Speaker 1: Most things worth saying will not be agreed with immediately.
Speaker 1: Probably if everyone agrees with you straight away, what you're
Speaker 1: saying didn't need to be said. Welcome to the one
Speaker 1: you feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance
Speaker 1: of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
Speaker 1: or you are what you think ring true. And yet
Speaker 1: for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good Wolfe, thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode,
Speaker 1: who has been on before, is Johan Harry, a writer
Speaker 1: and journalist. He's written for The New York Times, Lamond,
Speaker 1: The Guardian and other newspapers, and his TED talks have
Speaker 1: been viewed over seventy million times. His work has been
Speaker 1: praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey
Speaker 1: to Noam Chomsky to Joe Rogan. Hi, Johan, welcome to
Speaker 1: the show. I'm really glad to be back with you. Eric.
Speaker 1: I'm so happy to have you on. As I've said before,
Speaker 1: you're one of my favorite guests, so I'm always happy
Speaker 1: when we get a chance to talk. I'm so pleased
Speaker 1: to hear that, and you're one of my favorite podcasts.
Speaker 1: I so well, thank you the marriage made in heaven
Speaker 1: and you can check. I don't say that to any
Speaker 1: other podcasts ses. I've never said that to podcast days before.
Speaker 1: So I would like everyone to scour the internet and
Speaker 1: confirm you're not my side piece poco a pocast. You're
Speaker 1: the main guy, the main guy. We're going to get
Speaker 1: to your book Stolen Focus why you can't pay attention
Speaker 1: in just a minute. But before we do, let's start
Speaker 1: the way we always do, which is we start with
Speaker 1: that parable. There's a grandfather talking with his grandson. He says,
Speaker 1: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 1: and hatred and fear, and the grandson stops and he
Speaker 1: thinks about it for a second. He looks up at
Speaker 1: his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?
Speaker 1: And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to start off by asking you what that parable
Speaker 1: means to you in your life and in the work
Speaker 1: that you do. I'm very impressed that you can still
Speaker 1: say that story with animation, and because you know, you know,
Speaker 1: you've said it like more than four times, so I'm
Speaker 1: very impressed by that. You know, it's funny. I actually
Speaker 1: thought about that parable quite a lot when I was
Speaker 1: writing Stolen Focused. There was a particular moment when I
Speaker 1: found myself thinking about it. So for the book, I
Speaker 1: took three months completely off the internet and with no smartphone,
Speaker 1: and I went to a place called Provincetown in Cape Cod.
Speaker 1: And honestly I didn't even think of it particularly as
Speaker 1: a kind of experiment. I thought of it as I
Speaker 1: can't bear that my attention is deteriorating, that with every
Speaker 1: year that passes, things that require deep focus feel more
Speaker 1: and more like running up and down escalator. I just
Speaker 1: need a break. But it actually ended up giving me
Speaker 1: some useful insights, both about what we can do and
Speaker 1: the limits of some of the things we try to do.
Speaker 1: But I remember thinking a lot while I was there
Speaker 1: about the difference between a day that's filled we're looking
Speaker 1: at social media and a day that's filled with reading
Speaker 1: books that feeding yourself with these different forms of being
Speaker 1: with the world. And I found myself thinking about Marshall
Speaker 1: mcluen's famous line, the medium is the message, which I
Speaker 1: had never really understood obviously here, but it's a kind
Speaker 1: of pliche. You hear people talking about it all the time,
Speaker 1: and for people who don't know. Marshall mcluen was a
Speaker 1: Canadian information the theorist who became very famous in the
Speaker 1: sixties partly by talking about this. And I read mccluen
Speaker 1: while I was out there. I ordered it from a bookstore,
Speaker 1: physical bookstore, and I think what mccluen was saying, And
Speaker 1: there's actually a debate about what mcluen was saying, but
Speaker 1: the way the way I understood it is mccluen was arguing,
Speaker 1: when you absorb a medium, whether it's a book, television,
Speaker 1: or although of course mccluen I didn't see this, then
Speaker 1: social media it's like you're putting on a set of
Speaker 1: goggles and seeing the world through that medium. So when
Speaker 1: you watch television, which of course mcluen was primarily thinking about.
Speaker 1: When you watch television, doesn't matter whether you watch Wheel
Speaker 1: of Fortune or The Wire, you are absorbing a view
Speaker 1: of the world where the world will begin to look
Speaker 1: to you like television. So you know, give the impression
Speaker 1: that the world is very fast, that it's very speedy.
Speaker 1: Even just think about things like if you read novels
Speaker 1: that were written before the advent of cinema and television,
Speaker 1: the way they talk about memory is quite different to
Speaker 1: the way we talk about memory. You think about the
Speaker 1: concept of the flashback, which we have, right, which doesn't
Speaker 1: exist in the same way. Of course, people talk about
Speaker 1: human memory, but not in the same grammar that's created
Speaker 1: by television. Right. So when television comes along, it trains
Speaker 1: us to see the world is shaped like television. But
Speaker 1: I thought a lot about what is the message hidden
Speaker 1: in the medium of the book versus the message hidden
Speaker 1: in the medium of social media. So if we think
Speaker 1: about let's say Twitter, right, it doesn't matter whether you're
Speaker 1: Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or Bubba the Love sponge. Right
Speaker 1: when you tweet, you are agreeing to a certain set
Speaker 1: of implicit ideas that are embedded in that medium. One
Speaker 1: of the ideas is the world can and should be
Speaker 1: described in two characters. You can meaningfully describe a lot
Speaker 1: of the world in two characters. Secondly, what matters is
Speaker 1: that you respond to things very quickly. Thirdly, what matters
Speaker 1: is whether people immediately agree with what you have decided
Speaker 1: to say very quickly in two characters. The way you
Speaker 1: win at Twitter is if lots of people immediately agree
Speaker 1: with you, right, Or think about Instagram, what's the message
Speaker 1: implicit in that? The message is What matters is how
Speaker 1: you look on the outside and whether people like how
Speaker 1: you look on the outside. We could go through you know,
Speaker 1: there's a message inplicit in Facebook that friendship, what human
Speaker 1: friendship is is to present the edited highlights of your
Speaker 1: life for others to view, and for you to view
Speaker 1: the edited highlights of their life. Have you to exchange
Speaker 1: likes and comments on these edited highlights right from There's
Speaker 1: other messages implicit in it as well. So I thought
Speaker 1: about those messages, which of course I was suddenly deprived
Speaker 1: of when I was off the internet. Obviously, throughout my
Speaker 1: life I've read a huge number of books. But I
Speaker 1: was reading a lot of books, and I was thrilled
Speaker 1: that my attention went back to what it had been
Speaker 1: in my early twenties, really long periods of deep reading.
Speaker 1: And I thought, why do I feel so much better
Speaker 1: when I'm reading a book compared to when I'm on
Speaker 1: social media? And I think it's partly because there's a
Speaker 1: message implicit in the printed book. Right, It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: what the book says that this specific book, there's a
Speaker 1: message in the form of the book which says, Firstly,
Speaker 1: it's worth just thinking about one thing for many hours.
Speaker 1: Slow down, right, think about you want to just glance
Speaker 1: the books behind me, You want to think about Joseph Stalin,
Speaker 1: you want to think about Columbia in the whatever it
Speaker 1: might be. It is worth taking many hours to think
Speaker 1: about this one thing. Secondly, it is worth thinking about
Speaker 1: the internal lives of other people in great depth and
Speaker 1: realizing that other people have rich, complex internal lives like you.
Speaker 1: And it's worth spending your time with an object that
Speaker 1: is going to be saying the same thing a hundred
Speaker 1: years from now as it says today. Right. And I
Speaker 1: realized in some deep sense, I don't agree with the
Speaker 1: messages implicit in the mediums of Twitter and Facebook. Right. Actually,
Speaker 1: very few things that are worth saying can be said
Speaker 1: in two characters. Actually, it really doesn't matter whether people
Speaker 1: agree with you immediately or not. In fact, most things
Speaker 1: worth saying will not be agreed with immediately. Probably if
Speaker 1: everyone agrees with you straight away, what you're saying didn't
Speaker 1: need to be said, right. I think about most of
Speaker 1: the people I admire, you know, whether it's Non Chomsky
Speaker 1: or Joan Rivers. Actually a lot of people really didn't
Speaker 1: agree with them initially, right, and if you don't agree
Speaker 1: with them now. But also, very few things that are
Speaker 1: worth saying should be said immediately and at great speed. Actually,
Speaker 1: most important insights require you to slow down, think through
Speaker 1: the complexity of a situation. Not in every instance. There's
Speaker 1: value in some immediate responses. There's times when it's necessary.
