Johann Hari: Solving Loneliness and Taking Back Stolen Focus (E288)

0:00Watch it early on the High Performance App. Available now, Roman Kemp, the broadcaster, opens up a powerful conversation on success and mental health. It's no sign of good health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. There's lots of factors in our culture which are undermining our ability to be the best version of ourselves. Depression and anxiety are not technical malfunctions in the main. They are signals. They're telling us that something's gone wrong in our lives that we need to change. None of us are going to lie on our deathbed and think about all the likes we got on Instagram and all the shoes we bought.

0:34We're going to think about moments of love and meaning and connection. Focus and attention are at the heart of all human achievement. There is a lot indicating we're in a serious attention crisis. The solutions are there. We can do it. We can sort this out. We can fix this. And, you know, this is in the interests of everyone. That is the voice of author Johan Harry who joins us on today's episode of High Performance, the show that explores the stories and ideas of some of the most extraordinary people in the world. I'm Jake Humphrey and like a lot of you, I'm simply fascinated by just unlocking a better version of myself.

1:12And I'm Damien Hughes, an expert in high performance. I've worked with the England national football team, Scotland rugby and professional sports teams right across the world and with leading business people to help them understand how to get the best out of themselves and others. In this podcast, we discuss both how people achieve great things and the why that drives them to do so. And both of us are very excited to welcome Johan Harry onto today's show. He's a New York Times bestselling author. He's written about a diverse range of topics, including focus, addiction, depression, and recently about his own experiences using the weight loss drug Ozempic.

1:51On top of this, he's written for some of the most prestigious publications in the world, including the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Guardian, as well as having his TED Talk viewed over 93 million times. What were your impressions of talking to Johan, Damien? I mean, this is a really wonderful conversation that I hope listeners find as valuable as I did. I mean, we go into a range of topics, like why loneliness is a real problem and how we can look to fix it. How anxiety might just be our natural reaction to the society we live in. And one other thing that really grabbed me was how our focus has been deliberately stolen and sold by technology companies.

2:30And you know what, loneliness, anxiety, having our focus stolen, like they're big, heavy topics that I think can weigh on us quite a lot. But actually my overall feeling from having this brilliant conversation with Johan is optimism. Not only did he leave me feeling good, he left me with a number of different tools, tricks and tips that I can use in my own life to combat the things that society is stealing from us. And I really hope that you're going to feel the same way because Johan is so eloquent and he has a really special gift of making these sometimes quite complicated problems feel understandable and making us all feel better equipped to deal with them.

3:07Before we get into the conversation, I do just want to let you know that we do discuss the theme of suicide. So please listen with caution if you need to. But here he is, as we welcome Johan Harry to High Performance.

3:25Johan, welcome to the show. Oh, I'm well chuffed to be here. Thanks for having me. Are you? Yeah. I don't know why I just said that in like a Cockney. I'm well chuffed to be a governor. I don't know why that came out in my voice. It's not my natural voice. You're so excited it's turned you into a Cockney. Exactly. I've become Dick Van Dyke. Yeah, why are you so happy to be here? Life is good. Well, Chad, I've listened to lots of episodes of the show, so it's really exciting to be here. I'm glad that my warm-up act was the next Prime Minister. So, great, well, what can you on? So in the context of the things that you talk about and write about so well, depression and loneliness and obesity and self-loathing, self-care, all these...

3:58All the fun subjects. All the fun subjects. What does high performance look like in the context of life being a challenge for people? You know, I think the reason I was trying to figure out the answer to that question is because for me, the book I wrote about depression and anxiety was called Lost Connections. And there were these two kind of mysteries that led me to try to answer that question. So the first mystery was, when I wrote the book, I was about to turn 40. And every single year that I'd been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in Britain, in the US, in fact, across the Western world.

4:35I was like, that seems a bit weird. Why is it that with each year that passes, more and more of us are finding it harder to get through the day, right? What's going on? And I wanted to understand that because of a more personal mystery, which is that when I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor and saying that I had this feeling like pain was kind of leaking out of me, right? I couldn't understand it. I was a bit ashamed of it. And my doctor told me a story that I now realise was well-intentioned, but quite oversimplified. My doctor said, well, we know why people get like this. Some people just have a problem in their brain.

5:05There's a chemical missing. You're clearly one of them. All you need to do is take these drugs. You'll be fine. So I started taking an antidepressant called Ciroxat. I felt much better. And then this feeling of pain came back. So she gave me a higher dose. Again, I felt better. Again, the pain came back. So I kept being given higher and higher doses until for 13 years, I was taking the maximum possible dose you're allowed to take. And I still felt like shit, basically, a lot of the time. I was sort of asking, well, I'm doing everything that I'm being told to do by the story our culture tells about depression and anxiety.

5:35Why do I still feel like this? So I ended up for the book going on this really big journey for three years all over the world, investigating depression and anxiety. And I learned that there's actually scientific evidence for nine factors that can increase depression and anxiety, and loads of them have been rising in the culture. So actually, I think the core of the answer to your question is, there are many great things about the culture we live in. I'm glad to be alive today. But there's lots of factors in our culture which are undermining our ability to be the best version of ourselves, right?

6:07To achieve our higher goals. And of those nine causes, so two of them are in our biology. That's why what my doctor said wasn't totally wrong, right? There are real biological factors that can contribute to depression and anxiety. There are changes that happen in your brain as you become depressed and anxious that can make it harder to get out. Your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems, though they never write your destiny. But most of the factors that cause depression and anxiety are not actually in our biology. They're factors in the way we live, right? And once you understand them, that opens up a very different way of thinking about these kind of problems.

6:43But I guess the core that connects a lot of those factors, not all of them, but a lot of them, is the way I would put it is, you know, everyone watching knows they have natural physical needs, right? You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast, right? But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense, right?

7:16And our culture has been getting less good at meeting those deep underlying psychological needs. I think we're all pretty much the same age for all of our lifetimes, right? For all sorts of ways that have been demonstrated scientifically. And the core of how we get back, how we get to being the highest performance version of you that you can be, which of course we're not all going to be, you know, Lewis Hamilton or Keir Starmer or whatever, but the way we get to the highest iteration of who we want to be is partly by creating a culture and changing our own lives so that we can get our deeper psychological needs met, so that we're not sort of spinning out in this mode of disorientation and these signals that are telling us, oh, something's wrong, something's wrong.

7:55What's wrong, what's wrong?

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9:39So for people who maybe still doubt that this is a real problem, These are some of the latest numbers, and you'll know them. One in six adults in the UK affected by depression. 33 % of 18 to 25-year-olds in the US are experiencing mental health concerns. A record number of children in Britain are suffering a mental health crisis. So we know all these numbers, right? What I don't understand is why we haven't taken greater steps towards these nine factors that are causing this. I mean, maybe we could run through what those are and then try and work out why we're not doing more as individuals or as society to try and solve this.

10:15I think part of the problem is we've told an oversimplified story that has eclipsed all the other stuff, right? There was a moment I had a real breakthrough in understanding this. I was absorbing the science for a long time and I was trained in the social sciences at Cambridge University. I thought, well, I know how to read this stuff. I was interviewing all these leading experts all over the world, from Miami to Melbourne to Moscow, not just the cities that begin with the letter M. I don't know why I just did that. And there was a moment when so much of it fell into place for me. I went to interview a South African psychiatrist called Dr.

10:47Derek Summerfield, great guy. And he told me he happened to be in Cambodia in Southeast Asia in 2001 when they first introduced chemical antidepressants. The people in Cambodia, they'd never had them in that country before. and the local doctor said to him, oh, what are antidepressants? They'd never heard of them. And so he explained and they said to him, oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants. And he was like, what do you mean? He thought they were going to talk about some kind of like herbal remedy, like a ginkgo biloba or something. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields.

11:23And one day he stood on a landmine left over from the war with the Americans and he got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial limb. They're good at that. And after a while, he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's super painful to work underwater when you've got an artificial limb. And I'm guessing it's pretty traumatic to go and work in the field where you got blown up. The guy started to cry a lot. He refused to get out of bed. He developed what we would call classic depression, right? This is when the Cambodian doctors said to Dr. Somerfield, well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant.

11:55And he said, what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense, right? You only had to speak to this guy for a few minutes to realize why he was so distressed. One of the doctors thought, well, you know, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone. It never came back. They said to Dr. Summerfield, so you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant.

