Speaker 1: Life Uncut podcast acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout
Speaker 1: Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We
Speaker 1: pay our respect to their elders past and present and
Speaker 1: extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island
Speaker 1: peoples today.
Speaker 2: This episode is recorded on Gadigal Land of the Aurora Nation.
Speaker 2: Hi guys, and i'll welcome back to another episode of
Speaker 2: Life Uncut. I'm Laura and I'm produce a Keisha and
Speaker 2: I'm filling in once again for Brittany Hockley, who is
Speaker 2: still not back yet, but she's coming, hopefully metaphorically and
Speaker 2: physically coming. Who knows where she is or what she's doing.
Speaker 2: I hope wherever she is she is coming. I'm not
Speaker 2: sure if she is on not either, Laura.
Speaker 3: Before we get into today's episode, there is something it's
Speaker 3: hot on my tongue.
Speaker 2: I've been thinking about it the entire weekend.
Speaker 3: See the news about Nick Cannon having his tenth child.
Speaker 2: I don't even know who Nick Cannon is alone? Do
Speaker 2: you really? Do you remember? And Mariah Carey's first husband,
Speaker 2: They've got twins together.
Speaker 4: He had the humongous Mariah tattoo across his back.
Speaker 2: Okay, I wish I was better informed. And now I
Speaker 2: feel like I've come to the podcast really poorly researched
Speaker 2: because you've thrown this spanner at me. I am going
Speaker 2: to do a live Google and I would encourage anybody
Speaker 2: else who feels equally as old as I do and
Speaker 2: has no idea who he's's talking about to do the same.
Speaker 2: I feel like Nick Kenned and I don't min this offensively.
Speaker 3: I feel like he's more in your age is in mind?
Speaker 3: He's forty one.
Speaker 2: He's like a comedian actor like TV host. Yes I know, yes, yes, Okay,
Speaker 2: now that I've seen a photo of him, very bad
Speaker 2: with names, very good with faces, I know exactly who
Speaker 2: he is.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, I put up a picture of him and
Speaker 3: also the Mariah tattoo on our Instagram stories.
Speaker 2: If you know who I'm talking about, does he still
Speaker 2: have Mariah? That's that's always my question is like when
Speaker 2: you get a tattoo of like, for example, Kim Kardashian
Speaker 2: and Pete Davison, like is he going to keep? I mean,
Speaker 2: you don't know the answer to this. I actually did
Speaker 2: hear about this.
Speaker 3: He got them branded which is like the burn and
Speaker 3: you can't get that. Okay, back to Nick anyway, Nick Cannon.
Speaker 3: Another wild story is that personally, I believe that reproductive
Speaker 3: scientists across the world need to study this men's sperm
Speaker 3: because I don't know what kind of superpowers they've got.
Speaker 3: But he has announced that he is about to have
Speaker 3: another baby to a woman that he already has two
Speaker 3: children to. Now you'd hear that, normally, you'd be like, yeah, cool, congratulations.
Speaker 2: And he's where it gets a little spicier. Wait, so
Speaker 2: he has this will be his tenth child. Mm hmm okay,
Speaker 2: ten ten children? Ten how many different mums? Not that
Speaker 2: it's not that it's actually important, but it's good to
Speaker 2: note context.
Speaker 3: I'll read through the names of them and their ages.
Speaker 3: So eleven year old Wins Moroccan and Monroe with Mariah Carey.
Speaker 3: Then there's five year old Golden Sagan, nineteen month old
Speaker 3: powerful Queen, and another on the way with Britney Bell.
Speaker 2: How would you know, Like, how does one look at
Speaker 2: a newborn baby with a floppy neck and think that
Speaker 2: is a powerful queen?
Speaker 3: You just know, you just know he has a newborn
Speaker 3: son named And I'm just journalistically reporting this legendary love
Speaker 3: with model pre Tacy.
Speaker 2: What is his nickname, because that's a very long name
Speaker 2: to go into any sort of situation with Hello, my
Speaker 2: name is legendary love. Sounds like a good name for
Speaker 2: a song. Do you think he just calls himself lege.
Speaker 3: Or maybe double L like els little L.
Speaker 2: It does come from a rapper of a dad.
Speaker 3: Where it does get slightly more spicy is that he's
Speaker 3: also got thirteen month old twins. He must have the
Speaker 3: twin Jeane, because he's got a couple of them, Zion
Speaker 3: and Zillion with Abby Della Rosa, who is also expecting
Speaker 3: another one of his children. So doing the math, there
Speaker 3: is a child Jew in somewhere like September October, and
Speaker 3: then there's another one Jew October November ish.
Speaker 2: Wait, so twins, and then another one with completely different partners.
Speaker 3: So he has twins to one of them who is
Speaker 3: also pregnant again, so she's having the third of his children.
Speaker 3: And then there is another woman who has two kids
Speaker 3: to him, not twins, who is also pregnant right now.
Speaker 2: See this to me? At first I was like, ooh, spicy,
Speaker 2: but no, I reckon, they're just in a polyamorous relationship
Speaker 2: like this all sounds consensual because surely they would all
Speaker 2: know about each other. There's so many other children and
Speaker 2: siblings and half siblings going on. You kind of know
Speaker 2: that the other person exists already, don't you.
Speaker 3: I mean you'd think, but I mean look at Closes
Speaker 3: Rastashian and Tristan Thompson, Like sometimes it's right under your
Speaker 3: nose and you just can't smell it.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: I don't know if they're building some type of commune,
Speaker 3: but at this point, I'm convinced, like this man must
Speaker 3: not even need to have sex to get people pregnant.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm pretty sure he's still having a lot of sex.
Speaker 3: So there's so many children. There's so many children, so
Speaker 3: many people getting pregnant. At the same time, he was
Speaker 3: reported saying that because this was last like December ish,
Speaker 3: that these two women both got pregnant, and he just
Speaker 3: said he was having a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: And that's what you've come to learn on this this episode.
Speaker 3: My favorite part of the entire story was that he
Speaker 3: did a pregnancy photo shoot, which you can imagine he'd
Speaker 3: be pretty good.
Speaker 2: At by this point.
Speaker 3: Right the comments underneath My favorite comment read.
Speaker 2: Just DJ Karlid. I don't get it in all of
Speaker 2: these songs, he's like DJ CARLEYD. Not the one it's
Speaker 2: like brilliant. Like I find it so hard to laugh
Speaker 2: at any stories that center around kids, because as much
Speaker 2: as I think it's funny to laugh at him and
Speaker 2: not at him even you know, if it's all consensual
Speaker 2: and they're living their lives in whatever structure they feel
Speaker 2: makes it works for them, it's one thing for us
Speaker 2: to sit here and like look in and have a laugh.
Speaker 2: But then I think there's kids at the bottom of
Speaker 2: the ears, and these kids, maybe they have atrocious names,
Speaker 2: but they didn't ask for that. I didn't ask for mine.
Speaker 2: We just get given it. The spelling of them keisha
Speaker 2: peas stupid Keshia, and there's no legendary love is probably
Speaker 2: going to be thinking the exact same thing when he
Speaker 2: grows up.
Speaker 3: Ten kids laws, that's a lot of babies, that's a
Speaker 3: lot of remembering of birthdays. But one thing that is
Speaker 3: quite sweet is that he was quoted saying, I'm so
Speaker 3: excited about all of my kids constantly, from every aspect
Speaker 3: of it, from them getting Citizen of the Month awards
Speaker 3: in the first grade to the birth of the new ones.
Speaker 2: Every day I just wake up excited as a father.
Speaker 2: That's amazing. There are people, there are men out there
Speaker 2: who have one child who are terrible dads, let alone
Speaker 2: someone who's got ten kids, and to be an active
Speaker 2: participant in active dad in all of their lives is
Speaker 2: pretty phenomenal. It seems like a full time job. Frank.
Speaker 2: And that's what one other person on Instagram wrote.
Speaker 3: They said, dude, any there's only twenty four hours in
Speaker 3: a day, Like how I mean, he's having more sex
Speaker 3: than any of us.
Speaker 2: Put it that way. I mean, to be fair, I
Speaker 2: haven't really seen anything that Nick Cannon has done in
Speaker 2: the last little bit. Has he done anything with everyone
Speaker 2: and taking care of children and getting no sleep? Okay, well,
Speaker 2: let's move on from Nick Cannon because I'm sure that
Speaker 2: there are still people who are confused as to who
Speaker 2: he even is. Let us tell you what today's episode
Speaker 2: is about. For anybody who is slightly confused. Today's episode,
Speaker 2: we're talking to Yohani. Reproductive Sciences is On today's episode,
Speaker 2: we're studying the strength of these swimmers. We're talking about contraception.
Speaker 2: Sit take a seat. No, we are talking to Yohann
Speaker 2: Hari about something they think literally every single person struggles
Speaker 2: with at the moment, and that is keeping and maintaining attention.
Speaker 2: And why is it that we all feel so scattered
Speaker 2: and find it so hard to actually focus on any
Speaker 2: one thing at anyone time. And I know that we've
Speaker 2: spoken a lot on the podcast over the last couple
Speaker 2: of years about burnout and overwhelm and social media and
Speaker 2: all of these contributing factors. But Johann Hari is an
Speaker 2: expert in attention as a subject. He's written a book
Speaker 2: on it called Stolen Focus. And the thing I love
Speaker 2: so much about this conversation is that I think a
Speaker 2: lot of us feel guilty for the fact that we
Speaker 2: are so scabby, or we're so overwhelmed, or we're so
Speaker 2: we're spread so thin that we find it hard to
Speaker 2: concentrate on anyone's task. And this conversation with Johann was
Speaker 2: a real sort of eye opener that it's not necessarily
Speaker 2: your fault or my fault, but it's actually something that
Speaker 2: is being intentionally done to us, and our focus and
Speaker 2: attention is being intentionally stolen. See what I.
Speaker 3: Love about this conversation is that if I were to
Speaker 3: hear Oh, we're going to talk about focus and attention.
Speaker 2: I don't have another attention totally.
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh, that's a bit, you know, I probably
Speaker 3: I will be scattered halfway listening to it. Johanna is
Speaker 3: one of the funniest people I've ever heard, story like,
Speaker 3: and he does he practices what he preaches. He actually
Speaker 3: went on a three month no social media, no internet connection,
Speaker 3: no phone connection to study for this book and to
Speaker 3: really research it. I love that he just he puts
Speaker 3: his money where his mouth is. He really dives so
Speaker 3: deep into his subject matter.
Speaker 2: He also has probably the funniest accidentally unfiltered story. Like
Speaker 2: we've heard a lot, We've heard a lot of accidentally
Speaker 2: unfiltered stories. This has got to be the fucking funniest
Speaker 2: story I have ever heard, to the point where we
Speaker 2: were both crying whilst it was being said. But also
Speaker 2: I was like, how is this going to offend anyone?
Speaker 2: In the first five minutes of this interview and we
Speaker 2: don't even care. It's so worth it, it stated. So
Speaker 2: even if that's all you listen to, it's brilliant.
Speaker 3: If you don't like harsh language, maybe skip a little bit.
Speaker 3: But yeah, he's phenomenal, and I genuinely think this is
Speaker 3: one of my favorite guests that I've ever heard on
Speaker 3: Life one Card. I just think he's so so funny
Speaker 3: and entertaining and engaging, and like, I learn a lot
Speaker 3: from it without a feeling like I was sitting in
Speaker 3: a lecture theater.
Speaker 2: So loved it. Well. Something that I wanted to talk
Speaker 2: to you about, Kesha, the question I had for you
Speaker 2: before we get into speaking to Johann. There is something
Speaker 2: that's been making the rounds on TikTok now because laugh
Speaker 2: on Cut is on TikTok. If you didn't know that,
Speaker 2: go and follow us. It's laugh on Cut podcast. I'm
Speaker 2: pretty sure where TikTok is now, but there has been
Speaker 2: a conversation and this was repurposed in news dot com today.
Speaker 2: You It is a young girl who is nineteen years old.
Speaker 2: She's moved out with her boyfriend and instead of them
Speaker 2: moving out together and getting rooms together and sleeping in
Speaker 2: the same bed every single night, they've moved out and
Speaker 2: they have intentionally gotten separate bedrooms in the same house,
Speaker 2: and it has divided the internet.
Speaker 3: Interesting can see why this would divide the internet because
Speaker 3: it's not very typical but I think she's a genius.
Speaker 2: When you and your boyfriend finally move in together, but
Speaker 2: you want separate rooms so you can still have your
Speaker 2: own space and you decorate it how you want, she
Speaker 2: said while sharing footage of their adjacent rooms. Now, there
Speaker 2: are so many people commenting on this about Howard is
Speaker 2: a red flag. But I'm with you. I think that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: people are saying that this is like the beginning of
Speaker 2: the end.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, in what way you're gonna start living
Speaker 3: like roommates because they technically are.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't
Speaker 2: fuck my roommates. I mean, like, by definition, they are roommates.
Speaker 3: Which when you're in a romantic part when you live
Speaker 3: with a partner, you technically are just roommates.
Speaker 2: Who sleep in the same bed. Like, No, you're not, No, Keisha,
Speaker 2: You're not just roommates who sleep in the same bed.
Speaker 2: Kesha's like, so I'm in a relationship with my house
Speaker 2: made at the moment, I'm absolutely not. He will not
Speaker 2: like me saying that normal his new girlfriend, who I
Speaker 2: know listens to the podcast. Okay, I don't know, Sorry, No, Okay.
Speaker 2: I think that the reason why this type and Look,
Speaker 2: we actually spoke about it on the radio this week
Speaker 2: as well. There is so much stigma around couples who
Speaker 2: don't sleep in the same bed because I think we
Speaker 2: expect and we think it indicates that must mean that
Speaker 2: relationship has broken down, or that you don't love each
Speaker 2: other as much anymore, or the fact that you need
Speaker 2: your alone time at nighttime indicates that you're not happy together,
Speaker 2: or that you don't want to be together, And I
Speaker 2: just think it's such a fucking farce, Like there are
Speaker 2: so many people who are There's so many reasons why
Speaker 2: couples don't sleep in the same bed together, and it
Speaker 2: doesn't have to just be that the relationship is falling down.
Speaker 2: If anything, could just be that they both want a
Speaker 2: good night's sleep, which makes the relationship better totally. I
Speaker 2: used to work in breakfast radio and a lot of
Speaker 2: the people that I worked with who worked similar hours,
Speaker 2: so we.
Speaker 3: Were getting up anywhere between three and four o'clock in
Speaker 3: the morning, and a.
Speaker 2: Lot of them would sleep in separate rooms to their partners.
Speaker 3: But the one thing that I think they did really
Speaker 3: well was that they would do that Sunday to Thursday,
Speaker 3: and then they'd spend Friday and Saturday night in the
Speaker 3: same bed, so when they were waking up to go
Speaker 3: to work really early, they wouldn't disturb the other person.
Speaker 3: You also have your wardrobe separate, so that like they
Speaker 3: could get dressed and go to work and it just
Speaker 3: it wouldn't annoyed the other person and cause them to
Speaker 3: have bad sleeping patterns.
Speaker 2: My grandparents to be married for sixty six years, but
Speaker 2: they don't actually like each other anymore, because anyone.
Speaker 3: So in love, it's actually it's so beautiful to see
Speaker 3: them together. But they've slept in separate bedrooms for ages
Speaker 3: because one of them snored, and.
Speaker 2: That is literally the foundation as to why they've been
Speaker 2: together for sixty six years. I actually have friends who
Speaker 2: have done something similar where when they've brought like because
Speaker 2: obviously things change so much when you have kids, but
Speaker 2: when they've had their first baby, they started sleeping in
Speaker 2: separate rooms because it just worked for them in terms
Speaker 2: of getting more sleep, especially because sleep is such a
Speaker 2: priority and such a rarity when you're in that period
Speaker 2: of life, and that it's something that's just continued for them.