Speaker 1: And I realized I kind of thought to myself, be
Speaker 1: careful what mediums you expose yourself to. Be careful what
Speaker 1: technologies you expose yourself to, because over time, your consciousness
Speaker 1: will come to be shaped to a significant degree by
Speaker 1: the medium as you look at. Right, if you feed
Speaker 1: yourself very heavily with social media, you will begin to
Speaker 1: implicitly think of the world using those messages. You just
Speaker 1: can't be plugged into a reward system Oh my god,
Speaker 1: he got five likes and I got one. You can't
Speaker 1: be plugged into a machinery like that without starting some
Speaker 1: level psychologically to try to compete in the architecture of
Speaker 1: that machinery. And this is a very pompous way of
Speaker 1: putting it. But I want my mind to be shaped
Speaker 1: like a novel, not like a TikTok feed, not like
Speaker 1: a Twitter feed. I don't want to be thinking in
Speaker 1: tiny pellets of anger and snark. I want to be
Speaker 1: thinking in rich, complex ways about the inner lives of
Speaker 1: other people over many hours, many days, many months. I
Speaker 1: want to be thinking in a sustained way. So I
Speaker 1: want to feed my sentences. Of course, not just to books.
Speaker 1: There's ore many other ways of feeding yourself in that way.
Speaker 1: At the moment, we're feeding ourselves very heavily with something
Speaker 1: that contains messages but I think are not You can
Speaker 1: say they're not true, but their value judgments that's a
Speaker 1: harder thing to say. That contain value judgments that I
Speaker 1: think are profoundly destructive to the human psyche and destructive
Speaker 1: to human society actually in ways that I'm sure we'll
Speaker 1: talk about, which is not to say that all social
Speaker 1: media is bad, and I'm sure we'll get to that
Speaker 1: as well. But I thought about that very parable when
Speaker 1: I was thinking this through, what have I been feeding
Speaker 1: myself with? And how do I feel when I feed
Speaker 1: myself with that versus how do I feel when I
Speaker 1: feed myself with slower, deeperforms of media. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1: I really cut that part of your book. Actually, the
Speaker 1: way you said it was I realized one of the
Speaker 1: key reasons why social media makes me feel so out
Speaker 1: of joint with the world is that I think all
Speaker 1: these ideas, the messages implicit in these mediums are wrong
Speaker 1: and that I just bam, it hit me. I was like,
Speaker 1: that's exactly it. Like, I'm the same way I do
Speaker 1: not believe the world can be explained in two under
Speaker 1: an eighty characters. You know, there's another thing that makes
Speaker 1: me think of I don't know who said this, but
Speaker 1: they said the least viral thing you can say is
Speaker 1: I don't know, And I was like, it's one of
Speaker 1: my favorite phrases, right, I don't know, you know, like
Speaker 1: there's a curiosity that I don't know, there's an openness
Speaker 1: that I don't know. I love that. That's so brilliant.
Speaker 1: I remember seeing on the news a few years back,
Speaker 1: I forget what it was, one of the rolling news channels,
Speaker 1: and they were talking about something that happened between Israel
Speaker 1: and the Palestinians, presumably one of the wars that was happening,
Speaker 1: and they said, tweet us with your views of the
Speaker 1: Israel Palestine conflict. And I thought the idea that something
Speaker 1: is complex and fraught with complexity and ambiguity. If you
Speaker 1: think that anything worthwhile can be said about Israel, Palestine
Speaker 1: and children eating characters, I don't want to hear what
Speaker 1: you have to say about it, right, Yeah. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: other thing that you said that struck me as we
Speaker 1: were talking about social media and you described the phrase
Speaker 1: that I've tried to say this in a lot of
Speaker 1: different ways, but I never said it as well as
Speaker 1: you did. What I'm about to read, because when we
Speaker 1: talk about being on social media all the time, I've
Speaker 1: talked about well, I feel distracted, I feel sort of edgy,
Speaker 1: I feel kind of scattered, I feel tired, in a
Speaker 1: way I don't know. But what you said was I
Speaker 1: understood why when I felt constantly distracted, I didn't just
Speaker 1: feel irritated. I felt diminished. And I was like, that's
Speaker 1: the word I've been looking for for what too much
Speaker 1: time on social media makes me feel. It's not just scattered,
Speaker 1: that's part of it, but diminished, Like I have less
Speaker 1: to offer the world than I did before that, And
Speaker 1: I actually I am just inside like shrunken by taking
Speaker 1: part in that medium you want expressing, and the media's
Speaker 1: medium says they are currently structured and they could work differently.
Speaker 1: We can talk about that. You're consenting to a whole
Speaker 1: set of ideas that people like you and me don't
Speaker 1: agree with and would never dream of teaching to our children, right,
Speaker 1: You would never want to communicate your children what matters
Speaker 1: in life. Matters in life is to say things really quickly,
Speaker 1: really confidently, really aggressively, and to immediately obsess on how
Speaker 1: many people agree or disagree with the thing you said,
Speaker 1: extremely confidently, really quickly. A dream of teaching the children.
Speaker 1: I love that I would. I would regard someone who
Speaker 1: taught their children those messages as abuses too strong a word,
Speaker 1: but as really harming their kids. Right, and this fits
Speaker 1: with a wider issues, you know, Eric, which is, of course,
Speaker 1: this is one dimension of a much wider crisis, a
Speaker 1: crisis in which we are all being diminished, which is
Speaker 1: for a long time, I thought when I felt my
Speaker 1: own attention fraying, when I saw it happening to lots
Speaker 1: of people I knew, and I said to them in
Speaker 1: a very smug way, which some of my friends have
Speaker 1: reminded me of recently, every generation thinks this, right, everyone thinks.
Speaker 1: You know, you get older, your brain deteriorates, and you
Speaker 1: blame the deterioration of your brain. You mistake the deterioration
Speaker 1: of your brain for the deterioration of the world. Right.
Speaker 1: You know, you can find letters from monks nearly a
Speaker 1: thousand years ago writing to each other going, well, my
Speaker 1: attention ain't what it used to be. Right. It's not
Speaker 1: exact quote, but that's the gist of it. But then, actually,
Speaker 1: I traveled all over the world, and I interviewed the
Speaker 1: leading experts on attention of focus, and I went to
Speaker 1: places that have been profoundly affected by changes and attention.
Speaker 1: From our favela in Rio, where attention had collapsed in
Speaker 1: a particularly disastrous way to a company in New Zealand
Speaker 1: that found a really interesting way to restore their workers attention.
Speaker 1: And actually, based on everything I saw in the evidence,
Speaker 1: I think there is good evidence that we really are
Speaker 1: in a serious attention crisis. That this is somewhat analogist
Speaker 1: to the obesity crisis or the climate crisis. That's something
Speaker 1: as a professor Sooner Layman, who are interviewed in Copenhagen
Speaker 1: in Denmark, said to me when he sawt he he
Speaker 1: did the first study that proved our collective attention span.
Speaker 1: It's been shrinking, he said to me when he saw
Speaker 1: the data, God, damnit, something really is happening here. And
Speaker 1: you can see this in a whole array of forms.
Speaker 1: And I learned that there's there's actually scientific evidence for
Speaker 1: twelve factors enhanced or degrade attention, and I was really
Speaker 1: surprised that actually tech is only one of them. That
Speaker 1: tech I do not think is the biggest, And actually
Speaker 1: it's a narrower aspect of technology that is causing this problem.
Speaker 1: Then we sometimes think it's a very deep contribution to
Speaker 1: the problem. But I think we need to reframe how
Speaker 1: we think about attention across the board, and we need
Speaker 1: to reframe how we think about the tech component as well. Excellent, Well,
Speaker 1: thanks for leading us kind of back into the book.
Speaker 1: And as you say, your point is in the book
Speaker 1: that there are these deeper forces at work that are
Speaker 1: damaging our attention, and the attention is actually something really
Speaker 1: really important. Right, So first, maybe say why to you
Speaker 1: attention is a thing that is so important to try
Speaker 1: and preserve. I think there's kind of two levels to
Speaker 1: thinking about that. So one is at personal level. The
Speaker 1: level of the individual attention is generally defined. It's a
Speaker 1: definition that goes back to William James, the founder of
Speaker 1: American psychology in the late nineteenth century. An incredible, man,
Speaker 1: is your ability to selectively attend to stimuli in your environment. Right. So,
Speaker 1: I'm sitting in a room talking to you, But if
Speaker 1: I really tried, I can hear my heater over there,
Speaker 1: and I can see that the light is flickering in
Speaker 1: the corner because I need to change the bulb over there,
Speaker 1: and I can see all my books around me, I
Speaker 1: can see my television there. I'm selectively attending to you.
Speaker 1: I'm talking to Eric. I'm filtering all that out. Now.
Speaker 1: When your attention breaks down. The average American college student,
Speaker 1: according to a small study, now focuses on any one
Speaker 1: task for sixty five seconds. In fact, the median amount
Speaker 1: they focus is nineteen seconds. And the average office worker
Speaker 1: now focuses on anyone task. According to Professor Gloria Marks's research,
Speaker 1: I interviewed her, the average office work enough focuses for
Speaker 1: three minutes. So you've got people whose entire working lives
Speaker 1: have dissolved into a sort of hail storm of tiny,
Speaker 1: little three minute chunks. Now, when that happens, it becomes
Speaker 1: much harder to formulate and achieve your goals in life. Right,
Speaker 1: pretty much anything anyone wants to achieve. Anyone listening, think
Speaker 1: about something you're proud of having achieved in your life.
