Dr Rupy: Johann, thank you so much for taking the time considering you literally got back from abroad yesterday. So it's great, great to have you on the pod.
Johann Hari: Oh, thank you so much. And I'm sick as a dog, but I will try not to die during this podcast, or you could market it as my final interview if I do. So it's a roundabout. Hopefully I will not die in the next hour. I'm going to swig Lucozade all through this interview.
Dr Rupy: That's all good. Which is funny considering you have a section on nutrition in this book as well. So you maybe you could talk us through the impact of Lucozade and stuff and how you're trying to do a bit better as well, because I know it's always working progress. But look, I was fascinated by this book as someone, like many people who are recognising the impact of technology on my own attention, how I feel like I'm constantly flicking around the page rather than following line by line. I was fascinated to dive into this book and dive a little deeper around it. I thought we could perhaps anchor the listener by talking a bit about attention as it is. And you have this wonderful bit actually in the conclusion of the book where you talk with James Williams, the former Google strategist, about attention described as spotlight attention, daylight attention, and starlight.
Johann Hari: Yeah. I mean, I wrote the book because like you, like I'm guessing pretty much everyone who's listening, I could feel that my own ability to pay attention was getting worse. With each year that passed, it felt like things that required deep focus that are incredibly important to me, reading books, watching films, having proper long conversations, were just getting harder and harder. And I could see this was happening to huge numbers of people around me. The average office worker now focuses on any one task for less than three minutes. And for every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now a hundred children who've been identified with that problem. So I wanted to understand what was happening to us. And it's interesting you bring up Dr Williams. Obviously, I used my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to go on a really big journey all over the world from Moscow to Miami to Melbourne to interview over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus. And what I learned is there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse. And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely rising in recent years. You mentioned tech. Obviously, there are some aspects of our tech that are doing this. One of the things that fascinated me is actually how wide the causes are, that tech is only, it's a substantial part of my book, but it's not the biggest part. The food we eat, an issue obviously very important to your podcast, is hugely affecting our ability to focus. A huge array of factors, the way our offices work, the way our kids' schools work. There's a really big, broad array of these 12 factors. But you've gone to a really interesting one of the things that really interested me that I learned, which is when we think about attention, we tend to think about it in quite a narrow way, as a kind of mild irritant, poor attention problems, right? But actually, Dr Williams, who I would argue is the most important philosopher of attention in the world, argues there's three layers of attention that help us to think about this. I would actually argue there's a fourth, and I know he agrees with this. So the first layer of attention is what we mostly think about when we think about attention problems. And that's what's called your spotlight, right? So your spotlight, you think about the room I'm in now, right? I'm talking to you from my flat. I'm homing in on answering your questions, but actually, I'm surrounded by a load of stuff, right? I can hear, if I zone out a little bit, I can hear the sound of my radiator over there. If I turn my head a little bit, I can see people walking past on the street. I'm surrounded by all my stuff, my books. Somewhere hidden in this room, there's my phone. I'm zoning out all of that and I'm narrowing down to you. So it's called your spotlight because it's your ability to narrow down your focus to one immediate task. And we can all feel that our spotlight is being disrupted. You know, I go to the fridge to get a Diet Coke. On the way there, I get a text message from my friend, I start answering, suddenly I'm standing in the kitchen, I'm like, why the hell did I come here? I come back to my laptop and I don't have a Diet Coke, right? That kind of disruption is happening to us all the time and it's having huge consequences that I'm sure we'll talk about. But actually, so that's mostly when we think about attention problems, we think about spotlight disruption. We don't use that term, but that's sort of what we think about, right? I was trying to get something done and I got disrupted and now I'm not doing it, right? And that's huge. But actually the next level up, Dr Williams argues, I think persuasively, is even more disruptive. And it's what he calls your starlight. And he says that's not just your ability to achieve a short-term goal, like going to the fridge to get a drink. That's your ability to achieve a long-term goal. You know, I want to start a business, I want to write a book, I want to be a good parent, right? It's called your starlight because when you're lost in the desert and you don't have GPS, you look to the stars and you're like, oh yeah, that's the direction I'm travelling in, right? And he argues it's not