Why you can't focus with Johann Hari

0:02 A listener production. Today, I am super excited to share with you a conversation I recently had with Johann Hari. Johan is a British writer who has written two New York Times best selling books, and he's just published a third book, which I am sure is going to follow in the same footsteps. You may know Yohann for his TED talks, which have together been viewed more than eighty million times. The first one, you married Call was called Everything you think you know about Addiction is Wrong, and that was the one where he made the case that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection. And the second was called This could be Why You are depressed or anxious and it described how our increasing social isolation is a major contributing factor to mental illness in our society. And the book he wrote on that topic was called Lost Connections. So if you haven't seen his TED talks, I would highly recommend them.

1:00 But more recently, Johann. Has applied his investigative skills to the topic of our inability to pay attention. If you are like me, you will have personal experience of the fact that our capacity to sustain our attention on any given task or topic is gradually being eroded. We are distractable, we are forgetful, and many of us blame technology, or we blame being busy and stressed the addictive nature of our phones for this problem. But Johanne has actually identified twelve different causes for our attention problems, including a whole lot of things that you may not have necessarily connected to your compulsive scrolling and your lack of focus and your goldfish mind.

1:46 What I really love about Johann's work is that he has a gift for going straight to the source of the most cutting edge information on whatever topic it is that he's researching. He pulls together really complex information and he has a way of presenting it in a way that is very clear and very engaging. His book Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention is basically the summary of all of this research. It's just been published. It is, without doubt, the best book that I have read on the topic of our inability to pay attention. I could not wait to talk to Johann about the book, and so, without further ado, here is my conversation with Johann. Hari. Johan, thank you. So much for being on the Crappy to Happy podcast.

2:28 This morning for me, this evening for you. It is such a pleasure to have you here. I'm so happy to with you. Cas just saying I would killed to be in Australia right now, So this is the closest I'm going to get to being in Australia for quite a while. So I'm happy to be with you. Everybody in Australia would kill to get out of Australia. We've been a little bit lot here for the last two years. We just want to go. Somewhere right Britain, We'll have Australia. Everything will work out far Johan. I have been very fortunate to be reading an advanced copy of your book Stolen Focus, and first of all, it is brilliant. Thank you so much for the time that you have spent in investigating and raising the issues that you have in this book.

3:11 Oh thank you. So this started for. You as noticing, as a lot of us do, that you were struggling to pay attention. You talked about, you know, starting to read and reading the same page over and over, and the fact that everybody is so glued to our phones and that we just are just our capacity to sustain attention on anything seems to be really diminishing, and I could relate to this so much personally. You did something drastic initially, and you decided that the Internet's obviously the problem. Social media is the probably going to take myself off all social media, going to remove myself from the Internet for three home months, which is a very very big. Drastic thing to do.

3:53 I would love for you to talk about what led you to that decision, and I guess what your fears were and what you. Learned from that three months off the internet. Yeah, you know, I did it. I would love to tell you I did it for these big intellectual reasons that I wanted to intellectually understand our attention problems. The truth is that that's not actually why I did it. I couldn't bear the feeling that I had anymore of just being unable to focus, and I had this moment that really drove me to take that three month break. Like you say, for a long time, I'd had this sort of hunch that attention seemed to be getting worse.

4:35 I could certainly feel mineas getting worse. So many of the people I knew kept describing their own attention as getting worse, and I would see these sort of eye catching studies. There's one study, small study of college students in the United States that found that, on average, they focus on any one thing for sixty five seconds. In fact, a median amount they focused was nineteen seconds, and the average office worker now focuses on anyone task for three minutes. I thought, oh, that seems that sounds bad to me. Is it really always been like that? But I would reassure myself by saying, well, doesn't every generation feel like this. Doesn't every generation feel that attention is getting worse? You know there's a letter that one monk wrote to another nearly a thousand years ago, going, God, my attention ain't what it used to be. And so I would reassure myself, I going, well, this is just an eternal human thing, right, And then there was this moment because I thought, can that be right? And then there was this moment when I thought, no, I need to actually investigate this. I've got a godson called Adam, who, when he was nine, developed this really freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley the way that nine year olds do, and he would kind of run around singing Viva Las Vegas or suspicious Mind.

5:48 What was so cute about it is that he didn't know that that had become like a cheesy cliche. So he was doing with that kind of heart catching sincerity of kids who think they're being cool. And he kept getting me to tell him the story of Elvis's life over and over again, and I tried to obviously skip over the last and the last bit of it where guy's on a toilet. And one night I was tucking at him in and he looked at me very intensely, and he said, Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I said, yeah, sure, in the way that you do with nine year olds, knowing they'll forget it. The next day, I said, too sure, and he said, no, do you really promise that one day you'll take me to Graceland? And I said, I promise, I'll take you to Graceland. And I didn't think of it again for ten years until everything had gone wrong. So he had dropped out of school when he was fifteen, and by the time he was nineteen, he was just living in this blur where he was constantly alternating between WhatsApp, snapchat, porn YouTube. And one day we were sitting on the sofa just you can't see it, but just from behind mine my laptop is I was looking at him and he was alternating between these devices and all these different apps on these devices, and it was like he's a lovely person, but it's like he was kind of whirring at the speed of snapchat, where nothing still or serious could reach him. And I was looking at my own phone and feeling kind of disgusted with myself that I was glued to my phone, and I suddenly remembered this

7:19 moment from all those years before, and I said to him, Hey, let's go to Graceland. And he looked at me and it's like, what he didn't even remember this Elvis obsession until I reminded him of it. And I said, no, no, really, let's go to Graceland. We've got to break this numbing routine. This is no way to live. Let's go. And I said, but I'll take you on one condition, which is that when we go, you leave your phone in the hotel room. And he said, yeah, I'll do that, I promise, so literally, I think it was two or three weeks later, we flew from Heathrow to We went to New Orleans first and then we went to Memphis. And when you arrived at the gates of Graceland, there isn't a person to show you around anymore. Or this is even before COVID.