Speaker 1: That achievement, whether it's being a good parent, or setting
Speaker 1: up a business, or writing a book, whatever it might
Speaker 1: be learning to play the guitar, that achievement took a
Speaker 1: lot of sustained attention and focus. And if your attention
Speaker 1: breaks down, your ability to achieve goals across the board
Speaker 1: breaks down, your abilities from connections with other human beings degrades.
Speaker 1: So does that level to it, Then there's a social
Speaker 1: level to it, which is a society of people whose
Speaker 1: attention breaks down will find it much harder to solve
Speaker 1: their collective problems, to identify the collective problems and solve
Speaker 1: that collective problems. I don't think it's a coincidence that
Speaker 1: this attention crisis is occurring at the same time as
Speaker 1: a really significant crisis in democracy across almost all the
Speaker 1: world's democracies. Now. Don't have a simplistic about this. There's
Speaker 1: many factors that are contributing to this democratic crisis and
Speaker 1: the kind of rocking and royaling of our democracies. But
Speaker 1: I think one factor is we can't pay sustained attention
Speaker 1: to problems. We can't listen to other people because listening
Speaker 1: requires sustained attention. And when we can't pay attention, and
Speaker 1: there's lots of research on this, we look for more
Speaker 1: simplistic solutions. We zone out complexity, We become more shallow,
Speaker 1: we become more angry and irritable. I think you can
Speaker 1: see these things happening. So individuals who can't focus face
Speaker 1: real problems. Society is comprised of individuals who can't focus
Speaker 1: face real problems, and I think you can see that
Speaker 1: is playing out all around us and then I think
Speaker 1: the core message from there is that, yes, there are
Speaker 1: some things that you as an individual can do to
Speaker 1: work on to improve your ability to pay attention, and
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about some of those things, but
Speaker 1: that this is a bigger problem, it's a more systematic problem,
Speaker 1: and that yes, you can make some changes individually, but
Speaker 1: you may only get so far with it. So share
Speaker 1: a little bit more about that. When I struggled to
Speaker 1: focus and pay attention, I would go into a very
Speaker 1: negative dialogue with myself. I would say, Oh, you're weak,
Speaker 1: you're lazy, you're not disciplined enough, funny enough. I had
Speaker 1: a kind of little epiphany about this when I went
Speaker 1: to interview a man called Professor Roy Baumeister very early
Speaker 1: in the research for the book. Is at the University
Speaker 1: of Queensland, and the Professor Baumeister is the leading expert
Speaker 1: on willpower in the world. He wrote a book called Willpower.
Speaker 1: People listening will probably know his famous experiment, the marshmallow experiment.
Speaker 1: So I go to see him and I said, don't
Speaker 1: think you're writing a book abou attention. This needs to
Speaker 1: be a problem here. And he said to me, you
Speaker 1: know it's funny. You should say that, because I just
Speaker 1: find I can't really pay attention anymore. I I just
Speaker 1: spend loads of time on my phone playing video games,
Speaker 1: and I'm sort of listening to him and say this,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, I didn't say this. So I was like,
Speaker 1: didn't you write a book called Willpower? I was like, Jesus,
Speaker 1: it's even happening to you, right. So I would go
Speaker 1: into sort of negative self recrimination and I would seek
Speaker 1: purely individual solutions. And I tried many individual solutions that
Speaker 1: I learned about based on the evidence, many of which
Speaker 1: helped me significantly. But I had an interesting moment. Obviously,
Speaker 1: I gave you an extreme act of willpower. I literally
Speaker 1: gave away all my internet connected devices for three months,
Speaker 1: and that led to all sorts of positive improvements. And
Speaker 1: then at the end of those three months, I thought, well,
Speaker 1: I've cracked the code here. I'm going to rediscipline and
Speaker 1: integrate all these insights and within a few months have
Speaker 1: been reunited with my devices. I was as bad as
Speaker 1: I've ever been, and I went to Moscow to interview
Speaker 1: Dr James Williams. Totally incredible. I think, arguably the most
Speaker 1: important philosoper of intention in the world. Today. He's a
Speaker 1: former Google engineer who left and did a PhD on
Speaker 1: attention at Oxford, And James said to me, what you
Speaker 1: got wrong by just trying to get out your own
Speaker 1: devices for three months is what you've done is a
Speaker 1: bit like thinking that the solution to air pollution is
Speaker 1: for you individually to wear a gas mask two days
Speaker 1: a week. Right now, He's not opposed to gas masks, right.
Speaker 1: If I lived in Beijing, I wear a gas mask.
Speaker 1: In fact, the air pollution is so bad here in London,
Speaker 1: there's an argument for wearing them here, but we all
Speaker 1: know that's not the solution, right The solution is to
Speaker 1: actually deal with the source of the air pollution. And
Speaker 1: for me, what I learned is there need to be
Speaker 1: two levels of our response to this attention crisis. One
Speaker 1: level has to be individually protecting ourselves, right, and that's
Speaker 1: very important, and I talked about lots of ways we
Speaker 1: can do that. I'm strongly in favor of that, But
Speaker 1: I really worry about the fact that almost all the
Speaker 1: books about how to cope with these problems end there, right,
Speaker 1: because the truth is we're living in an environment that
Speaker 1: is pouring itching powder on us all the time, and
Speaker 1: what's happening is it's like the forces that are orwing
Speaker 1: inching powder honors, lean down and go. You know, you
Speaker 1: might want to learn how to meditate, then you wouldn't
Speaker 1: scratch so much. Right now, you can see we through
Speaker 1: that analogy. No, we need to stop these people pouring
Speaker 1: itching powder honors and sometimes, and I know that can
Speaker 1: sound a bit abstract, will get into lots of very
Speaker 1: concrete ways of both individually and collectively. We can deal
Speaker 1: with some of the twelve forses that are invading and
Speaker 1: destroying our attention. But I think we need to understand
Speaker 1: this in a more truthful and complex way than we
Speaker 1: have up to now. I think we've had a very
Speaker 1: simplistic approach. I certainly had a very simplistic approach about
Speaker 1: self blame, self criticism. I also think it can be
Speaker 1: slightly false to present it as conscious that even the
Speaker 1: way I've just put it to you is slightly simplistic,
Speaker 1: because sometimes it's gonna be framed us there's an individual
Speaker 1: solution and then there's these huge, grand political solutions. But
Speaker 1: actually the big solutions only happen if enough of us
Speaker 1: as individuals banned together and demand them right it's not.
Speaker 1: We don't wait for a messiah to suddenly deliver us
Speaker 1: from these collective problems, right, We'll wait forever. The collective
Speaker 1: solutions come from us individually, persuading each other and standing together,
Speaker 1: as we've seen with pretty much every positive change that's
Speaker 1: ever happened in history, right, every positive political change that's
Speaker 1: ever happened. Yes, So what conscious of all the things
Speaker 1: I've just says can sound rather abstractive. We don't give
Speaker 1: concrete examples, and I'm sure we'll get to those concrete examples.
Speaker 1: But you're absolutely right to raise right at the start.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the reasons why I'm so
Speaker 1: uncomfortable with simply giving the individual solutions, even though they
Speaker 1: have been hugely beneficial to me and will be beneficial
Speaker 1: to everyone listening if they do them, is this concept.
Speaker 1: It was thought off by the blossopher Lauren Berlance. He
Speaker 1: called it cruel optimism. A cruel optimism is where you
Speaker 1: take something with a really big social cause, like obesity, depression,
Speaker 1: attention problems, or addiction, and you offer people, in a
Speaker 1: very upbeat tone, a really simplistic solution. Hey, you can't focus,
Speaker 1: I've got great news. I've got the solution for you. You
Speaker 1: You just need to do ten minutes of this kind
Speaker 1: of meditation every morning. You're going to be fine, right,
Speaker 1: And it sounds very kind. You're off bring the person
Speaker 1: a solution. But the reason it's cruel is because although
Speaker 1: meditation has lots of positive effects, some in favor of it.
