Speaker 1: I think when we get asked the question do we
Speaker 1: lack focus, that question means something completely different to what
Speaker 1: it potentially meant ten to twenty years ago. Ten twenty
Speaker 1: years ago, it meant, so, do you lack focus in
Speaker 1: your life or your job or whatever it might be
Speaker 1: your career path? I think now that question can legitimately
Speaker 1: be asked, do you lack focus? As in can you
Speaker 1: pay attention or concentrate to anything? And I think the answer,
Speaker 1: sadly for most of us, and I'm putting my hand
Speaker 1: up here too, is no, or at least not for
Speaker 1: very long periods of time. And this is not just
Speaker 1: true for us. It's true for our friends, it's true
Speaker 1: for our partners, it's true for our kids, which is
Speaker 1: really scary. So the good news is that our guest
Speaker 1: today is someone who has done extensive research on focus,
Speaker 1: attention spans and the way that we can reconnect both
Speaker 1: to what we need to be paying attention to and
Speaker 1: to each other.
Speaker 2: I'm so excited about this guest.
Speaker 1: And then we're going to reflect on some of the
Speaker 1: positive things that we've done recently and the things that
Speaker 1: we're proud of and are worth celebrating.
Speaker 2: This is the wood Life.
Speaker 1: I'm Sam Wood and we're going to kick things off
Speaker 1: of our interview on focus and attention spans.
Speaker 2: And if there is.
Speaker 1: One interview that I want you to listen to, this
Speaker 1: is the one I wore to say. Definite language warning
Speaker 1: on this one, so perhaps listen to it by yourself
Speaker 1: before you listen to it with your kids. Our next
Speaker 1: guest is the guest that I have been most looking
Speaker 1: forward to speaking to since The wood Life started. He
Speaker 1: is a New York Times best selling author and he
Speaker 1: has written a recent book called Stolen Focus, which is
Speaker 1: all about our inability to focus or concentrate, and it's
Speaker 1: all in the name that it's stolen from us. It
Speaker 1: is none other than the absolutely inspiring and incredible Johann Harry.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Woodlife. Well, thank you so much. Sam.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and your latest book, Stolen Focus, is all
Speaker 1: about our inability to focus or concentrate or hav an
Speaker 1: attention span. Where exactly did this come from?
Speaker 3: So the reason I cared about this is I could
Speaker 3: feel my own attention going to shit. Ye know, it
Speaker 3: felt for me like with each year that passed, things
Speaker 3: that require deep focus that are so important to me,
Speaker 3: like reading books, having proper long conversations, watching films. We're
Speaker 3: getting more and more like running up a down escalator,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. I could still do them,
Speaker 3: but they were getting harder and harder, and I could
Speaker 3: see this happening to everyone around me. The average office
Speaker 3: worker now focuses on any one task for three minutes.
Speaker 3: For every one child who was identified with a serious
Speaker 3: attention problem when I was seven years old, there's now
Speaker 3: one hundred children have been identified with that problem. So
Speaker 3: I wanted to understand what's going on here and most importantly,
Speaker 3: what do we do about it? So I ended up
Speaker 3: going on this really big journey all over the world,
Speaker 3: from Melbourne to Moscow to Miami to Montreal, not just
Speaker 3: the cities that begin with the letter M, and I
Speaker 3: interviewed over two hundred of the leading experts in the
Speaker 3: world on attention and focus. And I learned that there's
Speaker 3: twelve factors that can make your attention better or can
Speaker 3: make your attention worse. They include some aspects of our tech,
Speaker 3: but actually go way beyond it as well. But the
Speaker 3: key thing I learned is that your attention didn't collapse.
Speaker 3: Your attention has been stolen from you by some really
Speaker 3: big forces, but once you understand them, you can start
Speaker 3: to get your attention back.
Speaker 1: I'm listening to you, going, well, there's Sam the social
Speaker 1: media person, and Sam the boss, who agrees and understands
Speaker 1: everything that you're saying and yet still does it to
Speaker 1: serve his own needs. And then there's Sam the dead
Speaker 1: who's just paralyzed and paranoid about the world that these
Speaker 1: children are coming into or are already in. And then
Speaker 1: there's Sam the hypocrite, who is quick to say to
Speaker 1: his sixteen year old daughter, you can't do this, and
Speaker 1: these are the reasons why, and yet he does it himself.
Speaker 3: I think that those feelings you're having are less in
Speaker 3: conflict than you might think. So I give tell you
Speaker 3: this historical story. When I was a kid, I think
Speaker 3: you're younger than me. When I was a kid, the
Speaker 3: standard form of petrol in Australia and Britain was leaded petrol,
Speaker 3: and a little bit before my time, people used to
Speaker 3: paint their houses with leaded paint. And it was discovered
Speaker 3: by scientists that exposure to lead really fucks your brain,
Speaker 3: and particularly fucks children's ability to focus and pay attention.
