Jan. 23, 2022

Why you can't focus with Johann Hari

Why you can't focus with Johann Hari
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Why you can't focus with Johann Hari
Why you can't focus with Johann Hari
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Season 7 Psychology & Neuroscience Mindfulness & Acceptance Physical Health

In this episode, Cass talks with Johann Hari, the New York Times best-selling author of “Chasing the Scream” and “Lost Connections” who is also famous for his TED Talks which have garnered over 80 million views. After experiencing his own declining attention and witnessing people around him being consumed by small screen addiction, Johann has applied his investigative skills to the topic of our inability to pay attention.
In his latest book, “Stolen Focus”, Johann outlines 12 different factors that contribute to our lost attention. He describes the perfect storm of environmental and lifestyle factors that have made us vulnerable to the tech companies that profit from our distractibility. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who feels like their capacity to pay attention is gradually being eroded and would like to get it back!
To learn more about Johann, his books and TED Talks: www.johannhari.com
Connect with Johann: www.twitter.com/johannhari101
Buy “Stolen Focus”: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/AoA6Ko
Connect with Cass:www.crappytohappypod.comhello@crappytohappypod.com 
www.instagram.com/crappytohappypodwww.tiktok.com/crappytohappypod
Join the free 7-day Happiness Challenge:www.cassdunn.com/happiness

Connect with Cass:

www.cassdunn.com
www.instagram.com/cassdunn_xo

Contact Crappy to Happy:

Email: hello@crappytohappypod.com
www.crappytohappypod.com
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www.tiktok.com/@crappytohappypod


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Transcript
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A listener production.

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Today, I am super excited to share with you a

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conversation I recently had with Johann Hari. Johan is a

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British writer who has written two New York Times best

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selling books, and he's just published a third book, which

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I am sure is going to follow in the same footsteps.

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You may know Yohann for his TED talks, which have

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together been viewed more than eighty million times. The first one,

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you married Call was called Everything you think you know

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about Addiction is Wrong, and that was the one where

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he made the case that the opposite of addiction is

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not sobriety, it's connection. And the second was called This

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could be Why You are depressed or anxious and it

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described how our increasing social isolation is a major contributing

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factor to mental illness in our society. And the book

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he wrote on that topic was called Lost Connections. So

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if you haven't seen his TED talks, I would highly

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recommend them.

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But more recently, Johann.

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Has applied his investigative skills to the topic of our

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inability to pay attention. If you are like me, you

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will have personal experience of the fact that our capacity

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to sustain our attention on any given task or topic

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is gradually being eroded. We are distractable, we are forgetful,

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and many of us blame technology, or we blame being

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busy and stressed the addictive nature of our phones for

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this problem. But Johanne has actually identified twelve different causes

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for our attention problems, including a whole lot of things

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that you may not have necessarily connected to your compulsive

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scrolling and your lack of focus and your goldfish mind.

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What I really love about Johann's work is that he

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has a gift for going straight to the source of

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the most cutting edge information on whatever topic it is

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that he's researching. He pulls together really complex information and

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he has a way of presenting it in a way

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that is very clear and very engaging. His book Stolen Focus,

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Why You Can't Pay Attention is basically the summary of

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all of this research. It's just been published. It is,

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without doubt, the best book that I have read on

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the topic of our inability to pay attention. I could

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not wait to talk to Johann about the book, and so,

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without further ado, here is my conversation with Johann.

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Hari.

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Johan, thank you.

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So much for being on the Crappy to Happy podcast.

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This morning for me, this evening for you. It is

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such a pleasure to have you here.

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I'm so happy to with you. Cas just saying I

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would killed to be in Australia right now, So this

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is the closest I'm going to get to being in

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Australia for quite a while. So I'm happy to be

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with you.

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Everybody in Australia would kill to get out of Australia.

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We've been a little bit lot here for the last

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two years.

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We just want to go.

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Somewhere right Britain, We'll have Australia. Everything will work out

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far Johan.

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I have been very fortunate to be reading an advanced

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copy of your book Stolen Focus, and first of all,

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it is brilliant. Thank you so much for the time

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that you have spent in investigating and raising the issues

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that you have in this book.

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Oh thank you.

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So this started for.

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You as noticing, as a lot of us do, that

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you were struggling to pay attention. You talked about, you know,

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starting to read and reading the same page over and over,

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and the fact that everybody is so glued to our

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phones and that we just are just our capacity to

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sustain attention on anything seems to be really diminishing, and

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I could relate to this so much personally. You did

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something drastic initially, and you decided that the Internet's obviously

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the problem. Social media is the probably going to take

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myself off all social media, going to remove myself from

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the Internet for three home months, which is a very

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very big.

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Drastic thing to do.

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I would love for you to talk about what led

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you to that decision, and I guess what your fears

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were and what you.

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Learned from that three months off the internet.

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Yeah, you know, I did it. I would love to

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tell you I did it for these big intellectual reasons

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that I wanted to intellectually understand our attention problems. The

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truth is that that's not actually why I did it.

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I couldn't bear the feeling that I had anymore of

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just being unable to focus, and I had this moment

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that really drove me to take that three month break.

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Like you say, for a long time, I'd had this

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sort of hunch that attention seemed to be getting worse.

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I could certainly feel mineas getting worse. So many of

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the people I knew kept describing their own attention as

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getting worse, and I would see these sort of eye

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catching studies. There's one study, small study of college students

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in the United States that found that, on average, they

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focus on any one thing for sixty five seconds. In fact,

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a median amount they focused was nineteen seconds, and the

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average office worker now focuses on anyone task for three minutes.

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I thought, oh, that seems that sounds bad to me.

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Is it really always been like that? But I would

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reassure myself by saying, well, doesn't every generation feel like this.

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Doesn't every generation feel that attention is getting worse? You

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know there's a letter that one monk wrote to another

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nearly a thousand years ago, going, God, my attention ain't

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what it used to be. And so I would reassure myself,

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I going, well, this is just an eternal human thing, right,

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And then there was this moment because I thought, can

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that be right? And then there was this moment when

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I thought, no, I need to actually investigate this. I've

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got a godson called Adam, who, when he was nine,

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developed this really freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley the

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way that nine year olds do, and he would kind

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of run around singing Viva Las Vegas or suspicious Mind.

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What was so cute about it is that he didn't

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know that that had become like a cheesy cliche. So

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he was doing with that kind of heart catching sincerity

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of kids who think they're being cool. And he kept

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getting me to tell him the story of Elvis's life

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over and over again, and I tried to obviously skip

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over the last and the last bit of it where

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guy's on a toilet. And one night I was tucking

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at him in and he looked at me very intensely,

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and he said, Johann, will you take me to Graceland

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one day? And I said, yeah, sure, in the way

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that you do with nine year olds, knowing they'll forget it.

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The next day, I said, too sure, and he said, no,

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do you really promise that one day you'll take me

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to Graceland? And I said, I promise, I'll take you

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to Graceland. And I didn't think of it again for

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ten years until everything had gone wrong. So he had

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dropped out of school when he was fifteen, and by

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the time he was nineteen, he was just living in

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this blur where he was constantly alternating between WhatsApp, snapchat,

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porn YouTube. And one day we were sitting on the

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sofa just you can't see it, but just from behind

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mine my laptop is I was looking at him and

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he was alternating between these devices and all these different

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apps on these devices, and it was like he's a

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lovely person, but it's like he was kind of whirring

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at the speed of snapchat, where nothing still or serious

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could reach him. And I was looking at my own

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phone and feeling kind of disgusted with myself that I

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was glued to my phone, and I suddenly remembered this

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moment from all those years before, and I said to him, Hey,

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let's go to Graceland. And he looked at me and

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it's like, what he didn't even remember this Elvis obsession

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until I reminded him of it. And I said, no, no, really,

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let's go to Graceland. We've got to break this numbing routine.

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This is no way to live. Let's go. And I said,

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but I'll take you on one condition, which is that

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when we go, you leave your phone in the hotel room.

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And he said, yeah, I'll do that, I promise, so literally,

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I think it was two or three weeks later, we

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flew from Heathrow to We went to New Orleans first

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and then we went to Memphis. And when you arrived

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at the gates of Graceland, there isn't a person to

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show you around anymore. Or this is even before COVID.

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The way it works as they hand you an iPad

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and you put in earbuds and the iPad guide you around,

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so it says, you know, go left, and it tells

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you about the room, and every room you go into

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there's a picture of that room on the iPad that appears.

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So we're walking around Graceland and I noticed that what's

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happening is everyone just walks around Graceland staring at their iPad,

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and I'm sort of feeling more and more tense. I'm like, oh,

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this isn't what we traveled here for. And I'm trying

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to make eye contact with someone to sort of laugh

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about it, to go isn't this funny. We're the people

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who traveled thousands of miles and actually looked at the

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place we gained to. And finally I made I quite

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a long way and I was able to make eye

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contact with one of the other people, and then I

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realized he'd only looked away from his iPad to take

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out his phone and take his selfie. And we got

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to the Jungle Room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland,

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which is kind of like a fake jungle with lots

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of fake plants that've frankly seen better days. And we're

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looking at I'm looking at it, and there's this couple

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next to me, a Canadian couple and the wife. The

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husband turned to his wife and he said, honey, this

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is amazing. Look. If you swipe left, you can see

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the Jungle room to the left, and if you swipe right,

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you can see the Jungle Room to the right. And

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I laughed because I thought he was being witty, and

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then I realized that him and his wife are just

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wiping left. Try and she goes, wow, look, And so

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I turned to this guy and I said, yeah, but sir,

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there's an old fashioned form of swiping you can do.

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It's called turning your head. Because we're actually in the

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Jungle Room. You don't have to look at a digital

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representation of it. We're actually there, right, And they of

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course looked at me like I was in say back

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to it, and I said, no, no, do you understand

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we're in the jungle room, you don't have to look

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at your iPad and they sort of ran off understandably,

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and I turned to my godson to sort of laugh

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about it, and he was in the corner looking at Snapchat,

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because from the minute we landed he'd been completely unable

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to keep his promise. He was constantly looking at his phone.

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And I stormed up to him and I said, you know,

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I know you're afraid of missing out, but this is

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guaranteeing you will miss out. You're not present at any

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of the events of your life. And I tried to

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grab the phone of him and he stormed off as well,

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in the same direction as the Canadian couple, and so

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I kind of just stomped around Graceland on my own

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for the afternoon. And that night I found him, my

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god son at the Heartbreak Hotel, which is where we

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were staying. There's a guitar shaped swimming pool where they

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play a constant loop of Elvis songs and he was

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sitting there looking at his phone, and I went up

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to him and I apologized, and he said, look, I

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know something is really wrong here, but I don't know

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what it is. And that's when I thought I need

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to look into this. I need to figure out what's

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going on so later. As you know, for the book,

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I traveled all over the world, including some really key

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moments in Australia, and I interviewed over two hundred of

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the leading experts about focus experts on focus in the world.

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But when I got back from Memphis, I was so

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disgusted at myself and so horrified by this trend. I

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decided to do exactly as you, as you says, this

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disdrastic thing for myself, which is, you know, it's in

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this incredibly fortunate position that I could do that, cause

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my previous books had sold well. I just booked a

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room in a beach house in a place called Provincetown,

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which is in Cape Cod, and I said, everyone, I'm

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going completely off the internet for three months. I'm not

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going to have a smartphone, I'm not going to have

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a laptop that can connect to the internet. I'm just

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I'm done. I'm exhausted. I can't bear this. So I

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went to Provincetown, which is a little gay resort town.

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To give you a sense of what it's like. It's

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the kind of place where more than one person makes

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a full time living by dressing as a Cela, the

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villain from The Little Mermaid, and singing songs about kind

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of lingis. It's a great play. And it was a

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really strange experience because at first, the first few weeks,

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I walked around in this haze of decompression and I

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was so relieved. And then I had this really nasty

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crash where I felt this incredible hunger for the rewards

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that we get from the internet. You know, the likes,

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the retweets were all exposed to these thin, insistent signals

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all the time, and I really felt this desperate hunger

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for them. You know, I wanted to snatch phones off

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of people and be like, oh, give me that, right

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and then and then once I got through that and

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I found my way to a greater sense of meaning

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in Provincetown, I was amazed by how deeply my attention

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came back, and I felt amazing. You know, I'd really

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thought that, just because of age I'm forty two now

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I was thirty nine then, that my brain had deteriorated.

