How To Fix Your Focus & Stop Procrastinating: Johann Hari | E114

United States everywhere everyone is according to our standards either thin or muscular there is no one who is what we consider fat right no one is really weird and it's not that fat people stay at home Well, what happened is that yes We look at 1970, there was almost no obesity in the Western world and then certain absolutely crucial changes occurred in the way we live. Our food supply changed. People used to eat fresh and nutritious food. We move on to highly processed and ultra-processed foods. Processed foods that affect

your

body in a very different way and our city has completely changed, so before you could bike and walk to work to the places you wanted to go in many of our cities, that's now it's impossible and as a result of these two big changes and some other actually stress, the more stressed you are, the more you want it comforting as a result of these big changes, obesity exploded, so it's not that people become weak or what whatever the stigma that these people say about overweight people and what Professor Nick said is something very similar is happening with attention, there are changes in the way we live that are pouring acid on everyone's ability to pay attention, as he put it, the kind of technical term is that we have a pathogenic culture of attention, a culture in which it is very difficult for all of us to form and maintain deep

focus

.

That's why activities that require deep forms of

focus

, like reading a book, have just fallen off a cliff in the last 20 years, so what we need to do is make there two. levels of response one is that there are individual responses there are changes that we can all make in our lives obviously I talk about this a lot in the stolen book I focus on this there are changes that we can all make in our lives there are also big changes that we need to make as a society , so we need to come together and demand changes in society that will allow us to make a lot of these positive changes that we want to make, so these two layers, I mean, I know there's a lot to do, um. but okay, so if we were to agree that attention has waned, what I really want to know is how, so what is the cost to my life, other than the fact that I may not have such attractive relationships, is there any other cost? my productivity to anything else I really care about, yes this is a very important question.

I think there are two kinds of levels where we need to think about it. The first is as an individual, if you can't focus and pay attention to

your

ability to achieve. your goals across the board diminish, so you want to start a business you want to write a book you want to learn to play the guitar all of those things become much more difficult if you can't concentrate and pay attention if you're constantly pushed away by the pings you already know on your phone, well, let's say you want to be a good parent, if you're constantly pulled away from it, if you're constantly distracted, your ability to do that, whatever goal you have in your life is diminished if you can't pay attention and that's the personal layer.

There is also a collective and social layer if you live in a society where people cannot pay attention if you are surrounded by people who cannot pay attention to our ability. solving our collective problems and we face many collective problems right now also fails, so attention is crucial to achieving goals and solving problems and to me those are the two most important things in life, right? and you went to the other just being present with people, you know, if you can't be present with people, if you think about my godson, you can't form the deeper relationships that you have, if most of us think about whether you I said, do you know what it is? a moment that has been deeply meaningful to you in your life will be a moment, but most likely, when you are paying attention and other people are paying attention to you, it is a moment of shared focus, a moment of meaning, um, we can't do that. that if we can't pay attention and you become kind of a stump of yourself, you know you can feel like you could have been more, that stifles growth and there are some ways to think about this, there's an amazing attention expert called Dr. .

James Williams, who interviewed him in Moscow. He is a former Google engineer who said that there are a few different types of attention that we see and we seem to be missing them all, which is why the first type of attention is called focus of attention. Okay, so let's say there's a refrigerator in the corner of this room, let's say I want to go get two drinks of that and bring them to the people in the other room, so my focus I have an immediate task, go get it. the drinks take them to the people in the other room now if I'm constantly interrupted if I constantly check my texts I might get to the fridge get a little text forget why I went there again the guys in the room say where the hell is Johan ?

Why hasn't he brought us these things? So the highlight is your ability to focus on an immediate task. That's obvious, we can all see how that is being altered. I can talk more about that if you want, so there's what he calls your starlight, which is your medium-term goals, so a medium-term goal could be, you know, a goal that you obviously had a few years ago. years. I want to start a business. That's a medium-term goal, it's called starlight because when you're not sure where you are, you look at the stars and you say, oh, you orient yourself by the stars.

That is being interrupted if your life is full of distractions, if your consciousness is hijacked by really petty goals or goals that are someone. the goals of others, like social media, you can't, you lose, you start to lose your ability to formulate, it's not just that you can't achieve short-term tasks, you lose your ability to achieve your long-term tasks, and the third shape is what james calls dr. Williams calls your daylight, which is how do you even know that you want to start a business, how do you even know what it means to be a good father, how do you know what it means to have a good life?

To be able to see clearly a room has to be flooded with natural light and it's not just that we're losing our attention in the short term, it's not just that we're losing our attention in the medium term when those things happen, you have less ability to make sense of it. Your own life, you know, compared it to the Internet, a denial of service attack where when someone wants to shut down a website, they get thousands of computers to log in simultaneously and the computer crashes, it's like we're experiencing that we're so overloaded. that your sense of who I am, what I want to do if you are, if your life atrophies in periods of 65 seconds and three minutes, how do you build a sense of where you want to go? and who you want to be, you start to feel lost in your own life and I think you can see that happens to a lot of people.

I certainly can and like you were saying, do you feel it for yourself? Oh 100 and as you said that I. I was reflecting on how hard it is for me to just sit with my girlfriend and just pay attention and try to connect with her, what your day has been like without devices and screens and there was a big change that we made together where we made some kind of rule that we would exclude devices from certain parts of our life so that we don't have them in the bedroom, if we're in bed together, we don't have devices there and, um, there.

There will be times when we commit to putting our phones away and doing something for seven hours, so it'll be like she's saying to me, I want to do this special kind of dance that she's never done before. Put the phones away and while I'm doing it, especially in the beginning, while we're doing this, it's called the contact dance that you wanted to do with me where you always maintain a point of contact. I was thinking about my phone and then about you. I know, I think we got to hours five and six and I'm still thinking on my phone and it's funny because I'm not present, I'm not, I'm actually fulfilling what she wants to do so I can go back to my phone and do it.

I find it really very sad and I can actually see how it would jeopardize the possibility of a truly meaningful connection in modern relationships where you are never really connected. I think a lot of relationships are actually more connected. on social media than in real life and I wonder if that has had an adverse effect on the success of relationships. This absence of focus and attention. I think there are so many important things in what you just said. um built for you and your girlfriend, your first response is a good first response, which is um, on an individual level, there are also great collectives, but on an individual level, a good response is what's called precommitment, so what you do that is, you. and your girlfriend says we're going to put our phone away for seven hours, so you say it in advance and there's a woman named professor molly crockett at yale university where i interviewed her as some kind of expert on pre-engagement, so pre-engagement is us .

We all know there are all kinds of things you want to do and you know you might give in later and not accomplish them well, so I don't want to eat any Pringles because they make me even fatter than I am, so it's best. One form of precommitment is when I go to the grocery store, I don't buy the Pringles properly because I buy the Pringles and I say to myself, I'm going to have fun, I'm going to eat five tonight, and of course you get there at 2 in the morning and you wake up. You're swallowing them like Homer Simpson, so the only point of the precommitment is to not buy the Pringles b tell everyone you're not going to buy the Pringles because even just stating your goal out loud makes you more likely to achieve it.

So you have a form of precommitment, you've said, "Okay, we're going to tell each other, we have seven hours, now we're going to put the phone away, so that's a really good model." of pre-engagement, but you also have one of the challenges with what is your, you know, you feel like your consciousness has been hijacked by these technologies and it was really interesting to research this because a lot of people when they say I've done a book on attention and concentration, they say Oh, you've written a book about technology, it's really only about 20 of what's going on I think, although it's a very important 20 and it was really interesting to look into this because it's actually No, most of the problem is not inherent. to technology, it is the result of something else that is actually more solvable because you and I are not going to give away our phones nor should we be right, we are not going to abandon this technology.

We could make technology work for our attention instead of against it, so I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing the people who designed the world we now live in well and I really feel bad about it, and They have all the problems that you, me and everyone watching have. There's actually James Williams, the Google engineer I just mentioned. There was an incredible moment when he spoke at a technology conference, so he's talking entirely to really influential designers who are making the things that we're all using and he said to them: is there anyone here in the audience who wants to live in the world that we're creating? ?

