Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNOX7a7-kwQ
you're not being present in your life you're being present at all johan hari he's been on a journey to understand attention and why we seem to have so little of it these days i know something's really wrong but i don't know what it is and that's when i thought are we having an attention and focus crisis if we are why is it happening and most importantly what can we do to get our brains back if you've got all these smart engineers and they've got one incentive how do i take stephen's attention the absolute most i can we need an attention movement to reclaim our minds if our goal is as a country to be a country that's innovative my god a country of people who can think is going to be innovative country of adult people flicking between whatsapp snapchat and tick tock ain't going to be a place full of innovation do you want your child to be able to focus do you want your child to be able to read books do you want your child to be able to think deeply of course you do okay we've got to fix the society and culture to give them those things and we absolutely can change them quick one can you do me a favor if you're listening to this and hit the subscribe button the follow button wherever you're listening to this podcast thank you so much today one of my favorite ever guests on this podcast returns and they return with a completely different conversation for you johan hari what he wrote about mental health and the causes of depression and anxiety and meaningful connection changed my life it's probably the number one book i recommend and you've heard me recommend on this podcast the book lost connections but over the last several years johan's been on a completely different journey he's been on a journey to understand attention and why we seem to have so little of it these days but why it's so fundamentally important for our happiness our success and everything in between we all know we're a generation that are glued to our screens and our phone but what is the cost what is the cost of things that actually matter how do we change it why should we change it johan went on that journey the most remarkable entertaining
hilarious journey and he's unbelievable maybe the best ever on this podcast storyteller you're gonna absolutely love this conversation and entertainment aside it might just change your life so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] johan first and foremost thank you for coming back i it just dawned on me that you visited here more than any other guest you now have the record as three times we've had i mean i'm officially the king of your you're the king of my podcast and my my first question to you is i know how talented you are at writing and how um you could basically write about anything if you wanted to because your books have been so successful you're a very very well acclaimed um author so my first question is and this is the question i asked myself when i received your book from your publisher is why did you decide to write about attention when you could have spent your life writing about anything you know for years i had this feeling like when i walked around in my friends in myself something was going badly wrong with our ability to focus and pay attention and every now and then i would see small studies that seem to suggest this was true there's a study of american college students that found that now they only focus on average on any one thing for 65 seconds there's a study of office workers that found on average now office workers only focus on one task for three minutes but i thought people have always felt their attention is getting worse right what happens as you get older you know your attention deteriorates and you mistake your own deterioration for the deterioration of the world around you right you can read stories of monks in the middle ages uh letters they wrote to each other saying oh my attention isn't what it used to be i'm worried about this right so i just thought uh everyone thinks this and then there was a it was a moment that for me i thought i do think there's something deeper
happening here when he was nine my godson adam developed this brief but really freakishly intense obsession with elvis i never found out why he must have seen him on on youtube or the telly or something and he he didn't know that like elvis impersonation has become this cheesy thing so he did it with this totally like heart catching sincerity he would sing viva las vegas and suspicious minds and and all the kind of elvis classics and um he kept getting me to tell him the story of elvis that elvis is born in this little town called tupelo in mississippi and one of the poorest places in america he's born and his twin brother died as he was being born and as he was a little boy his mother told him that if he looked at the moon and he sang his little brother could hear him so that's why he became one of the reasons he became such a great singer so i was telling my god son this story and what and i obviously told him that elvis became really famous and bought this palace that he called graceland and one day i was tucking tucking him in and he said to me 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 you do with little children you're just like you know they're never gonna forget it the next day and he said no do you really promise will you take me to graceland and i said yeah i promise you i didn't think about it again for 10 years until really everything had gone wrong so by the time adam was 19 he dropped out of school when he was 15 and he was just spent he seemed to spend just all his time alternating between his ipad his laptop and his phone and he seemed to live in this kind of blur of whatsapp and youtube and porn and it was like he had fragmented as a person it was like he was kind of whirring at the speed of snapchat right you couldn't have a conversation with him lasted more than a few minutes he was very
intelligent decent not good person but it was like nothing could gain any friction in his mind and one day we were sitting on my sofa and i was looking at him doing this and i was thinking god in the decade that you've become a man this has happened to so many people i know okay this is the extreme end of the spectrum but i could feel it happening to myself right things that require deep focus like reading a book obviously i still do that a huge amount but it felt like with every year that passed that was more and more like running up a down escalator right some people can still get to the top but and the escalator is getting faster right and i was looking at him and i thought i have to break this routine i can't bear to see this happen to him i can't bear to feel this happened to myself and i suddenly remembered when he'd been a little boy and i said you know what let's go to graceland and he looked at me like what are you talking about he didn't even remember this elvis obsession and i was like no i'll take you to graceland let's go let's just leave but i'll take you on one condition which is that when we go there you leave your phone in the hotel when we go out right because i can't take you there and just you be looking at your phone the whole time so two weeks later we flew we went to new orleans first but we left from heathrow and we and we we flew out to the south and when you arrive at the gates of graceland now this is pre-covered i imagine it's worse now but when you arrive at the gates of graceland there isn't a physical guide to show you around anymore what happens is they give you an ipad and you put in uh little uh earphones and the ipad shows you around so you look at the ipad and it says go left and then there's an actor telling you like in this room and it explains all these things and in each room you're in there's like a representation of that room on the ipad so what happens is people walk around graceland staring at their ipad right so i'm walking around surrounded by this kind of united
nations of blank-faced people from like korea and canada and everywhere else and no one is looking at the thing they've traveled to see right and i'm getting more and more like tense as i'm watching this and i'm trying to make eye contact with someone to go like oh you know someone i'm waiting for someone else to look up and go look we're the people who traveled 3000 miles and actually looked at the thing we traveled to and finally i did make eye contact with a guy and i smiled and i was about to say exactly what i just said and then i realized he'd only taken the earphones out and put down the ipad so he could take out his phone and take a selfie and i was feeling more and more tense and finally we got to the jungle room which was elvis favorite room in graceland it's just a kind of fake jungle with loads of fake plants and there's this couple next to me and the man turned to his wife and said honey look this is amazing 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 she goes oh wow and so she's swiping left and right on her ipad and i look at this guy and i said right but sir there's an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do it's called turning your head because we're actually in the jungle room right you don't need to look at a digital representation of it we're literally here look it's in front of you and of course this couple thought i was insane not possibly not unreasonably and they they walked off and i turned to my godson to kind of bond with him and laugh about isn't this mad and he was just standing in a corner looking at snapchat from because the minute we le we landed he just was on his phone constantly i remember when i said to him i thought you said you weren't going to use your phone he said oh i thought you meant i won't take phone calls i can't not use social media right and it was he said it was a kind of baffled sincerity as if i was asking him to hold his breath or something i got really angry and i said to him you know you're frightened of missing out but what this is doing is it's guaranteeing you miss out you're not
being present in your life you're being present at all and he kind of stormed off again not unreasonably i was being a bit angry and so i stomped around graceland on my own for a while and then that night i found out we were staying in the heartbreak hotel which is across the street from graceland and i found him there's a swimming pool that's shaped like a guitar where they play all these songs in a constant loop and i saw him sitting there looking at his phone and i went up to him and i realized like a lot of anger my anger at him was really angry at myself i could feel these pressures happening to me i could feel my own attention and focus fragmenting and he just looked at his phone and said i know something's really wrong but i don't know what it is and that's when i thought okay i need to look into are we having an attention and focus crisis if we are why is it happening and most importantly what can we do to get our brains back and what did you discover in terms of the stats facts and figures around the attention crisis is it a real thing is it is it happening and and link to that i guess what is the what are we losing because of the attention crisis yeah so i ended up traveling all over the world i interviewed 250 of the leading experts in the world about attention and focus and i went to just places that have been really differently affected by this so from moscow to miami from a favela islamic in rio de janeiro where attention had collapsed in a particularly disastrous way to an office in new zealand where they discovered this amazing way to restore people's attention and what i learned is so the best way we could know if attention has collapsed would be if for the last 150 years every year scientists are given the same kind of attention test to people and then we'd be able to track it that way no one did that so that that we don't know that but i do think there's another way we can reasonably conclude that this is a real crisis so there's scientific evidence for 12 different factors that affect attention and focus but either