just our ability to do immediate short-term tasks that's being screwed with, it's our ability to achieve longer-term tasks as well. If you're jammed up all the time, if you're experiencing these 12 factors that I write about in my book, Stolen Focus, you're going to find it harder to do those longer-term projects. I'd say to anyone listening, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that you're proud of required a lot of sustained long-term focus. And when your ability to pay attention breaks down, your ability to achieve your goals is diminished. Your ability to solve your problems is diminished. You feel worse about yourself because you actually are less competent. And when you start to get your attention back, obviously you start to feel much better. There's a layer of attention even above that, which Dr Williams calls your daylight. And that's not your ability to achieve a long-term goal, like starting a business, being a good dad or whatever. That's your ability to even know what your long-term goals are, to even figure out your long-term goals. How do you know what business you want to start? How do you know what kind of book you want to write? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? To figure those things out, you need to have time to think, you need to have rest, you need to let your mind wander. It's called your daylight because you can see a room most clearly when it's flooded with daylight, right? And he argues we're so jammed up that our ability to even figure out who we are is getting harder and harder, right? He calls it decohering, which is a kind of fancy term, but I think makes some sense that we become less coherent as people because we can't think clearly. And I would argue there's a layer even above that, which I would call our stadium lights. And that's not just your ability to figure out what your long-term goals are and achieve them as an individual. That's your ability as a society. How do we come together, figure out what our collective goals are and achieve our collective goals, right? We can all see that's getting harder and harder. We can't listen to each other. We end up screaming at each other all the time. We're so polarised, we're so angry. So when you realise what seems like a small thing, oh, my attention's getting worse, it's annoying. You realise that problem hobbles us at every stage of our lives and crucially, starting to solve the problem means that at every level of our lives, we become more effective as people and better able to achieve our goals and solve our problems.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. And you actually, you start the book by chatting with Professor Joel Nigg about something that I thought was really starkly described as an attentional pathogenic culture. I wonder if we can dive into that because it kind of relates to the breakdown of the attention stages or areas that you've just described there so eloquently. What, when it comes to the culture of loss of attention, what is Professor Joel actually talking about there?
Johann Hari: He's arguably the leading expert on children's attention problems in the United States and a wonderful person. I went to interview him in Portland, Oregon. And when he says that we need to ask if we're now living in what he calls an attentional pathogenic culture, he's drawing an analogy with what we know about obesity, right? So if you look at the figures, it's extraordinary. In 1960, 1% of people in Britain and the United States were obese. Now, the figures have absolutely blown up. In the United States, it's almost a majority of men who are obese or overweight. And the rest of us are, you know, Britain is not far behind that, right? So it's been an extraordinary transformation. And that didn't happen because any of the dumb stigmatising things we say about overweight or obese people, by the way, I am one of those people. So it's not because they were weak-willed or greedy or anything like that. It's because there was a complete transformation of our environment. Our food supply system completely changed, right? The food we eat is unrecognisable to the food our grandparents and great-grandparents ate. We built cities that it's impossible to bike and walk around in most cases, and we became much more stressed, which makes people eat more. So you look at those factors, there's a very strong body of evidence that we've created what are called obesogenic environments, right? Environments in which it's easy to be obese and hard to resist obesity. Now, what Professor Nigg is saying we should ask, and he's saying, it's important to say he's posing it as a question. He's not saying he's confident that we've done this. But he's saying we need to ask, has something similar happened to our attention? Have we created, as you say, an attentional pathogenic environment, which would mean an environment where just like it's hard to resist being overweight or obese in the environment we've created, is it harder, have we created an environment where it's hard for us to pay attention, to focus, to think deeply? And I think the evidence is, I'm going beyond what Professor Nigg says now, but I think the evidence is pretty clear that we have indeed done that, that our, we've created an environment for all sorts of reasons from environmental pollutants to the way we work, a whole range of factors are really undermining our ability to focus, which can seem quite overwhelming when you first hear it. But I don't write my books to moan about how bad things are, that doesn't interest me. I write