Speaker 3: And obviously, if it's in petrol is then in the air,
Speaker 3: everyone was exposed to huge amounts of lead. Right, So
Speaker 3: a group of ordinary Australian mums banded together and said, well,
Speaker 3: why are we tolerating this? Why are we allowing the
Speaker 3: lead industry to trash our kids' brains? And it's really
Speaker 3: important to notice what they didn't say. So they didn't say, Okay,
Speaker 3: here's the solution, ban or paint. And they didn't say
Speaker 3: here's the solution.
Speaker 2: Ban or petrol.
Speaker 3: They said, let's deal with the specific aspect that is
Speaker 3: so harming our kids, right, And they fought, and they fought.
Speaker 3: These mums fought for their kids, and some dads as well,
Speaker 3: and some people who didn't have kids, and they succeeded.
Speaker 3: You know, you will have noticed there's no more leaded paint,
Speaker 3: there's no more leaded petrol. As a result, the Center
Speaker 3: for Disease Control, since the average child is now three
Speaker 3: to five iq points higher than they would have been.
Speaker 3: Have we not band led?
Speaker 2: Right now?
Speaker 3: To me, that's a really interesting moment. People identify something
Speaker 3: in the environment that is harming people's attention, they single
Speaker 3: out that thing. They don't mix it up with other stuff.
Speaker 3: They don't overreact and they deal with it, and they
Speaker 3: get it out of the environment, and it leads to
Speaker 3: a really positive change.
Speaker 2: So I think some.
Speaker 3: People when they hear some of the criticisms I have, think, oh,
Speaker 3: he's anti tech, right, Oh he's saying we've got to
Speaker 3: get rid of our tech. That is not. I'm no
Speaker 3: more anti tech than those mothers were anti paint or
Speaker 3: anti petrol.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So when you're saying, well, I make a living from
Speaker 3: social media, social media is a good thing. I want
Speaker 3: social media. I just want social media that doesn't contain
Speaker 3: the specific aspects the harm our attention. I can go
Speaker 3: to more detail on that. The way big tech want
Speaker 3: us to think about this, and I'll stress again, tech
Speaker 3: is only one of the twelve factors that arming our attention.
Speaker 3: It's only specific aspects of our tech. But the way
Speaker 3: big tech want us to think about this debate is
Speaker 3: are you pro tech or are you anti tech?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: And you hear that and you're like, fuck, I'm not
Speaker 3: going to give up my phone and my laptop. I'm
Speaker 3: not going to join the armish. I guess I'm pro tech, right.
Speaker 3: That's not the debate. We're all pro tech apart from
Speaker 3: the armish who bring us people no disrespect. The film
Speaker 3: Witness lied to us. But that's not the debate. The
Speaker 3: debate is what tech do we want? Designed for? What purpose?
Speaker 3: Is working in whose interests? At the moment we have
Speaker 3: tech that is designed to hack and invade our attention,
Speaker 3: we can have tech that's designed to heal our attention, right,
Speaker 3: that's what we want. That's absolutely a world we can
Speaker 3: live in.
Speaker 1: So then to that point, yeahan, how do we we
Speaker 1: do get overwhelmed by the power of these big tech
Speaker 1: companies And it's almost you know, how does little old
Speaker 1: me as an individual actually make a difference in that
Speaker 1: fight against these tech companies When what they do and
Speaker 1: the way they do it is so commercially driven, How
Speaker 1: do we actually impact that?
Speaker 3: So I would say, for all of the twelve factors
Speaker 3: that are harming our attention that I write about, install
Speaker 3: and focus, we've got to respond in two different ways.
Speaker 3: I think of them as defense and offense.
Speaker 2: Right, So there are loads of.
Speaker 3: Things we can all do to defend ourselves and our
Speaker 3: children at an individual level from these factors that are
Speaker 3: harming our attention. So I'll give you an example of one.
Speaker 3: I go through dozens in the book. I've got something
Speaker 3: called a k safe, so plastic safe. You take off
Speaker 3: the lid you put in your phone, you put on
Speaker 3: the lid, you turn the dial at the top, and
Speaker 3: it will lock your phone away for anything between five
Speaker 3: minutes and a whole day. Yeah, I use that four
Speaker 3: hours a day to do my writing. I won't to
Speaker 3: sit down and watch a film with my partner unless
Speaker 3: we both imprison our phones in the phone jail. I
Speaker 3: have my friends around for dinner unless everyone puts their
Speaker 3: phone in the phone bit. And people freak out at first,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, listen, you're not Joe Biden. You don't
Speaker 3: have to give orders for what's happening in your grain.