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And suddenly I found that I could focus in the

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way I had when I was a teenager. It was

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this incredible transformative experience, and at the end of it,

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I was like, the end of the three months, I

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was like, well, I'm going to live like this for

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the rest of my life. I'm never going to go

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back to that. And then I was reunited with my

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phone in my laptop when I got the ferry over

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to Boston, and within a month I was as bad

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as I'd ever been, and I thought, Oh, what's happening here?

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And I went to Moscow later to interview an amazing

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man named doctor James Williams, who's probably the most important

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philosopher and attention in the world. And he said to me,

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you've made a mistake here thinking that you can solve it.

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There's things you can do as an individual that will help,

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but thinking you can solve it on your own is

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like thinking the solution to air pollution is to wear

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a gas mask, Right, it's going to help. If I

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lived in Beijing, I would wear a gas mask, but

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it's not going to solve the problem. And I was like, oh, well,

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so that's when I had to go on this much

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bigger journey to meet all these experts and figure out, okay,

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well what can we do then?

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Yeah, And of course we all are kind of aware

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of the addictive name nature of social media. Many of

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us have watched the Netflix series The Social Dilemma. I

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think personally, I feel like we are so habituated, like

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we don't know life without our phones. Like the idea

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of you going off the internet completely, I mean, how

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do you do anything.

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Without access to the internet. So I think we're just

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resigned to the fact that that is just how it is,

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and that we can't do anything about that.

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And it's this sort of vague, ambiguous idea that you know,

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we're getting a dopamine rush and are well, ah, well,

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we sort of feel like the benefits of the Internet

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and the social media outweigh the costs. Why should we

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be concerned about the way those apps, I guess and

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platforms are are geared to get us hooked.

293
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Well, one of the things I learned that was so

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interesting is actually there's scientific evidence for twelve different factors

295
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that are degrading our attention. Is only one of them,

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and interestingly, it isn't the biggest, which surprised me. But

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even the element that relates to tech, I think we

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need to understand quite differently. And there's a kind of

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historical analogy that I think that helped me to think

300
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about it. So a lot of people, a lot of

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your listeners will remember, in the nineteen seventies it became

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undeniable that the lead we were using to pain, in

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paint and in petrol was really damaging people's brains. There's

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actually very good evidence exposure to lead causes brain inflammation,

305
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really damages children's ability to pay attention and think. So,

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I mean, actually they knew that, going right back to

307
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ancient rome, that led screws up your brain, but the

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lead industry just denied it for a really long time.

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And by the seventies the science was so overwhelming that

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the lead industry couldn't suppress it anymore. So what happened

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we did not ban paint, and we did not ban petrol.

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You will have noticed, I'm in a room that's been painted,

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so are you. You know there are cars outside by

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window going past, which happened in their tanks. What we

315
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did is we banned the lead in the petrol. And

316
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it turns out with the tech there's something similar. Now,

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there's some degree to which the invention of these technologies

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would have had some effect on our attention. But actually,

319
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and this was fascinating spending a lot of time in

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Silicon Valley with the people who designed the world in

321
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which we now lived, many of them that actually, a

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lot of the damage to our attention is not being

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done by the tech itself. It's being done by a

324
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specific aspect of the tech is a bit analogous to

325
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the lead that used to be in paint and petrol.

326
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And it took me a long time to understand this,

327
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And there's a moment it began to fall into place

328
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for me, so I interviewed I was walking around San

329
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Francisco with my friend Tristan Harris, who you probably know.

330
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You mentioned the social dilemma, and I was interviewing him

331
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long before he worked on that documentary. But the and

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Tristan said to me one day, for people who don't know,

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by the way, he's a former Google engineer who was

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at the heart of designing many of the things that

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we use every day, and then became very uncomfortable with

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what he was doing because it was destroying his own

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attention and he could see it destroying the attention of

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people around him. So he became this outspoken proponent of

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dealing with these problems. Christ An said to me one

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day you open Facebook now, it'll tell you all sorts

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of things. Right, it will tell you whose birthday is,

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It'll tell you who tagged you in a photo. It'll

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tell you what you said on that date ten years before.

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There's one thing Facebook won't tell you. There's no button

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on Facebook that would say that says I'd like to

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meet up with one of my friends. Is there anyone

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around who wants to meet up? Right? There's no button.

348
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That's an incredibly technologically easy button to design. We all

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know dating apps that work that way. Why does Facebook

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not provide it? Everyone listening would know that that would

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be really popular. Facebook's users would really like that. If

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you follow the trail from that question, why doesn't Facebook

353
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provide that thing? We would all like I think you

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begin to understand some of the ways in which our

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attention is being invaded and some of how we can

356
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get it back without becoming the armish or renouncing our phones,

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which clearly we're not going to do a noise should we.

358
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So the reason Facebook doesn't have that button is kind

359
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of simple. When you open Facebook, they make money in

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two ways. First way is really obvious. You see ads.

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We all know how that works. The second way is

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much more important. Everything you say on Facebook is scanned

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and sorted by their AI. So let's say over the years,

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you've clicked that you like Kylie Minogue, Donald Trump, and

365
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you've told your mum that you just bought some nappies. Right,

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so Facebook is figuring out, Okay, you're a man in

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my case, you like Kylie Minogue, you're probably gay. Oh

368
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you like Donald Trump, which I'm sure you can guess

369
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I don't. Okay, your right wing, and oh, you just

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bought some nappies. You've probably got a baby. Right now,

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they've got tens of thousands of pieces of information like

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that about you. They've got a very detailed sense of

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who you are. And the reason they build up that

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00:19:01.119 --> 00:19:04.440
information is because you are not the customer of Facebook.

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You are the product they sell to advertisers. So if

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I'm an advertiser who's selling nappies, you don't want to

377
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target an ad at me. I don't have a baby.

378
00:19:12.880 --> 00:19:15.079
You want to target it to someone who's got a baby. Right,

379
00:19:15.400 --> 00:19:18.960
So you're constantly they're selling this profile to you. Now,

380
00:19:19.240 --> 00:19:21.799
imagine that Facebook introduced that button I want to meet

381
00:19:21.839 --> 00:19:24.480
up with my friends. What would happen Let's say you

382
00:19:24.480 --> 00:19:26.680
push that button and I push that button, like, Oh,

383
00:19:26.839 --> 00:19:28.680
Cass wants to meet up, Let's go for a coffee.

384
00:19:29.079 --> 00:19:32.000
You would close Facebook and I would close Facebook, and

385
00:19:32.039 --> 00:19:34.599
we would look into each other's faces and smile, you know,

386
00:19:34.960 --> 00:19:37.319
and talk to each other and pay attention to each other.

387
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For Facebook, that's a disaster. Every moment you do that,

388
00:19:40.720 --> 00:19:45.759
they're losing both of those revenue streams. Right, So their

389
00:19:46.039 --> 00:19:48.839
entire Just like the business model for KFC is how

390
00:19:48.839 --> 00:19:51.519
do I get Cass to eat fried chicken? The business

391
00:19:51.519 --> 00:19:54.279
model for Facebook is how do I get Cass to

392
00:19:54.359 --> 00:19:57.440
keep scrolling for as long as possible and as many

393
00:19:57.519 --> 00:19:59.519
times a day? Right, This is what the people at

394
00:19:59.559 --> 00:20:02.200
the heart are the but themselves say. Sean Parker, one

395
00:20:02.240 --> 00:20:05.119
of the biggest initial investors in Facebook, said, we designed

396
00:20:05.160 --> 00:20:08.039
it to maximally take people's attention. We knew what we

397
00:20:08.039 --> 00:20:10.000
were doing, and we did it anyway. God only knows

398
00:20:10.039 --> 00:20:12.839
what it's doing to our kids' brains, That's what he said. Right,

399
00:20:13.640 --> 00:20:17.279
So that can feel like it is a very big thing, right,

400
00:20:17.960 --> 00:20:21.200
because the more you scroll, the more money they make.

401
00:20:21.880 --> 00:20:25.920
All of their engineers, all of this extraordinary human intelligence

402
00:20:26.440 --> 00:20:29.880
is geared towards that one thing. What techniques can we

403
00:20:29.960 --> 00:20:34.160
design to keep you scrolling? But the reason this becomes

404
00:20:34.160 --> 00:20:35.799
a bit like the lead in the pain and not

405
00:20:35.920 --> 00:20:40.400
the paint itself is because I learned. I remember the

406
00:20:40.440 --> 00:20:43.279
specific moment again that this first fell into place to me.

407
00:20:43.319 --> 00:20:46.440
I was interviewing someone called as Of Raskin, who designed

408
00:20:46.480 --> 00:20:48.559
one of the key aspects of how the Internet works.

409
00:20:49.720 --> 00:20:53.200
His dad, Jeff, actually designed the Apple Macintosh for Steve

410
00:20:53.279 --> 00:20:56.319
Jobs and ASA said to me, look, if you want

411
00:20:56.319 --> 00:20:58.440
to deal with these negative effects on people's attention, you

412
00:20:58.480 --> 00:21:02.599
do one thing, ban the current business model. So just

413
00:21:02.640 --> 00:21:05.640
like we banned lead in paint, just say we do

414
00:21:05.720 --> 00:21:10.960
not permit companies to surveil us, track us, to figure

415
00:21:11.000 --> 00:21:14.799
out weaknesses in our attention and sell those weaknesses to

416
00:21:14.799 --> 00:21:17.279
the highest bidder. We don't allow it. It's in human,

417
00:21:17.519 --> 00:21:20.200
it's anti human. It's not allowed. And I said to him,

418
00:21:20.200 --> 00:21:21.920
and lots of other people in Silicon Valley said this

419
00:21:21.960 --> 00:21:23.240
was a solution to me as well, And I said,

420
00:21:23.200 --> 00:21:26.519
tod Asa, okay, but let's imagine we did that. So

421
00:21:26.519 --> 00:21:29.079
I was trying to get my head around it. What

422
00:21:29.200 --> 00:21:31.319
happens if I open Facebook the next day? Does it

423
00:21:31.400 --> 00:21:34.240
just say, oh, sorry, we've gone fishing day after a ban,

424
00:21:34.880 --> 00:21:37.319
He said, of course not. What would happen would be

425
00:21:37.960 --> 00:21:40.000
they would have to move to a different business model.

426
00:21:40.519 --> 00:21:42.359
And there's lots of other possible business models that we

427
00:21:42.400 --> 00:21:44.200
all know about. One is like Netflix. It could be

428
00:21:44.240 --> 00:21:47.960
subscription and we could pay fifty cents a month. Another model,

429
00:21:48.160 --> 00:21:52.759
which everyone listening has experienced with everyone listening is close

430
00:21:52.799 --> 00:21:56.519
to a sewer pipe right now. Before we had sewage pipes,

431
00:21:56.559 --> 00:21:58.640
we had you know, shit in the streets, and we

432
00:21:58.759 --> 00:22:02.720
got cholera. So we all pay for the sewers to

433
00:22:02.759 --> 00:22:05.079
be built and maintained together because we all have an

434
00:22:05.119 --> 00:22:07.519
interest in avoiding that. Now it might be in the

435
00:22:07.559 --> 00:22:10.319
same way we want. Just like we own the sewer

436
00:22:10.359 --> 00:22:12.759
pipes together, we might want to own the information pipes

437
00:22:12.799 --> 00:22:16.759
together because we're getting the attentional equivalent of cholera and

438
00:22:16.799 --> 00:22:19.519
on all sorts of other negative effects. But whatever the

439
00:22:19.559 --> 00:22:22.079
alternative model we adopt is. The most important thing is

440
00:22:22.640 --> 00:22:26.000
once the incentives change, the product can change. At the moment,

441
00:22:26.799 --> 00:22:29.480
you're not the customer, you're the product. But if we

442
00:22:29.519 --> 00:22:32.440
move to one of those other business models, suddenly you

443
00:22:32.559 --> 00:22:34.839
are the customer. They have to ask God, what does

444
00:22:34.880 --> 00:22:37.759
Cass want? Oh Cass wants to meet up with her friends. Okay,

445
00:22:37.839 --> 00:22:40.960
let's introduce a button to do that. Oh Cass wants

446
00:22:41.000 --> 00:22:43.079
to have an ability to pay attention. Okay, Well, let's

447
00:22:43.119 --> 00:22:46.160
want to pluck one example. Let's warn her every time

448
00:22:46.200 --> 00:22:48.359
we send her a link. You think this will take

449
00:22:48.400 --> 00:22:50.559
you only five seconds. In fact, it takes on average

450
00:22:50.599 --> 00:22:53.680
twelve minutes when we send someone a link. There's a

451
00:22:53.799 --> 00:22:56.799
thousand ways in which Facebook could be redesigned, not to

452
00:22:56.920 --> 00:22:59.839
hack your attention, but to heal your attention. But to

453
00:23:00.119 --> 00:23:03.960
do that, we have to change the business incentives. They're

454
00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:05.480
never going to do that on their own, any more

455
00:23:05.519 --> 00:23:07.880
than the lead industry was on its own going to

456
00:23:07.880 --> 00:23:10.440
ban leaded patrol. Right, they were never going to do that.