12:25That's what you mean, right? But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively from this individual unscientific anecdote is what the leading medical body in the whole world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the main a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs. And I think the way we have to reframe depression and anxiety that really changed so many things for me is the story I was told, right? It's just a problem in your brain. Now, stress again, there are real biological contributions and drugs give some people some relief, and I'm sure we can come back to that.

13:02But that story, what it says to you is your pain is just a malfunction, right? It's like a glitch in a computer program. It doesn't mean anything. It's just, you know, some technical problem. But the truth is depression and anxiety are not technical malfunctions in the main. They are signals. They're telling us something. They're telling us that something's gone wrong in our lives that we need to change, right? And so I think part of the problem, there's many reasons why we haven't engaged with these deeper reasons, these deeper factors that are causing depression. But partly right at the moment of the depression and anxiety, we're told it doesn't mean anything.

13:38It's not a signal of anything. It's just a technical glitch that's just got to be fixed with drugs. So I think right at the start, we're sort of cut off or the story disempowers us from understanding these deeper causes. And then there's lots of other reasons as well. But for me, that's the first one. Yeah, that makes total sense, doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm interested then if you'd explain what are the other factors and if there's anyone watching this that maybe is struggling or they're getting the first signals that something isn't right. What have you learned from interviewing these many experts that we can do better?

14:13Well, let's look at an obvious example that will be playing out for a huge number of people who are watching and listening, right? We are the loneliest society in human history in the Western world, right? We're only just behind the Americans. There's a study in the US that asks people, how many close friends do you have who you could turn to in a crisis? And when they started doing this study years ago, the most common answer was five. Now, the most common answer, not the average, but the most common answer is none, right? There are more people with nobody to turn to than any other option. There was a study in the US just before COVID, if I remember the figure right, I think 41 % of Americans agreed with the statement, no one knows me well.

14:57Staggering. What's life like when no one knows you well? When you're just sort of spinning out on your own. And I spent a lot of time discussing this with one of the leading experts in the world on loneliness, an amazing man at Chicago University called Professor John Cassiopo, who sadly died recently. Amazing guy. And he made a huge number of breakthroughs in the study of loneliness and depression. He was the first person who proved that loneliness causes depression. I know that sounds like a bit of a no-shit Sherlock breakthrough, but actually, at the time before him, people thought, well, maybe it's just you become depressed and that makes you lonely, not the other way around, right?

15:29And I remember him saying to me one day, why do we exist? Why are we here? You, me, everyone you've ever met. One of the key reasons is that our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't bigger than the animals they took down a lot of the time. They weren't faster than the animals they took down a lot of the time. But they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating, right? That's our superpower as a species. Just like bees evolved to live in a hive, humans evolved to live in a tribe, right? If you ever get a bee and you separate it from its hive, it just goes crazy, right?

16:05It doesn't function on its own. And loneliness evolved as a signal saying, get back to the tribe. You're in terrible danger. In the circumstances where we evolved, if you were cut off from the tribe, you were screwed, right? If you got injured, you would die. You were very vulnerable. So loneliness was an essential signal. And that's still who we are, right? So you can begin to see, you understand that, right? I doubt there's many people watching or listening. It doesn't sound right to me, right? This is kind of obvious once you know it. There's been a huge rise in loneliness. Loneliness causes depression.

16:35So this is one of the nine reasons why depression has gone up, right? So once you understand that, it opens up a very different route to finding a solution. So I'll give you an example of one of the solutions that flows in this. There's lots of kind of different ways of thinking about it. One of the heroes of my book, Lost Connections, is an amazing man named Dr. Sam Everington. You should have him on. He's not based far from me. He's a doctor in East London, a GP, where I lived for a long time in Tower Hamlets. So sadly, he was never my doctor. and Sam had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety.

17:09And like me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants. In fact, he prescribes them, but he could see two things. Firstly, he could see that the people who were coming to him were often depressed and anxious for really understandable reasons like loneliness. And secondly, that antidepressants were helping some of them, but were usually just taking the edge off, they usually weren't solving the problem. So one day, Sam began to pioneer a different approach, one that's now spreading all over Europe. The fancy name for it is social prescribing, but it's pretty simple. So a woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham, who I got to know later.

17:42And Lisa had been shut away in her home with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years. And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs, but I'm also going to prescribe something else. I'm going to prescribe for you to come here to the doctor's offices a couple of times a week to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people, not to talk about how shit you feel. You can do that if you want to, but that's not the point. I want you guys to find something to do together that you find meaningful. So the first time Lisa went, she was so anxious, she started vomiting because it was just so overwhelming to be out of her house.

18:16But yeah, people rubbed her back. They talked to her. The group started talking. They were like, what could we do? These were inner city, East London people like me, they knew nothing about gardening. But there was an area behind the doctor's offices that was, well, it was known as Dog Shit Alley, which gives you a sense of what it was like. The barren scrub land where dogs were going shit. And they said, you know what? We could turn Dog Shit Alley into a garden. So they went to the library and took out loads of books about gardening. They started to watch clips on the internet of gardening. They started to get their fingers in the soil.

18:44They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. There's a lot of evidence that exposure to nature is a really powerful antidepressant. But they started to do something even more important. They started to form a group. They started to care about each other. If one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking for them, be like, hey, what's wrong? How can we solve your problem, right? The way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom, right? And there's been a series of admittedly small studies on this across the world. One small study in Norway found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants in reducing anxiety.

19:20I think for an obvious reason, and this is something I saw all over the world, from Sydney to Sao Paulo, the most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the deep, underlying reasons why we're depressed and anxious in the first place. Now, it's not your fault you've been cut off from having your underlying needs met, right? Think about that Cambodian farmer. They didn't say to him, well, mate, It's your job to solve this. Sort it out, right? They came together as a group and they solved it together. So I think what we've got to be asking is, what's the cow for the things that are screwing us up?

19:55What are the solutions? Now, that needs to be a really big, broad menu of stuff. For some people, absolutely, chemical antidepressants should be one of the things on the menu. For some people, they're not right. For some people, they are. But we've got to have loads more things on the menu, precisely because this problem goes deeper than our biology. The solutions need to go deeper than our biology too. I think this is really powerful because, you know, I've been in therapy in the past and suffered with anxiety and mental health problems. And certainly when it happened to me and I was in my early 20s, everything on the outside seemed okay, right?

20:25I just got a job on Children's BBC. I'd just moved to London. I'd just left home. I was only talking like this. I think, well, hold on. I'd left the home I'd been brought up in. I was a country boy from Norwich. I'd started working on Kids Telly where actually it's very much everyone for themselves. You know, you have a fleeting relationship with people, but the truth is you're in competition because you all want to get the next big job on the television. I hear Gordon the Gopher's the right fucker. Oh, he is evil. So understandably, I was probably, one of the issues was probably an element of loneliness, right?

20:58But at no point did I think that the depression is anything other than the depression. Does that make sense? So it's almost like we have to change when we go, oh, you're depressed, go to the doctor. It's like, right, you're depressed. maybe you should go to the doctor, but maybe there's an underlying reason for this depression. Let's talk about what that is. I think that we're in a place where we think that the depression is the thing rather than the depression being the symptom of the thing. A hundred, so brilliantly put. I think you're absolutely right that what we do is we take something that's a signal and we act like it's a sort of thing in itself, right?

21:34We act like people say, I've got anxiety, not I'm feeling anxious, which is a more meaningful thing to say, right? So you think about even what you're saying about children's TV, so there's the loneliness and disorientation, but also you're in this hyper-competitive environment. And you think about one of the other factors that I write about in Lost Connections that I think is really playing out here, might be playing out in your situation. So for thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about status and money and showing off, you're going to feel like shit, right? It's not exactly what Confucius said, but that's basically what he said, right?

22:07But weirdly, no one had actually scientifically investigated this until an incredible man I got to know named Professor Tim Kasser. So he was the first person to actually scientifically investigate this intuition that philosophers had had. And he discovered loads of things. But the headline is, the philosophers were right. The more you think life is about money and status and showing off, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by a quite significant amount, right? So think about the environment you were in, this hyper-competitive environment, where what's valued is getting ahead.

