Your Attention Didn't Collapse. It Was Stolen.
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This is honestly. The deal is done. Twitter has been sold to Elon Musk. Elon Musk purchased Twitter this week for $44 billion. The outspoken CEO of Tesla and the world's wealthiest person has said he wants to buy Twitter because he thinks it's not living up to its potential as a platform for free speech. And the internet exploded. Elon Musk lives in a world in which the only kind of free speech is white men feeling free

to say whatever the hell they want. Well, it looks like Twitter's gone. They accepted the money and Elon Stalin is taking over. So fuck you, Twitter, and goodbye forever.

Are you concerned about the rise of American fascism? Well today, you can be more concerned. This is a big win. This is huge. The fact that it's now announced, that's fucking amazing. If you get invited to something where there are no rules, where there is total freedom for everybody, do you actually want to go to that party?

Or are you going to decide to stay home? And that's a question for Twitter users. I love to see ideology backfire on people because a lot of us, when we were coming out with these complaints about Twitter, talking Section 230, talking about free speech and censorship, we were met with, well, it's a private business and they can do whatever they want. Get your own platform, build a new social media, blah, blah, blah. And now you're hearing the same people who said those things going, oh, my gosh, I can't believe Elon Musk has bought Twitter and is going to be upholding free speech. What a horrendous thing to do.

This is very treacherous. If you follow me, you know that I'm extremely invested in the conversation about free speech, and I feel cautiously optimistic about what this could mean. But for today, while everyone else is talking about what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter, I want to talk about what Twitter and the other social media apps are doing to all of us. The average American adult spends over three hours a day staring into their phone.

If you're a teenager, it's even worse. Before the pandemic, most teens were spending seven hours a day looking into screens. I don't even want to know how much those numbers grew over the last two years. And what's troubling is that consistently, in survey after survey and study after study, people say that they want to be looking at their screens much less than they are. They just cannot look away.

I'm one of those people. My daily average screen time is so high that I'm actually too embarrassed to tell you. And I know I should because this is a show called Honestly. That's how bad it is. Here's what I'll tell you. I wake up every morning and the first thing I do is go on Twitter. Then I go on email. Then I go to my text messages. And then at some point I sort of roll from my phone over to my computer. And then somehow it's lunchtime and I'm looking at Instagram while I eat and you get the picture.

And as I am saying this, you can't see my face, but I'm blushing. I'm filled with shame. And that's because I feel like I have no control over it. My guest today, Johan Hari, knows how we can regain control. He's a journalist who, like me and maybe you, felt that his ability to focus and pay attention was rapidly deteriorating.

Things that require deep focus, like reading a long book or watching a movie, were getting more and more like running up and down an escalator. He could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder every month and every year. And he wanted to understand why. Was this an issue of personal willpower? Or were there bigger, maybe more sinister forces at play?

In his new book called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again, Johan interviews over 200 of the world's leading experts on how we lose and gain focus. What he found and what we talk about today is that your attention didn't just collapse. It's actually been stolen from you.

It's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then leaning forward and going, you know what, buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch so much. We'll be right back. Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

Johanna, we met for the first time a few summers ago in Provincetown, and it was actually hard to coordinate meeting up because you had no devices that summer because you were essentially on a tech cleanse. Tell me about what made you do that. I remember it so clearly. I remember waiting for you on the harbor as your boat arrived and, you know, having no way to sort of check when you were coming, if you'd actually caught the boat. I did it for a very personal reason. And

Oh, sorry, I felt a bit emotional saying it. So I've got a godson, I call him Adam in the book. And when he was nine, he developed this brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He would kind of run around singing Viva Las Vegas and Suspicious Minds. And one night when I was tucking him in, he said to me, looked at me really intensely, and he said, Johan, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I said, yeah, sure, in the way you do with little kids because you know they're going to forget.

And he said, no, do you really promise? Do you promise that one day you're going to take me to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely promise. And I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years until everything had gone wrong. So he dropped out of school when he was 15. And one day when he was 19, we were sitting on the sofa just behind where my laptop is now.

And he was sitting there and it's like he had fragmented. He spent all his time, I mean, literally almost all his time, alternating between devices, between this kind of blur of WhatsApp, YouTube, Snapchat, pornography. It was like he was whirring at the speed of Snapchat where nothing still or serious could touch him. And I was sitting on the sofa and I was trying to get a conversation going. He's a lovely, intelligent person.

And I was horrified, but I was also disgusted at myself because the truth is I wasn't that much better, right? I was sitting there, I was looking at my phone and I suddenly, I was looking at it, I was horrified at what had become of us and of so much of our culture. And so I said to him, hey,

let's go to Graceland. He didn't even remember this promise years before, but I was like, let's break this numbing routine. Let's get away from this. We'll go all over the South, but you've got to do it on one condition, which is that you'll leave your phone in the hotel during the day when, when we go out. And he promised. And a few weeks after that, we arrived in Memphis. And when you get to the gates of Graceland, what happens is they hand you an iPad and

And you put in earbuds and the iPad shows you around. So it says go left, go right. It narrates the history of the room you're in. It tells you stuff. So what happens is everyone walks around Graceland just staring at their iPad.

And I'm sort of walking around and I'm feeling a bit tense because I'm like, this is weird. I'm trying to make eye contact with people to kind of go, oh, this is funny. We're the people who traveled thousands of miles and actually looked at the place we traveled to. But the only person I managed to make eye contact with, I suddenly realized had looked away from the iPad only to take out his phone and take a selfie. So we got to the jungle room, which was Elvis's favorite room. And there was a Canadian couple next to us. And the Canadian guy turned to his wife and he said, honey, this is amazing. Look.