457
00:23:10.519 --> 00:23:12.599
Of course, they made money out of it. They only

458
00:23:12.599 --> 00:23:14.359
did it because we made them. It was actually a

459
00:23:14.359 --> 00:23:19.079
campaign in Britain by what they called housewives that wanted

460
00:23:19.079 --> 00:23:21.160
to protect their kids from lead that did that, right,

461
00:23:21.400 --> 00:23:23.799
that achieved the ban in Britain. There were similar campaigns

462
00:23:23.799 --> 00:23:29.960
all over the world, including in Australia. So we absolutely

463
00:23:30.680 --> 00:23:33.079
don't It doesn't have to work the way it currently

464
00:23:33.079 --> 00:23:35.319
works the way Dr James Williams, the guy I mentioned before,

465
00:23:35.319 --> 00:23:39.519
but it to me was the Acts existed for one

466
00:23:39.559 --> 00:23:42.200
point four million years before anyone thought to put a

467
00:23:42.200 --> 00:23:44.799
handle on it. The Internet has existed for less than

468
00:23:44.839 --> 00:23:47.960
ten thousand days. It doesn't have to work the way

469
00:23:47.960 --> 00:23:49.680
we've had it up to now. We can change it

470
00:23:49.720 --> 00:23:50.359
if we want to.

471
00:23:50.960 --> 00:23:53.759
That's so interesting, And obviously to do that, to make

472
00:23:53.799 --> 00:23:56.839
a change like that requires a coming together.

473
00:23:56.960 --> 00:24:00.920
Of you know, individuals for a colorive cause.

474
00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:04.160
And the other thing I found really interesting and you know,

475
00:24:04.240 --> 00:24:07.880
kind of alarming in your book was about the very

476
00:24:07.920 --> 00:24:14.079
fact that social media is also diminishing. It's basically creating

477
00:24:14.119 --> 00:24:16.519
more division. And I would love for you to talk

478
00:24:16.559 --> 00:24:19.119
a little bit about that, about how the algorithms work

479
00:24:20.079 --> 00:24:23.119
to promote this division, so they're actually getting in the

480
00:24:23.160 --> 00:24:26.640
way of our capacity to come together to create solutions

481
00:24:26.680 --> 00:24:29.799
to some of these huge problems, not just this, but

482
00:24:30.160 --> 00:24:33.920
but you know, climate change, all sorts of major problems.

483
00:24:33.599 --> 00:24:34.039
In the world.

484
00:24:34.559 --> 00:24:37.039
Yes, as you know, most of my book Stolen Focus

485
00:24:37.119 --> 00:24:40.279
is about individual attention, and you know, the way so

486
00:24:40.359 --> 00:24:44.160
much we pay attention in our everyday lives. There's also

487
00:24:45.240 --> 00:24:49.680
a really important layer to this, which is our collective attention, right,

488
00:24:49.680 --> 00:24:53.240
how we pay attention as a society, And if you

489
00:24:53.240 --> 00:24:56.480
have a society of people whose individual attention has been

490
00:24:56.519 --> 00:24:58.480
stolen and is in a terrible state, that that will

491
00:24:58.480 --> 00:25:05.079
of course lead to real problems collectively. But you're absolutely right,

492
00:25:06.279 --> 00:25:11.319
and this isn't this isn't what the social media companies intended,

493
00:25:11.400 --> 00:25:15.960
but it's an effect of their products entirely because of

494
00:25:16.000 --> 00:25:18.720
the existing business model. It's not inherent to the idea

495
00:25:18.759 --> 00:25:24.160
of social media. So, like I say, their goal, their

496
00:25:24.240 --> 00:25:26.599
sole purpose is to keep you scrolling and maximize the

497
00:25:26.640 --> 00:25:29.920
amount of time you scroll. So all of their algorithms

498
00:25:29.920 --> 00:25:32.920
are designed constantly scanning the behavior of everyone to figure

499
00:25:32.920 --> 00:25:35.400
out how do we keep them scrolling, what keeps people looking?

500
00:25:36.559 --> 00:25:39.920
And those algorithms, while doing that, stumbled upon an uncomfortable

501
00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:44.000
human truth, a difficult, challenging human truth. It's something that

502
00:25:44.039 --> 00:25:46.039
psychologists have actually known about for a very long time.

503
00:25:46.039 --> 00:25:49.119
It's called negativity bias. It's very simple. Anyone who's ever

504
00:25:49.119 --> 00:25:52.599
seen a car crash on the motorway knows what negativity

505
00:25:52.599 --> 00:25:55.480
bias is. You stared at the car crash a lot

506
00:25:55.519 --> 00:25:57.400
longer than you stared at the pretty flowers on the

507
00:25:57.440 --> 00:25:59.839
other side. Of the road. Humans will stare longer at

508
00:25:59.839 --> 00:26:01.880
the things that anger and upset them than they do

509
00:26:03.160 --> 00:26:06.519
at things that please them. This goes right back. This

510
00:26:06.559 --> 00:26:09.680
is very early in human evolution. Even ten week old

511
00:26:09.720 --> 00:26:11.599
babies will stay longer at an angry face than a

512
00:26:11.599 --> 00:26:14.839
happy face. And it's probably for a good reason in

513
00:26:14.839 --> 00:26:17.599
our evolution that you know, you probably wanted to watch

514
00:26:17.640 --> 00:26:22.079
out for the things that were scary, but takes when

515
00:26:22.079 --> 00:26:25.440
that takes place on social media, when the algorithm has

516
00:26:25.440 --> 00:26:27.920
discovered this, it has a horrendous effect. So what the

517
00:26:27.960 --> 00:26:31.880
algorithm is discovered is you, cass will keep scrolling longer

518
00:26:31.920 --> 00:26:33.720
if we show you things that make you angry and

519
00:26:33.839 --> 00:26:36.240
upset compared to if we show you things that make

520
00:26:36.279 --> 00:26:39.279
you happy. So that means the algorithms begin to select

521
00:26:39.359 --> 00:26:42.160
for things that make you angry. So imagine that. Just

522
00:26:42.359 --> 00:26:44.720
think about that, just at a personal level. Imagine two

523
00:26:44.759 --> 00:26:47.400
teenage girls who go to the same party and they

524
00:26:47.480 --> 00:26:50.119
leave and go home on the same bus, and one

525
00:26:50.119 --> 00:26:52.359
of them does a Facebook status update where she says

526
00:26:53.319 --> 00:26:56.519
that was such a nice party. Everyone looked good at

527
00:26:56.559 --> 00:26:59.279
a great time, and another teenage girl on the same

528
00:26:59.279 --> 00:27:02.480
bus says, I can use this language because you spend

529
00:27:02.480 --> 00:27:04.359
a lot of time with my niece. Looking at social media,

530
00:27:05.359 --> 00:27:08.480
it says Karen was a complete slag at that party.

531
00:27:08.640 --> 00:27:11.759
She looks so dog ugly, and she tried to sleep

532
00:27:11.799 --> 00:27:14.799
with my friend's boyfriend, and her boyfriend stinks like shit.

533
00:27:15.400 --> 00:27:18.440
Just a stream of negative comments, right. The algorithm will

534
00:27:18.480 --> 00:27:20.680
of course pick up on both of these, and it

535
00:27:20.720 --> 00:27:23.160
will put that first status update, the nice one, into

536
00:27:23.160 --> 00:27:25.920
a few people's feeds, but it will put the second

537
00:27:25.920 --> 00:27:30.039
one into far more people's feeds because the algorithm knows.

538
00:27:30.079 --> 00:27:35.400
It scans for angry and outraging words like slag, stink, anger, hate,

539
00:27:35.960 --> 00:27:38.480
and it knows that if it puts that into people's feeds,

540
00:27:38.680 --> 00:27:40.680
more people will look at it for longer because you'll

541
00:27:40.720 --> 00:27:43.160
be shocked, it makes you angry, More people will engage,

542
00:27:43.160 --> 00:27:44.839
They'll go, how can you say Karen's a slag, You're

543
00:27:44.880 --> 00:27:47.279
a slag, whatever it might be. That's a literal conversation

544
00:27:47.279 --> 00:27:50.960
as your my nieces social media recently, so you can

545
00:27:50.960 --> 00:27:53.839
see how that's really damaging at the level of just ordinary,

546
00:27:54.200 --> 00:27:58.960
you know, everyday human interaction. When that effect happens not

547
00:27:59.079 --> 00:28:01.920
just with people describing a party they've been to, but

548
00:28:02.119 --> 00:28:06.680
people describing say, a political party. You begin to see

549
00:28:06.960 --> 00:28:09.480
think about the trends we've seen all over the world

550
00:28:09.559 --> 00:28:12.119
in the last you know, seven eight years. Now, this

551
00:28:12.200 --> 00:28:14.039
is not the only reason why the happening. It's important

552
00:28:14.039 --> 00:28:20.079
stress at as many reasons. But think about you know, in

553
00:28:20.200 --> 00:28:26.279
countries as different as Britain, Brazil and Australia, you've seen

554
00:28:26.839 --> 00:28:33.960
everywhere arise in toxic rage, hatred, refusal to listen to

555
00:28:34.000 --> 00:28:38.920
the other side, desire to destroy the other side, all sorts. Now,

556
00:28:38.920 --> 00:28:44.480
these are partly the product of these disasters trans In fact,

557
00:28:44.480 --> 00:28:51.359
when Brazil elected a very extreme far right president called

558
00:28:51.440 --> 00:28:55.559
Jaya Bolsnaro, who in a debate in the Brazilian Senate

559
00:28:55.559 --> 00:28:58.599
when he was a senator, had told in a debate

560
00:28:58.640 --> 00:29:02.119
about rape, told the feat email senators, you don't need

561
00:29:02.119 --> 00:29:04.400
to worry about rape. You're so ugly, you're not worthy

562
00:29:04.400 --> 00:29:09.480
of it. When he became president, his supporters on election

563
00:29:09.680 --> 00:29:16.160
night at the rally chanted Facebook Facebook Facebook, because they

564
00:29:16.279 --> 00:29:18.920
knew it was the Facebook algorithms that are promoted Bolscenaro

565
00:29:19.200 --> 00:29:22.200
and led to his victory. In fact, Facebook's own internal

566
00:29:22.319 --> 00:29:28.000
research found that one third of all the people who

567
00:29:28.160 --> 00:29:33.720
joined neo Nazi groups in Germany did so because Facebook's

568
00:29:33.720 --> 00:29:37.920
algorithms specifically recommended they joined that group. You might want

569
00:29:38.000 --> 00:29:39.839
to join, it said, and then it was followed by

570
00:29:39.880 --> 00:29:44.119
a neo Nazi group. So we can see how both

571
00:29:44.119 --> 00:29:47.000
at an individual and a collective level, our attention is

572
00:29:47.079 --> 00:29:51.000
really being assaulted by this model, which is why we

573
00:29:51.119 --> 00:29:54.319
have to defend ourselves. Right, we had to protect ourselves,

574
00:29:55.200 --> 00:29:56.720
we had to protect our children, and we have to

575
00:29:56.759 --> 00:29:59.640
protect ourselves against the effects of this catastrophic model. And

576
00:29:59.640 --> 00:30:01.480
those are just two of the negative effects. There's loads

577
00:30:01.519 --> 00:30:05.559
more that we haven't talked about. Obviously, we absolutely can

578
00:30:05.599 --> 00:30:07.759
deal with this because you're right, a lot of the

579
00:30:07.759 --> 00:30:11.400
times people talk about the problems with the technology, people

580
00:30:11.440 --> 00:30:13.240
say exactly what you said. You put it really well,

581
00:30:13.319 --> 00:30:15.519
which is, well, we get more benefit than harm from it,

582
00:30:16.079 --> 00:30:18.160
and you know, what are we going to do anyway?