Speaker 1: I do it myself, but the vast majority of people,
Speaker 1: that's not going to solve the problem. Right. It will help,
Speaker 1: it's a good thing to do. But if you sell
Speaker 1: that as the solution and they try it and the
Speaker 1: individuals still can't focus, what they think is there's something
Speaker 1: really wrong with me. Right. What the cruel optimism whispers
Speaker 1: is the problem is in the system. The problem is
Speaker 1: in you, and that needs to all sorts of harm,
Speaker 1: and it takes us away from the bigger solutions. This
Speaker 1: chapter was a challenging one for me because I didn't
Speaker 1: know the term cruel optimism. Actually, I'm happy to have
Speaker 1: a term for something that I wrestle with in my
Speaker 1: own life in the work that I do, because there
Speaker 1: are times that a lot of what we do is
Speaker 1: putting out individual solutions to individual suffering and challenges. And
Speaker 1: at this discussion with my son, who's much more of
Speaker 1: a systematic activist type guy, you know, And so he'll
Speaker 1: say it's a way bigger problem than that, and I'll go,
Speaker 1: I agree, it is a way bigger problem. And you know,
Speaker 1: to use your analogy, still got to figure out how
Speaker 1: to put on the gas mask, you know, You've still
Speaker 1: got to do that. But the cruel optimism part is
Speaker 1: kind of, like you say, is this idea of giving
Speaker 1: people it's just really easy to solve your problems and
Speaker 1: all you gotta do is do this. The self help
Speaker 1: industry is known for basically saying I'll tell you to
Speaker 1: do something when you do it, instead of you turning
Speaker 1: back to me and saying the problem is with your method.
Speaker 1: The way it's all structured is the problem is about
Speaker 1: the person who's trying the method. It's almost a four
Speaker 1: proof way to keep people coming back. You know. It's
Speaker 1: so interesting because this is something I wrestle with in
Speaker 1: a similar way, and obviously I thought about it very
Speaker 1: deeply and talked to a lot of people about it
Speaker 1: for the book, and the way I came to think
Speaker 1: about it was the alternative to cruel optimism is not pessimism.
Speaker 1: The alternative cruel optimism is to level with people about
Speaker 1: the layers of the problem and to explain to them
Speaker 1: there's always things you can do as an individual, even
Speaker 1: if you are in solitary confinement and you've been put
Speaker 1: there for a crime you didn't commit in you're there
Speaker 1: for sixty years, even there, you can do something right.
Speaker 1: Primo Levi of course writes about this sort as Victor
Speaker 1: Frank or even people in the concentration camps who are
Speaker 1: entirely at the mercy in one sense of these monstrous
Speaker 1: what the Nazis had some agency in their own minds
Speaker 1: of nowhere else. So there's always things individuals can do,
Speaker 1: even if the mare gin is very small. But you
Speaker 1: want to also explain to people the truth, which is
Speaker 1: there are many layers to this. One layer to which
Speaker 1: you can respond is the individual level, and that will
Speaker 1: get you a certain way right, And there are other
Speaker 1: levels where you also cann exercise power. Now you can
Speaker 1: some powers and individual And I'm conscious that this can
Speaker 1: all sound a bit abstract. So if it's like I'll
Speaker 1: give you a very specific example of a problem which
Speaker 1: has both an individual and collective solution, I think so
Speaker 1: I'll go for a real low hanging fruit one one
Speaker 1: that I think everyone will get immediately. So I went
Speaker 1: to interview Professor Earl Miller, m i t one of
Speaker 1: the leading neuro scientists in the world, and he said
Speaker 1: to me, look, there's one thing, more than anything else
Speaker 1: that you've got to understand about the human brain. You
Speaker 1: are only able consciously to think about one thing at
Speaker 1: a time. That's it. The human brain has not significantly
Speaker 1: changed in forty years, ain't going to change on any
Speaker 1: time scale we're going to be around for This is
Speaker 1: just a limitation of your brain. But we have fallen
Speaker 1: for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they
Speaker 1: can follow seven forms of media at once. And what
Speaker 1: Professor Miller's colleagues found when they get people into the labs,
Speaker 1: not just teenagers, and they get them to think they're
Speaker 1: doing lots of things at the same time, is they
Speaker 1: discover that in fact, when you do that, you're juggling, right,
Speaker 1: You're switching very rapidly between us. So let's say somewhere
Speaker 1: in this room there's my phone. Let's say that while
Speaker 1: you were talking, I just glanced at my text messages
Speaker 1: for a moment, and I glanced back at you. What
Speaker 1: happens in that moment is my brain is focused on you,
Speaker 1: then it refocuses on the text message I write my
Speaker 1: friend Rob message me. Okay, that's what that means. Then
Speaker 1: I have to refocus on you. And that process that
Speaker 1: juggling incurs a cost is called the switch cost effect. Right.
Speaker 1: It takes a certain amount of your brain power. Now
Speaker 1: it doesn't sound like much, but in fact, switching in
Speaker 1: this way incurs for really quite significant costs. The first
Speaker 1: is there's just a certain amount of brain power and
Speaker 1: the switching itself that you lose. The second is that
Speaker 1: as you switch, you make more mistakes, and then you
Speaker 1: have to go back and correct your mistakes for obvious reasons.
Speaker 1: The third is you remember less of what you experience
Speaker 1: because encoding your experiences into memory takes a certain amount
Speaker 1: of mental energy that's just diminished if your brain is
Speaker 1: doing other stuff. And fourthly, this is more medium to
Speaker 1: long term effect. You become significantly less creative. Creativity comes
Speaker 1: from your mind wandering, thinking back over all the experiences
Speaker 1: you've had, and bringing together, popping together two ideas that
Speaker 1: have not previously been brought together. All of those things diminished.
Speaker 1: Now this can sound like a small effect. In fact,
Speaker 1: the evidence is pretty shocking on this. Actually, I'll give
Speaker 1: you just a small example. Hewlett Packard, the printer company,
Speaker 1: did a small study where they got a scientist to
Speaker 1: split a group of their workers into two groups. And
Speaker 1: the first was told, just do whatever your task for
Speaker 1: today is and we're not going to interrupt you. And
Speaker 1: the second task was told do whatever your task is
Speaker 1: for the day, and they were heavily interrupted with texts
Speaker 1: and emails. Then at the end of it they tested
Speaker 1: the i Q of both groups. The group that was
Speaker 1: not interrupted tested is having ten i Q points higher
Speaker 1: than the group that was interrupted. To give you a
Speaker 1: sense of how big that effect is, if you or
Speaker 1: me got stoned, now, if we smoke cannabis together, our
Speaker 1: i Q would dropped by about five points. So being
Speaker 1: severely distracted it has doubled the degrading effect on your attention,
Speaker 1: at least in the short term. As smoking cannabis, you
Speaker 1: will be better off sitting at your desk smoking a
Speaker 1: spliff and doing one thing at a time than sitting
Speaker 1: at your desk being constantly distracted and not smoking cannabis.
Speaker 1: It was a similar study by Carnegie Mellon University, they
Speaker 1: split under thirty eight students into two groups. They both
Speaker 1: did the same exam. One group was told do the
Speaker 1: exam in normal exam conditions, and the second group was told,
Speaker 1: you can leave your phone on and you can receive
Speaker 1: and send text messages. Now you'd expect instinctively the second
Speaker 1: group to do better because they could have cheated, right,
Speaker 1: they could have texted people and ask for the answer.
Speaker 1: In fact, the group that had texts on did twenty
Speaker 1: less well on average than the group that did it
Speaker 1: in exam conditions. Now we are all losing that of
Speaker 1: our brain power throughout the day. Professor Michael Posner at
Speaker 1: the University of Oregon found that if you're interrupted, it
Speaker 1: takes you twenty three minutes to get back to the
Speaker 1: same level of focus that you had before the interruption.
Speaker 1: But most of us never get twenty three minutes without
Speaker 1: being interrupted, so we're constantly the way Professor Miller said
Speaker 1: it to me at m I T S, we live
Speaker 1: in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation. Now there's both
Speaker 1: personal and collective solutions to that. So there's lots of
Speaker 1: personal solutions that obviously I write back in Style of
Speaker 1: Focus to give you a very obvious one. You can't
Speaker 1: see it here, Eric, but in the corner of my
Speaker 1: room over there, I've got white plastic tim to safe.
Speaker 1: It's called a case safe. Case Safe should start paying
Speaker 1: the commission because I recommended get every that. It's very simple.
Speaker 1: It's plastic safe. You take the lid off, you put
Speaker 1: your phone in it, you put the lid on, you
Speaker 1: turn the dial, and it will lock your phone away
Speaker 1: from between five minutes and a week whatever you tell
Speaker 1: it to lock it away for. Every day, I put
Speaker 1: my phone in that case safe for four hours, so
Speaker 1: I just get space to properly think without being interrupted.
Speaker 1: So that's an obvious individual solution, one of many individual
Speaker 1: solutions to this this problem. But there's a reason why
Speaker 1: we also have to think at this collective level because
Speaker 1: a lot of people, when they've heard what I just said,
Speaker 1: I put my phone away for four hours a day,
Speaker 1: will experience me saying that as a bit like if
Speaker 1: I'd gone up to a homeless person and said, hey, buddy,
Speaker 1: do you know what would make you feel much better?