Speaker 3: The world can cope without you for an hour and
Speaker 3: a half, right, And if they've got kids, I always
Speaker 3: give them the landline number, because I'm like, look, there's
Speaker 3: an emergency with your kids, They'll ring the fucking landline.
Speaker 3: It's okay, right, We're not that important. And at first
Speaker 3: people are really panicked. But the pleasure of getting your
Speaker 3: attention back is so much greater than the pleasure of
Speaker 3: whatever shitty distraction you know you're afraid of missing. And
Speaker 3: I would just say to anyone listening. Think about anything
Speaker 3: you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of,
Speaker 3: whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning
Speaker 3: to play the guitar, whatever it is. That thing that
Speaker 3: you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus
Speaker 3: and attention. And when your ability to focus and pay
Speaker 3: attention break down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down,
Speaker 3: your ability to solve your problems breaks down, you've become
Speaker 3: less competent. But when you get your focus back, you
Speaker 3: get a feeling of being competent again. So there's all
Speaker 3: these defensive measures. But I want to be really honest
Speaker 3: with people, and we've gone right to the heart of
Speaker 3: this at the start of the conversation, Sam, I am
Speaker 3: passionately in favor of these individual changes.
Speaker 2: They have helped me.
Speaker 3: They will help you, but they will only get you
Speaker 3: so far, because at the moment, it's like we're it's
Speaker 3: like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day
Speaker 3: and then they're leaning forward and going, you know what, mate,
Speaker 3: you might want to learn how to meditate. Then you
Speaker 3: wouldn't scratch so much, and you want to go, well,
Speaker 3: fuck off, I'll learn how to meditate.
Speaker 2: That's really valuable.
Speaker 3: But you need to stop pouring itching powder on me, right,
Speaker 3: So we have to go on offense against the forces
Speaker 3: that are doing this to us. And that can sound
Speaker 3: kind of fancy and abstract, but I went to lots
Speaker 3: of places that I've already done it. I spent a
Speaker 3: lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing people who designed
Speaker 3: key aspects of the world that we all live in
Speaker 3: and that our kids are so obsessed with. You know,
Speaker 3: there were lots of moments that really haunted me. But
Speaker 3: one was an amazing man named Dr James Williams, who
Speaker 3: used to be at the heart of Google, was horrified
Speaker 3: by what they were doing, quit and became, I would argue,
Speaker 3: the leading philosopher of attention in the world. And one
Speaker 3: day he was speaking at a tech conference and the
Speaker 3: audience are people who literally designed the stuff that your
Speaker 3: kids use. And he said to them, if there's anyone
Speaker 3: here who wants to live in the world that we're creating,
Speaker 3: please put up your hand.
Speaker 2: And nobody put up their hand.
Speaker 3: Right well, and I asked a lot of these people
Speaker 3: who designed the world we live in, Okay, what's the
Speaker 3: equivalent to the lead in the lead paint, and they
Speaker 3: kept telling me, and for a really long time, I
Speaker 3: just didn't understand what they were saying, right, And it
Speaker 3: really took me a long time to absorb it.
Speaker 2: So give you an example.
Speaker 3: This guy called Azer Raskin, who designed a key part
Speaker 3: of how the Internet works. His dad, Jeff Raskin, invented
Speaker 3: the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. And ASA said to me,
Speaker 3: you want to know what the lead is, it's the
Speaker 3: current business model, right, So anyone listening, if you open Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram,
Speaker 3: now they start to make money out of you immediately
Speaker 3: in two ways. The first way is really obvious. You
Speaker 3: see advertising, Okay, everyone knows how that works. Second way
Speaker 3: is much more important. Everything you do on these apps
Speaker 3: is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to.
Speaker 2: Learn who you are.
Speaker 3: So let's say that you click or write that you
Speaker 3: like I don't know Pauline Hanson, Bete Midler, and you
Speaker 3: tell your mum you just bought some nappies. Okay, So
Speaker 3: you like Pauling Hanson, it's figured out you're probably right wing.
Speaker 3: If you like bet Midler, and a man's figured out
Speaker 3: you're probably gay. And if you've got nappy, you' bought nappies, Okay,
Speaker 3: it figures out you've got a baby.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: It's learning tens of thousands of things like this about you. Now,
Speaker 3: partly that's to sell that information to advertisers, because you
Speaker 3: are not their customer. You are the product they sell
Speaker 3: to their real customer. So people making nappies want to
Speaker 3: advertise to people who've got babies. They don't want to
Speaker 3: waste their money talking to me, I don't have a baby, right.
