Your Attention is Being Stolen — and Here's How to Take it Back | Johann Hari

0:02Damian Hughes: Attention is your absolute superpower. 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. Something I kept seeing with people in Silicon Valley, the people who designed this world, is how sick with guilt and shame they feel about what they've done. Know that your attention is being stolen from you by some really big and powerful forces and know that we can take it back.

0:30Johann Hari: What if your phone isn't just distracting you, it's actually making you depressed? Our guest today is Johan Hari. He's a New York Times bestselling author whose TED Talk has been viewed over 80 million times. He spent years travelling the world investigating depression, anxiety and why we can't pay attention. Interviewing neuroscientists, Silicon Valley insiders and leading psychiatrists to understand what's really going wrong. And his conclusion is as uncomfortable as it is urgent. Our attention is being systematically stolen. Our values have been corrupted. The society we've built is making us sick.

1:09Johann Hari: But he also offers solutions. And that's where we want to start this conversation. One that will change how you see your phone, your mind, and your life. Welcome to High Performance, Johan Hari.

1:27Damian Hughes: 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, there's 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? There's lots of ways to do that and lots of levels at which we can do it.

1:56Damian Hughes: 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. 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? And the problem they had was loads of the kids were getting obsessed were getting the latest Nike sneakers or the latest iPhone. If they weren't getting it, they were going mental.

2:25Damian Hughes: 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'll just 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. So him and Presa Kassa did this really interesting experiment.

2:53Damian Hughes: If I remember rightly, details are in the book. It's every couple of weeks for quite a few months, the kids came in with their parents. And they sat together in groups. And the first time they met, Nathan said to the group, just write a list of everything you've got to have. And he said, I'm not going to define that for you. Just whatever you think that means, right? And at first they obviously 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? And then he said to them, okay, let's go down to that thing on the list, not water or whatever.

3:32Damian Hughes: And they said, 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 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.

4:00Damian Hughes: But 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. 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.

4:32Damian Hughes: They 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.

5:08Damian Hughes: So 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 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.

5:39Damian Hughes: 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? Very 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.

6:14Damian Hughes: 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? We 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.

6:49Damian Hughes: 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. The best definition of depression I was ever given was by a wonderful, incredible British woman called Dr. Tyrrell Harris, who made a series of breakthroughs in the 1970s on depression, world-changing discoveries, along with Professor George Brown.

7:18Damian Hughes: 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. My first book, Chasing the Scream, is about addiction. There's a brilliant pair of scientists called Professor Ann Case and Professor Angus Dayton. They've shown, if you look at suicide, addiction, depression, violence, they all cluster in the same places. They're all highest in the same places.

7:58Damian Hughes: 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. The way you do that is not by insulting them and mocking them and being cruel to them.

8:23Johann Hari: It just exasperates their problem.

8:24Damian Hughes: Yeah, well, it's fucking cruel for a start. don't be cruel to suffering people and secondly, yeah, you're absolutely right

8:31Johann Hari: it adds to their feeling and they're not wrong

8:34Damian Hughes: if we're calling them losers fuck me

8:38Johann Hari: you know these questions, just one quick thing let's say here on High Performance 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 guest we talk about the KPIs, the targets 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?

9:00Damian Hughes: 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 was 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. And 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.

9:33Damian Hughes: 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 thing, 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 in 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.

10:04Damian Hughes: That 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, the most depressed parent in the world will get up to save their child's life, right? You can usually do something for someone else, even when you can't do it for yourself.

10:37Johann Hari: Dell PCs with Intel Insider are built for the moments that matter, for the moments you plan and the ones you don't. They're built for the busy days that turn into all night study sessions, the moment you're working from a cafe and realize that every outlet's taken, the times you're deep in your flow and the absolute last thing you need is an auto-update throwing off your momentum? Well, that's why Dell builds tech that adapts to the way that you actually work. Built with a long-lasting battery so you're not scrambling for the closest outlet and built-in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it.

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11:22Johann Hari: thinking about that message about doing it 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 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, are dragging him into the swamp of a comparison culture of looking at the things that we recognise are not healthy and don't lead to long-term happiness.