8:01 The way it works as they hand you an iPad and you put in earbuds and the iPad guide you around, so it says, you know, go left, and it tells you about the room, and every room you go into there's a picture of that room on the iPad that appears. So we're walking around Graceland and I noticed that what's happening is everyone just walks around Graceland staring at their iPad, and I'm sort of feeling more and more tense. I'm like, oh, this isn't what we traveled here for. And I'm trying to make eye contact with someone to sort of laugh about it, to go isn't this funny. We're the people who traveled thousands of miles and actually looked at the place we gained to. And finally I made I quite a long way and I was able to make eye contact with one of the other people, and then I realized he'd only looked away from his iPad to take out his phone and take his selfie. And we got to the Jungle Room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland, which is kind of like a fake jungle with lots of fake plants that've frankly seen better days. And we're looking at I'm looking at it, and there's this couple next to me, a Canadian couple and the wife. The husband turned to his wife and he said, honey, this is amazing. Look. If you swipe left, you can see the Jungle room to the left, and if you swipe right, you can see the Jungle Room to the right. And I laughed because I thought he was being witty, and then I realized that him and his wife are just wiping left. Try and she goes, wow, look, And so I turned to this guy and I said, yeah, but sir, there's an old fashioned form of swiping you can do.

9:27 It's called turning your head. Because we're actually in the Jungle Room. You don't have to look at a digital representation of it. We're actually there, right, And they of course looked at me like I was in say back to it, and I said, no, no, do you understand we're in the jungle room, you don't have to look at your iPad and they sort of ran off understandably, and I turned to my godson to sort of laugh about it, and he was in the corner looking at Snapchat, because from the minute we landed he'd been completely unable to keep his promise. He was constantly looking at his phone. And I stormed up to him and I said, you know, I know you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing you will miss out. You're not present at any of the events of your life. And I tried to grab the phone of him and he stormed off as well, in the same direction as the Canadian couple, and so I kind of just stomped around Graceland on my own for the afternoon. And that night I found him, my god son at the Heartbreak Hotel, which is where we were staying. There's a guitar shaped swimming pool where they play a constant loop of Elvis songs and he was sitting there looking at his phone, and I went up to him and I apologized, and he said, look, I know something is really wrong here, but I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought I need to look into this. I need to figure out what's going on so later. As you know, for the book, I traveled all over the world, including some really key moments in Australia, and I interviewed over two hundred of the leading experts about focus experts on focus in the world.

11:00 But when I got back from Memphis, I was so disgusted at myself and so horrified by this trend. I decided to do exactly as you, as you says, this disdrastic thing for myself, which is, you know, it's in this incredibly fortunate position that I could do that, cause my previous books had sold well. I just booked a room in a beach house in a place called Provincetown, which is in Cape Cod, and I said, everyone, I'm going completely off the internet for three months. I'm not going to have a smartphone, I'm not going to have a laptop that can connect to the internet. I'm just I'm done. I'm exhausted. I can't bear this. So I went to Provincetown, which is a little gay resort town.

11:42 To give you a sense of what it's like. It's the kind of place where more than one person makes a full time living by dressing as a Cela, the villain from The Little Mermaid, and singing songs about kind of lingis. It's a great play. And it was a really strange experience because at first, the first few weeks, I walked around in this haze of decompression and I was so relieved. And then I had this really nasty crash where I felt this incredible hunger for the rewards that we get from the internet. You know, the likes, the retweets were all exposed to these thin, insistent signals all the time, and I really felt this desperate hunger for them. You know, I wanted to snatch phones off of people and be like, oh, give me that, right and then and then once I got through that and I found my way to a greater sense of meaning in Provincetown, I was amazed by how deeply my attention came back, and I felt amazing. You know, I'd really thought that, just because of age I'm forty two now I was thirty nine then, that my brain had deteriorated.

12:55 And suddenly I found that I could focus in the way I had when I was a teenager. It was this incredible transformative experience, and at the end of it, I was like, the end of the three months, I was like, well, I'm going to live like this for the rest of my life. I'm never going to go back to that. And then I was reunited with my phone in my laptop when I got the ferry over to Boston, and within a month I was as bad as I'd ever been, and I thought, Oh, what's happening here? And I went to Moscow later to interview an amazing man named doctor James Williams, who's probably the most important philosopher and attention in the world. And he said to me, you've made a mistake here thinking that you can solve it. There's things you can do as an individual that will help, but thinking you can solve it on your own is like thinking the solution to air pollution is to wear a gas mask, Right, it's going to help. If I lived in Beijing, I would wear a gas mask, but it's not going to solve the problem. And I was like, oh, well, so that's when I had to go on this much bigger journey to meet all these experts and figure out, okay, well what can we do then?

13:52 Yeah, And of course we all are kind of aware of the addictive name nature of social media. Many of us have watched the Netflix series The Social Dilemma. I think personally, I feel like we are so habituated, like we don't know life without our phones. Like the idea of you going off the internet completely, I mean, how do you do anything. Without access to the internet. So I think we're just resigned to the fact that that is just how it is, and that we can't do anything about that. And it's this sort of vague, ambiguous idea that you know, we're getting a dopamine rush and are well, ah, well, we sort of feel like the benefits of the Internet and the social media outweigh the costs. Why should we be concerned about the way those apps, I guess and platforms are are geared to get us hooked.

14:52 Well, one of the things I learned that was so interesting is actually there's scientific evidence for twelve different factors that are degrading our attention. Is only one of them, and interestingly, it isn't the biggest, which surprised me. But even the element that relates to tech, I think we need to understand quite differently. And there's a kind of historical analogy that I think that helped me to think about it. So a lot of people, a lot of your listeners will remember, in the nineteen seventies it became undeniable that the lead we were using to pain, in paint and in petrol was really damaging people's brains. There's actually very good evidence exposure to lead causes brain inflammation, really damages children's ability to pay attention and think. So, I mean, actually they knew that, going right back to ancient rome, that led screws up your brain, but the lead industry just denied it for a really long time.

15:43 And by the seventies the science was so overwhelming that the lead industry couldn't suppress it anymore. So what happened we did not ban paint, and we did not ban petrol. You will have noticed, I'm in a room that's been painted, so are you. You know there are cars outside by window going past, which happened in their tanks. What we did is we banned the lead in the petrol. And it turns out with the tech there's something similar. Now, there's some degree to which the invention of these technologies would have had some effect on our attention. But actually, and this was fascinating spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley with the people who designed the world in which we now lived, many of them that actually, a lot of the damage to our attention is not being done by the tech itself. It's being done by a specific aspect of the tech is a bit analogous to the lead that used to be in paint and petrol.