my books to solve problems. And one of the things that really encouraged me is once you understand these 12 factors, we can begin to solve them to some degree as individuals and to some degree collectively as a society. What Professor Nigg is saying is so important for people to understand because, and what many other scientists are explaining about this, because it completely flips how we think about this. You know, when my attention was getting worse, I thought, well, there's something wrong with me, right? I went into a very negative spiral. There's something wrong with me, I'm lazy, I don't have enough willpower. When I looked at the young people in my, it was a experience with a young person in my life that really spurred me to write the book. When, when I looked at the young people in my life who were struggling to focus, I was getting angry with them. And what this evidence shows us is, if you are struggling to focus and pay attention, there's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing wrong with the kids in your life. There's something wrong with the way we're living, but together we can fix the way we're living.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I think this really frames, this is a really good framing part of our conversation to really drive into exactly what is creating or what are the factors behind that environment. And there are a lot of parallels, obesogenic environment, psychogenic environment. There appears to be a bit of a thread with the things that you write about as well. It's really the environment that we're creating ourselves and has been created for us that is a one of the causes as to why we're witnessing these things. I was going to talk about this in a bit later, but Nir Eyal is another person that you had a conversation with. His book, Hooked, is one of those recommended reading materials that every startup entrepreneur is given alongside the lean startup, zero to one by Peter Thiel. And you have a conversation with him about personal responsibility, which sounds like it's really around, you know, it's people's choice to maintain attention and there are tools now that have been put on phones to help people do that thing, things like screen time or do not disturb. What's the argument against that and for that? Because there does appear to be, in a similar vein, this suggestion that it's our fault that we're obese. It's not the sugar lobby or not the fact that junk food advertising is rife, for example. The same thing with the technology, it's our fault that we've got an attention issue, not the products that are being served to us.
Johann Hari: Yeah, there's no argument against those things, but the argument is against thinking that they're going to solve the problem for everyone, right? So I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing people who designed key aspects of the world in which we now live. And the thing that was most striking to me was how incredibly sick with guilt they are. You mentioned Dr Williams. So he used to work at the heart of Google. And one day he was speaking at a tech conference where the audience were literally the people who designed the stuff you and your kids use. And he said to them, he was feeling uneasy. He said, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, please put up your hand. And nobody put up their hand. Not long afterwards, he quit. And I spent a lot of time with people in Silicon Valley. I'll come to Nir Eyal in a minute because he's a an interesting figure in relation to this. But the people who've been at the heart of this machine kept explaining something to me. And to be honest with you, it took me quite a long time to get it because it seemed to me too simple, right? They kept explaining to me, anyone watching now, anyone listening, if you open TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, please don't. But if you did, do that now, those companies begin to make money out of you immediately in two ways. The first way is really obvious, you see advertising. Okay, no one needs me to explain that. The second way is much more important. Everything you ever do on these apps, including your so-called private messages, is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and what you like. So, for example, let's say that you've ever indicated on any of these apps that you like, I don't know, Donald Trump, Bette Midler, and you told your mum you just bought some nappies. Okay, it's going to figure out, if you like Donald Trump, you're quite likely to be right-wing. If you like Bette Midler and you're a man, you're probably gay. No disrespect to any straight men who like Bette Midler, I don't believe you. And you've just bought nappies, so okay, you've got a baby, right? So it knows these apps, they know, if you've been using these apps for any amount of time, they know tens of thousands of data points about like this about you. They know a huge amount about you. And they're learning that information for a few reasons. One is to sell that information about you to advertisers. You are not the customer of any of these apps, right? They've got customer service departments. TikTok has a customer service department. You can't phone it, I can't phone it, because we're not the customer. We're the product they sell to the real customer, who is the advertiser, right? So, obviously they're selling that information about advertisers, because if they're marketing nappies, they want to know they're selling to people who've got babies, right? But there's a much more important reason