If you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right.

And I thought he was joking. So I kind of turned to him to laugh. And him and his wife were just swiping back and forth. Like, in other words, you also have a neck. You could just turn your head. Well, I said to him, hey, sir, there's an old fashioned form of swiping you could do. You could just turn your head because we're actually in the jungle room. You don't have to look at a digital representation of it. We're literally in the jungle room. Look at it.

And they sort of backed away to the other room, clearly thinking I was insane, possibly correctly. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it. And he was standing in a corner just looking at Snapchat because from the minute we landed, he could not not look at it. And I went up to him and I tried to snatch the phone off him. And I said, I know you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you're missing out. You're not showing up to your own life. You're not present at your own existence. This is no way to be. And he stormed off.

And I wandered around Graceland and Memphis on my own. And that night I found him in the Heartbreak Hotel where we were staying across the street. And he was sitting by the swimming pool and he kept scrolling. But he just said, I know something's really wrong and I don't know what it is. And that's the moment when I thought, because I've been thinking about this subject for a long time and I put it off. I was quite frightened of looking into it. I thought, OK, I need to begin to investigate what's happening to our attention here. And when I came back from Memphis, I was so reeling from it.

that I just announced very quickly to all my friends. I am going completely offline for three months. I've been online for 15 years and I can't take it anymore. I'm tired of being wired. So I booked a little place that you saw in a beach house in Provincetown. And for people who don't know Provincetown, it's a little gay beach resort. It's the kind of place where more than one person earns a living by dressing as Ursula, the villain from The Little Mermaid and singing songs about tunneling gifts.

It's heaven. And Johan, when you decided to tell all of your friends, was that because you sort of wanted to be held accountable, like telling people, I'm going to start being a runner so that the sort of public pressure to make you be a runner will in fact be the thing that guarantees that you actually run? Totally. I thought, well, I'll look like a fool now that I, I mean, I literally left my devices in Boston and took the ferry over and

And I thought, well, I'm going to look like a fool if in a month's time I pop up on social media, right? I'm really going to have to stick to this. You're exactly right. That technique you're describing is called pre-commitment. You want to do something, but you're worried you're going to crack. Tell everyone. There's all sorts of other ways you can use pre-commitment. There's one that I'm using literally right now that we might talk about later. In this moment? Yeah, in this very moment. What is it? Oh, so in the corner of the room, I have something called a K-safe.

It's a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial and it will lock your phone away for between five minutes and 24 hours. And right now, I think I put it on. Yeah, I think it's counting down from about four hours. I do it for four hours every day. So that's one of the ways I took Provincetown home with me. But I went to Provincetown and there were really hard moments. I felt tremendous craving at first.

for the thin insistent signals of the web that we've all become profoundly addicted to. But one thing that astonished me is I thought, you know, look, I think I just turned 40. I thought, you know, you get older, maybe your brain just deteriorates. I was stunned by how much my focus came back. I went back to having the focus I had when I was 17. You know, I think the day we met, I was reading War and Peace, right? I could sit and read for eight, nine, 10 hours a day. And my focus was really clear. Wow.

Yeah. And I remember the conversations we had about it and you looking at me, how would you describe the way you looked at me? I remember seeing... Like you had a third nipple. I mean, it was more just self-conscious that I wouldn't have the same ability to do what you were doing, frankly. But I remember you saying that at the time and it was such an interesting thing because...

A lot of people would express a kind of panic for me. I remember when I went into the Target in Boston to try to get a phone that couldn't go on the internet. Ironically, I had to go online in the end to get a phone that couldn't go online. The guy just saying to me, but what will you do if there's an emergency? And this guy was the same age as me. And I remember saying, but you do remember that we spent half our lives without these phones. We didn't all just die. But I remember when I got to the end of those three months thinking, oh my God, I found Nirvana. I'm never going to go back to the way I was.

And I got the ferry back and I was violently sick on the ferry. It was really choppy that day. And I took my phone back from the friend I'd left it with. And if I'm honest, I was really disappointed because I thought I would have a week's worth of emails to go through. I thought, oh, I'm so important. And because I'd had an auto reply saying absolutely no one can contact me in any circumstances, there were almost no emails, which felt a bit weird. Even the Apple font seemed really alien to me.

And then I never went back to as bad as I was, but within a couple of months, I was 80% back to where I was. And I only really understood why when I went to interview Dr. James Williams in Moscow, who he was a Google strategist, senior Google strategist, who was disgusted by what they're doing, quit and has become, I would argue, the leading philosopher of attention in the world. And he said to me, the mistake you've made, Johan,

It's as though you thought the solution to air pollution was for you personally to wear a gas mask. Now, if I lived in Beijing, I would wear a gas mask, right? Gas masks are a good thing in highly polluted situations. They are not the solution to air pollution. We are living in an environment that is profoundly degrading our attention. Now, there are lots of things we can do as isolated individuals to defend ourselves to some degree.

But the primary thing we have to do, Dr. Williams and many other people argue, is we have to actually take on these forces that are doing this to us. Because ultimately, we're not going to become like the Amish. We're not going to secede. We have to fix the aspects of tech that are doing this to us. And actually, we have to fix the 11 other aspects. And one of the things that fascinated me interviewing these experts is actually, I came to the conclusion that although there are aspects of our tech that are profoundly invasive to our attention, that are really damaging us and we need to deal with, it's a huge issue.