Speaker 2: But I remember when she first told me that she
Speaker 2: was sleeping in a separate room to her partner, and
Speaker 2: in my mind, because we're so conditioned by what is
Speaker 2: the normal thing for a relationship, I was like, oh
Speaker 2: my god, red flag ding ding ding, they must be
Speaker 2: on the rocks. But really they're in such a great place.
Speaker 2: It's just the fact that it's not how I view relationships.
Speaker 2: It's not what I would necessarily want for my relationship.
Speaker 2: And I think we often impose what we think is
Speaker 2: the right way to do something on how somebody else
Speaker 2: is living and how they are navigating their relationship. Do
Speaker 2: you remember in.
Speaker 3: Sex and the City when they spoke about secret single behavior.
Speaker 3: To me, this feels like the best amalgamation of both,
Speaker 3: where you're in a relationship, but you can also do
Speaker 3: those things where you just want that time to yourself
Speaker 3: to like watch the show the partner's gonna hate.
Speaker 2: Maybe if you want to be done.
Speaker 3: I don't know, do your face stuff, Like just do
Speaker 3: the stuff that you don't want to do in front
Speaker 3: of your partner. If you have your own bedroom, you
Speaker 3: can do that any night of the week.
Speaker 2: Oh it's not just that. I think about this and
Speaker 2: I'm like, if I could go back and redo things,
Speaker 2: if I could go back and have my own bedroom
Speaker 2: in my house. Very expensive in bondying. Yeah, bedrooms are like,
Speaker 2: look to get a two bedroom. Alola was sleeping in
Speaker 2: a hallway for a really long time because we couldn't
Speaker 2: afford anything else. But if we could, let's say we
Speaker 2: were booge enough to have enough bedrooms for everyone, I
Speaker 2: would one hundred percent. You don't have to share a
Speaker 2: wardrobe with anyone. You don't have to like navigate who's
Speaker 2: gonna put their shoes wear. You don't have to worry
Speaker 2: about like all your shit in the bathroom getting moved around,
Speaker 2: or having to compromise to have your own space and
Speaker 2: your own things, and just cuddle when you want to cuddle,
Speaker 2: and then as soon as it's sleep time to be like,
Speaker 2: please don't touch me anymore or breathe on me, or
Speaker 2: make those Why does it sound like you're playing tennis
Speaker 2: with your mouth and your sleep. We just got into
Speaker 2: Laura's therapy session just so we all know. Now, are
Speaker 2: we moving into a four bedroom house? It's gonna be great.
Speaker 2: I've got my own bedroom. No, But I think if
Speaker 2: you can afford it, what a fucking awesome way to
Speaker 2: move into if you want to, if you want it,
Speaker 2: what an awesome way to start living with someone, especially
Speaker 2: if it's you've just started living with them, so you
Speaker 2: don't have to make the full plunge or make all
Speaker 2: the compromises. You can have sleepovers when you want to
Speaker 2: have sleepovers. You get your own space. I actually think
Speaker 2: it's genus. I think it's genius.
Speaker 3: And also you can play like which better we're you're
Speaker 3: gonna have sex in tonight?
Speaker 2: Like keep it interesting. Like my only question would be like,
Speaker 2: at what point, if any point, do you then migrate
Speaker 2: into the same bedroom, Like at what point do you go, oh, Okay,
Speaker 2: we've done enough, this is this is enough time that
Speaker 2: we've had our own space. We're gonna now move in together,
Speaker 2: but actually move into the same room, Like do you
Speaker 2: do it in baby steps? Is it that you've just
Speaker 2: moved in together, but you've kept separate rooms and then
Speaker 2: the next time you move you move into the same room,
Speaker 2: Because that's really like compiling all your shit together.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it's like, if you got used to
Speaker 3: doing the whole separate thing and you really liked it,
Speaker 3: why would you feel the need to come to merge.
Speaker 2: This could be a forever thing, could it? Though? Because
Speaker 2: society says it shouldn't be. It could be. Who are
Speaker 2: we to young? There? Young? All right, let's get into
Speaker 2: favorite part of every episode, and that is accidentally Unphil said,
Speaker 2: produce a keisha. You can kick it off today, all right,
Speaker 2: this one.
Speaker 3: I can actually see this happening to you if I'm
Speaker 3: being honest, So it reads. I purchased my first vibrator online,
Speaker 3: thinking it would be a bit more discreet of an
Speaker 3: option than going into a store. I picked out the
Speaker 3: one I had my eye on, and I was so
Speaker 3: excited for it to arrive. Weeks went by and it
Speaker 3: still hadn't arrived. Turns out it actually went missing in
Speaker 3: the post.
Speaker 2: And when that happens, you have to submit an.
Speaker 3: Inquiry to Australia Post detailing and I literally mean detailing
Speaker 3: to the exact.
Speaker 2: Point what was in the parcel. I really just hope
Speaker 2: wherever it ended up it was being put to good use.
Speaker 3: Oh Blair, having to write to oz Post, you just
Speaker 3: say vibrator, You just say, you know what, do you
Speaker 3: just own it?
Speaker 2: It's a vibrator and I want it because they're very expensive.
Speaker 3: I mean, you do want it, but do you feel
Speaker 3: comfortable enough writing Hey, my vibrator slush dildo got lost
Speaker 3: in the mail. Have you seen it floating around? It
Speaker 3: could be bouncing down the street.
Speaker 2: Is a better question. If a vibrator rocks up and
Speaker 2: the package is damaged, like it looks like it's been opened,
Speaker 2: because you know, sometimes they open it and go through it,
Speaker 2: would you still want to use it or would you
Speaker 2: be like, absolutely not. It's it's not like. I don't
Speaker 2: mean like someone from a Strainger post pulled it out
Speaker 2: and had to go and tell you no. I just
Speaker 2: mean they opened it, looked inside and then they were like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's a vibrator, closed it back up, and sent it
Speaker 2: on its merry way. I'm usually all about like the
Speaker 2: five second rule. There are exceptions, and this is one
Speaker 2: of them. Okay, well, very very coincidentally, and I swear
Speaker 2: we didn't plan this, but mine is also a vibrator story.
Speaker 2: My daughter loves to put treasures inside her glittery seed handbag.
Speaker 2: That sounded very strange when I said this had to
Speaker 2: do with vibrating. She's a little pirate, okay, But also
Speaker 2: I can relate to this because Marley's three and she
Speaker 2: likes to pack it. She likes to pack a suitcase. Mommy,
Speaker 2: I'm taking my suitcase and it's just like a kid's handbag.
Speaker 2: And she puts like a couple of lego blocks and
Speaker 2: like some sort of half massacred crosskit in there. It's
Speaker 2: just the essentials, yeah, for a day out. So this
Speaker 2: one day at the park, my beautiful two year old
Speaker 2: was busy making friends, as she usually does. She was
Speaker 2: dressed as a bloody, puffy fairy unicorn thing with chul
Speaker 2: and glitter glare. I saw her in a little huddle
Speaker 2: with other girls around the same age as her, and
Speaker 2: I thought nothing of it except how sweet it is
Speaker 2: that she's making friends. That was until one of the
Speaker 2: mums sheepishly walked over to me and said, um, I
Speaker 2: think your daughter might have packed something she shouldn't have
Speaker 2: in her handbag today. My little girl had popped the
Speaker 2: lipstick vibrator that was sitting on my bedside table into
Speaker 2: her bag, had taken it to the park, and had
Speaker 2: showed her adoring peers. I didn't even know what to
Speaker 2: say to this woman. As she handed me my vibrator.
Speaker 2: I turned bright red, yanked the vibrator out of her hands,
Speaker 2: and told my daughter we were going to get some
Speaker 2: ice cream and some chips, and we've never been back
Speaker 2: to that park again. Here's my question. Would you pick
Speaker 2: up someone's vibrator and hand it back to them or
Speaker 2: just say to little girl, go and give that to
Speaker 2: your mummy, Laura. This is the same question as the
Speaker 2: one before. You don't touch other people's vibrators. I'm all
Speaker 2: about recycling and all about reusing, but there are exceptions,
Speaker 2: and this is one of them. I have a question.
Speaker 2: This is going out okay, if you're sitting in the car,
Speaker 2: I want to know your answer to this. Please write in.
Speaker 2: Would you ever use somebody else's vibrator that you're not
Speaker 2: sexually active with, like a friend, or your mum, or
Speaker 2: your sister, just someone else's. Would you ever use a
Speaker 2: recycled vibrator that's been disinfected like Kishi? If I brought
Speaker 2: mine over and I was like, hey, it's been through
Speaker 2: the dishwasher, would you use it over my dead body?
Speaker 2: We are close. I want to know you're close. I
Speaker 2: don't ever need to be that close to you. What
Speaker 2: if it was like a dire situation where you really
Speaker 2: need a vibrator? You know what, I'll call Nick Cannon.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go manual. I'm gooing Manuel on this one.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 2: Like again, I say this a lot. I don't like
Speaker 2: to yuck a yum, but that is fucking yuck. I
Speaker 2: want to know, would you, oh, look, maybe do you
Speaker 2: know what actually though, like I wouldn't like like if
Speaker 2: it was I don't know if they would never be
Speaker 2: a situation where I would need to like we I'm
Speaker 2: never gonna have a situation where I'm like on a
Speaker 2: girl's weekend away and I'm like, hey, guys, sorry didn't
Speaker 2: bring my vibrator and Brittany goes, don't worry, I disinfected
Speaker 2: mine this week. Like it's never gonna happen. But like
Speaker 2: it just reminding myself when I packed for Laura's hens,
Speaker 2: don't worry about bringing make sure you clean up the
Speaker 2: dishwasher before we leave. Yeah, I don't know. I feel
Speaker 2: like it's not as disgusting as we make it out
Speaker 2: to be. It's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: Well, the thing that actually just popped into my mind was,
Speaker 3: you know, like, if you have sex toys and you
Speaker 3: break up with the person, or.
Speaker 2: You might just be using them with a casual whoever,
Speaker 2: do you then use them with the next casual person.
Speaker 3: I've done it.
Speaker 2: So this person involuntarily used a sex toy that you
Speaker 2: used with someone else and they didn't even know about it.
Speaker 2: And I bet you didn't even disinfect I did clean it.
Speaker 2: I did what was I'm not a fucking what just
Speaker 2: whated and down was some toilet paper? What do you
Speaker 2: mean soap with special like sex toys? So okay, that's different.
Speaker 2: When you said soap, I was like washing things with
Speaker 2: soap doesn't make it hygienic. It came in the packet
Speaker 2: like it was a freebie that got thrown in. That
Speaker 2: was the King Jelly lot.
Speaker 3: Mine didn't get lost in the mails, so it came
Speaker 3: in the bag it maybe that Maybe that's another question,
Speaker 3: like can you use a sex toy with more than
Speaker 3: one person?
Speaker 2: That's another ask on Quick. I'm writing that in for
Speaker 2: this week's ask on cut. Can you use a sex
Speaker 2: toy with your ex and then with a new partner
Speaker 2: without telling them that you used it with your ex?
Speaker 2: Oh that's a biggie all right. On that note, you
Speaker 2: get like a fake packet to open it up from
Speaker 2: and be like this brand new babe. Let's get into
Speaker 2: the chat with Johann Harry.
Speaker 4: Johann Harry is an author of three New York Times
Speaker 4: best selling books. Ted Talks have been viewed more than
Speaker 4: eighty million times. The first his names Everything You Know
Speaker 4: about Addiction is Wrong. The second is titled This Could
Speaker 4: Be Why You are depressed or anxious? And his latest book,
Speaker 4: Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention, was published in
Speaker 4: January this year and has been a best seller on
Speaker 4: three continents. I mean, talk about an overachieva Joanne, Welcome
Speaker 4: to life on cut hooray.
Speaker 5: I'm so to be with you guys.
Speaker 2: Also, I like that it's very early in the morning
Speaker 2: and we forced a coke zero upon you.
Speaker 5: No, no, no, my god, I've already had two. Right.
Speaker 2: Excitement that was shown was really I like that.
Speaker 5: I think the biggest division between human beings is not
Speaker 5: like a theist versus religious people, or left wing versus
Speaker 5: right wing. It's fucking morning people versus everyone else. One
Speaker 5: of my exes he used to wake up every morning
Speaker 5: at five am without an alarm clock. I'd be like,
Speaker 5: what are you? What is this exa happening?
Speaker 2: And then it's surprising, but well not surprising that it
Speaker 2: didn't work out. And that's probably was the real wedge
Speaker 2: in the relationship. We start every.
Speaker 3: Single one of our interviews the same way, and that
Speaker 3: is by asking you to divulge your most embarrassing story.
Speaker 2: Do you have an accidental unfiltered So when I arrived.
Speaker 5: At your offices ten minutes ago, the first thing I
Speaker 5: saw was a copy of the book The Art of
Speaker 5: Happiness by the Dala Lama, which reminded me of the
Speaker 5: time the diala a Lama called me fat. It turns
Speaker 5: out it turns out he's a complete fucking bitch. Who
Speaker 5: knew it was? It was genuinely traumatic. So when I
Speaker 5: was was a baby journalist, there must have been like
Speaker 5: twenty five inexplicably I got sent to it. I know,
Speaker 5: this gets so much fucking worse. It was. It was horrendous.
Speaker 5: So I got sent to interview the Diala Lama, right,
Speaker 5: and everyone who into used the dial Alarma just says,
Speaker 5: you know, your holiness, you're the greatest person I've ever met.
Speaker 5: Can I rent a flat somewhere in your asshole for
Speaker 5: the next time? And you know, I really admire the Dilarma.
Speaker 5: I admire the resistance to the Chinese occupation to bet
Speaker 5: all sorts of things about him. But I think when
Speaker 5: you interview a powerful person, you know, if your journalist,
Speaker 5: your job is to challenge them in some way. So
Speaker 5: did some digging. I was like, oh, it's the dial
Speaker 5: Alarm I ever done anything wrong. Turns out he thinks
Speaker 5: disabled people are being punished for what they did in
Speaker 5: a previous life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5: He says that, you know, he's very anti gay. You
Speaker 5: shouldn't use the other holes is an actual quote from
Speaker 5: the dial Alarma, and you know, using the other holes
Speaker 5: is one of my hobbies. So I was watching it
Speaker 5: and so I thought, okay, I'll challenge him a bit
Speaker 5: right started to go to interview him. He gave a
Speaker 5: speech first, if I remember rightly, and afterwards I'm sort
Speaker 5: of taken backstage. And the first twenty minutes we're talking
Speaker 5: about stuff we really agree on, you know, like the
Speaker 5: Chinese occupation to Bet, which is indeed horrific. And then
Speaker 5: I started asking him the kind of more challenging questions
Speaker 5: and he started pretending he didn't speak English. He literally
Speaker 5: goes like, I I don't won't to do Zach said,
Speaker 5: because I don't understand this this quick, And I'm like,
Speaker 5: I just saw you get English. We've been talking in
Speaker 5: English for like twenty I know you can. And he's
Speaker 5: literally just refusing to answer, just pretending he doesn't understand
Speaker 5: what I'm saying. I'm sort of pushing him and pushing
Speaker 5: him in his like goons. I'm sure that's not their
Speaker 5: official job title. But he's like people are like standing
Speaker 5: in the corner looking quite pissed off, and I thought, God,
Speaker 5: they're going to throw me out. So I thought, I'll
Speaker 5: bring it back to something where we agree. And I said,
Speaker 5: you know, your holiness, you've always been very critical of
Speaker 5: income inequality in the West, And he said, yeah, I
Speaker 5: don't see why we why we need so much money?