12:09Johann Hari: 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 yes i wrote a book about this as you know

12:20Damian Hughes: called stolen focus why you can't pay attention and as you're saying that flashed a moment in my 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 james 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 design 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.

12:55Damian Hughes: 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 Oxford now you should have him on he's a brilliant guy and this is something I kept seeing with people in Silicon Valley in 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 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?

13:35Damian Hughes: 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. I go through and install and focus nine factors that are harming our attention, causing these problems. And 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 defense and offense. 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.

14:11Damian Hughes: 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. They'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.

14:41Damian Hughes: 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. So 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.

15:20Damian Hughes: 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. It'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, right?

15:55Damian Hughes: Focus and attention are at the heart of all human achievement. When 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. If attention is our superpower, you are surrounded by kryptonite, right? So I would start with that, like just use the K-safe 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?

16:35Damian Hughes: So 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 Instagram, Pornhub, or I 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.

17:07Damian Hughes: 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.

17:39Damian Hughes: Do you ever go on there, look at updates and see

17:41Johann Hari: what's going on?

17:42Damian Hughes: 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? So we just had a break and you and me had an Oreo.

18:11Damian Hughes: 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 a Zen pick as 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 phone an app, you know, give them an hour a day. Thirdly, I would say buy them a light phone.

18:47Damian Hughes: 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 a light phone they've still got you can still do the chat, group chats you know, my god sons have this they'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.

19:37Johann Hari: Can I ask you a question as Johan Harry, the individual, not Johan Harry, the expert, right? You mentioned your godsons. How worried are you about their use of technology? And how worried should we be about our kids' use of technology?

19:50Damian Hughes: 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. There's only one of them. It's obviously one of the biggest.

20:22Damian Hughes: And it took me quite a long time for it to land because I kept saying, 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, whatever the fuck I'm meant to call it now, right? Those 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.

21:00Damian Hughes: 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. Okay, 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, vastly more than many of your friends, because your friends aren't reading all your messages at 3am.

21:38Damian Hughes: 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. That 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.

22:11Damian Hughes: So all of this genius in Silicon Valley, when it's applied to social media, or this AI, or 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. That's it. And the people at the heart of the machine who've been there, I kept saying, well, 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?

22:45Damian Hughes: 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 you cared about how much chicken you bought. In the same way, these are machines designed to harvest our attention. And they are getting better and better at it, right? Paul Graham, who's 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?

23:15Damian Hughes: 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. It'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?

23:55Damian Hughes: 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. So basically what happens now is you and your kids appear to get TikTok and Instagram for free, right? You don't pay anything upfront, 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.

24:25Damian Hughes: 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. We'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.

25:00Damian Hughes: 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. In 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.

25:39Damian Hughes: 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 a set of social media that's designed to maximize offline engagement that would make us all feel better, right? But 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.

26:12Damian Hughes: 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. we 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?

26:54Damian Hughes: Now, you want to be very careful that that would have to be independent of the government. We can all imagine what it would be like if, you know, an authoritarian leader owned the pipes of the internet. That'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 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?

27:26Damian Hughes: I'm sure you remember 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. And 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?

28:07Damian Hughes: Why are we allowing the lead industry to fuck up our kids' brains? They 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.

28:39Damian Hughes: And 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, than they fought them, than 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, and there are dozens and dozens of things I talk about that we can do immediately.

29:16Damian Hughes: 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. Very valuable. I'm in favor of that, but you've got to stop pouring this fucking itching powder over me, right?

29:52Damian Hughes: 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 and absolutely we can do this right I would argue we have to do it we can't continue you know for every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when we were seven years old there's now a hundred children who've been identified with that problem today the average office worker now focuses on only one task for less than a minute it, right?

30:46Damian Hughes: 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. Also, 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, a massive improvement in learning and a massive fall in bullying, right?

31:26Damian Hughes: 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, 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. It'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.

32:02Damian Hughes: So, so there's a 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. So 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.

32:35Damian Hughes: 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? If 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.

33:17Damian Hughes: 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. We 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 prick. I don't know if teenagers still say skank.

33:53Damian Hughes: Might be. We wouldn't know, shall we? Exactly. We'll rehabilitate the word skank. But, you know, her 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 if 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 you what what you 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?

34:30Damian Hughes: 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? So it's showing people things that make them angry, upset, hurt. You could then begin to see why in schools that ban 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.