why they're gathering all this information and harvesting all this information about you. They're learning what it is that makes you tick, what you like, what you don't like, so that they can keep you scrolling for a very simple reason. Every time you open the app and you begin to scroll, they begin to make money. Every time your children open the app and begin to scroll, these apps begin to make money. And every time you close the app, those revenue streams disappear, right? So all of this AI, all of these algorithms, all of this genius in Silicon Valley is geared towards one thing and one thing only, figuring out how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. That's it. They are, they've created machines with the sole purpose of figuring out how to hack and harvest your attention. And this kept being explained to me by these people at the heart of the machine. And I kept kind of going, well, it can't be that simple, right? And they kept looking at me. There's a slightly crude analogy. I don't know how crude your podcast can get, but I kept thinking they were looking at me the way like a maiden aunt in the 1850s, you'd look at her if she'd just suddenly learned about the existence of fingering, right? Like they were like, how did you think it worked? What did you think we did, right? And it was, it was fascinating to keep seeing this. And you mentioned Nir Eyal, who's a really interesting person to reflect on in this context. So Nir Eyal wrote a hugely successful book that was a kind of guide to programmers to teach them how to build habit-forming products. It's called Hooked, right? So it's like a kind of, I think he calls it a cookbook for how to create habit-forming apps on the internet, right? And he teaches you how to, I mean, one of his phrases, not in his book, but I think it was on his website was how to, how to make people crazy, right? And the whole book is explaining these different techniques you can use as a programmer, things like intermittent rewards. So intermittent rewards are where you just get, sometimes you get rewards like hearts, but they're unpredictable. The more unpredictable they are, the more, the more you become hooked on it, right? So he wrote this book and, you know, the former head of Microsoft held it up and said to all the programmers, read this book. It's been hugely influential. And I want to stress, by the way, I like Nir Eyal. I think he's, this is not about attacking him as an individual. I'd also recommend people listen to the entire audio of the conversation I had with Nir Eyal because he's not here to put his own case forward and you can hear the entire audio on the book's website, The Lost Connections. But what was most fascinating to me, so Nir Eyal writes this guide to how to create apps that hook you. And you read the book and you're like, whoa, those techniques have been used on me, right? Then he wrote a book called Indistractible, which was about how you can solve your attention problems. And he's written this book before that's describing these incredibly sophisticated techniques for how they're hacking you and invading you. And then he writes this book that goes, it's really easy for you to deal with this. Just, as he said, turn off your fucking notifications. That's the way he put it to me. Um, picture yourself as a leaf on a river, you know, like these incredibly simplistic, tiny human interventions. And look, I'm in favour of everything that Nir does. I am in favour of individual solutions to these problems. But I also want to be really honest with people because I do not feel, although I don't think Nir is being consciously dishonest, I don't feel most people who talk about attention are levelling with people, right? I am passionately in favour of individual changes. I go through dozens of them in the book. I'm sure we're going to talk about lots of them. People should absolutely do them. But we've got to level with people. They'll make a real difference to your life. On their own, purely individual solutions are not going to solve this problem. Because what it feels like with people like Nir Eyal is like they've been pouring itching powder over us all day, and then they lean forward at the end of the day and go, hey buddy, you should learn how to meditate, then you wouldn't be scratching all the time. And you want to go, fuck you, I'll learn to meditate, that's hugely valuable, but you need to stop pouring this itching powder on me, which is why we also need to have an additional level of how we respond to these threats to our attention. And by the way, not just with tech, with food, environmental pollutants across the board, we need to have two levels with which we deal with this. I think of them as defense and offense. Defend ourselves and our kids using all the different techniques where Nir and I would broadly agree, although I would go further than him. But then we also need to have an offense level where we take on the forces that are doing this to us. And I went to places that begun to do that and can explain how.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I I I love that analogy and you use this phrase, cruel optimism in the book. And you know, I liken it to if Pepsi wrote a book about the amount of marketing spend, the ways in which they isolated pop stars and sports figures to promote their products. And then a couple of years later wrote a diet book. I'm like, oh, it's really easy. You just count your calories, you make sure you're under here and then that's it. And then you're done. You know, you won't get fat.