boost it or trash it and there's good evidence that a lot of these factors have been rising throughout your lifetime and my lifetime so i think it's fair to conclude therefore that we are facing a real crisis and there's various pieces of evidence that do show collectively our attention span really is shrinking so and i think that leads to um we've got to understand what's happening to us in a very different way because when i felt my attention fraying my main response was to go into you know just self-criticism just go you're weak you're lazy you're not good enough why aren't you strong enough to resist these forms of distraction and actually when you know that this is happening to almost all of us or in fact these factors are bearing on all of us right they're affecting some of us differently that made me realize you've got to think about this in it in a different way so there's a guy i went to interview one of the leading experts on children's attention problems in the world a guy named professor joel nigg who's uh in portland and oregon and he said to me look think about obesity right if you look at a beach a photograph of a beach in britain in 1970 or in the us anywhere everyone is by our standards either slim or buff there's nobody who's what we think of as fat right no one it's really weird and it's not that fat people just stayed at home right what happened is if you look at 1970 there was almost no obesity in the western world and then certain absolutely crucial changes happened in the way we live right our food supply change people used to eat fresh and nutritious food we moved to heavily processed and ultra processed food which affects your body in a very different way and our city's completely changed so you used to be able to bike and walk to work to the places you wanted to go in a lot of our cities that's now impossible and as a result of these two big changes and some other ones actually stress right the more stressed you are the more you want it comforting as a result of these big changes obesity exploded so it's not that individuals got like weak or whatever we might whatever the stigmatizing these people say about overweight people
and what professor nick said is something very similar is happening with attention there are changes in the way we live that are pouring acid on everyone's ability to pay attention um the way he put it the kind of technical term is that we have a an attentional pathogenic culture a culture in which it is very hard for all of us to form and sustain deep focus this is why um activities that require deep forms of focus like reading a book have just fallen off a cliff right in the last 20 years so what we've got to do is there's two levels of response one is there are individual responses there are changes we can all make in our lives obviously i talk about this a lot in the book stolen focus about this there are changes we can all make in our lives there are also big changes we need to make as a society so we need to come together and demand changes in the society that would make it possible for us to make a lot of these positive changes we want to make so these two layers i mean i know there's a lot there to um but okay so if we were to agree that um attention has decayed what i really want to know is um like so what what what is the cost to my life outside of the fact that i might not have as engaging relationships is there any other cost to my productivity to anything else that really really matters to me yeah this is such an important question i think there's two sort of levels we need to think about it the first is as an individual if you can't focus and pay attention your ability to achieve your goals across the board diminishes right so you want to set up a business you want to write a book you want to learn how to play the guitar all of those things become much harder if you can't focus and pay attention if you're constantly pulled away by the you know pings in your phone well let's say you want to be a good parent if you're constantly pulled away from that if you're constantly distracted your ability to do that so any goal you have in your life is diminished if you can't pay attention and so that's the personal layer there's also just a collective and social layer
if you live in a society where people can't pay attention if you're surrounded by people who can't pay attention our ability to solve our collective problems and we're facing a lot of collective problems at the moment also breaks down so attention is crucial for achieving goals and problem solving and to me those are the two of the most important things in life right and you went to the other one just being present with people right you know if you can't be present with people if you think about my godson you can't form the deepest relationships you have if most of us think about if i said to you you know what's a moment that's been deeply meaningful to you in your life it'll be a moment but very likely when you are paying attention and other people are paying attention to you right it's a moment of shared focus a moment of meaning um we can't do that if we can't pay attention so you become a sort of stump of yourself there's a you know you can sense that you might have been more it chokes off growth and there's there's kind of there's a few ways of thinking about this there's an amazing expert on attention called dr james williams who interviewed in moscow it's a former google engineer who said that there's a few kind of different types of attention that we see and we seem to be losing all of them so the first type of attention is called your spotlight right so let's say there's a fridge in the corner of this room let's say uh i want to go and get two drinks from that and bring it to the people in the other room right so my spotlight i've got an immediate task go and get the drinks take them to the people in the other room now if i'm constantly interrupted if i'm constantly checking my text i might get to the fridge get a little text forget why did i go there again the guys in the room are saying where the hell's johan why has he not brought us this stuff so your spotlight is your ability to home in on an immediate task right that is obvious we can all see how that's being disrupted i can talk more about that if you like then there's what he calls your starlight which is your more medium-term goals so a medium-term goal might be you
know a goal that you obviously had a few years ago i want to start a business right that's a medium term goal it's called starlight because when you're not sure where you are you look up at the stars and you're like oh you orientate yourself by the stars right that is being disrupted if your life is full of distractions if your consciousness is hijacked by really petty goals or goals that are someone else's goals like social media you you can't you lose you begin to lose your ability to formulate it's not just you can't achieve the short-term tasks you lose your ability to achieve your longer-term tasks and the third form is what james calls dr williams calls your daylight which is how do you even know that you want to set up a business how do you even know what it means to be a good dad how do you know what it means to have a good life right for to be able to see clearly a room has to be flooded with daylight and it's not just that we're losing our short-term attention it's not just that we're losing our medium-term attention when those things happen you you have less ability to make sense of your own life you know he compared it to on the internet a denial of service attack where when someone wants to take down a website they get you know many thousands of computers to log on simultaneously and the computer crashes it's like we're experiencing that we're so overloaded that your sense of like who am i what do i want to do if you're if your life is atrophied into 65 second and three-minute chunks how do you build a sense of where you want to go and who you want to be you begin to feel lost in your own life and i think you can see that happening to lots of people i certainly can and as you were saying do you feel that for yourselves oh 100 and as you were saying that i was reflecting on um how difficult i find it to just sit with my girlfriend and just like pay attention and just try and connect with her like how has your day been without devices and screens and there was a there was a big change we made together where we kind of made a rule that we would exclude devices from certain parts of our life so we don't have them in the bedroom if we're in if we're in bed together we don't have
devices in there and um there'll be some times where we commit to putting the phones away and doing something sometimes for seven hours so it'll be like she'll say to me i want to do this special type of dance that i've never done before right so put the phones away and as i'm doing it especially at the start as we're doing this like there's called contact dance you wanted to do with me where you always maintain one point of contact i was just thinking about my phone and then you know i think we get into hour five and six and i'm still thinking about my phone and it's funny because i'm not being present i'm not i'm actually kind of like complying with what she wants to do so that i can get back to my phone and i find that really really sad and it's actually i can see how it would jeopardize the chance of a really meaningful connection in modern relationships where you're never really connected i think a lot of relationships are actually more connected on social media than they are in in real life and i wonder if that's had an adverse effect on the success of relationships this uh this this absence of focus and attention i think there's so many important things in what you just said so what you've um built for you and your girlfriend there your first response is a good first response which is um for an individual level there's big collective ones as well but an individual level a good response is what's called pre-commitment so what you do is you said you and your girlfriend say we're gonna put our phone away for seven hours right so you say it in advance and there's a woman called professor molly crockett at yale university where i interviewed as kind of expert on pre-commitment so pre-commitment is we all know there's all sorts of things you want to do that you know you might crack and give in later and not achieve them right so i don't want to eat any pringles right because they make me even fatter than i am right so the best form of pre-commitment is when i go to the supermarket don't buy the pringles right because i buy the pringles and tell
myself i'll just have fun i'll have five tonight and of course you get to 2am you wake up you're [ __ ] chugging them like homer simpson right so the one point pre-commitment there is a don't buy the pringles b tell everyone you're not going to buy the pringles because even just articulating your goal out loud makes you more likely to achieve it so you've got one form of pre-commitment there right you've said okay we're going to say to each other we've got seven hours now we're going to put the phone away so that's a really good model of pre-commitment but also you've got to one of the challenges with that which is your you know your you you feel like your consciousness has been hijacked by by these technologies and it was really interesting researching this because a lot of people when i say i've done a book about attention and focus they say oh you've written a book about tech actually texts only about 20 of what's going on i think although it's a very important 20 and and it was really interesting researching this because actually it's not most of the problem is not inherent to the technology it's the result of something else which is actually more fixable because you and me we're not going to give away our phones nor nor should we right we're not going to abandon this technology we could make the technology work for our attention rather than against it so i spent a lot of time in silicon valley interviewing the people a lot of the people who designed the world in which we now live right and really feel bad about it and they are they have all the problems that you me and everyone watching have there's a really james williams the google engineer who i just mentioned there was an incredible moment when he spoke at a tech conference so he's speaking entirely to really influential designers who are making the stuff that we're all using and he said to them is there anyone here in the audience who wants to live in the world that we're creating put up your hand and not one of them did another one of them tristan harris an amazing
dissident in silicon valley who also worked for google he worked on the gmail team when they were designing gmail and you know spreading it to the whole world and one day he was in the googleplex and one of his colleagues said i've got an idea because they were trying to figure out figure out how to get more and more people to use gmail more so one day i had an idea he just said why don't we make it so that every time someone gets an email their phone vibrates and everyone in the team said that's a good idea and tristan a week later was walking around san francisco and just heard these vibrations everywhere and thought [ __ ] we did that and that's happening everywhere within a few months he did calculation there were 11 billion distractions every day being caused by his company right so these people are really open to there's a big obviously a big debate about this but there was a moment and there's lots of things to say about it and lots of techniques these social companies use to maximally hijack your attention and we can talk about those techniques and i think there's loads we need to learn about that but actually to me the most important thing the root of this is to understand that social media doesn't have to work that way and the moment that really helped me to understand it i was really struggling with getting my head around that if i open facebook it'll tell me all sorts of things it'll say oh it's you you make rob's birthday today um this is something you said five years ago there's been a terrorist attack and look these people have marked themselves as safe i don't tell you all sorts of things what it won't do is something that actually lots of people would really love there's no button on facebook that says i'd like to meet up with my mates who's free now who's nearby and available right now that's technologically unbelievably easy facebook could design that in an hour right that would be