35:05Damian Hughes: 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. So 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've 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?

35:45Damian Hughes: They didn't tell us they'd done this. We only know this because a brilliant whistleblower leaked it. and their own data scientists said that Facebook algorithms maximizing engagement by maximizing 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?

36:23Damian Hughes: And Mark Zuckerberg disbanded the group and told them to never bring him any findings like that ever again. So 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 realise 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 where the rule of law is unraveling, where basic democratic ideas are unraveling.

37:08Damian Hughes: 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. We've reached the point in the interview for our quickfire questions. Oh, yes, right. Okay, quickfire. I'm not good at this. I bet you are.

37:37Damian Hughes: Okay, let's do it.

37:41Johann Hari: the three non-negotiable behaviours that you think are most important be curious

37:47Damian Hughes: about other people listen to people be kind to them lovely

37:53Johann Hari: that was quick see okay they've done it there's a lot more okay

37:57Damian Hughes: what's the single best piece of advice you've ever received and why from my grandmother she 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 your pain makes sense the reasons you're distressed are totally understandable.

38:36Damian Hughes: There'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? My 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, but 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 a function of a strength, but it's the downside of a strength.

39:17Damian Hughes: 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. 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

39:42Damian Hughes: where I've got to know some absolutely incredible people over the last 13 years and there's a thing where Vegas is a particularly weird environment anyway but where you can be so in the mode of thinking it as a story that you sort of become almost distanced from it and sometimes I can do that with my own life 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 but 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.

40:31Damian Hughes: So that can be a weakness. It can cut you off. It can have a weird psychological effect, I think.

40:37Johann Hari: 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.

40:48Damian Hughes: All your achievements will be the sum total of the things you paid attention to, right? There'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. It 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.

41:20Damian Hughes: I'm sure you've got much better things to do than deal with your attention problems. If 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.

41:55Damian Hughes: 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. We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and we can take them back if we want to.

42:12Johann Hari: What a powerful way to finish.

42:14Damian Hughes: Hooray.

42:15Johann Hari: Johan, thank you so much.

42:20Johann Hari: Damien Jay 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 he his brain moves a million miles an hour his mouth moves a million miles an hour but it means that for the audience that I've just listened to and watched that conversation I really hope they realise the incredible value that Johan's just given us I know psychologists often talk 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.

43:01Johann Hari: We can all achieve our own definition of high performance. How 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 sort of 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 like pointed thing. It's not on your phone, no? No, no, it's not on my phone. So how do you update Instagram not on your phone?

43:34Johann Hari: 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 behaviours. 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 the voter example, who you're 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.

44:16Johann Hari: And it's a really good point, isn't it? Why are we begging for crumbs at the table of these big social media superpowers? 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 fear 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.

44:46Johann Hari: And how can they ever win against the minds of Silicon Valley? That'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. 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 we'll go, why did we ever allow social media to be accessed by kids?

45:30Johann Hari: You'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 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. The three things that I'm taking away from this, I'm going to download an app like Freedom to block unwanted websites I'm definitely going to get a K-safe actually to lock the phones in the house my wife Harriet and I have been talking about doing that for so long and most importantly we're going to start having that monthly conversation with people that we trust about the meaningful things in our life rather than just that noise of hey how are you oh I'm fine me too it's just meaningless and it's time it changed look I really hope this one landed for you if you took something away from it please share it with someone that you think would find it useful thank you so much for listening i look forward to speaking to you soon

46:52Johann Hari: the next part of today's show is brought to you by indeed i'm just looking at what's coming up in the script and actually made me think of something. We're going to be talking about hiring someone for a role on the basis of them having a degree. And actually, of all the conversations we've really had on this podcast, we don't often talk about degrees, which I think is actually really interesting when you stop and ponder it, because getting a degree is obviously a huge achievement and something to be proud of. There's no doubt about that. But as time has gone on, and by the way, I say this as someone that didn't go to university and doesn't have a degree, degrees are not the only route into a great career or being a high performer.