Johann Hari: Put down the Pepsi, exactly. It's a very good analogy. It's something about being lectured about it by literally someone who was at the heart of designing these mechanisms and the imbalance between the incredible sophistication of the techniques he outlines in Hooked and the poultryness of the self-defense techniques he advocates in Indistractible. And I stress again, he's not here to defend himself. People should listen to the audio because he, you know, he has a counter argument to to all of this and you know, he's not against any there are some forms of collective regulation that he's in favour of, although I think they're pathetically minor, things like if you use Facebook or TikTok or whatever for like 40 hours a week, it should give you a little warning saying, oh, you might be addicted, you can get help here. Well, all right. I'm not against that, but that's not, that's not going to solve that seems to me pretty pathetic to be honest. But, but yeah, so I think you're you're right, you you raise this concept of cruel optimism. It's a phrase that comes from a wonderful history professor called Professor Lauren Berlant, who sadly died recently. Cruel optimism is where you take something with really deep causes, often social causes, like depression, anxiety, obesity, attention problems, I would argue. And you say to everyone, hey guys, great news, I've got a solution for you. You just need to do these three simple things and you're going to be fine. You know, just use this meditation app for five minutes a day, you're going to be fine. And it's optimism because it, of course, you're offering a solution. But it's cruel optimism because in most cases, you're setting people up to fail. And the problem with that is when they fail, because your solution is so small relative to the size of the problem, they'll blame themselves. They'll say, well, I did the thing that you're meant to do, and look, I'm still looking at my phone all the time, I'm still eating way too much, whatever it might be, there must be something wrong with me. Now, it's important to say the alternative to cruel optimism is not pessimism. People should not be pessimistic. There are solutions. The alternative, the real alternative to cruel cruel optimism is authentic optimism, where we build solutions that match the size of the problem, right? And I've been to places that have done that, that have begun to do that. That is where we need to go now, because these problems are solvable. One of the things that's really interesting to me is, you know, a lot of people think, oh, our attention's getting worse, but it's just the reality of the modern world. It's just, you know, that's technology, that's how it goes. Actually, I left the book much more optimistic than I've been at the start. That is not true. We can have all the technology we currently have, but have it designed not to hack and invade our attention, but have it designed to heal our attention. I can talk about how we could get there. With all of these factors that are undermining our attention, they are relatively recent changes. They are the results of quite small numbers of people making decisions that benefit them at the expense of the rest of us. And we can put this right. You know, we can fix those problems. To quote Dr. Williams again, we're talking about him a lot today. He's a great person. He often says, you know, human beings had the axe for 1.4 million years before anyone said, guys, should we put a handle on this axe? The entire internet has existed for less than 10,000 days, right? We can fix this shit if we want to. And I went to places that have begun to do it. But first of all, we have to really shift our psychology on it. We need to stop blaming ourselves and start getting angry with the forces that are doing this to us and our children and putting those forces right.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I I I remember the first time I I thought I sort of had this revelation around the addictive potential of technology on kids in particular. And I I don't want to just talk about the problem. I want to get to some of the solutions in your book as well in a second. But I remember I was in clinic a few years ago. I was in A&E. I was seeing a young child coming with his mother and he was he was being distracted by a phone as as many parents do in the middle of the waiting room. You know, you've got to wait a couple of hours at least in a lot of cases. Um, and it's perfectly reasonable. When when the child came in, in my particular cubicle room, there's never any internet service. It just kind of cuts out. And the horror and the the screams that came from this kid, it it just it it really went down to because it was just the fact that Peppa Pig or whatever it was had just cut off mid mid watching it. And it was almost as if it had been yanked from the child. Um, and you know, I I thought to myself, oh God, it's all technology, it's all this stuff. But then I asked myself the question, would the same thing have happened 50 years ago if it was a book that the child was reading or a toy that were playing with and it was yanked straight from them? I don't know. I can't really answer that question, but for me, it just really did paint a stark picture of what potentially is going array with with the attention and the addictive nature of these devices.