really popular i'm sure everyone listening thinks yeah that'd be a really handy thing to have um it doesn't exist why does the market not provide it if you follow the chain from why the market doesn't provide it i think you begin to understand some of the ways our attention are being invaded and how we can get it back so when you open facebook facebook makes money in two ways first way is very obvious you see ads we all understand how that works the second way is much more valuable to facebook everything you do on facebook everything you like everything you dislike everything you message to people is scanned and sorted by their ai technology to build a profile of you right so let's say that you like kylie minogue and donald trump and you message your mum going i've just bought a load of nappies right okay so the ai is figuring out okay this person is probably gay no disrespect to heterosexual fans of kylie probably out there this person's gay they're quite right-wing and they've got a baby because why would they be messaging about nappies right so think about thousands and thousands of data points like that it's building up a very complicated and detailed profile of you which it then sells to advertisers so they can target you because if you're if you're making nappies you don't want to send an ad to me i don't have any children you've wasted your money you want to target your advertising so facebook is making money every moment you open it facebook makes money through those two revenue streams and every time you put the facebook app down or you shut your phone off facebook loses money right or they don't make the money they would make if you carried on scrolling right that's it that's their business model it's simply that once you understand that you can see why there's no button that says who's available and wants to meet up now because if you push that button and it said oh joe's around the corner i'll go for a coffee with joe you and joe would sit opposite each other and talk to each other right well then you're not on facebook they're
losing money their entire business model as sean parker who was one of the first investors in facebook said our whole business model was to hack people's attention we knew we were doing it and we did it anyway so they have the most sophisticated engineers in the world specifically working to figure out maximally how to hack your attention but the thing that blew my mind about this because you can get into okay you talk about that and very often this is framed as oh okay so is this an anti-tech or pro are we pro-tech or anti-tech are we it's completely wrong way to think about it the question is not are you pro-tech or anti-tech the question is what tech working in whose interests right because that business model which is designed has to be about fracking your attention that's that's the only way it can work is not the only business model for these companies right so let's say acer asking one of the who designed key aspects of the internet that we now use amazing guy said to me we should just ban that business model right a business model that is based on tracking you surveilling you invading your attention and selling that attention to the highest bidder that is just an inhuman way of doing it it's like lead in pain ban it so i said well what to all these people what happens the day after we ban it right so what do i open facebook and it just says sorry close no what would happen is all these companies would have to move to other business models which already exist so one model might be subscription you know like netflix we don't know how subscription works or it might be that we choose to own it together somewhere beneath where we're sitting there's a sewer right we own that sewer you and me as taxpayers own that sewer together because when we didn't have sewers we had [ __ ] in the street and we got cholera and people died and then together we built the sewers and together we own and maintain the sewers because it's important for all of us now it might be we want to say just like we own the sewer pipes together we might want to own the information pipes together because at the moment we're
getting the equivalent of cholera for our attention right but the key thing about that is when you move to these different models instead of you being the product right today you're not the customer of facebook you're the product they sell to advertisers if we move to those different business models suddenly you're the person they want to please right if you want to pay attention they could start des redesigning facebook in all sort of ways sorts of ways very practical ways i can tell you about lots of them that are designed not to hack your attention but are designed to heal your attention and designed to make your life better she looks really interesting so obviously my background is social media so um been knee deep in this industry for a long long time and in 2019 mark zuckerberg wrote a letter where he said he posted on his facebook saying um we've done some studies we've spoken to some people and we've discovered that the timeline is bad for you it's net negative predominantly because of these highly addictive very short viral videos i'm gonna put my hands up that was part of the company i built business model we were we built we had huge huge facebook pages some of which had tens of millions of followers and we knew that if we wanted a ton of views which would result in a ton of followers we had to post very very short highly engaging short videos facebook that year changed the timeline they killed that bit that part of our business model where these like super addictive viral videos would no longer work and in their little statement they said the things that will now work are any content that gets people to basically just have conversation with each other so we then tested that and buzzfeed tested that as well buzzfeed posted some things and discovered that if your post is dis discussion worthy it will now do better and so is facebook were apparently trying to do the right thing um which cost them that year their revenues i believe went down that year their stock price definitely did and they pointed to listen we made these changes to our to our timeline our news feed to try and make it more
healthy something else emerged and that thing which is now the dominant force is called tick-tock and tick-tock took the place of short addictive as [ __ ] you don't even know your scrolling videos and the way that i know it from my social media background that tiktok have fully owned that space is simple on my tic toc now say i have a hundred thousand followers a video can get 1 000 views or a million views the variance of viewership is extreme what that means is they are the algorithm is just taking the most addictive things and saying [ __ ] everything else it's like i'm not gonna show your followers or the the discovery feed the thing you posted that wasn't addictive i'm just gonna grab the viral stuff that's super short and put that in the feed so now i was talking to some of my colleagues today fortunately i don't actually use tik tok like i don't use it myself i have a tick tock but i don't use it myself to engage with friends and every single one of my friends some of them are sat in this room now some of them are downstairs they describe their relationship with tick-tock as like as if it's heroin like i've never heard a social network described in such a way my friend dash who's like 35 he goes i'll just touch the app and he goes an hour's gone and he's like i've never seen anything like it so if facebook change my point here is that some i've seen how someone else who just doesn't give a [ __ ] will come and occupy that space make a billion dollars and um and run off and so i'm like oh you know but this is why we you're totally right this is why we need to look at the business model for social media and whether we allow or not of course think about lead paint again right so presumably there was a market leader in lead paint in the 70s and let's say the responsible paint just would go you this individual company needs to stop manufacturing lead paint of course someone else would have just come along and made lead paint that's not the solution solution is to say no no one can put lead in paint right which is not to say there can't be social media that absolutely can social media has lots of great things about it but it's about
saying do you have a business model that is designed about maximally invading people's attention or do you have a business model that's about uh giving people what they want most people do not what like you're saying your friends they push the button and it's gone for now most people don't want that right most tick tock users i think about my nieces using tick tock all the time she doesn't want that either so at the moment we have a model that's about hacking people and giving them what they don't want to sell them to advertisers when you get rid of that business model which they won't do spontaneously we have to make them do it right that it produces a completely different dynamic i so i'm keen so you put your i read in the book you basically put your phone in a box and then escaped to the phone you must have been more productive than ever because of this thing that people described called being in the flow state right i imagine if i'm distraction free then i'll be in that flow state longer i i heard about this concept of a flow state maybe about a year or two ago and then i i could i could relate to it because i've had those moments in my work or when i'm doing a certain activity specifically more like monotonous activities or repetitive activities where you get into that state of flow where you're almost doing it without thinking what is flow and how do you find it and what is the power of being in one's flow state so a flow state is when you're everyone listening will have experienced at some point in their life a flow state is when you're doing something that's really meaningful to you and you really get into it and your sense of time falls away your sense of ego falls away and your attention to it just feels effortless right so one rock climber put it it's like you get into flowing rock climbing when you feel like you are the rock you're climbing right so we all will have had moments of flow in our lives what's really important about flow in relation to attention is this is a power this is a capacity that all human beings have and it's a capacity where
you can pay attention to something deeply but it doesn't feel like an effort right it's not like studying for an exam where you're like okay so napoleon was born there okay you know you can you can pay attention that way but that's an effort flow is like a gusher of attention that is inside all of us that that we can pay so obviously mahali spent professor chick sent me high he sent spent 40 years of his life more than actually 50 years of his life studying flow states how do they happen how do we maintain them what ruins them and and he discovered lots of amazing things about it he discovered that actually flow states are really essential for having a good life for feeling competent for for good mental health and he discovered he made lots of discoveries but for me there were three really important things he discovered about how to get into a flow state firstly you have to choose one goal if you're trying to do lots of things at the same time you will not get into flow i can explain why later that's really important you have to choose one thing right the second thing you have to do is you have to choose a goal that is meaningful to you if it's not meaningful you'll never get into flow on it for me it would be writing right but everyone will have something and thirdly you need to choose something that is ideally at the edge of your abilities so let's say you're a rock climber let's say you're a medium talent rock climber right if you just clamber over garden wall you're not going to get into a state of flow equally if you suddenly try and climb mount kilimanjaro it's going to be overwhelming you're also not going to get into a state of flow what you want to do is choose something that's a little bit harder than the thing the time you did last time right so flow begins at the edge of your abilities so you want those those three things one clear goal it's got to be meaningful to you and it's got to be the edge of your abilities if you do that you there's no guarantee but you max