47:24Johann Hari: When I stop and reflect on the conversations that we've had on this show, it rings true. Like I immediately think about Bear Grylls and I remember when we asked him, you know, what high performance means, his answer to us was resilience. And then we start talking about how you can build the muscle of resilience. And interestingly, in a world where we put success and achievement and accolades and trophies and awards and victory so high up the list, what Bear spoke about was the power of failure. I love to encourage my kids to fail. I think failure early on in life is so vital for people because if you don't fail early on, you almost have this false impression that you're some kind of superhuman.

47:56Johann Hari: You've got a golden touch for success, which is false of anyone. And then later in your life or your career, you do fail and suddenly you can't cope with it because you've not experienced failure. And Bear Grylls spoke brilliantly on High Performance about how important it is at an early age as a young person at school to fail, to not get the marks that you want, to not make the sports teams that you need, to not get the accolades at school that people think are really important. That is building the most important muscle for life, which is the muscle of resilience. And as vital and as important as higher education and degrees are, they don't always build that muscle of resilience.

48:28Johann Hari: You know, sometimes the best thing in life is to have a bit of a punch in the guts and have to pick yourself up and get going again. And I thought it's so interesting that when I ask someone about the skills you need for life, they don't say a first or three A levels or amazing exam results or a gleaming, glistening CV. They talk about something that you really can't measure, which is resilience. And then I remember the brilliant Johnny Wilkinson. We asked him, what does high performance mean to you? And he said to explore. And that's actually something that's really important. I've learned over the last few years to really hold my beliefs lightly, particularly when it comes to education.

48:55Johann Hari: You know, we have created a foundation from high performance where we're working with young people in schools to give them the exploratory mindset, that ability to fail and struggle and grow the resilient muscle so that you've got the resilience to thrive in the future. And Johnny Wilkinson's message of what high performance looks like was simply exploration. This is a really interesting thing when we talk about CVs or experience or hiring people. How do you know if someone's an explorer? Well, sometimes I think the way you know is that they've done things in a different way to other people. They haven't actually followed the well-trodden path.

49:26Johann Hari: I think it's really vital. Who else? Dame Stephanie Shirley. I mean, she came over to the UK on the Kindertransport, escaping Nazi persecution, did go to university, created a tech business that was in the end worth billions. And she gave the business to her staff before she sold it. And people don't realize that it was a female-only business. And the first black boxes for Concord were coded by housewives at their kitchen tables in the 1960s. And her message for us when it came to high performance, again, it wasn't about the outside victories. It wasn't about the things that you can write on a piece of paper.

49:54Johann Hari: She spoke to us about risk. She said, risk is not as risky as you think. If you don't live a life of risk, then you restrict yourself so much and you don't really know what you could actually achieve given the opportunity. And I think, again, it's a really powerful and fantastic lesson from someone as incredible as Dame Stephanie Shirley that we can so often write down the skills that we have. But when you speak to high performers on this podcast, the things that they talk about are not the hard skills, they're the soft skills. And out of all of those lessons and many more that we've discussed, having a degree didn't come up once.

50:22Johann Hari: And I don't think it's ever been discussed on our show remarkably. And I'm, again, not saying it's not important to get a degree or to be well educated. But I just want you to understand that success is down to so much more than just one factor. You can't show your true self just on a piece of paper or with an exam result. I actually think it's dangerous to hire someone just because they've got good exam results. I think that businesses lose out on top talent because they assume unless someone's got great exam results, they're not relevant. It isn't true. I think that we think that degrees or higher education qualifications tell us everything about everyone.

50:51Johann Hari: It's not true. If you want to understand a person's skills, you need to find out how they actually perform in the workplace. Hiring the right person is not just hiring the perfect CV. Let me just explain one really important thing to you at this point. I got an E, an N, and a U for my three A levels. I didn't get good enough grades to go to university. I don't have a degree. I've ended up creating multiple businesses and having an amazing broadcasting career. And I think that's because for so many reasons, getting noticed in the job market shouldn't mean just having a degree, which is what Indeed is actually so good at, because as Indeed profile lets you showcase what really matters.

51:22Johann Hari: On Indeed, you can get noticed for the important things like your real world experience and skills, not just a piece of paper, which is so important as it means it's fair on job seekers and employers can filter candidates based on actual skills, which results in a more diverse team. So to find the job that's right for you, create your Indeed profile today by downloading the Indeed app.