Actually, I don't think tech is the biggest of those 12 causes. And the other causes all interact with it in an interesting way.

I want to get to those causes and also how the experts you spoke to and how you, as an expert yourself at this point, believe we can change it. But first I want to sort of make the case that what's happening now to us is different, right? Throughout the 20th century, there were people concerned about the hours Americans spend in front of their TVs. You know, now the focus has switched to phones. I want to understand, Johan, how is what's going on

between humans and phones, how is it different than the relationship, say, between people and their televisions half a generation ago?

I think it's a really good point. And television did profoundly transform the society. It's one of the key factors that caused an explosion in loneliness. So every technology that comes along profoundly changes the society in good and bad ways. How is this different? Yeah, let's start with just one huge array of ways in which it's different. I went to interview Professor Earl Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. And he said to me, you've got to understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else.

You can only think about one or two things consciously at a time.

That's it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years. It ain't gonna change on any time scale you and me are ever gonna see. You can only think about one thing at a time. But the average teenager today believes they can follow seven forms of media at the same time. So what Professor Miller's colleagues do is they get people into labs and they get them to think they're doing lots of things at the same time. And they monitor what happens.

And it turns out when you think you're doing lots of things at the same time, you're actually invariably juggling. You're very quickly switching between one thing and another thing. You're refocusing, refocusing, refocusing. And your consciousness papers over it to give a seamless impression. But it turns out that comes with a huge cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. When you're trying to do more than one thing at a time, you will do all the things you're trying to do simultaneously.

far less competently. You will remember them less, you will make far more mistakes, and you'll be far less creative about what you do. And it feels like a small effect when you're doing it. It feels like if I now, I can't because of my K-safe, but if my phone was next to me now, and while you asked me that question, I just glanced at my text. That feels like such a small thing. In fact, Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you're interrupted by

it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus. But most of us never get 23 minutes without interruptions. And there's a study, a very small study, part of a much bigger body of evidence that really brought this home to me. Hewlett Packard, you know the printer company? Yes. They got a scientist in to do a small study with their workforce.

And what he did is he split their workers into two groups. And the first group was told, basically, just do your task for the day and you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told, do your task for the day and you're going to answer a fairly heavy amount of emails and phone calls. And then at the end of it, they gave them all an IQ test. The people who had not been interrupted scored 10 IQ points higher. To give you a sense of how big that is, if you or me got stoned now, Barry, if we just sat down and just smoked a fat spliff,

Our IQ would go down by five points. So the effect of being chronically distracted in the short term, there's obviously a longer debate about IQ and cannabis in the longer term, but in the short term is twice as bad for your ability to focus and pay attention, your general intelligence, as getting stoned.

Not getting stoned and being constantly interrupted. Obviously, it's better to in fact not get stoned and not be interrupted Let's not get carried away But if your screen time your screen time says seven hours, but if those seven hours are spread evenly throughout the day What that means is you're losing even more than that in depleted focus the refocusing those 23 minutes is happening throughout the day that process of getting back to where you were and when this becomes really chronic and

As I think it did for me a few points in my life. I think what happens is you become almost like a stump of yourself. You can sense what you would have been had you been able to apply yourself, but you can't quite get there. So the way Professor Miller put it to me is we live in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of constantly being interrupted and distracted. Does that ring true to you, Barry?

It does. And it takes me to something I've been thinking about a lot, which is that there are a lot of apologies right now coming out of Silicon Valley. And you talk to some of these people in the book, engineers from places like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, some of them like Tristan Harris, who was a design ethicist at Google. And they tell you they knew they were building something really bad.

And they're agonized. They're pained by this machinery that they helped to create, whether they did it knowingly or unknowingly. What did talking to some of these people help you understand? You know, it really helped me because, again, very early in this, I basically had two narratives about why my attention was bad. It was you are personally weak.

And the smartphone was invented. Those are the two things that I thought. And they're both profoundly disempowering narratives. Of course, personal weakness just makes you feel like shit and like you have no sense of agency. And actually, I had a really funny moment early in the research for that where I went to interview the leading expert in the world on willpower, a man named Professor Roy Baumeister. And for anyone who's heard of the marshmallow test, he's the guy who invented that.

And he wrote a book called Willpower. So I went to see him and I said, oh, you know, I'm thinking of writing a book about, you know, attention problems. And he said to me, oh, it's interesting you say that because, you know, my attention is really bad now. I just play video games all the time on my phone. And I'm sitting there opposite him and I was like, wait, what?

"Did you write a book called Willpower? Aren't you the leading expert on willpower?" And you're sitting there telling me you play fucking Candy Crush all day. It was almost a kind of dystopian moment where I was like, "Everyone's been body snatched," right? But the really important thing I learned in terms of the tech, that narrative, the smartphone did it to you, I realized is grossly oversimplified.

The way these companies want us to frame this is as, are you pro-tech or anti-tech, right? Because then, well, what are we going to do? We're not going to join the Amish, right? So, oh, well, we've got no choice but to be pro-tech. But actually what you learn when you speak to the people who've been at the heart of the machine is that these machines are currently designed, the devices and most particularly the apps on them, to maximally hack and invade our attention, as they admit.

for a very specific reason that is not inherent to the technology and is not inherent to the concept of social media. And there's an analogy that really helped me to think about this. So older listeners will remember, it used to be completely normal. I learned this from Jaron Lanier, a wonderful technologist. It used to be perfectly normal that people painted their homes with lead paint and they put leaded gasoline in their cars. I remember my mother doing it when I was a kid.