massively increase your chance of getting into flow which is this form of deep meaningful attention but mahali also made a discovery he discovered this in the late 80s the um there's something that absolutely consistently ruins flow which is being interrupted being distracted right just kills flow dead which kills the deepest form of attention and i think we're really living and mahali thought that we're really living with a crisis of flow states now what is the harm of interruption i i read in your book about the the decaying creativity and the time it takes to get back into the task once you've done it but is there a more sort of um consequential so if you want to understand and this might sound when i first describe it like a small effect i'm going to explain how big it is afterwards because don't feel big when you're doing it so i went to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world of my name professor earl miller who's mit the massachusetts institute of technology and professor miller said to me you have to understand one crucial thing about your brain my brain everyone's brains you can only think consciously about one thing at a time this is just a fundamental limitation of the human brain human brain hasn't changed in 40 000 years ain't going to change any time soon you can only think about one thing at a time but we have fallen for a mass delusion so the average teenager according to a study by professor larry rosen believes they can now follow seven forms of media at the same time so what happens when you believe you're you're you're doing lots of things at once so they get people into labs they get them to do think they're doing lots of things at once and see what happens and it turns out there are four really big costs that happen so the first is what's called the switch cost effect so let's say my phone is outside this room but let's say i have my phone in my pocket right let's say you were just talking you spoke for a minute or two
what you said was really interesting let's imagine that i had just taken out my phone and glanced at my text messages for a few seconds while you were doing that right kind of thing that happens all the time you think oh i've just taken two seconds and i'll in that moment i have to refocus my brain oh um jess texted me oh right so that must mean that her mum needs to oh right okay you've got it and then i have to re-focus on you wait what was stephen just saying again seems like a small effect it's not i'll talk about how much it is in a minute the the second uh cost it it brings in is you start to make mistakes when you're switching between things it massively increases your error rate so say that i'm i don't know doing my tax return and i look at my text and i go back to my tax return i'm much more likely to make mistakes and that means i have to go back and correct my mistakes the third effect is on your memory so to translate your experiences into memories it takes mental effort right takes a certain amount of brain power if your brain is instead just jammed up with all this switching the evidence shows you're significantly less likely to just remember what happened you're less likely to remember any of it and the the third effect is on your creativity so when you just have time to think your brain naturally wanders and it will roam over you know things people have said to you in your life moments you've had things you've read a whole range of things and it will start to make connections between those things that's actually what creativity is it's when two ideas that have never been put together go together and pop right you know that's much better than me but when your brain is jammed up with switching it just doesn't get the space to do that right and i've heard that i'm thinking speaking to president miller who's an amazing man and just thinking all right i get that but that's quite small right when i looked at the studies i was quite struck hewlett-packard you know the people who make printers well they're [ __ ] printers that always jam
in my experience but anyway hewlett-packard did a quite small experiment with their workers so they split them into two groups and the first group was told just do whatever task you've got to do today and you're not going to be interrupted and the second group was told just do your tasks today and they were interrupted with emails and texts right what was described as a heavy amount of emails and texts and then they just tested their iq after either not being distracted or being distracted what they found is the people who have been distracted tested are having 10 iq points lower than the people who had not been distracted right because it makes you less intelligent constantly switching the strain of that makes you less intelligent and to give you a sense of what 10 iq points means if you and me smoke to spliff now together our iq would drop by about five points so it's double just being heavily interrupted it has double the effect on your intelligence and attention as getting stoned so you would be better off sitting at your desk doing one thing and smoking a spliff then sitting at your desk not smoking a spliff and being interrupted all the time there's a guy called professor michael posner at the university of oregon who found that if you are distracted and pulled away it takes you 20 and go back to the task you were doing originally it takes you 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus as you had before right so we're all our focus is being stolen the book is called stolen focus for this reason our focus is being stolen by these forces that's just one of the twelve there's loads of them but we've got to understand this and the other point i guess so you write about in this book which is i was surprised you linked to attention because it wasn't an obvious link to me was about sleep and and the decay in um our sleeping health over decades and you you write that we're sleeping less than ever before and we're having worse sleep than ever before my sleep is fairly good but it i think it's
decaying i'd say it's decaying um i sleep with my phone in my bed first thing i do when i wake up in the morning i'm actually as i'm opening my eyes i'm thinking about where i need to put my hand to get the phone like i'm visualizing where i think i left it and my brain always knows my brain's like it's over by your right your right ear yeah yeah it always knows where it is and then i wake up i look at what's that 100 notifications 100 things um what's the you know what's the cost of this type of behavior which i think a lot of people will resonate for and what is the like macro trend in sleep health yeah this is one of the 12 causes i write about in in stolen focus that really uh the evidence was quite shocking actually so i interviewed lots of experts but i interviewed arguably the leading expert in the world on sleep a man named dr charles seisler who's at harvard medical school he's taught everyone from the boston red sox to the secret service about about sleep and he started to make this breakthrough in 1981 so he when charles was a medical school he was taught that um basically when you're asleep your brain is just inert it's not doing much so he starts doing this research nothing to do with sleep it was it's not really doesn't matter what it's about but it was about the time of day that the body releases a particular hormone and to study that he had to keep people awake in a lab right for quite long periods of time so he's working with them and he's got all sorts of techniques for keeping them awake like attention techniques and he was just immediately struck when he's doing this how quickly and how dramatically people's attention and ability to think deteriorated as they stayed awake longer if you're awake for 19 hours it doesn't feel like very long your attention and ability to think is the same as if you were legally drunk right so your your attention things that would take a fraction of a second when you're refreshed and alert he was discovering if you were awake for just a day we're taking 12 seconds a staggering increase
in your ability to think so you start to think oh i should study sleep i should look into this and he began to do a series of hugely groundbreaking research on sleep what he did is he pioneered putting together two bits of technology there's a kind of technology that can scan your eyes to see what you're looking at and obviously there's pet scans and things that can scan your brain and see what's happening in your brain so he put this together and he looked at people who were tired not that tired but tired um to see what they were looking at and what was happening in their brain as they looked at it and what he discovered is that you when you're tired you could appear to be awake as awake as you and me seem now you can be looking at people you can be talking but parts of your brain have literally gone to sleep it's called local sleep because it's local to one part of the brain right which is kind of mind-blowing this helps to explain why attention degrades so rapidly when you're asleep and i was trying why is that what's going on there i mean it's also important to bear in mind this is one of the ways we know attention has got worse there's good evidence that sleep has dramatically deteriorated we sleep on average an hour less than people did in 1942 and children sleep 80 minutes a night less than they did a century ago so it's a staggering there's been a 20 decline in adult sleep in the last century incredible figures and when you look at them they're kind of mind-blowing um only 15 percent of people wake up feeling refreshed so i wanted to understand why is this right what why does sleep affect our attention so much one of people are interviewed about this and looked at her research very carefully it's an amazing woman called professor roxanne prichard who's at the university of minneapolis where i interviewed her she explained to me when you don't sleep your body interprets it as an emergency it says something's really wrong here right he's not sleeping why isn't he sleeping so it has all sorts of physiological and psychological effects it raises your heart rate it makes you crave more sugar and fast food because it'll release
glucose quickly it makes your heart beat faster and it shuts down a lot of the creative parts of your brain a lot of the more fertile parts of your brain it's like it's an emergency you haven't got time to worry about that you know but what's happening is lots of us effectively live in a bodily emergency 23 percent of british people sleep for five hours a night on average staggering figures and the reason this is important is partly the bodily emergency and it's partly that what dr seisler had been taught at medical school much earlier was wrong sleep is not a passive process sleep is an incredibly active process the way roxanne put it to me professor prashad is when you're sleeping you're repairing your brain is rinsed with a a watery fluid that carries away metabolic waste it takes it down to your liver and gets rid of it your brain repairs itself in sleep the longer you sleep the better and deeper the repairs are i mean there are lots of other things that happen in sleep that i talk about in the book as well and we're not we're giving ourselves time to repair we're not giving ourselves time to rest and as a result we're going around groggy our brain isn't functioning to its full potential so i'm saying to dr seisler you know okay so we know that sleep's got worse we know that sleep is crucial for attention um does that mean it is true to say that we have got an attention crisis and he said even if nothing else to change in society and this is only one of the twelve changes even if nothing else to change in society that alone would be a guarantee that we had an attention crisis so what do we do about it i i'm that person i'm the pathetic um i have pathetic sleeping habits for sure for sure um so what can i do about it you know removing my phone from the bedroom aside the government or society collectively deciding that um we should they should impose better professional laws so that people aren't as interrupted you know when they could be sleeping etc what else can i do on a real practical level so yeah at a
personal level there's plenty of pre-commitment you can do so i would recommend that you get a case save do you know about them oh is that like a safe that my phone goes in yeah so basically it's a plastic safe with a lid at the top you take the lid off you put your phone in it you turn the dial at the top and it'll lock away your phone for anything you set it to between five minutes and a week and if there's like a fire or something you could easily smash it but then you have to buy another iphone and buy another case safe right um so i would say an hour before you go to bed put your phone in the case safe and and then you can't again it's pre-commitment you're binding yourself so that when you're lying there in bed and your mind's racing like oh [ __ ] i forgot that email too late you can't check it that's what i do massively improve my sleep so it's partly that that's one of the individual changes there's also big tips and this is one thing i recommend to you so i went to new zealand to meet a guy called andrew barnes so andrew uh grew up here in london and in the 80s he in 1987 he worked in the city of london the financial district uh just as the whole thing was deregulated so the whole thing blows up you know you've probably seen on the news these images of like men in suits and lots of hairspray like shouting at each other buy buy sell cell and he was one of those guys right and in that world uh he was a young guy then in in that world you you know this is the word language they would have used it's not my language you were a fool if you came to work later than 7 30 in the morning and you were a [ __ ] if you left before 7 30 at night right so for half the year andrew never saw the sun because he would had you know leave at six o'clock in the morning in the dark and he would get home at nine o'clock in the morning and at nine o'clock at night in the dark he didn't have a good relationship with his children he had to build that as an adult this thing just consumed him and he didn't like it and wisely he quit and he went to live in australia and then new zealand and he became a very successful businessman there and one day