Speaker 3: But more importantly, they're gathering all this information to figure
Speaker 3: out the weaknesses in your attention so they can keep
Speaker 3: you scrolling. Because the longer you scroll and the longer
Speaker 3: your kids scroll, the more money they make. And every
Speaker 3: time you close the app, their revenue stream disappears. So
Speaker 3: all of their AI, all of their algorithms, all of
Speaker 3: this genius and Silicon Valley is geared towards doing one thing,
Speaker 3: figuring out how do we make you and your kids
Speaker 3: pick up your phones as often as possible and scroll
Speaker 3: as long as possible.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 3: All they care about is how do we get you
Speaker 3: to scroll the most? This is what they say, right,
Speaker 3: They admit it when you talk to them they admit
Speaker 3: it publicly, right, but social media doesn't have to work
Speaker 3: that way. So ASA said to me that business model,
Speaker 3: the kind of fancy term for it is surveillance capitalism,
Speaker 3: the idea that you know, they surveil you to figure
Speaker 3: out the weaknesses and sell you. Right, he said, just
Speaker 3: ban it, just like we said we don't let you
Speaker 3: put lead in lead paint. Just ban that business model.
Speaker 3: So one different business model is subscription. Everyone knows how
Speaker 3: Netflix works. You pay a certain amount, you get access.
Speaker 3: Or think about the sewers. Right before we had sewers,
Speaker 3: we had shit in the streets, people got really ill.
Speaker 3: And actually, starting in Melbourne, it was one of the
Speaker 3: first sewers in the world. They built sewers. And now
Speaker 3: we all own the sewers together, and we all maintain
Speaker 3: the sewers together. Right, you own the sewers in Melbourne.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: It may be that we all want to own the
Speaker 3: sewage pipes together to stop us getting cholera. We might
Speaker 3: want to own the information pipes together to stop us
Speaker 3: getting the equivalent of cholera for our attention. And I
Speaker 3: would argue for our politics. But whatever alternative they moved to,
Speaker 3: all the incentives change Suddenly the incentives are not how
Speaker 3: do we fuck Sam's attention and keep him scrolling? Suddenly
Speaker 3: it's like, oh, Sam's our customer. Now what does Sam want?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: It turns out Sam feels good when he actually meets
Speaker 3: up with people offline and looks into their eyes. Okay,
Speaker 3: let's design our app not to keep people scrolling, but
Speaker 3: to get them to actually meet up. Oh, turns out
Speaker 3: Sam wants to be able to pay attention. Let's design
Speaker 3: our app to heal attention, not to hack attention. Technology
Speaker 3: to do that exists right now. My friends in Silicon
Speaker 3: Valley lecturists don Aarrez could.
Speaker 2: Do that in a week.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: The reason it doesn't happen is because the incentives aren't there.
Speaker 3: But we can make the incentives be there. Right, We
Speaker 3: can fight for this, just like you know, the lead
Speaker 3: industry was never going to go. You know what, guys,
Speaker 3: I think we've just made enough money. Let's stop doing this,
Speaker 3: but let's start it works, right. They had to be
Speaker 3: made to do it. These social media companies had to
Speaker 3: be made to do it. The acts existed for one
Speaker 3: point four million years before anyone said, should we put
Speaker 3: a handle on this thing? The entire Internet has existed
Speaker 3: for less than ten thousand days.
Speaker 2: Right, we can sort this shit out. Human beings have
Speaker 2: dealt with much.
Speaker 3: Bigger things than this, Right, But we've got to decide
Speaker 3: that attention is something we value, and then we've got
Speaker 3: to actually fight to do it right. And actually the
Speaker 3: tech is only one of a whole series of changes
Speaker 3: we have to make. The food we eat at the
Speaker 3: moment is profoundly harming our ability to focus and pay attention.
Speaker 3: The way we work is harming our ability to focus
Speaker 3: and pay attention. That the complete transformation in childhood that's
Speaker 3: happened in the last two generations is really harming our
Speaker 3: children's attention. These are big things, but we can fix
Speaker 3: big things right. We can put them right, but we
Speaker 3: had to resolve to do it, and we have to
Speaker 3: fight like hell for them.
Speaker 1: That's given me a lot, and it gives me a
Speaker 1: lot to think about it, but it gives me a
Speaker 1: vote of confidence. I just know even our listeners might
Speaker 1: be thinking, God, this is bigger than I even thought
Speaker 1: it was, and it's so overwhelming, and it's so scary,
Speaker 1: and it's so intimidating, particularly for parents.
Speaker 2: So you know, I would say.
Speaker 3: Sam, right and I had that feeling sometimes, right, And
Speaker 3: there were times in the research of the book, you think,
Speaker 3: oh fucking hell, are we trapped in the fucking matrix here? Yeah,
Speaker 3: But when I think about that, I think about my
Speaker 3: friend Andrew Sullivan was diagnosed as HIV positive at the
Speaker 3: height of the AIDS crisis in nineteen ninety four. His
Speaker 3: best friend Patrick had just died of AIDS and he thought, well,
Speaker 3: that's it. I've got a couple of years to live.