583
00:30:18.160 --> 00:30:20.960
We're not going to give up our phones. And that's

584
00:30:21.039 --> 00:30:23.799
exactly how these social media companies want us to think

585
00:30:23.839 --> 00:30:27.519
about it. But actually it's about explaining to people it's

586
00:30:27.680 --> 00:30:31.279
not inherent to the technology. These toxic effects, some negative

587
00:30:31.319 --> 00:30:33.960
effects are inherent to the technology. It would be more distracting, whatever,

588
00:30:34.880 --> 00:30:38.480
but it wouldn't be this scale of invasion of our attention, right,

589
00:30:38.720 --> 00:30:42.519
it wouldn't be this level of horror, and that to

590
00:30:42.599 --> 00:30:45.400
me is very empowering message. Right, just like it's not

591
00:30:45.480 --> 00:30:47.759
inherent to lead and paint that it will destroy our attention.

592
00:30:47.839 --> 00:30:50.359
It was leaded paint and leaded petrol. There's a very

593
00:30:50.359 --> 00:30:51.319
similar effect going on.

594
00:30:55.079 --> 00:30:58.319
I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the

595
00:30:58.400 --> 00:31:01.279
benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are

596
00:31:01.440 --> 00:31:04.119
enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe

597
00:31:04.200 --> 00:31:06.480
so that you get notified when you EPs drop and

598
00:31:06.599 --> 00:31:09.000
head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen

599
00:31:09.079 --> 00:31:18.440
and leave us a rating and review. I pulled a

600
00:31:18.519 --> 00:31:21.480
quote out from your book which was that something like,

601
00:31:21.640 --> 00:31:24.240
if you live within fifty meters of a major highway,

602
00:31:24.279 --> 00:31:28.279
you're fifteen percent more likely to experience dementia.

603
00:31:28.799 --> 00:31:30.039
So the effect of.

604
00:31:30.039 --> 00:31:33.519
Our environment of pollution and the world we live in,

605
00:31:33.759 --> 00:31:36.079
not to mention what we're putting into our bodies, our diet,

606
00:31:36.279 --> 00:31:41.440
there are all of these other causes of our diminishing attention.

607
00:31:42.720 --> 00:31:43.519
What do you think of it?

608
00:31:43.839 --> 00:31:45.240
Well, I guess can you just talk a little bit

609
00:31:45.279 --> 00:31:48.640
about that just to raise people's awareness of so it

610
00:31:48.759 --> 00:31:50.440
isn't just all social media.

611
00:31:50.720 --> 00:31:52.319
There are lots of other things at play here.

612
00:31:52.880 --> 00:31:55.720
Yeah, I mean, I was really shocked by the stuff

613
00:31:55.799 --> 00:31:59.680
about pollution. Professor Barbara Domini, who is one of the

614
00:31:59.759 --> 00:32:04.240
leader scientists in France, she won the legend'onneur, which is

615
00:32:04.880 --> 00:32:07.720
the highest civilian honor. She said to me, it was

616
00:32:07.799 --> 00:32:11.640
quite chilling. We're exposed to so many brain altering pollutants

617
00:32:11.759 --> 00:32:13.720
that she said, the phrase you use was there's no

618
00:32:13.839 --> 00:32:16.319
way you can have a normal brain today. So to

619
00:32:16.400 --> 00:32:19.759
give one example, and although it's actually one of the

620
00:32:19.759 --> 00:32:22.119
things that got a little bit better under COVID. So

621
00:32:22.240 --> 00:32:24.960
when you walk around any city Sidney, em Albourne, London,

622
00:32:25.920 --> 00:32:31.400
Mexico city, wherever it is, you are breathing in very

623
00:32:31.440 --> 00:32:34.160
heavy amounts of air pollution. And one of the things

624
00:32:34.200 --> 00:32:35.839
that's in the ebb that we breathe at the moment

625
00:32:35.960 --> 00:32:38.160
is a lot of iron and it goes straight to

626
00:32:38.200 --> 00:32:39.559
your brain you breathe, it didn't it goes straight to

627
00:32:39.599 --> 00:32:42.519
your brain, and your brain just did not evolve to

628
00:32:42.839 --> 00:32:46.480
handle or just suddenly being exposed to iron that's inhaled nasally.

629
00:32:46.519 --> 00:32:48.400
There's nothing in our evolution that prepared us for that,

630
00:32:48.880 --> 00:32:51.920
and that causes the way. Professor Barbara Maher, who's at

631
00:32:51.920 --> 00:32:54.519
the University of Lancaster here in Britain, is one of

632
00:32:54.559 --> 00:32:56.640
the leading experts, and this said to me was it

633
00:32:56.759 --> 00:33:01.000
causes a repeated chronic insult to the brain is brain inflammation.

634
00:33:01.640 --> 00:33:04.119
We've got early studies that are very disturbing from Mexico

635
00:33:04.240 --> 00:33:06.839
City of kids who live in heavily polluted areas their

636
00:33:06.920 --> 00:33:11.359
brains have plaques and tangles, which are like dementia patients

637
00:33:11.440 --> 00:33:15.480
and their children. Right, So the pollution that we're exposed

638
00:33:15.519 --> 00:33:19.720
to is one obvious example. You mention another one, And

639
00:33:19.720 --> 00:33:22.119
it's interesting that pollution is one that we can only

640
00:33:22.200 --> 00:33:24.759
deal with a collective level. But with all the other

641
00:33:24.880 --> 00:33:29.559
causes of attention problems that I write about, install and focus,

642
00:33:30.480 --> 00:33:32.720
there's two levels at which we've got to deal with this.

643
00:33:33.359 --> 00:33:35.440
One is there are lots of things we can do

644
00:33:35.519 --> 00:33:38.519
as individuals to deal with this, and I talk about

645
00:33:38.559 --> 00:33:39.920
lots of them, and I'm sure we'll talk about some

646
00:33:40.000 --> 00:33:42.000
of the things that I do. There are lots of

647
00:33:42.039 --> 00:33:45.359
things we can do as individuals. And then but we've

648
00:33:45.359 --> 00:33:47.359
also got to be honest with people. That will only

649
00:33:47.400 --> 00:33:49.640
get you so far. You can genuinely improve your attention

650
00:33:49.720 --> 00:33:52.640
by individual action, but then you'll hit a wall because

651
00:33:52.640 --> 00:33:55.960
we're living at the moment. It's like we're living in

652
00:33:56.440 --> 00:33:59.400
an environment which is constantly pouring itching powder on us,

653
00:33:59.799 --> 00:34:01.799
and then the person pouring itching powder on us is

654
00:34:01.880 --> 00:34:04.920
leaning forward and going, do you know what, mate? You

655
00:34:05.039 --> 00:34:06.759
might want to learn how to meditate, then you wouldn't

656
00:34:06.759 --> 00:34:10.239
scratch so much, and it's like, yeah, you should also

657
00:34:10.239 --> 00:34:15.960
stop pouring itching powder on me. Right, So you mentioned

658
00:34:16.000 --> 00:34:17.599
what a really interesting one where I think, obviously there's

659
00:34:17.599 --> 00:34:20.519
both individual and collective solutions, which is the way we eat.

660
00:34:21.119 --> 00:34:23.599
And you know, this is probably the one I most

661
00:34:23.599 --> 00:34:26.599
struggle with in my own life. As you can probably

662
00:34:26.599 --> 00:34:29.039
see from my chins, there is literally the other side

663
00:34:29.039 --> 00:34:32.039
of the room there was actually a McDonald's bag from

664
00:34:32.079 --> 00:34:36.679
earlier tonight. There's been a profound transformation in the way

665
00:34:36.760 --> 00:34:39.239
we eat, and for me this I thought about this

666
00:34:39.360 --> 00:34:43.079
a lot in relation to my grandparents. My dad grew

667
00:34:43.199 --> 00:34:46.920
up on a mountain in Switzerland, a little wooden hut

668
00:34:46.960 --> 00:34:50.360
on a mountain in Switzerland, and I was born here

669
00:34:50.400 --> 00:34:54.599
in Britain, and because my mum's British and my dad

670
00:34:54.639 --> 00:34:57.440
came to live here and starting when I was nine.

671
00:34:57.599 --> 00:35:01.360
My dad every summer would ban to my grandparents' farm

672
00:35:01.400 --> 00:35:03.320
in Switzerland and got I got to her farm and

673
00:35:03.559 --> 00:35:07.400
make you into our mom, and so I would go there,

674
00:35:08.239 --> 00:35:11.719
and I remember the first summer I went there arriving,

675
00:35:11.800 --> 00:35:14.119
so I was writing. I was raised mostly by my

676
00:35:14.280 --> 00:35:16.800
Scottish grandmother, who's you know, was a working class Scottish woman.

677
00:35:17.159 --> 00:35:20.719
So basically our diet was like you know, chips and

678
00:35:21.159 --> 00:35:26.840
you know, like microwave food and you know, heavily processed food.

679
00:35:27.960 --> 00:35:30.800
And I arrived in Switzerland and my Swiss grandparents ate

680
00:35:30.840 --> 00:35:32.880
how pretty much all humans in all of human history

681
00:35:32.880 --> 00:35:35.639
of eaten, which was they ate with very few exceptions.

682
00:35:36.280 --> 00:35:39.159
They ate fresh and nutritious food they themselves had grown,

683
00:35:39.719 --> 00:35:42.880
or animals they had raised and killed themselves. And I

684
00:35:42.880 --> 00:35:44.719
remember my Swiss grdmother would put food in front of me,

685
00:35:46.400 --> 00:35:49.079
and I remember saying to her, but this isn't food.

686
00:35:49.519 --> 00:35:52.840
And I wasn't joking. I literally didn't recognize what it was.

687
00:35:52.920 --> 00:35:54.360
Like she put leaves in front of me. I'd be like,

688
00:35:54.400 --> 00:35:56.719
but this is not what is this? This isn't this

689
00:35:56.840 --> 00:35:59.159
isn't food. And the first few weeks I was there,

690
00:35:59.199 --> 00:36:01.199
I just I could barely eat because it was so

691
00:36:01.280 --> 00:36:03.719
disgusting to me. And then in the end I made

692
00:36:03.760 --> 00:36:06.800
her take me to the McDonald's and Zurich, and when

693
00:36:06.840 --> 00:36:09.639
she looked at what I ate, she didn't recognize it

694
00:36:09.679 --> 00:36:14.480
as food. She was absolutely shocked by it. She refused

695
00:36:14.519 --> 00:36:16.079
to even have a mouth, which was like, what is this?

696
00:36:16.760 --> 00:36:19.440
So in those two generations, from my Swiss grandparents to me,

697
00:36:21.320 --> 00:36:26.599
what we eat completely changed. And it turns out we

698
00:36:26.679 --> 00:36:28.719
all know the ways in which that has caused an

699
00:36:28.880 --> 00:36:33.800
enormous increase in obesity. The average American has gained twenty

700
00:36:33.880 --> 00:36:39.880
two pounds since nineteen sixty, extraordinary gaining weight. And Australia

701
00:36:39.920 --> 00:36:43.239
has was, you know, a very big abysia crisis. Like

702
00:36:43.320 --> 00:36:46.440
Britain does not quite as bad as the US, but

703
00:36:46.480 --> 00:36:49.719
it's bad. And what I learned from interviewing loads of

704
00:36:49.719 --> 00:36:52.039
backs this is really interesting new field of science called

705
00:36:52.159 --> 00:36:56.000
nutritional psychiatry, which looks at the ways in what we

706
00:36:56.079 --> 00:36:59.599
eat affect our brains and our mental states. And what

707
00:36:59.679 --> 00:37:01.760
I learned from talking to them and others is that

708
00:37:01.840 --> 00:37:05.840
there's three crucial ways in which what we has affected

709
00:37:05.880 --> 00:37:09.159
our ability to focus and pay attention. So the first

710
00:37:10.199 --> 00:37:13.440
is this is explained to me by Dale Pinnick, who's

711
00:37:13.960 --> 00:37:17.880
Britain's best known nutritionist. He explained to me that the

712
00:37:18.000 --> 00:37:22.119
way we eat causes huge spikes of energy and then

713
00:37:22.360 --> 00:37:25.559
crashes of energy. And when your energy crashes, you get

714
00:37:25.639 --> 00:37:28.360
brain fog and you can't pay attention. So imagine if

715
00:37:28.440 --> 00:37:31.480
in the morning you eat Frosty's and white bread that

716
00:37:31.599 --> 00:37:35.599
gives a huge, huge, immediate release of glucose, which even

717
00:37:35.639 --> 00:37:37.480
as I say it now, makes me feel good, right,

718
00:37:38.800 --> 00:37:40.760
And that makes you feel great for about twenty minutes,

719
00:37:40.760 --> 00:37:42.239
and then you arrive at your desk and you start

720
00:37:42.280 --> 00:37:44.199
to or your child arrives at their desk and at

721
00:37:44.239 --> 00:37:46.639
school and they start to just crash, right. And what

722
00:37:46.840 --> 00:37:50.440
happens is most of us, certainly me included, live on

723
00:37:50.519 --> 00:37:53.320
a sort of roller coaster of energy spikes and energy

724
00:37:53.360 --> 00:37:56.159
crashes throughout the day. Where we get a huge release

725
00:37:56.159 --> 00:38:00.280
of energy, we crash, we feel a bit crap, happy

726
00:38:00.360 --> 00:38:03.400
to use your title of your podcast. Then we go

727
00:38:03.519 --> 00:38:05.360
for another boost later in the day, we feel better,

728
00:38:05.519 --> 00:38:08.800
we crash, and this just affects your brain function, right.