Speaker 5: We each only have one stomach, and then said, except you,
Speaker 5: you clearly have at least three. I'm like, this man
Speaker 5: is meant to love blades of grass and rocks? Is
Speaker 5: he fat shaming me? Is this what's happening? Am I
Speaker 5: being fat shamed by a living God?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 5: And it was not my finest moment in Joe Listen.
Speaker 5: I said, well, you're quite fat as well. So after
Speaker 5: they basically threw me out, and so after when I
Speaker 5: let what I read about this right, I got the
Speaker 5: world's first of a Buddhist death threat, which I'm really
Speaker 5: proud of. They were like, are we going to kill you?
Speaker 5: And I was like, I wrote back and said, you're
Speaker 5: going to have at least five fucking lives as a
Speaker 5: woodlouse now because you sent this emi. But it was
Speaker 5: genuinely it's not look at look at that beneficent, smiling face.
Speaker 5: Now imagine you're going you're fat bitch, right that that
Speaker 5: is what happened to me.
Speaker 2: He uses other holes as it was horrible to someone
Speaker 2: who pretended as though he didn't know what you were saying.
Speaker 5: Every fucking word that I said to him.
Speaker 2: Now that we have offended anybody who is quite the
Speaker 2: fan of the Dalai Lama.
Speaker 5: Right, Like the thing is it's precisely because he's so
Speaker 5: admirable that it's quite upsetting, but also it's quite nice
Speaker 5: because it's a reminder you know, everyone is flawed, you know,
Speaker 5: even the most admirable people. So it's actually a nice
Speaker 5: little lesson in life about like sometimes you know you
Speaker 5: identify an unpleasant characteristic in yourself, you're like, oh God,
Speaker 5: and I that kind of person you are? No, everyone's
Speaker 5: a cunt sometimes, right. Sorry. Kevil in Australia, using that word.
Speaker 5: My mother is Scottish, so I know that this is
Speaker 5: the only place in the world that uses the sea
Speaker 5: word in the same way as Scottish people.
Speaker 2: I don't know if we do. I don't know if
Speaker 2: it's good because I am frequency. I mean, it is
Speaker 2: what ten am in the nine thirty nine thirty The
Speaker 2: sea words a big words bring out for breakfast.
Speaker 5: You see in Scotland. So if you said to my mother,
Speaker 5: I don't know how to get to the post office,
Speaker 5: she going, so got left it here doning about one
Speaker 5: hundred yards, you'll see a bunch of cunts standing there
Speaker 5: gore right where they are? What done? You'll see another
Speaker 5: bunch of cunts. That's the post office, right, and there
Speaker 5: would be no insult to any of those people. That's
Speaker 5: just that's just a neutral word meaning person or thing, right,
Speaker 5: So I know it is a bit misogynistic and so
Speaker 5: we should we should read it. And I have tried
Speaker 5: to explain this to the people of Scotland, but they
Speaker 5: sadly called me a Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, the reason why you were actually it's not just
Speaker 2: the reason why you're here, but it's one of the
Speaker 2: reasons why we wanted to speak to you. You spent
Speaker 2: quite a bit of time by yourself in Provincetown talk
Speaker 2: to us about why and what was the instigator for
Speaker 2: this trip and why it was so special.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So I noticed my own ability to focus and
Speaker 5: pay attention was getting worse, you know, with each year
Speaker 5: that passed. It felt like things that require deep focus
Speaker 5: that are so important to me, like reading books, watching films,
Speaker 5: having proper long conversations were getting more and more like
Speaker 5: running up and down escalator, do you know what I mean?
Speaker 5: Like I could still do them, but it was like
Speaker 5: the escalator was getting faster and I was having to
Speaker 5: run faster to get there. I noticed this happening to
Speaker 5: lots of people around me, and there was this moment
Speaker 5: which set me on the road to Provincetown where I
Speaker 5: sort of realized I could see the facts. Right. The
Speaker 5: average office worker now focuses on only one task for
Speaker 5: only three minutes. I said that to someone the other day,
Speaker 5: and they said, how do they get a whole three minutes?
Speaker 5: Every one child who was identified with serious attention problems
Speaker 5: when when I was seven years old, there's now one
Speaker 5: hundred children who've been identified with that problem. But I
Speaker 5: think I was quite afraid of looking into it. To
Speaker 5: be honest, I think because I was quite embarrassed. I thought, well,
Speaker 5: there's something wrong with me, so why would you try
Speaker 5: and figure out the problems? Obviously just weak, you're not
Speaker 5: good enough, right.
Speaker 2: Ignorance is bliss? Yeah, yeah, exactly, or even the question
Speaker 2: of like well, I mean it's pretty easy, like just
Speaker 2: pay more attention, or just be more focus, have more willpower,
Speaker 2: have more self control. Like that's the kind of I
Speaker 2: think a lot of initial thoughts. We blame ourselves more
Speaker 2: than external forces one hundred percent.
Speaker 5: And I had, you know, it's so funny you say that,
Speaker 5: because very early on in the research for the book,
Speaker 5: I went to interview the leading expert on willpower in
Speaker 5: the world, and an amazing scientist called Professor Roy Baumeister
Speaker 5: who's at the University of Queensland here in Australia. And
Speaker 5: I said to me, and I'm thinking of writing this
Speaker 5: book about why people can't focus because I interview huge
Speaker 5: numbs of scientists in my books and I'm being interested
Speaker 5: in what's going on and obviously how your science could
Speaker 5: help us to understand it. And he said to me
Speaker 5: something like these out words are in the book he says,
Speaker 5: saying like, Oh, it's interesting you say that, because I've
Speaker 5: found I can't really focus. I just play games on
Speaker 5: my phone phone a lot. Now I just kind I'm
Speaker 5: sort of sitting there and I'm like, the fuck.
Speaker 2: See if you have problems with this, we are author.
Speaker 5: He wrote a book called Willpower. He's literally the leading
Speaker 5: expert of the world of willpower. I'm like, I rememberlieve
Speaker 5: that a to be thinking, oh fuck, what do we do?
Speaker 5: But actually the solution does not like primarily and individual willpower.
Speaker 5: Be Sorry, there was this Just to go back to
Speaker 5: your initial question, because what set me on the road
Speaker 5: to it, there was one experience that really was like, Okay,
Speaker 5: I have to investigate this. I've got a godson, and
Speaker 5: when he was nine he developed this brief but very
Speaker 5: intense obsession with Elvis Presley, and it was super cute
Speaker 5: because he appeared to genuinely not know that impersonating Elvis
Speaker 5: had become a kind of cheesy cliche. So I think
Speaker 5: he was the last person ever to do a totally
Speaker 5: sincere impression of Elvis. So it was completely adorable when
Speaker 5: he would do like suspicious Minds or Rubellas Vegas, and
Speaker 5: when he used to tack him in. He would get
Speaker 5: me to tell him the story of Elvis's life over
Speaker 5: an over again. Obviously I skipped a bit at the
Speaker 5: end where of this shit himself to death on the toilet,
Speaker 5: and one night I mentioned just in passing, I mentioned Graceland,
Speaker 5: where Elvis lived, and his eyes lit up and he
Speaker 5: said to me, John, will you take me to Graceland
Speaker 5: one day? And I was like, sure, the way you
Speaker 5: do with nine year olds, know next week it'll be
Speaker 5: Lego Land.
Speaker 2: Or Lapland, or we're ever going to have to actually
Speaker 2: see it exactly.
Speaker 5: It's like it's like promising.
Speaker 2: I'm still holding onto the pink convertible car that my
Speaker 2: dad promised me when I was nine, and I never
Speaker 2: got the cruelty, the cruelty, the trauma that he inflicted.
Speaker 5: Exactly, that trauma will, no doubt if harm your attention.
Speaker 2: And it's another that's a whole other episode.
Speaker 5: He kept sort of going, no, no, do you swear
Speaker 5: you'll take me to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely promise.
Speaker 5: And I didn't think at that moment again for ten
Speaker 5: years until so many things had gone wrong. So he
Speaker 5: dropped out of school when he was fifteen. By the
Speaker 5: time he was nineteen, he spent literally all his waking hours.
Speaker 5: I know that sounds like in saturation. It's not alternate
Speaker 5: between his iPad, his iPhone, and his laptop, and his
Speaker 5: life was just this kind of blur of WhatsApp, YouTube, porn.
Speaker 5: And when you talk to him it was almost like
Speaker 5: he was kind of whirring at the speed of snapchat.
Speaker 5: You know, it felt like nothing still could get through
Speaker 5: to him. And one day we were sitting on my
Speaker 5: sofa in London, and all day I was trying to
Speaker 5: talk to him, and I just I just couldn't. It
Speaker 5: was like, you know, throwing sticks into a really fast
Speaker 5: moving river. You just couldn't get any traction with him.
Speaker 5: And to be totally honest with you both, I wasn't
Speaker 5: I wasn't that much better, right. I was staring at
Speaker 5: my own devices and I was hating this experience. And
Speaker 5: I suddenly remembered this moment all these years before, and
Speaker 5: I said to him, Hey, let's go to Graceland. This
Speaker 5: is no way to live. Let's break this numbing routine.
Speaker 5: Let's go on a big road trip all over the South.
Speaker 5: But as immediately thought ahead, you've got promise me one
Speaker 5: thing if we do it, which is that if we go,
Speaker 5: you'll leave your phone in the hotel during the day,
Speaker 5: because there's no point going if you're just gonna stare
Speaker 5: at your phone the whole time. And he took him.
Speaker 5: He didn't like the way he was living either. He
Speaker 5: took a moment, he thought about it, and he said, yeah,
Speaker 5: let's do this. I'll do it. Okay, I promise you,
Speaker 5: I'll do that. Let's do it. And I think it
Speaker 5: was literally like it was two or three weeks later.
Speaker 5: We took off from Heathrow to We went to New
Speaker 5: Orleans first, and a couple of weeks after that we
Speaker 5: got to the Gates of Graceland. And when you get there,
Speaker 5: now this was even before COVID, there's no one who
Speaker 5: shows you around. What happens is they hand you an
Speaker 5: iPad and you put in earbuds and the iPad shows
Speaker 5: you around. Right, It kind of says, go left, go right,
Speaker 5: your tour guide exactly. Every room you're in, it like
Speaker 5: exactly like a tour guide. It tells you the story
Speaker 5: about that room, and every room you go in, there's
Speaker 5: an image of that room on the iPad in front
Speaker 5: of you. Right. So we're walking around Graceland and I
Speaker 5: sort of note I was getting a bit pissed off
Speaker 5: because I'm started to notice what happens is everyone just
Speaker 5: walks around staring at the iPad, right. They're just sort
Speaker 5: of staying and then sometimes people do look up. They
Speaker 5: look up to take out their phones, take a selfie pose,
Speaker 5: they put their phone away, and then they go back
Speaker 5: to staring at the iPad. And I'm getting a little
Speaker 5: bit annoyed, but not like massively, but just like feeling
Speaker 5: a bit out of sorts about it. And we got
Speaker 5: to the Jungle Room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland.
Speaker 5: It's got loads of fake plants in it and I
Speaker 5: never forget them. There was a middle aged Canadian couple
Speaker 5: next to us, and the man turned to his wife
Speaker 5: and he said, honey, this is amazing. Look. If you
Speaker 5: swipe left, you can see the Jungle Room to the left,
Speaker 5: and if you swipe right, you can see the Jungle
Speaker 5: Room to the right. And I thought they were kidding, right,
Speaker 5: So I laughed and I turned and looked at them,
Speaker 5: and they were just swiping back and forth. And I
Speaker 5: leaned forward and I said, but sir, there's an old
Speaker 5: fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning
Speaker 5: your head, because you realize we're actually in the jungle room.
Speaker 5: You don't have to look at a picture of it
Speaker 5: on the internet. We're literally there. It's all around you.
Speaker 5: And they looked at me like I was completely arranged
Speaker 5: and back to out the room and I turned to
Speaker 5: my godson to laugh about it, and he was standing
Speaker 5: in the corner staring at Snapchat, because from the minute
Speaker 5: we landed he just couldn't stop. He couldn't stop. And
Speaker 5: I went up to him, and I did think it's
Speaker 5: never a good idea with teenagers. I tried to grab
Speaker 5: the phone out of his hand. I said to him,
Speaker 5: I know you're afraid of missing out, but this is
Speaker 5: guaranteeing that you'll miss out. You're not showing up at
Speaker 5: the events of your own existence. You're not present at
Speaker 5: your own life. This is no way to live. And
Speaker 5: he stormed off, understandably, and I wandered around Memphis on
Speaker 5: my own that night, and I found him later by
Speaker 5: the guitar shapes swimming Paul in the Heartbreak Hotel where
Speaker 5: we were staying, and he was sitting with his feet
Speaker 5: in the pool and he was looking at his phone
Speaker 5: and I apologized to him for getting so angry, and
Speaker 5: he didn't look up from a snapchat, but he said,
Speaker 5: I know something's really wrong here and I don't know
Speaker 5: what it is. And that's when I thought, I need
Speaker 5: to stop putting this off. I need to figure out
Speaker 5: what's actually because it was like, it was like we
Speaker 5: went away to escape this problem of distraction, but there
Speaker 5: was nowhere to escape to because it was everywhere, right,
Speaker 5: And that's why that was the start of me really
Speaker 5: going on this big journey all over the world.
Speaker 2: And why Provincetown? What was it about going there that
Speaker 2: you thought if you say it's everywhere, it's going to
Speaker 2: follow you regardless. What was it about going and spending
Speaker 2: time especially there, or what were the rules that you
Speaker 2: had for yourself health in doing this that was different.
Speaker 5: So at the start of working on my book, style
Speaker 5: and focus, I thought, well, it's obvious what the problem
Speaker 5: is here. I'm weak, I'm not good enough. I need
Speaker 5: to use my willpower. And someone invented the smartphone and
Speaker 5: that fucked me over, right, So I thought, okay, if
Speaker 5: these are the two problems and the solution is kind
Speaker 5: of obvious, right, I'll use my willpower to separate myself
Speaker 5: from the phone. So I was in this very lucky
Speaker 5: position that one of my previous books got made into
Speaker 5: big Hollywood film, so I had a load of money
Speaker 5: for the first time in my life. I thought, fuck out,
Speaker 5: I'm just gonna go away. So I booked a room
Speaker 5: in a beach house in Provincetown, which is a bit
Speaker 5: like Byron Bay. Basically, it's on the tip of Cape Cod.
Speaker 5: It's a much gayer version of Byron Bay. It's the
Speaker 5: kind of place where there's more than one person who
Speaker 5: owns a full time living by dressing as Ursula, the
Speaker 5: villain from The Little Man Made and singing songs about
Speaker 5: kind of lingers.
Speaker 2: Right, that's amazing.
Speaker 5: It's paradise.
Speaker 2: I would hate.
Speaker 5: I should have gone into the Dilama dressed as Ursula.
Speaker 5: That would have really fucked with him. But if I
Speaker 5: ever do it again, I will. And I booked this
Speaker 5: room and I went there, and I had no smartphone,
Speaker 5: and I had no laptop that could get online. My
Speaker 5: friend Mtiat has gave me his broken old laptop that
Speaker 5: been able to get online for years, and I had
Speaker 5: three months completely offline. I didn't have any access to
Speaker 5: the Internet at all, and loads of things happened in
Speaker 5: that month, but the biggest thing that amazed me was,
Speaker 5: I Mean, the other thing I thought before I went was, well,
Speaker 5: maybe my attentions getting worse because I'm getting older. I
Speaker 5: was nearly forty when I went, And the most striking
Speaker 5: thing was how much and how rapidly my attention came back.