22:36You're constantly comparing yourself to other people. And there's this interesting thing about, in a way, the analogy I kept thinking about in relation to that is, so we all know junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right? But at the same time, our kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. We've been taught that what life is about is competition, showing off, doing better than the person next to you, getting more likes, whatever it might be. We live in a culture where Donald Trump is probably going to be re-elected. Think about the values he represents just in terms of that.

23:17And at some level, we all know there's something wrong with that, right? With those junk values. Because none of us are going to lie on our deathbed and think about all the likes we got on Instagram and all the shoes we bought. We're going to think about moments of love and meaning and connection. But we're fed a kind of, almost like a kind of KFC for the soul, right? We're taught from when we're very young. So think about you. You're this young guy. You're in your early 20s. And suddenly you're in this hyper-competitive junk values environment. And essentially, because you said a really interesting sentence, it's something like, I won't get the words exactly right, but you said something like, everything was going well for me.

23:50And a lot of people say to me, well, there must be something biologically wrong with me because everything is going well for me, but I still feel bad. That's exactly what I thought. I thought, well, there can't be an underlying thing here because my life is more successful than it's ever been. Only 20 years later can I unpick it to realise that there were things going on. If you think about it, there's an analogy that helped me think about this. Everything was going well for you by the standards of the culture, but the standards of the culture can be wrong. There's a brilliant Bengali philosopher called Krishnamurti who said it's no sign of good health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

24:25There's an analogy I think of, right? Say that again, please. It's no sign of good health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. If we could go back to your 21-year-old self at CBBC or whatever, I think we might go, well, you're doing well by the standards of the culture, but is this culture really, are the values right? Why, though, would those values make me anxious and depressed? Why is chasing the next job promotion causing us a problem? Why is wanting to have a better car than our friend that we see on Instagram causing us a problem? Why is comparison so deadly dangerous to us? So I would separate out the first question you asked from the others.

25:05So why is wanting to get a job promotion? I think it very much depends on your motives. And it's another thing that Professor Kasser did along with lots of other people, did a lot of research on. So if you think about, so let's imagine you play the piano. I'm completely unmusical, so this ain't me. But if you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it gives you joy, that's what's called an intrinsic motive to play the piano. You're not doing it to get anything out of it. You're doing it because you love it. It gives you pleasure, right? Okay, now imagine you play the piano, not because you love it, but because your parents' dream for you is that you would be a piano maestro and they're hugely pressuring you.

25:42Or to post the clips on Instagram to get likes. Or I don't know, maybe you're trying to impress a woman. Maybe there's some piano fetishist out there, right? That would be what's called an extrinsic reason to play the piano, right? You're not doing it because that thing gives you joy or meaning. You're doing it to get something out of it further down the line. And we're all a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motives. You have to be to get through the day. But what Professor Kassler showed is the more your life gets dominated by extrinsic motives, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious.

26:11So think about when kids start using Instagram, right? They get very much into, it's just happening with my godsons now, where it's driving me crazy and really upsetting me. You start to think of your life through comparison. I don't know if you're talking about my godson. I love reading, right? I love reading books. And for a while, I would post on social media what book I'd read, right? I go, I love this book. And I thought, well, I'm doing a good thing here. I'm promoting this author. Aren't I a nice person? But I started to then, then you get reactions, right? Or I started to think, oh, have I posted enough that I like this kind of author and not that kind of author?

26:46How am I making myself look? And it started to shift me from this intrinsic joy I love to read. It started to become an extrinsic thing. Oh, I'll read this book so I get kudos. We'll go, isn't it impressive I read this obscure Nigerian author or whatever it might be, right? So you can see when we think about comparison, comparison puts us in the zone of extrinsic values, right? If you're doing something, if you want to have a nice car because you get the joy of driving and it feels great to you, that's totally fine. If you're doing it to invite the envy of other people, and we're all a lot more like that in this culture than we'd like to think, the way Professor Kassar put it to me, is we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life.

27:29From the moment we're born, we're soaking up these messages from advertising, from the culture, that are constantly locking us into this endless comparison, competition, tearing each other down, making each other jealous. And that is not the path to happiness. And at some level, we all know that, right? At some level, Well, it's almost like a fucking Hallmark card, right? At some level, we know that. But the culture is constantly pulling us away from what we know intrinsically. Which leads me to wonder on a stat, and I'd be interested in if you could help us answer it somehow, Johanna. One in three, well, I'll read it, that men are three times more likely to die by suicide than women.

28:16and I'm interested in this sort of junk values culture. Do you think there's any connection with why that's the case? Totally. I think there's a lot of things going on there.

28:28There's a lot. This is a very personal question to me because we had a man in my family killed himself. A man in my very close family killed himself nearly two years ago. You all right? Yeah, yeah, sorry, I might get a glass of water, actually, if you don't mind. Look, by the way, I understand your emotion, right, around this family. My grandma committed suicide, and I think it leaves such a scar because the super pain here is it leaves all of us thinking if only we had done more, if only something else could have happened. And I think that's why suicide is such a horrendous thing for society because it deeply impacts the people around.

29:10I'm more emotional now about that 20 years after it happened than I was at the time, strangely. Why do you think that is? I just think, well, I was a teenager. I was just cracking on with being a teenager. I had my A-level exams and then life got busy. Now, at 46, I think, man, the impact on my dad or the feet. I now think, you know, none of us were enough. Your grandkids, your children. It's very, very difficult. And that's the hard thing. It never leaves. It's devastating and it's... I think... In terms of why men have higher suicide rates, there's a few things we know. One is that men are far less likely to have friends.

29:52The number of men who have no friends is extraordinary. And they're much more likely to be lonely. I think men are much more locked into junk values through no fault of their own. I think we also live in a culture, this is a more controversial point and I would put it delicately. I think we live in a culture that makes a lot of men feel incompetent. I think we have a school system that is really bad for boys. It's not good for girls, but it's really shit for boys. We are the first society ever to try to get boys to sit still for eight hours a day. That is crazy. and especially crazy that we get them to sit still for eight hours a day to memorize meaningless shit for pointless tests that measure nothing.

30:45That is a bad system, right? And so I think there's so many factors going on with men and a huge number of factors going on with women. And as I know you guys agree, it's not a contest, you know, that we can... Every woman in Britain wants fewer men to kill themselves and every man in Britain wants fewer women to kill themselves and anyone who tries to pit us against each other is just being pointlessly conflictual and silly. So I think there's lots of things going on with men. When you asked me that, and I was thinking about my relative, sometimes people think, if you've learned all this, no one has said this to me so explicitly, because they're not arseholes, but if you learned all this, why couldn't you help more?

31:30And obviously I've reflected a lot on what happened, and one of the things I wish I could have said to the person in my family who killed himself was, and I thought, what could I have said that would have stopped him? And weirdly, I think the thing I could have said that would have stopped him, of all the things, I could have talked to him about all the solutions in my book. He'd read my book, right? I could have talked to him about all the solutions in my book. I could have done all that and I, of course, did at great length. I wish I could have told him something that I think is one of the most important facts about suicide, and a very difficult and painful one, which is that suicide is contagious.

32:10If you kill yourself, you make it much more likely that other people you know will kill themselves. All forms of violence are contagious. In fact, murder is contagious, weirdly. Human beings are social animals and we take our signals. It's why you often get clusters of suicides, right? Remember in that town in Wales not that long ago, there was that dreadful, was it, a horrific cluster of suicides. That's a real thing. It's why now... You called it, was it the Goethe effect? Is that the name of it? Yeah, but named after Goethe, the great German, well, dramatist and novelist, he wrote a novel called The Sorrows of Young Bertha in the 18th century that described a suicide and there were then lots of copies of that.

32:53It's why now, when a celebrity kills themselves, the media does not report how they did it. because it has a, we know this when Marilyn Monroe killed herself, there was then a bump in the suicide rate of people doing what she did. So this is a big, big factor, right? And my red silver killed himself was in a, obviously, a state of profound despair. If he had known that it made it more likely that the kids in our family, who we love, were more likely to kill themselves further down the line, I don't think he would have done it. There's a thing about even when you can't love yourself and he couldn't love himself, you can love someone else, right?

33:33And even at his lowest, he really, really loved his children. And I don't believe he would have taken a risk with his children's lives. And I knew that, and I didn't say it to him. And I really regret it. Of course, I can't guarantee it. Of course, if I think about all the things I could have said and done, that to me is the thing I suspect would have been the most effective. And we know this about lots of things that people, it's one of the beautiful things about human beings. We actually value other people more than we value ourselves. It's one other reason why junk values are so wrong. There's friends of mine who do research on voting methods, people like Dave Fleischer in Los Angeles, who did this beautiful pilot where they were trying to get people to vote.

