Interconnected Ep 1: What happened to our attention spans?

Jordan You’re listening to this right now because I couldn’t read a book. And I am mean, I really couldn’t read one. Like everyone who reads, I have a pile of books that I’m meaning to get to. And for literally the past year, that pile had only grown. Even though I was reading, I read a ton of articles, posts, Twitter threads, columns, hot takes, blogs, you name it. And the only books I could even read were ones that I had already read many times before. If you gave me something new with more than 20 pages or so, I just couldn’t get into it. I’m sure if I looked harder, I would have found other signs. But it was this one that woke me up to just how shrunken and sick my attention span had become. And like the guest you’re about to hear from, I had a theory about what happened. The theory was that technology did this to me. Apple made that stupid iPhone, I got one, I put Twitter on it. And then the world went to hell and I doom scrolled for two straight years until I lost the ability to focus on anything.

I wanted to understand how that happened, which is where the idea for this special series of The Big Story came from. Naturally, this first episode is about attention spans, and we had a perfect guest all ready to join us and discuss it in depth. All I had to do to prepare for the interview was read his book. This is how it went.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is Interconnected on The Big Story, Part One: Attention. Johann Hari is an author and journalist. His latest book is called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. Hello, Johann.

Johann Hari Hey, Jordan. I’m so happy to be with you.

Jordan You are right now. Would you be less happy to be with us if I told you, and does it surprise you to know, that I got your book a couple of days ago? I knew this interview was coming. I’ve been trying to make time for it. I’ve been trying to get through it. I’m on page 23.

Johann Hari So this is one of the reasons I wrote the book, is that I noticed that with each year that passed, things that require deep focus that are so important to me, like reading books, having proper long conversations, watching movies, we’re getting more and more like kind of like running up a down escalator, you know what I mean? Like, I could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. And I noticed this seemed to be happening to enormous numbers of people around me. It’s happening to you. The average office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. For every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there’s now 100 children who have been identified with that problem.

So I wanted to understand, partly based on quite disturbing experience in my own life that we can talk about, if you like. I want to understand, well, what’s going on here? Right? Is this really a crisis? If it is, what’s causing it? And most importantly, how do we solve this? So I ended up going on this really big journey all over the world, from Moscow to Montreal to Melbourne to Miami, not just to cities that began with the letter M, to try to figure out what’s going on here. And I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts in the world on attention and focus. And I learned from them there’s scientific evidence for twelve factors that can make your attention better or can make them worse. And they range really widely from the food we eat, to some aspects of the tech we use, to the air we breathe.

I learned that, in fact, loads of the factors that can harm your attention have been hugely rising. So if you’re listening and you’re struggling to focus and pay attention like you are, Jordan, this is not your fault. The book is called Stolen Focus because your attention is in fact being stolen. But once we understand the factors that are stealing our attention, we can begin to get it back.

Jordan You know, this interview is part of a week we’re doing on this program about how the onset of the digital age has changed us as humans, about how we are evolving, for better or for worse, to live in it. And this was the one thing that felt to me like the most practical, everyday aspect of it. Because, like you mentioned, every single person has the story. I used to read 100 or more books a year. Now I probably read a couple of dozen, if I am lucky. And there are many normal times that I would notice it. But you began your book with an event that sort of brought it into stark focus for you. I’m wondering if you can, as you mentioned, just quickly retell that before we get into why all this has happened.

Johann Hari Yeah, and remind me to flag up, because I think it’s so important that we understand–this harm to our attention is not inherent to the technological change that has happened. It’s the result of something narrower and something that in some ways it’s easier to fix when it comes to technology. I had this experience. I’ve got a godson, I call him Adam in the book. That’s not his real name, for reasons that will become obvious. When he was nine, he developed this brief but a very intensive session with Elvis Presley. And it was unbelievably cute because he seemed to not know that impersonating Elvis had become a kind of cheesy cliche. I think he was literally the last person in history to do an entirely sincere impression of Elvis. And he would sing like Suspicious Minds and Viva Las Vegas.

