asked Michael and his mother well when did this begin was anything happening in his life at that point it turned out that's the point at which his dad had left the family and not even spoken to his son so when Sammy's interviewing he's thinking oh maybe maybe this is maybe that's a factor right seems fairly obvious so Sammy phoned Michael's dad and explained to him the problems that his son was having and the dad was quite shame faced he came in to see Sammy and he agreed to start seeing his son once a week within a few months of seeing his dad once a week they began to wean him off these attention these very powerful stimulant drugs and Michael was fine right he didn't have some innate biological problem he missed his dad and he blamed himself for his dad going away now that's not going to be true for every child with attention problems clearly but it is going to be true for a lot of them so I think we need to think and there are more importantly there are lots of doctors and scientists who think we need to think about it but we've been thinking in a very simplistic way about children's attention problems we've also been thinking different in a different but very simplistic way about our own attention problems and I think we need to think in a much more sophisticated way hey thanks for being here today thanks for listening or watching this conversation with you and 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