Johann Hari: That's such a revealing and interesting story and obviously, I'm sure everyone listening has seen that. And obviously, a lot of my book is about our kids. And I think there we do know the answer to your question, which is, is it different to reading a book, right? And there's there's lots of evidence that it is. There's both a lot of research on the effects that reading books have. So we know that if you read people like Professor Raymond Mar, who I interviewed a lot in Toronto, has done really interesting research on this. So we know that if you read long form fiction or even if you watch long form narrative television, so where you're immersing yourself in an imagined world, you're having to empathize a lot, you're having to imagine how other people think, that actually carries over into your life when you're not reading novels and you're not watching TV, long complex TV shows, you are more empathetic to other people, right? It's like an empathy gym where you're practicing, oh, how is that person thinking? We know that that's not the case with, for example, social media. It doesn't enhance your empathy. By the way, anyone who's ever spent five minutes on Twitter should have figured that out without any scientific studies for it. But the it doesn't enhance your empathy. In fact, it can make you meaner and cruler. I can explain some of the mechanisms by which it makes us meaner and cruler if you like. But so again, I stress that's social media as it currently exists. We can change social media so it's not like that. So I think you're you're absolutely right and we do know that that is a shift that is in many ways harmful. I'll give you an example of another harm that I think will be playing out for almost everyone listening and watching to some degree today. I went to MIT to interview Professor Earl Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, an amazing man. And he said to me, look, there's one thing you've got to understand about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years. It's not going to change on any time scale any of us are going to see. But what's happened is we've fallen for a kind of mass delusion. The average teenager believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. And the rest of us are not that far behind them. So what happens is scientists like Professor Miller, scientists all over the world, get people into labs and they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time and they monitor them. And what they discover is always the same. You're not doing more than one thing at a time. What you're doing is you're juggling very rapidly between tasks. You're like, wait, what did you just ask me? What is this message on WhatsApp? What does it say just happened on the TV over there? What is this Facebook message? Wait, sorry, what were you asking me again? So we're juggling. And it turns out that juggling comes with a really big cost. The kind of technical term for it is the switch cost effect. Everyone should know this term and learn how to to protect themselves against it. So the switch cost effect, the switch cost effect shows when you try and do more than one thing at a time, when you're switching between tasks, you do all the things you're trying to do much less competently. You make more mistakes, you remember less of what you do, you're much less creative. And I remember when I was first reading that, reading through the science of this, I kept thinking, okay, I get it. I can see that's true. But this is a small effect, right? This isn't a big deal. The evidence shows it's a really big effect. I'll give you an example of a small study that's backed by a wider body of evidence. Hewlett Packard, the printer company, got a scientist into study their workers, and he split them into two groups. And the first group was told, just get on with your task, whatever it is, and you're not going to be interrupted. Just do what you've got to do. And the second group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is, but at the same time, you've got to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls. So pretty much how most of us live. And at the end of it, the scientist measured the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher than the group that had. To give you a sense of how big an effect that is, if we sat down together and smoked a fat spliff right now and got stoned, our IQs would go down by five points in the short term. So at least in the short term, being chronically interrupted in the way most of us are is twice as bad for your intelligence as getting stoned. You'd be better off sitting at your desk, smoking a fat spliff and doing one thing at a time than you would be sitting at your desk, not getting stoned and being constantly interrupted. Now, I don't want anyone to misunderstand me. Obviously, you'd be better off neither getting stoned nor being interrupted. Don't want to give anyone the wrong idea here. But you can see this is why Professor Miller says we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. Those were two fascinating things for me. The first one that you alluded to earlier being reading as an empathy gym. And as someone who reads a lot of non-fiction, that's definitely adjusted the type of reading that I'm going to try and indulge myself in going forward. And the other thing is the switch cost effect. We had Professor Cal Newport on the podcast a couple of months ago talking about attention switching and that's basically what a lot of us do all day long. Like I've got multiple tabs open all the time. I've got my phone on. You know, my wife's coming in. She thinks that she can do multiple tasks, having a conversation with me and like texting at the same time and all that kind of stuff. But um, yeah, it's something that I think is just so rife. And I realized the impact it was having on me even at work. A lot of junior doctors, I think, right now, not only have to deal with the stresses of the day-to-day, multiple patients on the go, multiple managerial decisions, but also financial stresses, things like the cost of living crisis, obviously it's having a lot of impact on everyone. And I'm imagining this is also having a compounding effect on people's attention levels as well. I you did talk about finance in in the book as well, in particular universal basic income.