729
00:38:08.960 --> 00:38:10.639
And the way Dale put it to me is it's

730
00:38:10.719 --> 00:38:13.320
like putting rocket fuel into a mini It will go

731
00:38:13.599 --> 00:38:15.320
really fast for a little bit and then it'll just

732
00:38:15.360 --> 00:38:17.760
putter out, whereas if you put in the fuel that

733
00:38:17.880 --> 00:38:20.119
the car is actually suited to, it'll go along nicely

734
00:38:20.159 --> 00:38:23.480
all the time. So that's one way. The second way

735
00:38:24.840 --> 00:38:28.480
is that our diets lap a lot of the nutrients

736
00:38:28.519 --> 00:38:31.800
that are necessary for your brain to develop properly. There's

737
00:38:31.840 --> 00:38:35.079
a really interesting Dutch study that got a load of

738
00:38:35.159 --> 00:38:40.159
kids and split them into two groups, and one carried

739
00:38:40.199 --> 00:38:43.000
on eating the kind of normal Western diet and the

740
00:38:43.079 --> 00:38:46.039
other one, the other group, was put on a diet

741
00:38:46.079 --> 00:38:48.039
where they it was called an elimination this diet, but

742
00:38:48.079 --> 00:38:50.119
they basically had to only eat kind of fresh, healthy

743
00:38:50.159 --> 00:38:54.679
food and seventy percent of them had an improvement and attention.

744
00:38:54.800 --> 00:38:59.280
The ones who shifted diet and the average improvement was

745
00:38:59.559 --> 00:39:02.679
fifty percent, which is extraordinary after improvement in their attention.

746
00:39:03.800 --> 00:39:06.480
And the third way is that it's not just that

747
00:39:06.599 --> 00:39:10.559
our diets lack things we need, they also contain things

748
00:39:10.639 --> 00:39:12.519
that act on us, like drugs. There was a really

749
00:39:12.559 --> 00:39:15.639
interesting study here in Britain in Southampton in two thousand

750
00:39:15.639 --> 00:39:18.159
and seven where they got two hundred and ninety seven kids.

751
00:39:18.679 --> 00:39:20.360
They split them into two groups. They were either nine

752
00:39:20.480 --> 00:39:23.320
or thirteen, and they gave the first group, which just

753
00:39:23.400 --> 00:39:26.039
got made to drink water or something neutral, and the

754
00:39:26.119 --> 00:39:29.360
second group drank a cocktail that not an alcoholic cocktail

755
00:39:29.400 --> 00:39:33.239
obviously that would be unacceptable, a cocktail that contained a

756
00:39:33.320 --> 00:39:35.960
lot of the synthetic dyes and chemicals that you find

757
00:39:36.000 --> 00:39:40.159
in everyday suits, like eminems, things like that, And they

758
00:39:40.239 --> 00:39:42.159
monitored them, and of course the kids who drank the

759
00:39:42.199 --> 00:39:44.679
cocktail were much more likely to become significantly more likely

760
00:39:46.119 --> 00:39:50.639
to become manic and act up. And again with obviously

761
00:39:50.639 --> 00:39:53.840
with diet, there's some degree to which, as individuals we

762
00:39:53.920 --> 00:39:55.960
can change our diet. Right, that's hard to do. We

763
00:39:56.119 --> 00:39:59.159
live from the moment we're born. We're raised to associate

764
00:39:59.239 --> 00:40:01.920
positive emotion with foods that are not good for us.

765
00:40:02.960 --> 00:40:06.719
There's a machinery design to get us to crave the

766
00:40:06.960 --> 00:40:10.280
shitty foods. The foods that are good for your brain

767
00:40:10.400 --> 00:40:13.079
and good for the rest of you are more expensive,

768
00:40:13.159 --> 00:40:14.800
they're harder to get. There's all sorts of ways in

769
00:40:14.840 --> 00:40:16.360
which the system is rigged against us. So I don't

770
00:40:16.360 --> 00:40:18.639
want to be simplistic about this, but there are some

771
00:40:18.800 --> 00:40:21.320
things we can do as individuals and collectively we can

772
00:40:21.400 --> 00:40:23.400
change the food supply system right again, rather like the

773
00:40:23.440 --> 00:40:26.159
internet's owning system for ten thousand days, it's only been

774
00:40:26.199 --> 00:40:28.719
a generation for which we've been eating. Most of the

775
00:40:28.800 --> 00:40:31.960
food we now eat in Australia and Britain is processed

776
00:40:32.039 --> 00:40:35.280
or ultra processed food, which means you A good definition

777
00:40:35.400 --> 00:40:37.559
of process food was given by my friend Michael Pollen,

778
00:40:37.920 --> 00:40:40.280
the food writer. He said, you can tell the food

779
00:40:40.360 --> 00:40:42.719
is processed if when you look at the ingredients you

780
00:40:42.840 --> 00:40:44.840
can't figure out what they were in nature.

781
00:40:45.239 --> 00:40:45.360
Right.

782
00:40:45.440 --> 00:40:48.360
That's a good rough ride, and most of what we

783
00:40:48.480 --> 00:40:50.320
eat it now falls into that category.

784
00:40:50.440 --> 00:40:54.880
Yeah. I actually have a couple of real life friends

785
00:40:55.039 --> 00:40:57.119
who are great examples of that.

786
00:40:57.280 --> 00:41:00.239
I remember when my daughter is now fifteen, when she

787
00:41:00.400 --> 00:41:03.119
was little, a friend of mine had a child roughly

788
00:41:03.199 --> 00:41:06.599
the same age, and this child had attention problems, all

789
00:41:06.639 --> 00:41:09.920
sorts of issues, and she used to post quite a

790
00:41:10.000 --> 00:41:12.679
lot just as a reminder on Facebook of these two

791
00:41:12.880 --> 00:41:16.920
coloring in sheets that her daughter had done. One was

792
00:41:18.320 --> 00:41:21.880
how but the before photo basically of this scrawl and

793
00:41:21.960 --> 00:41:24.440
this scratch just all over the page. And then she

794
00:41:24.679 --> 00:41:28.519
put her daughter onto effectively an elimination diet and cut

795
00:41:28.599 --> 00:41:31.480
out all of the dyes and colors and processed foods,

796
00:41:31.679 --> 00:41:33.760
and you know, within a few weeks there was this

797
00:41:34.079 --> 00:41:38.280
perfect colored within the lines drawing. You would not know

798
00:41:38.320 --> 00:41:40.599
it was from the same child at the same age.

799
00:41:40.760 --> 00:41:44.719
That was how significant the effect was. So I really

800
00:41:44.800 --> 00:41:46.320
relate to that, and.

801
00:41:46.320 --> 00:41:49.239
I think more of us should really be aware of that.

802
00:41:49.800 --> 00:41:52.920
You know, just what is going on in kids and

803
00:41:53.039 --> 00:41:56.840
our own but you know, particularly in kids' brains, and

804
00:41:57.079 --> 00:42:00.280
it's uncomfortable as a parent to deal with hyperactive Kidsagine

805
00:42:00.280 --> 00:42:00.679
what it's.

806
00:42:00.559 --> 00:42:01.320
Like for the kids.

807
00:42:01.679 --> 00:42:04.880
Imagine what it's like to live in that state of

808
00:42:05.599 --> 00:42:10.360
brain confusion and fog, etc. Which brings me to this

809
00:42:10.920 --> 00:42:13.679
issue of ADHD. We can't talk about attention without talking

810
00:42:13.719 --> 00:42:15.599
about ADHD. And I said right at the beginning here

811
00:42:15.639 --> 00:42:17.360
that I was ready to run off and get myself

812
00:42:17.760 --> 00:42:21.320
a diagnosis, only half joking. You know, many of my

813
00:42:21.440 --> 00:42:28.400
adult friends are coming out now with ADHD adult ADHD diagnoses.

814
00:42:28.880 --> 00:42:31.360
As a psychologist, I'm very aware of the link between

815
00:42:32.159 --> 00:42:36.199
early trauma, you know, adverse childhood experiences, and how that

816
00:42:36.320 --> 00:42:38.800
can impact your later cognitive development and function.

817
00:42:38.920 --> 00:42:41.639
And you do talk a lot about that in your

818
00:42:41.920 --> 00:42:42.559
book as well.

819
00:42:43.400 --> 00:42:47.159
You spent a lot of time exploring this and speaking

820
00:42:47.239 --> 00:42:54.480
to various experts on the topic of ADYHD, what conclusions

821
00:42:54.519 --> 00:42:58.079
did you draw about the the I guess the increased

822
00:42:58.679 --> 00:43:01.760
that there definitely has been a sharp increase in ADHD

823
00:43:01.920 --> 00:43:05.960
diagnosis in our kids in the last ten twenty years.

824
00:43:06.239 --> 00:43:10.079
Well, you're totally right about the explosion for every I'm

825
00:43:10.119 --> 00:43:14.679
forty two for every one person who was diagnosed with

826
00:43:14.719 --> 00:43:17.880
ADHD when I was seven in Britain, there's now a

827
00:43:18.159 --> 00:43:23.000
hundred people diagnosed that way. And ADHD was the subject

828
00:43:23.360 --> 00:43:25.000
of all the things that I write about in Style

829
00:43:25.039 --> 00:43:27.039
and Focus, it was the one that the experts most

830
00:43:27.119 --> 00:43:32.280
disagreed on. There's a very broad range of disagreement on this.

831
00:43:33.239 --> 00:43:37.760
So you get some scientists who say, some good reputable scientists,

832
00:43:37.800 --> 00:43:40.880
you say, this is overwhelmingly a biological problem. These are

833
00:43:40.920 --> 00:43:44.599
just biologically different people. And then you get other very good,

834
00:43:44.760 --> 00:43:49.480
very reputable scientists who say the biology is hugely exaggerated,

835
00:43:49.880 --> 00:43:52.280
it's only a little bit of what's going on. And

836
00:43:53.199 --> 00:43:55.440
I'm not a scientist, and I'm a journalist. I mean,

837
00:43:55.440 --> 00:43:58.199
I was trained in social sciences at Cambridge. I think

838
00:43:58.199 --> 00:44:01.280
I'm good at understanding these things, but I can't reach

839
00:44:01.360 --> 00:44:04.400
a scientific conclusion. But what I can do is say

840
00:44:04.480 --> 00:44:07.840
some of the things that we we do know. And

841
00:44:07.960 --> 00:44:10.079
one of the people who I found most interesting about

842
00:44:10.119 --> 00:44:13.480
this was an incredible man named Professor Joel Nig who's

843
00:44:13.480 --> 00:44:15.440
one of the leading experts in the world on children's

844
00:44:15.440 --> 00:44:18.280
attention problems. And he said to me, we need to

845
00:44:18.440 --> 00:44:21.719
ask if we are now living in what he called

846
00:44:22.079 --> 00:44:24.000
if our kids in particular are now living in what

847
00:44:24.239 --> 00:44:27.639
he called an attentional pathogenic environment, which is one that

848
00:44:27.800 --> 00:44:31.559
is systematically undermining children's attention. And the last quarter of

849
00:44:31.559 --> 00:44:34.920
the book is really about children, why our children can't

850
00:44:34.920 --> 00:44:37.119
pay attention, what we can do about it, And there's

851
00:44:37.119 --> 00:44:41.800
a I think a reasonable conclusion is that there is

852
00:44:42.079 --> 00:44:45.239
some biological contribution to some people's attention problems. I think

853
00:44:45.239 --> 00:44:48.000
the evidence for that is pretty clear, but it's not

854
00:44:48.400 --> 00:44:52.639
most of what's going on here, right, But that's important

855
00:44:52.639 --> 00:44:54.760
once you've said that to stress, because some people hear