And it was known, going right back to ancient Rome, that exposure to lead is really bad for people. And in the 1920s, there was an amazing female scientist called Dr. Alice Hamilton who warned that this was going to really damage people's brains, leaded gasoline. And the lead industry funded an enormous amount of just bullshit, fake science, denialism. But by the time you got to the 1970s, it was just undeniable. Exposure to lead, in particular, damages children's ability to focus and pay attention.

So what did we do? We didn't ban paint. We didn't ban petrol. As you can see, my apartment is painted with paint, right? I can see cars going past outside the window that have petrol in their gasoline in their tanks. What we did is we banned the lead in the gasoline and the lead in the paint. And there's an analogy for that in the current social media landscape.

There's a step we can take through regulation that I think goes to the heart of this aspect of the problem. So at the moment, and most people now know this, every time you open Facebook or any social media app, they make money in two ways. The first is really obvious. You see ads. We all know how that works. The second way is much more important and much more valuable, which is everything you say,

on social media is being scanned and sorted by their algorithms to build a profile of you. So let's say that you like, I don't know, Dolly Parton, Donald Trump, and you say to your mother that you just bought some diapers. Okay, if you're a man who likes Dolly Parton, the algorithm will figure out you're probably gay. If you like Donald Trump, you're probably conservative. If you're buying diapers, you've probably got a baby. They are gathering tens of thousands of data points like this

in order to sell you your attention to the highest bidder. Because if I'm marketing diapers, you don't want to market to me. I haven't got a baby. You want to sell to people who've got diapers. So every time you pick up your phone, Facebook makes more money or TikTok or Snapchat or whatever we're talking about. And every time you put it down,

those revenue streams disappear. So all of this algorithmic genius, all of this engineering power is geared absolutely and entirely towards one thing. How do we take as much of your attention as we possibly can? This isn't my view. This isn't just the view of the dissidents in Silicon Valley. This is what they admit. Sean Parker, one of the biggest initial investors in Facebook said,

said publicly, although he was then silenced on this question because it damaged their share price, we designed it specifically to invade people's attention. We knew what we were doing and we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our kids' brains. That's what he said. Now, that business model means that the technology we use is maximally designed to invade attention. It's just a very simple truth in the same way KFC wants you to eat fried chicken, which has given me a craving just saying that,

These apps want you to scroll and scroll and scroll. And every time you get your life back, it is a disaster for them. I remember speaking to Asa Raskin, who invented a key part of how the internet works. His dad, Jeff Raskin, invented the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. And Asa said to me, look,

There's one huge step that is the core of the solution to this. You have to ban the current business model, a business model based on figuring out the weaknesses in your attention in order to hack them and sell your attention to the highest bidder. That is just inhuman. It is like lead in leaded paint. We will not allow it. And loads of other people said this to me and I kept saying to them, okay, but what happens the day after we do that? If we did it and I open Facebook, does it say, okay,

Sorry, we've gone fishing. They said no, of course not What would happen is they would have to move to a different business model one is really obvious subscription We all know how Netflix and HBO work another one literally everyone has experienced this and

All of you are in a place that is connected to the sewage system. Before we had sewers, we had shit in the streets, we had cholera. So we all paid to build the sewers and we all own the sewers together. Everyone listening, you own the sewers where you live. Now, just like we all own together the sewage pipes, we might want to own together the information pipes. We'd have to definitely have a way. It was independent of government for obvious reasons.

But we might want to do that because we're getting the attentional equivalent of cholera. But the key thing is, as soon as there's a different business model, all the incentives change. At the moment, famously, as people in Silicon Valley always say, you are not the customer of Facebook. You are the product they sell. But under this different business model...

you become the customer. And suddenly they don't ask, what do the advertisers want us to do to Barry? They start to say, what does Barry want? Oh, Barry wants to be able to pay attention. Okay, let's design the app so it improves and heals her attention, not destroys it. Barry wants to meet up with her friends.

Let's introduce a button where she can say, "Anyone nearby and wanna meet up?" And other people can click and go, "Yeah, I'd love to do that." There's all sorts of ways. It's not technologically difficult. It's very easy to design that. Tristan and his friends could design in a week a Facebook that would be designed not to hack your attention, but to heal your attention. But Facebook and these other companies will never do this on their own, any more than the lead industry was gonna say one day, "You know what, guys?

I think we've just made enough money. I think we can just stop now, right? They'll only do it if we make them do it through regulation and through a movement. Lead paint was got rid of because ordinary housewives in the United States, Britain and across the world launched democratic campaigns to say, we will not let you do this to our children's brains. I'm curious about how you connect children

stolen focus or the brain breaking that we are living through with the rise of cancel culture? I think there's a really deep link. There's lots of things going on with cancel culture and you're doing incredible work. One of the structural reasons for cancel culture, I think, can be explained in this model. It's where two things come together. On the one hand, you've got a business model that is entirely premised on the longer you scroll, the more money they make.