And when I would tuck him in at night, he got me to tell him again and again the story of Elvis’ life. Obviously, I tried to skip over the bit at the end where Elvis shot himself to death on the toilet. And one night I was telling him the story and I mentioned Graceland, where Elvis lived, and he looked at me and he said, Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I said, Sure, the way you do with nine year olds knowing next week it’ll be Legoland or whatever. And he looked at me really intensely, said, No, I really mean it, do you swear one day you’re going to take me to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely promise. I didn’t think of that moment again for ten years until so many things had gone wrong.

So when he was 15, he dropped out of school, and by the time he was 19, this will sound like an exaggeration. It’s not. He spent literally all his waking hours alternating between his iPad, his iPhone. His life was just this kind of blur of WhatsApp, YouTube, porn. And it was really like he was kind of whirring at the speed of Snapchat, where nothing still or serious could touch him. And one day we were sitting on my sofa in London.

I’ve been trying to get a conversation going with him all day and I couldn’t get any traction. And to be totally honest with you, Jordan, I wasn’t that much better, right? I was staring at my own devices and I suddenly remembered this moment all those years before. And I said to him, Hey, let’s go to Graceland. And he looked at me completely blankly. He didn’t even remember this moment all these years before. And I reminded him, and I said, let’s break this numbing routine. Let’s get the hell out of here. In fact, let’s go on a big journey all over the south. But if we’re going to do this, you’ve got to promise me one thing, which is that when we go, you’ll leave your phone in the hotel during the day, because there’s no point in us going if you’re just going to stare at the phone the whole time. And he really thought about it and he said, you know what? Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

And so I think it was literally two weeks later, we took off from London and he drove to New Orleans, which is where we went first. And a couple of weeks later, we arrived in Memphis. And when you get to the gates of Graceland now, this is even before COVID, there’s no one to show you around. What happens is they hand you an iPad and you put in earbuds and the iPad shows you around, right? So it says, Go left, go right. And it tells you a story about that room and everywhere you go, a picture of that room appears on the iPad in front of you.

So, what happens? It’s a bit weird. I sort of noticing this as we’re walking around is people just walk around staring at their iPad, right? It’s a bit disorientating. So I can walk around and get a bit pissed off. I’m like, well, we traveled 3000 miles. Everyone should actually look at the thing that’s in front of them. And we got to the Jungle Room. That was Elvis’s favorite room in Graceland. And there was a Canadian couple next to us. I’ll never forget this, no disrespect to all your listeners, not representative of the nation, I’m sure. And the man turned to his wife and he said, honey, this is amazing. Look, if you swipe left, you can see the Jungle Room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the Jungle Room to the right. And he’s kind of swiping back and forth on the iPad. And I burst out laughing because I thought he was kidding. And I turned and just watched him and his wife. And they literally just stood there swiping back and forth. And I leaned over and I said, but hey, sir, there’s an old fashioned form of swiping you could do. It’s called turning your head. Because, look, we’re actually in the Jungle Room. You don’t have to look it up on your iPad. We’re literally there, right? It’s right in front of you. And they looked at me like I was insane and backed out of the room.

And I turned to my godson to laugh about it. And he was standing in the corner staring at Snapchat. Because from the minute we’d landed two weeks before, he could not stop. He just couldn’t stop. And I went up to him and did that thing that’s never a good idea with teenagers. I tried to grab the phone out of his hand and I said to him, look, I know you’re afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you’ll miss out. You’re not present at your own life. You’re not showing up at the events of your own existence. And he stormed off. And I wandered around Memphis on my own that day. And I found him that night in the Heartbreak Hotel down the street where we were staying. And he was sitting by the guitar shaped swimming pool. And I went up to him and I apologize for getting so angry. And he didn’t look up. But he said, I know something’s really wrong, but I don’t know what it is. And that’s when I thought, I need to investigate this. Because it’s like we went away to get away from all these distractions, but there was nowhere to escape to because everyone was as distracted as we had been. And that was what I thought. I came to really understand what’s going on here.