Raise your hand and none of them did, another one of them, Tristan Harris, an incredible maverick in silicon. Valley, who also worked for Google, worked on the Gmail team when they were designing Gmail and you know, spreading it around the world, and one day he was at the Googleplex and one of his colleagues said, "I have an idea because they were trying it." . to figure out how to get more and more people to use gmail more, so one day I had an idea and he just said, why don't we make it so that every time someone gets an email their phone vibrates and everyone on the team goes?

That's a good idea and Tristan, a week later, was walking around San Francisco and heard these vibrations everywhere and thought we've done it and that's happening everywhere in a few months. He estimated that his company caused 11 billion distractions each day. These people are really open to obviously there being a big debate about this, but there was a time and there are a lot of things to say about it and a lot of techniques that these social enterprises use to hijack your attention as much as possible and we can talk about those techniques and I think that There's a lot we need to learn about that, but actually for me the most important thing is to understand that social media doesn't have to work that way and the moment that really helped me understand that I was really struggling. understanding that if I open Facebook it will tell me all kinds of things and say oh, you are the one who makes today Rob's birthday.

This is something you said five years ago, there was a terrorist attack and look, these people have marked themselves as safe I'm not telling you all kinds of things what they won't do is something that actually a lot of people would love there's no button on Facebook to say I would like to meet my friends, now it is free who is nearby and available at this moment that istechnologically incredibly easy facebook could design that in an hour that would be very popular I'm sure everyone listening thinks yes it would be a very useful thing to have um it doesn't exist why doesn't the market provide it if you follow the chain why the market doesn't provide it, I think you start to understand some of the ways that our attention is being invaded and how we can get it back, so when you open Facebook, Facebook makes money in two. ways the first way is very obvious you see ads we all understand how it works the second way is much more valuable to facebook everything you do on facebook everything you like everything you don't like everything you message people is scanned and classifies using its artificial intelligence technology to build a profile of you, so let's say you like kylie minogue and donald trump and you message your mom saying I just bought a bunch of diapers, well, then the AI ​​is finding out, well this person is probably gay.

No disrespect to straight Kylie fans, this person is probably gay, they are pretty right wing and they have a baby, because why would they be messaging about diapers? So think about thousands and thousands of data points like that being accumulated. a very complicated and detailed profile of you that you then sell to advertisers so they can target you because if you make diapers you don't want to send me an ad. I don't have kids. You've wasted your money and you want to target your advertising so that Facebook makes money every time you open it. Facebook makes money through those two revenue streams and every time you close the Facebook app or turn off your phone, Facebook loses money or not.

They wouldn't make the money they would if you kept scrolling right, that's it, that's their business model, it's just that once you understand that you can see why there isn't a button that says who is available and wants to meet now because if you pressed that button and it said oh joe is around the corner i'm going to go have coffee with joe you and joe would sit across from each other and talk ok then you're not on facebook they're losing money their whole business model like parker , who was an early investor in Facebook, said our entire business model was hacking people's attention.

We knew we were doing it and we did it anyway, so they have the most sophisticated engineers in the world working specifically to figure out as much as possible how to hack. your attention, but what surprised me about this is that you can get into well, you talk about it and very often this is framed as oh, okay, is this anti-tech or pro? Are we pro-technological or anti-technological? is a completely wrong way to think about it, the question is not whether you are pro-technology or anti-technology, the question is which technology works in whose interest, because the business model that is designed has to consist of diverting your attention, that's the only way. can work, it's not the only business model for these companies, so let's say Acer asked one of those who designed key aspects of the Internet we use now.

Some awesome guy told me we should ban that business model, right? A business model that is based on tracking you, surveilling you, invading your attention and selling that attention to the highest bidder, that's just an inhumane way of doing it, it's like lead in pain, banning it, so I said, well, what do you think? happens to all these people? What happens the day after we ban it? Okay, so what do I open on Facebook and it just says Sorry, close? No, what would happen is that all of these companies would have to move on to other business models that already exist, so one model could be subscription, you know, like Netflix, we don't know how subscription works. or it could be that we choose to own it together somewhere below where we are sitting there is a sewer, right we own that sewer, you and I as taxpayers own that sewer together because when we didn't have sewers we did. in the street and got cholera and people died and then together we built the sewers and together we own and maintain the sewers because now it's important to all of us, maybe we want to say that just like we own the sewer pipes, together we can wanting to be owners of the information. pipelines together because right now we're getting the equivalent of cholera for our attention, but the key to this is that when you move to these different models instead of being today's product, you're not Facebook's customer.

You are the product they sell to advertisers, if we move to those different business models, suddenly you are the person they want to please. If you want to pay attention, they could start redesigning Facebook in many ways, in many ways, in very practical ways. I can tell you about many of them that are designed not to hack your attention, but to heal your attention and to improve your life. She looks really interesting so obviously my background is social media so I've been knee deep in this industry for a long time. A long, long time and in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter saying that he posted on his Facebook saying, "We've done some studies, we've talked to some people, and we've found that the timeline is bad for you, it's predominantly negative". because of these very short, highly addictive viral videos, I'm going to put my hands up, that was part of the company I built, the business model we built, we had huge Facebook pages, some of which had tens of millions of followers and We knew it.

If we wanted a ton of views that resulted in a ton of followers, we had to post very, very short, very engaging short videos. Facebook that year changed the timeline, they killed that part of our business model where these, like super addictive viral videos, would no longer work and in their little statement they said the things that will now work are any content that makes people basically chat with each other, so then we tried it and Buzzfeed tried it too. Buzzfeed posted some stuff and found out that if your post is worthy of discussion, it will do better now and Facebook was apparently trying to do the right thing, which cost them that year, their revenue, I think, went down that year, their stock price it definitely did and they pointed out that listen, we made these changes. to our timeline, our news feed to try to make it healthier, something else came up and that thing that is now the dominant force is called tick-tock and tick-tock took the place of addictive short, since you don't even know your scrolling through videos and the way i know from my experience on social media that tiktok totally owns that space its simple in my tic toc now i say i have a hundred thousand followers a video can get 1000 views or a million views the audience variation is extreme, what that means is that they are the algorithm that just takes the most addictive stuff and says everything else, it's like it's not going to show your followers or the discovery feed what you posted that it didn't.

It was addictive, I'm just going to take the viral things that are super short and put them in the feed, so today I was talking to some of my colleagues. Luckily, I don't actually use tik tok any more than I use it myself. I have a tic tac, but I don't use it. I don't use it to interact with friends and each and every one of my friends, some of them are sitting in this room now some of them are downstairs, they describe their relationship with tick-tock like it's heroin, like I've never heard A The social network describes my friend Dash, who is about 35 years old, this way.

I just tap on the app and it disappears for an hour and it says I've never seen anything like this so if Facebook changes my point here is that some I've seen someone else who just doesn't care about your will come and take up that space make a thousand million dollars and um and it slips away and then I say, oh, you know, but that's why we're absolutely right, that's why we need to look at the business model for social media and whether or not we allow, of course, to think again about the lead paint. So presumably there was a leader in the lead paint market in the '70s and let's say responsible painting would go to this guy. the company needs to

stop

making lead paint, of course, someone else would have come along and made lead paint, that's not the solution.

The solution is to say that no one can properly put lead in paint, which is not to say that there can't be social media that Absolutely, social media can have a lot of great things, but it's about saying: do you have a business model? designed to invade people's attention as much as possible or do you have a business model that is about giving people what they want and most people don't like? you're saying your friends press the button and it goes away for now most people don't want that most tick tock users i think about my nieces using tick tock all the time she doesn't want that either so right now we we have a model that is about hacking people and giving them what they don't want to sell to advertisers, when we get rid of that business model that they won't do spontaneously, we have to force them to do it right, that produces a completely different result.

I dynamic, so I'm interested, so you put what I read in the book, you basically put your phone in a box and then escaped to the phone. You must have been more productive than ever because of this thing that people described as being in the flow. right state, I figure that if I am free of distractions then I will be in that flow state for longer. I heard about this concept of flow state maybe a year or two ago and then I could relate to it because I've had those moments in my job or when I'm doing a certain activity specifically more like monotonous or repetitive activities where you get into that flow state. where you almost do it without thinking about what flow is and how you find it and what the power of being in the flow state itself is, so a flow state is when everyone listening will have experienced at some point in their Lives a state of flow is when you are doing something that is really meaningful to you and you really get into it. and your sense of time disappears, your sense of ego disappears and your attention to it just feels effortless, that's how one climber put it, it's like you get into a fluid rock climb when you feel like you are the rock you're climbing, So we will all have had moments of flow in our lives.