So that means the algorithms are constantly scanning for what words, what kind of posts keep people scrolling longer. But it bumped into an underlying psychological truth that's been known about for a really long time, and it's called negativity bias. Negativity bias is really simple. Anyone who's ever seen a car accident knows what negativity bias is. You will stare longer at a car accident than you do at the pretty flowers on the other side of the road. Human beings will stare longer...

at things that make them frightened or upset than things that make them feel good. This is very deep in human nature. 10 week old babies will stare longer at an angry face than a smiling face. There's obviously an evolutionary advantage in being more alert to danger and to anger and to rage. But when it combines with that business model, it produces a horrific effect. So you want to understand it at a very basic level. Imagine two teenage girls who go to the same party.

and they leave and get the same bus home. And one of them does an update where they say, "I had a great time at that party. Everyone looked great. Everyone was nice. What a lovely night." And the other one says,

Julie was a fucking skank at that party. She's so fucking ugly. Her boyfriend's so fucking ugly. I spend a lot of time with my niece looking at her social media, so I'm disconcertingly familiar for a man my age with this discourse, right? Now, the algorithm will scan both of them. It's scanning for the kinds of words that keep people scrolling. And it will put into a few people's feed that first post.

but it will pick up on the angry and outraged words in the second post and it will put them to far more people. Far more people will see it and then people go, what do you mean Karen's not a skank? You're a fucking skank. If it's enraging, it's engaging. And that means the algorithms select and promote for it. Now that is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls on a bus. Let's look at the leaked documents we got from Facebook. After the success of Brexit and the victory of President Trump,

Facebook set up an internal inquiry to figure out if they had played a role in the polarisation that produced those outcomes and many others like the genocide in Myanmar, which the UN said they played a role in by promoting hateful messages about the minority Rohingya. What their internal research found was that their business model is inherently polarising. They said that the growth of Facebook was inherently tied

to polarization and producing extremism. They found that one quarter of all the people who joined neo-Nazi groups in Germany joined them because Facebook specifically recommended them. They saw in their feed the words, you might want to join, and followed by a neo-Nazi group. You might remember Germany did have some experience with Nazism, right? This is no trivial thing. And

Facebook was told this, their own data scientists said the only solution was for them to adopt what they called an anti-growth strategy. That the more they grew the company, the more they produced polarisation. And when the Wall Street Journal, who did excellent reporting on this, they did a very dry line, I thought, which was they described all that science and then they said something like,

After Mark Zuckerberg was shown this research, he asked that he never be brought anything like it again. Right? Now, where this connects to cancel culture is really important. It is a machine which promotes canceling.

angry, hostile and hateful comments. There's a very good website that tracks which words the YouTube algorithm picks up to promote. And the most popular words are hates, destroys, obliterates, slams. Right. Put those words in, your video gets far more traction because the algorithm selects for it because people will look at it longer. So when we use this stuff, we are plugging into a machinery that rewards the most merciless,

cruel and hateful behavior. And we all have this capacity in us, right? Everyone listening, we all have an angry and hateful side. And if that angry and hateful side is systematically rewarded and the kind, generous, decent, merciful side of us, which almost everyone has as well, is penalized and ignored, if that's your machinery, if that becomes your public square for the journalists of your society, then

One of the things you'll get is a culture that seeks to penalise minor infractions with Saudi Arabian style social shunning and, you know, social death, that brilliant phrase you use. It turns all of us into the least kind versions of ourselves.

because it rewards systematically the least kind behavior. Does that regroup you? Extremely so. I also think the fact that the permanence of the internet, the fact that anything that you've said from the time that you're a 14-year-old singing along to a video on Snapchat or TikTok can later sort of be used against you and that things that you've maybe made demands for, apologized for,

changed your mind about, you know, there's sort of no outer limit, right? You can be put in double jeopardy at any time. And I think that's another aspect to it. And I think a lot about whether or not in the future, we're going to have our human normal selves and our sort of, you know, anonymous avatar selves, and maybe that'll be healthier. I'm not really sure. There's something you were saying as you said that, that I thought about a lot in Provincetown, which is

That thing that the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message? Yes. I started to think, what's the medium buried in the message of something like Twitter? When you tweet, it doesn't matter if you're Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump or Bubba the Love Sponge, you are consenting to a set of messages. One is...

The world can and should be described in 28 character bursts very, very quickly. I remember seeing a news show a little while ago that said, tweet us your views on the Israel-Palestine conflict, right? The world, the idea that the world can and should be described in exceptionally short, simplistic bursts. The second message in that medium is,

is that what really matters is whether people immediately agree with the very simplistic thing you just said. The whole thing is structured so you immediately see if people agree. The ultimate humiliation is being ratioed where more people disagree than agree. And I think one of the reasons I realized why I feel so out of kilter when I use Twitter is because those messages are deeply wrong. They're really wrong. Even when I'm winning at that game, even when I'm getting loads of retweets, I'm doing well.

It's not true. Almost nothing useful can be said in 280 characters. Maybe you're a Japanese haiku artist, in which case, 280 characters, knock yourself out. But the vast majority of us, almost nothing useful can be said in 280 characters. You will certainly not address the Israel-Palestine conflict in any meaningful way in 280 characters. You will struggle in a 280-page book. And it really doesn't matter if people immediately agree with you. In fact...

Almost everyone you've ever admired, almost everyone who brought any progress of any kind, most people disagreed with them when they started to articulate their ideas. So we compare that with the message in the medium of, say, the printed book, right? It doesn't matter what the words of the specific book are. What do books say to us, printed books? The first thing they say is, slow down.