16:35 And it took me a long time to understand this, And there's a moment it began to fall into place for me, so I interviewed I was walking around San Francisco with my friend Tristan Harris, who you probably know. You mentioned the social dilemma, and I was interviewing him long before he worked on that documentary. But the and Tristan said to me one day, for people who don't know, by the way, he's a former Google engineer who was at the heart of designing many of the things that we use every day, and then became very uncomfortable with what he was doing because it was destroying his own attention and he could see it destroying the attention of people around him. So he became this outspoken proponent of dealing with these problems. Christ An said to me one day you open Facebook now, it'll tell you all sorts of things. Right, it will tell you whose birthday is, It'll tell you who tagged you in a photo. It'll tell you what you said on that date ten years before.

17:26 There's one thing Facebook won't tell you. There's no button on Facebook that would say that says I'd like to meet up with one of my friends. Is there anyone around who wants to meet up? Right? There's no button. That's an incredibly technologically easy button to design. We all know dating apps that work that way. Why does Facebook not provide it? Everyone listening would know that that would be really popular. Facebook's users would really like that. If you follow the trail from that question, why doesn't Facebook provide that thing? We would all like I think you begin to understand some of the ways in which our attention is being invaded and some of how we can get it back without becoming the armish or renouncing our phones, which clearly we're not going to do a noise should we.

18:09 So the reason Facebook doesn't have that button is kind of simple. When you open Facebook, they make money in two ways. First way is really obvious. You see ads. We all know how that works. The second way is much more important. Everything you say on Facebook is scanned and sorted by their AI. So let's say over the years, you've clicked that you like Kylie Minogue, Donald Trump, and you've told your mum that you just bought some nappies. Right, so Facebook is figuring out, Okay, you're a man in my case, you like Kylie Minogue, you're probably gay. Oh you like Donald Trump, which I'm sure you can guess I don't. Okay, your right wing, and oh, you just bought some nappies. You've probably got a baby. Right now, they've got tens of thousands of pieces of information like that about you. They've got a very detailed sense of who you are. And the reason they build up that information is because you are not the customer of Facebook.

19:04 You are the product they sell to advertisers. So if I'm an advertiser who's selling nappies, you don't want to target an ad at me. I don't have a baby. You want to target it to someone who's got a baby. Right, So you're constantly they're selling this profile to you. Now, imagine that Facebook introduced that button I want to meet up with my friends. What would happen Let's say you push that button and I push that button, like, Oh, Cass wants to meet up, Let's go for a coffee. You would close Facebook and I would close Facebook, and we would look into each other's faces and smile, you know, and talk to each other and pay attention to each other. For Facebook, that's a disaster. Every moment you do that, they're losing both of those revenue streams. Right, So their entire Just like the business model for KFC is how do I get Cass to eat fried chicken? The business model for Facebook is how do I get Cass to keep scrolling for as long as possible and as many times a day? Right, This is what the people at the heart are the but themselves say. Sean Parker, one of the biggest initial investors in Facebook, said, we designed it to maximally take people's attention. We knew what we were doing, and we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our kids' brains, That's what he said. Right, So that can feel like it is a very big thing, right, because the more you scroll, the more money they make.

20:21 All of their engineers, all of this extraordinary human intelligence is geared towards that one thing. What techniques can we design to keep you scrolling? But the reason this becomes a bit like the lead in the pain and not the paint itself is because I learned. I remember the specific moment again that this first fell into place to me. I was interviewing someone called as Of Raskin, who designed one of the key aspects of how the Internet works. His dad, Jeff, actually designed the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs and ASA said to me, look, if you want to deal with these negative effects on people's attention, you do one thing, ban the current business model. So just like we banned lead in paint, just say we do not permit companies to surveil us, track us, to figure out weaknesses in our attention and sell those weaknesses to the highest bidder. We don't allow it. It's in human, it's anti human. It's not allowed. And I said to him, and lots of other people in Silicon Valley said this was a solution to me as well, And I said, tod Asa, okay, but let's imagine we did that. So I was trying to get my head around it. What happens if I open Facebook the next day? Does it just say, oh, sorry, we've gone fishing day after a ban, He said, of course not. What would happen would be they would have to move to a different business model.

21:40 And there's lots of other possible business models that we all know about. One is like Netflix. It could be subscription and we could pay fifty cents a month. Another model, which everyone listening has experienced with everyone listening is close to a sewer pipe right now. Before we had sewage pipes, we had you know, shit in the streets, and we got cholera. So we all pay for the sewers to be built and maintained together because we all have an interest in avoiding that. Now it might be in the same way we want. Just like we own the sewer pipes together, we might want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the attentional equivalent of cholera and on all sorts of other negative effects. But whatever the alternative model we adopt is. The most important thing is once the incentives change, the product can change. At the moment, you're not the customer, you're the product. But if we move to one of those other business models, suddenly you are the customer. They have to ask God, what does Cass want? Oh Cass wants to meet up with her friends. Okay, let's introduce a button to do that. Oh Cass wants to have an ability to pay attention. Okay, Well, let's want to pluck one example. Let's warn her every time we send her a link. You think this will take you only five seconds. In fact, it takes on average twelve minutes when we send someone a link. There's a thousand ways in which Facebook could be redesigned, not to hack your attention, but to heal your attention. But to do that, we have to change the business incentives. They're never going to do that on their own, any more than the lead industry was on its own going to ban leaded patrol. Right, they were never going to do that.

23:10 Of course, they made money out of it. They only did it because we made them. It was actually a campaign in Britain by what they called housewives that wanted to protect their kids from lead that did that, right, that achieved the ban in Britain. There were similar campaigns all over the world, including in Australia. So we absolutely don't It doesn't have to work the way it currently works the way Dr James Williams, the guy I mentioned before, but it to me was the Acts existed for one point four million years before anyone thought to put a handle on it. The Internet has existed for less than ten thousand days. It doesn't have to work the way we've had it up to now. We can change it if we want to.