Speaker 5: My attention went back to being as good as it
Speaker 5: had been when I was seventeen. I could read for
Speaker 5: like eight hours a day, I could have really long
Speaker 5: conversations quite quickly. That desperate kind of hunger for the distractions,
Speaker 5: the kind of pings and paranoias of the way we live,
Speaker 5: really washed out, like a tide that had gone. And
Speaker 5: I later realized actually, because after that I went on
Speaker 5: this big journey, I interviewed over two hundred the leading
Speaker 5: scientists in the world, from Moscow to Melbourne to Miami
Speaker 5: who've studied why our attentions getting worse, and they've actually
Speaker 5: shown that there's scientific evidence for twelve factors that can
Speaker 5: make your attention better and make your attention worse. Some
Speaker 5: of them are in our tech, but actually most of
Speaker 5: them are not they're much bigger factors in the way
Speaker 5: we live. I'm sure we'll get to some of them.
Speaker 5: And I realized actually a lot of them had changed
Speaker 5: in Provincetown. It wasn't just the lack of the tech.
Speaker 5: But I remember on the last day I was there,
Speaker 5: there's a point at the edge of Provincetown. It's just
Speaker 5: beyond the lighthouse where you can go on a boat,
Speaker 5: and I remember going there and looking out over I
Speaker 5: hadn't gone anywhere for three months, right, and looking out
Speaker 5: over this landscape where i'd been, where my mind had
Speaker 5: really been for three months, and thinking this is amazing.
Speaker 5: Why would I ever go back how I lived before? Right?
Speaker 5: I loved this? And the next day I got the
Speaker 5: ferry back to Boston and I got my phone and
Speaker 5: my laptop back from my friend Joleen, And within two
Speaker 5: months I was eighty percent back where i'd been. I
Speaker 5: didn't ever go quite back as far, and I was like, ah,
Speaker 5: And then I felt this kind of renewed wave of shame, like, well,
Speaker 5: what happened? Right? And that was when I realized, Oh,
Speaker 5: I need to understand in a deeper way what's happening
Speaker 5: and build more sustainable solutions than just Look, detoxes are great,
Speaker 5: but they're not the solution.
Speaker 2: And I think that's what everyone does, right people you
Speaker 2: see it, they go, I'm having a weekend off social media,
Speaker 2: as though that's the solution to cleansing whatever feelings it is.
Speaker 2: You know, sometimes people feel overwhelmed by using social media
Speaker 2: or overwhelmed by their phones. But it's this idea that
Speaker 2: a twenty four hour step away is going to solve
Speaker 2: all the problems. But the problems are actually a lot more.
Speaker 2: It's just intertwined in the way that we live our
Speaker 2: lives rather than it being just a once off detox.
Speaker 5: Yeah. And I think for all of the twelve factors
Speaker 5: that are harming our attention that I write about in
Speaker 5: my book Style and Focus, I learned from this journey
Speaker 5: that there's sort of two levels of which we've got
Speaker 5: to tackle them. I think I think of them as
Speaker 5: defense and offense. There are loads of things that we
Speaker 5: can do as individuals to defend ourselves and our children
Speaker 5: from these forces that are stealing our focus. Right. I'm
Speaker 5: sure we'll get to lots. I go through dozens in
Speaker 5: the book, but I'll give you an example of one
Speaker 5: I have at home a so called a K safe.
Speaker 5: It's a plastic safe. I don't get an commission for this,
Speaker 5: by the way, it's a bit like AVC salesperson by
Speaker 5: saying it's a plastic safe. In the show Note, you
Speaker 5: take off the lid, you put in your phone, you
Speaker 5: put on the lid, you turn the dial, and it
Speaker 5: locks your phone away for anything between five minutes and
Speaker 5: a whole day. Right. I won't sit down and watch
Speaker 5: a film with people unless that everyone puts their phone
Speaker 5: in the phone jail. We'll have my friends around for
Speaker 5: dinner unless we all in prison our phones. And it's
Speaker 5: very hard at first, and I felt that difficulty myself.
Speaker 5: If to say to people, you know, think about anything
Speaker 5: you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of,
Speaker 5: whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning
Speaker 5: to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that
Speaker 5: you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus
Speaker 5: and attention. And when focus and attention break down, your
Speaker 5: ability to achieve your goals breaks down, your ability to
Speaker 5: solve your problems breaks down. You feel worse about yourself
Speaker 5: actually because you are less competent. Right, And when you
Speaker 5: start to get your attention back. Even beginning in these
Speaker 5: very small ways. It's initially anxiety provoking, and then you
Speaker 5: feel the tremendous pleasure. Just the pleasure of sitting and
Speaker 5: having dinner with your friends and them actually listening to
Speaker 5: you and you actually listening to them is such a
Speaker 5: profane and pleasure that it quite quickly people want to
Speaker 5: expand the spaces in which they can do that. So
Speaker 5: that's one level of which we've got to respond defense, right,
Speaker 5: and we can talk about lots of other ways people
Speaker 5: can defend themselves. But I want to be really, really
Speaker 5: honest with people, because, to be candid, I don't think
Speaker 5: most books about attention are being honest with people. I
Speaker 5: am passionately in favor of these individual changes. They will
Speaker 5: make a big difference. They go a long way, but
Speaker 5: on their own they're not going to solve this problem
Speaker 5: because at the moment, it's a bit like someone is
Speaker 5: pouring itching powder over us all day and then leaning
Speaker 5: forward and going, you know what, mate, you might want
Speaker 5: to learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch so much,
Speaker 5: and you want to go, well, fuck off, I'll learn
Speaker 5: to meditate. That's really valuable, But you need to stop
Speaker 5: pouring this itching powder on me. Right, So we've got
Speaker 5: to actually deal with the factors together collectively that are
Speaker 5: doing this to us. Because you know, this didn't happen
Speaker 5: because you failed, and you failed, and I failed and
Speaker 5: our kids failed. Right, this happened because of very big
Speaker 5: social forces. But these social forces, they are not inevitable.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: Dr James Williams, who'd been at the heart of Silicon Valley,
Speaker 5: a key figure in Silicon Valley, was horrified by what
Speaker 5: they were doing, quit and became, I would argue, the
Speaker 5: most important philosopher attention in the world. He said to me, Look,
Speaker 5: the acts existed for one point four million years before
Speaker 5: anyone said, guys, should we put handle on this thing.
Speaker 5: The entire Internet has existed less than ten thousand days. Right,
Speaker 5: we can sort the shout if we want to, and
Speaker 5: not just the tech element, the other eleven components as well.
Speaker 5: We can deal with these things, but a lot of
Speaker 5: them have to be dealt with through collective action together,
Speaker 5: some of them can be dealt with individually, and a
Speaker 5: lot of them have to be dealt with at a
Speaker 5: kind of collective level.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, in when I was because I listened
Speaker 4: to your book.
Speaker 3: Weirdly enough, I am a podcaster, so I like listening
Speaker 3: and I listened to your audio book and something that
Speaker 3: I just found insanely relatable that you spoke about when
Speaker 3: you went to Provincetown was one of the things that
Speaker 3: happened to you in one of the first days that
Speaker 3: you were there, and it was that immediate, I guess
Speaker 3: anxiety of when you tap your pocket or when you
Speaker 3: check your hand and you're like, where the fuck is
Speaker 3: my phone? And at the time, I thought, I go
Speaker 3: through that literally anytime I cannot find my phone, to
Speaker 3: the point where I then get my Apple Watch to
Speaker 3: ping it.
Speaker 2: So I can go and find it. It's because it's
Speaker 2: just an extension of us, like we're so used to
Speaker 2: constantly having it as like a body part almost, so
Speaker 2: you're like sometimes even wake up and I'm like, why
Speaker 2: is it in my bed? But it's in my bed,
Speaker 2: you know, so's my child, and then there's my phone
Speaker 2: next to me in between.
Speaker 5: Us, and it's so As one of the scientists who
Speaker 5: made an incredible breakthrough and understanding this professor Suner Layman,
Speaker 5: who I interviewed in Copenhagen in Denmark. The reason he
Speaker 5: started researching this is because he loves his sons, and
Speaker 5: every morning his sons would come and jump in the bed,
Speaker 5: and instead of turning to these lovely creatures or he loves,
Speaker 5: he would instinctively reach for his phone and look at
Speaker 5: it first, and he was like, what am I doing?
Speaker 2: But so many of us do it, and that's We're
Speaker 2: all doing it, and we almost justify it to ourselves
Speaker 2: in terms of like, well, I'm just going to check in,
Speaker 2: or I'm just going to check my emails, or I'm
Speaker 2: just going to check I don't know, my Instagram, my comments, whatever,
Speaker 2: that small thing is that we think we just need
Speaker 2: to check. But it's the constantness of it, Like, what's
Speaker 2: the difference if those comments are checked at the end
Speaker 2: of the day collective once, rather than that being checked,
Speaker 2: you know, all the time throughout the day. What I
Speaker 2: always find interesting is and something that I'm so guilty
Speaker 2: of is I might be in the middle of a task,
Speaker 2: whether it be writing or researching for the podcast, or
Speaker 2: doing something for my other business, and just the distraction
Speaker 2: of getting a message or just the distraction of you know,
Speaker 2: I'll quickly tap into Instagram for a second. What impact
Speaker 2: does that have. So if you're focused on a task
Speaker 2: and then you you know, quickly check out of that
Speaker 2: task and then go back to it, what impact does
Speaker 2: that have on your ability to actually complete whatever it
Speaker 2: is that you're supposed to be given your focus to.
Speaker 5: Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon did a study,
Speaker 5: really shocking study found if you're interrupted, and it could
Speaker 5: be something as small as a text message. So let's
Speaker 5: say you get text message, it takes you twenty seconds
Speaker 5: to look at it. It takes you, on average twenty
Speaker 5: three minutes to get back to the level of focus
Speaker 5: you had before you were interrupted. So you think, oh,
Speaker 5: I'll answer my friends text message will take twenty seconds
Speaker 5: very much, I'll take you twenty three minutes plus twenty seconds, right,
Speaker 5: But most of us, of course, are never getting twenty
Speaker 5: three minutes spare, So we're constantly operating at this lower
Speaker 5: level of cognitive ability. And so one of people who
Speaker 5: most help me to understand this is an amazing man
Speaker 5: name Professor Earl Miller, who I went to interview at
Speaker 5: MIT in the US. See he's one of the leading
Speaker 5: neuroscientists in the world. And he said to me, look,
Speaker 5: there's one thing you've got to understand about the human
Speaker 5: brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think
Speaker 5: about one or two things at a time. That's it.
Speaker 5: This is a fundamental limitation to the human brain. The
Speaker 5: human brain has not changed significantly in forty thousand years.
Speaker 5: It's not going to change on any time scale any
Speaker 5: of us are going to see. But what's happened is
Speaker 5: we've fallen for a kind of mass delusion. The average
Speaker 5: teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms
Speaker 5: of media at the same time, and that the rest
Speaker 5: of us are not that far behind them. So what
Speaker 5: happens is scientists like Professor Miller, scientists all over the world,
Speaker 5: they get people into labs and they get them to
Speaker 5: think they're doing more than one thing at a time,
Speaker 5: and they monitor them, and what they discover is you
Speaker 5: can't do more than one thing at a time. What
Speaker 5: you do is you juggle very quickly. You're like, wait,
Speaker 5: what did you just ask me? What's that message on WhatsApp?
Speaker 5: What does it saying on the TV there? What's this?
Speaker 5: What's this message on Facebook? Sorry? What did you ask me? Again?
Speaker 2: And the overwhelm and that burnout that then comes from
Speaker 2: that feeling of like never actually being able to complete
Speaker 2: a task because it's like this constant feeling of being
Speaker 2: overwhelmed and stressed out because there's so many plates spinning.
Speaker 5: Well, the technical term for that, the kind of fancy
Speaker 5: term for that, is the switch cost effect. So there's
Speaker 5: a cost switching between tasks. So when you're switching rapidly
Speaker 5: between tasks, the evidence is very clear, you remember much
Speaker 5: less of what you do, you make far more mistakes,
Speaker 5: you're much less creative. Evidence is that it's huge. I
Speaker 5: give you an example of a small study. It's backed
Speaker 5: by a wider body of evidence. Hewlett Packard, the printer company.
Speaker 5: They got a scientist in to study their workers, and
Speaker 5: he split them into two groups. And the first group
Speaker 5: was told, just get on with your task, whatever it is,
Speaker 5: and you're not going to be interrupted. And the second
Speaker 5: group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is,
Speaker 5: but you're going to have to at the same time
Speaker 5: onto a heavy load of email and vocals. So pretty
Speaker 5: much how most of us work. And at the end
Speaker 5: of it, the scientists tested the IQ of both groups.
Speaker 5: Group that had not been interrupted scored on average ten
Speaker 5: IQ points higher than the group that had to keep
Speaker 5: your sense to that big That is, if we all
Speaker 5: smoked a fat splift together now and got stoned. If
Speaker 5: we did that now instead of waiting far now, our
Speaker 5: IQs would go down in the short term by five points.
Speaker 5: So being chronically interrupted is twice as bad in the
Speaker 5: short term for your IQ as getting stones.
Speaker 2: Right, if that's some pretty bad conversations being markedly, if
Speaker 2: you were a.
Speaker 5: Chronic stoner, or if you were getting absolutely hammered, it
Speaker 5: would be different, right, But you can see you you'd
Speaker 5: be better off sitting at your desk doing one thing
Speaker 5: at a time, a smoking a spliff. Then you would
Speaker 5: sit at your desk, not smoking a spliff and being
Speaker 5: constantly interrupted. Now, to be clear, you'd be better off
Speaker 5: neither getting stoned nor being interrupted. Don't want to get
Speaker 5: the wrong idea, but this is why Professor Miller said
Speaker 5: to me, we're living in a perfect storm of cognitive
Speaker 5: degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted.
Speaker 3: Always joking like amongst our team that we are scatterbrains.
Speaker 3: You know that we kind of can't keep on the
Speaker 3: one train of thought thriving chaos.
Speaker 2: Say that we thrive in chaos. We don't, We say
Speaker 2: our job. We don't thrive in chaos, but it's constantly
Speaker 2: chaos and we survive. It's probably more the saying.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's so interesting. So why do you think you
Speaker 5: say that?
Speaker 2: Oh, because it's just a it's a war cry to
Speaker 2: get through the day, really, I think. But no, we
Speaker 2: work very much in a digital space, so a podcasting
Speaker 2: is very much an audio digital medium. A lot of
Speaker 2: the work that we do and how we connect with
Speaker 2: our communities is via social media platforms, but it is
Speaker 2: without having one designated person who takes care of just
Speaker 2: the customer service side. In terms of like the huge
Speaker 2: community of emails or messages that need to be responded to,
Speaker 2: it kind of always feels like a constant barrage.
Speaker 3: And it is.
Speaker 2: As much as there's incredible aspects of that which we
Speaker 2: are so grateful for, there are some aspects of that
Speaker 2: which make it really hard to kind of hone in
Speaker 2: and get and feel accomplished in like the to do
Speaker 2: list as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I've always put it down to the fact
Speaker 3: that that's our personalities. But what I loved hearing you
Speaker 3: say was that our inability to not pay attention to
Speaker 3: the one thing at the one time, it wasn't entirely
Speaker 3: our own faults, and that social media has. These big
Speaker 3: companies of social media have a lot to be accountable for.