The really important thing about flow in relation to attention is that it is a power, it is a capacity that all human beings have and it is a capacity in which you can pay attention to something deeply, but you don't. It doesn't feel like an effort, does it? It's not like studying for an exam where you say okay, so Napoleon was born there. Okay, you know you can, you can pay attention that way, but that is a flow of effort, it is like a stream of attention that is within everything. of us who can afford so obviously mahali spent teacher girl sent me high he sent spent 40 years of his life over 50 years of his life studying flow states how they happen how we maintain them what ruins them and he discovered many surprising things about it, discovered that actually flow states are really essential to having a good life, feeling competent and having good mental health and he found that he made a lot of discoveries, but for me there were three really important things that he discovered about how to get into a state of flow. flow, first you have to choose a goal.

If you're trying to do too many things at once, you won't get into flow. I can explain to you why that's really important later. You have to choose one thing correctly in the second. What you have to do is choose a goal that is meaningful to you. If it's not, you'll never make it. For me, it would be writing well, but everyone will have something and thirdly, you want to choose something that is ideally at the limit of your abilities, so let's say you're a climber, let's say you're a mid-talented climber, right, if you just If you climb the garden wall, you won't enter a state of flow in the same way if you suddenly try to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

It's going to be overwhelming. You are also not going to enter a state of flow. What you want to do is choose something that is a little more difficult than what you did last time, so that begins the flow. at the limit of your abilities, so you want those three things, a clear goal, it has to be meaningful to you and it has to be the limit of your abilities, if you do it, there is no guarantee, but you will greatly increase your chances of achieving it. in flow, which is this form of deep, meaningful attention, but Mahali also made a discovery, he discovered it in the late '80s, um, there's something that absolutely consistently ruins flow being interrupted, distraction, right, it simply kills the dead flow, which kills the deeper form of attention. and I think we are really living and Mahali thought we are really living with a crisis offlow states.

What is the harm of interruption? I read in your book about creativity on the decline and the time it takes to get back to normal. task once you've done it, but is there some kind of more consequential um? So if you want to understand and this may sound like a small effect when I first describe it, I'm going to explain how big it is later because it doesn't feel big when you do it, so I went to interview one of the world's leading neuroscientists. , my name, Professor Earl Miller, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professor Miller told me, "You have to understand one crucial thing about your brain." my brain everyone's brain you can only consciously think about one thing at a time this is just a fundamental limitation of the human brain the human brain hasn't changed in 40,000 years it's not going to change anytime soon you can only think about one thing at a time, But we have fallen into a massive delusion whereby the average teenager, according to a study by Professor Larry Rosen, believes they can now follow seven forms of media at the same time, so what happens when you think it's you?

They're doing a lot of things at once, so they take people into the labs, make them think they're doing a lot of things at once, and see what happens, and it turns out there are four really big costs that happen, so the first one is which is it. I called the change cost effect, so let's say my phone is outside this room, but let's say I have my phone in my pocket, right? Let's say you were talking, you talked for a minute or two, what you said was really interesting, let's imagine you had just spoken. I pulled out my phone and glanced at my text messages for a few seconds while you did that kind of right thing that happens all the time and you think, oh, I just took two seconds and at that point I'll do it to refocus my brain oh um jess texted me oh right, that must mean his mom needs oh right, okay, you got it and then I have to focus on you again, wait, what Stephen just said again seems like a little effect.

Not that I'll talk about how much it is in a minute, the second cost of it is that you start making mistakes when you switch between things, which greatly increases your error rate, so say no. I don't know how to do my tax return and I look at my text and go back to my tax return. I'm much more likely to make mistakes and that means I have to go back and correct my mistakes. The third effect is in your memory. to translate your experiences into memories takes mental effort, right, it takes a certain amount of brain power, if your brain is just stuck with all these changes, the evidence shows that you are much less likely to simply remember what happened, it's less likely to do so.

Remember all that and the third effect is on your creativity, so when you have time to think, your brain naturally wanders and wanders, you know the things that people have told you in the times in your life when you have had things that you have had. read a wide range of things and you will start to make connections between those things. That's actually what creativity is, it's when two ideas that have never been put together come together and explode, you know, that's a lot better than me, but when your brain is stuck. with change you just don't have the space to do it right and I heard that I'm thinking about talking to President Miller, who is an incredible man, and I just thought, "Okay, I understand, but that's pretty small right when I looked at the studies , I was quite surprised by Hewlett-Packard, you know the people who make printers well, in my experience they are printers that always jam, but anyway, Hewlett-Packard did a pretty small experiment with their workers, so the They were divided into two groups and the first group was told just do whatever tasks you have to do today and you will not be interrupted and the second group was told just do your tasks today and they were interrupted with emails and text messages, just what they did. which was described as a lot of emails and text messages and then they just tested their IQ after not being distracted or distracted, what they found is that the people who were distracted in the test have 10 IQ points less than the people who weren't distracted, because that makes you less intelligent.

Constantly changing the tension makes you less intelligent and to give you an idea of ​​what 10 IQ points means, if you and I smoked together now, our IQ would drop by about five points, so it's double. The effect on your intelligence and attention is to get you high, so you'd be better off sitting at your desk doing one thing and smoking a joint, than sitting at your desk not smoking a joint and getting interrupted all the time. There's a guy named Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon, who found that if you get distracted and walk away, it takes you 20 minutes and you go back to the task you were originally doing, it takes you 23 minutes to get back to the same level of concentration you had before. , so we are. our whole focus is being stolen the book is called stolen focus for this reason our focus is being stolen by these forces which is just one of the twelve there are many of them but we have to understand this and the other point I guess so writes In this book, I was surprised that you linked it to attention because it wasn't an obvious link to me.

It was about sleep and the deterioration of our health for decades and you write that we are sleeping less than ever. and we are sleeping worse than ever before my sleep is pretty good, but I think it is declining, I would say it is declining. I sleep with my phone in my bed, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning. Actually, as I open my eyes, I think about where I have to put my hand to pick up the phone, like I'm visualizing where I think I left it and my brain always knows that my brain is like it's to your right, to your right. heard, yeah, yeah, it always knows where it is and then I wake up, I look at what are those 100 notifications, 100 things, um, what is the cost of this type of behavior, which I think a lot of people will resonate with and what is the like the macro trend in sleep health, yeah, this is one of the 12 causes that I write about in Steald Focus and actually, the evidence was pretty shocking, so I interviewed a lot of experts, but I interviewed possibly the leading expert in the world in a man's dream. named Dr.

Charles Seisler, who is at Harvard Medical School, taught everyone from the Boston Red Sox to the Secret Service about sleep and started making this breakthrough in 1981, so when Charles was In medical school, they taught him that basically when you're asleep, your brain is just inert, it's not doing much, so he starts doing this research, it has nothing to do with sleep, it doesn't really matter. what it's about, but it's about the time of day that the body releases a particular hormone and to study it you had to keep people awake in a lab for quite long periods of time, so you're working with them and He has all kinds of techniques to keep them awake, like mindfulness techniques, and when he did this he was immediately surprised at how quickly. and how dramatically people's attention and ability to think deteriorated the longer they stayed awake.

If you're awake for 19 hours it doesn't seem like a long time, your attention and your ability to think are the same as if you were legally drunk, so your attention would do things that would take a split second when you're refreshed and alert he was discovering if you were awake. just for one day, we're going to take 12 seconds an amazing increase in your thinking ability to get you to start thinking oh, I should study sleep I should research this and he started doing a series of hugely innovative research on sleep. What he did was pioneer in putting two bits of technology together.

There is a type of technology that can scan your eyes to see what you are looking at. and obviously there are pet scanners and things that can scan your brain and see what's going on in your brain, so he put this together and looked at people who were tired, not that tired, but tired, to see what they were looking at and what was happening in their brains as they watched it and what he discovered is that when you're tired you can appear to be awake, as awake as you and I seem right now, you can be looking at people, you can be talking, but parts of your brain have literally stayed awake. asleep, it's called local sleep because it's local to one part of the brain, which is kind of mind-blowing.