23:50 That's so interesting, And obviously to do that, to make a change like that requires a coming together. Of you know, individuals for a colorive cause. And the other thing I found really interesting and you know, kind of alarming in your book was about the very fact that social media is also diminishing. It's basically creating more division. And I would love for you to talk a little bit about that, about how the algorithms work to promote this division, so they're actually getting in the way of our capacity to come together to create solutions to some of these huge problems, not just this, but but you know, climate change, all sorts of major problems.

24:33 In the world. Yes, as you know, most of my book Stolen Focus is about individual attention, and you know, the way so much we pay attention in our everyday lives. There's also a really important layer to this, which is our collective attention, right, how we pay attention as a society, And if you have a society of people whose individual attention has been stolen and is in a terrible state, that that will of course lead to real problems collectively. But you're absolutely right, and this isn't this isn't what the social media companies intended, but it's an effect of their products entirely because of the existing business model. It's not inherent to the idea of social media. So, like I say, their goal, their sole purpose is to keep you scrolling and maximize the amount of time you scroll. So all of their algorithms are designed constantly scanning the behavior of everyone to figure out how do we keep them scrolling, what keeps people looking?

25:36 And those algorithms, while doing that, stumbled upon an uncomfortable human truth, a difficult, challenging human truth. It's something that psychologists have actually known about for a very long time. It's called negativity bias. It's very simple. Anyone who's ever seen a car crash on the motorway knows what negativity bias is. You stared at the car crash a lot longer than you stared at the pretty flowers on the other side. Of the road. Humans will stare longer at the things that anger and upset them than they do at things that please them. This goes right back. This is very early in human evolution. Even ten week old babies will stay longer at an angry face than a happy face. And it's probably for a good reason in our evolution that you know, you probably wanted to watch out for the things that were scary, but takes when that takes place on social media, when the algorithm has discovered this, it has a horrendous effect. So what the algorithm is discovered is you, cass will keep scrolling longer if we show you things that make you angry and upset compared to if we show you things that make you happy. So that means the algorithms begin to select for things that make you angry. So imagine that. Just think about that, just at a personal level. Imagine two teenage girls who go to the same party and they leave and go home on the same bus, and one of them does a Facebook status update where she says that was such a nice party. Everyone looked good at a great time, and another teenage girl on the same bus says, I can use this language because you spend a lot of time with my niece. Looking at social media, it says Karen was a complete slag at that party.

27:08 She looks so dog ugly, and she tried to sleep with my friend's boyfriend, and her boyfriend stinks like shit. Just a stream of negative comments, right. The algorithm will of course pick up on both of these, and it will put that first status update, the nice one, into a few people's feeds, but it will put the second one into far more people's feeds because the algorithm knows. It scans for angry and outraging words like slag, stink, anger, hate, and it knows that if it puts that into people's feeds, more people will look at it for longer because you'll be shocked, it makes you angry, More people will engage, They'll go, how can you say Karen's a slag, You're a slag, whatever it might be. That's a literal conversation as your my nieces social media recently, so you can see how that's really damaging at the level of just ordinary, you know, everyday human interaction. When that effect happens not just with people describing a party they've been to, but people describing say, a political party. You begin to see think about the trends we've seen all over the world in the last you know, seven eight years. Now, this is not the only reason why the happening. It's important stress at as many reasons. But think about you know, in countries as different as Britain, Brazil and Australia, you've seen everywhere arise in toxic rage, hatred, refusal to listen to the other side, desire to destroy the other side, all sorts. Now,

28:38 these are partly the product of these disasters trans In fact, when Brazil elected a very extreme far right president called Jaya Bolsnaro, who in a debate in the Brazilian Senate when he was a senator, had told in a debate about rape, told the feat email senators, you don't need to worry about rape. You're so ugly, you're not worthy of it. When he became president, his supporters on election night at the rally chanted Facebook Facebook Facebook, because they knew it was the Facebook algorithms that are promoted Bolscenaro and led to his victory. In fact, Facebook's own internal research found that one third of all the people who joined neo Nazi groups in Germany did so because Facebook's algorithms specifically recommended they joined that group. You might want to join, it said, and then it was followed by a neo Nazi group. So we can see how both at an individual and a collective level, our attention is really being assaulted by this model, which is why we have to defend ourselves. Right, we had to protect ourselves, we had to protect our children, and we have to protect ourselves against the effects of this catastrophic model. And those are just two of the negative effects. There's loads more that we haven't talked about. Obviously, we absolutely can deal with this because you're right, a lot of the times people talk about the problems with the technology, people

30:11 say exactly what you said. You put it really well, which is, well, we get more benefit than harm from it, and you know, what are we going to do anyway? We're not going to give up our phones. And that's exactly how these social media companies want us to think about it. But actually it's about explaining to people it's not inherent to the technology. These toxic effects, some negative effects are inherent to the technology. It would be more distracting, whatever, but it wouldn't be this scale of invasion of our attention, right, it wouldn't be this level of horror, and that to me is very empowering message. Right, just like it's not inherent to lead and paint that it will destroy our attention. It was leaded paint and leaded petrol. There's a very similar effect going on.

30:55 I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you EPs drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. I pulled a quote out from your book which was that something like, if you live within fifty meters of a major highway, you're fifteen percent more likely to experience dementia. So the effect of. Our environment of pollution and the world we live in, not to mention what we're putting into our bodies, our diet, there are all of these other causes of our diminishing attention.

31:42 What do you think of it? Well, I guess can you just talk a little bit about that just to raise people's awareness of so it isn't just all social media. There are lots of other things at play here. Yeah, I mean, I was really shocked by the stuff about pollution. Professor Barbara Domini, who is one of the leader scientists in France, she won the legend'onneur, which is the highest civilian honor. She said to me, it was quite chilling. We're exposed to so many brain altering pollutants that she said, the phrase you use was there's no way you can have a normal brain today. So to give one example, and although it's actually one of the things that got a little bit better under COVID. So when you walk around any city Sidney, em Albourne, London, Mexico city, wherever it is, you are breathing in very heavy amounts of air pollution. And one of the things that's in the ebb that we breathe at the moment is a lot of iron and it goes straight to your brain you breathe, it didn't it goes straight to your brain, and your brain just did not evolve to handle or just suddenly being exposed to iron that's inhaled nasally.