Think about just one thing for 10 hours, right? Just think about one thing and really focus on it. The second thing it says is think about the internal lives of other people. Give a lot of intention to the internal lives of other people. And I've realized the reason I feel so much better when I've spent my time reading a book than tweeting or looking at Twitter is

It's because the medium of the book contains messages that are at some very deep level true and morally right. And the messages in the medium of Twitter are wrong. They are not true. And I think they are morally debased. I know that sounds a bit grand and fancy, but, you know, you talk so much, Barry, in such an interesting way about how people can be brave. And I think if you wanted to create a machinery that would crush bravery, you would create Twitter, right? Yeah, I agree with that.

After the break, how the attention problem is affecting our sleep, our sex lives, and more. We'll be right back. Johan, let's do a quick round that helps us understand how this attention problem that you're talking about is affecting us specifically. So number one, how does it affect our sleep?

As Professor Roxanne Prashad at the University of Minneapolis put it to me, when you're sleeping, you're repairing. Your brain is healing itself. And we don't sleep, partly because it exposes us to artificial light just before we go to sleep, partly because it gets us really amped up. And the less you sleep, the less your brain repairs. If you stay awake for 19 hours, your attention is as impaired as if you had got legally drunk. So we have hugely reduced the amount we sleep.

partly in response to the technology, and then the lack of sleep makes us more vulnerable to the technology when we wake up feeling groggy. So it's a cruel cycle. So in other words, when I wake up at four in the morning and can't sleep, looking at my Twitter is not helping? How did you guess? Okay. Next question, Johan. How does this affect our sex lives?

I didn't research this, but sex is a very deep form of attention. And this research, I'm trying to remember the figure because it's not in the book. A staggering number of people check their phones during sex. And I have to say, if my boyfriend ever did that, I would be horrified beyond words. Okay.

Johan, how does this, and I know this is a big question, how does this affect our relationships? Well, I would say everyone listening, just think about anything you've ever done that you're proud of, whether it's setting up a business, being a good friend, learning to play the guitar. That thing you're proud of took a lot of attention and focus.

And when your attention and focus breaks down, your ability to achieve your goals and solve your problems also breaks down. And your ability to attend to your friendships breaks down. Friendship is one of the most beautiful forms of attention. A friendship is where you look into each other's eyes across years and years. You laugh together, you grieve together, you dance together. And people who can't pay attention...

can't form friendships as well because friendship is attention what was the line nick laird the great irish poet said love is how you spend your time i think that's how he put it you know how you deploy your attention is a form of love and we're signaling to the people around us we love

these fucking dancing to Mark Zuckerberg's algorithm more than we love looking into the eyes of our kids and our partners. That's not the way we want to be. Okay, speaking of kids, how is this affecting our children? So this is huge. The last quarter of the book is about this. It is not a coincidence that the explosion of children's attention problems has occurred at the same time as a profound transformation of childhood. If you think about your parents, my parents, who grew up in very different places...

All human children used to leave home when they're about five years old and go to school with other groups of children. And they would go and play after school for many hours and find their way home. And children, when they're doing that, learn all the essentials of attention. Dr. Isabel Benke, who's at Oxford University, has done some of the key research on this. And then in the space of a generation, we put all our children under house arrest.

And it turns out there's only 10% of children, even before COVID, ever played outside without adult supervision in the United States. This absolutely fucks their ability to develop attention. One of the things it does is the only way our kids get to explore anything, which is a profound human urge, is on video games. Even think about something as basic, such a no-shit Sherlock insight as...

Exercise is essential for attention and we have stopped children from running around. That is one of the key reasons all the attention experts warn why they can't focus and pay attention. We need to restore childhood and there's an incredible group called letgrow.org that I report on in the book. Absolutely everyone who's a parent, go now to letgrow.org. If we want to restore attention and resilience, we have got to restore something that our ancestors would have recognised as a human childhood.

Okay, well, speaking of human childhoods, one of the things that I am extremely interested in, and I'm curious what you think about, is the social contagion theories that are connected to young people being so online all the time. I think especially here about young people starting to see themselves as having dissociative identity disorder or Tourette's after watching a lot of TikTok videos and actually having exactly the same tic

as the person they're seeing in the video. I wonder if you did any research on that or just your personal thoughts about it. There's a guy called Edward Shorten who's done really interesting research on this. So I interviewed in Toronto. He's a professor. He invented this key concept which he calls symptom pools. In any given society, there's a certain amount of distress. That will vary according to all sorts of things that are going on, obviously.

And if you're distressed, you will seek ways to express that distress in which it is recognised by the society around you. So you look for what he calls recognised symptom pools. So let's think about hysteria in the 1880s in Vienna, where Freud begins to write about it. So at that time, if you were a woman whose life was shit and most women's lives were shit, and you wanted to express your distress...

you would faint a lot, right? Yes. Because that was a recognized symptom, Paul. Now, I want to stress this happens entirely unconsciously. It's not that a woman goes, oh, I want to signal my distress, I'll faint. It's just that they pick up in this society. That is what's going to give me the attention that I need. Exactly, exactly. And it's both unconscious and entirely legitimate. So we know this with multiple personality disorder, which is if we think about the release of the famous book, Sybil, and the TV movie starring Sally Field,

We now know, there was brilliant journalistic research about this, that the book Sybil was largely untrue. The account it told of multiple personality disorder, which popularised the concept, was not true. So that book creates a narrative of something that didn't happen.

popularizes it, and then people began to experience the things that book described. Now, of course, there was some theory of multiple personality disorder prior to Sybil, but the book established a new way of thinking about it and new details of it that people then began to genuinely manifest. And the reason why this is difficult to talk about

is because some people deeply mishear this message. Right, they would hear it as, it's fake, but it's not fake. We've got this really problematic way of thinking that's quite deep in the grammar of Western culture, which is if something is biological, it's real, and if it's psychological, it's somehow fake. That is complete nonsense. Love is a psychological phenomenon. Grief is a psychological phenomenon. Does anyone doubt that love and grief are real? Of course not.