in 2018 andrew was on a plane and he was reading a business magazine and he saw these quite shocking figures which are accurate that basically they'd done productivity research and they discovered the average worker sits at their desk for eight hours a day says pre-coded obviously sits at their desk eight hours a day but they are actually only concentrating on their work for three hours a day right which are amazing figures right bad for everyone bad for the worker their life is passing them by bad for the employer you know they're not getting good value out of their employees and andrew did this andrew remembered this these moments when he was working in the city and he was exhausted and run down and he wasn't having a life and he thought maybe my workers are just really tired maybe that's part of what's going on so he had this this idea just came to him he said if i said the company's gonna move to a four day week instead of a five day week for exactly the same amount of money and in return let's say my work is matched this three hours a day in return if my workers just did 45 minutes more every day of actually concentrating because they were better rested and so on that would make up that then we'd be in the same place for four hours four days a week versus five so andrew organized a conference call he had uh everyone on it and he said from now on i'm gonna pay you all the same but we're gonna move to four days a week we're gonna try it for three months and see if it works if it works we'll carry on doing it um andrew's head of hr literally fell over it's like what is this right and people even the people who were gonna be the beneficiaries and they were all the beneficiaries but even the kind of lower level staff were like is this a trick what's what's going on how is this going to work so they spent a few months preparing it actually made them all think about productivity more how are we going to make ourselves more productive they came up with all sorts of strategies some of them really simple things like you know everyone has a little pot on their desk you can put a
white flag in it when you've got the white flag that means you don't want to be interrupted things like that and they tried it and uh i interviewed everyone who worked in their office in rotorua and this experiment was studied by dr helen delaney who's at the university of auckland business school and what they found is the company achieved more in four days than they had in five right productivity massively went up stress massively went down social media use at work massively went down and it was fascinating talking to the staff there about what they did one of the things they did is they just slept more some of them didn't take five days i didn't take four days what they did is they did five days but they did six hours a day instead of eight hours a day they slept more they rested more they were able to switch their brains off from work which if you're going and going and going is very very hard to do and i remember interviewing them thinking can this be true actually lots of places have done these experiments with four day weeks and a lot of tech companies are offering it now as an inducement but a lot of places did these experiments so microsoft in japan went to a four day week their productivity went up by 40 toyota and gothenburg moved all their mechanics to a six-hour day and they produced a hundred and fourteen percent more in in six hours than they had in eight profits went up by 25 in a way it sounded too good to be true right and i went to interview this guy uh professor jeffrey pfeffer who's at the university of stanford who's an expert one of the leading experts in the world on organizational behavior i was saying well how can that be and he said look it's not difficult ask any sports team do you want your team to go onto the pitch exhausted worn out no every sports fan wants their team to go onto the pitch well rested well slept you know so that experiment again we won't always think about it at these two levels what can individuals do there's a lot and there's the collective level where
we can make it possible for people to make more personal changes quick one i can't talk about huel enough in my life especially right now and it's really interesting because what we tend to see at this time of year is the first thing that goes is our diet quickly followed by our fitness and we see that in the data across multiple surveys people in the fourth quarter of the year start indulging a little bit more which is totally fine and they start exercising a little bit less which is totally fine however a really useful crutch during this period where the seasons have changed and we're starting to behave a little bit differently is making sure your fridge is stocked with things that are nutritionally complete healthy and that are going to be convenient for you to consume without compromising your health and that is where ladies and gentlemen huel comes in and they now have four brand new flavors they have the salted caramel flavor absolutely love they have the cinnamon swell flavor the number one new flavor in my opinion which is really surprising iced coffee caramel and they have the strawberries and cream flavor if you're going to try any of the new flavors please do try the cinnamon swirl and let me know what you think it's an absolutely unexpected champion of the new flavors writers you're a writer that's one thing you talk about you talk about why reading is important and there's been a macro decay in our reading and i as i read that i thought why why why is reading so important what role does reading play we all consume information digitally now why do we need to go back to reading stuff i think there's a few reasons um and it's not again not a snooty thing at all so you're absolutely right that reading is mass reading books has massively declined um 57 of americans now never read a book in any given year it's the first time in the history of the american republic that's the case we're we're still a bit better than that in britain but not not by much and there's several people who really helped me to understand this
and what that what that's doing to us that's partly a symptom of our declining attention and partly a cause of it and i took a bit about how saying to be a woman called professor anne mangan is at stavanger university in norway who's a professor of literacy and probably the leading expert in the world on on these questions and she explained lots of things but there's one very simple one you can do studies have been loads of studies showing this now so you get group people you split them randomly into two the first group let's say you could do it with my book you give one group of people my book on the ipad like your ipad there and the other group you give the physical book right and then you go back to them a week a month a year later and you just ask them questions about the book and it turns out invariably the people who've read it on the screen remember significantly less and understand significantly less of what they read this is a very well proven effect it's called screen inferiority it's such a big effect if you take a ten-year-old child it's the equivalent of two-thirds of their progress in reading in a year is lost when they're reading on a screen it's that's how that's how much it diminishes our ability to think and it seems to be there's lots of there's a big debate about why but when you read let's say um you know we opened the bbc news site now and you me read the same story when we read on a screen what we tend to do is read in a sort of skimming zed pattern you sort of skim key words right um when you read a book generally we read linearly we read from left to right you know and you keep going but part of the problem is if you spend too much time reading on screens when you read a book you start doing that when you read books and it screws with your ability to read books but the truth is i think it's something more subtle right so this marshall mcluhan was this kind of professor in the 60s who said this famous thing that i never understood for years he said the medium
is the message right and what what he meant was when a new medium comes along he was talking about television so a new way of telling stories and thinking about the world comes along you know you could tell on your television and you can watch the wire or wheel of fortune or anything in between right the medium of television itself has a message in it right irrespective of the show you're watching on the television so the medium of television the messages the world is very fast it's all happening at the same time we can all think about things you get from watching tv the way you feel if you and i love tv things you feel when you when you watch tv but i think there's a medium in the message of social media right so think about twitter when you open twitter it doesn't matter if you're donald trump bernie sanders or i know bubba the love sponge right there is a message you are absorbing about how the world should be i would say the message is firstly the world should be interpreted and thought about very quickly right quick quick quick it should be interpreted very briefly anything worth saying can be said in very short little bursts it's binary exactly and what matters the thing that is most important is whether people immediately agree with this very fast very short thing you've said right that is the message hidden in the medium of twitter right think about instagram what's the message hidden in the medium of instagram it's um what really matters is whether you look good and whether people like how you look right that's it that's the message what's the message in facebook the message is okay friendship which is the most precious human thing friendship is looking at other people's photographs of their life that you should narrate your life to your friends through images and crave their likes and that that's what friendship is mutually watching each other's carefully collected paparazzi images of
each other and liking them now i think all those messages are wrong that is a terrible way to live your life right it is not true that life should be interpreted quickly actually if people immediately agree with what you're saying what you're saying probably didn't need to be said at all right um yeah i like pretty people instagram fine okay but if that's the thing that you overweight your life towards something's really going wrong and friendship a true friendship is nothing like a facebook friendship but think about the message the reason i say this in relation to reading is think about the message in the book right the printed book what does a printed book say to you firstly the world is complicated and you might want to take a good bit of time to think about one thing secondly it says um you should slow down slow down look at this thing that will be saying the same thing 100 years from now as it says right now right and and thirdly it says you might want to spend time thinking about the inner lives of other people because the inner lives of other people are really interesting and you'll find that they're like you in some ways and unlike you in others right so i would say take care what technologies you absorb because over time your consciousness will come to resemble those technologies you know you want to have a life of meaning and purpose where you engage with complex things where you showed empathy where you showed love these are not these are things that the current model of social media absolutely militates against and the books help with they don't they're not the solute you know they're not the sole solution there's lots of things going on but i i deeply believe in the medium of the book i completely agree one of the when i started writing my book i thought it was insanity the concept of a book because i'd grown up in that social media area where you get instant feedback etc etc and one of the like really profound things i discovered with a book is because there's no comment section no like really i think about a book if