Speaker 1: It would be if you went into that fancy restaurant
Speaker 1: over there and you had a really nice dinner. You
Speaker 1: feel much better. Right. The homeless person entirely understandably would
Speaker 1: say screw you. They won't like me, and lots of
Speaker 1: people hearing that will go, yeah, I'd love to not
Speaker 1: be interrupted, screw you. I can't do that, right. And
Speaker 1: there's a place that dealt with this, and there's lots
Speaker 1: of places that have dealt with this. Give an example
Speaker 1: of one that I went to. So in France, they
Speaker 1: had a huge debate about what they called la burnout,
Speaker 1: which I don't think you need me to translate, and
Speaker 1: under pressure from labor unions, the French government appointed a
Speaker 1: guy called Bruno met Ling, who was the head of Orange,
Speaker 1: they're leading telecoms company, to investigate this, figure out what's
Speaker 1: going on. So met Ling did all this research and
Speaker 1: he discovered that thirty of French workers felt they could
Speaker 1: never stop checking email or turn off their texts because
Speaker 1: their boss could message them at any time of the
Speaker 1: day or night and they would get in trouble if
Speaker 1: they didn't answer. So they were never mentally unplugging, they
Speaker 1: were never physically unplugging. Right, They were in this constant ratchet.
Speaker 1: I mean I remember when we were kids, the only
Speaker 1: people who were on call were the prime minister and doctors,
Speaker 1: and even doctors weren't on call constantly. Right now, almost
Speaker 1: half the economy spends their time on call. So Mettling
Speaker 1: proposed a very simple solution that was then passed into law.
Speaker 1: It's called the right to disconnect. It's very simple, says
Speaker 1: two things. One, you have a right to have legally
Speaker 1: defined work ours, written work hours that are stipulated to
Speaker 1: you before you start work. And you have a right
Speaker 1: outside of those work hours to not have to check
Speaker 1: your email on your phone. So I went to Paris
Speaker 1: spoke to lots of people about this. Big companies now
Speaker 1: get fined rent to kill. When I was just before
Speaker 1: I was there, got find seventy euros because they criticized
Speaker 1: a worker for not checking his work email an hour
Speaker 1: after his work hours had ended. Right now, you can
Speaker 1: see how that is a collective solution that was fought
Speaker 1: for by French workers through their labor unions. They have
Speaker 1: very powerful unions in France because they banned together. That
Speaker 1: was fought for by ordinary French workers. There is a
Speaker 1: collective solution that frees up individuals to make individual solutions.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's framed as individuals versus collective solutions. But actually
Speaker 1: the collective solutions make it possible to make individual changes.
Speaker 1: There's many examples like this. I think that's an example
Speaker 1: of problem individual solution, collective solution, and people can see
Speaker 1: how the collective solution adds an extra layer that we
Speaker 1: can't get to a lot. Maybe some people listening will
Speaker 1: be so powerful in their workforce that they can go
Speaker 1: to their boss and go, you know what, I'm just
Speaker 1: not checking my email after I leave at five pm.
Speaker 1: But the vast majority of people are not going to
Speaker 1: be in that position, right. That's why you have to
Speaker 1: have a collective fight, not just an individual fight. And
Speaker 1: I think the way you explain that is really really good,
Speaker 1: and it kind of sort of leads us into one
Speaker 1: of the more you called it I think controversial parts
Speaker 1: of the book, which is a discussion between you and
Speaker 1: another previous guests of the show, near Al about this right,
Speaker 1: because what he's saying is, look, there's do not disturb
Speaker 1: button on your phone. There's a way to turn off
Speaker 1: all these notifications. You can just very easily go do this, right,
Speaker 1: And then your point is, and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: nuance going to be lost in this, So I encourage
Speaker 1: people before you say anything about this, you should read
Speaker 1: the whole section. And I know, Johan, you posted the
Speaker 1: interview or conversations between you guys on your website, So
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to foment a debate between two people
Speaker 1: here in any way, shape or form. But it's an
Speaker 1: important part of the book, which is he says, the
Speaker 1: tools are there, it's your responsibility turn them off. And you,
Speaker 1: as you just eloquently said, not everybody can do that, right,
Speaker 1: And so I think what you said is really great,
Speaker 1: which is we got to look at the layers here, right,
Speaker 1: Because I know there are people coaching clients I've worked
Speaker 1: for before who could go to their boss and say, look,
Speaker 1: I'm just not going to be answering emails overnight. And
Speaker 1: they could do that. They choose not to do that
Speaker 1: because some of its culturally condition, but some of it
Speaker 1: is as NEAR would say, it's their internal trigger, it's
Speaker 1: their own anxiety like to be connected. I gotta know
Speaker 1: what's going on. I gotta know what's going on. So
Speaker 1: I think both things can be true. But I think
Speaker 1: what you're pointing out is that for a lot of us,
Speaker 1: and this gets to I think the cruel optimism bit
Speaker 1: too for a lot of people, these strategies and solutions
Speaker 1: that will work, they might work, and for many people
Speaker 1: they won't work at all, and the people that do
Speaker 1: are often very privileged. You know. I think you just
Speaker 1: put that really well, and I'm grateful to Near for
Speaker 1: engaging with me. And there's a lot in what he
Speaker 1: says that I agree strongly with. But I felt two
Speaker 1: levels of discomfort. So Near talks a lot about well.
Speaker 1: The phrase he used to me is people should just
Speaker 1: push the fucking button. Right, They've got a button on
Speaker 1: their phone that they can turn up on the notifications.
Speaker 1: He says, this is actually really simple, right, people should
Speaker 1: just push the fucking button. That kind of thing, and
Speaker 1: I want to be fatting in There are some collective
Speaker 1: solutions that Near is in favor of. He's not entirely
Speaker 1: focused on the individual. I think the collective solutions he
Speaker 1: proposes are very small, but there are some. But there
Speaker 1: are two levels at which I was uncomfortable with what
Speaker 1: he said. One is the cruel optimism element that we've
Speaker 1: talked about, and it's interesting he he uses an analogy
Speaker 1: that I think is really interesting and revealing. When Near
Speaker 1: as a child he was obese, which is very surprising
Speaker 1: when you see him now, because he's like, he looks
Speaker 1: quite buff to me now. And he overcame his obesity
Speaker 1: by realizing that he was emotionally eating to deal with distress,
Speaker 1: and he overcame that, right. And he extends that analogy
Speaker 1: in a way that will be extendable for some people.
Speaker 1: And I think he over extends it in a way
Speaker 1: that becomes cruel optimism. If we look at the obesity crisis.
Speaker 1: You know, if you look at a photograph of a
Speaker 1: beach in the United States in nineteen seventy, everyone is
Speaker 1: what we would call slim or buff, right, everyone. There's
Speaker 1: no fat people on the beach, right, And that's not
Speaker 1: that the fact people were hiding away. There was almost
Speaker 1: no obesity in nineties seventy, right, And what happened. The
Speaker 1: average American is getting twenty two pounds. And that's not
Speaker 1: because they all individually failed or individually ate their feelings.
Speaker 1: It's because our entire food supply system change in ways
Speaker 1: that causes obesity. It's because the way our cities work
Speaker 1: essentially impossible to walk or bike around many American cities.
Speaker 1: I spend a lot of my time in Las Vegas
Speaker 1: try walking anywhere in Vegas. It's impossible. Right. So there's
Speaker 1: one level of which I feel it's overly simplistic and
Speaker 1: it's cruel optimism. But there's a second level at which
Speaker 1: I'm uncomfortable with it, which I discussed with him. And
Speaker 1: to be fair, people should listen to his response, which
Speaker 1: is posted on the book's website, Stolen Focus book dot com,
Speaker 1: because I don't feel like it can entirely fairly summarize
Speaker 1: his argument. But Near wrote this book saying you can
Speaker 1: get control of your attention really easily, you know, push
Speaker 1: the fucking button, that kind of thing. And to be fair,
Speaker 1: proposes various techniques, all of which I'm in favor of,
Speaker 1: and I discussed some of them in Stolen Focus. But
Speaker 1: he wrote a book before that, a book called Hooked.
Speaker 1: So Near as a tech designer, and he wrote a
Speaker 1: book called Hooked, which, as he describes it, as a
Speaker 1: cookbook for tech designers to figure out how to manipulate
Speaker 1: human behavior. So a typical headline on his website giving
Speaker 1: advice to people was want to hook your users, drive
Speaker 1: them crazy? Right, And in Hooked he describes a series
Speaker 1: of very powerful techniques which he describes as designed to
Speaker 1: hook people, to create very strong cravings in them. And
Speaker 1: this has been a very influential book. The head of
Speaker 1: Microsoft held it up and told all her workers to
Speaker 1: read it. Lots of apps have been designed using this advice. Right,
Speaker 1: And what I felt very uncomfortable with is he writes
Speaker 1: this book saying, hook your users. I have seen kids
Speaker 1: in my life become hooked by precisely the techniques that
Speaker 1: near has advocated. And then when they do become hooked,
Speaker 1: he says, well, you could just solve it real easily,
Speaker 1: just sort yourself out, push the fucking button, right. And
Speaker 1: to me, there's a disparity between the thinness of the
Speaker 1: personal solutions he advocates and the power of the big
Speaker 1: invasive forces he advocates. Right, So he talks about these
Speaker 1: very powerful techniques of reinforcement that are applied to two people,
Speaker 1: the cravings to use his words drive them crazy, and
Speaker 1: then his solutions and things like picture yourself as a
Speaker 1: leaf on a river meditating. I mean, there's a real
Speaker 1: disparity between these things, and you can see how. And
Speaker 1: I want to be clear, I do not believe this
Speaker 1: is conscious on his part. I don't think it is
Speaker 1: mendacious or anything. But you can see how this is
Speaker 1: how big tech wants us to think about our attention problems. Right.