34:22What makes people vote? Of course, the natural thing is you kind of go, oh, vote Labour and you'll get this level of childcare or vote Conservative and you'll get this tax cut. I come to you and I say, you will get this benefit if you vote for this party, right? But they also posted a different strategy, which is they said, you can only do this in the US as British people. We wouldn't do this on the doorstep. They say, tell me about someone you love. And you might go, you might tell me about your son or your nan or whatever. Okay, how would voting Labour or voting Conservative or whatever you want, how would that make your son's life better?

34:54How would it make your grandmother's life better? And you say to them, actually, on Thursday, I would like you to vote for your son. Do this vote. And that was a much more effective getting out the vote strategy than giving people an individualistic reason to vote, right? It's really fascinating. So I think appealing to people's love for other people, you know, we live in a culture, even think about the cliches we say about people, right? Be you, be yourself. We said to people, I think it's literally on my fucking shampoo bottle, right? Be yourself, right? And I say, but actually, don't be you.

35:24That's not, the problem is that you're you all the fucking time. The problem, the solution is actually be us, be part of the group. There was a personal interview for Lost Connections, brilliant academic called Dr. Brett Ford, interviewed in Berkeley, but I think she's at the University of Toronto now. So she did this research with loads of other people. Really fascinating piece of research. So what they did is they wanted to figure out, let's imagine you decided you were going to spend an hour a day from now on trying consciously to be happier. They wanted to figure out, would it work? Would you actually become happier?

35:56And they did this research in four countries. It was the US, Russia, Taiwan, and Japan. And what they found at first seems really weird. In the US, if you try deliberately to become happier, you do not become happier. But in the other countries, if you try deliberately to become happier, on average, you do. There are exceptions on both sides, obviously. And they were like, oh, that's weird. What's going on? So they looked at it more. What I discovered was, in the US, I'm sure this is true mostly of us as well, if you try to make yourself happier, you do something for you. You do the values you were taught as a children's TV presenter.

36:27Of course, yeah. Try to get a promotion, work harder, buy something, treat yourself, show it off on Instagram, make other people go, OMG, so jealous. You do you, right? In the other cultures, Russia, Taiwan, and Japan, in the main, if you try to make yourself happier, you did something for someone else. You did something for your friends, your family, your community. So the fancy way of putting it is we have an instinctively individualistic idea of what it means to be happy. And they have an instinctively collective idea of what it means to be happy. And, you know, our theory of happiness just doesn't work, right?

36:55A species of isolated individualists would have died out on the savannas of Africa. They would not have banded together and survived. I always think individualism is a bit like what Winston Churchill said about communism, was meant to have said in apocryphal. He said, communism is a great theory. They just got the wrong species. It works very well for ants. And I kind of think, individualism, great theory, but we ain't in that species. That's not us. That's not our instincts. That's not who we are. But we're constantly trained to be individualists, right? If you're still overpaying for wireless, it's time to say yes to saying no.

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39:32So how do we solve this then? Because we know the numbers and the stats, right? We understand that men particularly are killing themselves more than ever before. We know there's a mental health crisis on every level, yet we're still in the world that's causing the problem. So how do we as individuals, how do the people watching and listening to this conversation, how can we begin the tidal wave of change to solve this? The whole second half of Lost Connections is about this, because I think it's the absolutely key question. I'm not actually that interested in intellectual diagnosis of problems, unless it leads to a solution, right?

40:07So I think the first thing is once you reframe the problem, so the first thing is we say to someone who's depressed and anxious, not, there's something wrong, what my doctor said to me, lovely doctor, by the way, good person, well-intentioned, but my doctor said to me, there's something wrong with your brain, you just need to drug yourself. What that did is it made me doubt the signal I was receiving, or in fact, not even doubt it, completely disregard it. So instead of saying, something wrong with your brain, we start to say, okay, you've got unmet needs, how can we support you? How can we help you to get those deeper needs met?

40:36There's lots of ways to do that and lots of levels at which we can do it. So some of them are very local, things you can do as an individual and some things, you know, bigger things that we have to do as a society. So I'll give you an example of a small thing. Professor Kasser, who made those breakthroughs, also made this other really interesting breakthrough. So there was a guy called Nathan Dungan, who was a financial advisor in Minneapolis. And one day he got approached by a school, kind of middle-class school. And they said, look, we've got a big problem. will you come in and talk to the kids?

41:05And the problem they had was loads of the kids were getting obsessed with getting the latest Nike sneakers or the latest iPhone. If they weren't getting it, they were going mental. And it was causing problems at the school and problems at home. They said, will you just come in and teach these kids about budgeting and what their parents can afford? So he comes in, gives them a load of lessons about budgeting and quickly discovers these kids don't give a shit about budgeting. They should be like, whatever, I need the fucking sneakers, right? So he learned about Professor Kasser's research and thought, actually, what's happened here is something's gone wrong with their values, not just with their understanding of how much their parents can afford.

41:39So him and Professor Kasser did this really interesting experiment. If I remember rightly, details are in the book. It's every couple of weeks, for quite a few months, they came in, the kids came in with their parents. And they sat together in groups. and the first time they met the group the the um nathan said to the group just write a list of everything you've got to have and he said i'm not going to find that for you just whatever you think that means right and at first they they obviously everyone says like we've got to have water and food and that but quite quickly people started saying things you've not got to have like the latest iphone and the parents were the same they would name like expensive shit right um and then said to them, okay, let's, they go down to that thing on the list, not water or whatever.

42:27And they say, okay, tell me how your life would be better if you got this thing. How would your life change? So let's say Nike sneakers. What was interesting is none of the kids said, oh, I'm a basketball player. And if I get these sneakers, I'll be able to jump higher. No one said that. They said things like, well, if I get these sneakers, other people will want me to be part of their group or other people will envy me. They only get, you need to get people to say that out loud before they realize, oh, what's going on here is I want to be part of a group, right? So it was a little bit of sort of deconstructing their junk values.

42:56But the next bit is what I think was really most important. Then they would say, write about a moment in your life when you've had a feeling of meaning and connection. And different people would describe different things, moments at work, when they helped someone, being on the beach with their kids, learning to play the guitar, whatever it might be. And then they said to them, okay, how can you build more of your life around pursuing these moments of meaning and connection and less around this shit you don't need that doesn't make you feel good, right? And then literally just every couple of weeks, they came and had that conversation.

43:29They talked about what they'd done the previous two weeks. Because we're living in a culture that's constantly diverting us towards the bullshit. So just meeting, we don't have these conversations in our culture, right? Just meeting and going, oh, you know, I could have spent all that time, you know, working extra hours to buy this handbag and making my friends jealous, but instead I spent it with my daughter or learning French or whatever it might be, right? So it was almost like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for the bullshit values we're given as a culture, right? And what was fascinating was just having those conversations led to a really marked shift in people's values, which we know correlates with lower depression and anxiety.

44:07So after I learned this, one thing I do, we do it once a month. For a long time, we had to do it over Zoom for obvious reasons because of the pandemic. But me and three of my friends we have a Zoom and we just have that conversation because it is so easy to get diverted onto bullshit. And tell us again the questions you ask each other. So we talk about I'll give you an example from my own life, right? So I'm talking to you I've just had a new book out, right? Yeah, yeah. Which is called Magic Pill The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs just so my publicist doesn't taser me when we get out of this.

44:36And see, even saying that, right? Even though I made a little joke of it when you have a book out there's part of you that becomes driven by these values. How is it selling? What are people saying? And I've had times when that goes really well and my books have sold a million copies and times when they don't sell so well. But I've got to tell you, even when it goes brilliantly and when it goes not so well, it's never a feeling of satisfaction. And you get a kind of high when it does well, a very, very short acting high, I have to say. But you get into that zone of those values. It makes you egotistical.

45:06It makes you more narcissistic. So I would say we meet and we just talk about what did we do this month that was meaningful? And in retrospect, what did we do that was bullshit, that was chasing the stuff that isn't meaningful, right? And if you don't have that conversation, just having that abstract insight, look, I know that. If I'm not anchored, and I then think ahead to it, I think, oh, Jess is going to say that if I do this. Oh, no, I want to make sure, you know, so you want to be anchored in these meaningful values. And the way you get anchored in meaning of any kind, it's very hard to sustain meaning on your own, right?