Johann Hari: Yeah, so there's, I think you're totally right. Just to say about multitasking, I've got bad news for your wife, which is the studies found that people who think they're good at multitasking are generally actually even worse at it than everyone else. So sorry to break that to your wife. I mean, even if you think about the term multitasking, that is a term that that was invented to describe computers. Computers can multitask. They've got more than one processor. We are not computers. We can't live by the logic of machines. Also, there's a really interesting fact about this. You know, Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you're interrupted by something as simple as a text message, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted. So, you know, you think, oh, I'll pause this conversation with you to just take 10 seconds to reply to this text. It won't take you 10 seconds. It'll take you 10 seconds plus the 23 minutes it takes you to refocus your mind fully. But you asked a really important one about stress. And obviously this is one of the 12 causes that I write about in Stolen Focus. So one of the people who really helped me to understand this is an incredible woman called Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, who was until I think about a month ago, the surgeon general of California, so the most senior medical figure in the state. And Dr. Burke Harris did a huge amount of research on the roles of trauma and stress in attention, the effect they have. And I'll never forget how she put it to me. We were sitting in San Francisco outside a cafe. She said to me, imagine one day you're walking down the street and out of the blue, you're attacked by a bear, right? And you survive. In the weeks and months that follow, something totally involuntary will happen to your attention. You'll find it harder to do like deep spotlight focus, you know, reading a book or attending to, you know, work, because a big part of your brain will be scanning the horizon for risk. It'll be like, whoa, something came out of the blue and attacked us. I need to watch the horizon because I don't know what else might come out of the blue, right? That's not your brain failing to do its job. That is in fact your brain doing its job properly, right? Okay, now imagine that you were attacked by a bear again, right? You're very unlucky in this scenario, but you do survive, right? In that case, your brain would very likely slip into a state called hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is where you you just can't focus on something like reading a book because your brain is like, whoa, we don't know how this environment works. This is chaos. We need to be looking out for risk and danger. A classic example would be soldiers who return from war zones are often in a state of hypervigilance. Children who are being sexually abused or being physically abused are often in a state of hypervigilance. And then they go to school and they're told they have ADHD and, you know, they're often given stimulants. This is actually how Nadine began to research it. She took over a clinic in a poor neighborhood called Bayview, and she noticed that just like staggering numbers of the kids were being given stimulant drugs for ADHD. She said, well, well, hang on, how could it be that so many more children had here had ADHD than anywhere else? And she discovered that huge number of these kids are being violently abused and they're vigilant, right? Now, you think about that in relation to our more ordinary lives, you know, anything, well, small levels of stress actually enhance attention in the short term. You know, if I'm about to go on stage to give a speech, I feel a surge of stress, but that's good because it makes me focus, right? But beyond really quite low levels, stress is profoundly corrosive for spotlight, deep, you know, for deep focus, right? And, you know, I think we saw that in the pandemic. You know, I remember at the start of the pandemic, lots of people saying, oh, we're the people who were not doing the heroic work that you were doing in the medical services, but were, you know, going to be stuck at home. Loads of people were saying to me, oh, I'm going to finally read War and Peace. I'm going to learn French on Duolingo. You will have noticed no one fucking read Tolstoy and no one learned French. In fact, people Googling, how do I get my brain to work, increased by I think 3,000%, right? And there's various reasons for that. Some of them actually had COVID, but more of them, it was, you know, we were in a bear attack, right? Like the bear came back, the bear came back three times. We didn't know what the hell was going on, right? So anyone who in circumstances of stress struggles to focus should never be critical of themselves or indeed critical of their brain. Your brain is doing the thing it's meant to do. It's looking out for risk. But anything that reduces stress, and obviously I talk about how we can do that, will massively enhance attention.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe not as extreme as your experiment that you describe at the start of the book and you come to and come back to where you go away and you shut yourself off for three months, no internet, no phone, no nothing. I'm most productive at 5:00 in the morning to 7:00 when I wake up early. I'm one of those people. I'm sorry. And uh, and when I go to Australia, uh, so I go to Australia because I used to work there for a couple of years. My wife's Australian. We go there fairly often for an extended period of time because when I'm working during UK hours, no one's pinging me with emails. I've done all the bulk of emails and then I just get uninterrupted work. But aside from leaving the UK and traveling halfway around the world or locking yourself away in Provincetown or waking up at 4:00 or ever early hours in the morning like I do, how do you tap into that flow state? You spoke to Prof Mahali about flow states and this for me is absolutely fascinating and I'm I'd love to to dive in a bit deeper into that.