This helps explain why attention degrades so quickly when you're asleep, and I was trying to figure out why that's what's happening there. It's also important to note that this is one of the ways we know care has gotten worse. There is compelling evidence that sleep has deteriorated dramatically. We sleep on average one hour less than people in 1942, and children sleep 80 minutes a night less than them. I did it a century ago, so it's amazing that there's been a 20% decline in adult sleep in the last century, incredible numbers and when you look at them, they're mind-blowing. Only 15 percent of people wake up feeling refreshed, so I wanted to understand why it's right, why does sleep affect our attention so much?

One of the people was interviewed about this and looked at his research very carefully. She is an amazing woman named Professor Roxanne Prichard, who is at the University of Minneapolis where I interviewed her and she explained it to me. when you don't sleep, your body interprets it as an emergency, it says something is really wrong here, right, he's not sleeping, why isn't he sleeping? So he has all kinds of physiological and psychological effects, it increases your heart rate, it makes you crave more sugar. and fast food because it releases glucose quickly, it makes your heart beat faster and it shuts down a lot of the creative parts of your brain, a lot of the most fertile parts of your brain, it's like it's an emergency, you don't have time.

You have to worry about that, you know, but what's happening is that many of us are effectively living in a body emergency. 23 per cent of brits sleep five hours a night on average, staggering figures and the reason this is important is partly bodily emergency and partly that's what dr. seisler had been taught in medical school long before it was wrong sleeping is not a passive process sleeping is an incredibly active process as roxanne told me professor prashad is when you are sleeping you are repairing your brain it is rinsed with water Liquid that carries metabolic waste , takes them to the liver and gets rid of them.

The brain repairs itself during sleep. The more you sleep, the better and deeper the repairs will be. I mean, there are a lot of other things that happen during sleep that I talk about. It's also talked about in the book and we're not giving ourselves time to repair ourselves we're not giving ourselves time to rest and as a result we walk around in a daze our brain is not functioning at its full potential so I'm telling Dr. Seisler you know, okay so we know sleep has gotten worse, we know sleep is crucial for attention, does that mean it's true to say we have an attention crisis and he said even if there's nothing else to change? society and this is just one of the twelve changes, even if there is nothing else to change in society, that alone would be a guarantee that we had an attention crisis, so what do we do about it?

I'm that person, I'm the pathetic one, um. I have pathetic sleeping habits, sure, so what can I do about it? You know, taking my phone out of the room in addition to the government or society collectively deciding that we should impose better career laws so that people aren't so interrupted. knowing when they might be sleeping etc, what else can I do on a real practical level? So yes, on a personal level, there are a lot of pre-commitments you can make, so I would recommend getting a case. Do you know about them? Oh, is that it? like a safe that my phone goes in yeah so basically it's a plastic safe with a lid on the top you take the lid off you put your phone in it you turn the dial on the top and it will lock your phone for anything you need. set it anywhere from five minutes to a week and if there's a fire or something you could easily crush it but then you'll have to buy another iPhone and buy another safe case so I would say an hour before you go to bed put your phone in the secure case and then you can't get back to it, it's a pre-commitment, you're binding yourself so that when you're lying in bed and your mind is racing like, oh, I forgot that email too late, you can't check it. that's what I do, it greatly improves my sleep, so part of it is one of the individual changes.

There's also some great advice and this is something I recommend, so I went to New Zealand to meet a guy called Andrew Barnes, so Andrew grew up here. in London and in the 80s hein 1987 he worked in the city of london the financial district uh just when everything was deregulated so everything explodes you know, you've probably seen on the news these images of men in suits and a lot of hairspray, like shouting at each other buy buy sell cell phones and he was one of those guys, right? and in that world, uh, he was a young boy, so in that world you know this is the word language that they would have used, isn't it.

In my language, you were a fool if you came to work later than 7:30 in the morning and you were a fool if you left before 7:30 at night, so for half the year Andrew never saw the sun because he I had said you would leave at six. in the morning in the dark and he came home at nine in the morning and at nine at night in the dark he didn't have a good relationship with his children, he had to build that as an adult, this just consumed him and he didn't like it and he wisely left it and went to live in australia and then new zealand and there he became a very successful businessman and one day in 2018, andrew was on a plane and he was reading a business magazine and he saw these figures quite shocking ones that are accurate, they basically did research on productivity and found that the average worker sits at their desk for eight hours a day, it says precoded, obviously they sit at their desk eight hours a day. but in reality they only concentrate on their work for three hours a day, which are staggering numbers, bad for everyone, bad for the worker, their life is overlooked, bad for the employer, you know, they don't get good value of its employees. and Andrew did this Andrew remembered these times when he was working in the city and he was exhausted and exhausted and he didn't have a life and he thought maybe my workers were just really tired, maybe that's part of what's going on, so If he had come up with this idea, he said that if I said that the company would change to a four-day week instead of a five-day week for exactly the same amount of money and, in exchange, let's say that my work corresponds to these three hours a day to come back if my workers did 45 minutes more each day to concentrate because they were better rested and so on, that would make up for that then we would be in the same place for four hours four days a week instead of five, so Andrew organized a conference.

He called, he had everyone involved and said from now on I'm going to pay you anyway, but we'll move to four days a week, try it for three months and see if it works. We'll continue to do it um Andrew's head of HR literally fell over it's like what is this entitlement and the people even the people who were going to be the beneficiaries and they were all the beneficiaries but even the kind of lower level staff that He said: Is this a trick? What's going on? How is it going to work? So they spent a few months preparing it.

In fact, it made them think more about productivity. How are we going to become more productive? They came. He thinks of all kinds of strategies, some of them really simple things, like you know everyone has a little pot on his desk. You can put a white flag on it when you have the white flag, that means you don't want to be interrupted. So and they tested it and I interviewed everyone who worked in their office in Rotorua and this experiment was studied by Dr Helen Delaney, who is at the business school at the University of Auckland, and what they found is that the company managed more in four days than they had achieved. in five, the right productivity increased massively stress decreased massively use of social media at work decreased massively and it was fascinating to talk to staff about what they did, one of the things they did was just sleep more, some of them didn't they took five days I didn't take four days what they did is they did five days but they did six hours a day instead of eight hours a day they slept more they rested more they were able to disconnect their brains from work, which if Going and going is very, very difficult to do and I remember interviewing them thinking: could it be true?

In reality, many places have done these experiments with four days a week and many technology companies now offer it as an incentive, but many places did these experiments, so Microsoft in Japan moved to a four-day week, Their productivity increased by 40%, Toyota and Gothenburg moved all their mechanics to a six-hour day and produced one hundred and fourteen percent more in six hours than they had done. in eight the profits increased by 25 in a way that sounded too good to be true and I went to interview this guy, professor jeffrey pfeffer, who is at stanford university and who is one of the world's leading experts on organizational behavior .

He was saying, well, how can that be? and he said, look, it's not hard, ask any sports team if you want your team to go out on the field exhausted, exhausted, not every sports fan wants their team to go out on the field well rested, well slept, you know. That experiment again, we won't always think about it at these two levels, what can individuals do? There is a lot and there is the collective level where we can make it possible for people to make more personal changes quickly. I can't talk enough. in my life, especially right now, and it's really interesting because what we tend to see this time of year is the first thing to go is our diet, quickly followed by our fitness and we see it in the data from multiple surveys of people in the fourth quarter. of the year they start to enjoy themselves a little more, which is totally fine, and they start to exercise a little less, which is totally fine.

However, a really useful crutch during this period where the seasons have changed and we are starting to behave a little differently is to make sure that your refrigerator is stocked with things that are nutritionally complete and healthy and that are convenient for you to consume without compromising your health and that's where, ladies and gentlemen, Huel comes in and now they have four new flavors, they have the savory one. caramel flavor I love it, they have cinnamon flavor, the new number one flavor in my opinion, which is really amazing, iced coffee caramel and they have strawberries and cream flavor.