And there's a pattern that happens with symptom pools where the pattern will rise and rise and then that symptom will become so widespread that actually it will no longer signal distress because too many people are doing it. It doesn't signal unique distress anymore. It just becomes almost like a norm and then it will crash down again. This is why you see huge patterns with self-starvation, with anorexia.

There's a wonderful journalist in San Francisco called Ethan Waters who did super interesting research on anorexia in Hong Kong. So in 1994, a girl collapsed in the central business district of Hong Kong and she was taken to hospital. I think she died on the way.

And when they looked at her, they thought she was an old man because her body was so withered. It turned out she was like a 14 or 15-year-old girl who had starved herself to death. And at that time, there was no awareness of anorexia in Hong Kong. So loads of really well-meaning Western mental health specialists descend on Hong Kong in the light of this famous case, and they explain anorexia to the children of Hong Kong. And there was an explosion of anorexia. Because if you give people a narrative about their distress...

If you tell people this is the way distress is expressed, many people who are distressed, who are sincerely distressed, will then express that symptom, Paul. Now, the real solution to that, it's not to rubbish this behaviour, it's not to mock these people, it's not to tell them their pain isn't real. It's to find healthy outlets for them to express their distress and find solutions to their problems. And I think this is really related to the fact that we live in a culture where

where there are so many psychological needs people have that are not met. People are profoundly lonely. 41% of Americans agree with the statement, no one knows me well. People are profoundly financially insecure going into the pandemic. More than half of Americans had less than $500 in savings, mostly through no fault of their own. In a society with so much distress, where people have been so depoliticized and so stripped to the capacity to solve their problems collectively,

people don't have healthy solutions and where all these other factors are happening. So this totally fits with the opioid crisis. Where are the opioid deaths happening? They're not happening in the places where people find it easiest to get opioids. Everyone on the Harvard faculty could go and get opioids tomorrow. They've all got medical insurance and they've all got doctors who trust them. And it's relatively low there. It's highest in places like Monadnock in New Hampshire, where I went.

where people have been stripped of the things that make life worth living. When a factory closes in a town, among its workers, the opioid addiction rate and overdose rate doubles over the next three to five years. Opioid addiction is highest where people are most despairing. Now, of course, the opioids play a role. Chemical hooks are real, but the

core of the problem is the baseline of despair. And I think this is true of tech as well. Think about something as basic as our obsession with our phones. Of course, there's a relationship that goes both ways.

The phones make us more lonely, but also more lonely people become more obsessed with these technologies. There's a very complex iterative relationship. So we've got to deal with all of these problems in a systemic way. We pick a thread and you deal with them. Sorry, that was a long answer. I'm sorry. No, no, no, no. Johan, let's talk a little bit about solutions to the problems we've been talking about.

Do you think that the big social media companies should be broken up? Yes, but that's not the solution. The solution is to go after the business model. If we had loads and loads of social media companies that all had the current business model, it wouldn't solve the problem. The reason we need to break them up is because then they'll be less powerful in their lobbying and it will be easier to ban the business model. And there's other good reasons to break them up, but that's not the solution to the attention component of this problem. Earlier on in the conversation, you talked about sort of

Housewives banding together, rising up to insist that lead be taken out of paint. What is the equivalent here? Draw out that analogy a little bit more, if you would. I think the analogy is with the feminist movement. Just like we needed a feminist movement to reclaim women's bodies and lives, and of course still need one.

We need an attention movement to reclaim our minds. And it requires a profound shift in consciousness. That thing you said, you look at your phone, you see seven hours, you feel disgusted. You need to stop doing that. We are not medieval peasants at the court of King Zuckerberg begging for crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies.

and we own our own minds, and we can take them back from the fuckers who've stolen them, and we can systematically take on these forces. We need a movement that raises people's consciousness, just like the feminist movement did. My grandmothers thought that being subjected to misogyny and their lives being thwarted, which really damaged their lives, they thought that was the natural way of things. The next generation of women had a consciousness-raising movement to say it doesn't have to be this way, so we need a consciousness-raising where people are

understand that this is something that is being done to you. It's not something you are doing to yourself. And then we need to defend ourselves in all sorts of individual ways that I talk about in the book. And then we've got to go after these forces. And there are all sorts of practical ways to do that. I went to countries that have begun that process. We've got to have an attention movement to defend our and our children's minds.

What about in our own lives? Most of us are not going to take three months off, read War and Peace, throw away our phones. So give us some rules of the road. What can we as individuals or as families do on a day-to-day basis to start to reclaim our attention and our minds? So it's so interesting because I learned so many factors that I never even thought of as related to attention. So I'll just give you an example of one.

The way we eat is profoundly damaging our ability to focus and pay attention. So let's say you wake up and you eat white bread or Frosties, the kind of breakfast that I grew up eating. As Dale Pinnock, one of the leading nutritionists, explained to me, what that does is that gives you a huge release of energy, huge release of glucose to your brain. It feels great. It's like you've woken up.