Jordan Can you try to quantify this for us? Because I think seeing this in younger people is definitely an adult phenomenon. But as you point out with your story, we’re not immune to it either. Can you quantify for us at all how our attention spans have dwindled in the past couple of decades? Do we track that thing over time? Can we?

Johann Hari So there’s two ways that we could, I think, be confident that attention is getting worse, that this isn’t just a kind of anecdotal sense that it is actually happening. The first would be, as you say, the kind of gold standard of evidence would be if consistently, every year for, say, the last 150 years, scientists had administered the same attention test in the way that we have done with IQ tests that hasn’t been done, that data has not been gathered. So we don’t have evidence from that direction. But there’s a different way, I think we can gather evidence, which I think has led me to conclude that this is a very real crisis. So there are all sorts of things that have been shown in the short and medium term to profoundly harm attention that we know have hugely increased. I’ll give you two very simple examples: sleep. Scientific evidence is overwhelming. If you don’t sleep properly, your attention will suffer. And there is huge evidence that we sleep much less than we did even in the relatively recent past. We sleep about 20% less than we did a century ago.

Or think about a different one. I went to MIT to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, an extraordinary man named Professor Earl Miller. And he said to me, look, you’ve got to understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That’s it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years. It’s not going to change on any time scale any of us are going to see. But what’s happened is we’ve fallen from mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. So what happens is Professor Miller and his colleagues and scientists all over the world get people, not just teenagers, older people too, into labs, and they get them to think they’re doing more than one thing at a time. And what they discover is always the same you can’t do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you switch very rapidly between tasks. You’re like, Wait, what did Jordan just ask me? What’s this message here on Facebook Messenger? What does it say on the TV just happened in Ukraine? Wait, what did Jordan ask me again?

So we’re constantly juggling like that, and it turns out that comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the switch-cost effect. When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you will do all the things you’re trying to do much less competently. You’ll make more mistakes, you’ll remember less of what you do, you’ll be much less creative. And this is not a small effect. One small study, for example, found that being chronically distracted and interrupted is twice as bad for your intelligence and attention as getting stoned. Right. At least in the short term. So this is a big event. This is why Professor Miller said we’re living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation at the moment. Because we all know, of course, we’re interrupted far more than we were in the past. Think about it–I’m 42, right? When I was at university, if you were sitting in a lecture, the only way you could be interrupted would be if someone physically wrote a note and handed it to you. Now, every university student can be interrupted by anyone in the world while they’re sitting there, right. Talk to any university lecturer. So we’re all being interrupted vastly more than we were. So when you put together this evidence, obviously I go through the twelve factors installed at my book Stolen Focus. A huge number of them have been massively increasing in recent years. Which is why we should, I believe, conclude that this is, as indeed many scientists have, that this is a very real crisis and that we can deal with these underlying reasons, but we can only get to the solutions if we actually understand what’s happened to us.

Jordan So let’s get into the causes of it, then, and what has happened, and I’m going to get you, even though I know you have said that this is not the only contributing factor and that there are many others by starting with the technology. Because when I was prepping instead of reading your book, but prepping for this interview nonetheless, and I was trying to think of all the times when I tried to focus and not be able to, they almost all involved switching between phone, laptop, tablet, and whatever I was ostensibly doing at the moment. How much does tech contribute to our waning attention span?

Johann Hari When I first started writing the book, I thought what had happened to me was obvious. I basically had two stories in my mind about why my own attention was getting worse. I thought, you’re weak, you’re not strong enough. Why can’t you resist this stuff? So I had a very negative self kind of dialogue about that. And the other was I thought, well, someone invented the smartphone and that screwed me over and that’s damn them, right? So because those were the two stories I had in my head, I thought the solution seemed kind of obvious. I was in the lucky position that a kind of Hollywood film got made out of one of my books. So I had some money. First time in my life, really, and I thought, what’s more important to me than being able to think, I’m just going to go away for three months and have no access to the Internet. Right? I went away with that. I went to a place called Provincetown in Cape Cod. I had no smartphone. I had no laptop that could get online. And lots of things happened in those three months that we can talk about.