856
00:44:54.840 --> 00:44:57.679
it as if the problem is overwhelmingly biologically, it's real,

857
00:44:57.960 --> 00:45:00.719
and if the problems are elsewhere in our psychology and

858
00:45:00.880 --> 00:45:03.480
the way we live, they're somehow not real. And I

859
00:45:03.519 --> 00:45:06.119
think that's a completely wrong way of framing it. Everyone

860
00:45:06.159 --> 00:45:08.239
who's struggling to focus your problem is real. That's what

861
00:45:08.320 --> 00:45:11.800
my whole book is about. We need to understand the

862
00:45:11.880 --> 00:45:13.679
whole range. So the kind of fancy term for it

863
00:45:13.800 --> 00:45:16.840
is called the biopsychosocial model, which is where you basically say,

864
00:45:17.039 --> 00:45:19.400
and this is true of all mental health problems. There

865
00:45:19.440 --> 00:45:22.239
are three kinds of cause of all mental problems. There

866
00:45:22.239 --> 00:45:26.880
are biological contributions like your genes or brain changes. There

867
00:45:26.920 --> 00:45:30.039
are psychological problems like you mentioned trauma. That's a very

868
00:45:30.079 --> 00:45:33.559
important one, but there's also others. And there are social

869
00:45:33.679 --> 00:45:36.400
causes like the way our schools work, the way we

870
00:45:36.480 --> 00:45:40.199
feed our children. And of course all these three things interact, right,

871
00:45:40.480 --> 00:45:44.719
they're not separate little boxes. So I think the biopsycho

872
00:45:44.800 --> 00:45:47.320
social model is right. There's all three of these things

873
00:45:47.360 --> 00:45:50.719
are playing out, so we have to ask ourselves what

874
00:45:50.920 --> 00:45:53.639
can we do about that. I think the most important

875
00:45:53.679 --> 00:45:57.199
factor to understand about children's attention problems is rather like

876
00:45:57.639 --> 00:45:59.679
we've had a complete transformation in the way we eat

877
00:46:00.119 --> 00:46:02.840
in the last few generations, such that the way I

878
00:46:03.079 --> 00:46:05.480
ate was literally unrecognizable to my grandmother, and the way

879
00:46:05.519 --> 00:46:09.079
my grandmother ate was unrecognizable to me. There has been

880
00:46:09.239 --> 00:46:13.920
a such a deep transformation of childhood and there's very

881
00:46:13.960 --> 00:46:17.360
strong evidence that key aspects of that change in childhood

882
00:46:18.280 --> 00:46:21.840
are deeply altering our children's ability to focus and pay attention.

883
00:46:22.199 --> 00:46:24.119
So one of the heroes of my book is an

884
00:46:24.119 --> 00:46:27.800
amazing woman called leonorse Ga Nazi who runs a group

885
00:46:27.840 --> 00:46:30.599
called let Grow dot org. But when Leonore was five

886
00:46:30.679 --> 00:46:32.639
years old. She grew up in a suburb of Chicago.

887
00:46:32.719 --> 00:46:35.760
When Lenore was five years old, she would leave her

888
00:46:35.800 --> 00:46:38.880
house on her own and walk to school, which was

889
00:46:38.920 --> 00:46:40.559
fifteen minutes away. She'd usually meet up with the other

890
00:46:40.599 --> 00:46:42.920
neighbor kids on the way. They'd walk together. When she

891
00:46:43.000 --> 00:46:44.920
got to the school, there was a ten year old

892
00:46:44.960 --> 00:46:47.280
boy whose job was to help the five year olds

893
00:46:47.280 --> 00:46:49.039
across the road. He was dressed as a lollipop ma'am.

894
00:46:49.719 --> 00:46:51.480
And then she was at school until three o'clock. And

895
00:46:51.519 --> 00:46:53.079
then she would leave on her own or with their

896
00:46:53.119 --> 00:46:55.760
group of friends. They'd wander around the neighborhood on their

897
00:46:55.800 --> 00:46:58.599
own for two or three hours. They'd go to the woods,

898
00:46:58.639 --> 00:47:00.719
they'd go to the library. They do invent their own

899
00:47:00.719 --> 00:47:03.719
little games outside they would play spontaneous soccer games or

900
00:47:03.760 --> 00:47:06.039
whatever it was, and then they would go home when

901
00:47:06.039 --> 00:47:10.119
they were hungry. This is what almost everyone's childhood looked

902
00:47:10.199 --> 00:47:13.480
like from basically the beginning of humanity until the nineteen sixties. Right,

903
00:47:13.519 --> 00:47:16.880
there were a few exceptions, like you know, the height

904
00:47:16.920 --> 00:47:19.800
of industrialization, chimney sweeps or chatt or slavery, but there

905
00:47:19.840 --> 00:47:22.719
were very, very few exceptions to this. Right by the

906
00:47:22.800 --> 00:47:24.920
time Leanoree had her own kids, she was living in

907
00:47:25.000 --> 00:47:27.000
Queens in New York at the time, in the nineties,

908
00:47:28.199 --> 00:47:30.679
childhood had completely transformed. If you let your five year

909
00:47:30.679 --> 00:47:32.119
old walk to school on their own, people would have

910
00:47:32.159 --> 00:47:34.960
owned the police. Right you expected to until they were,

911
00:47:35.400 --> 00:47:37.559
you know, well into their teens. You were expected to

912
00:47:37.719 --> 00:47:40.440
walk or drive your children to school and wait until

913
00:47:40.480 --> 00:47:42.400
you saw them go through the door, and you were

914
00:47:42.400 --> 00:47:44.199
meant to be there to collect them like a package

915
00:47:44.480 --> 00:47:47.519
when the day was over. And only ten percent of

916
00:47:47.559 --> 00:47:52.280
American children ever play outside without an adult supervising them.

917
00:47:52.639 --> 00:47:55.360
And this is pre COVID. Obviously, during COVID it almost

918
00:47:55.440 --> 00:48:01.159
nothing at all. And this transformation in childhood has deprived

919
00:48:01.280 --> 00:48:04.800
children and many aspects that we know are essential for

920
00:48:04.880 --> 00:48:08.400
developing attention and focus. One of those factors are just

921
00:48:08.480 --> 00:48:10.079
named a few of them, but one of those factors

922
00:48:10.639 --> 00:48:16.800
is exercise. Overwhelming scientific evidence children who run around and exercise,

923
00:48:16.840 --> 00:48:19.599
their brains go bigger, their brains go more neurons, They

924
00:48:19.639 --> 00:48:23.639
are physically and mentally healthier. Right, children want to run around.

925
00:48:23.679 --> 00:48:26.440
We are the first human society ever to think that

926
00:48:26.760 --> 00:48:30.440
we can make children sit still for eight hours a day. Bonkers, Right,

927
00:48:31.119 --> 00:48:34.119
We've stripped play out of schools, and we've stripped and

928
00:48:34.199 --> 00:48:36.480
we've stripped play out of the time they're not in school.

929
00:48:36.840 --> 00:48:39.320
So this has a disastrous effect on their ability to

930
00:48:39.360 --> 00:48:42.360
focus and pay attention. The second is we And this

931
00:48:42.480 --> 00:48:44.920
is really crucial And I learned a lot about this

932
00:48:44.960 --> 00:48:48.079
from Dr Isabel Benka, an amazing chile and primatologist, is

933
00:48:48.119 --> 00:48:52.079
an expert on this. That most of the skills that

934
00:48:52.239 --> 00:48:56.960
children learn they learn by playing with other children. This

935
00:48:57.079 --> 00:48:59.480
is the foundation of how you learn, how you learn

936
00:48:59.559 --> 00:49:02.320
what to pay attention to. So think about what Lenore

937
00:49:02.440 --> 00:49:04.159
was learning when she was five years old and she's

938
00:49:04.440 --> 00:49:06.960
running around with the other kids in her neighborhood. She's

939
00:49:07.039 --> 00:49:09.760
learning how to get other people's attention, how to engage them.

940
00:49:10.559 --> 00:49:12.599
She's learning how to persuade the other kids. You've got

941
00:49:12.639 --> 00:49:14.920
to persuade them to play the game. She's learning how

942
00:49:15.000 --> 00:49:16.800
to cope with disappointment. You're going to lose the game

943
00:49:16.880 --> 00:49:18.840
sometimes and the other kids will go, you're lost. You've

944
00:49:18.840 --> 00:49:21.440
got to sit out right. She's learning how to be

945
00:49:21.559 --> 00:49:23.800
brave and how to cope with anxiety. You might climb

946
00:49:23.840 --> 00:49:25.559
the tree, you get a little bit high, you feel scared,

947
00:49:25.800 --> 00:49:28.360
You carry on climbing. The other kids help you get down.

948
00:49:28.639 --> 00:49:31.800
You're learning how to navigate the world. And when we've

949
00:49:31.840 --> 00:49:34.440
deprived children of free play, and it's crucial that it's free.

950
00:49:34.719 --> 00:49:36.599
If it's adults standing over them telling them what to do,

951
00:49:36.639 --> 00:49:39.840
it doesn't count. Doesn't act get those benefits. By depriving

952
00:49:39.880 --> 00:49:42.039
children of that, we've deprived them of the ability to

953
00:49:42.199 --> 00:49:45.719
develop a healthy sense of attention. They're really anxious, they're

954
00:49:45.760 --> 00:49:49.880
really afraid. I interviewed this guy called Professor Zavier Castellanos En.

955
00:49:49.960 --> 00:49:55.039
Why a new university professor of child adolescent psychiatry who

956
00:49:56.079 --> 00:49:58.599
was involved in these rat experiments or told me about

957
00:49:58.599 --> 00:50:00.880
these rat experiments? Are they to learn about it? Basically,

958
00:50:00.920 --> 00:50:02.320
they get a load of rats. Some of them are

959
00:50:02.360 --> 00:50:04.880
allowed when their children, some of them are allowed to play,

960
00:50:04.920 --> 00:50:07.519
and some of them aren't, and then they monitor them

961
00:50:07.559 --> 00:50:09.159
as they grow up. Because it takes a few years

962
00:50:09.199 --> 00:50:11.320
for rats to grow up. And the rats that were

963
00:50:11.360 --> 00:50:15.360
allowed to play were much better at solving problems, dealing

964
00:50:15.400 --> 00:50:19.840
with challenges, deploying their attention than the rats that were

965
00:50:19.880 --> 00:50:22.480
not allowed play. Rats weren't allowed to play really struggled

966
00:50:22.519 --> 00:50:26.119
with solving problems. Right, And again, we could intuitively understand

967
00:50:26.119 --> 00:50:28.679
why that would be the minute you hear it. Right, So,

968
00:50:29.920 --> 00:50:32.559
I don't think you can separate the rise in what

969
00:50:32.679 --> 00:50:37.119
we're calling ADHD from the complete transformation of childhood that

970
00:50:37.159 --> 00:50:40.400
happened at the same time. Right, It's important to stress again,

971
00:50:40.440 --> 00:50:44.599
there are real biological contributions. Some children, as a result

972
00:50:44.639 --> 00:50:46.559
of their genes, find it harder to focus. But as

973
00:50:46.639 --> 00:50:48.960
Joel Nigg explained to me, genes are turned on and

974
00:50:49.039 --> 00:50:51.519
off by the environment. Right, So your genes make you

975
00:50:52.000 --> 00:50:55.000
increase the odds of you struggling to focus. The other thing,

976
00:50:55.280 --> 00:50:57.360
and this is a more complicated point, but a really

977
00:50:57.400 --> 00:51:00.760
important one is you know, I spent some time in

978
00:51:00.760 --> 00:51:06.159
an Amish village in Indiana, and Amish kids don't get ADHD.