If you are going to try any of the new flavors, try the cinnamon one. spin around and let me know what you think is an absolutely unexpected champion of new flavors writers you're a writer that's something you talk about you talk about why reading is important and there's been a macro decline in our reading and I as I read that I thought : Why is reading so important? What role does reading play? We all consume information digitally. Now why do we need to re-read things? I think there are a few reasons, um, and it's not at all presumptuous, so you You're absolutely right that reading is massive, book reading has decreased enormously. 57 of Americans now never read a book in a given year.

It is the first time in the history of the American republic that that is the case. We're still a little better. that in Britain, but not by much and there are several people who really helped me understand this and what it is doing to us, it is partly a symptom of our diminished attention and partly a cause of it and it took me a little bit about how to say being a woman named professor anne mangan is at the university of stavanger in norway, she is a professor of literacy and probably the leading expert in the world on these questions and she explained a lot of things, but there is a very simple one that you can do, The studies have been many. of studies that show this now, so you get a group of people, you randomly divide them in two, the first group let's say you could do it with my book, you give a group of people my book on the ipad like your ipad there and the other group you give the physical book, and then you go back to them a week, a month, and a year later and you just ask them questions about the book and it turns out that invariably the people who read it on the screen remember much less and understand much less of what they read this is a very proven effect it's called screen inferiority it's such a big effect if you take a ten year old child it's the equivalent of two thirds of their reading progress in a year is lost when they read on a screen like this it's like it diminishes our ability to think and it seems like there's a lot of, there's a lot of debate about why, but when you read, let's say, you know we open the BBC news site now and you read the same story when we read on a screen. , what we tend to do is read in a sort of skimming pattern, you sort of skim the key words to the right.

When you read a book, we generally read linearly, we read from left to right, you know, and you go on. but part of the problem is that if you spend too much time reading on screens when you read a book, you start doing that when you read books and it affects your ability to read books, but the truth is, I think it's a more subtle thing, right? this marshall mcluhan was some kind of professor in the 60s who said something famous that i never understood for years, he said the medium is the right message and what he meant was that when a new medium comes out, he was talking about television, so that a new way of telling stories and thinking about the world appears, you know you can tell it on your television and you can watch cable or Ferris wheel or anything in between, the medium of television itself has a message, regardless of the program you are on.

We are watching television, so the medium of television, the messages of the world are very fast, everything happens at the same time. We can all think about the things you get from watching TV, the way you feel if you and I love TV, the things you feel when you watch TV, but I think there's a medium in the message of social media. So think about Twitter when you open Twitter, no matter if you're Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or I Know Bubba the Love Sponge. message you are absorbing about how the world should be. I would say that the message is, first of all, that the world must be interpreted and thought about very quickly. exactly and what matters, the most important thing is whether people immediately agree with this, very briefly and very briefly, what you said, right?

That's the hidden message on Twitter. Think about Instagram, what is the hidden message on Instagram? It's um what really matters is if you look good and if people like how you look good that's all that's the message what is the message on Facebook the message is good friendship that is the most precious thing about human beings friendship is to look at the photographs of other people's lives that you should narrate your life to your friends through images and long for their likes and that is what friendship is, to mutually look at each other's carefully collected paparazzi images and give them I like it.

Now I think all those messages are wrong, it's a terrible way to live. your life is right, it's not true that life should be interpreted quickly, in fact, if people immediately agree with what you're saying, what you're saying probably didn't need to be said at all, um, yeah, I like people pretty on Instagram, okay, but If that's what overtakes your life into something that's really going wrong and friendship, a real friendship is nothing like a Facebook friendship, but think about the message, the reason why What I say this in relation to reading is think about the message of the book as it is printed. book, what does a printed book tell you?

First of all, the world is complicated and you might want to take some time to think about one thing. Secondly, he says: "You should go slower, slower, look at this it will say the same thing." thing in 100 years like he says right now and thirdly, he says that you might want to spend time thinking about other people's inner lives because other people's inner lives are really interesting and you will find that they are like you in some ways and sometimes different from you in others, so I would say be careful about the technologies you absorb because over time your consciousness will come to resemble those technologies that you know you want to have a life of meaning and purpose in which you engage with complex things in the ones you showed empathy where you showed love these are not things that the current social media model absolutely militates against and books help with that they don't they are not the solution you know they are not the only solution there are many things happening, but I think deep in the middle of the book.

I completely agree. When I started writing my book, I thought it was a crazy concept of a book because I had grown up in that area of ​​social media where you become instantaneous. comments, etc., etc., and one of the really profound things I discovered with a book is that there is no comments section, I don't like it, I really think of a book if it had a comments section underneath, the comments section of a book exists on some website. Millions of miles away maybe in reviews and I never really look at them so when someone consumes it they can't develop their opinion based on the consensus below and I've noticed this many times on Instagram if I post something and the top comment . adopts a certain narrative that everyone belowthey will follow, so if at the top I make a post, people see it as it is, then you can see their behavior, like going to the comments section and the moment a certain narrative comes up that people find interesting, everyone follows that narrative and then if I've done it before, like many years ago, just delete that comment or hide it, the narrative below changes and you can see people actually deciding what they think of what you're saying or if it's okay or wrong according to the consensus below, I think it's even, I think you're absolutely right Stephen, I don't know enough about comment sections, but I think in terms of online comments, it's actually even worse than what You just said in many cases and this is an effect of all the effects that I learned in the book.

This is one that I think is the most damaging. Remember what we were saying before and I know you know very well what happens with the business model. to keep people scrolling at the right time, you

stop

scrolling, they lose money, all their algorithms are literally designed with one goal, what will keep you scrolling, that's it, that's the right goal, so while the algorithms in AI were figuring out what keeps people moving, they stumbled upon them. discovered a human quirk that is not the intention of anyone on Facebook or YouTube or any of these places called a very well-documented psychological phenomenon called negativity bias which basically means that we will look at something negative longer than we will look at something.

I'm sure anyone who has been driving on the highway and been in a car accident knows exactly what I'm talking about. You look at the car accident longer than you look at the pretty flowers on the other side of the road, and this is it and this is it. The negative bias runs deep. 10 week old babies will look longer with an angry face than with a smiling face, but when this is combined with algorithms designed to maximize attention capture, this produces a catastrophic effect and this is not my opinion. This is what Facebook found. in their own internal investigation that we have now leaked, so imagine, imagine this on both a personal and political level, so imagine a teenager, a group of teenagers go to a party, one of them goes home and on the bus on the way.

At home they say it was a really lovely party. I enjoyed it. They all looked great and were very friendly. Another teenager from the same public party. God, Karen looked like a real scumbag tonight. Her boyfriend Jim is what does the algorithm do in the second? It's more like the car accident people will stare at it longer the algorithm will promote it in the feed it will put it much higher the good thing is that it will be very low if someone sees it right now that's pretty disastrous at the level of the teenagers I've gone to a party now imagine on a political level we don't have to imagine it everyone listening remembers who donald trump was then what happened in the 2016 election what happened in what is happening around the world every day all the time in politics en We are encouraged to be angrier every time the algorithms select anger because anger will keep you moving to the right. and that is destroying our ability to solve problems and this is not just my opinion in the wake of the Brexit victory and donald trump facebook internally created a group of its own data scientists called common ground and now we know what they found because it was leaked and what their own data scientists said is that Facebook's model and the broader social media business model inevitably causes division and polarization, that this was having catastrophic effects, it's partly what drove the genocide in Myanmar in Burma um and that this was in it. actually very striking the way they expressed it this was inherent to facebook's business model and the only alternative was for facebook to abandon its business model and adopt what they called an anti-growth model where they said we will not grow as a company but No.

We are going to set the world cup on fire, right, and there is a very dry The Wall Street Journal that leaked it, they said they told their new story after receiving this report, Mark Zuckerberg asked that they never bring him reports like this again, right ? just so you know, they know what they are doing, the business model, they are tied to their business model, they will only stop doing it when we make them, but this machinery that is making us angry is just a personal scoop. destroys attention when you're angry it's much harder to pay attention we've all had that experience but there's good science about it too but it's also devastating to society and we have to deal with it, I remember doing it. a study, I think it was in 2017, I don't remember the year Trump was elected, that I presented to Coca-Cola, where I looked at Hillary Clinton's online reach on Crimson Hexagon versus Trump and it was like 12, he was reaching 12 times 12 to 15 times more people with your message because you focused on really polarizing and inflammatory things and the algorithm just sends that, while indifference just doesn't move on social media it's like a tree falling in the forest with no one there, well not even a reasonable argument difference yeah who cares you know who's going to hit that doesn't resonate with anyone so the tribe can't pick it up and move it for you then you're right fear and any kind of movement polarizing Really, really good, but I would say that I think it's a very important point and I thought about it a lot when I was working on Steald Focus.