32:46 There's nothing in our evolution that prepared us for that, and that causes the way. Professor Barbara Maher, who's at the University of Lancaster here in Britain, is one of the leading experts, and this said to me was it causes a repeated chronic insult to the brain is brain inflammation. We've got early studies that are very disturbing from Mexico City of kids who live in heavily polluted areas their brains have plaques and tangles, which are like dementia patients and their children. Right, So the pollution that we're exposed to is one obvious example. You mention another one, And it's interesting that pollution is one that we can only deal with a collective level. But with all the other causes of attention problems that I write about, install and focus, there's two levels at which we've got to deal with this.

33:33 One is there are lots of things we can do as individuals to deal with this, and I talk about lots of them, and I'm sure we'll talk about some of the things that I do. There are lots of things we can do as individuals. And then but we've also got to be honest with people. That will only get you so far. You can genuinely improve your attention by individual action, but then you'll hit a wall because we're living at the moment. It's like we're living in an environment which is constantly pouring itching powder on us, and then the person pouring itching powder on us is leaning forward and going, do you know what, mate? You might want to learn how to meditate, then you wouldn't scratch so much, and it's like, yeah, you should also stop pouring itching powder on me. Right, So you mentioned what a really interesting one where I think, obviously there's both individual and collective solutions, which is the way we eat.

34:21 And you know, this is probably the one I most struggle with in my own life. As you can probably see from my chins, there is literally the other side of the room there was actually a McDonald's bag from earlier tonight. There's been a profound transformation in the way we eat, and for me this I thought about this a lot in relation to my grandparents. My dad grew up on a mountain in Switzerland, a little wooden hut on a mountain in Switzerland, and I was born here in Britain, and because my mum's British and my dad came to live here and starting when I was nine. My dad every summer would ban to my grandparents' farm in Switzerland and got I got to her farm and make you into our mom, and so I would go there, and I remember the first summer I went there arriving, so I was writing. I was raised mostly by my Scottish grandmother, who's you know, was a working class Scottish woman.

35:17 So basically our diet was like you know, chips and you know, like microwave food and you know, heavily processed food. And I arrived in Switzerland and my Swiss grandparents ate how pretty much all humans in all of human history of eaten, which was they ate with very few exceptions. They ate fresh and nutritious food they themselves had grown, or animals they had raised and killed themselves. And I remember my Swiss grdmother would put food in front of me, and I remember saying to her, but this isn't food. And I wasn't joking. I literally didn't recognize what it was. Like she put leaves in front of me. I'd be like, but this is not what is this? This isn't this isn't food. And the first few weeks I was there, I just I could barely eat because it was so disgusting to me. And then in the end I made her take me to the McDonald's and Zurich, and when she looked at what I ate, she didn't recognize it as food. She was absolutely shocked by it. She refused to even have a mouth, which was like, what is this?

36:16 So in those two generations, from my Swiss grandparents to me, what we eat completely changed. And it turns out we all know the ways in which that has caused an enormous increase in obesity. The average American has gained twenty two pounds since nineteen sixty, extraordinary gaining weight. And Australia has was, you know, a very big abysia crisis. Like Britain does not quite as bad as the US, but it's bad. And what I learned from interviewing loads of backs this is really interesting new field of science called nutritional psychiatry, which looks at the ways in what we eat affect our brains and our mental states. And what I learned from talking to them and others is that there's three crucial ways in which what we has affected our ability to focus and pay attention. So the first is this is explained to me by Dale Pinnick, who's Britain's best known nutritionist. He explained to me that the way we eat causes huge spikes of energy and then crashes of energy. And when your energy crashes, you get brain fog and you can't pay attention. So imagine if in the morning you eat Frosty's and white bread that gives a huge, huge, immediate release of glucose, which even as I say it now, makes me feel good, right, And that makes you feel great for about twenty minutes, and then you arrive at your desk and you start to or your child arrives at their desk and at school and they start to just crash, right. And what

37:46 happens is most of us, certainly me included, live on a sort of roller coaster of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day. Where we get a huge release of energy, we crash, we feel a bit crap, happy to use your title of your podcast. Then we go for another boost later in the day, we feel better, we crash, and this just affects your brain function, right. And the way Dale put it to me is it's like putting rocket fuel into a mini It will go really fast for a little bit and then it'll just putter out, whereas if you put in the fuel that the car is actually suited to, it'll go along nicely all the time. So that's one way. The second way is that our diets lap a lot of the nutrients that are necessary for your brain to develop properly. There's a really interesting Dutch study that got a load of kids and split them into two groups, and one carried on eating the kind of normal Western diet and the other one, the other group, was put on a diet where they it was called an elimination this diet, but they basically had to only eat kind of fresh, healthy food and seventy percent of them had an improvement and attention.

38:54 The ones who shifted diet and the average improvement was fifty percent, which is extraordinary after improvement in their attention. And the third way is that it's not just that our diets lack things we need, they also contain things that act on us, like drugs. There was a really interesting study here in Britain in Southampton in two thousand and seven where they got two hundred and ninety seven kids. They split them into two groups. They were either nine or thirteen, and they gave the first group, which just got made to drink water or something neutral, and the second group drank a cocktail that not an alcoholic cocktail obviously that would be unacceptable, a cocktail that contained a lot of the synthetic dyes and chemicals that you find in everyday suits, like eminems, things like that, And they monitored them, and of course the kids who drank the cocktail were much more likely to become significantly more likely to become manic and act up. And again with obviously with diet, there's some degree to which, as individuals we can change our diet. Right, that's hard to do. We live from the moment we're born. We're raised to associate positive emotion with foods that are not good for us.

40:02 There's a machinery design to get us to crave the shitty foods. The foods that are good for your brain and good for the rest of you are more expensive, they're harder to get. There's all sorts of ways in which the system is rigged against us. So I don't want to be simplistic about this, but there are some things we can do as individuals and collectively we can change the food supply system right again, rather like the internet's owning system for ten thousand days, it's only been a generation for which we've been eating. Most of the food we now eat in Australia and Britain is processed or ultra processed food, which means you A good definition of process food was given by my friend Michael Pollen, the food writer. He said, you can tell the food is processed if when you look at the ingredients you can't figure out what they were in nature.