it had a comment section below it the comment section for a book exists on some a website a million miles away maybe in reviews and i really never look at them so when someone's consuming it they don't get to develop their opinion based on consensus below and i've noticed this so many times on instagram if i post something and the top comment takes on a certain narrative everyone below will follow so if the top so i do a post people see it as it take it as it is you can then see the behavior of them like going into the comments section and the minute a certain narrative emerges which people find interesting everyone follows that narrative and then if you i've done it before like many years ago just remove that comment or hide it the narrative below changes and you can see people actually deciding what they think of what you're saying or whether it's right or wrong based on the consensus below i think it's even i think you're absolutely right stephen i don't know enough about comment sections but i think in terms of commentary online it's actually even worse than what you just said in a lot of cases and this is an effect of all the effects i learned about in the book this is one of the one that's that i think is most harmful remember what we were saying before which i know you know very well that thing about the business model is to keep people scrolling right minute you stop scrolling they lose money all their algorithms are designed with literally one goal what will keep you scrolling that's it that's the goal right so as the algorithms in the ai were figuring out what keeps people scrolling they bumped into they uncovered a human quirk which is not the intention of anyone at facebook or youtube or any of these places which is called it's a very well documented psychological phenomenon called negativity bias which is basically means we will stare at something negative longer than we will stare at something positive anyone who's ever been driving down the motorway and passed a car crash knows exactly what i'm talking about you stare at the car crash longer than you stare at the pretty flowers on the other side of the road right and this is and this is
negatively biased goes very deep 10 week old babies will stare longer an angry face than a smiling face but when this meets algorithms designed to maximize the harvesting of attention this produces a catastrophic effect and this was this is not my view this is what facebook itself found in its own internal research which we've now had leaked so imagine uh imagine this at both a personal level and a political level so imagine a teenager a group of teenagers go to a party one of them goes home and on the bus on the way home they say that was a really lovely party i enjoyed it everyone looked great and they were so nice another teenager from the same party posts um god karen looked like a right slag tonight uh her boyfriend jim is a [ __ ] what does the algorithm do the second one is more like the car crash people will stare at it longer the algorithm will promote it in the feed it will put it much higher the nice one that's gonna be way down if anyone sees it right now that's disastrous enough at the level of teenagers who've gone to a party now imagine at a political level we don't have to imagine it everyone listening remembers who donald trump was so what happened in the 2016 election what happened in what's happening all over the world every day all the time on politics is we are being stoked to be more angry all the time the algorithms select for anger because anger will keep you scrolling right and that is destroying our ability to solve problems and this is not just my view in the wake of the victory of brexit and donald trump facebook internally set up a group of its own data scientists called common ground and we now know what they found because it was leaked and what their own data scientists said is the facebook model and the wider business model of social media inevitably causes division and polarization that this was having catastrophic effects it's partly what fueled the genocide in myanmar at burma um and that this was in it was actually
very striking the way they put it this was inherent to the facebook business model and the only alternative was for facebook to abandon its business model and adopt what they called an anti-growth model where they said we won't grow as a company but we won't set the cup world on fire right and there's a very dry the wall street journal who got leaked it they said their new story said after he received this report mark zuckerberg asked that he never be brought any reports like this ever again right so you know they know what they're doing the business model they're tied to their business model they're only going to stop doing it when we make them but this machinery that is amping us up into anger is just a personal first it destroys attention when you're angry it's much harder to pay attention we all we've all had that experience but there's good science for it as well but also it's it's devastating for the society and we've got to deal with that i remember doing a study i think it was 2017 i can't remember the year when trump got elected which i presented to coca-cola where i looked at hillary clinton's online reach on crimson hexagon versus trump's and it was like 12 he was reaching 12 times 12 to 15 times more people with his message because it was centered in like really polarizing inflammatory stuff and the algorithm is just sending that whereas indifference just doesn't move on social media it's like a tree falling in the forest with no one there well not even a difference reasonable argument yeah who cares you know like who's that going to bang with it doesn't resonate with anybody so the tribe can't pick it up and move it for you so you're right like the fear and anything sort of polarizing moves really really well but i would say i think it's a really important point and i thought a lot about it when i was working on stolen focus i think there are obvious and i know you know this much better than i do there are huge other human motivators than fear and anger that we can that we can build algorithms around right so more compelling than fear though oh well at the moment
precisely because this rage can be drilled into and monetized that's why we need regulations to stop that hacking of the worst aspect of our characters which not to say there aren't legitimate things to be angry about there are and building algorithms around better things right and and that's why you know people in favor of progressive change like ending racism in policing which is an urgent cause actually the emotion we appeal to most is not rage the emotion we appeal to most those of us who believe in that cause is hope and love and empathy right the very why why if you look at even if you think about left-wing anger versus right-wing anger why do these algorithms boost right-wing anger much more than left-wing anger and there's again this is leaked by facebook we know this it's because ultimately when you're in favor of progressive change you can't just be angry you have to have a hopeful vision of the future do you see what i mean yeah and we can build this machinery around encouraging and rewarding hope at the moment we have it we're all plugged in to what maggie haberman the new york times journalist called an anger-based video game right that's basically what twitter is and facebook there's an amazing study by the pew research institute that found that for every word of moral outrage you add to a facebook status update you double the likes and shares right the words that most supercharge sharing and views on youtube are hates destroys and obliterates right now that is a machinery if you plug people into that anger-based machinery for large parts of the day the anger doesn't go away when they put the phone down right it's not like a release valve it's like a it's like taking a an uh you know a drug that amps you up right and you're seeing that and that is degrading our individual attention because angry people pay attention much less well uh it's dreading our ability to think but it's also degrading our collective attention right you see it's how we're tribalizing around covid you can see this in all sorts of ways the ways we're tribalizing and turning on each other
about things that actually we have perfectly sensible solutions to do you think that it's anger-based machinery or do you think it's plugging angry humans into machinery because i i think i think if you just created an algorithm which just which had no bias at all and you said um you know our objective as youtube is to show you things that you click on more it would only take a couple of days for everyone's algorithm to be programmed to show them fearful things because as you said about the the fear bias we have and the prehistoric evolutionary reasons why we would want to know that there was a line behind the rock versus one caring if there was an ant behind the rock that eventually because we are fear avoiding humans we would we basically would train in any algorithm eventually just to show us the scary [ __ ] so there are definitely and tristan harris i talked to him a lot about this the former google engineer there are lots of alternative ways you can structure these apps right so to give an obvious one you could just turn off the youtube recommendations it's not like before they existed we were all going what will i watch next what will i do we weren't suddenly a lot just it's tristan says just turn it off if the only way it can work is that it [ __ ] people up turn it off we don't need it it's not that important or an alternative issue and there are all sorts of other ways the other ones could be structured so twitter and we don't have to think hypothetically twitter used to be chronological right if you follow 200 people you open twitter the first thing you would see is the most recent thing that one of the 200 people you you follow posted right you'll notice twitter doesn't do that anymore it now has an algorithm that selects precisely for the things we're talking about means twitter has become even more toxic and even more hateful and it went wasn't that good at the start right um so again just go back to the chronological even just going back to the chronological algorithm you need a lot more changes than that that in itself you're right would be better so there's all sorts of algorithms you'd have to do to every technology company though because no you don't this is the
thing you have to change the incentives and then they will do it right at the moment all of their incentives you've got all these smart engineers and they've got one incentive how do i take steven's attention the absolute most i can right now you change the incent they don't work for you remember they work for the advertisers who who when the incentives change then they're going to change then obviously their behavior changes right any business when their incentive changes if they want to please you rather than pleasing the advertiser then of course the market will then provide all sorts of ways the market the competition at the moment the competition is how do i maximally invade your attention if we move to a new business model the competition is what does stephen actually want if steven wants to know where his friends are so we can have a drink with them okay give him that button what else does steven want steve wants to meditate oh we'll give him that button you can see how once they they're figuring out what you want not what the advertisers want then of course the market begins to experiment and there'll be a thousand innovations and maybe some of those innovations will go awry and have other negative effects and we'll have to stop them doing that just like you know there might be a new form of paint that's even worse than lead paint all right we'll ban that and we'll stick with the one that doesn't screw people up it feels like running around with the uh with a fire extinguisher like spring fight like absolutely will be if we don't change the incentives yeah right is that a government decision to and what would the legal intervention be it's pretty straightforward you you ban the specific mechanism of surveilling people in order to harvest their education and sell that to the it's not that's not complicated it's not a legally difficult thing to do it's a politically difficult thing to do right we have to take on these companies paul graham one of the leading silicon valley investors said the world would be far more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40. think about