But I really realized afterwards that although I had an amazing experience in Provincetown for all sorts of reasons, that actually something much deeper is happening to us that we need to understand. So I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley with people who designed key aspects of the world in which we live, and it was fascinating talking to them, because the way you phrased it, Jordan, is exactly the way I would have phrased it at the start of writing the book. How much of this is due to the tech? Actually, the way big tech wants us to frame this is, well, are you pro-tech or are you anti-tech? Right? And actually, the way we need to understand this is more subtle and more empowering than that, because we’re not going to give up our tech, nor should we. We’re not going to all join the army, set aside our technologies, nor is that something I want us to do. If we understand it in a more subtle way, we can get to more meaningful solutions.

So anyone listening, if you open your phone now, please don’t. But if you did and you open TikTok or Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or any of the mainstream social media apps, two things immediately happen. Those apps start making money out of you in two ways. The first way is really obvious. You see ads, okay? No one listening needs me to explain that. We all know how that works. The second way is much more important and much more valuable and much more damaging. Everything you do on these apps is scanned and sorted by the artificial intelligence algorithms to learn something about you.

So let’s say there are many things about you. So let’s say that you say on you’ve indicated on Facebook that you like, I don’t know. Let’s choose an improbable combination. Let’s say that you like Donald Trump, Bette Midler, and you tell your mother you just bought some diapers. Okay? So it’s going to figure out. If you like Donald Trump, you clearly right wing. If you like Bette Midler and you’re a man, you’re probably gay. No disrespect to any straight men who like Bette Midler, but I’ve never met any. And you’re buying diapers. That means you’ve got a baby. Now, it’s gathering this information partly to sell that information to advertisers. You are not the customer of any of these social media apps. Your attention is the product they sell to their real customers who are the advertisers. So if someone is selling diapers, they want to be able to target their ads specifically at people who have babies. If someone’s targeting marketing to Bette Midler fans, OK? They want to know who’s a Bette Midler fan and so on.

But these algorithms are learning who you are for an even more important reason. They are figuring out the weaknesses in your attention to keep you scrolling for a really simple and obvious reason. The more times you pick up your phone and the longer you scroll, the more money these companies make. And every time you put down your phone or your kid puts down their phone, those revenue streams disappear. So all of this AI, all of this genius in Silicon Valley is all geared towards one thing figuring out how do we get Jordan to pick up his phone as often as possible? And when he does, how do we get him to scroll as long as possible? And how do we get Jordan’s kids to pick up their phone as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. Just like the head of KFC, all he cares about is did you go to KFC today? And if you did, how big was the bucket you bought? All these companies care about all they are designed to do is to maximally get you to pick up your phone and scroll as long as possible. And they are unbelievably good at it, right?

But the important thing to understand, and it took me a long time to get my head around, I had to interview lots of people who have been at the heart of the machine, is this technology doesn’t have to work that way. We can have all the current technology we have and not have it designed to maximally, hack and invade our attention. So think about Aza Raskin. Aza Raskin designed a key aspect of how most websites work. His dad, Jef Raskin, invented the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. And Aza said to me, look, this technology is designed this way. That’s how social media has worked up to now. But it doesn’t have to work that way. There’s an alternative.