Speaker 3: It's over. No one knew about the new treatments that
Speaker 3: were about to come online, and he thought, Okay, before
Speaker 3: I die, he quits job, and he thought, before I die,
Speaker 3: I'm going to do one last thing. And he decided
Speaker 3: he was going to write a book about a crazy
Speaker 3: utopian idea that no one had ever written a book
Speaker 3: about before. And he was like, look, I'll never live
Speaker 3: to see this happen. No one alive today will ever
Speaker 3: live to see it happen. But maybe someone somewhere down
Speaker 3: the line will pick up this idea. The idea that
Speaker 3: he was the first person to ever write a book
Speaker 3: about was gay marriage. Right, And when I get depressed
Speaker 3: and think, oh God, we're up against something big here,
Speaker 3: I tried to imagine going back in time to when
Speaker 3: Andrew was writing his book Virtually Normal in nineteen ninety
Speaker 3: four and.
Speaker 2: Saying to him, Okay, Andrew, you're not going.
Speaker 3: To believe me, but twenty six years from now you'll
Speaker 3: be alive. That would have completely blown his mind. B
Speaker 3: you'll be married to a man because that'll be legal.
Speaker 3: And see, I'll be with you when the Supreme Court
Speaker 3: of the United States quotes from this book you're writing,
Speaker 3: when it makes it mandatory for every state in the
Speaker 3: United States to introduce gay marriage, and the next day
Speaker 3: you're going to be invited to have dinner with the
Speaker 3: president in a white house lit up in the colors
Speaker 3: of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you and millions
Speaker 3: of other people have achieved. Oh and by the way,
Speaker 3: that president he's going to be black, insane.
Speaker 2: So you had two thousand.
Speaker 3: Years of gay people being burned, imprisoned, treated like shit,
Speaker 3: you like in every human society basically, and in the
Speaker 3: space of a few generations, the whole fucking edifice falls
Speaker 3: right and we get to I'm not saying there's not
Speaker 3: still problems with homophobia. There is, of course, but you know,
Speaker 3: staggering staggering progress. Right, amazing changes can happen. The forces
Speaker 3: that are sucking up our attention are very real, these
Speaker 3: twelve factors, they are very real. They are really debilitating.
Speaker 3: Some of them have very powerful forces behind them. But
Speaker 3: we can prevail over those forces like we prevailed over
Speaker 3: a lot of shitty forces in the past. Right at
Speaker 3: this moment, I've got a god son. I call him
Speaker 3: Adam in the book, it's not his real name. When
Speaker 3: he was nine, he developed this brief but incredibly intense
Speaker 3: obsession with Elvis Presley. When I used to tuck him in,
Speaker 3: he would get me to tell tell him the story
Speaker 3: of Elvis's life. One night, I mentioned Graceland, where Elvis lived,
Speaker 3: and his eyes like wined. He said, God, yeah, will
Speaker 3: you take me to Graceland one day? And I said, sure,
Speaker 3: the way you do with nine year olds. No, next
Speaker 3: week it will be fucking Legoland or Lapland or whatever.
Speaker 2: And he looked at me.
Speaker 3: So intensely, and he said, do you swear you will
Speaker 3: take me to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely swear.
Speaker 3: And I did not think of that moment again for
Speaker 3: ten years, until so many things had gone wrong. So
Speaker 3: he dropped out of school when he was fifteen, and
Speaker 3: by the time he was nineteen. This will sound like
Speaker 3: an exaggeration, it isn't. He spent literally almost all his
Speaker 3: waking hours looking at his iPad or his iPhone or
Speaker 3: his laptop, and his life was just this blur of WhatsApp, YouTube, porn,
Speaker 3: and it was like he was kind of whirring at
Speaker 3: the speed of snapchat when nothing still all serious could
Speaker 3: touch him. And one day we were sitting on my
Speaker 3: sofa there all day I was trying to get a
Speaker 3: conversation go with him, and just I couet.
Speaker 2: I couldn't do it.
Speaker 3: And to be honest with you, Sam, I wasn't that
Speaker 3: much better, right, I was staring at my own devices.
Speaker 3: And I suddenly remembered this moment all these years before,
Speaker 3: and I said to him, Hey, let's go to Graceland.
Speaker 3: And he was like, well, the fuck are you talking about
Speaker 3: any remember this thing, right? And I reminded him, and
Speaker 3: I said, now let's break this numbing routine. Let's get
Speaker 3: out of here. But if we go, you've got to
Speaker 3: leave your phone in the hotel during the day, right,
Speaker 3: There's no point going. I'm just going to be on
Speaker 3: your phone the whole time, and he really he thought
Speaker 3: about it, and he said, yeah, I'd like to do that.