Speaker 5: It's not all your fault, right, you didn't design this
Speaker 5: environment in which we live. So let's look at one
Speaker 5: of the twelve factors that you brought up, one of
Speaker 5: the twelve factors that are harming our focus. And they
Speaker 5: go really widely, from you know, the food we eat,
Speaker 5: to the way our kids' schools work. There's a whole
Speaker 5: range of things. But let's home in on this one,
Speaker 5: because I think you're totally right. It's the one that
Speaker 5: we think of most. I actually don't think it's the biggest, interestingly,
Speaker 5: but it's definitely very big, and it's the one we
Speaker 5: think of the most when we think about this problem.
Speaker 5: And I spent a lot of time trying to understand
Speaker 5: this by interviewing people in Silicon Valley, a lot of
Speaker 5: whom are designed the world in which we live, right.
Speaker 5: It was so interesting to see how haunted they are
Speaker 5: by what they've done. So, for example, I mentioned before
Speaker 5: doctor James Williams had been a key figure in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 5: He had this moment that really haunted him if speaking
Speaker 5: at a tech conference and the audience were literally the
Speaker 5: people anyone listening. Your kids are using stuff designed by
Speaker 5: the people who were in that audience today, right, And
Speaker 5: he said to them, if there's anyone here who wants
Speaker 5: to live in the world that we've created, please put
Speaker 5: up your hand. Not one person put up their hand.
Speaker 5: Not long afterwards he quit, who will? I can't do
Speaker 5: this anymore? This is immoral? Right?
Speaker 2: When you say this is immoral, what is the moral?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Exactly, what's the part that's I mean, you know, and
Speaker 2: I think so many of us have seen documentaries like
Speaker 2: The Social Dilemma or you know, we've tapped into the
Speaker 2: fact that there are problematic aspects of social media of
Speaker 2: how it sucks us of not just our attention but
Speaker 2: with our money in many ways. But what is it
Speaker 2: about it that is immoral?
Speaker 5: Yeah? So this is so important because the way big
Speaker 5: tech want us to think about this debate is are
Speaker 5: you pro tech or you anti tech? And when you
Speaker 5: hear that, you're like, oh, well, I'm not going to
Speaker 5: join the Armish. I'm not going to give up my technology.
Speaker 5: I guess that must be protech, right, no hate the Armish?
Speaker 5: Exactly if.
Speaker 2: People who believe.
Speaker 5: Exactly exactly. I once spent a week in an Amish
Speaker 5: community and I made a terrible mistake for a previous book.
Speaker 5: I made the terrible mistake the night before.
Speaker 2: I'm about to say that was a terrible mistake.
Speaker 5: No, no, well, actually they were quite nice. But the
Speaker 5: night before I made the terrible mistake of watching the
Speaker 5: Harrison Ford film Witness, which really scared the show out
Speaker 5: of me, because the Armish are not good people in
Speaker 5: that film. The real Armish are much better. No, but
Speaker 5: that's not the debate. We're all pro tech, right. The
Speaker 5: debate is what kind of tech do we want, designed
Speaker 5: for what purposes, working in whose interests?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 5: Which is sound a bit fancy, So just unpack it
Speaker 5: a bit if that's okay. So anyone listening, if you
Speaker 5: open Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, any of the mainstream social media apps,
Speaker 5: now they start to make money out of you immediately
Speaker 5: in two ways. First way is really obvious, you see advertising. Okay,
Speaker 5: no one needs me to explain that. Second way is
Speaker 5: much more important. Everything you do on these apps is
Speaker 5: scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure
Speaker 5: out who you are. Constantly harvesting information about you. So
Speaker 5: let's say you've said that you like I don't know
Speaker 5: Scott Morrison, Bet Midler, and you told your mummy you
Speaker 5: just bought some nappies, right, okay, so it knows you
Speaker 5: like Scott Morrison. You probably write wing. You like Bet Middler.
Speaker 5: If you're a man, you're probably gay. No disrespect to
Speaker 5: any straight man you like Bet Midler. I don't believe
Speaker 5: there are any, but if there are. And you've told
Speaker 5: your mommy you bought nappies, okay, you've got a baby.
Speaker 5: So it's harvesting all this information about you, right, partly
Speaker 5: because it wants to sell that information to advertisers, but
Speaker 5: mainly because it's figuring out what the weaknesses and your
Speaker 5: attention are. It's figuring out what is it that keeps
Speaker 5: you as an individual scrolling for a super simple reason.
Speaker 5: And it's had to be explained to me by so
Speaker 5: many people in Silicon Valley before I really got it
Speaker 5: understood how simple it was. In a way, every time
Speaker 5: you pick up your phone and start scrolling, those companies
Speaker 5: begin to make money. The longer you scroll, the more
Speaker 5: money they make. Every time you put the app away.
Speaker 5: Their revenue stream disappears. Did so for your kids? Right,
Speaker 5: every time your kids open the app, they start to
Speaker 5: make money. The longer they scroll, the more money the
Speaker 5: company makes, because obviously the longer you scroll, the more
Speaker 5: ads you see, and the more information they harvest about
Speaker 5: you to sell to the advertisers. So all of this
Speaker 5: genius in Silicon Valley, all these algorithms, or this AI
Speaker 5: or this incredible engineering power, all of it is good
Speaker 5: at the moment towards one thing, figuring out how do
Speaker 5: we get you and your kids to pick up your
Speaker 5: phone as often as possible and scroll as long as possible.
Speaker 5: Just like I know the head of KFC, all he
Speaker 5: cares about He might as an individual, care about something else,
Speaker 5: but in his job, all he cares about is how
Speaker 5: many times did you go to KFC today? And how
Speaker 5: big was the bucket you bought? All they care about
Speaker 5: is how often and how long did you scroll?
Speaker 2: That's it, right, And these are some of the smartest
Speaker 2: people in the world. And I think this goes back
Speaker 2: to what you said earlier, this idea of offense and defense.
Speaker 2: Sure we can have some defenses against that, but it's
Speaker 2: a hard one to unpack because when you're like well,
Speaker 2: we don't have to be black and white with this.
Speaker 2: Obviously everybody is pro tech. But if everybody is pro tech,
Speaker 2: how do we then have an offense to these massive
Speaker 2: tech companies. How do we then collectively turn around and say, well,
Speaker 2: we're not happy with this, but we still want all
Speaker 2: the other stuff you know that you've created that's free.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's such an important question. My friend tis
Speaker 5: Stan Harris always says, who'd been at the heart of
Speaker 5: Google is now? I would argue the most important dissident
Speaker 5: speaking out against this what they're doing, says, you know,
Speaker 5: you can try having self control, but every time you do,
Speaker 5: there's ten thousand engineers at the other side of the
Speaker 5: screen working really hard to undermine your self control. So
Speaker 5: I think you've gone to exactly the most important question.
Speaker 5: There are loads of things we can do as individuals.
Speaker 5: You've gone to the heart of it, and I think
Speaker 5: we want to understand one of the things we need
Speaker 5: to do now to deal with this, one of the
Speaker 5: twelve factors that are harming our attention. I think there's
Speaker 5: an analogy in the history of Australia that I think
Speaker 5: you can probably just about remember. I can remember that.
Speaker 5: I think shows us the way forward. So when we
Speaker 5: were kids, the most common form of petrol, in fact,
Speaker 5: by far the most dominant form of petrol in Australia
Speaker 5: and in Britain across the world was leaded petrol. Right,
Speaker 5: I can remember the smell of that.
Speaker 2: I can remember moment unleaded petrols where it.
Speaker 5: Came from, exactly right. And a bit before our time,
Speaker 5: people used to paint their houses a lot with lead paint, right,
Speaker 5: And it had been known going right back to the
Speaker 5: nineteen twenties that exposure to lead really screws up your
Speaker 5: brain and in particular harms children's ability to focus and
Speaker 5: pay attention. In fact, there was an amazing scientist named
Speaker 5: Dr Alice Hamilton who in the nineteen twenties said there
Speaker 5: was an alternative to leaded petrol even then, so don't
Speaker 5: introduce leaded petrol. If it's in the petrol, it'll get
Speaker 5: in the air, everyone will be exposed to it. It'll
Speaker 5: be really bad for people's brains. And she was kind
Speaker 5: of man explained out the room, and they introduced leaded petrol.
Speaker 5: And by the time you got to the late seventies
Speaker 5: the early eighties, the science was just totally undeniable that
Speaker 5: this was really harming children's ability to focus right, and
Speaker 5: has all sorts of other terrible effects. So what happened
Speaker 5: was a group of ordinary Australian mums what we used
Speaker 5: to call back then housewives, banded together and said, well,
Speaker 5: why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing these
Speaker 5: for profit companies to screw up our kids' brains? This
Speaker 5: is crazy, especially when there's an alternative that works just
Speaker 5: as well and doesn't do that right. And it's really
Speaker 5: important to notice what those mums didn't say. They didn't say,
Speaker 5: so we're anti petrol, get rid of it. They didn't
Speaker 5: say get rid of paint. No one should paint their
Speaker 5: houses anymore, in the same way no one could say
Speaker 5: we're anti tech. Right. What they said is, let's deal
Speaker 5: with the specific aspect of this that is so harming us.
Speaker 5: So they said, let's ban leaded petrol. Right, And these
Speaker 5: mums they fought, and they fought and they were ridiculed
Speaker 5: and it you know, it's a bit like that thing
Speaker 5: Gandhi said with every political movement, First they ignore you,
Speaker 5: then they fight you, then you win. Right, And that's
Speaker 5: what happened, and everyone listening knows these mums. They won.
Speaker 5: We don't have leaded petrol anymore. As a result, the
Speaker 5: Center of Disease Control says the average child is three
Speaker 5: to five IQ points higher than they would have been
Speaker 5: had we not got rid of lead right now, and
Speaker 5: we all have better attention as a result. Right if
Speaker 5: we still had lead in the air, our attention would
Speaker 5: be even worse than it is now now. You can
Speaker 5: see to me, along with the individual forms of defense,
Speaker 5: and I talk about lots of them in the book,
Speaker 5: that's a really great model. You identify the specific element
Speaker 5: that's fucking with our brains, and you get rid of
Speaker 5: that specific element while keeping all the good stuff. We
Speaker 5: still have petrol. We stand paint right with a room
Speaker 5: that's been painted, just not with leaded paint, right, just
Speaker 5: not recently. And to me, so what I wanted to
Speaker 5: figure out was, with all these people in Silicon Valley
Speaker 5: who were at the heart of the machine, what's the
Speaker 5: equivalent of the lead in the lead paint for this problem?
Speaker 5: Right there was a moment it really fell into place
Speaker 5: for me. Hainsfeed Asaraskin, who invented a key part of
Speaker 5: how most websites work. His dad, Jeff Raskin, invented the
Speaker 5: Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs and ASA said to me, look,
Speaker 5: there's an exact equivalent to the lead in lead paint.
Speaker 5: You've got to ban the current business model for social media.
Speaker 5: And I was like, well, what do you mean? And
Speaker 5: he said, past laws that say a business model that
Speaker 5: is based on secretly tracking you in order to figure
Speaker 5: out the weaknesses and your attention, that is just fundamentally immoral.
Speaker 5: It's like lead in lead paint. It's screwing up our kids' brains.
Speaker 5: We won't allow it. Let's imagine we do that. The
Speaker 5: day after we do that, what would happen when I
Speaker 5: opened Facebook? Would it just say sorry, everyone, we've gone fishing?
Speaker 5: He said, of course not. What would happen is they'd
Speaker 5: have to move to a different business model. And everyone
Speaker 5: I'm listening, almost everyone will have experience of the two
Speaker 5: different business models. So the first alternative is a subscription model.
Speaker 5: Everyone knows how Netflix works. You pay a certain amount,
Speaker 5: you get access, right, so it maybe that we'd want
Speaker 5: to pay a small amount to social media companies in
Speaker 5: order to get access. Key thing to understand is at
Speaker 5: that point all the incentives change. Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, you
Speaker 5: are not their customer. You are the product they sell
Speaker 5: to their real customer. Who are the advertisers? So all
Speaker 5: of their intentions towards you are figuring out, how do
Speaker 5: we hack your attention and focus and your kid's attention
Speaker 5: of focus to get you to scroll as much as possible?
Speaker 5: Pick up your phone. You want to know why your
Speaker 5: phone's in your bed. One reason is because they've been
Speaker 5: unbelievably good at making you desperately crave that feedback. Right,
Speaker 5: But if you become the customer, suddenly all the incentives change.
Speaker 5: Suddenly they're not like, oh, what does she want in
Speaker 5: order to how can we hack her in order to
Speaker 5: sell her to advertise? It's something like what does she want?
Speaker 5: It turns out she feels good when she meets up
Speaker 5: with her friends and looks into their eyes. We've will
Speaker 5: learned the importance of that in the last two years. Okay,
Speaker 5: let's design our app not to get her to doom
Speaker 5: scroll as much as possible. Let's design the app to
Speaker 5: maximize contact between people offline. Let's design it to say, Oh,
Speaker 5: your friend Hannah's around the corner. She's selected on a
Speaker 5: button she wants to meet up. Why don't you go
Speaker 5: for a drink with her. The technology exists to do
Speaker 5: that as easily as the technology exists right now, my
Speaker 5: friends in Silicon Valley could design that in five minutes.
Speaker 5: The key thing is the incentives aren't there. So that's
Speaker 5: one alternative business model. We'll think about another one which
Speaker 5: literally everyone listening has experience of. Before we had sewers,
Speaker 5: we had FECs in the street. People got cholera. It
Speaker 5: was terrible. So we all paid to build the sewers,
Speaker 5: and we all own and maintain the sewers together. Right.
Speaker 5: You own the sewers in Sydney, own the sewers in London.
Speaker 5: So just like we want to own the sewage pipes together,
Speaker 5: it might be we want to own the information pipes
Speaker 5: together because we're getting the equivalent of cholera for our attention.
Speaker 5: But the key thing is, for as long as the
Speaker 5: longer you scroll, the more money these companies make, they
Speaker 5: will just carry on being unbelievably good at it, right,
Speaker 5: and they'll get better and better at it. Paul Graham,
Speaker 5: one of the biggest investors in Silicon mailing, said the
Speaker 5: world will be more addictive in the next forty years
Speaker 5: on the current jectory than it was in the last
Speaker 5: forty Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to
Speaker 5: your kid than Facebook. So imagine the next crack like
Speaker 5: iteration of TikTok in the metabus. So that's one side
Speaker 5: of the race. Right on the other side of the race,
Speaker 5: there's got to be a movement of all of us
Speaker 5: saying no, no, you don't get to do this to
Speaker 5: us and our kids, just like those mums with the
Speaker 5: lead paint. No, we're not going to tolerate this. That's
Speaker 5: not a good life. No, this is not how we
Speaker 5: want some cost we want technology. Of course there are
Speaker 5: moments of speed, but we also want moments of thought
Speaker 5: and contemplation and rest. We want children who can play outside,
Speaker 5: who can read books. Right, we can get to that
Speaker 5: better future, but we won't get there if we don't
Speaker 5: fight for it.
Speaker 2: Do you think as well with this though? And I
Speaker 2: mean I love the analogy of the lead paint, but
Speaker 2: in terms of like how simple that was to be
Speaker 2: able to pin in and go and to really go. Okay,
Speaker 2: that's the problem. It's that one element, It's that one
Speaker 2: ingredient that's causing an issue. I guess the issue with
Speaker 2: social media is that it and especially social media, it's
Speaker 2: so abstract to so many people. I mean, especially the
Speaker 2: people who are doing the legislations around it. You know,
Speaker 2: so many of us and we work in a digital
Speaker 2: space and I still don't fully comprehend how it works.
Speaker 2: But I know it benefits me in lots of ways.