40:45 Right. That's a good rough ride, and most of what we eat it now falls into that category. Yeah. I actually have a couple of real life friends who are great examples of that. I remember when my daughter is now fifteen, when she was little, a friend of mine had a child roughly the same age, and this child had attention problems, all sorts of issues, and she used to post quite a lot just as a reminder on Facebook of these two coloring in sheets that her daughter had done. One was how but the before photo basically of this scrawl and this scratch just all over the page. And then she put her daughter onto effectively an elimination diet and cut out all of the dyes and colors and processed foods, and you know, within a few weeks there was this perfect colored within the lines drawing. You would not know it was from the same child at the same age.

41:40 That was how significant the effect was. So I really relate to that, and. I think more of us should really be aware of that. You know, just what is going on in kids and our own but you know, particularly in kids' brains, and it's uncomfortable as a parent to deal with hyperactive Kidsagine what it's. Like for the kids. Imagine what it's like to live in that state of brain confusion and fog, etc. Which brings me to this issue of ADHD. We can't talk about attention without talking about ADHD. And I said right at the beginning here that I was ready to run off and get myself a diagnosis, only half joking. You know, many of my adult friends are coming out now with ADHD adult ADHD diagnoses.

42:28 As a psychologist, I'm very aware of the link between early trauma, you know, adverse childhood experiences, and how that can impact your later cognitive development and function. And you do talk a lot about that in your book as well. You spent a lot of time exploring this and speaking to various experts on the topic of ADYHD, what conclusions did you draw about the the I guess the increased that there definitely has been a sharp increase in ADHD diagnosis in our kids in the last ten twenty years. Well, you're totally right about the explosion for every I'm forty two for every one person who was diagnosed with ADHD when I was seven in Britain, there's now a hundred people diagnosed that way. And ADHD was the subject of all the things that I write about in Style and Focus, it was the one that the experts most disagreed on. There's a very broad range of disagreement on this.

43:33 So you get some scientists who say, some good reputable scientists, you say, this is overwhelmingly a biological problem. These are just biologically different people. And then you get other very good, very reputable scientists who say the biology is hugely exaggerated, it's only a little bit of what's going on. And I'm not a scientist, and I'm a journalist. I mean, I was trained in social sciences at Cambridge. I think I'm good at understanding these things, but I can't reach a scientific conclusion. But what I can do is say some of the things that we we do know. And one of the people who I found most interesting about this was an incredible man named Professor Joel Nig who's one of the leading experts in the world on children's attention problems. And he said to me, we need to ask if we are now living in what he called if our kids in particular are now living in what he called an attentional pathogenic environment, which is one that is systematically undermining children's attention. And the last quarter of the book is really about children, why our children can't pay attention, what we can do about it, And there's a I think a reasonable conclusion is that there is some biological contribution to some people's attention problems. I think the evidence for that is pretty clear, but it's not most of what's going on here, right, But that's important once you've said that to stress, because some people hear it as if the problem is overwhelmingly biologically, it's real, and if the problems are elsewhere in our psychology and the way we live, they're somehow not real. And I

45:03 think that's a completely wrong way of framing it. Everyone who's struggling to focus your problem is real. That's what my whole book is about. We need to understand the whole range. So the kind of fancy term for it is called the biopsychosocial model, which is where you basically say, and this is true of all mental health problems. There are three kinds of cause of all mental problems. There are biological contributions like your genes or brain changes. There are psychological problems like you mentioned trauma. That's a very important one, but there's also others. And there are social causes like the way our schools work, the way we feed our children. And of course all these three things interact, right, they're not separate little boxes. So I think the biopsycho social model is right. There's all three of these things are playing out, so we have to ask ourselves what can we do about that. I think the most important factor to understand about children's attention problems is rather like we've had a complete transformation in the way we eat in the last few generations, such that the way I ate was literally unrecognizable to my grandmother, and the way my grandmother ate was unrecognizable to me. There has been a such a deep transformation of childhood and there's very strong evidence that key aspects of that change in childhood are deeply altering our children's ability to focus and pay attention.

46:22 So one of the heroes of my book is an amazing woman called leonorse Ga Nazi who runs a group called let Grow dot org. But when Leonore was five years old. She grew up in a suburb of Chicago. When Lenore was five years old, she would leave her house on her own and walk to school, which was fifteen minutes away. She'd usually meet up with the other neighbor kids on the way. They'd walk together. When she got to the school, there was a ten year old boy whose job was to help the five year olds across the road. He was dressed as a lollipop ma'am. And then she was at school until three o'clock. And then she would leave on her own or with their group of friends. They'd wander around the neighborhood on their own for two or three hours. They'd go to the woods, they'd go to the library. They do invent their own little games outside they would play spontaneous soccer games or whatever it was, and then they would go home when they were hungry. This is what almost everyone's childhood looked like from basically the beginning of humanity until the nineteen sixties. Right, there were a few exceptions, like you know, the height of industrialization, chimney sweeps or chatt or slavery, but there were very, very few exceptions to this. Right by the time Leanoree had her own kids, she was living in Queens in New York at the time, in the nineties, childhood had completely transformed. If you let your five year old walk to school on their own, people would have owned the police. Right you expected to until they were, you know, well into their teens. You were expected to walk or drive your children to school and wait until you saw them go through the door, and you were meant to be there to collect them like a package when the day was over. And only ten percent of American children ever play outside without an adult supervising them.

47:52 And this is pre COVID. Obviously, during COVID it almost nothing at all. And this transformation in childhood has deprived children and many aspects that we know are essential for developing attention and focus. One of those factors are just named a few of them, but one of those factors is exercise. Overwhelming scientific evidence children who run around and exercise, their brains go bigger, their brains go more neurons, They are physically and mentally healthier. Right, children want to run around. We are the first human society ever to think that we can make children sit still for eight hours a day. Bonkers, Right, We've stripped play out of schools, and we've stripped and we've stripped play out of the time they're not in school.