Speaker 1: They drive us crazy and then they tell us, well,
Speaker 1: what's wrong. We've given you the tools to solve the problem.
Speaker 1: Just push the fucking mutton right, And sorry to keep
Speaker 1: repeating that phrase. The reminds me there's a great Israeli
Speaker 1: pop song called push the Mutton. Um to me, that
Speaker 1: disparity makes me very uncomfortable, and as Dr James Williams
Speaker 1: said to me, it lets the people who are doing
Speaker 1: this to us off the hook. Yeah. Yeah, I have
Speaker 1: a couple of thoughts on that. One is I agree
Speaker 1: with you. I mean I often when I'm working with
Speaker 1: a coaching client, I'll have somebody say something like, well,
Speaker 1: I didn't write today because you know, I was just
Speaker 1: gonna watch one episode of my favorite show on Netflix.
Speaker 1: Then I was going to write. I was like, that
Speaker 1: is never going to work. Like, there are people who
Speaker 1: are incredibly smart, people who are sitting around and their
Speaker 1: thing they're thinking and spending lots of energy on is
Speaker 1: how do I get that guy not to turn it
Speaker 1: off after this one show? So you are fighting a
Speaker 1: losing battle if you structure things that way. I mean,
Speaker 1: another example doesn't apply exactly, but it does have some relevance,
Speaker 1: which would be it's a whole lot harder to stop
Speaker 1: snorting cocaine if you're you know, at a crack house, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's just when somebody wants to get sober. We
Speaker 1: try and remove our elves, you know, but as we're saying,
Speaker 1: we can't really remove ourselves. The vast majority of people
Speaker 1: can't do what you did, which was go away for
Speaker 1: three months, and even you can't do that all the time. Right,
Speaker 1: That's a that's a pretty rare, rare thing. So I
Speaker 1: agree with you about that general idea that we've got
Speaker 1: these really smart, powerful forces that are that are going
Speaker 1: against us. And I had another point that is now
Speaker 1: gone to me, and is how how apropos is thatses
Speaker 1: of destruction? I think that's really important what you've just said,
Speaker 1: And it was really interesting one of the things I
Speaker 1: took from many things I learned, but partly from my
Speaker 1: conversations with Near the way Near I think we'd like
Speaker 1: to frame this. Perhaps that's unfair the way I think
Speaker 1: a lot of big tech we'd like to frame this.
Speaker 1: Near may disagree with this. Is I think they want
Speaker 1: us to frame this debate as a debate between being
Speaker 1: pro tech or anti tech, right, and I'm sure my
Speaker 1: book will be described as anti tech. I'm not anti
Speaker 1: tech at all. The question isn't pro tech or anti tech.
Speaker 1: The question is what tech working in whose interests, with
Speaker 1: what goals? And to understand that, I think it's worth
Speaker 1: just unpacking a bit what I'm getting at, because what
Speaker 1: I learned is we could have social media that worked
Speaker 1: on very different principles. We currently have a model of
Speaker 1: social media that is designed to maximally hackn invade your attention.
Speaker 1: That's not my view, that's not the view of Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley dissidance. That's the view of Facebook. Right. Sean Parker,
Speaker 1: one of the first investors in Facebook, said, when Facebook
Speaker 1: was being designed, we designed it to figure out how
Speaker 1: we could maximally take your your attention. We knew what
Speaker 1: we were doing. We did it anyway. God only knows
Speaker 1: what it's doing to our kids brains. That's what one
Speaker 1: of the key big is in the history of Facebook
Speaker 1: is saying. And we now know from the leaked Facebook
Speaker 1: memos by Francis Howgan they were saying many other things
Speaker 1: like that, internally, and there was a moment this really
Speaker 1: fell into place for me. Over many years, I interviewed
Speaker 1: lots of times. Tristan Harris is a very well known
Speaker 1: former Google engineer who now is a kind of outspoken
Speaker 1: critics of the current business model that social media companies
Speaker 1: were adopting. It's a moment that really stayed with me
Speaker 1: that Tristan said. This is not a moment I'll get to.
Speaker 1: But Tristan worked on the Gmail team when they were
Speaker 1: trying to figure out very early in Gmail, where they
Speaker 1: wanted to maximize. Obviously want to increase their user base,
Speaker 1: but they also wanted to increase the number of times
Speaker 1: a day someone used Gmail for reasons I'll get to.
Speaker 1: And one of his colleagues, they were sitting in the
Speaker 1: Google Plex, and one of his colleagues had an idea.
Speaker 1: He just said, why don't we make it so that
Speaker 1: every time someone gets an email, their phone vibrates. And
Speaker 1: everyone said, that's a good idea. And a week later,
Speaker 1: Tristan was walking around San Francisco and it just hears
Speaker 1: these vibrations everywhere, like the chirruping of birds, and he realizes,
Speaker 1: ship we did that, and that's happening all over the
Speaker 1: world everywhere. In fact, he later calculated about a year
Speaker 1: later that that decision at that time was causing eleven
Speaker 1: billion interruptions to people's day across the world. It actould
Speaker 1: be much higher now. It staggering. So Tristan said to
Speaker 1: me one day, as a toy to Triestan about many
Speaker 1: different aspects of this, And Tristan said to me, today,
Speaker 1: ask yourself something really important. Open your phone, open Facebook,
Speaker 1: and Facebook will tell you lots of things. It will
Speaker 1: tell you whose birthday is, who tagged you in a photo,
Speaker 1: what you said on the exact same day ten years before,
Speaker 1: whatever it might be. There's one thing Facebook will never
Speaker 1: tell you. There is no button on Facebook that says
Speaker 1: something like I'd like to meet up with people? Are
Speaker 1: any of my friends nearby? Right? Any of them want
Speaker 1: to meet up? There's no such button. Now, as soon
Speaker 1: as I say that, everyone listening to this is on
Speaker 1: Facebook would think that would be a really nice button
Speaker 1: to have, right, That would very clearly be a popular option.
Speaker 1: Why does Facebook not provide that? When you follow the
Speaker 1: trail from that, I think you begin to understand what's
Speaker 1: being done to us and some of the solutions. So
Speaker 1: every time you open Facebook, they make money two ways.
Speaker 1: One is very obvious. You scroll down your feed, you
Speaker 1: see advertising. We all understand how that works. Second way
Speaker 1: is more subtle and much more important. Everything you do
Speaker 1: on Facebook is scanned and sorted to build a profile
Speaker 1: of you. So let's say you click that you like
Speaker 1: I don't know Bette Midler, Donald Trump, and you say
Speaker 1: in a message to your mother that you just bought
Speaker 1: some diapers. Okay, Facebook now knows you're probably a gay man,
Speaker 1: no disrespect to the straight people who like bet Midler.
Speaker 1: You're probably a conservative, and you've probably got a baby
Speaker 1: because you're talking about diapers. And now they've got tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of data points like that about you. They
Speaker 1: know a lot about you. They then sell that portrait
Speaker 1: of you two advertisers. So those advertisers can take your attention, right,
Speaker 1: because if I'm selling diapers, I don't want to market
Speaker 1: to everyone. There's no point showing an ad about diapers
Speaker 1: to me. I don't have a baby, right. They want
Speaker 1: to show it to someone who's got a baby. So
Speaker 1: that's the really valuable part. Okay, Now imagine that they
Speaker 1: did invent that button. The button that says, which of
Speaker 1: my friends are available and want to meet up? If
Speaker 1: you push that button, it guys are Dave's up the road.
Speaker 1: I'll go for a drink with Dave. You would close
Speaker 1: Facebook and Dave would close Facebook, and you would look
Speaker 1: into each other's is and you would talk. Right, the
Speaker 1: things that make us feel good as human beings. That's
Speaker 1: a disaster for Facebook because they lose both those revenue streams, right,
Speaker 1: they immediately lose them. They want you to be maximally
Speaker 1: interacting through their device because that's how they harvest the
Speaker 1: information about you to sell your attention to advertisers. So
Speaker 1: all of their machinery or the engineering genius they use,
Speaker 1: all of their algorithms, is all designed for one goal,
Speaker 1: one purpose. How do I keep you Eric from scrolling
Speaker 1: and scrolling and never putting that phone down? Right, that's
Speaker 1: the maximal goal that they want, because that's how they
Speaker 1: maximize their profits. That the entire model is based on
Speaker 1: the principle that your distraction is their fuel. Right, it
Speaker 1: is an attention harvesting model. But the important thing to
Speaker 1: understand is, as lots of dissidence in Silicon Valley explained
Speaker 1: to me, social media doesn't have to work that way
Speaker 1: to think about an analogy. Lots of older listeners will remember,
Speaker 1: until the eighties, we used to use leading gasoline. I
Speaker 1: can remember the smell of it right from when I
Speaker 1: was a kid. We also used to earlier than that
Speaker 1: entered in the seventies, we used to paint our homes
Speaker 1: with lead paint. And then it was discovered that inhaling
Speaker 1: lead inflames the brain and causes is catastrophic for people's attention,
Speaker 1: particularly children's attention. It can actually be disinhibiting to the
Speaker 1: point of violence for some people. So what do we do.