I think there are obvious things and I know you know it much better than I do. There are other great human motivators. that fear and anger, that we can, that we can build correct algorithms, so it is more compelling than fear, although well, at this moment, precisely because this anger can be deepened and monetized, that is why we need regulations to stop that hacking of the worst aspect of our lives. characters who don't want to say that there aren't legitimate things to get angry about, there are and build algorithms around better things, and that's why you meet people for progressive change, like ending racism in policing, who It's an urgent cause, actually the emotion that appeals to the majority is not anger the emotion that appeals to the majority of us who believe in that cause is hope, love and empathy, the same why, if you look even if you think about left-wing anger versus right-wing anger, why do these algorithms increase right-wing anger much more than left-wing anger?

And again, this was leaked on Facebook. We know this is because ultimately when you are for progressive change you can't just be angry, you have to have a hopeful vision for the future, you know what I mean? Yes, and we can build this machinery around encouraging and rewarding hope in the moment we have it. We are all connected to what Maggie Haberman, the New York Times journalist, called anger-based video. Well, that's basically what Twitter and Facebook are. There's an amazing study by the Pew Research Institute that found that for every word of moral outrage you add to a Facebook status update, you double the likes and shares of the words that boost shares and views the most. youtube are hatred, they destroy and destroy right now, that is a machinery, if you connect people to that anger-based machinery for much of the day, the anger does not go away when they hang up the phone correctly, it is not like a valve liberation, it's like It's like taking a drug that amplifies you and you're seeing that and that degrades our individual attention because angry people pay attention much less well.

It fears our ability to think, but it also degrades our collective ability. attention you see, this is how we are tribalizing around covid, you can see this in many ways, the ways in which we are tribalizing and attacking others for things that we actually have perfectly sensible solutions for, do you think it is based on anger? machinery or do you think it's connecting angry humans to machinery because I think if you just created an algorithm that didn't have any bias and said, you know, our goal as YouTube is to show you more things that you click on.

It would only take a couple of days to program everyone's algorithm to show them scary things because, like you said about the fear bias that we have and the prehistoric evolutionary reasons why we would want to know that there was a line behind the rock versus You care if there would be an ant behind the rock, eventually because we are afraid to avoid humans, we would basically train on any algorithm eventually just to show us how scary, so there is definitely Tristan Harris. I talked to him a lot about this. former Google engineer, there are many alternative ways to properly structure these apps, so to give you an obvious one, you can simply turn off YouTube recommendations.

It's not like before they existed. We were all thinking: What will I see next? What will I do? Suddenly not much, it's just that Tristan says just turn it off if the only way it can work is for people to turn it off, we don't need it, it's not that important or an alternative problem and there are all sorts of other ways. the others could be structured in a way that Twitter and we don't have to think hypothetically that Twitter used to be chronological. If you follow 200 people, you open Twitter, the first thing you'll see is the most recent thing from one of the 200 people. follow what's posted correctly, you'll notice that Twitter doesn't do that anymore.

Now you have an algorithm that selects precisely the things that we're talking about, which means that Twitter has become even more toxic and even more hateful and it wasn't that good at the beginning right, um, so again, just go back to the chronological, even just going back to the chronological algorithm, needs a lot more changes than that, in itself, you're right, it would be better, so there are all kinds of algorithms you would have to do. However, for all the technology companies, because no, they don't, this is what they have to change the incentives and then they will get it right in the moment, all their incentives, they have all these smart engineers and they have an incentive.

How can I get Steven's attention as much as I can right now? You change the incentive. They don't work for you. Remember that they work for advertisers. When incentives change, they will change. So obviously their behavior changes at any time. business when their incentives change if they want to please you instead of pleasing the advertiser, then of course the market will provide all kinds of ways the market the competition at the moment the competition is how can I invade your attention to the maximum if we move on to A new business model Competition is what Stephen really wants If Steven wants to know where his friends are so we can have a drink with them Okay, give him that button What else does Steven want? steve wants to meditate oh we'll give him that button You can see how once they figure out what you want and not what the advertisers want, then of course the market starts experimenting and there will be a thousand innovations and maybe some of those innovations will come out wrong and have other negative effects and We will have to stop them from doing that, just as you know, there could be a new form of paint that is even worse than lead paint.

Okay, we'll ban it and stick with the one that doesn't ruin people. It feels like running around with the uh with a fire extinguisher like a spring fight, as it absolutely will be if we don't change the incentives, yeah right, it's a government decision and what would be the legal intervention. It's pretty simple, the specific mechanism is prohibited. to monitor people to harvest their education and sell it to them is not that it is not complicated it is not something legally difficult to do it is something politically difficult to do well we have to confront these companies paul graham one of the leaders of Silicon Valley The investors said that the world would be a lot more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40.

Think about something as simple as a couple of simple things. Facebook has already patented a technology that could read your emotions through the camera of your phone and your laptop, you can see how that adds an extra layer of how they can invade your attention or think about something called and I learned about this when Acer me asked: Think about something called style transfer. really simple concept, some people might have seen it in There are machines that do it in arcades in the US, so you can take a photo, any photo, and you can run it through a style transfer program that it will remake that image in the style of Vincent Van Gogh or Monet, or you can name a painter, so it will simply remake that image in that style, style transfer, but style transfer can be used in a very different way.

Gmail, completely legally, could now scan your entire Gmail into AI, of course a human wouldn't read it. Scan all your Gmail email and discover the word patterns and speech patterns you use.You respond, you respond more correctly and then you can sell it to advertisers so they know how to approach you using the kind of words that are exceptionally persuasive. for you right now that's going to happen if we don't regulate that's because the technology exists um imagine a thousand things like that are going to be happening so it's not even like we're staying at the current level of technological invasion there's essentially a race In this regard of the attention crisis between the increasingly invasive forces of technology, which will become increasingly powerful and are more powerful this year than last year and will definitely be more powerful a year from now, there is that and then there is the movement of people who are trying to stop this and deal with other causes of the care crisis and to me it's a racial entitlement and it could seem like something really big, a movement, what does that mean?

When I think about that, I think about can I? I ask if you're optimistic because yes, I'm not optimistic at all and one of the most compelling reasons I'm not optimistic about there being any practical, effective change is because I watched the Senate hearing when they brought in Mark Zuckerberg and Jack . Dorsey and the CEO of all these big companies, Jeff Bezos, etc., and the people who make the laws had no idea about any social platforms and it was like a parody, in fact the videos went viral on all networks social of these pluses. 60 year old senators trying to understand what WhatsApp was, basically saying things like I can't find my phone password, well how can I get it?

It's strange and you could see Zuckerberg and Dorsey like everyone else could. if you look close enough you would see the smile at the corner of their mouth because they were just being mentally harassed, they have no idea about these technologies and I'll be honest as someone who has worked in this industry for a long time. Since I'm probably one of the few people who's been balls-deep in this since it started, sometimes when I hear people talk about the risks of technology and the conversation about data and all this stuff, I think, oh, You literally just had your opinion from reading the newspaper and it's so much deeper and if you just flip that switch, then the cascading impact that you don't understand because you can't see the whole picture is that actually this is just going to happen, and when I think about The people who make the laws is my conclusive point: they have no idea what they are talking about, so you base it and then the conclusion is that you have to go and get the industry people to make the laws.

There's no way, Boris. Johnson or anyone close to Boris Johnson and I have met some of these people who could make any really effective changes to the legislation, as you say when you talk about a race in time for that industry not to develop and change, and now you know We're probably still trying to figure out the news while these big corporations are now talking about machine learning and artificial intelligence and they will never be able to keep up and they never have been able to and now we have the metaverse coming and they. I'm still trying to figure out if Snapchat filters are okay and now we're running into the metaverse.

