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

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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