979
00:51:07.079 --> 00:51:09.599
There are no children that present with this phenomena. I'm

980
00:51:09.599 --> 00:51:11.119
try to figure out why this is. And I spoke

981
00:51:11.119 --> 00:51:13.119
to a lot of the Armish and they said to me, well,

982
00:51:13.159 --> 00:51:14.519
of course we have some kids who don't want to

983
00:51:14.519 --> 00:51:16.719
sit down all day, but then we just let them

984
00:51:16.760 --> 00:51:19.000
go off and go fishing or run around, Like, why

985
00:51:19.039 --> 00:51:20.679
would you want to make a child sit down if

986
00:51:20.679 --> 00:51:22.639
they can't sit down? And it's not The Armish are

987
00:51:22.679 --> 00:51:25.360
not like hippie. It's not a commune, right, they're just

988
00:51:25.519 --> 00:51:28.599
like that would be a We've created a society that

989
00:51:28.760 --> 00:51:32.280
puts such a high premium on making children passive sitting

990
00:51:32.400 --> 00:51:36.159
still all the time. Is that even desirable? Often it's

991
00:51:36.199 --> 00:51:38.320
the kid who doesn't want to sit still all day

992
00:51:39.199 --> 00:51:40.880
who will be the child who'll go on to achieve

993
00:51:41.000 --> 00:51:44.599
much more so, I think we've developed a disastrous school

994
00:51:44.679 --> 00:51:46.960
system through no thought of teachers who do an amazing

995
00:51:47.079 --> 00:51:51.280
job and have argued against this robotization of our education

996
00:51:51.400 --> 00:51:54.760
system where it's all about testing, which again is disastrous

997
00:51:54.760 --> 00:51:58.519
for children's ability to focus. Adults and children focus best

998
00:51:58.559 --> 00:52:01.000
when what they are learning is meaning to them. You

999
00:52:01.119 --> 00:52:03.760
can focus much better on saying that means something to you.

1000
00:52:04.320 --> 00:52:09.440
But when education becomes completely restructured around testing, it drains

1001
00:52:09.559 --> 00:52:12.920
learning of meaning, and that's disastrous for ability to focus

1002
00:52:12.960 --> 00:52:14.880
and pay attention. And there's lots of good evidence for that.

1003
00:52:15.840 --> 00:52:19.480
So all these transformations of childhood are so important. And

1004
00:52:19.599 --> 00:52:21.320
you know, there was one person. This will sound really

1005
00:52:21.320 --> 00:52:23.519
odd and it will sound like a joke. I promise

1006
00:52:23.559 --> 00:52:26.519
you it's not a joke. This person is real. There's

1007
00:52:26.559 --> 00:52:30.639
one person where the whole IDHD debate, not the whole

1008
00:52:30.679 --> 00:52:33.599
ADHD debate, because but one aspect of the ADHD debate

1009
00:52:33.639 --> 00:52:36.159
really fell into place for me. I went to interview

1010
00:52:36.199 --> 00:52:40.760
this guy called Nicholas Dodman, Professor Nicholas Dodman. It's professor

1011
00:52:40.840 --> 00:52:45.519
of veterinary science at Tufts University and a vet, and

1012
00:52:45.679 --> 00:52:51.000
he pioneered the diagnosing of dogs with ADHD. One day,

1013
00:52:52.000 --> 00:52:55.079
a woman brought her dog, a beagle named Emma, to

1014
00:52:55.239 --> 00:52:58.519
see Dr Dobman, and she said, I've got problem with

1015
00:52:58.639 --> 00:53:01.039
my dog. Whenever I leave her alone, she goes crazy

1016
00:53:01.079 --> 00:53:04.480
and she's always running around. And he diagnosed the dog

1017
00:53:04.519 --> 00:53:07.280
with ADHD and gave the dog Rittlin and the dog

1018
00:53:07.360 --> 00:53:12.719
became much more passive. And he's pioneered an enormous range

1019
00:53:12.719 --> 00:53:14.840
of animals are given what we used to think of

1020
00:53:14.880 --> 00:53:17.320
as human psychiatric drugs because of hearing me pioneered this.

1021
00:53:18.280 --> 00:53:21.679
Because of him, there are parrots on valium. There are

1022
00:53:21.800 --> 00:53:27.280
walruses on antipsychotics. There are polar bears on prozac. It's

1023
00:53:27.360 --> 00:53:28.960
a bit like One fell Over the Cuckoo's Nest for

1024
00:53:29.000 --> 00:53:33.440
actual cuckoos. But before I went to interview him, I

1025
00:53:33.519 --> 00:53:35.800
thought he would say to me, well, I do this

1026
00:53:35.840 --> 00:53:38.679
because these animals have a genetic problem, you know, and

1027
00:53:38.760 --> 00:53:41.039
that's why I have to do it. Actually, to be

1028
00:53:41.079 --> 00:53:43.880
fair to him, he didn't say that. He said, look,

1029
00:53:44.760 --> 00:53:47.639
dogs need to run around, right, Dogs are meant to

1030
00:53:47.719 --> 00:53:50.800
run around for three hours off leash every day. Almost

1031
00:53:50.880 --> 00:53:53.119
no dogs in the United States, and I'm guessing Australia

1032
00:53:53.360 --> 00:53:55.760
do that right. So the phrase he used, which really

1033
00:53:55.800 --> 00:53:59.239
stay with me, he said, they've got frustrated biological objectives.

1034
00:54:00.000 --> 00:54:01.920
Described to me one dog that had ADHD and in

1035
00:54:02.000 --> 00:54:04.199
voted commas. It was living in a small flat in Manhattan,

1036
00:54:04.719 --> 00:54:05.880
and then it was sent to go and live on

1037
00:54:05.920 --> 00:54:08.360
a farm and mysteriously all its attention problems went away

1038
00:54:08.559 --> 00:54:11.679
because it could run around all day. Right now, I

1039
00:54:11.719 --> 00:54:14.239
don't want to say that's what's happening with all humans

1040
00:54:14.280 --> 00:54:16.880
who are being diagnosed with ADHD. That would be oversimplifying.

1041
00:54:18.559 --> 00:54:21.639
There are many factors going on there are real biological contributions.

1042
00:54:21.679 --> 00:54:24.440
There are real psychological contributions. You mentioned trauma. People who

1043
00:54:24.440 --> 00:54:26.920
are under stressed will struggle to focus. Children who've been

1044
00:54:26.920 --> 00:54:30.159
through traumas are thirty six times more likely to be

1045
00:54:30.199 --> 00:54:33.559
diagnosed with ADHD severe trauma. There's other factors going on there.

1046
00:54:33.559 --> 00:54:35.880
I'm sure we can talk about. But I do think

1047
00:54:37.320 --> 00:54:42.119
part of what we're seeing is frustrated biological objectives, like

1048
00:54:42.239 --> 00:54:46.039
in those dogs, right, We're trying to fit kids into

1049
00:54:46.079 --> 00:54:48.079
a box they don't want to be in. And I

1050
00:54:48.159 --> 00:54:51.360
think we've particularly seen that during COVID. Although the COVID

1051
00:54:51.400 --> 00:54:53.639
restrictions in my view, were necessary in order to prevent

1052
00:54:53.679 --> 00:54:55.880
the spread of the virus, I know there's a legitimate

1053
00:54:55.920 --> 00:55:00.119
debate about that, and some reasonable people will disagree. I've

1054
00:55:00.119 --> 00:55:04.639
been under those necessary, in my view, necessary restrictions. We've

1055
00:55:04.679 --> 00:55:06.800
seen the effect it had on our kids, right, So

1056
00:55:06.920 --> 00:55:09.760
an increase on restriction has really damaged our kids' attention.

1057
00:55:10.119 --> 00:55:12.679
It's made them less physically fit. So if we can

1058
00:55:12.760 --> 00:55:14.239
see that, we should be able to see that the

1059
00:55:14.280 --> 00:55:17.599
increasing restrictions of the last thirty years have done that.

1060
00:55:17.679 --> 00:55:20.199
And Lenore, who I mentioned, the reason I wrote about

1061
00:55:20.239 --> 00:55:23.320
her is because she is the pioneer because if you're

1062
00:55:23.360 --> 00:55:25.119
the only parent who sends your kid out to play,

1063
00:55:25.440 --> 00:55:27.960
it doesn't work right. You just look like a nutter

1064
00:55:28.039 --> 00:55:30.840
and the chart gets frightened. So what Lenare does is

1065
00:55:30.920 --> 00:55:34.519
she goes to schools and persuades groups of parents and

1066
00:55:34.719 --> 00:55:39.679
communities to restore childhood, to let children play again, Like

1067
00:55:39.760 --> 00:55:41.440
I say, the group and I really recommend people look

1068
00:55:41.480 --> 00:55:44.760
this up letgrow dot org. She's an amazing person, a

1069
00:55:44.840 --> 00:55:49.760
real hero, I think. And Lenare it was so moving

1070
00:55:49.880 --> 00:55:55.440
going to these schools and seeing these children rediscover play

1071
00:55:56.079 --> 00:55:59.159
and meaning, and you could see the effect it had

1072
00:55:59.199 --> 00:56:01.159
on their attention. There was a little boy who was

1073
00:56:01.199 --> 00:56:03.719
in trouble a lot. His mum was constantly fighting with

1074
00:56:03.840 --> 00:56:06.360
him because he couldn't pay attention, He wasn't don't want

1075
00:56:06.360 --> 00:56:08.639
to read, he didn't want to do his homework. And

1076
00:56:08.760 --> 00:56:11.760
they started this lect Grow program, which about you choose

1077
00:56:11.800 --> 00:56:14.559
something you want to do freely on your own and

1078
00:56:14.679 --> 00:56:17.239
come back and tell us about it. And he decided

1079
00:56:17.280 --> 00:56:19.480
at first he wanted to build a model of a raft,

1080
00:56:20.440 --> 00:56:23.199
so he got a glue gun, he got toothpicks, all

1081
00:56:23.239 --> 00:56:24.760
these things that you would never normally let a nine

1082
00:56:24.840 --> 00:56:27.280
year old do and he built this model of a

1083
00:56:27.360 --> 00:56:28.559
raft and he took it to the ocean and he

1084
00:56:28.639 --> 00:56:31.000
let it float, and he loved doing that. So then

1085
00:56:31.400 --> 00:56:33.800
he started reading about how you build things, and he

1086
00:56:33.840 --> 00:56:36.199
said he was going to build an amphibious wagon, like

1087
00:56:36.320 --> 00:56:39.800
human sized amphibious wagon. He starts getting gathering all the material.

1088
00:56:39.880 --> 00:56:41.400
He goes into his neighbor's yards and ask him if

1089
00:56:41.440 --> 00:56:44.000
they can have their old bamboo. He starts to read

1090
00:56:44.159 --> 00:56:46.280
so much about how it is. He tries. He focuses

1091
00:56:46.360 --> 00:56:50.159
for hours, because he's chosen this thing. It's meaningful to him.

1092
00:56:50.199 --> 00:56:53.000
He focuses on it night and day. He takes the

1093
00:56:53.039 --> 00:56:55.920
amphibious wab into the wagon into the ocean, and it sank,

1094
00:56:56.440 --> 00:56:58.559
and he's like, damn it, I'm going to make this work.

1095
00:56:58.599 --> 00:57:00.199
And he goes back and does it again and again

1096
00:57:00.239 --> 00:57:03.119
and again, and suddenly all his reading. He doesn't have

1097
00:57:03.119 --> 00:57:05.559
a problem of reading anymore, because he wants to read.

1098
00:57:05.679 --> 00:57:08.679
He wants I spoke to her. She's like the transformation

1099
00:57:08.760 --> 00:57:11.280
in him. And I remember the wonderful teacher there, Donna

1100
00:57:11.360 --> 00:57:14.280
Verbeck said to me, you know that freedom taught him

1101
00:57:15.000 --> 00:57:17.960
so much more than anything. We could sort of put

1102
00:57:18.039 --> 00:57:20.760
him in a box and tell him could do we

1103
00:57:20.920 --> 00:57:22.559
need one of there's many things we need to do

1104
00:57:22.639 --> 00:57:25.199
to get our attention back. One of the things we

1105
00:57:25.280 --> 00:57:27.760
need to do is restore childhood as it was for

1106
00:57:28.000 --> 00:57:32.239
almost all of human history. We cannot continue, I mean,

1107
00:57:32.280 --> 00:57:35.000
we can continue with children happening entirely behind closed doors,

1108
00:57:36.119 --> 00:57:38.599
but it will produce physically and mentally stunted children, which

1109
00:57:38.599 --> 00:57:39.159
is what he's doing.

1110
00:57:39.519 --> 00:57:45.719
Yeah, I'm really conscious of your time, but thank you

1111
00:57:45.920 --> 00:57:47.559
so much. What I want to conclude with and what

1112
00:57:47.599 --> 00:57:48.880
I want to make time for, is for you.

1113
00:57:49.079 --> 00:57:51.719
After all of this research, everything that you learned in

1114
00:57:51.800 --> 00:57:55.960
this book, from where you were at the beginning to

1115
00:57:56.320 --> 00:57:57.880
you know, to where you came to at the end

1116
00:57:57.920 --> 00:58:00.360
of all of this this whole project, I get, what

1117
00:58:00.480 --> 00:58:03.440
are the specific changes that you have made in your

1118
00:58:03.519 --> 00:58:07.800
own life to help you to better manage your attention,

1119
00:58:08.239 --> 00:58:11.320
to get back that capacity to sustain your focus.