And it’s funny, there’s a historical analogy in the history of Canada that really helped me to think about this. And you’ll probably remember this, I remember it so when I was a kid, the standard form of gasoline in Canada, Britain, across the world was leaded gasoline. And then it was discovered that exposure to lead, which obviously everyone was being exposed to as an exhaust fumes that was in the air, is really bad for people’s brains and in particular is terrible for children’s ability to focus and pay attention. So a group of ordinary Canadian moms, what we used to call housewives, banded together and said, well, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing this for profit industry to screw up our children’s brains? This is crazy, right? And it’s really important to notice what they didn’t say. They didn’t say, so let’s ban all gasoline. Let’s ban gasoline. Right? Just like no one should be trying to get rid of tech. Now, what they said is, let’s deal with the specific component in the gasoline that’s harming our children’s brain. So they fought to ban lead of gasoline and forced us to move to different forms of gasoline. And at first, these mothers were ridiculed. They were demonized by the lead industry, and they fought for their kids. These moms, they fought and they fought and they fought. And as everyone listening knows, they won. There’s no more lead gasoline anywhere in the world. This is why the Center for Disease Control has calculated that the average American child is three to five IQ points higher than they would have been had we not banned leaded gasoline.

Now, when I talked about this with Aza, the historical analogy really helped me, because just like, the lead industry tried to frame this, oh, these crazy women are against cars. They’re against gasoline. They’re like, no, we like cars. We like gasoline. We just don’t want the element that’s screwing up our kids brains, right? In the same way, we need to move beyond the framing of, did the tech do this to us? The specific design of some tech played a really big role in harming our kids attention, but we can fix that. And Aza said to me, if you want to understand what the equivalent to the lead and the lead paint is, he said, It’s very simple. You’ve got to ban the current business model. You’ve got to say that a business model based on secretly surveilling and scanning people in order to figure out the weaknesses in their attention and selling their attention to the highest bidder is just an inhuman system. It’s like lead and lead paint. We won’t allow it. No.

And lots of people had to explain this to me in Silicon Valley before I really understood it. I remember saying to Aza, okay, let’s imagine we do that, and the next day, I open Facebook. We banned the current business model. And the next day, I opened Facebook or TikTok. Would it just say, Sorry, guys, we’ve gone fishing? He said, of course not. What would happen is those companies would have to move to a different business model, and almost everyone listening will have direct personal experience of the two alternative models. The first is subscription. So we all know how HBO and Netflix work. You pay a small amount. In return, you get access to the product, in the same way we could pay a small amount to access these social media sites. And the crucial thing about that is then you are no longer the products they sell to advertisers. Suddenly, you become the customer, which is really important. Or think about the other business model, which literally everyone listening has experience of. Think about the sewers. Before we had sewers, we had shit in the streets. People got cholera. So we all paid to build the sewers, and we all own the sewers together. You own the sewers in Toronto, I own the sewers in London, along with all the other citizens of our cities. Right. It may be that just like we want to own the sewage pipes together because we don’t want to get cholera, we might want to own the information pipes together because we’re getting the equivalent of cholera for our attention–and I would argue our politics. We can talk more about that. But the crucial thing to understand is once you change that model, all the incentives for the design of the technology change.

So at the moment, the sole incentive for the design of the technology is how do we get you to pick up your phone as often and scroll as long as possible. But if you become the customer, if you become the owner, suddenly those incentives are different. Suddenly they’re not trying to hack you. Suddenly they’re trying to think, well, what does Jordan want? No, it turns out Jordan wants to be able to pay attention. Let’s design our app. Not to hack his attention, but to heal his attention. Oh, it turns out Jordan feels good when he meets up with his friends offline and looks into their faces. We all know the importance of that the last two years. Okay, let’s design our app not to keep him doom scrolling, but to actually get him to interact offline with his friends. The technology to do that exists tomorrow. My friends in Silicon Valley could design it in 24 hours. But it won’t happen unless we have the incentives to do it.

So I argue we need an attention movement. We need to decide that we value attention. Now, just say to anyone listening, think about anything you’ve ever achieved in your life that you’re proud of. Whether it’s starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that you’re proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. And when focus and attention break down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down. Your ability to solve your problems breaks down. You feel worse about yourself because you become less competent. But when you get your attention back, it’s so profoundly healing, you become potent again. So we have to decide, do we value attention? Do we want it for our children? Obviously a lot more, because about our kids as well. If we do, we can take on the forces that have done this to us. Right? Dr. James Williams, who worked at the heart of Google and Quick, he was horrified by what they were doing, said to me, the axe existed for 1.4 million years before anyone said, guys, should we put a handle on this thing? The entire Internet has existed for less than 10,000 days. We can fix this shit if we want to. It’s not even that hard. But we have to take on the concentrated forms of power that are feeding us the current model?