48:36 So this has a disastrous effect on their ability to focus and pay attention. The second is we And this is really crucial And I learned a lot about this from Dr Isabel Benka, an amazing chile and primatologist, is an expert on this. That most of the skills that children learn they learn by playing with other children. This is the foundation of how you learn, how you learn what to pay attention to. So think about what Lenore was learning when she was five years old and she's running around with the other kids in her neighborhood. She's learning how to get other people's attention, how to engage them. She's learning how to persuade the other kids. You've got to persuade them to play the game. She's learning how to cope with disappointment. You're going to lose the game sometimes and the other kids will go, you're lost. You've got to sit out right. She's learning how to be brave and how to cope with anxiety. You might climb the tree, you get a little bit high, you feel scared, You carry on climbing. The other kids help you get down.

49:28 You're learning how to navigate the world. And when we've deprived children of free play, and it's crucial that it's free. If it's adults standing over them telling them what to do, it doesn't count. Doesn't act get those benefits. By depriving children of that, we've deprived them of the ability to develop a healthy sense of attention. They're really anxious, they're really afraid. I interviewed this guy called Professor Zavier Castellanos En. Why a new university professor of child adolescent psychiatry who was involved in these rat experiments or told me about these rat experiments? Are they to learn about it? Basically, they get a load of rats. Some of them are allowed when their children, some of them are allowed to play, and some of them aren't, and then they monitor them as they grow up. Because it takes a few years for rats to grow up. And the rats that were allowed to play were much better at solving problems, dealing with challenges, deploying their attention than the rats that were not allowed play. Rats weren't allowed to play really struggled with solving problems. Right, And again, we could intuitively understand why that would be the minute you hear it. Right, So, I don't think you can separate the rise in what we're calling ADHD from the complete transformation of childhood that happened at the same time. Right, It's important to stress again, there are real biological contributions. Some children, as a result of their genes, find it harder to focus. But as Joel Nigg explained to me, genes are turned on and off by the environment. Right, So your genes make you increase the odds of you struggling to focus. The other thing, and this is a more complicated point, but a really important one is you know, I spent some time in

51:00 an Amish village in Indiana, and Amish kids don't get ADHD. There are no children that present with this phenomena. I'm try to figure out why this is. And I spoke to a lot of the Armish and they said to me, well, of course we have some kids who don't want to sit down all day, but then we just let them go off and go fishing or run around, Like, why would you want to make a child sit down if they can't sit down? And it's not The Armish are not like hippie. It's not a commune, right, they're just like that would be a We've created a society that puts such a high premium on making children passive sitting still all the time. Is that even desirable? Often it's the kid who doesn't want to sit still all day who will be the child who'll go on to achieve much more so, I think we've developed a disastrous school system through no thought of teachers who do an amazing job and have argued against this robotization of our education system where it's all about testing, which again is disastrous for children's ability to focus. Adults and children focus best when what they are learning is meaning to them. You can focus much better on saying that means something to you.

52:04 But when education becomes completely restructured around testing, it drains learning of meaning, and that's disastrous for ability to focus and pay attention. And there's lots of good evidence for that. So all these transformations of childhood are so important. And you know, there was one person. This will sound really odd and it will sound like a joke. I promise you it's not a joke. This person is real. There's one person where the whole IDHD debate, not the whole ADHD debate, because but one aspect of the ADHD debate really fell into place for me. I went to interview this guy called Nicholas Dodman, Professor Nicholas Dodman. It's professor of veterinary science at Tufts University and a vet, and he pioneered the diagnosing of dogs with ADHD. One day, a woman brought her dog, a beagle named Emma, to see Dr Dobman, and she said, I've got problem with my dog. Whenever I leave her alone, she goes crazy and she's always running around. And he diagnosed the dog with ADHD and gave the dog Rittlin and the dog became much more passive. And he's pioneered an enormous range of animals are given what we used to think of as human psychiatric drugs because of hearing me pioneered this.

53:18 Because of him, there are parrots on valium. There are walruses on antipsychotics. There are polar bears on prozac. It's a bit like One fell Over the Cuckoo's Nest for actual cuckoos. But before I went to interview him, I thought he would say to me, well, I do this because these animals have a genetic problem, you know, and that's why I have to do it. Actually, to be fair to him, he didn't say that. He said, look, dogs need to run around, right, Dogs are meant to run around for three hours off leash every day. Almost no dogs in the United States, and I'm guessing Australia do that right. So the phrase he used, which really stay with me, he said, they've got frustrated biological objectives.

54:00 Described to me one dog that had ADHD and in voted commas. It was living in a small flat in Manhattan, and then it was sent to go and live on a farm and mysteriously all its attention problems went away because it could run around all day. Right now, I don't want to say that's what's happening with all humans who are being diagnosed with ADHD. That would be oversimplifying. There are many factors going on there are real biological contributions. There are real psychological contributions. You mentioned trauma. People who are under stressed will struggle to focus. Children who've been through traumas are thirty six times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD severe trauma. There's other factors going on there. I'm sure we can talk about. But I do think part of what we're seeing is frustrated biological objectives, like in those dogs, right, We're trying to fit kids into a box they don't want to be in. And I think we've particularly seen that during COVID. Although the COVID restrictions in my view, were necessary in order to prevent the spread of the virus, I know there's a legitimate debate about that, and some reasonable people will disagree. I've been under those necessary, in my view, necessary restrictions. We've seen the effect it had on our kids, right, So an increase on restriction has really damaged our kids' attention.

55:10 It's made them less physically fit. So if we can see that, we should be able to see that the increasing restrictions of the last thirty years have done that. And Lenore, who I mentioned, the reason I wrote about her is because she is the pioneer because if you're the only parent who sends your kid out to play, it doesn't work right. You just look like a nutter and the chart gets frightened. So what Lenare does is she goes to schools and persuades groups of parents and communities to restore childhood, to let children play again, Like I say, the group and I really recommend people look this up letgrow dot org. She's an amazing person, a real hero, I think. And Lenare it was so moving going to these schools and seeing these children rediscover play and meaning, and you could see the effect it had on their attention. There was a little boy who was in trouble a lot. His mum was constantly fighting with him because he couldn't pay attention, He wasn't don't want to read, he didn't want to do his homework. And they started this lect Grow program, which about you choose something you want to do freely on your own and come back and tell us about it. And he decided at first he wanted to build a model of a raft, so he got a glue gun, he got toothpicks, all these things that you would never normally let a nine year old do and he built this model of a raft and he took it to the ocean and he let it float, and he loved doing that. So then he started reading about how you build things, and he said he was going to build an amphibious wagon, like human sized amphibious wagon. He starts getting gathering all the material.