Speaker 1: We banned lead in paint, and we banned leading gasoline.
Speaker 1: You will notice I'm in a room that has been painted, right,
Speaker 1: You're in a room that's been painted. We still paint
Speaker 1: our homes, We still have gasoline in our cars. It's
Speaker 1: just not leaded paint and leaded gasoline. In the same way,
Speaker 1: it may be that we decide that the current model
Speaker 1: is the equivalent of leading gasoline. Someone called Asa Raskin
Speaker 1: really helped me to think about this. As a designed
Speaker 1: that key part of how the Internet works. His dad,
Speaker 1: Jeff Raskin, was the guy who designed the Apple Macintosh
Speaker 1: for Steve Jobs, and ASA said to me, we should
Speaker 1: just ban the current business model. We should just say
Speaker 1: a business model premised upon surveiling you in order to
Speaker 1: figure out how to hack your attention and sell that
Speaker 1: attention to the highest bidder is anti human and unacceptable.
Speaker 1: It's like leaded pain, and we do not tolerate it.
Speaker 1: And I said to him and lots of other people
Speaker 1: who advocate this approach, well, okay, but what would happen
Speaker 1: if I opened Facebook the day after we banned it,
Speaker 1: where they just be a little notice saying sorry, we've
Speaker 1: gone fishing. And he said, no, of course not. What what
Speaker 1: what happen is they would moved to a different business model,
Speaker 1: and there's plenty of other business models they can move to.
Speaker 1: Subscription is an obvious business model. You pay a certain
Speaker 1: amount to HBO and you get HBO or one of them.
Speaker 1: Maybe you know, everyone listening to this will be somewhere
Speaker 1: close to a sewer right now. Before we had sewers,
Speaker 1: we had feces in the street and people got cholera
Speaker 1: and it was a disaster. So together we funded the
Speaker 1: building of sewers, and together we own the sewer pipes.
Speaker 1: They're collectively publicly owned, right it. Maybe we want a
Speaker 1: model of public ownership independent of government, which would be
Speaker 1: very important, where we say, just like we own the
Speaker 1: sewage pipes, we want to own the information pipes, right
Speaker 1: we want to own the means by which we communicate.
Speaker 1: The reason this is so important is if we moved
Speaker 1: to a different model, the incentives for the design of
Speaker 1: social media completely change. If at the moment, you're not
Speaker 1: the customer, you're the product they sell to the real customer,
Speaker 1: the advertiser. But under a subscription model or a public
Speaker 1: ownership model, you become the person they want to serve.
Speaker 1: So they're not saying how do we hack Eric to
Speaker 1: sell his attention? They're saying what does Eric want? How
Speaker 1: Eric wants to spend time with his friends. Let's give
Speaker 1: him button that will tell him where his friends are.
Speaker 1: Eric wants to be able to focus. Let's warn him
Speaker 1: every time he gets a link from us that he
Speaker 1: thinks it will only to take a few seconds, it
Speaker 1: actually takes twenty three minutes before you'll get back to
Speaker 1: what he's doing. There's a thousand ways which are not
Speaker 1: technologically hard. They could be designed by Tristan and his
Speaker 1: friends in in a day that would transform it. So
Speaker 1: instead of being designed to hack your attention, it could
Speaker 1: be designed to heal and aid your attention. Instead of
Speaker 1: being a vacuum sucking up your attention, it could be
Speaker 1: a trampoline sending you back into the world. Right. But
Speaker 1: for that to happen, we need to change the busins model,
Speaker 1: and they're not going to change it on their own right.
Speaker 1: We need to make in the same way that companies
Speaker 1: that made lead pay and a letter gasoline they were
Speaker 1: never going to give up their model right without being
Speaker 1: made to do it by movements of ordinary citizens. Does
Speaker 1: that ring true to you er? Totally? Yeah, that makes
Speaker 1: complete sense. I love that analogy because, as you said earlier,
Speaker 1: it's easy for this to all start to sound anti tech,
Speaker 1: and that's not what it is. And I think the
Speaker 1: leaded gasoline model and the leaded paint model really makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense because it's saying like, yeah, we
Speaker 1: still want the benefits that social media gives us hundred
Speaker 1: and we can we all know the benefits of that.
Speaker 1: Think about something as simple as I'm gay, right, And
Speaker 1: I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who
Speaker 1: as a gay son um. You know, he's like fifteen,
Speaker 1: and he can find other gay people incredibly easily in
Speaker 1: a way that like it was really I mean that's
Speaker 1: partly the social advances and actually of gay people, but
Speaker 1: also this technology makes it possible to find for him
Speaker 1: to find other gay kids in a way that was
Speaker 1: unthinkable for me. Right, we can all think of an
Speaker 1: enormous number of bans as we want to keep the
Speaker 1: positive steps but not the disastrous ones, and there are
Speaker 1: ways we can do that. And again that's where someone
Speaker 1: like near in my view, or that he would disagree,
Speaker 1: I think, frames the debate in a false way where
Speaker 1: you know it's not protech or anti tech is what tech? Right?
Speaker 1: Comes back to what tech in whose interests? At the moment,
Speaker 1: we have tech that doesn't work in your interests on
Speaker 1: my interests, right, it works an interest of very small
Speaker 1: number of people who want to harvest our attention, which
Speaker 1: is having disastrous effects. I don't want us all to
Speaker 1: convert to become the Amish, right to my id of hell. Right,
Speaker 1: I don't want to go Hell's going too far, but
Speaker 1: it would be awful, right, But under no means stor
Speaker 1: we want to renounce these things. And of course there's
Speaker 1: some degree to which these technologies would have increased distraction,
Speaker 1: but to have them maximally designed to harvest and invade
Speaker 1: attention is a disaster. There's so many different directions we
Speaker 1: could take this and somewhat limited on time. But I
Speaker 1: think the other thing to speak to how your book
Speaker 1: isn't anti tech or the messages in anti tech, is
Speaker 1: you make the point of this attention span dwindling has
Speaker 1: been going on for quite some time, and that you know,
Speaker 1: largely what several people that you talked to and studied
Speaker 1: sort of showed was if you want to make people's
Speaker 1: ability to focus on one thing smaller so that we
Speaker 1: focus on more and more things, all you have to
Speaker 1: do is just keep feeding more information into the system.
Speaker 1: And that did not start with technology. That's been going
Speaker 1: on for a while. You know, the more things we
Speaker 1: have to focus on that get put in front of us,
Speaker 1: the less time we spend with any of them. This
Speaker 1: was sobering but also in some ways empowering, and I
Speaker 1: fell into place to me when I went to cyping
Speaker 1: Hagen in Denmark and interviewed Professor Sooner Layman, who's professor
Speaker 1: of applied mathematics at the Technical University of Denmark and
Speaker 1: Professor Lehman did a really important study with many other scientists,
Speaker 1: some of whom I interviewed, like Dr Philip Stein in Berlin,
Speaker 1: which was the first study that showed that our collective
Speaker 1: attention span genuinely has shrunk, and it found something really
Speaker 1: important in relation to what you just said, Eric. So
Speaker 1: the way they did it initially is so soon I
Speaker 1: was worried about his own attention. That's how it began.
Speaker 1: Like me, I wanted to figure out, what is this
Speaker 1: just a kind of grumpy old man thing or is
Speaker 1: something really changing. They started by doing a very small
Speaker 1: study that opened up into a much bigger technique that
Speaker 1: was much more revealing. So initially so they wanted to
Speaker 1: look at collective attention and initially they just looked at Twitter.
Speaker 1: And anyone who's on Twitter will know that Twitter has
Speaker 1: something called trending topics, where it's the AI is scanning too,
Speaker 1: and the algorithms are scanning to see what topics are
Speaker 1: being most discussed that day, whether it's I don't know,
Speaker 1: if Justin b fell over somewhere or whatever. You know,
Speaker 1: we could all think of things and it will show
Speaker 1: the most discussed things on Twitter that day. They looked
Speaker 1: at data on Twitter between twenty sixteen, and they want
Speaker 1: to just started with a very simple question, how long
Speaker 1: did a trending topic get discussed for on Twitter? And
Speaker 1: in with the earliest data they looked at, on average,
Speaker 1: a trending topic was discussed for seventeen point five hours.