Jordan That’s an incredibly hopeful answer. More hopeful, I have to say, than I was expecting. Aside from learning that I’ve been doubly screwed because I got the lead paint and now I have an iPhone, so I’m not set up for success at all. But listen, because this thing can’t go on forever, I want to keep learning a little bit about what the tech is doing to us, and in particular the way–I shouldn’t have said the tech is doing to us. I want to learn right now what the algorithm and the models are doing to us right now.

Johann Hari The current business, I would say the way I would just put it, I mean, the kind of technical term for it is what professor, the brilliant Professor Shoshana Zuboff at Harvard called surveillance capitalism. But I think the simplest way of putting it is just the current tech business model.

Jordan Sure. And I want to know what the current tech business model is actually doing. Is it changing our brains? This is what we’ve been trying to get at with some of the questions we’re asking this week. How is it actually changing the way our brains work? And if, you know, is it permanent? The lead damage in the 80s was permanent. Is this?

Johann Hari No, it’s definitely not permanent. Everything you do changes your brain. If you learned French now, it would change your brain. And the evidence is very clear that we can absolutely heal from these problems. Right. And I think it helps to think if we do this in the right way, I think it helps to think about Dr. James Williams, who I mentioned before, the guy who worked at the heart of Google, and then quickly, he was just horrified and became, I would argue, the leading philosopher attention in the world, had this incredibly revealing moment. He was speaking at a tech conference, and the audience was people designing literally the things that everyone listening your kids are using today. And he said to them, if there’s anyone here who wants to live in the world that we’re creating, please put up your hand. And not one person put up their hand. Nobody.

And I think the way we need to understand this is we’re in a race, right? On the one side, you’ve got all of these twelve factors that I write about in Stolen Focus, one of which–this is only one, although a big one, that are invading and degrading our ability to focus and pay attention. And on the current trajectory, those forces are on course to become more and more sophisticated and powerful. Right. One of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, Paul Graham, said, on the current trajectory of the world will be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40. Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to your kid than Facebook. Okay? Now imagine the next crack-like iteration of TikTok in the Metaverse. That’s one side of the race, right?

On the other side of the race, we’ve got to have a movement of all of us saying, no, you don’t get to do this to us. No, you don’t get to do this to our children. No, that’s not a good life. No, we choose a life where we can think clearly, where our children can play outside, where we can read books. We choose a life of depth and attention. We’re sure we have some buzzy moments of distraction, which are great, but that doesn’t dominate our whole lives and that is completely achievable. Human beings have taken on bigger fights than this, right? I’m gay. Gay people were imprisoned and burned for 2000 years and now I can get married, right? Any woman listening to this, I don’t want to underestimate how much further we got to go achieving liberation for me. But my grandmothers, whom I loved deeply, when they were the age I am now, when they were 42, one of them was a working class Scottish woman, the other was a Swiss woman living on the side of a mountain. My grandmothers weren’t allowed to have bank accounts in their own names because they were married women. It was legal for their husbands to rape them, as it was legal for a man everywhere in the world to rape his wife. My Swiss grandmother wasn’t even allowed to vote when she was the age I am now, right? You think about the difference between my grandmother’s life and my niece’s lives, right? How did millennia of entrenched patriarchy take such a kicking be so diminished? Again, I stress we still got much further to go, because ordinary people banded together and said, no, we’re not taking this shit. No, you don’t get to do this to us.