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
Speaker 3: And a couple of weeks later we got to Graceland.
Speaker 3: And when you arrive at the gates of Graceland, there's
Speaker 3: no one to show you around. What happens is they
Speaker 3: hand you an iPad and you put in earbuds and
Speaker 3: the iPad shows you around. It says go left, go right, whatever.
Speaker 3: So what happens is everyone just walks around Graceland staring
Speaker 3: at their iPad and it's doing my head in as
Speaker 3: we're walking around, and I never forget this. It was
Speaker 3: this Canadian couple and the man turned to his wife
Speaker 3: and said, honey, this is amazing. Look if you swipe left,
Speaker 3: you can see the jungle room to the left, and
Speaker 3: if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room
Speaker 3: to the right. And after that, lad, I thought he
Speaker 3: was kidding, and I turned and looked at them, and
Speaker 3: they were just swiping back and forth. And I leaned
Speaker 3: over and I said, but hey, sir, there's an old
Speaker 3: fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning
Speaker 3: your head, because literally we're there, right, And I turned
Speaker 3: to my god Son to laugh about it. And he
Speaker 3: was standing in the corner staring at Snapchat, because from
Speaker 3: the minute we landed he absolutely could not stop. And
Speaker 3: I went up to him and I did that thing
Speaker 3: it's never a good idea with the teenager. I tried
Speaker 3: to grab the phone out of his hands yep, And
Speaker 3: I said to him, I know you're afraid of missing out,
Speaker 3: but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out right. You're
Speaker 3: not showing up at your own life. You're not present
Speaker 3: at the events of your own existence. And he stormed off,
Speaker 3: and I wandered around Memphis on my own that day,
Speaker 3: and that night I went to the Heartbreak Hotel where
Speaker 3: we were staying, and he was sitting by the swimming
Speaker 3: pool looking at his phone, and I went up to
Speaker 3: him and I apologized, and he said, I know something's wrong,
Speaker 3: but I don't.
Speaker 2: Know what it is.
Speaker 3: Well, I realized, God, we came away to get away
Speaker 3: from this constant distraction, but there wasn't any escape because
Speaker 3: it was everywhere right. And that was when I thought, God,
Speaker 3: I need to understand what's happening here.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think there'd be a listener of
Speaker 1: ours that has a teenager or anyone probably over the
Speaker 1: age of eight. Really that can't you know, scarily, that
Speaker 1: can't relate to what you're saying. And I have a
Speaker 1: sixteen nearly seventeen year old daughter, and I know she
Speaker 1: won't admit there's a problem, because that'll mean that has
Speaker 1: to be the first step in actually doing something about it.
Speaker 1: As far easy to say, I'm in complete control, I
Speaker 1: don't know what I'm doing and this is just what
Speaker 1: all the kids do. And this is what I meant
Speaker 1: about my hypocrite comment. As much as I get frustrated
Speaker 1: by others, I then have a good hard look in
Speaker 1: the mirror, and I'm just as guilty of doing it myself.
Speaker 2: Will you think about what you think about what you're
Speaker 2: saying about your daughter.
Speaker 3: That's so interesting because that thing that we want to believe,
Speaker 3: and I feel it too, we want to believe, Well,
Speaker 3: you can do this and there's no cost.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: I went to interview one of the leading new A
Speaker 3: scientist in the world, a man named Professor Earl Miller,
Speaker 3: interviewed with it at MITA and he said to me, look,
Speaker 3: there's one thing you've got to understand about the human
Speaker 3: brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think
Speaker 3: about one or two things at a time.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 3: This is just a fundamental limitation of the human brain.
Speaker 3: The human brain hasn't changed in forty thousand years significantly.
Speaker 3: It's not going to change any time soon. Yeah, you
Speaker 3: can't do more than one thing at a time. What
Speaker 3: you do is you juggle very quickly between tasks. You go, Wait,
Speaker 3: what did Sam just ask me? What's this message on WhatsApp?
Speaker 3: What did it say on the TV there about the election?
Speaker 2: Wait? What did Sam just ask me? Again?
Speaker 3: Wait, what's the message on Facebook? You're constantly juggling. And
Speaker 3: it turns out that comes with a really big cost.
Speaker 3: The kind of fancy term for it is the switch
Speaker 3: cost effect. When you try and do more than one
Speaker 3: thing at a time, you do all the things you're
Speaker 3: trying to do much less competently, you make more mistakes,
Speaker 3: you remember less of what you do, you're much less creative.
Speaker 3: And that sounds like a small effect. Sciences, that shows
Speaker 3: it's really big. Can I give an example.