In my opinion, there is no possible possibility that technology and the pace of change will be slower than the pace of effective legislation when I have that thought and that thought obviously crosses my mind quite frequently I think about something very specific that happened in my family it will have happened in your family it will happen in the families of everyone listening it's to some extent so I'm 42 when my grandmothers were 42 I think about what the world was like so one of my grandmothers was a Scottish woman working class and one of my grandmothers was a Swiss woman who lived in a mountain who is what you would call a kind of peasant so true, it was legal for their husbands to rape them they were not allowed to have bank accounts because they were married women in their own names My Swiss grandmother didn't even have the right to vote.

She needed written permission to work outside the home, which her husband didn't give her at that time. Nowhere in the world was there a woman who ran a company. There was a woman who ran a country. There was a country. a woman who led in fact, in a police force there were almost no female police officers senior female police officers in Britain four percent of members of parliament were women all institutions in the world were led by men and had been since that they were created correctly and because the common people changed the culture that created pressure on politicians to change society, so now no politician would propose something like going back to 19 1962 1963 for women's rights, it would be unthinkable that even the candidate most radical in the United Kingdom, if he suggested that, he would have to withdraw.

Well, it is a cultural shift and just like the feminist movement reclaims women's right to their bodies and still has work to do as we know we need a care movement to reclaim our minds. Well, we can do some of this individually, but a lot of it we can do. What we do together right now is like someone is giving us itch powder all day and then the person who is giving us itch powder leaves, friend, maybe you want to learn to meditate, that will stop you from scratching so much, TRUE? I mean, I'm for it. meditation is a good thing, but someone will have to take care of those who are pouring the itch powder on us, right, we have to do both very interesting things because if you face those who are pouring the itch powder, it is as if there would be a blow. -In effect, I can see that I was thinking then about why Boris Johnson wouldn't want to prevail.

I was also thinking about the recommendation algorithms you talked about. um netflix has one youtube has a tick tock has one everything I seem to have on my phone have a recommendation algorithm to make me buy something wait longer whatever trying to serve me better under the guise of trying to serve me Netflix wants to serve you better because you are the customer, yes, so Netflix doesn't feed you with angry things Netflix doesn't show you the movie that will make you the most angry, because you are the customer of netflix on facebook tick tock and the rest of you are not the customer, that's why it feeds you with the things that make you the most angry, invade your attention, so there's an important distinction between those two, right, and then they are, but they both have the same incentive, which is that they say they are, I mean, Netflix said that our only competitor is sleepy, yes, rex hastings, the head of netflix said that, yes, yes, so if you like it.

Boris was going to turn around today and say I'm going to ban recommendation algorithms or whatever the issue is, it seems like that would hurt our chances of innovation in a global landscape where other countries don't have those bans and that's just what I want to say. that UK tech companies were worse, yes we need to have bigger movements but it's actually the exact opposite of a society of people who can't focus, can't pay attention, our thinking in 65 second bursts won't be an innovative society. true, there is a reason why China, although I strongly oppose communist tyranny in China, don't get me wrong, why China has just banned the number of children or has very strictly restricted the amount of time that children can spend video games every week and no.

Not allowing any of these algorithms to work on Weibo and other things or strictly regulating them would be a more accurate way to correct it, so if our goal as a country is to be an innovative country, my goodness, a country of people who can think. It is going to be an innovative country of adult people who switch between WhatsApp, Snapchat and tick tock. It's not going to be a place full of innovation, so I think of course it's a job to explain to people if it was made from scratch. would be baffled, in the same way that in 1962, um, what do you even think about gay people in 1962, literally no one, including gay people, suggested gay marriage, I wasn't saying no one thought it was right because it would be like that. .

It would be very strange, you know, at that time, um, well, a little bit before, being gay was a crime, so as you build, you start to get more sophisticated and have more ambitious goals, so right now we're just starting from a very basic level. There's a really interesting study done by a guy called Mahateri Islami at the University of Illinois, where he took a bunch of Facebook users and explained the algorithm to them, and 62 of them didn't know what an algorithm was before it. taught them through it, one of them compared it to the moment when keanu reeves in The Matrix discovers that he is living in a simulation, right, it blew their minds, so obviously we have a very basic level, but in terms of education, because we haven't been explaining that I didn't know most of these things before doing the research on stolen focus and I didn't know about all the other causes of things that are invading our attention, including some that are actually much bigger than this , so we have To do the work of education we have to understand the advantage that I think we have.

This is not like explaining quantum physics to someone. We could stop anyone on the street here in east London and explain this to them and they go. to do it right, you can feel this happening, you can see what's happening around you, so it's not that in some sense the dissatisfaction and unhappiness with all of this is on the surface, all we need to do is help people to understand what they can do with that dissatisfaction that this is not just not a personal failure on your part it's very important that people understand that if your answer is oh, I'm just weak, you know, that's what they would love for you to do.

You'll think That's right, look, there's a constant process of trying to transfer the blame to you, so it's partly understanding that it's not your fault, partly it's understanding that it's not even the technology's fault, it's the fault of specific aspects of how our technology works. that we can change practically, those are the two things that I think are really important to understand about today. I mean, there are many other things and other ways that we can protect ourselves by having more knowledge, but I think it is essential for us. I understand that, since you are right, it is very easy to become powerless.

Oh, this is so big, but I'll tell you what my grandmother in 1962 would have a lot more reason to think things could never change than we do when it comes to technology. true, I'm serious, if you had shown the life of my grandmother and my niece it would have been unthinkable, these things can totally change. James Williams, the Google engineer I quoted earlier, once told me that you knew the ax existed for 1.4 million years before anyone thought to put a handle on it. The entire web has only existed for less than 10,000 days. We can change this if we want to correct we are human and it is also a different disposition than this we are not broken people and we are not medieval peasants asking at King Zuckerberg's court for a few crumbs of attention from his table we are free citizens of democracies we are owners of our Minds we own our societies and we can take them back if we want we have to decide whether we value attention to people who have children and there is about a quarter of the book about how we get our children's attention and there are a lot of really important things that we need to know in this regard that they are very different from how our schools function and how our children function. eating for um the deprivation of children being able to play but people who have children do you want your child to be able to concentrate?

Do you want your child to be able to read books? Do you want your child to be able to think deeply? Do you want your child to have a life full of flow states? Of course you're fine, we have to fix society and culture to give them those things. I feel like, um, I feel like everyone who hears that will. I agree and everyone will say it's a problem. I agree. I want to make that change, but I think movements need a really specific goal for people to come together and that goal is ultimately what they're bringing to their legislators or their politicians saying this is what we want to change. , so I would suggest three very specific ones if we are going to have a movement of attention, a movement of attention and there are already many elements of this fight underway and I discuss them in the book. how who they are and how people can join them, I would say initially three goals, uh, ban, this is called surveillance capitalism, ban the business model of surveillance capitalism, they just can't track you, invade your profile and sell your attention advertisers, ban it very easily. what to do, you can write legislation in a day, right, that's number one, number two, I would say, a four-day work week, the evidence is very clear, we are exhausted, we are overworked, we haven't slept well , give people time back, well covered, it was the first time our society We have been acceleratingFor a long time now, we have slowed down because of a tragedy and of course none of us would have wanted it to happen this way, but of course there were many people who couldn't slow down like that. health workers, but many people found real relief in the slowness that came from covid, right, we have to slow down society, speed destroys attention, there is very good evidence of this and the third thing is that we need to restore childhood only 10 of Children play outside the home without adult supervision.

Play is how children learn to pay attention. It's the way they learn to learn. A lot of skills come from the game. Additionally, exercise greatly increases attention. We have deprived our children of exercise even before. Obviously covered Covid made it even worse for all the obvious reasons, so obviously those are three very simple goals, two of them could be achieved with legislation in a day at the moment, of course, it takes a big fight to prepare the ground for people to want those things. but they are achievable and they will improve our lives not only in terms of care but in many ways, so I am optimistic that there have been challenges greater than this, yes, and human beings overcame those challenges.

I also think that we have to be optimistic because if we don't deal with this, I don't think we can deal with the bigger crises. Think carefully about climate crises, a group of people, a species that can't pay attention, can't concentrate, and interacts primarily through media. that promote false claims and lies, so an MIT study found that 19 of the 20 most shared stories on Facebook in the 2016 election were not true, such as a false claim that the Pope could endorse Donald Trump, 19 of 20 are just not true, right if we can? Not regaining our focus and our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood.