But to do this with attention, it requires a profound shift in consciousness. We need to stop blaming ourselves. If you’re struggling to focus, it’s not your fault, right? We need to stop blaming the tech as if it was just technology itself that’s doing it, rather than the narrower aspects of the tech. And we need to stop asking only for small tweaks, right? Because at the moment it’s like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then leaning forward and going hey, buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn’t scratch so much. You want to go, well, screw you, I’ll learn to meditate. That’s really valuable. But you need to stop pouring into powder on me. And we need a shift in consciousness. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and together we can take them back.

But you don’t get what you don’t fight for. We have to decide do we value attention? Do we think it’s important? I think it’s our greatest quality as human being, certainly one of them. If we decide we value it, we’ve got to take on the forces that are systematically trashing it.

Jordan I wish we had another hour to explore everything else that’s in the book. I want to urge people to check out the book and learn more about it. The first 23 pages are amazing. But before you go, if you could, it’s fascinating because on the one hand I hear your call to action and I think that is absolutely necessary. On the other hand, I wonder if you came across in your research any of those more practical but smaller ways that people could perhaps try out one of the concepts and see if it works. Because I think we’re all searching for something and yeah, to your point, it does sound like saying just learn to meditate is not enough. But I would love to give people something to take away and try just so they can get the flavor of what you’ve been through during this journey.

Johann Hari Yes, with all of the twelve factors that I write about, install and focus that are harming our attention, with the exception of one, there are two levels at which we’ve got to tackle it. I think of them as defense and offense. Right. We’ve got to defend ourselves and our kids as individuals and we’ve got to take on these big forces. And you’re asking me specifically about defense and I go through dozens of things that we can do to defend ourselves. But I’ll give you a very practical example. I need to preface this by saying I am not being paid commissioned by these people, although their sales have massively gone up since I started talking about them. So I have here, stupidly, I’m pointing to it, but you can’t see because there’s a podcast, something called a KSafe. It’s very simple. It’s a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial at the top and it locks your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. I use that for 4 hours a day to do my writing. I won’t sit down and watch a movie with my partner unless we both put our phones in the phone jail. I won’t have my friends around for dinner unless everyone imprisons their phone. And it’s really hard at first, right? But you see the joy on people’s faces when they get a bit of focus back. So I would say everyone should buy a KSafe.

Also you can install on your laptop and your phone an app called Freedom, which will cut you off either from specific websites, say you were addicted to Instagram. You can tell it how long to not let you be able to access Instagram on your laptop and phone. Or you could just cut it off in the entire internet if you want for anything between I think it’s five minutes and a whole day. Anyone who has kids, the number of people I know who spend a lot of their time shouting at their kids to get off their phones while they themselves are staring at their phones, buy a KSafe and have an hour a day when everyone in the family puts their phone in the case safe. And you actually have to look at each other and talk to each other, like in the olden days. And also go through dozens more practical steps that people can take as individuals. And then, of course, the bigger picture where we’ve got to take on the forces and these are not sometimes people act like it’s a choice. Either you do the individual things or you do the collective things. In fact, those individual steps will make it easier to make the collective steps and the collective steps make it easier to take on to do the individual steps. And absolutely, we need both, clearly.

Jordan Johann, thank you so much for this. Really illuminating, fascinating.

Johann Hari Oh, thank you so much. And I meant to say, all my publishers tease me that anyone who wants to know where to get the audiobook, the ebook or the physical book can go to www.stolenfocusbook.com. But more importantly, you can listen for free on the website to audio of loads of the experts we’ve talked about and loads of other people that we haven’t got to. I’ve really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for having me.

Jordan You are very welcome. And we will throw the link to the website into the show notes, so anybody who’s listening can click it right from there. Thanks again.

Johann Hari Cheers.

Jordan Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus. I will make a postnote here just to tell you that I did, after our conversation, manage to read all of Johann’s book. It was the first new nonfiction book I had completed in almost a year. I can’t recommend it any more than that. That was The Big Story. You can find us at thebigstorypodcast.ca. Talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN, email us [click here!], and of course, call us. Leave a voicemail 416-935-5935. If you’re listening to this podcast in an app that lets you rate and review, please do so, if you’d so kind. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.

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