45:42Very hard. Some people can do it to some degree, but it becomes a thousand times easier in a group, right? Meaning is contagious, just like suicide. The loss of meaning is contagious, right? I actually think the cruelest thing we do about depression and anxiety is put the onus of solving it solely on the depressed individual who's least able to do that. We don't do that about car crashes, right? So as a society, we know, okay, car crashes are terrible, so we have seatbelts, we have airbags, we have A &E, we have all these things that solve the problem. We don't say the job of solving car crashes is on a guy who's just being cut out of a mangled wreck on the M25, right?

46:22We don't do that. That would be crazy. But it's like we put the job of solving depression solely on the depressed person. We've got to be doing it much more as a society, as a group, right? Because the truth is, if you're depressed and anxious, something did not primarily go wrong for you as an individual. Of course, there are individual psychological factors, and I go through them in the book, and especially about releasing shame around trauma. There are lots of important psychological factors. Of course, there are biological factors. But the reason depression and anxiety have increased, you've got to see the connection between all these things that are happening.

46:51The best definition of depression I was ever given was by a wonderful, incredible British woman called Dr. Tyrell Harris, who made a series of breakthroughs in the 1970s on depression, world-changing discoveries, along with Professor George Brown. She said to me, best definition of depression is very simple. Everyone experiences hopelessness sometimes. Depression is when that hopelessness spreads over your whole life like an oil slick, right? And we are seeing these indicators of despair all over the developed world. It's not a coincidence. There's many indicators of despair. You know, my first book, Chasing the Screamers about addiction.

47:28There's a brilliant pair of scientists called Professor Anne Case and Professor Angus Dayton. They've shown, if you look at suicide, addiction, depression, violence, they all cluster in the same places, right? They're all highest in the same places. By the way, so is support for Trump in the same place. Support for far-right political parties in France, right? They all cluster in those places as well. Those are symptoms of despair. It's why it's so unhelpful to call those people stupid or racist or insult them. That is not the way we get out of this, right? Although, of course, I would ask them not to make the choice they've made.

48:08The way you do that is not by insulting them and mocking them and being cruel to them. It just exasperates their problem. Yeah, well, it's fucking cruel for a start. Don't be cruel to suffering people. And secondly, yeah, you're absolutely right. It adds to their feeling of despair. And they're not wrong. If we're calling them losers, fuck me. You know these questions, just one quick thing. Say here on High Performance, right, there's almost 20 people that work on this show. And really, we just talk about the show. We talk about work. We talk about the next guests. We talk about the KPIs, the targets.

48:45So we should be having this kind of a conversation, shouldn't we, once a week as a team? Like, what have we done this week that's not for show, that is purely for us as individuals? professionals i would really recommend it and for me it was a real shift that i made in my own life because before i'm as much of a product of this culture as anyone when i would feel these feelings coming of depression anxiety what i would do is i would double down on external achievement right you know i'm someone who's you know i've always good at exams i'm you know i've done well in my jobs i would sort of double down on i must work harder to get this achievement to get that to get this, to do that.

49:20And now there's still a big part of me that's like that. And there's a part of me that that's driven intrinsically. You know, I'd like to think I write my books because the questions I ask are meaningful, but there's also a bit of me that's extrinsic and ego, of course. But now I also try to have a really big part of me that when I feel that coming, think, okay, what can I do for someone else now? And very often, you know, I'm not Oprah, I can't turn up and give them a car, but very often the best thing you can do for someone is such a lonely and isolated culture, leave your fucking phone at home and go and sit and listen to someone and really sit and listen to them and think about what they're saying and look into their eyes.

49:57That is the biggest gift you can give anyone, right? And very often when you can't feel good about yourself, you can still make someone else feel good, right? It's a surprising thing. It comes back to the thing about, you know, your vote is a gift you give to someone you love. When you can't summon your energy or strength to do something for yourself, you often can say you know i've the most depressed parent in the world will get up to save their child's life right you can you can you can usually do something for someone else even when you can't do it for yourself and thinking about that message about doing it for somebody for somebody else and my next question is prompted by that great example of how do you get people to vote think about doing it for your kids it's a bit of a selfish question of in a time of junk values how do we help our children get out of this because i have the issue with my son where he's like he's on a phone and our decision to give him the phone was about the social connection of that's what all his friends were doing so how does he keep in touch and yet i can also see that the apps snapchat instagram the different things.

51:12I've dragged him into the swamp of a comparison culture of looking at the things that we recognize are not healthy and don't lead to long-term happiness. What advice would you give to any parents listening or watching today, Johan, about how we can start to influence the next generation to maybe break this cycle? Yeah, so I wrote a book about this, as you know, called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention. And as you're saying that, I flashed a moment in in my mind. So I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing the people who designed the stuff your kids are using, right? Never forget, there's a guy called Dr.

51:46James Williams, who'd worked at the heart of Google. And one day he spoke to a tech conference, who were, the audience is literally the people who designed the apps that your kids are using right now. And he said to them, he was feeling really uneasy, he said, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, Please put up your hand. And nobody put up their hand. And not long after he quit and became, I would argue, one of the most important philosophers of attention in the world. He's at Oxford now. You should have him on. He's a brilliant guy. And this is something I kept seeing with people in Silicon Valley.

52:22In fact, one of the most striking things about them, the people who designed this world, is how sick with guilt and shame they feel about what they've done. And I'll sort of unpack that a bit, but you're absolutely right. right? Instagram, TikTok, these are machines designed to get people into comparison mode, right? One of the first things your son will notice when he posts on Instagram is, how many likes did I get, right? How many people, what do people say on TikTok? So if you wanted to supercharge these values, this is the machinery you would design, as indeed it has. So I go through in install and focus nine factors that are harming our attention, causing these problems.

53:01And for all of them, except for one, there's sort of two levels at which we've got to deal with this, I think. I think of it as defence and offence. So there are loads of things that we've got to do as individuals to protect ourselves and our children from these factors that are harming us, right? And I'll talk about some in a second. But I want to be really honest with people because I do not think most people who communicate about these problems are levelling with people. I am passionately in favour of these individual changes. They will make a really big difference. They've made a big difference in my life, in my godson's lives, in my nephew's lives.

53:33They're really important. On their own, they will not fully solve the problem because the truth is this didn't happen because your son had bad habits or I had bad habits. This happened because a fucking massive machinery designed by unbelievably clever people is systematically targeting and undermining us, right? As my friend Tristan Harris said when he testified before the Senate, he was also at the heart of the machine. You can try having self-control, but every time you do, there are 10 ,000 engineers, on the other side of the screen, trying to undermine your self-control, right? So when you think about that, we talk about the personal stuff you can do first.

54:09So I would recommend every parent do three things. First thing is several things. I mean, I go through loads in the book, but I could list like 20, but I'll just stick to a few. First thing is buy something called a K-safe. I should have brought it along as a demonstration. It's plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial, push the button, and it locks your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. So what I recommend about the K-safe is everyone with kids, and this is going to be a long process, right? It's not going to happen.

54:39It's not going to be solved overnight. Just start with all of you putting your phones in the K-safe for 15 minutes a night. And you have to actually look into each other's eyes like in the olden times. And they will reject it at first. But the thing I always say to people about attention is think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of. Whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. Focus and attention are at the heart of all human achievement.

55:13When you can't focus or pay attention, your ability to achieve your goals diminishes, your ability to solve your problems diminishes. And when you get it back, it's like regaining your superpower. So I would frame it to them like that. And if attention is our superpower, you are surrounded by kryptonite, right? So I would start with that. Just use the Ksafe 15 minutes a day, gradually stretch it a bit more. It's difficult at first, but the pleasure of someone actually listening to you and paying attention to you is so much greater than whatever shitty update you're going to miss on TikTok for 15 minutes, right?

55:51So start with that, build it into your collective routine, because it's no good you standing over your kids saying, use your phone less while you're staring at your own devices, right? Secondly, I would say install on your phone, your laptop, and your kids' phones and laptops, an app called Freedom. Very simple app. So let's say you were addicted to, I don't know, Instagram, Pornhub, I don't know, indicated to you, Pornhub. How did you know? Someone got a text. I mean, it has been playing throughout this entire interview, but, you know, didn't want to let you know. Whatever it is, right, let's say you've got one particular website you're addicted to.