Speaker 1: By the time you got to a trending topic was
Speaker 1: only discussed for twelve hours. So collectively we were talking
Speaker 1: about any one thing less than in the past. But
Speaker 1: they're like, okay, well that maybe that's just a phenomenon
Speaker 1: of Twitter that they looked at. Many websites read it.
Speaker 1: They looked at Google searches, things people search for on Google,
Speaker 1: and across the board, with one exception Wikipedia, the graph
Speaker 1: looked exactly the same. People were talking about one topic
Speaker 1: for less and less. But then they did something to
Speaker 1: me much more interesting. So there's a way they discovered.
Speaker 1: You can do this by looking at public in the past.
Speaker 1: So as you know, Google books are scanned books going
Speaker 1: back as long as there ever been books, and what
Speaker 1: you can do is you can train an algorithm to
Speaker 1: read through those books and detect the equivalent of trending
Speaker 1: topics in the past. The fancy term for it is
Speaker 1: detecting end grams, So there's plenty of phrases that pop
Speaker 1: up in the language, get to intensely discussed for a while,
Speaker 1: and then disappear again. Think about no deal Brexit. No
Speaker 1: one had ever said the phrase no deal Brexit before,
Speaker 1: no one will ever say again, apart from historians ten
Speaker 1: years from now. Or think about the Harlem Renaissance as
Speaker 1: a huge we can all think of something, right, so
Speaker 1: you can look at how quickly did topics emerge and
Speaker 1: how quickly did they vanish in the past. It's a
Speaker 1: very clever technique and what they discovered was really striking.
Speaker 1: They looked at books for every decade since the eighteen eighties,
Speaker 1: and since the eighties the graph looked almost exactly like
Speaker 1: the graph on Twitter. With each decade that passed, people
Speaker 1: were folks sing collectively together, but the less and less time.
Speaker 1: And this is a really interesting phenomenon, which again suggests
Speaker 1: it's way too simplistic to think this problem is just
Speaker 1: the Internet. Now, clearly, the Internet and particularly the business
Speaker 1: model that drives the dominant falls of the Internet, has
Speaker 1: clearly accelerated this trend, and there's good evidence for that.
Speaker 1: But it also shows there's something deeper going on, and
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time trying to think about
Speaker 1: what this is. Some of that is technological advance, and
Speaker 1: it appears by the way that we're doing all sorts
Speaker 1: of things faster. There's evidence that we speak faster than
Speaker 1: we did in the nineteen fifties, there's evidence that we
Speaker 1: walk faster than we did in the all sorts of
Speaker 1: forms of acceleration going on. One British writer Robert Colville
Speaker 1: has talked about how we live in the great acceleration
Speaker 1: and we know the effects that acceleration has on attention.
Speaker 1: You can even look at just studies as simple as
Speaker 1: training people to speed read. You can train almost anyone
Speaker 1: to read significantly faster. But what happens is they understand less,
Speaker 1: they remember less, and they think in a much more
Speaker 1: shallow way about what they've read. Is a bit of
Speaker 1: a no ship shell loock finding. But it helps, by analogy,
Speaker 1: for us to think about what's happening to all of
Speaker 1: us with acceleration. And there's a big debate about what's
Speaker 1: driving this acceleration. And I offer this more tentatively than
Speaker 1: I offer some of the other conclusions that I put
Speaker 1: forward in this conversation or in the book. But I
Speaker 1: spoke to a lot of people like Professor Thomas hilland
Speaker 1: Ericson in Norway and Professor Jason Hickel, who's now based
Speaker 1: in Spain, argued that part of what's happening is probably
Speaker 1: linked to the broader economic model we have of economic growth.
Speaker 1: So as Professor Ericson, who is one of the leading
Speaker 1: social scientists in Norway and one of the most prestigious
Speaker 1: in the world, said to me, if you have an economy,
Speaker 1: so we have a model based on economic growth. As
Speaker 1: everyone knows, if a company grows, we reward the CEO.
Speaker 1: If it shrinks, we punish the CEO if the country's
Speaker 1: economy if the next election, If the economy grew, President
Speaker 1: Biden will have a much better chance of re election.
Speaker 1: If it shrank, his re election will be less likely
Speaker 1: if he runs again. And Professor Erickson said to me,
Speaker 1: if you have to deliver growth all the time, since
Speaker 1: we live in a growth machine, there's really two ways
Speaker 1: you can deliver growth. One is you can discover a
Speaker 1: new market, and clearly that you know does happen. But
Speaker 1: the other way is you can get an existing market
Speaker 1: to consume more rapidly. So think about something as simple
Speaker 1: as if I can get you to watch television and
Speaker 1: tweet about it at the same time, I've doubled the
Speaker 1: amount of potential advertising you're exposed to. You see it
Speaker 1: on the TV, and you see it on Twitter. So
Speaker 1: he argues that economic growth built into economic growth is
Speaker 1: an inherent rapid acceleration of the experience of life, and
Speaker 1: the way Sooner Layman put it to me, they who
Speaker 1: did the studies, but there's just got to be a
Speaker 1: limit to how much speed we can tolerate without causing
Speaker 1: a profound degeneration in our ability to think. Now, offer
Speaker 1: that more tentatively, because that seems to me very plausible.
Speaker 1: It's hard to know how you could design a counter
Speaker 1: factual to look into that. Given that every economy in
Speaker 1: the world, I mean, you could sort of talk about
Speaker 1: Bhutan a bit, you could talk about some economies that
Speaker 1: have tried to extract themselves in the growth economy. That's
Speaker 1: a very very hard comparison point. So my instinct is
Speaker 1: I believe that we are going to have to build
Speaker 1: in addition to having all sorts of individual defenses for
Speaker 1: our attention. I think, just like women had to build
Speaker 1: a feminist movement to to reclaim control of their bodies
Speaker 1: and their lives, and indeed still need that movement. I
Speaker 1: think we're going to need something like an attention movement
Speaker 1: to reassert control of our minds to resist many of
Speaker 1: these forces that are invading our attention. And my hunch,
Speaker 1: which could be wrong, is that somewhere down the line
Speaker 1: and attention movement would have to bump into the logic
Speaker 1: of economic growth, and we'd have to think about that now.
Speaker 1: I also think there are very and this I feel
Speaker 1: more confident of, there are other very good reasons to
Speaker 1: think about moving beyond the model of economic growth, to
Speaker 1: do with the climate crisis and so on. We can
Speaker 1: talk about that another time, and there's people much better
Speaker 1: qualified to talk about it than me. But my hunches
Speaker 1: will end up bumping into that topic. But I feel
Speaker 1: like that's if we're thinking about the layers of the
Speaker 1: debate and the discussion, that's like ten layers up from
Speaker 1: where we are right that, because if you've got my
Speaker 1: case safe at the lowest level of the debate and
Speaker 1: debatem economic growth is the highest, highest, highest level. And
Speaker 1: I think we're so far from thinking about this is
Speaker 1: a collective problem that requires collective solutions that I feel like,
Speaker 1: let's put a peg in that and debate it ten
Speaker 1: years from now if we've got a really good movement going. Yeah, well, Johanna,
Speaker 1: I could do this with you for hours and hours,
Speaker 1: and you and I are going to continue a little
Speaker 1: bit more in the post show conversation, and one of
Speaker 1: the things that we're going to talk about is is
Speaker 1: mind wandering good for you? Or is mind wandering bad
Speaker 1: for you? Because you hear both these and you actually
Speaker 1: summarized it in one sentence as I was saying to
Speaker 1: you before, I love the way you look at these
Speaker 1: different things. We're gonna talk about that as well as
Speaker 1: I'd like to explore your three main goals you would
Speaker 1: see in a movement to reclaim our attention would focus
Speaker 1: on listeners. If you'd like to get access to the
Speaker 1: post show conversation, you can go to one you feed
Speaker 1: dot net slash joint here the rest of this conversation
Speaker 1: with Johan and I lots of other post show conversations
Speaker 1: and all kinds of other goodies like add free episodes.
Speaker 1: So that's when you feed dot net slash joint. Johan.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming on. It is always
Speaker 1: such a pleasure. I always love talking to Eric, and
Speaker 1: I'm meant to say all my publishers will taste me. Yes.
Speaker 1: Anyone who wants to know where to get the audio book,
Speaker 1: the book called the physical book, and we can get
Speaker 1: it from any good bookshop or indeed any shitty bookshop.
Speaker 1: I bet you can go to www dot stolen focus
Speaker 1: book dot com and you can also on the website
Speaker 1: you can hear what lots of prominent people have said
Speaker 1: about the book, and you can listen to audio of
Speaker 1: loads of the experts that we've talked to. You can
Speaker 1: listen for free to the audio with them and that
Speaker 1: conversation I had with Near and many other that we
Speaker 1: were talking about. They've got a little bit contentious. And
Speaker 1: you can find out loads of other good stuff about
Speaker 1: the book. Yep. And we'll put a link in the
Speaker 1: show notes, so if you just click on now, it'll
Speaker 1: take you right there. Also. All right, thank you, Johan,
Speaker 1: thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you,
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