1120
00:58:11.840 --> 00:58:13.000
So I give you some I'm going to go through

1121
00:58:13.039 --> 00:58:14.360
lots of examples in the book, but I'll give you

1122
00:58:14.360 --> 00:58:16.679
a specific one. You can't see this from the angle

1123
00:58:16.760 --> 00:58:19.880
which the camera is pointed, but just over there, I

1124
00:58:19.960 --> 00:58:22.119
have something called a k safe. This company should start

1125
00:58:22.119 --> 00:58:23.679
paying commision by the way, so I keep recommending it.

1126
00:58:23.800 --> 00:58:24.599
They should, they should.

1127
00:58:25.079 --> 00:58:28.320
I have so k Safe is a plastic safe. You

1128
00:58:28.440 --> 00:58:30.519
take the lid off, you put your phone in it,

1129
00:58:30.960 --> 00:58:32.599
you put the lid on, and you turn the dial

1130
00:58:32.639 --> 00:58:35.960
at the top and you can set it to anything

1131
00:58:36.039 --> 00:58:38.559
for between five minutes and a week. You push the

1132
00:58:38.599 --> 00:58:40.400
button and it will lock your phone away for the

1133
00:58:40.440 --> 00:58:42.360
period you asked it to lock your phone away. And

1134
00:58:42.440 --> 00:58:44.039
I locked my phone away for four hours a day.

1135
00:58:44.039 --> 00:58:45.960
I know that's a real privilege. We had to have

1136
00:58:46.000 --> 00:58:47.920
collective changes that make it possible for more people to

1137
00:58:48.000 --> 00:58:51.039
do that. But I put my phone four hours a day.

1138
00:58:51.199 --> 00:58:53.159
I'm a writer. That's how I get my writing done.

1139
00:58:53.159 --> 00:58:56.239
I also have on my laptop an app called Freedom,

1140
00:58:56.760 --> 00:58:58.679
which can cut you off. You can tell it to

1141
00:58:58.960 --> 00:59:01.840
deny you access to specific websites like say Twitter or

1142
00:59:01.920 --> 00:59:04.719
Instagram or the entire Internet, and you'll do it for

1143
00:59:04.800 --> 00:59:08.239
however long you tell it to, up to a whole day.

1144
00:59:08.840 --> 00:59:11.159
So those two things I had one of the ways

1145
00:59:11.199 --> 00:59:13.679
I sort of protect myself at a personal level. And

1146
00:59:13.719 --> 00:59:15.960
there's loads of loads of things I've done, but those

1147
00:59:15.960 --> 00:59:18.159
are two of the things that really it's sort of

1148
00:59:18.320 --> 00:59:21.039
my attempt to take Provincetown. What I learned in Provincetown

1149
00:59:21.159 --> 00:59:23.760
home with me in terms of how much better I felt.

1150
00:59:23.760 --> 00:59:29.960
Another change, very simple one, is I used to when

1151
00:59:30.000 --> 00:59:33.360
I couldn't focus and pay attention. I used to blame

1152
00:59:33.440 --> 00:59:35.639
myself all the time that oh, you're weak, you can't

1153
00:59:35.719 --> 00:59:39.719
you haven't got willpower. I don't do that anymore. Your

1154
00:59:39.760 --> 00:59:43.719
attention didn't collapse. Your attention was stolen from you, right,

1155
00:59:44.280 --> 00:59:46.880
And there's something very liberating and knowing that you're not

1156
00:59:47.000 --> 00:59:47.519
a failure.

1157
00:59:47.679 --> 00:59:47.840
You know.

1158
00:59:47.880 --> 00:59:49.159
There was a funny enough there was a moment with

1159
00:59:49.239 --> 00:59:52.559
an Australian. There were so many great Australians that interviewed

1160
00:59:52.559 --> 00:59:56.559
for the book. I love Australia. There's one moment, very

1161
00:59:56.639 --> 00:59:58.960
early in the research for the book really sobered me.

1162
00:59:59.559 --> 01:00:03.079
There's a a guy, he's a professor at the University

1163
01:00:03.119 --> 01:00:08.920
of Queensland, is called Professor Roy Baumeister. And I went

1164
01:00:08.960 --> 01:00:11.400
to interview him. So Roy Baumeister is the leading expert

1165
01:00:11.440 --> 01:00:13.440
in the world on willpower. He wrote a book called

1166
01:00:13.920 --> 01:00:17.000
Willpower Right, So go and see him and I said,

1167
01:00:17.480 --> 01:00:18.840
you know, I'm thinking of writing a book about why

1168
01:00:18.880 --> 01:00:21.000
we're struggling to focus and pay attention. And he said

1169
01:00:21.360 --> 01:00:24.239
something like, Jad, that's so interesting you should say that,

1170
01:00:24.360 --> 01:00:27.239
because I've just found I can't really pay attention a

1171
01:00:27.320 --> 01:00:29.679
lot of the time now. I just I pick up

1172
01:00:29.679 --> 01:00:32.400
my phone, I play video games all the time. And

1173
01:00:32.440 --> 01:00:34.920
I'm sort of sitting there and I'm like, hang on,

1174
01:00:35.519 --> 01:00:40.519
didn't you write a book called willpower? We have when

1175
01:00:40.639 --> 01:00:43.840
you are sitting there? Go God, just play video games

1176
01:00:43.880 --> 01:00:46.639
all day. I was like, oh my god, But that

1177
01:00:46.840 --> 01:00:51.119
really underscored to me. It's not about individual psychological insights

1178
01:00:51.159 --> 01:00:54.800
are very valuable, but it's as much about the environment. Right,

1179
01:00:56.920 --> 01:00:58.519
We've got to deal with these. We've got to deal

1180
01:00:58.559 --> 01:01:00.599
with it at both levels. And there's a analogy. I

1181
01:01:00.599 --> 01:01:03.920
think with feminism. We needed and we need a feminist

1182
01:01:04.000 --> 01:01:06.960
movement so that women could regain control of their bodies

1183
01:01:07.000 --> 01:01:10.639
in their minds, I think we need an attention movement

1184
01:01:11.159 --> 01:01:14.639
so we can regain control of our minds. Right, we

1185
01:01:14.760 --> 01:01:17.719
need to defend ourselves and that requires a shifting focus.

1186
01:01:17.840 --> 01:01:22.079
You know, we are not medieval peasants who are begging

1187
01:01:22.280 --> 01:01:25.800
King Zuckerberg to hand us little crumbs of attention from

1188
01:01:25.840 --> 01:01:29.079
his table. We are the free citizens of democracies. We

1189
01:01:29.400 --> 01:01:32.559
own our own minds and we can defend our minds,

1190
01:01:32.639 --> 01:01:35.320
and we can defend our children's minds, and we can

1191
01:01:35.440 --> 01:01:38.079
take our attention back from the malign forces that have

1192
01:01:38.119 --> 01:01:39.000
stolen it from us.

1193
01:01:39.639 --> 01:01:42.800
Yeah, and thank you so much for the work that

1194
01:01:42.960 --> 01:01:45.760
you do and all the work that you do. Lost

1195
01:01:45.800 --> 01:01:48.639
Connections is a brilliant book as well. Before that, there

1196
01:01:48.800 --> 01:01:53.199
was Chasing the Screen. I recommend all of them to.

1197
01:01:53.360 --> 01:01:56.920
Everyone, but I think this could not be more timely.

1198
01:01:57.280 --> 01:02:00.599
And I you know, it's the first I've read a

1199
01:02:00.639 --> 01:02:03.440
lot about attention and about focus, and I teach meditation,

1200
01:02:03.599 --> 01:02:04.559
and so I'm all like, oh.

1201
01:02:04.480 --> 01:02:05.360
We just need to meditate.

1202
01:02:05.400 --> 01:02:08.519
But I haven't seen anything that has gone into such

1203
01:02:08.639 --> 01:02:13.480
detail and really dug into the complexity of this. So

1204
01:02:13.800 --> 01:02:15.719
I'm enormously grateful, and I know it's going to be

1205
01:02:16.159 --> 01:02:17.679
a bestseller in twenty twenty two.

1206
01:02:17.840 --> 01:02:19.280
And I so appreciate your time.

1207
01:02:19.800 --> 01:02:21.280
Thank you so much. And I really and it sounds

1208
01:02:21.320 --> 01:02:23.400
like an ironic compliment, but I really appreciate the attention

1209
01:02:23.480 --> 01:02:25.960
you've paid to the book. And I'm meant to read

1210
01:02:26.000 --> 01:02:27.719
out or my publishers will taste me. I can't read

1211
01:02:27.760 --> 01:02:29.400
out the whole things. That makes me so ridiculous. But

1212
01:02:29.840 --> 01:02:32.559
anyone wants to know any more information or where they

1213
01:02:32.559 --> 01:02:36.480
can get the book, the ebook or the audiobook, can

1214
01:02:36.519 --> 01:02:39.960
go to stolenfocusbook dot com, where they can also see

1215
01:02:40.400 --> 01:02:42.960
Hillary Clinton, Stephen Frye and lots of other people have

1216
01:02:43.039 --> 01:02:46.320
said about the book. They can also listen for free

1217
01:02:46.519 --> 01:02:49.199
to audio of lots of the people experts we've talked about.

1218
01:02:49.519 --> 01:02:54.320
Great and I love Australia and I love them engaging

1219
01:02:54.360 --> 01:02:57.719
with my books. So yeah, I'm very very excited to

1220
01:02:57.800 --> 01:02:58.840
hear what Australians think of it.

1221
01:02:59.320 --> 01:03:01.440
And we'll put all the links in the show notes

1222
01:03:01.440 --> 01:03:03.360
as well. I'll repeat those.

1223
01:03:03.599 --> 01:03:05.920
And I just want to say to listeners, like we

1224
01:03:06.079 --> 01:03:08.599
have really, even in this hour long conversation, we have

1225
01:03:09.039 --> 01:03:13.119
barely scratched the surface really of what you have got.

1226
01:03:13.280 --> 01:03:15.519
That the amount of information and the amount of research

1227
01:03:15.559 --> 01:03:17.400
and the people that you've spoken to, it is really

1228
01:03:17.480 --> 01:03:18.800
really there is so much there to.

1229
01:03:20.320 --> 01:03:24.760
Learn and to you know, to understand. So thank you, Johan,

1230
01:03:25.000 --> 01:03:25.840
thank you so much.

1231
01:03:25.760 --> 01:03:27.159
Thank you so much. Hooray.

1232
01:03:30.480 --> 01:03:34.079
John's book is called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention.

1233
01:03:34.400 --> 01:03:37.159
It is a fascinating read and it is available right

1234
01:03:37.239 --> 01:03:39.880
now in all bookstores. While I've got you just a

1235
01:03:39.920 --> 01:03:42.679
reminder that all three of my Crappy to Happy books

1236
01:03:42.800 --> 01:03:45.679
are now available on Audible and they are free for

1237
01:03:45.800 --> 01:03:49.079
Audible subscribers. You do not need to use your credit

1238
01:03:49.440 --> 01:03:52.760
to download your audio version of any of the three

1239
01:03:52.920 --> 01:03:56.000
Crappy to Happy books, and if you're not an Audible subscriber,

1240
01:03:56.079 --> 01:03:58.320
you can still listen for free with a thirty day

1241
01:03:58.400 --> 01:04:02.000
free trial of Audible. As always, if you enjoy Crappy

1242
01:04:02.039 --> 01:04:04.639
to Happy, please think about leaving us rating and review

1243
01:04:04.679 --> 01:04:08.519
on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe so that you never miss an episode.

1244
01:04:09.079 --> 01:04:11.760
To hear about what I'm doing, Please jump onto my

1245
01:04:11.920 --> 01:04:16.920
email list at castdone dot com. I'm running courses, retreats,

1246
01:04:16.960 --> 01:04:19.519
got all sorts of things going on, and follow me

1247
01:04:19.599 --> 01:04:23.920
on socials. I'm at Castdone underscore XO on Instagram orcastdone

1248
01:04:24.079 --> 01:04:28.039
dot xo on Facebook. Thank you so much for being here,

1249
01:04:28.280 --> 01:04:30.480
and as always, I look forward to catching you on

1250
01:04:30.559 --> 01:04:32.400
the next episode of Crappy to Happy

1251
01:04:39.800 --> 01:04:40.199
Listener