How are we going to deal with the climate crisis? How are we going to deal with any of the problems we face? How we can correctly deal with our own personal problems. We can't do that, so this is the necessary step we must take. I think as individuals, if you face problems, the first step is if you can't pay attention to the things that matter. What can you do? I can't do anything you're like an animal flailing on a beach right, um, which is how I always look on the beach anyway, but um, so attention is the prerequisite for any achievement, I think the last thing that really gets me surprised In the stolen light bulb, in the lost connections you talk about junk values, but in the stolen light bulb you actually talk about junk food and there is the quote installed in the light bulb where you say that we should strive to eat what our grandparents would have eaten, what them I would have considered real food that I loved and that really resonates with me and I've been on kind of a crusade to try to live a little more humane and unless 20 20, maybe a little more, I don't know. 9000 BC or whatever, why did you feel the need to talk about junk food and eating in a book about mindfulness?

This is one of the causes that I learned that I didn't see coming and it was only when I was reading. A lot of science told me, "Oh, wait, there are three ways that the current diet that we eat, which is completely different from that of all humans before the age of eight, I mean, has been an extraordinary transformation in a very short period of time and is harmful. Our attention, so Dale Pinnock, who is one of Britain's leading nutritionists, you should have it. Actually, he's a very interesting guy. Dale, so, Dale explained to me that scientists and others have shown that the diet we eat causes a very rapid release of energy and very rapid drops of energy that cause brain fog that ruins your concentration, so let's say, for example, yes and by the way, I want to say that I am completely hypocritical for saying this.

I literally had a McDonald's on the way here, so any sense of superiority, let's say. you have ice cream and white bread ideal for breakfast, what that does is it releases a huge amount of glucose, it gives you a huge burst of energy, you feel great for about 20 minutes and then you're sitting at your desk or your kids are sitting at your desk and the glucose crashes and you're in a brain fog, so one way is like Dale puts it: you know, if you put rocket fuel in a mini, it would go really fast for a minute and then it would just shut down and we're basically doing that and, as he told me, if you're eating some kind of shitty carbs at every meal, you're doing that over and over again all day long.

The second way it damages our attention, our current diet deprives us of necessary nutrients. for your brain to develop, there is an interesting study done by Dutch scientists where they got a group of children, they did this several times and it replicated well, they got a group of children and they put one of them on what they called an eliminationist diet in the one that basically didn't eat any processed foods and the other group of kids just ate normally and the kids that were put on a regimen eliminated all processed foods and everything, 70 of them had significant improvements in their attention and their average improvement in detention was 50, so a really big improvement, the third cause is that it is Not only that our food is missing things that we need, but it contains things that act on us, like drugs.

There's a really shocking study about this, done in Southampton, here in Britain, in 2007. They involved almost 300 children, they were seven years old and 12 years old. old and they divided them into two groups and the first group was given a drink that only contained dyes that exist in normal foods such as synthetic dyes and the other group I think I can't if it is just water or was it some kind of flavoring that does not contains these dyes and then they were monitored and the children who drank the dyes that the kitten every day and I eat every day were significantly more likely to have attention problems and difficulties concentrating so you have these three ways and you mentioned that you know this big change about how our ancestors I mean I remember when it was like I said my my dad is from Switzerland um I grew up on this in this little cabin on a mountain in Switzerland and when I was a kid, it started when I was nine years old, my father, that bastard, his very kind man sent me, in many ways, he sent me every summer to go and stay on this farm where he had grown up, it's like going to the farm.

I became a man, he said um and I would get there and to me this was like I grew up in Edward, all of a sudden, on a Swiss mountain, it's like what's happening, um, and I remember the way my grandparents ate like almost all humans in almost all. of our history they have eaten, they grew their own food and they killed their own animals and ate them and I remember my grandmother used to put food in front of me. I remember very clearly the first day I was there. looking at it because I grew up, you know, I was raised primarily by my Scottish grandmother, working class Scottish women, I grew up eating microwave chips and fried food, and you know, I remember looking at the food that my Swiss grandmother gave me and literally saying where there's the food this is not food and then I was completely taken aback so for two weeks I ate almost nothing and finally she broke down and took me to McDonald's in Zurich which is quite far away and I remember I was sitting in McDonald's and she looking at it and her saying but this is not food what are you talking about she just couldn't understand why I would want to eat it and so, in three of two generations there was a big change: we went from eating mainly fresh and nutritious food for most people , most Brits and Americans, most of their diet now consists of processed or ultra-processed foods, which is really different, it's very different, I mean the food writer Michael Pollan, who I know, said that we shouldn't call.

It's food, we should call it food-like substances because it doesn't look like food. This is one of the other causes. A bit like the four-day week. I can tell you all the facts. I can do it? No, you know, I mean. I'm a little better than I was, but only a little, so in closing we're going to continue with our new tradition, which is to ask you the question that our previous guest left you and the previous guest who sat here wrote in the diary. What was the best conversation you've ever had and why? Oh, that's a very good question.

I shouldn't talk about this, but I will talk a little about it. I'm getting a little excited about this. Uh, try not to, for the last 10 years I've been researching a book about a series of crimes that have been going on in Las Vegas and I'm not supposed to talk about it too much and there's a couple that lived underneath Caesar's palace in the drainage tunnel under his palace named Tommy and Shea, who I knew incredibly well, who are two of the people I've loved most in my life. I remember standing above where their tunnel is and shadow and shadow, just telling all these people "them." We're a lot closer to where we are than you think, not just physically but some things go wrong and in that society you're in a tunnel and I remember that night with Tommy and Shay and I must have heard that I think I was with them for about 12 hours that day, I think it's one of the best conversations I've ever had.

Shay is so wise, Tommy is so funny, and they taught me so much over all the years I knew them. being a person and tommy was murdered last year is one of the reasons why i spent a lot of the plague in las vegas because i have been trying to help shay and figure out what's going on, what happened and i think that's one of The best conversations of my life, I think they are, they taught me to think about life differently and every day I integrate some lesson that Tommy taught me and I think that's one night, I mean, we spent so many nights together, but that one It's a night that really stands out for me, I mean I can think of many others, but that's the one you know, it's amazing.

The remarkable thing about your writing, which makes it so engaging and compelling, is that it's not assigned to shouting facts and figures at you, which I Like someone who struggles to read anyway, I have to have a captivating emotional journey that takes me carry through these themes so I can ingrain them in my consciousness, so all of your books do that, especially this one, especially missed connections, which is one of my favorite books of all time by the way, but the stolen focus is a sequel incredible, somewhat linked, in many ways and on many themes of that book, and that was my favorite of all time and this is one of now one of my favorite books. well, because it is one of the books that I managed to read in the last year because of the way you write and that is a great credit to you.

There's a reason I always bring you back on this podcast. I love these conversations. Brilliant. you've been uh and off camera you know you should probably be a comedian because you're really funny but on camera you're a really smart human being and off camera you're funny you're smart you're not that off camera but you're an amazing human being and I love it I love having you here so thank you again for giving me this time and I'm so glad we can. having this conversation because it is very important and one that I need in my life.

I really appreciate how deeply you pay attention to the book and, um, what I should say or my editors will tell me, let's do it. um, anyone who wants to know where to get the audiobook, the ebook, or the physical book, you can go to robofocusbook.com and on the website you can listen to a lot of the experts that we talked about for free, like the guy who discovered the states of flow, eh, everyone. these Google experts, a bunch of people, um, I'm meant to read something where I say "read it," and I can't do it, it makes me sound like something like "you can find out what Stephen Fry, Hillary Clinton, and many others leaders" the experts thought of the book, something like that, Hillary Clinton read the book that you have, it's a very good thing, yes, and very, I mean, so sad, there is an alternative universe where Hillary Clinton is in her second term as president and unfortunately instead she's in a world where she has to read my book, but I'd rather live in a place where we can skip Trump, but it doesn't matter, yeah, and you can get the book at all the good bookstores you can.

Even get it in bookstores and it's available now, it's available, it just came out, so go read it. Thank you very much Steven. I really sincerely thank you for coming and doing this again.