Speaker 2: Of something that every parent can do?
Speaker 1: Yeah, please, I'd love you too.
Speaker 2: That I think is separate to tech.
Speaker 3: It's not totally unrelated, but one of the heroes in
Speaker 3: my book is a woman called Leonor's Gnazi. So Lenau
Speaker 3: grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 3: and from when she was five years old, she left
Speaker 3: her home on her own, walked out the front door,
Speaker 3: and walked to school that was fifteen minutes away on
Speaker 3: her own. But she would bump into all the other kids,
Speaker 3: the five, six seven year olds who walking to school,
Speaker 3: because in the ninety sixties, every child walked to school
Speaker 3: on their own, right ask anyone who was alive, then
Speaker 3: that was what everyone did. And then when school ended
Speaker 3: at three o'clock, Lenare would leave and she'd just wander
Speaker 3: around the neighborhood with her friends for a couple of hours.
Speaker 3: They'd invent games, they'd play, and they went home when
Speaker 3: they were hungry. Right again, that was the norm. By
Speaker 3: the time Lenor was a mother in the nineties, that
Speaker 3: had been completely that had ended. Right You were meant
Speaker 3: to walk your kid to the gate and be waiting
Speaker 3: when they came out. In fact, by two thousand and three,
Speaker 3: only ten percent of American children ever went outside without
Speaker 3: an adult supervising them. And it turns out that childhood
Speaker 3: we've lost contained loads of things that were really important
Speaker 3: for attention and focus. To give a real no shit
Speaker 3: sherlock one exercise, right, kids need to run around. When
Speaker 3: you run around, as Professor Joel Nigg has shown, your
Speaker 3: brain connections grow, you can pay attention much better. Single
Speaker 3: best thing you can do for kids you can't pay
Speaker 3: attention is let them.
Speaker 2: Go and run around.
Speaker 3: Right, But there's something even more important in the childhood
Speaker 3: we've lost that was so important for attention. When children
Speaker 3: play freely without adults standing over them, supervising them, enforcing
Speaker 3: the rules, they learn attention. They learn what they find interesting,
Speaker 3: which is really important for attention. They learn how to
Speaker 3: persuade other kids to pay attention to what they find interesting.
Speaker 3: They learn how to take turns, paying attention to things
Speaker 3: other kids wants do. They learn how to take risks.
Speaker 3: You climb the tree, you go to high, you shit yourself,
Speaker 3: you come back down. If you don't learn how to
Speaker 3: take risks, you become cripplingly anxious.
Speaker 2: That ruins your attention.
Speaker 3: And we took all that away from our kids.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Nor could see all this right, and she could see
Speaker 3: this was really harmful to kids' attention. And at first
Speaker 3: she thought well, the solutions obvious, just let my kid
Speaker 3: go out to play and urge other parents to do
Speaker 3: the same. But she quickly discovered if you were the
Speaker 3: only parent who did it, that your kid got scared,
Speaker 3: you look like a nutcase and often people would call
Speaker 3: the police. Right, So Leonard decided you had to have
Speaker 3: a Biggert strategy. She runs a group called let Grow.
Speaker 3: It's let grow dot org. I really urge everyone who's
Speaker 3: parent or grandparent listening to go to let grow dot org.
Speaker 3: And what they do is they go to whole schools
Speaker 3: and whole communities and persuade everyone to give their kids
Speaker 3: increasing levels of independence that build up to playing outside
Speaker 3: with our adults. At the moment, we are not giving
Speaker 3: our children a childhood that our ancestors would recognize as
Speaker 3: a human childhood. Just like we don't eat food that
Speaker 3: our ancestors would recognize as food, we don't sleep in
Speaker 3: a way our ancestors would recognize. So there's so much
Speaker 3: we can do. I'm so optimistic. I went to so
Speaker 3: many places from France to New Zealand to Long Island
Speaker 3: that would do it. Amazing things that we're restoring people's
Speaker 3: attention and focus. We can absolutely do this. But we've
Speaker 3: got to realize, you know, we are not medieval peasants
Speaker 3: begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few
Speaker 3: little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the
Speaker 3: free citizens of democracies. We own our own minds and
Speaker 3: we can take them back if we want to.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you beautiful man.
Speaker 1: You speak so much common sense and you articulate it
Speaker 1: so beautifully. I'm going to get your beautiful message out
Speaker 1: there and make sure that I'm doing everything i can
Speaker 1: for as many people as possible to start to challenge
Speaker 1: the way that they're thinking, challenge the way that they're doing,
Speaker 1: and get back to these basic ways that we need
Speaker 1: to live.