something as simple a couple of simple things facebook has already patented a technology that could read your emotions through your camera on your phone and your laptop right um you can see how that adds an extra layer of how they can invade your attention or think about something called and i learned about this from acer asking think about something called style transfer really simple concept um some people might have seen it in like um there's like machines that do it in arcades in the us so you can take a photo any photo and you can run it through a style transfer program that will remake that image in the style of vincent van gogh or monet or you can name a painter right so it'll just redo that picture in that style the style transfer but style transfer can be used in a very different way gmail totally legally now could scan all of your gmail at the ai would of course a human being doesn't read it scan all of your gmail and figure out the patterns of words and the ways of talking that you reply to you respond to most right and then it can sell that to advertisers so advertisers know to approach you using the kind of words that are uniquely persuasive to you right now that's going to happen if we don't regulate that's that technology exists um imagine a thousand things like that are going to be happening so it's not even like we'll stay at the current level of technological invasion there's essentially a race on this aspect of the attention crisis between the increasingly invasive forces of technology which will get more and more potent and are more potent this year than they were last year and would definitely be more potent a year from now there's that and then there's the movement of people who are trying to restrain this and to deal with the other causes of the attention crisis and to me it's a race right and it might seem like a really big thing a movement what does that mean when i think about that i
think about can i ask you that are you optimistic because i yeah i am absolutely not and one of the the most compelling reasons that i'm not optimistic about there being any um practical effective change is because i watched the senate hearing when they brought in mark zuckerberg and jack dorsey and the ceo of all these big companies jeff bezos etc and the people who are making the laws didn't have a [ __ ] clue about any social platform at all and it was like parody in fact the videos went viral on all social networks of these plus 60 year old senators trying to get their head around what whatsapp was well they were basically saying things like i can't find the password for my phone well how do i get it like bizarre and you could see zuckerberg and dorsey just like you could all if you look close enough you'd see the smirk in the corner of their mouth because they were just like mentally bullying them they have no idea about these technologies and i'll be honest as someone that's worked in this industry for a very long time since probably one of the few people that's been like balls deep in this since it began sometimes when i hear people speaking about um the risks of technology and the data conversation and all of these things i think oh you just you've literally just got your opinion from like reading the newspaper and it's so much deeper and if you just flick that switch then the cascading impact which you don't understand because you can't see the full picture is actually this will just happen and so when i think about the people making the laws is kind of my conclusive point they have no idea what they're talking about like so you base and then the conclusion is so you have to go and get people from the industry to make the laws i there is no way boris johnson or anyone around boris johnson and i've met some of these people could make any real effective change to legislation as you say when you're talking about a race
in time for that industry not to develop and change and now you know they're probably still trying to figure out the news feed whereas these big corporations are now talking about machine learning and ai and they just will never keep up and they've never been able to and now we've got the metaverse coming and they they're still trying to figure out if snapchat is filters are okay and now we're racing off into the metaverse there's in my opinion there is no possible chance that technology and the pace of change will um be slower than the pace of effective legislation when i have that thought and that thought obviously crosses my mind fairly often i think about something very specific happen in my family will have happened in your family will happen in the families of everyone listening it's to some degree so i'm 42 when my grandmothers were 42 years old i think about what the world was like right so one of my grandmothers was a working class scottish woman and one of my grandmothers was a swiss woman living on a mountain which is what would be called sort of a peasant then right it was legal for them to be raped by their husbands they were not allowed to have bank accounts because they were married women in their own names my swiss grandmother didn't even have the vote she needed written permission to work outside the home which her husband would not give her at that time nowhere in the world was there a woman who ran a company was there a woman who ran a country there was one country was there a woman who ran a police force in fact there were almost no women police officers senior women police officers in britain four percent of members of parliament were women every institution in the whole world was run by men and had been since they were created right and because ordinary people
changed the culture that created pressure on the politicians to change the society so now no politician would propose anything like going back to 19 1962 1963 for women's rights it would be unthinkable that even the most far-out ukip candidate if they suggested that would have to stand down right so it's cultural change and just like the feminist movement reclaim women's right to their bodies and still has work to do as we know we need an attention movement to reclaim our minds right we can do some of it individually but a lot of it we can do together at the moment it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then the person pouring itching powder on us is going mate you might want to learn to meditate it will stop you scratching so much right i mean i'm in favor of meditation it's a good thing but someone's gonna have to take on the [ __ ] who are pouring the itching powder on us right we've got to do both so interesting because if you take on the [ __ ] that are pouring the itching powder there's like there's like some knock-on effects i can see i was thinking then about like why boris johnson wouldn't want to impose i was thinking as well about recommendation algorithms which you discussed um netflix has one youtube has one tick tock has one everything everything on my phone seems to have a recommendation algorithm to get me to buy something hang around longer whatever trying to serve me better under the guise of trying to serve me netflix wants to serve you better because you are the customer yeah so netflix doesn't feed you in raging things netflix doesn't show you the film that will wind you up the most right because you are the customer for netflix on facebook tick tock and the others you're not the customer that's why it feeds you the stuff that angers you maximally invades your attention so there's an important distinction between those two right and then they're but they both have the same incentive which is they say they are i mean netflix famously said our only competitor is sleepy yeah rex hastings
the head of netflix said that yeah yeah so if like boris was to turn around today and says i'm going to ban recommendation algorithms or whatever the issue he has is it sounds like that would hurt our chance of innovation in a global landscape where other countries haven't got those bans and so that would just mean that uk tech companies were worse yeah we've got to have bigger movements but actually it's exact opposite a society of people who can't focus can't pay attention our thinking in 65 second bursts is not going to be an innovative society right there's a reason why china although i strongly oppose the communist tyranny in china don't get me wrong why china has just banned the amount of kids or very tightly restricted the amount of time kids can spend on um video games each week and don't allow any of these algorithms on way about weibo and the other things or tightly regulate them would be more accurate way of putting it right so if our goal is as a country to be a country that's innovative my god a country of people who can think is going to be innovative country of adult people flicking between whatsapp snapchat and tick tock ain't going to be a place full of innovation right so i think of course it's a job of explaining to people if it was done out of the blue now people would be baffled right so in the same way that in you know 1962 um what you think about even just gay people in 1962 literally nobody including gay people suggested gay marriage it wasn't saying anyone even thought of right because it'd be like it'd be so bizarre you know at that point um well a little bit before that being gay was a crime right so as you build you start to become more sophisticated and have more ambitious goals so at the moment we're starting from a very basic level there's a really interesting study that was done by a guy called mahateri islami at the university of illinois where he just got a load of facebook users and just explained the algorithm to them and 62 of them didn't know what an algorithm was before he taught them
through it one of them compared it to the moment when keanu reeves in the matrix finds out he's living in a simulation right it blew their minds so we're obviously a very basic level but in terms of education because we haven't been explaining i didn't know most of this stuff before i did the research for stolen focus and i didn't know about all the other causes of uh things that are invading our attention including some that are much bigger actually than even this so we have to do the work of education we have to understand the advantage i think we've got is this isn't like explaining quantum physics to someone right we could stop anyone in the street here in east london and explain this to them and they are going to get it right they can feel this happening they can see it happening around them so it's not that there's in a sense the dissatisfaction and unhappiness with all this is at the surface all we need to do is help people to understand what they can do with that dissatisfaction that this isn't just it's not a personal failing on your part it's really important people to understand that if your response is going ah i'm just [ __ ] i'm weak i'm you know a that's they would love you to think that right they look they there's a constant process of trying to transfer the blame down to you right so it's partly to understand it's not your fault it's partly to understand it's not even the fault of technology it's the fault of specific aspects about how our technology works that we can change in practical ways that's those are the two things i think it's really important to understand on the about the current i mean there's many other things and other ways we can protect ourselves by having more knowledge but i think it's essential for us to understand that because you're right it's very easy to get into a disempowered oh this is so big but i'll tell you what my grandmother's in 1962 would have a lot more reason to be to think things could never change than we do about tech right
i mean it if you had shown my grandmother's my niece's life it would have been unthinkable these things can totally change james williams the google engineer i quoted before said to me once you know the axe existed for 1.4 million years before anyone thought to put a handle on it the entire web has only existed for less than 10 000 days we can change this thing if we want to right we're humans and it's also about a different disposition to this we're not broken people and we are not like medieval peasants begging at the court of king zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table we are the free citizens of democracies we own our minds we own our societies and we can take them back if we want to we have to decide do we value attention people who've got children and there's about a quarter of the book is about how we're [ __ ] up our kids attention and there's loads of really important things we need to know about that that are very different from how our schools work what our kids eat to um the deprivation of children being able to play but people who've got children do you want your child to be able to focus do you want your child to be able to read books do you want your child to be able to think deeply do you want your life to have a your child to have a life full of flow states of course you do okay we've got to fix the society and culture to give them those things i feel like um i feel like everyone listening to that will agree and they'll all say that's a problem i agree i want to make that change but i think like movements need a really specific objective for people to rally around and that objective is ultimately what they're kind of taking to their legislators or their politicians to say this is the thing we want to change so i would suggest three very specific if we're going to have an attention a movement an attention movement and there's already lots of elements of this fight going on and i go through in the book how who peop who they are and how people can join them i would say initially three goals uh ban this is called surveillance capitalism ban the surveillance