56:25Yeah. You can say to it, I'm not looking again. You can say, block me from that website for the next five minutes, the next whole day, however long it'll be. Or you can say, block me from the entire internet for the next five minutes, the next 24 hours. And once you push the button, if you try to go to that website, it will just say you have been set free and you can't look at it anymore. So I permanently, on my phone, have blocked all social media. Because I do not want people to sit at my funeral, stand up and go, yeah, Johan spent a lot of time on Instagram, right? So I have an assistant who does my, it sounds very fancy, but I have an assistant who does my social media.

56:58Do you ever go on there, look at updates and see what's going on? Well, just in the last week, so I had to get it unblocked on my phone because I did an Instagram Live with Davina McCall. And I didn't put the blocker back on. So I spent a week where like, again, I was like, oh, I'll just use it for five minutes a day. And yesterday I was on it for like an hour and I was like, fucking block it again. So I've blocked it again, right? because it's very hard to, this is a phenomenon called pre-commitment. Pre-commitment is when you know you want to do something in the future, but you also know you're going to crack, right?

57:27So we just had a break and you and me had an Oreo. I do not allow Oreos in my house. I will never buy them because I know I will wake up at two o 'clock in the morning and stuff my fucking face with Oreos, right? Even on his own, because I am, it will still happen, right? So my form of pre-commitment is I never bring it into my house, right? So I buy, the Johan in the supermarket knows that Johan at 2am is not going to be as strong as he is now. So I don't let it. So it's a form of pre-commitment. Freedom is another form of pre-commitment. So download Freedom, sync it to your phone and app, you know, give them an hour a day.

58:03Thirdly, I would say buy them a light phone. It's about 200 quid. It's not cheap. But a light phone is a phone that, it's a phone. You can call people on it. You can have, I think it's 200 songs. You can have maps, but you cannot get onto the internet, right? So again, let them have their smartphone. I would say build up so that eventually the ideal is, we don't want to get rid of technology, obviously. They should have their smartphone for an hour, maybe 90 minutes a day. The rest of the time it lives in the K-safe and the rest of the time they have a light phone, right? Because light phone, they've still got, you can still do the chat, group chats, you know, my godsons have this.

58:43They're not completely cut off, but, you know, you're not living in some weird Amish land where you never get, you know, you don't get that connection. So, yeah, I would say those are three things you should do immediately as individuals, but we've also got to do the big social stuff, which I'm happy to talk about. Can I ask you a question as Johan Hari, the individual, not Johan Hari, the expert, right? About, well, quite a while ago, you mentioned your godsons and you said, I'm worried about, and then you went, I'm actually really worried about them. And then quickly said, I don't know why I'm talking about them and moved on, right?

59:10How worried are you about their use of technology? And how worried should we be about our kids' use of technology? I'm profoundly worried. They're being hacked and invaded by extremely sophisticated people who have their own set of motives for our kids, which are not our motives. And I think that really connects up to the other thing I was going to say, which is the social component. If you want to understand what I just said, because it sounds a bit weird or even conspiratorial, I kept interviewing people in Silicon Valley and they kept explaining this to me the core of what's happening here with this element there's nine factors that are harming our attention this is only one of them this is obviously one of the biggest and it took me quite a long time for it to land because I kept saying like how can this be right so they kept explaining to me bear in mind these are people who'd worked at the heart of these companies they said to me if you open now Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or X or whatever the fuck I'm meant to call it now, right?

1:00:06Those companies begin to make money out of you immediately in two ways. The first way is really obvious. You see advertising, okay? Everyone knows how that works. The second way is much more important. Everything you ever do on these apps, including your so-called private messages, is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and what makes you tick. What makes you happy? What makes you sad? What makes you horny? What makes you angry? They're learning all of that. So let's say you've ever indicated on your, in any of these messages that you like, I don't know, Nigel Farage, Bette Midler, and you told your mum you just bought some nappies.

1:00:45Okay, it's going to figure out. If you like Nigel Farage, you're probably right wing. If you like Bette Midler and you're a man, you're probably gay. No disrespect to any straight men who like Bette Midler, I don't actually believe you. And you bought some nappies, okay, you've had a baby, right? So if you've been on these apps for a while, they know tens of thousands of things about you, right? Vastly more than many of your friends, because your friends aren't reading all your messages at 3am, right? And it's harvesting that information for several reasons. But the most important is it's figuring out what to show you next that will keep you scrolling, right?

1:01:16That is the key thing it is learning. And it's learning that for a crucial reason. Every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money. The longer you scroll, the more money they make because the more ads you see. Every time you close the app, that revenue stream disappears. Every time your kid opens the app and begins to scroll, they begin to make money. Every time your kid closes the app, that revenue stream disappears. So all of this genius in Silicon Valley, when it's applied to social media, all this AI, all these algorithms are geared towards literally one thing, figuring out how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible.

1:01:53That's it. And the people at the heart of the machine who'd been there, I kept saying to them, it must be more complicated than that. And they were like, the head of KFC might be a perfectly nice man or woman, right? And may care about many things. But in his or her professional capacity, they care about one thing. How often did you go to KFC this week? And how big was the bucket you bought? That's it. I don't give a shit about anything else, right? If they cared about anything else and they started acting on it, they'd get fired and be replaced by someone who only cared about how much chicken you bought.

1:02:21in the same way, these are machines designed to harvest our attention. And they are getting better and better at it, right? Paul Graham is one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, said that the world will be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40 on this current trajectory. Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to your kid than Snapchat was, or certainly than Facebook was, right? So imagine these crack-like iterations that are coming out. So first, when you hear that, especially when you hear it from the people at the heart of it all, I thought, well, fuck, we're just screwed then.

1:02:55It's like we're living in the matrix. That's what I'm thinking. Can we ever win? So what's really important to understand about that is there is a solution, a really important solution. And there's an analogy that happened in our lifetimes that I think really helps us to get to this solution. So if you want to understand what we've got to do about this that gets us out of this matrix like we're trapped thing, I've got to understand that there are basically three ways you can fund social media, right? There's three models. There's the one we've got now. The fancy technical term for it is surveillance capitalism, which comes from Professor Shoshana Zuboff, brilliant person at Harvard.

1:03:33So basically what happens now is you and your kids appear to get TikTok and Instagram for free, right? You don't pay anything up front, But you pay with your attention, with your time. And I would argue with our democracy, though, remind me to come back to that pretty important thing. So you're not paying up front, but you're being harvested. And you're basically, your attention is being sold to the highest bidder. You know, these companies, they've all got customer service departments. We can't phone them. You try ringing the customer service department, they won't talk to you, right? Because we're not the customer.

1:04:07We're the product they sell to the real customer who's the advertiser, right? So that's one model. There's some benefits to that. You don't pay up front. That's something, right? People's budgets are tight. I don't sniff at that. But you pay with a huge number of other things, right? So that's one model. The second model is something that I'm guessing pretty much everyone watching has some experience of. It's very simple. It's subscription. Think about Netflix. You pay a small amount, in return you get access. The key thing to understand about a subscription-based model, so you would pay a small amount to get on, is all the incentives change in a subscription-based model.

1:04:48In a surveillance capitalism model, the model is how do I hack and invade you in order to keep you scrolling as long as possible? Because you're not the customer, you're the product. Suddenly in a subscription model, you actually are the customer. Suddenly they have to go, oh, what do you want? turns out you feel good when you sit opposite people face to face and talk to them in the real world not when you doom scroll through their photoshopped images okay let's design our app to maximize meeting offline you can design the app so it pings if you've turned it on oh bob's up the road bob wants to have a coffee do you want to have a coffee with bob my friends in silicon valley could design in a day and a set of social media that's designed to maximize offline engagement that would make us all feel better, right?

1:05:32But you have to change the incentives to get to that, right? If the longer you scroll, the more money they make, they're going to discourage you from meeting up offline and keep you doom scrolling, which is what they do. So that's second model, subscription. The third model is one that literally everyone has experience of. The fancy term for it is public ownership, independent of government. Think about the sewers. Before we had sewers, we had shit in the streets. People got cholera. It was terrible. So actually, just up the road from where we are now, first sewers were built. We all live in London.