Speaker 2: It benefits me from a business, from an advertising perspective,
Speaker 2: it benefits me from keeping connected. And I know it's negative,
Speaker 2: but without really understanding the nuances of how the platforms
Speaker 2: have been created, and I think that there is kind
Speaker 2: of a lack of transparency from the people who sit
Speaker 2: at the top, like an intentional lack of transparency. Totally
Speaker 2: that that's kind of what stops people from collectively going
Speaker 2: we don't want this. You know, individually we're all like, yeah,
Speaker 2: we're not happy, but collectively, no one really knows where
Speaker 2: to start.
Speaker 5: I think that's totally right. There's a different historical analogy
Speaker 5: that makes me helps me to think about that, and
Speaker 5: it will sound a bit odd for a moment, but
Speaker 5: I really loved my grandmother's I was raised by my
Speaker 5: Scottish grandmother and my mom was ille when I was
Speaker 5: a kid, and my dad was in a different country,
Speaker 5: and my grandmother's with the age I am now in
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty two, right, and in ninety six, So one
Speaker 5: of them was a Scottish, working class Scottish woman living
Speaker 5: in a kind of housing project, and my Swiss grandmother
Speaker 5: was a peasant living in a what's what they would
Speaker 5: have called her then, in a wooden heart on the
Speaker 5: side of a mountain. Right. And in nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 5: neither of my grandmothers were allowed to have bank accounts
Speaker 5: because they were married women. They were added to bank
Speaker 5: accounts in their own name. It was legal for their
Speaker 5: husbands to rape them, as it was legal everywhere in
Speaker 5: the world for men to rape their wives. My Swiss
Speaker 5: grandmother wasn't allowed to vote because she was a woman, right,
Speaker 5: And I'm very conscious of a man man's blaming this
Speaker 5: to you know this much better than I do. But
Speaker 5: I think about my grandmother's lives then and how enormous
Speaker 5: the challenges that face them were, right, And then I
Speaker 5: think about my niece Erin, who's just about to turn eighteen.
Speaker 5: My Swiss grandmother, she loved to paint and draw. And
Speaker 5: when she liked to paint and draw, they when she
Speaker 5: was a girl They would just say, what the fuck
Speaker 5: are you doing, Get into the kitchen, that's your job.
Speaker 5: My niece, when she loved to paint and draw, we
Speaker 5: started googling art schools. Right now, I don't want to
Speaker 5: underestimate how much further we've got to go in achieving
Speaker 5: liberation for women. But even the craziest misogynists wouldn't say, well,
Speaker 5: Erin shouldn't be allowed to have a bank account, it
Speaker 5: should be legal for men to rape her, and she
Speaker 5: shouldn't be allowed to vote. Even the most barking, mad
Speaker 5: you know figure doesn't say that, right. That transformation happened
Speaker 5: because loads of women just said I'm not fucking taking
Speaker 5: this anymore. You're not going to treat me like that.
Speaker 5: And if I think about my grandmother's in nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 5: it's not like they had a script, right, it was like, oh,
Speaker 5: we'll do the following twelve point program, and you know,
Speaker 5: and that had to fight had to happen at every
Speaker 5: level as well. It had to happen every family, in
Speaker 5: every workplace, in every in parliaments everywhere, right, And I
Speaker 5: think this is a bit like that, the attention fight.
Speaker 5: I don't want to overestimate the power else. There's a
Speaker 5: lot of differences as well, but in the same way,
Speaker 5: the fight for attention has to happen in your most
Speaker 5: intimate spaces, in your bed, right, You've got to have
Speaker 5: that fight for attention. You are going to have it
Speaker 5: at your kid's schools, You've got to have it at
Speaker 5: you know, at a national level. So it's got to
Speaker 5: happen at lots of levels. But sometimes people say to me,
Speaker 5: totally understandably, but big tech is so powerful, how we
Speaker 5: going to take this on? And I would say to them,
Speaker 5: You're absolutely right. It's a big fight. We've got ahead
Speaker 5: of us, and the other eleven factors are big as well.
Speaker 5: But big tech is not one hundredth as powerful as
Speaker 5: men were in nineteen sixty two, right when these women
Speaker 5: that I knew and loved were the age I am now,
Speaker 5: men controlled literally everything, right, It's not an exaggeration. They
Speaker 5: controlled every country, almost every company in the world, every
Speaker 5: police force, every.
Speaker 2: Army, and it wasn't in their interest to change anything
Speaker 2: until they were forced to change something exactly.
Speaker 5: You know, Rebecca Sonat, a brilliant American writer, says, you know,
Speaker 5: politicians or weather veans, it's our job to be the weather. Right,
Speaker 5: They'll be as good as we make them. The changes
Speaker 5: that happen will be as good as the ones that
Speaker 5: we organize and demand right now. Of course we do
Speaker 5: that at an individual level and a collective level. But yeah,
Speaker 5: like the lead industry, they were never going to go,
Speaker 5: you know what, guys, We've made enough money, let's stop
Speaker 5: sucking up kids' brains. Right, They we're never going to
Speaker 5: do that, right, They had to be made to do it.
Speaker 5: We have to make these companies do it when it
Speaker 5: comes to big tech and across the board all these
Speaker 5: other things. But we can totally that can I talk
Speaker 5: about just I think it were particularly relevant to your audience.
Speaker 5: There's another way in which this is harming us that
Speaker 5: I think is really worth thinking about. It's particularly catastrophic
Speaker 5: for teenage girls. The design of the machinery is driven
Speaker 5: by just one idea, which is, how do we get
Speaker 5: people to scroll longer and longer and longer. Right, So
Speaker 5: the algorithms, all the computers are set up to figure out, okay,
Speaker 5: track everything and figure out what it is that keeps
Speaker 5: people scrolling, right, and those algorithms. This wasn't anyone's fault.
Speaker 5: They didn't design it that way, but they just stumbled
Speaker 5: across an underlying truth about human psychology. Right. The kind
Speaker 5: of fancy term for it is negativity bias, but it's
Speaker 5: very simple. Everyone will have experienced it. You will stare
Speaker 5: longer at something that makes you angry or upset then
Speaker 5: you will at something that makes you feel good. If
Speaker 5: you've ever seen a car crash, you know exactly what
Speaker 5: I mean. Right, you stared longer at the mangled car
Speaker 5: wreck than you did at the pretty flowers side.
Speaker 2: We said this about comment sections. You know, you could
Speaker 2: receive one hundred good comments on something, or even five
Speaker 2: nice comments on something you won't. They will not even
Speaker 2: reach you. But if you receive one thing that hurts you,
Speaker 2: that makes you feel invalidated or question your sense of self,
Speaker 2: that will rock you. Whereas the compliments, the niceties, everything else,
Speaker 2: it's as though they don't even exist because we can
Speaker 2: be so negatively good.
Speaker 5: That's a really powerful example of negativity bias, and it's
Speaker 5: very deep in human nature. Ten week old children will
Speaker 5: stare longer at an angry face than a smiling face.
Speaker 5: It's probably for a good reason. O're eating our evolution,
Speaker 5: our ancestors who weren't watching out for the scary shit,
Speaker 5: probably got eaten and didn't get to be our ancestors. Right,
Speaker 5: And there's a slightly crude way of putting it, but
Speaker 5: you see what I mean, right. But the problem is
Speaker 5: probably is when you combine two things, a business model
Speaker 5: designed to figure out what keeps you scrolling plus negativity bias. Right.
Speaker 5: So what these algorithms discovered is best way to explain.
Speaker 5: It's picture two teenage girls who go to the same
Speaker 5: party and go home on the same bus, and one
Speaker 5: of them does a little video for TikTok status update whatever,
Speaker 5: and they say, what a nice party, I had a
Speaker 5: great time. Everyone looked good. You know, we danced this
Speaker 5: or that whatever, Right, And the second girl does a
Speaker 5: video or update where she goes, Karen was a right
Speaker 5: skank at that party her boyfriend's and asshole, I spent
Speaker 5: too much time counseling my niece on her TikTok.
Speaker 2: So it's so true, Yes, she got the spicy ta,
Speaker 2: so doesn't angry.
Speaker 5: Imagine that girl does an angry denunciatory rant, right, So
Speaker 5: the algorithm is scanning to look at the kind of
Speaker 5: words you use, and it will put that nice video
Speaker 5: that nice Data's update into a few people's feeds, right,
Speaker 5: But the second update it will put into far more
Speaker 5: people's feeds because it knows if you see something angry
Speaker 5: and what do you mean, Karen's a scank, You're a
Speaker 5: fucking scant. You can see how that triggers an argument
Speaker 5: that causes engagement.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: I fucking love this because we see this and we've
Speaker 2: had this conversation internally. In regards to influencers, I think
Speaker 2: a lot of influencers engage outrage culture. They get really angry,
Speaker 2: and often it's around things that you should be angry about,
Speaker 2: but they will verbalize how angry they are as a
Speaker 2: way of growing their following because it is a really
Speaker 2: fucking great tactic. People love to see someone angry and
Speaker 2: outraged about an injustice, and we are so much more
Speaker 2: willing to follow that. To get on board with that.
Speaker 2: It is a crusade. It is a plight rather than
Speaker 2: following someone who you know is just happy. Not that
Speaker 2: we need to be happy all the time or positive,
Speaker 2: That's not what I'm saying. But it is a tool,
Speaker 2: and I don't think people are aware that it's actually
Speaker 2: a tool that some people and influencers have clocked into
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 5: Those influencers are consciously or unconsciously learning the rules of
Speaker 5: the system they're operating in rightly. So just like the
Speaker 5: teenage girls on the bus, an influence is going to
Speaker 5: clock if I do all these nice posts. If I say, oh, look,
Speaker 5: I read this nice book and wasn't it lovely? You know,
Speaker 5: you're not going to get much traction if you go
Speaker 5: have you seen what this bitch did? Right, It's going
Speaker 5: to get a lot of traction. So I feel it
Speaker 5: happening to myself. I don't look at social media now,
Speaker 5: I've got an assistant. I give my tweets to do.
Speaker 5: It sounds very grand, because I feel myself becoming cruder
Speaker 5: and nastier when I'm on it, because you see, oh,
Speaker 5: I said this nice thing and it looked like hardly
Speaker 5: anyone noticed, and I said this nasty thing, and look
Speaker 5: now people are talking about me. There's some degree to
Speaker 5: which this is just human psychology. But we're operating in
Speaker 5: a machinery that it's super charging the worst of our psychology, right,
Speaker 5: and that doesn't have to happen. We can't change the
Speaker 5: negativity bias. That's just a natural part of human psychology.
Speaker 5: But we can stop the machines fucking jabbing a knitting
Speaker 5: needle that are at our negativity bias all the time. Right,
Speaker 5: So if we change the business model and the way
Speaker 5: we've talked about, you get out of that trap. Right
Speaker 5: in a subscription model and I want to make you
Speaker 5: angry something, they're like, oh, you want to feel good,
Speaker 5: Let's start giving her feedback where she feels good, not
Speaker 5: feedback that makes it angry, upset, and hostile. Right.
Speaker 2: See.
Speaker 3: I also think that there's like a whole other elements
Speaker 3: to this, And Johanna, I know that this is something
Speaker 3: that you are extremely well researched in, and that is
Speaker 3: our brains and the way that they work in a
Speaker 3: similar way to how drug addiction works with social media.
Speaker 3: You know, we now have so much research that shows
Speaker 3: us that when we post something on social media that
Speaker 3: gets likes and gets comments and gets any type of interaction,
Speaker 3: we get a release of dopamine in our brains. And
Speaker 3: that's the same thing that goes up when you take
Speaker 3: just about any illegal drug. And so not only do
Speaker 3: we have these massive tech companies that have designed these
Speaker 3: algorithms to keep us scrolling and keep us engaged. We
Speaker 3: also have our own brains that are being programmed and
Speaker 3: kind of rewired that every time we post something that
Speaker 3: might create you know, outrage culture as we're talking about,
Speaker 3: we get more interaction and so we get more of
Speaker 3: that dopamine being released into our own brains. So it's
Speaker 3: kind of like a storm in a tea cup of
Speaker 3: all of these different factors with how our brains are
Speaker 3: working in terms of social media.
Speaker 2: It's interesting though, the irony in that which I find
Speaker 2: is that all of that comes down to this want
Speaker 2: for connectedness, if this want for like being part of
Speaker 2: a community, to feel validated, to be liked by your friends.
Speaker 2: You know, a lot of that is what it's geared around.
Speaker 2: It's still feeling like you're part of a community, but
Speaker 2: we almost are lacking connection because of it. At the
Speaker 2: same time.
Speaker 5: Well, I think about that. It's such an important point,
Speaker 5: and I thought about this a lot because one of
Speaker 5: the places that we clarified my thought on this is
Speaker 5: I went to the first ever Internet rehab center in
Speaker 5: the world.
Speaker 2: There is a rehab center for the Internet. Well, not
Speaker 2: for the Internet. I'm addicted to the Internet.
Speaker 5: Oh that's amazing, you know, it's funny when I arrived that.
Speaker 5: It's just outside Spokane in Washington State. And I remember
Speaker 5: when I arrived there, it's in a clearing in the woods.
Speaker 5: I got out the car absolutely instinctively, I looked at
Speaker 5: my phone was really pissed off. I had no signals.
Speaker 5: Ah fuck, you're in the right place, right, So I
Speaker 5: went in and this was this is pre COVID. They
Speaker 5: get all kinds of people there, but they disproportionately get
Speaker 5: young men who'd become obsessed with online multiplayer role playing games.
Speaker 5: Then it was World of Warcraft, it'd be Fortnite now.
Speaker 5: The woman who runs co founded the clinic and co
Speaker 5: runs it is an amazing person called Dr Hillary Cash.
Speaker 5: This place is called Restart Washington. And remember how saying
Speaker 5: to me afterwards, well, you've got to ask yourself, what
Speaker 5: are these young men getting out of these games. What
Speaker 5: they're getting is the kind of parody of the things
Speaker 5: they've lost. So let's think about that. They're getting a
Speaker 5: sense that they're physically moving around, Right, young men don't
Speaker 5: leave the house, but to getting sense they're physically moving around,
Speaker 5: they're getting a sense that people see them. Right, we
Speaker 5: are even before COVID, we were the loneliest society and
Speaker 5: human here. Right, at least when you're playing the game,
Speaker 5: someone's seeing you visibility exactly. Oh, they're getting a sense
Speaker 5: they're good at something, and they.
Speaker 2: Can be the version of themselves they want to be.
Speaker 2: They cannot create who they are, the way they look,
Speaker 2: how they present themselves. Someone who's an introvert can be
Speaker 2: an extrovert in that environment one percent.
Speaker 5: And they're also getting a sense they're getting better and
Speaker 5: better at something. But what doctor Cash said to me
Speaker 5: is they're getting these are unparaphrasing, but they're getting a
Speaker 5: kind of parody of those things. Right. Well, I thought
Speaker 5: about this a lot because the young men were often
Speaker 5: addicted both to these games and to pornography. Right, I'm
Speaker 5: thinking you have to talking to them in a way.
Speaker 5: I think the relationship between social media and social life
Speaker 5: is a bit like the relationship between pornography and sex. Right.
Speaker 5: If your whole sex life consisted looking at porn, you
Speaker 5: would go around feeling pissed off and inadequate all the time,
Speaker 5: because that's not what we evolved to do. We evolved
Speaker 5: to have sex.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: In the same way, if your life consists of staring
Speaker 5: at people through screens. It's it's like a sex life.
Speaker 5: The consists only a pornography. It's not meeting your deeper
Speaker 5: knee as a human being. Right, Everyone listening knows they
Speaker 5: have physical needs. You need food, you need water, you
Speaker 5: need clean air. If I took those things away from you,
Speaker 5: you be in real trouble, real fast. But there's equally
Speaker 5: strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs.