capitalism business model just they cannot track you invade you profile you and sell your attention to advertisers ban it very easy to do you can write legislation in a day right that's number one number two i would say a four day working week the evidence is very clear we are exhausted we are overworked we are underslept give people back time right covered was the first time our society has slowed down we've been accelerating for a long time now we slowed down because of a tragedy and of course none of us would have wished for it to happen this way but and of course there were many people who were not able to slow down like health workers but a lot of people found a real relief in the slowness that came from covid right we've got to slow the society down speed destroys attention there's really good evidence for this and the third thing is we need to restore childhood only 10 of children play outside their home without adult supervision ever play is how children learn to pay attention it's how they learn to learn a whole body of skills come from play also just exercise massively boosts your attention and we've deprived our children of exercise that's even before covid obviously covered made it even worse for all the obvious reasons so obviously those are three very straightforward goals two of them could be done with legislation in a day right now of course it takes a big fight to prepare the ground for people to want those things but they are achievable they'll make our lives better not just in terms of attention but in so many ways so i'm optimistic in the sense that there have been bigger challenges than this yeah and human beings met those challenges i also i think we have to be optimistic because if we don't deal with this i don't think we can deal with the bigger crises right think about the climate crises a group of people a species that cannot pay attention that cannot focus and that interacts primarily through mediums that promote false claims and lies so an mit study found that 19 of
the 20 most shared stories on facebook in the 2016 election were untrue like a false claim that the pope could endorse donald trump 19 out of 20 just not true right if we can't get our focus and our ability to distinguish uh truth from falsehood back how are we ever going to deal with the climate crisis how are we ever going to deal with any of the problems that face us how we can deal with our own personal problems right we can't do that so this is the necessary step we have to take i think as individuals if you're facing problems the first step is if you can't pay attention to the things that matter you're [ __ ] what can you do you can't do anything you're just like a flailing animal on a beach right um which is what i always look like on a beach anyway but um so attention is the prerequisite to any achievement i think the last thing i was actually really surprised to find in stolen focus was you talking about food in lost connections you talk about junk values but in stolen focus you actually talk about junk food and there's the quote installed in focus where you say we should endeavor to eat what our grandparents would have eaten what they would have considered real food i loved that really resonates with me and i've been i've been on a bit of a crusade to try and live a little bit more human and unless 20 20 maybe a little bit more i don't know 9000 bc or whatever that was so why why did you feel the need to talk about junk food and food in a book about attention this is one of the causes that i learned about that i did not see coming and it was only when i was reading a lot of the science i was like oh wait so there's there's three ways in which the current diet we eat which is completely different to all humans before i was eight i mean it's been an extraordinary transformation in a very short period of time is is damaging our attention so dale pinnock who's one of britain's leading
nutritionist you should um should have him on actually he's really interesting guy dale um so dale explained to me that the and other scientists have shown that the diet we eat causes very rapid release of energy and very rapid crashes in energy which causes brain fog which ruins your focus so say for example you have and by the way i want to say i'm completely hypocrite saying this i literally had a mcdonald's on the way here so just any sense of superiority let's say you have frosties and white bread right for breakfast what that does is it releases a huge amount of glucose gives you a massive rush of energy feels great for about 20 minutes and then you're sitting at your desk or your kids sitting at their desk and the glucose crashes and you're just in brain fog right so one way is it the way dale puts it is you know if you put um rocket fuel into a mini it would go really fast for a minute and then it would just putter out and we're basically doing that and as he put it to me if you're eating sort of shitty carbohydrates every meal you're doing that to yourself again and again and again all throughout the day the second way in which it harms our attention our current diet deprives us of nutrients that are necessary for your brain to develop right there's an interesting study by dutch scientists where they got a bunch of kids they did this several times and it replicated well they got a bunch of kids and they put one of them on what they called an eliminationist diet where they basically didn't eat any processed food and the other group of kids just ate normally and the kids that were put on a on with cut out all the processed food and all of that that 70 of them had significant improvements in their attention and their average improvement in detention was 50 so really big improvement the third cause is that it's not just that our food lacks things we need is that it contains things that act on us like drugs there's a really shocking study on this it's done in southampton here in britain in 2007. they got nearly 300 kids they were seven year olds and
12 year olds and they split them into two groups and the first group was given a drink that just contained dyes that exist in normal food like m m's you know synthetic dyes and the other group i think i can't if it's just water or it was some kind of flavoring that doesn't contain these dyes and then they were monitored and the kids that drank the dyes that kitten every day and i'm eating every day were significantly more likely to have attention problems struggle focusing so you've got these three ways and you mentioned you know this this big change about how our ancestors i mean i remember when i was a as i said my my my dad's from switzerland um i grew up on this in this little hut in a mountain in switzerland and when i was a kid it started when i was nine my dad that bastard sent me his very nice man in many ways sent me every summer to go and stay on this farm where he'd he'd grown up he's like go to the farm you've become a man he said um and i would arrive there and to me this was like i grew up in edward right suddenly on a swiss mountain it's like what's happening right um and i remember my so my grandparents ate how almost all humans in almost all of our history have eaten they would grow their own food and they would kill their own animals right and eat them and i remember my my grandmother used to just put food in front of me i remember the i remember very clearly the first day i was there looking at it because i grew up you know i was raised mostly by my scottish grandmother working class scottish women i grew up eating microwave chips and fried food and you know i remember looking at the food my swiss grandmother gave me and literally saying where is the food this isn't food and then just being completely puzzled so for like two weeks i didn't i ate almost nothing and then finally she cracked and took me to the mcdonald's in zurich which is pretty far away and i remember i was sitting at mcdonald's and her looking at it and her saying but this isn't food what are you talking
about she just couldn't understand why i would want to eat it and so in three in two generations there was a huge change we went from eating mostly fresh and nutritious food to mostly most peop most british and american people most of their diet now consists of processed or ultra processed food which is just really different it's just very different i mean the food writer michael pollan who i know said we shouldn't call it food we should call it food-like substances because it doesn't resemble food now again this is one of the other causes bit like the four day week i can tell you all the facts can i do it no you know i mean i'm a bit better than i was but only a bit so to um to end we're going to continue with our new tradition which is asking you the question that our previous guest left for you and the previous guest that sat here wrote in the diary what was the best conversation you ever had and why oh that's a very good question i'm not meant to talk about this but i'll i'll i'll talk a little bit about it i am getting emotional a bit emotional about this uh try not to um the last 10 years i've been researching a book about a series of crimes that have been happening in las vegas and i'm not meant to talk about it too much and there's a couple who lived beneath caesar's palace in the drainage tunnel beneath his palace called tommy and shea who i got to know incredibly well who are two of the people i've most loved in my life i remember standing above where their tunnel is and shade and shade just saying all these people they're so much closer to where we are than they think not just physically but a few things go wrong and in that society you're in a [ __ ] tunnel and i remember that night with tommy and shay and i must have heard that i think i was
with them for like 12 hours that day uh i think that's one of the best conversations i've ever had there shay is so wise uh tommy is so f was so funny and they taught me so much about in all the years i knew them for how to be a person and tommy was murdered last year it's one of the reasons why i spent a lot of the plague in vegas because i've been trying to help shay and figure out what's going on what happened um and i think that's one of the best conversations in my life i i think they are they they taught me to think about life differently and every day i integrate some lesson that tommy taught me and i think that's one night i mean there's so many nights we spent together but that's one night that really stands out for me i mean i can think of lots of others but that's the one that you know it's amazing the remarkable thing about your writing which makes it so engaging and compelling is it isn't assigned to shouting facts and figures at you which i just as someone that struggles to read anyway i have to have a captivating emotional journey to take me through these subjects for me to be able to ingrain them in my conscious so um your books all do that especially this one especially lost connections which is one of my all-time favorite books by the way but stolen focus is a is a an amazing somewhat linked uh sequel in many respects and on many topics to that book and that was my favorite ever and this is one of now one of my favorite books as well because uh it's one of the books that i managed to actually read in the last year because of the way you write and that's a huge credit to you um there's a reason i always bring you back on this podcast i love these conversations great um and you've been uh and off camera you're you're you know you probably should be a comedian because you're so hilarious but on camera you're such an intelligent human being and off camera you're funny you're intelligent you're not so off-camera
but uh you're an incredible human being and i love i love having you here so oh thanks again for giving me this time and i'm so i'm so glad that um we're able to have this conversation because it's such an important one and one that i need i needed in my life i really appreciate you how deeply you pay attention to the book and um i'm meant to say or my publishers will tell me let's do it that um anyone who wants to know where to get the audio book the ebook or the physical book can go to stolenfocusbook.com and on the website you can listen for free to loads of the experts we talked about like the guy who discovered flow states uh all these google experts a ton of people um i'm meant to read something where i say like read it also i can't bring myself to it makes me sound like a [ __ ] something like you can find out what stephen fry hillary clinton and many other leading experts thought about the book um something like that hillary clinton's read the book she has she's something a very nice thing um yeah and lots i mean so sad there's there's an alternate universe where hillary clinton is in her second term as president and unfortunately instead she's in a world where she has to read my book instead but um i would rather live in the i'd rather live in a bit where we got to skip trump but nevermind um the yeah so and you can get the book in all good bookshops you can even get it in [ __ ] book shops and it's out right now it's available it's just come out so go and read it thank you so much steven i really thank you honestly that you came and did this again [Music] [Music] you