1:06:04We own the sewers in London together with all the other citizens of London, and we pay to maintain the sewers together, right? Because we don't want to get cholera and all the other stuff you get when you don't have sewers. It might be that just like we want to own the sewage pipes because we don't want to get cholera, we might want to own the information pipes together because we don't want to get cholera for our attention, for our democracy, right? Now, you want to be very careful that that would have to be independent of the government. We can all imagine what it'd be like if, you know, an authoritarian leader owned the pipes of the internet.

1:06:35That's not what we want. So I would argue we need to move from surveillance capitalism to either subscription or some kind of public ownership independent of government, right? Now, if that sounds very kind of fancy and like, oh, good luck to that, I would give an analogy that from our lifetimes, right, that we can remember. So when we were kids, the only form of petrol you could get was leaded petrol, right? I'm sure you remember, you know, your parents putting it in the car. And it was discovered by scientists that exposure to lead is extremely bad for people's brains and particularly bad for children's ability to focus and pay attention, right?

1:07:14And obviously, if it's in the petrol, it's in fumes, everyone was breathing in huge levels of lead. It's why there was a big spike in many of these problems, actually a big spike in violence because exposure to lead disinhibits people and makes them more violent. It's why the murder rate went up in the 70s because there was such a big increase in lead exposure. So what happened was a group of ordinary mums, what at the time would have called themselves housewives, led by an amazing woman called Jill Runette, banded together and said, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing the lead industry to fuck up our kids' brains?

1:07:45They probably didn't say fuck up, they were sweary as me, but whatever. But, you know, why are we allowing this? And it's really important to notice what those mums didn't say. They didn't say, so let's ban petrol. Let's get rid of cars. Let's go back to living in the 19th century. No one said that. Just like none of us are saying, let's get rid of technology. Let's all convert to the Amish. That's not what we want, right? I'm pro-tech, right? What they said is, let's get rid of the specific kind of petrol that's screwing up our kids' brains and replace it with the kind of petrol that won't fuck up our kids' brains.

1:08:14and it followed their fight. That was a really difficult fight. They had to fight for years and it followed the classic pattern of all political fights that was described by Mahatma Gandhi. First, they ignored them. Then they laughed at them. Then they fought them. Then they won. As we know, ain't no more leaded petrol anywhere in the world. Venezuela just became the last country to get rid of it in the whole world. As a result, the average British child is three to five IQ points higher than they would have been had we not banned leaded petrol. Now, to me, that's a really great model in addition to all the individual stuff that I go through in my book, Stolen Focus, that we should do.

1:08:48And there are dozens and dozens of things I talk about that we can do immediately. We've also, because I really want to level with people because I don't feel most people who are talking about this crisis are leveling with people. There's an analogy I always think of. It's a bit of a distasteful analogy, but when you hear these tech people promoting meditation or whatever, to me, it's like someone is leaning over and pouring itching powder over us all day. And then they're saying, you know what, mate, you should learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't be scratching all the time. And you want to go, all right, I'll learn to meditate.

1:09:22Very valuable. I'm in favour of that. But you've got to stop pouring this fucking itching powder over me, right? So these individual solutions are important, but in the scale of the level of profound disruption to our attention and thought that is happening, you know, they're pretty feeble, our individual solutions. They're important. I do them. They make my life better. But we've got to also have, and I slightly jokingly call it an attention rebellion. But I absolutely think we've got to do that. And we can do that. And I went to countries that have started to do it from France to New Zealand, countries that have begun to take these steps.

1:10:00And absolutely, we can do this, right? I would argue we have to do it. We For every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when we were seven years old, there's now 100 children who've been identified with that problem today. The average office worker now focuses on only one task for less than a minute, right? There is a lot indicating we're in a serious attention crisis. The solutions are there. We can do it. We have to do it. And when governments have stood up, it has worked. I can give examples. So we don't have to accept this being done to us and our children. There are lots of practical steps.

1:10:39Also, you talk about what parents can do. Absolutely fight to get smartphones out of your kids' schools. Do not allow them. In places that have done that, and I interviewed the scientists who studied this in Spain, in Norway. I went to schools that have done it in California, all over the world. The evidence is very clear. You get a massive improvement in learning and a massive fall in bullying, right? I can explain why the bullying, if you want. but like, so absolutely we can do this. We don't have to tolerate our kids being put up with this. But the first thing we have to do, sort of, I think at the moment we're in this sort of zone where we're like, oh, this is bad, but it's just the modern world.

1:11:16It's just, you know, doesn't it suck to be like this, right? But oh, isn't it bad the world went in this direction? No, it didn't have to go in this direction. It doesn't have to continue going in this direction. We can sort this out. We can fix this. And, you know, this is in the interests of everyone. So tell us about the bullying one. Oh, so there's a really interesting thing that's going on. It's a funny thing. It links up both individual bullying and the crisis in democracy in a funny way. So like I said, if you open these apps now and begin to scroll, they begin to make money and they want you to scroll longer and longer.

1:11:50So the algorithms are designed to figure out how do we get you to keep scrolling. They're agnostic about what they show you next. They don't care specifically what it is. All they want is for you to keep scrolling. So the algorithms are trained on literally 3 billion people. What keeps people scrolling? And those algorithms bumped into an underlying truth about human psychology that's actually been known about for, what, 80 years now. So it's called negativity bias. It's very simple. Human beings will stare longer at things that make us angry or upset than we will at things that make us feel good, right?

1:12:25If you've ever seen a car crash on the motorway, you know what I mean. you stared longer at the mangled wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. This is very deep in human nature. And that's always been part of our nature. But when it combines with algorithms that learn specifically what pisses you off, what you care about, what makes you angry, it leads to a horrendous effect. So imagine you've got two teenage girls who go to the same party and leave and go home on the same bus. and they both open their phones and do a TikTok video. And one of them says, ah, we had a great night.

1:13:01We danced to Ariana Grande. I fucking loved it, right? That video will go into some people's feeds. The algorithm's always scanning the kind of language you use. Put it into a few people's feeds. You know, a few people will see it. Imagine the second girl opens a video, makes the video and says, Karen was an absolute skank at that party and her boyfriend's a product of teenagers still say skank. I think I'm dating myself. Exactly. We'll rehabilitate the word skank. But, you know, our boyfriend's a prick and just does an angry rant about everyone at the party. Because it's scanning the words you use, the algorithms know if it's enraging, it's engaging, right?

1:13:38If it makes you angry and upset, more people will look at it. More people will look at it for longer and more people will engage. What do you mean Karen's a skank? You're a fucking skank. They'll have an argument. They'll have a fight, right? I'd like to think that what I'm saying to you is interesting now, But if outside that door that we can see through, if someone started having a fight, you would definitely stop listening to me and watch the fight, right? So you can see how that incentive is having a catastrophic effect in algorithms designed to show you the thing that will keep you scrolling, right?

1:14:08So it's showing people things that make them angry, upset, hurt. You could then begin to see why in schools that banned smartphones, there was less bullying. because the kids are, for at least eight hours a day, taken out of that nexus where the mean comments are given a megaphone and pushed to the front and the kind comments are muffled and pushed to the back. Now, that is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls on a bus. We all know what's happened to teenage girls' mental health. My friend Professor Jonathan Haidt has done amazing work on this. But now imagine that being applied to a whole country, except you don't have to imagine it.

1:14:43So we're living in a dynamic where the cruelest people are being pumped up and promoted. And the people who say, let's not hate each other. Yeah, we might disagree on some important things, but we still all live together and we still love each other and we still got things to value. Those people get muffled. And don't take my word for it. In 2016, after the election of, well, after the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, Facebook set up a group of its own data scientists to figure out, God, did we play a role in this? They didn't tell us they'd done this. We only know this because a brilliant whistleblower leaked it.

1:15:20And their own data scientists said that Facebook algorithms maximising engagement by maximising anger had massively promoted far-right material. In fact, a third of all the people in Germany who joined a far-right group joined because the Facebook algorithm specifically recommended it. You might want to join it, said, followed by a far-right group. And Facebook's own scientists said, we just have to abandon our current business model because our current business model inherently promotes hatred, right? And Mark Zuckerberg disbanded the group and told them to never bring him any findings like that ever again.