Speaker 5: You need to feel you belong. You need to feel
Speaker 5: your life has meaning and purpose. You need feel people
Speaker 5: see you and value you. You feel got a future
Speaker 5: that makes sense, and interacting through screens has many great
Speaker 5: things about it. But if it takes too much of
Speaker 5: your life, your psychological needs aren't met. Look, if interacting
Speaker 5: through screens met our psychological needs, we would all have
Speaker 5: been completely fine in the last two years. Right Instead,
Speaker 5: I never once heard anyone say the sentence hooray another
Speaker 5: zoom call. Right ever? Right, Because this way of being,
Speaker 5: while it has many benefits and should be part of
Speaker 5: our lives, if it's everything, is not meeting your deep
Speaker 5: in ees. So I think you've got to ask as well,
Speaker 5: what are the unmet needs that we have that are
Speaker 5: making us turn to this Because it looks like the
Speaker 5: things we've lost. Oh, we've got less friends than we had,
Speaker 5: but here's some Facebook friends. You've lost status in the
Speaker 5: society and the economy, but here's a status update. It
Speaker 5: looks like the things you've lost. But it's not the
Speaker 5: things you've lost. It's not It's like giving a sex
Speaker 5: style person porn. It's it's not going to solve the problem. Right.
Speaker 2: I even remember when MySpace first started, and I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm the top, a bit older than you, but like
Speaker 2: you look at people and you'd be like, how many
Speaker 2: friends have they got? Who's in their top friends list?
Speaker 2: You know, I still do that. We still go on
Speaker 2: Instagram and we go how many followers has that person got?
Speaker 2: How many comments did they get on their new version
Speaker 2: of it?
Speaker 5: But I think I just want of thinking about what
Speaker 5: are the wider So there are all sorts of other
Speaker 5: changes that are happening that are making us more vulnerable
Speaker 5: to that thing you're describing, right, that thing or how
Speaker 5: many follows is this person got mindlessly scrolling for hours
Speaker 5: and hours. Anyone listening who struggled to focus in a pandemic,
Speaker 5: stop blaming yourself right. In fact, you'd be a very
Speaker 5: weird person if in a situation of unprecedented danger you
Speaker 5: were able to focus right. And this is true so
Speaker 5: many of the things that I write about in stolein focus.
Speaker 5: It's called stolen focus because your focus didn't collapse, you'll
Speaker 5: lose it, exactly, it was stolen from you by these
Speaker 5: big forces. A lot of the elements. Anything that reduces
Speaker 5: stress improves attention. So I talk about lots of ways
Speaker 5: we can reduce stress, lots of things that have been
Speaker 5: done across the world to reduce stress in all sorts
Speaker 5: of places. So that's one example, but there's so many.
Speaker 5: I mean, it was so weird doing this research because
Speaker 5: there were so many things I had never even thought
Speaker 5: about that hugely affected. I'd never thought, for example, about
Speaker 5: how food might affect my attention right. As you can
Speaker 5: tell from my chins, I'm a bit of a junk
Speaker 5: food addict and the three stomachs I had. I had
Speaker 5: a real low point in my life, and it was
Speaker 5: Christmas Eve two thousand and seven. It based it's so sad.
Speaker 5: It was Christmas Eve. At lunch time, I went to
Speaker 5: my local KFC. I used to live in brit Lane
Speaker 5: in East London, and I went and I said my
Speaker 5: standard order, which is so disgusting I won't repeat it.
Speaker 5: And the guy behind the counter said, oh, Yohan, I'm
Speaker 5: really glad you're here. I was like, all right, and
Speaker 5: he went off behind where they fried the chicken and
Speaker 5: the chips something, and he came back with all the
Speaker 5: members of staff and they have bought me a massive
Speaker 5: Christmas card in which they've written to our best customer,
Speaker 5: and they've all written these persons. And one of the
Speaker 5: reasons my heart sunk is I thought, this isn't even
Speaker 5: the fried chicken shop I come to the most. How
Speaker 5: can this be happening to me? It was Actually I
Speaker 5: didn't go back there for ages. And then about a
Speaker 5: year later I bumped into the guy by the counter
Speaker 5: and he said, you didn't come back your hand. We
Speaker 5: assumed you'd had a heart attack. Anyway, it was a
Speaker 5: terrible So so when I talk about the element with food,
Speaker 5: I say this with no sense of superiority at all,
Speaker 5: but so sorry. It was so awful heart attack. I
Speaker 5: was very fat at the time, but as various living
Speaker 5: deities happened. So there's this really fascinating movement called nutritional
Speaker 5: psychiatry amte loads of them. So they're studying how the
Speaker 5: ways we eat affect the ways we feel and are
Speaker 5: capacities of our minds and our brains. And they taught
Speaker 5: me that there's loads of ways in which the way
Speaker 5: we eat is harming our attention and folks. It's I
Speaker 5: give the example of one. There's lots that go through
Speaker 5: in the book. So let's say you have the standard Australian,
Speaker 5: British American breakfast. You have sugary cereal or white bread
Speaker 5: with butter toasted or whatever.
Speaker 2: Right, pichapetta does like some white bread as don't have
Speaker 2: bird seed, just inalized white eat bread. Have the good bread.
Speaker 5: I'm one hundred percent with you, and I'll be I'll
Speaker 5: see you in the cardiac ording forty years time. But
Speaker 5: the will be the ones chickens will be the one
Speaker 5: getting KFC from here when you have that. What it
Speaker 5: does is it One of the reasons it feels so
Speaker 5: good is it releases a huge amount of energy really
Speaker 5: quickly into your brain. So you're like, I'm awake, the
Speaker 5: day has begun. Right, a huge amount of glucose in
Speaker 5: particulars released in your brain. But what's happened is it's
Speaker 5: released so much energy so quickly that an hour, an
Speaker 5: hour and a half later, you'll be sitting at your desk,
Speaker 5: your child will be sitting at their desk, and you'll
Speaker 5: get a huge energy slump. And what you get then
Speaker 5: is what's called brain fog, where you just can't focus
Speaker 5: very well. Your just your at tension isn't as good
Speaker 5: until you have another sugary carbe treat.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: So, the way Dale put it to me is the
Speaker 5: way we eat puts us on a roller coaster of
Speaker 5: energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day, spike crash,
Speaker 5: spike crash, which gives you these long patches of brain fog.
Speaker 5: Whereas if you eat food that releases energy more steadily,
Speaker 5: like you had oatmeal with blueberries something I've never tried.
Speaker 5: What that would do is it would release energy much
Speaker 5: more steadily throughout the day. Right, the way Dale put
Speaker 5: it to me, at the moment we're putting rocket of
Speaker 5: fuel into a mini right, it'll go really fast for
Speaker 5: five minutes and then it will just stop. Whereas if
Speaker 5: you put in the fuel it's designed to take, you'll
Speaker 5: go for longer with your attention. So there were so
Speaker 5: many things like that where I just thought, God, I'd
Speaker 5: never I'd never thought about that. It never even crossed
Speaker 5: my mind that there's there's so many of these components.
Speaker 5: It was fascinating just going on this journey into the
Speaker 5: science of it and realizing, Oh, there's so much that's
Speaker 5: affecting our attention and these things combined. So we all know,
Speaker 5: a day you haven't sleapt is the day that you're
Speaker 5: going to be so much more tempted by that, you know,
Speaker 5: scrolling through a scrolling scroller. Day when you've eaten badly,
Speaker 5: you haven't slept, you're very stressed out. So a lot
Speaker 5: of these factors have been combining. I think it's why
Speaker 5: attention has really suffered during the pandemic. A lot of
Speaker 5: them have been combining and combining in complicated ways. But
Speaker 5: once you understand what these twelve factors are, then you
Speaker 5: can begin to defend yourself as an individual, you can
Speaker 5: defend your kids a bit, and then we can begin
Speaker 5: to take on these bigger, bigger forces.
Speaker 2: What are just I mean, obviously we focused on social
Speaker 2: media and on not just social media but your phones
Speaker 2: in general for so long because I think it's the
Speaker 2: one that is so obvious, like it's the one that
Speaker 2: really seems to on a day to day affect people.
Speaker 2: We've covered food. What are the other really important factors
Speaker 2: that influence the way that someone can concentrate or their
Speaker 2: ability to have focus?
Speaker 5: So I think there's lots, and if it's okay, rather
Speaker 5: than just kind of summarizing lots some bit weird, I'll
Speaker 5: don't home in on one that I think I'll be
Speaker 5: really relevant to a lot of your audience as well.
Speaker 5: One of the heroes of my book is a woman
Speaker 5: called Leonor's Gnazi. Leno is one of my heroes because
Speaker 5: she's the kind of person. You know, it's very easy
Speaker 5: in life to describe problems right. Lenai is one of
Speaker 5: those people who build solutions to things right. Lenare grew
Speaker 5: up in a suburb of Chicago in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 5: mid nineteen sixties. I think she won't tell me her
Speaker 5: exact age. I've never been I've unpushed her on it.
Speaker 5: And from when she was six years old, Lenore used
Speaker 5: to leave home on her own at eight am and
Speaker 5: walk to school on her own, and generally she would
Speaker 5: jump into all the other kids who were walking to
Speaker 5: school because in the mid nineteen sixties, everyone everywhere in
Speaker 5: the world walked to school. Ask your parents, that's what
Speaker 5: they did, right, And when school ended at whatever it was,
Speaker 5: three o'clock, her and her friends would leave on their own,
Speaker 5: wander around the neighborhood freely, and find their way home
Speaker 5: when they were hungry. Right. By the time Lenore was
Speaker 5: a mother in the mid nineties, she was living in
Speaker 5: Queens in New York. That had ended. You were meant
Speaker 5: to deliver your child like a package to school and
Speaker 5: be waiting there at the gate when they came out.
Speaker 5: In fact, by two thousand and three, only ten percent
Speaker 5: of American children ever played outside without an adult. And
Speaker 5: obviously it completely ended during COVID. Right, And it turns
Speaker 5: out that childhood we've lost contained a huge number of
Speaker 5: things that were incredibly important for children to develop attention.
Speaker 5: To give you a real no shit sher loot one
Speaker 5: exercise right, Children who get to run around can focus
Speaker 5: much better. As Professor Joel Nigg, the leading expert on
Speaker 5: children's attention problems in the United States, explained to me,
Speaker 5: children who get to exercise develop more brain connections. Their
Speaker 5: attention is better. The single best thing you can do
Speaker 5: for a child who's struggling to focus is let them
Speaker 5: go and run around. We are the first human society
Speaker 5: ever in the history of our species to try to
Speaker 5: get kids to sit still for eight hours a day.
Speaker 5: It's bonkers, right, But even beyond exercise. This is one
Speaker 5: of the key elements to this. How this is this
Speaker 5: transformation is harmed attention is that we've deprived children of
Speaker 5: free play. When children play freely with other children, they
Speaker 5: develop all sorts of skills that are extremely important for
Speaker 5: focus and attention. One is they learn how to take risks. Right,
Speaker 5: you climb the tree, you get quite high up, you're scared,
Speaker 5: but you didn't die. You find your way down, you break.
Speaker 2: A leg, you get over, and your mom doesn't take
Speaker 2: your hospital too. So that's just the nineties.
Speaker 5: You take it. You, That's why you've got that mysterious
Speaker 5: limb y. You take all these risks with other kids. Socially,
Speaker 5: if you've got adults standing over you telling you what
Speaker 5: to do, you don't do that. And if you don't
Speaker 5: develop those skills of taking risks, realizing your competent, building
Speaker 5: up your competence, you'll be anxious all the time. It's
Speaker 5: one of the reasons We've got so many anxious children now,
Speaker 5: and anxiety destroys attention. As we all know. Anyone so
Speaker 5: I had any anxiety knows that you can't pay attention.
Speaker 2: We have so many anxious parents though, as well, and
Speaker 2: I think so much of that comes from the fact
Speaker 2: that we are so aware now of what can go wrong.
Speaker 2: Every day we are bombarded by what can go wrong,
Speaker 2: how your kid can die, what horrible thing can happen
Speaker 2: to them, And we live in this constant protection mode,
Speaker 2: which is why all these other things have been impacted.
Speaker 2: And I think, you know, maybe back in the day
Speaker 2: and there was an ignorance almost you know, bad things
Speaker 2: would happen maybe in another community or another town, never
Speaker 2: in our town, and so you lived in this ignorance
Speaker 2: is kind of bliss. And as we've become more exposed
Speaker 2: to the news, as we've become exposed to terrible things
Speaker 2: that have happened through social media, we go, fuck, that
Speaker 2: could happen to us, and everyone's well got smaller because
Speaker 2: of that.
Speaker 5: I think it's a really good way of putting it.
Speaker 5: And so Lena was trying to think about what do
Speaker 5: we do about that? Right, And at first she thought,
Speaker 5: what the solution's obvious. And she discovered also by the
Speaker 5: way she learned the science, that there's loads of other
Speaker 5: benefits to free play that boost attention. So she was like,
Speaker 5: what can we do? And then she at first she thought, well,
Speaker 5: the answers really obvious. I'll just let my kid out
Speaker 5: to play, But she quickly discovered if you're the only
Speaker 5: parent letting your kid out to play, they get scared.
Speaker 5: You look nuts. Actually often people call the police now, right,
Speaker 5: So she's like, that's not solution. So Lenor began to
Speaker 5: run a group called let Grow. It's letgrow dot org
Speaker 5: that everyone listening, I really recommend you go to it.
Speaker 5: And what they do is they go to whole groups
Speaker 5: and whole communities and whole schools and they persuade everyone
Speaker 5: to give their kids increasing levels of independence that build
Speaker 5: up to playing outside. And I think of all the
Speaker 5: conversations that have per stolen focus, I think probably the
Speaker 5: most moving was with fourteen and you're a boy in
Speaker 5: Long Islands just before COVID here who This is a big, tall,
Speaker 5: strapping boy. He was taller than me and until this
Speaker 5: program had begun nine months before, he had never played
Speaker 5: outside without an adult watching it. He'd never gone outside
Speaker 5: of his house without an adult, right. I asked him
Speaker 5: why and he said, oh, my parents are afraid of
Speaker 5: all these kidnappings. He lived in a town where the
Speaker 5: French bakery was across the street from the olive oil store,
Speaker 5: and he had a level of fear that would be
Speaker 5: appropriate if he lived in like Ukraine. Right now, right,
Speaker 5: But then this program began and I said what did
Speaker 5: you do? And he said, I me and my friends.
Speaker 5: We started to play in the street boll games. And
Speaker 5: I said, oh, and I never forget away said it?
Speaker 5: He said it, and he said it, and then we
Speaker 5: started to go into the woods and he leaned forward
Speaker 5: and said, even though our cell phones don't have any
Speaker 5: reception in the woods, he said, like that was like
Speaker 5: some explosive relation. And I said, what did you do
Speaker 5: in the woods and he said, oh, we've built a
Speaker 5: fort and now we're building an even bigger fort. And
Speaker 5: I said, I was speaking to this boy. Maybe this
Speaker 5: sounds over the top, but it was like watching him
Speaker 5: come to life. Right. I thought about how many kids
Speaker 5: I know who never get to explore anything except on
Speaker 5: Fortnite we can have surprise. They're obsessed with it and
Speaker 5: Lenor was with me that day, and when he left,
Speaker 5: she turned to me. She said, you know, think about
Speaker 5: human history. For all of human history, human beings, when
Speaker 5: they were young, they had to go out, they had
Speaker 5: to explore, They had to figure out how things worked,
Speaker 5: They had to map the territory and the space of
Speaker 5: basically one generation, we took all that away from them.