Speaker 3: Oh, cher Sam, I really enjoyed this, and I'm meant
Speaker 3: to say, oh, my publishers takes me that anyone wants
Speaker 3: to know to get the audiobook, the ebook or physical
Speaker 3: book can go to stolenfocusbook dot com.
Speaker 1: Thank you so so much.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: I must admit, before speaking to Johannah was a little
Speaker 1: bit worried that it might bring me down, not because
Speaker 1: Johann brings people down, quite the opposite, but just the
Speaker 1: overwhelm and the seriousness of how did we get ourselves
Speaker 1: into this message of world and can we get ourselves
Speaker 1: out of it? But it actually has done the opposite.
Speaker 1: The optimism and the positivity that Johann brings and the
Speaker 1: fact that it's about these are the real things that
Speaker 1: we can do in the offense and the defense. So
Speaker 1: I've loved that he's done that. So we're going to
Speaker 1: continue on with some of the optimism and positivity by
Speaker 1: celebrating some of the beautiful accomplishments that our would lifeless
Speaker 1: as have done. That's next on the show.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Recently I asked you to share your proud fitness achievements,
Speaker 1: whatever that might be, no matter how big or how small,
Speaker 1: and I think it was interesting how Johann mentioned that
Speaker 1: when you need to achieve something incredible, you really do
Speaker 1: need to give it your focus and attention and you're
Speaker 1: not going to get very far. And I'm sure all
Speaker 1: of you that have sent in those achievements would be
Speaker 1: agreeing with that statement. Right now. I thought it might
Speaker 1: be nice that we share those because it's not just
Speaker 1: for my benefit, it's for the benefit of inspiring each
Speaker 1: other and inspiring all of you. So I've collated a
Speaker 1: group of achievements that have been sent into us here
Speaker 1: at the Woodlife, and here.
Speaker 2: They are.
Speaker 5: Ten thousand steps every day every day. I started this
Speaker 5: in September and ever since then, I've met sure that
Speaker 5: I do it. My last month went for a to
Speaker 5: US because I was traveling, but other than that, I
Speaker 5: meet sure I do the ten thousand steps every single day.
Speaker 4: I think at the moment, I'm pretty proud because I've
Speaker 4: I tried with consistency in terms of like staying away
Speaker 4: from food that just makes my body react, and so
Speaker 4: I've been pretty good at the moment staying away from
Speaker 4: like wheat. Yeah, I get bloated and I find it
Speaker 4: hard to breathe properly when I eat it. So I've
Speaker 4: actually been really consistent for the past couple of months
Speaker 4: actually not eating it.
Speaker 5: When I graded and I got my yellow single in kickboxing.
Speaker 6: And when I got my first stripe in jiu jitsu.
Speaker 6: I'm happy that I'm doing yoga twice a week, and
Speaker 6: that's good. That helps me quite a lot. Actually, flexibility
Speaker 6: is much better. But what I've noticed is that my
Speaker 6: blood pressure is steady, and which was an issue and
Speaker 6: cholesterol levels. I got really fit about six years ago
Speaker 6: and I did the OX spam one hundred the hiking,
Speaker 6: so we had to hike for one hundred k's in
Speaker 6: a certain time frame. And I've also done a couple
Speaker 6: of ceteries up in the Grampians, which is eighty k
Speaker 6: over two days hike. So a group of four of
Speaker 6: us for besties, we would go out once a month training,
Speaker 6: usually up at the Dandy Knongs or out at Ludider
Speaker 6: Gorge or Mount Methodon. Yeah, we still do it. We
Speaker 6: still go hiking at least once a month. We usually
Speaker 6: do about twenty k's.
Speaker 1: Now, there's no right, there's no wrong, there's no better,
Speaker 1: there's no worse. It's an individual achievement and it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter how big or small you might think it is.
Speaker 1: It's important to acknowledge it, and it's actually really nice
Speaker 1: and powerful to share it. I just think we're so
Speaker 1: hard on ourselves, where our own harshest critics in this world.
Speaker 1: You know, we tend to focus on the things that
Speaker 1: we're not doing a lot of the time, and there's
Speaker 1: often things that we are doing that perhaps we're not
Speaker 1: giving ourselves enough credit for. So I just thought, at
Speaker 1: the end of such a beautiful episode of the wood
Speaker 1: life would be really nice to share those achievements with
Speaker 1: each other. And as always, if you have anything recently
Speaker 1: that you're proud of, please let me know send them
Speaker 1: in through the voice message. You can do that through
Speaker 1: the link in the show notes. I can't thank you
Speaker 1: enough for listening to the WOODLFE. I appreciate all of
Speaker 1: your support that we've had so far, and I'll be
Speaker 1: back on Monday for our next motivational moment. And of
Speaker 1: course you can listen for free on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 1: Have a wonderful week, I'll see you soon.