1:15:58So you see, it's such an interesting thing when I did the research for Stolen Focus, that when you start looking at attention, it seems like a small thing. Oh, I'm distracted. It takes me longer to get things done than it used to. But then you realize that every level of our lives, in our children's lives, in our own lives, in work, in our offices, and the highest levels, these factors are screwing over our ability to be who we want to be, actually to achieve high performance, right? Good luck achieving your highest performance in a society that's where the rule of law is unraveling, where basic democratic ideas are unraveling.

1:16:40You know, we've really got to deal with these underlying factors. And the good news is that we can, that there are solutions, that they're very practical, they're not fancy, they're based on things that have improved all of our lives in the past. But we've got to really acknowledge, God, we're in a crisis, right? All the smoke alarms are going off. It's time to, just like we were saying, we've got to listen to the signal on depression. We've also got to listen to these signals. Really powerful. Look, Johan, we've reached the point in the interview for our quickfire questions. Oh, yes, right. Okay, quickfire.

1:17:11I'm not good at this. I bet you are. Okay, let's do it. Okay. The three non-negotiable behaviours that you think are most important? In human beings generally, be curious about other people, listen to people, be kind to them. Lovely. That was quick, see? Okay, they've done it. They're well done. There's a lot more. Okay. What's the single best piece of advice you've ever received and why? From my grandmother.

1:17:40She said, never let anyone think they're worth more than you and never let anyone think they're worth less than you. and why is that so important because no one is worth more than you or less than you every person you ever meet knows loads of things you don't know and has had all these unique experiences and when people behave badly it's because of things that have happened to them that are also interesting and that you can understand and empathize with if you could give your your 14 year old self one piece of advice what would it be would it be your pain makes sense the reasons you're distressed are totally understandable.

1:18:16There's nothing wrong with you. There's something wrong with what's being done to you. And you can get help for that. What's your greatest strength and your biggest weakness?

1:18:29My greatest strength is probably that I really like other people. I almost never dislike anyone I actually meet. So I think whatever the opposite of misanthropy is, I suppose it would be philanthropy, people, we call that something else. I really, really like people and I have a lot of energy for listening to people and I'm very curious about them. My biggest weakness is probably, it's a function of a strength, but it's the downside of a strength. So I'm good at telling stories and structuring stories. And when you're good at that, particularly if you're a writer, it can have a weird effect where you become quite distanced from your own life and the people around you.

1:19:24So we were talking before about, for the last how many years, since 2011, I've been working on a book about a series of crimes that are happening in Las Vegas.

1:19:37where I've got to know some absolutely incredible people over the last 13 years. And there's a thing where, okay, Vegas is a particularly weird environment anyway, but where you can be so in the mode of thinking of it as a story that you sort of become almost distanced from it. And sometimes I can do that with my own life. I can sort of, it's almost like I'm looking at my own life from a distance and I'm seeing it as a story and a narrative. And I have to really reconnect. It's also a way of protecting myself. I developed it when I was a kid because I grew up in a family where there was a lot of addiction and craziness.

1:20:13But it can mean that I get kind of quite distanced from my own life and I sort of see it in quite a clinical way. And that can kind of cut you off in your own emotional responses. And I have to sort of work at constantly rerouting myself in my own life. So that can be a weakness. It can cut you off. it can have a weird psychological effect, I think. And the last question, Johan, you're one golden rule for living a high-performance life that you'd like to leave people thinking about. I suppose it would be about attention. You know, all your achievements will be the sum total of the things you paid attention to, right?

1:20:56There's an analogy that Dr. James Williams, who I mentioned before, said to me that really helped me with this. He said, imagine you're driving somewhere and you've really got to get to your destination and someone throws a massive bucket of mud over your windshield. Doesn't matter what you've got to do when you get to your destination. The first thing you've got to do is get the mud off your windshield or you ain't going anywhere, right? And I think the attention crisis is like that. We're all experiencing an attention crisis. And the attention crisis is like the mud on the windshield. I'm sure you've got much better things to do than deal with your attention problems.

1:21:26If you don't deal with your attention problems, you're going to just struggle to do all the things you want to do. So I would say, know the value of your attention. So I would say, know that attention is your absolute superpower. Know that your attention is being stolen from you by some really big and powerful forces and know that we can take it back. But it requires a shift in psychology. We need to stop blaming ourselves and our kids and being angry with ourselves and with them and start blaming the people who are doing this to us. And I guess my rule would be we are not medieval peasants begging at the table of King Musk and King Zuckerberg for a few little shitty crumbs of attention from their table.

1:22:07We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and we can take them back if we want to. What a powerful way to finish. Hooray. Johan, thank you so much. Oh, cheers. Thank you. And I meant to say on my publisher's Tase Me that anyone wants to know where to get any of the books we talked about or the audio books, You can go to it's johannhari.com and they can see where to follow me on social media, but I won't fucking see you.

1:22:37Damien. Jay. Look, I really enjoyed that, but it was a bit like kind of having a machine gun of information sitting across the table from us, just firing constant bullets of knowledge the whole time. I mean, his brain moves a million miles an hour. His mouth moves a million miles an hour, but it means that for the audience that have just listened to and watched that conversation, I really hope they've realised the incredible value that Johan's just given us. Yeah, you know, I know psychologists often talk about we go where our attention goes and I think his point there around attention being our superpower, that if we start to take it back, we start to create the environments where we can pay attention to the things that really matter, we can all achieve our own definition of high performance.

1:23:24How addicted are you to picking up your phone and looking at it? Truthfully. Yeah, truthfully, yeah. I think I'm on a journey of getting a lot better. So you know that I sort of deleted a lot of the social media apps. You go on Instagram. I always know it's one of your Instagram updates. You still go on there now and then. Yeah, but it's not on my phone. When someone annoys you. Yeah, so it's not on my phone. I always tell you put up some pointed thing. It's not on your phone, no? No, no, it's not on my phone. How do you update Instagram, not on your phone? I remember my Peter Attia advice of having two phones.

1:23:57Right, so you pick up a different phone and do it on a different phone. Yeah, so I've got a work phone and a personal phone, and when I'm not at work, I don't have any apps on it or anything like that. So to answer your question, I'm a recovering phone addict, so I still lapse, but I work quite hard at not doing it. and part of it is like the conversation we had with him there around for our children it's more the idea of just trying to role model better behaviors i can't keep hectoring my kids not to be on the phone and then be a hypocrite so i'm just trying to do it for them if nothing else like like the voter example who are you voting for to help your kids i mean i like the fact that we kind of ended with him giving us reasons for being optimistic that as humans we can change this and It's a really good point, isn't it?

1:24:44Like, why are we begging for crumbs at the table of these big social media superpowers? Like, there's billions of us. Let's all get together and say, we don't want this. We don't want our kids to absorb this. We don't want to be derailed. We don't want to end our days thinking we spent hours and hours on social media. It's just crap. Yeah. And I've feared that it won't change, personally. I'll try and do what I can for my kids. But I also know that by the time they get to 15, 16, which is where your kids are, they're actually, they have to be in control. They have to make their own decisions, and how can they ever win against the minds of Silicon Valley?

1:25:17That's the fear. Yeah, but then his example of the leaded petrol in the 70s, it's not a battle that will be won overnight, but to change the narrative around it and make it healthier for our generation, just make it more regulated, I think that's where we'll eventually get to. My feeling is, sometimes we speak about this, about the Mad Men test. of we look back on the TV series Mad Men in the 60s and wonder how did people get away with being sexist or racist or drinking in the workplace and we laugh now. And I think in 2050, when we look back to 2024, we'll go, why did we ever allow social media to be accessed by kids?

1:26:00You're only going to ever have two kids. Yeah. And they've both been born in this period where social media dominates and that is a shame. Yeah, and that upsets me. And that's why, so the selfishness of interviewing Johan there was thinking about how can, how, like, how can you make that small difference in your own life? And hopefully people listening and watching this might be able to use it in their lives as well. Thanks, mate. Thank you, mate.

1:26:29And that's it for today. Look, if you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love you to reach out and tell me what stood out to you from today's conversation. But most of all, I just want to say a genuine thanks to you for growing and sharing this show among your community. Please hit the follow button if you haven't already and do continue to spread the learnings you're taking from high performance. Remember, there is no secret. It is all there for you. So chase those world class basics. Don't get high on your own supply. Remain humble, curious and empathetic. And we'll see you very soon.

1:27:07Thank you.

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