56:39 He goes into his neighbor's yards and ask him if they can have their old bamboo. He starts to read so much about how it is. He tries. He focuses for hours, because he's chosen this thing. It's meaningful to him. He focuses on it night and day. He takes the amphibious wab into the wagon into the ocean, and it sank, and he's like, damn it, I'm going to make this work. And he goes back and does it again and again and again, and suddenly all his reading. He doesn't have a problem of reading anymore, because he wants to read. He wants I spoke to her. She's like the transformation in him. And I remember the wonderful teacher there, Donna Verbeck said to me, you know that freedom taught him so much more than anything. We could sort of put him in a box and tell him could do we need one of there's many things we need to do to get our attention back. One of the things we need to do is restore childhood as it was for almost all of human history. We cannot continue, I mean, we can continue with children happening entirely behind closed doors, but it will produce physically and mentally stunted children, which is what he's doing.

57:39 Yeah, I'm really conscious of your time, but thank you so much. What I want to conclude with and what I want to make time for, is for you. After all of this research, everything that you learned in this book, from where you were at the beginning to you know, to where you came to at the end of all of this this whole project, I get, what are the specific changes that you have made in your own life to help you to better manage your attention, to get back that capacity to sustain your focus. So I give you some I'm going to go through lots of examples in the book, but I'll give you a specific one. You can't see this from the angle which the camera is pointed, but just over there, I have something called a k safe. This company should start paying commision by the way, so I keep recommending it.

58:23 They should, they should. I have so k Safe is a plastic safe. You take the lid off, you put your phone in it, you put the lid on, and you turn the dial at the top and you can set it to anything for between five minutes and a week. You push the button and it will lock your phone away for the period you asked it to lock your phone away. And I locked my phone away for four hours a day. I know that's a real privilege. We had to have collective changes that make it possible for more people to do that. But I put my phone four hours a day. I'm a writer. That's how I get my writing done. I also have on my laptop an app called Freedom, which can cut you off. You can tell it to deny you access to specific websites like say Twitter or Instagram or the entire Internet, and you'll do it for however long you tell it to, up to a whole day.

59:08 So those two things I had one of the ways I sort of protect myself at a personal level. And there's loads of loads of things I've done, but those are two of the things that really it's sort of my attempt to take Provincetown. What I learned in Provincetown home with me in terms of how much better I felt. Another change, very simple one, is I used to when I couldn't focus and pay attention. I used to blame myself all the time that oh, you're weak, you can't you haven't got willpower. I don't do that anymore. Your attention didn't collapse. Your attention was stolen from you, right, And there's something very liberating and knowing that you're not a failure. You know. There was a funny enough there was a moment with an Australian. There were so many great Australians that interviewed for the book. I love Australia. There's one moment, very early in the research for the book really sobered me.

59:59 There's a a guy, he's a professor at the University of Queensland, is called Professor Roy Baumeister. And I went to interview him. So Roy Baumeister is the leading expert in the world on willpower. He wrote a book called Willpower Right, So go and see him and I said, you know, I'm thinking of writing a book about why we're struggling to focus and pay attention. And he said something like, Jad, that's so interesting you should say that, because I've just found I can't really pay attention a lot of the time now. I just I pick up my phone, I play video games all the time. And I'm sort of sitting there and I'm like, hang on, didn't you write a book called willpower? We have when you are sitting there? Go God, just play video games all day. I was like, oh my god, But that really underscored to me. It's not about individual psychological insights are very valuable, but it's as much about the environment. Right, We've got to deal with these. We've got to deal with it at both levels. And there's a analogy. I think with feminism. We needed and we need a feminist movement so that women could regain control of their bodies in their minds, I think we need an attention movement so we can regain control of our minds. Right, we need to defend ourselves and that requires a shifting focus.

1:01:17 You know, we are not medieval peasants who are begging King Zuckerberg to hand us little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies. We own our own minds and we can defend our minds, and we can defend our children's minds, and we can take our attention back from the malign forces that have stolen it from us. Yeah, and thank you so much for the work that you do and all the work that you do. Lost Connections is a brilliant book as well. Before that, there was Chasing the Screen. I recommend all of them to. Everyone, but I think this could not be more timely. And I you know, it's the first I've read a lot about attention and about focus, and I teach meditation, and so I'm all like, oh.

1:02:04 We just need to meditate. But I haven't seen anything that has gone into such detail and really dug into the complexity of this. So I'm enormously grateful, and I know it's going to be a bestseller in twenty twenty two. And I so appreciate your time. Thank you so much. And I really and it sounds like an ironic compliment, but I really appreciate the attention you've paid to the book. And I'm meant to read out or my publishers will taste me. I can't read out the whole things. That makes me so ridiculous. But anyone wants to know any more information or where they can get the book, the ebook or the audiobook, can go to stolenfocusbook dot com, where they can also see Hillary Clinton, Stephen Frye and lots of other people have said about the book. They can also listen for free to audio of lots of the people experts we've talked about.

1:02:49 Great and I love Australia and I love them engaging with my books. So yeah, I'm very very excited to hear what Australians think of it. And we'll put all the links in the show notes as well. I'll repeat those. And I just want to say to listeners, like we have really, even in this hour long conversation, we have barely scratched the surface really of what you have got. That the amount of information and the amount of research and the people that you've spoken to, it is really really there is so much there to. Learn and to you know, to understand. So thank you, Johan, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Hooray.

1:03:30 John's book is called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention. It is a fascinating read and it is available right now in all bookstores. While I've got you just a reminder that all three of my Crappy to Happy books are now available on Audible and they are free for Audible subscribers. You do not need to use your credit to download your audio version of any of the three Crappy to Happy books, and if you're not an Audible subscriber, you can still listen for free with a thirty day free trial of Audible. As always, if you enjoy Crappy to Happy, please think about leaving us rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe so that you never miss an episode. To hear about what I'm doing, Please jump onto my email list at castdone dot com. I'm running courses, retreats, got all sorts of things going on, and follow me on socials. I'm at Castdone underscore XO on Instagram orcastdone dot xo on Facebook. Thank you so much for being here, and as always, I look forward to catching you on the next episode of Crappy to Happy Listener