And then you get to work and your energy absolutely crashes and you get brain fog. And brain fog means that you can't focus and pay attention very well. The way Dale put it to me is at the moment our diet is like we're putting rocket fuel into a tiny little car. It'll go really quickly for five minutes and then it'll stop. And we live on a roller coaster of energy spikes and energy crashes, right?

which gives us brain fog for large parts of the day. So if you move to a diet, and I really struggle with this, I did it in Provincetown just without even knowing the science because there are no fast food places in Provincetown, not even a Burger King. If you move to a diet that releases energy steadily throughout the day,

That will massively improve your attention and focus. I mean, there's dozens of other things I talk about in the book, but that's a good example. Okay. So what I'm hearing is less fries and milkshakes. What about logging off the apps? I mean, do you see that as something plausible that people should make the choice to do? Yeah. I mean, I would say, I think every home should have a K-safe, the thing that locks away your phone and every laptop should have freedom on it. The app that cuts you off from the internet. And again,

Again, doing that with groups, we want a social norm where when you have dinner, everyone puts their phone in the case safe. We want to build all sorts of change social norms as well. Well, yeah, I guess I'm wondering if there's like an element that in a positive way that we can use shame here, meaning shame.

Right now, there's a kind of question about what's proper etiquette when you're out with friends and you're at a meal that maybe goes on for a few hours. Is it rude to take out your phone and look at it and check? I sort of think it is. Other people don't seem to think that at all. Should there be a sort of remoralization around the way that we think about using our phones when we're with other people? I think that's really smart. I say to people,

I've come here, I love you, I really wanna talk to you. I think your mind is so interesting, that's why I'm here. I wanna hear from you and I want your mind to actually be able to function. We can present it positively 'cause it is meant positively, right?

Also, I think we can change all sorts of social norms. Think about something as basic as people expect you to reply to their text straight away. And of course they think, well, why didn't you reply to my text? It would have taken you five seconds. And you go, no, it would have taken me five seconds plus the 23 minutes it takes for me to get my focus back afterwards. And just explaining that to people and having a changed social norm is

Has a really profound effect think about what they did in France France introduced a law called the right to disconnect Because 35% of French workers felt they could never stop checking their phone because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night and they were suffering from a crisis of what they called Le Burnout, which I don't think you need me to translate and The French government introduced a very simple law says two things everyone's work hours have to be defined in their contract and

And you should never contact your workers outside those work hours. So when I went to Paris just before Rent-A-Kill, the pest control company, was fined 70,000 euros for trying to get a worker to answer his phone an hour after he left the office. Right. Now, you can see how that's a social change that makes it possible for people to begin to change their norms and creates just a shifted societal norm. So I think you're totally right. We can do it at all sorts of levels.

Johan, I can listen to you talk for hours, but now a lightning round. You ready? Okay, let's do it. Let's do it. How hard is it for you to practice what you preach in your book? Really hard. I'm addicted to Twitter, but sometimes I convince myself that my addiction's actually good for my career. Should I quit it anyway? Don't quit. Get an assistant to do all your tweets for you. Never log in. Never look at the timeline. Is that what you do? Yeah. Use it to broadcast, but never use it to receive. If

If you could snap your fingers and change any one thing about the world, what would it be? I would ban that business model and I would restore childhood. Bullish or bearish on America? I fucking love America. Bullish, bullish, bullish. Should we legalize all drugs?

Yes, but it's important to understand that legalisation means different things for different drugs in the same way that it's legal to own a dog, a monkey and a lion, but the rules are different. For every drug, the rules should be different. For example, in Switzerland, they legalised heroin. Doesn't mean there's a heroin aisle in CVS. It means if you've got a heroin addiction, you're given it legally in a clinic. Since they moved to that policy, and I reported on this a lot in Chasing the Scream, it's

There have been zero heroin overdose deaths on legal heroin in 15 years and an enormous fall in illegal heroin deaths because who wants to buy shitty street drugs when you can get it for free in a clinic? Coffee or tea? Oh, coffee. I mean, I'm a rare British person who doesn't like tea, doesn't believe in the monarchy and doesn't like soccer. So yeah, it's a portrayal of my nation, which I love in every other respect, but coffee. Where and when can audiences watch your new show narrated by Samuel L. Jackson called The Fix?

Ah, this was such good fun. So it's adapted from my book, Chasing the Scream. By the time people hear this, they can go to Roku, they can watch The Fix, anyone who's got a Roku TV, or you can just watch it for free on the Roku website. I'm so fucking proud of that series. And it's about the opposite of addiction is connection and about how we need to think about drugs differently and about the places that actually solved their addiction crises. And Samuel L. Jackson is so fucking cool. I wanted to ask him to record my answer machine message, but it felt like it would be a bit disrespectful. So I couldn't quite bring myself to.

Johan Hari, an absolute pleasure talking to you. It's always a joy to talk to you, Barry. And I meant to say, because my publishers tase me, but I don't say this, that anyone who wants to know where to get the book, the audio book or the e-book, can go to StolenFocusBook.com and they can also listen for free to interviews with loads of the experts that we've talked about. You know, it's always a joy to talk to you and what a delight. Hooray. Thank you so much for listening. Johan's book is called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply.

And put your phone down for a few minutes, maybe a few hours, except for when you're texting your friends about Honestly, sharing it on social media, and giving us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. We'll see you next time.