Speaker 5: It stunted them physically, It stunted their attention, It stunted
Speaker 5: their ability to function in the world. And that boy,
Speaker 5: given a tiny little sliver of freedom, what did he do.
Speaker 5: He went into the woods and he built a fort.
Speaker 5: Because it is so deep in human nature, these impulses.
Speaker 5: So I would argue every there's lots of things we
Speaker 5: need to do to restore attention. One is we need
Speaker 5: to give our children a childhood that our ancestors would
Speaker 5: have recognized as a human childhood. We need to restore
Speaker 5: human childhood. Every school in Australia should have a let
Speaker 5: Grow program. This is free, it costs nothing. It unites
Speaker 5: people who are really left wing and really right wing
Speaker 5: and everything in between. We can do that right, that
Speaker 5: doesn't cost anything. And if one good thing can come
Speaker 5: out of COVID, this has been a terrible tragedy and
Speaker 5: millions of people across the world have died. But we
Speaker 5: can all see. Whatever you think about the restrictions, and
Speaker 5: I was broadly in favor of them, we can all
Speaker 5: see that shutting our kids away for two years has
Speaker 5: catastrophically harmed them. Okay, well, if shutting our kids away
Speaker 5: during COVID harmed them, which we can all see, we
Speaker 5: should be able to see that shutting them away before COVID,
Speaker 5: which by any historical standard is what we were doing,
Speaker 5: that was also really harming them. And if part of
Speaker 5: the legacy as we re emerge is that we learn
Speaker 5: how to let our children grow again, grow physically, grow
Speaker 5: a sense of attention. And like you said that, you
Speaker 5: were talking about the kind of fear people feel, which
Speaker 5: is totally understandable. And Leonor said to me, you know, look,
Speaker 5: you can tell people the statistics, and the statistics are
Speaker 5: really coming there, even more striking in Australia. But your
Speaker 5: child is significantly more likely to be hit by lightning
Speaker 5: than be kidnapped by a stranger. Right, And if someone
Speaker 5: said to you, I'm not going to let my kid
Speaker 5: out because I'm worried they might get hit by lightning.
Speaker 5: You'd think they were completely deranged, right, But Lane said,
Speaker 5: it doesn't work. It's not how human psychology work. It
Speaker 5: doesn't work explaining statistics to people. Statistics worked, no one
Speaker 5: would buy lottery tickets and Las Vegas would be a
Speaker 5: you know, empty town in the desert. Right. What works
Speaker 5: is getting people to try. Their kids going out and
Speaker 5: their son, who they've been worried about being so anxious
Speaker 5: and fragile, comes back and he's a bit sweaty, and
Speaker 5: he can see he's had this adventure and he's sort
Speaker 5: of squirrel and tried to climate try and they're like, oh,
Speaker 5: that's my boy, that's the child I want. It's those
Speaker 5: moments of transformation that people get when their children start
Speaker 5: to actually grow. That's what makes them want to do it.
Speaker 5: So you've just got to get parents to try this.
Speaker 5: Trying to argue against the fear just increases the fear. Well,
Speaker 5: you've got to give them as a sense, your child
Speaker 5: doesn't have to be like this because they can see.
Speaker 5: People can see how unbelievably anxious children are at the moment. Right,
Speaker 5: this is a key element of what we can what
Speaker 5: we can do. It's one of the kind of one
Speaker 5: of several really big changes I argue for in the book,
Speaker 5: along with lots of individual changes.
Speaker 2: Johannah, thank you so much for coming and being a
Speaker 2: part of the podcast. I could speak to you for
Speaker 2: literally whole day.
Speaker 5: Oh this has been so to joy. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: You are a joy.
Speaker 5: And I forgive you for presenting the face of mynmosis.
Speaker 2: Did you get this from our book swop?
Speaker 5: It was literally was the very first thing I saw
Speaker 5: when I walked through the door was an image of
Speaker 5: the deal Alama. So I forgive you.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I'm sorry for the trauma that brought up, but
Speaker 2: I'm very glad that you got to share that on
Speaker 2: the podcast. But please tell everyone where they can find you.
Speaker 2: I mean, you can get your books from all good bookstores,
Speaker 2: from all good audio places.
Speaker 5: To get them from ship bookstore. Your bookstore is not
Speaker 5: good enough do that. But so where can people find
Speaker 5: If they go to www dot stolenfocusbook dot com, they
Speaker 5: can see where to follow me on social media. I
Speaker 5: will not see you back, sorrysteg Semi. There they can
Speaker 5: see where to get the audiobook, the ebook or the
Speaker 5: physical book. They can see what people like Oprah and
Speaker 5: Hillary Clinton and lots of other people have said about
Speaker 5: the book. I love being able to say that.
Speaker 4: I'll all the links in the show notes as well,
Speaker 4: so you can just tap that way.
Speaker 5: I got in trouble at the end of a podcast
Speaker 5: a couple of and maybe a year and a half
Speaker 5: ago now, I was interviewed by the Sama guy. He
Speaker 5: was fifty this is relevant and at the end he
Speaker 5: said to me, so, what's your Facebook? And I said it?
Speaker 5: And he said what's your Twitter? And I said it?
Speaker 5: And he said what's your Instagram? And I said it.
Speaker 5: He said what's your Snapchat? And I said, I am
Speaker 5: a forty three year old man. The only forty three
Speaker 5: year old men on Snapchat are definitely pedophiles, right, Why
Speaker 5: are they there?
Speaker 2: He was like, I want Snapchat?
Speaker 5: Why he didn't laugh at all? And I've got this
Speaker 5: really bad thing where when someone doesn't laugh at joke,
Speaker 5: I tell I lean into it. So I said, you
Speaker 5: know that show To Catch a Predator, the American Showman
Speaker 5: the Catfish pedophiles, I said, the next season of To
Speaker 5: Catch a Predator, they should just go up to adult
Speaker 5: men in the street and say, what is your Snapchat handle?
Speaker 5: And if they have one, immediately fucking arrest them in
Speaker 5: the van. Right Anyway, he didn't laugh at that. Later
Speaker 5: I go look him up. He's quite big on snapchat.
Speaker 5: So so now my bar for all interviews is do
Speaker 5: I get through them without accidentally accusing the person interviewing
Speaker 5: me of being a pedophile? And I'm friends, have we
Speaker 5: met that low bar?
Speaker 2: I lie that that's it? How can I offend someone
Speaker 2: on this interview today?
Speaker 5: Exactly?
Speaker 2: You know what you got to do that You've got
Speaker 2: to have the extra dreams and the lows, otherwise you
Speaker 2: don't get cut through. You don't want everyone to like you.
Speaker 2: Shot of whiskey? Wasn't that that someone said that I did?
Speaker 5: That interesting?
Speaker 2: When I don't want to be everyone's cup of tea,
Speaker 2: you want to be someone's shot of whiskey. I love that.
Speaker 2: I was a terrible Instagram quote. I think I read
Speaker 2: during a breakup once and I was like, yeah, fuck you,
Speaker 2: I'll post that.
Speaker 5: I love that. That's so good.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, it's been the best.
Speaker 5: Oh what a pleasure. Cheers, Thanks so much.
Speaker 2: All right, You know that we never finish our episodes
Speaker 2: without our suck and our sweet, our highlight and our
Speaker 2: low light of each and every week. And I just
Speaker 2: asked produce a Keisha what her suck was, and then
Speaker 2: she almost vomited. So I'm really frightened about what this is.
Speaker 2: Like fully gagged into the microphone. We had to start again.
Speaker 3: I said, I that was genuinely an accident, and I
Speaker 3: didn't actually feel that one coming, But it is related
Speaker 3: to my suck.
Speaker 2: Two weeks ago, I got on the podcast and I
Speaker 2: said that my suck for the.
Speaker 3: Week was that I had been really, really sick, and
Speaker 3: the main symptom that I had was that I was
Speaker 3: super nauseous and really fatigued. Anyway, it turns out through
Speaker 3: the week, I found out that I got three parasites.
Speaker 2: Wait what did you call them? It was like they
Speaker 2: thought it was an amoeba amibas that it wasn't an
Speaker 2: Amba the great Amima twenty three three parasites. You really
Speaker 2: did take a few things home from Bali you shouldn't have.
Speaker 3: But anyway, so the suck comes into it because I
Speaker 3: found this out on the Monday, and I got sent
Speaker 3: away to go and get the medicine to treat the
Speaker 3: worst of the three, the other.
Speaker 2: Two to keep the final ones keep the other two,
Speaker 2: just get rid of the bad one.
Speaker 3: I think the two of them will fix themselves up,
Speaker 3: but one of them needs medicine. And I went to
Speaker 3: maybe three or four different pharmacies and they were like, hey,
Speaker 3: this medication has been out of stock for more than
Speaker 3: three months in all of Australia.
Speaker 2: And I thought, well, that's not good.
Speaker 3: But it was a moment where I went, you know what,
Speaker 3: this is the first time this has ever happened to me,
Speaker 3: which makes me so grateful to live in Australia because
Speaker 3: we're never in the position where we're out of medication or.
Speaker 2: Do you know why they don't have it here? It's
Speaker 2: because no one's been traveling, so no one's needed medication
Speaker 2: for a fucking rogue a meeba from Bali who knows anyway,
Speaker 2: So that is the suck. Still don't have the medicine
Speaker 2: for it.
Speaker 3: So I'm still getting like a lot of the side
Speaker 3: effects of feeling really really sick all the time.
Speaker 2: So yeah, apologies for that, but my sweet is a
Speaker 2: bit related to that.
Speaker 3: So at the moment, they've got me on some other
Speaker 3: things to treat the other ones, and I can't drink
Speaker 3: at all, which makes it sound like I'm a massive
Speaker 3: party girl.
Speaker 2: Who drinks a lot, which is only on weekends, which
Speaker 2: is only two of my seven days a week. Don't
Speaker 2: judge me on weekends. I like to have a good time.
Speaker 3: But as a part of that, I've kind I feel
Speaker 3: as though I've kind of hit reset because I was like,
Speaker 3: all right, we just need a month of chill.
Speaker 2: Okay, we need to.
Speaker 3: I spent my first Saturday night in the house not
Speaker 3: doing anything in as long as I can remember. I
Speaker 3: have watched so much more Netflix, and it's been a real,
Speaker 3: like wholesome, good for my body time. So that is
Speaker 3: my sweet is that I'm starting to feel like I'm
Speaker 3: doing things to get my body back on track.
Speaker 2: And surely that's going to have good outcomes. What I
Speaker 2: like about this, though, is that you're health forced you
Speaker 2: to spend a Saturday night in and so you're choosing
Speaker 2: to see the silver lining. Yes, you're forced in buying
Speaker 2: a meeba against your will, and you're seeing the bright
Speaker 2: side of things. That's the positivity I like to hear.
Speaker 2: I like to find the silver lining in life. Okay,
Speaker 2: my suck for the week is that we drove down
Speaker 2: to Molliwook. We're gonna have a weekend away with the
Speaker 2: girls and we did. I mean that was sweet. We
Speaker 2: had a weekend away with the girls. Except I've had
Speaker 2: this very annoying cold not COVID PCR test says it's
Speaker 2: not COVID for like the last week, so I was
Speaker 2: like half blast. So I didn't really feel like I
Speaker 2: got to enjoy it as much as I would have.
Speaker 2: But on the way back from Mollimook, we stopped and
Speaker 2: we visited my mum, who lives in Woollongong. And when
Speaker 2: we stopped out, you know, like in the car, how
Speaker 2: some things are automated and it's like lots of pressure
Speaker 2: in back tire or you're you're really driving different cars.
Speaker 2: Your oil needs must be nice. Mine just has flashing
Speaker 2: lights on the dashboard and it's like engine not HoTT
Speaker 2: Mine was like lots of pressure and back tire. We
Speaker 2: were like, ah, yeah, whatever. It always tells us there's
Speaker 2: things wrong that I'm wrong when they're not wrong. Oh no,
Speaker 2: there was something wrong. We had a completely flat tire
Speaker 2: and we're driven for over an hour with a completely
Speaker 2: flat tire. God like nothing, and I was up your car.
Speaker 2: I was like wondering where the car was going down
Speaker 2: the fucking freeway. What did you not notice? So anyway,
Speaker 2: we stopped and I learned that I'm very good at
Speaker 2: jacking a car up it's done, and Matt's not very
Speaker 2: good at jacking a car up. And that was like
Speaker 2: a real moment of just like I felt like a
Speaker 2: powerful queen validation. You know, when I was eighteen, I
Speaker 2: got my first flat tire. I just moved to Queensland nineties.
Speaker 3: I didn't know anybody and I had to change a
Speaker 3: car tire only to get like a couple hundred meters
Speaker 3: down the road.
Speaker 2: Via a YouTube video. You couldn't get everything from YouTube.
Speaker 2: I told myself how to be a jurey designer because
Speaker 2: of YouTube and a podcast. You actually do you can
Speaker 2: learn anything from YouTube. My sweet for the week, I
Speaker 2: have a couple of sweets, so I'm going to rattle
Speaker 2: off two of them. One is that our merch finally
Speaker 2: dropped just in time for summer. I hope you guys.
Speaker 2: Are I enjoy your jumpers? The nights are still cold. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it's also not like it's not a hot I'm
Speaker 2: wearing it right now.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You wouldn't let me wear it because if I went
Speaker 2: to put the same one on but we thought we'd
Speaker 2: looked silly. I was like, we can't have matching uniforms,
Speaker 2: but no, the jumpers are here. They are beautiful. They
Speaker 2: are the perfect perfect temperature for between seasons. Highly recommend
Speaker 2: going and getting one. Also, five dollars from every single
Speaker 2: merch jumper is going towards Deadly Connections, which is we
Speaker 2: interview Karlie on the podcast from Deadly Connections charity and
Speaker 2: what that is is a non for profit organization run
Speaker 2: by the Indigenous community for Indigenous people, so it is
Speaker 2: an amazing cause. Also, my other sweet for the week
Speaker 2: is that I finally got a copy, a hard copy
Speaker 2: printed copy of our fucking book and I am so excited.
Speaker 2: Life on cart Well Domination twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: Hang on, we just need to get Delilah in the
Speaker 3: Rain to the Go Away to give context to this.
Speaker 3: The very first copy that Britain Laura got of the book.
Speaker 3: The first time they'd seen the book, they were going
Speaker 3: to take pictures with it.
Speaker 2: I hadn't even seen it, and then it saw the
Speaker 2: inside of Delilah's mouth. It was an unbelievable case of
Speaker 2: my dog ate my homework. And that was the very
Speaker 2: first book that ever got printed. It got absolutely fucking annihilated.
Speaker 2: She loved it, she devoured it. But anyway, guys, that
Speaker 2: book is coming out in October, So if you haven't
Speaker 2: gone and gotten your pre order copy yet, please go
Speaker 2: and get yourself a copy. We don't know how many
Speaker 2: we're gonna need before they sell out, so jump on.
Speaker 2: You can pre order it from the website. We'll put
Speaker 2: all the details in the show notes. And that is
Speaker 2: it from us. And you know the drill? Do you, Keisha?
Speaker 2: Do you know the drill? Mate? I've been feeling in
Speaker 2: for three weeks. Now, Tell your mom, tell your dad,
Speaker 2: tell your dog, tell your friend, and share the love
Speaker 2: because we love love. I mean it is friends plural,
Speaker 2: but that's okay. Tell your friend, just one friend. It's
Speaker 2: to your friend. Fuck tell you won't tell you that
Speaker 2: you don't. Tell your friends and share the love because
Speaker 2: we all love