Johann Hari: I'm just reeling from your revelation about 5:00 a.m. I think the biggest division between human beings is not atheist versus religious people. It's not left-wing versus right-wing. It's morning people versus everyone else. What you've just said to me is so deeply insane. It's like if you'd said to me, every morning I wake up and eat my own shit, it would make as much sense to me, right? What? You wake up at 5:00 in the morning? I have structured my entire life so I never have to be awake before 11:00 a.m., right? My ex used to wake up at like 5:00 a.m. without an alarm and I would look at him and go, what are you? Like, who is this person, right? So yeah, we are at opposite ends of the spectrum here, but in terms of, in terms of flow states, yes, so everyone, and there's lots of things we can do to enhance our attention. This is one of them. So everyone listening will have experienced a flow state, even if they don't know the term. A flow state is when you're doing something and you just totally get into it. And when it's over, you're like, whoa, is it 5 o'clock? That went really quickly, right? You know, the way one rock climber described it is when you're climbing a rock and you get into flow, it's like you are the rock you're climbing, right? And different people get flow from different things. I definitely would not get it from rock climbing. In fact, I would fall off and die. But, you know, some people get it from making bagels, some people get it from brain surgery. For me, it would be writing. Everyone will have their thing, right? And flow states are really important for the understanding of attention because when you're in flow, it's both the deepest form of attention that human beings can provide and once you get into it, the easiest form of attention to provide. It's not a slog. It's not like memorizing facts for an exam or something. So obviously, I wanted to understand, God, if this is a gusher of flow that exists inside all of us, where do we drill to get it? So I went to interview Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, it took me so long to learn how to say that, who was the scientist who first identified flow states in the 1960s and spent 60 years studying them. Sadly, I did the last interview he ever did because he died not long afterwards. A totally amazing man. And he discovered a huge number of things, but I think there's three in particular that would help anyone listening. So he discovered, if you want to maximize your chances of getting into a flow state, there's no guarantee, but you can really increase your odds. There are three things you can do. The first thing is you've got to choose one goal and set aside a significant amount of time to just pursue that one goal. I'm going to paint this canvas. I'm going to write this chapter. I'm going to, whatever it might be, right? If you're trying to pursue one, two, three, four goals, you won't get into flow, right? You've got to choose one goal and clear your schedule to pursue it. Secondly, you've got to choose a goal that's meaningful to you. Attention evolved to attach to meaning. You know, a frog will stay longer at a fly than it will at a stone because the fly is meaningful to the frog and the stone is not, right? We're like that. Everyone knows if I gave you a book about something you were really interested in, you will find that a much easier book to focus on than if I give you a book about a subject that you don't find interesting at all, right? That's true of lots of things. Often when our attention is slipping and sliding off a something, it's a sign that we don't find it meaningful and need to find a way to infuse it with meaning. Thirdly, and this seemed counterintuitive to me when I first learned it, it will really help if you choose a goal that pushes you to the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them. So let's say you're a medium talent rock climber. You don't want to just climb over a garden wall. That's too easy. You won't get into flow doing that. Equally, you don't want to suddenly try and climb Mount Everest. That's going to be overwhelming. You won't get into flow. You want to climb a slightly higher and harder rock face than the one you climbed last time. Flow begins at the edge of your comfort zone. It's when you're pushing yourself just to the edge but not beyond it. And that's a hard balance to do. So if you do those three things, set aside a significant amount of time to just pursue one goal where you won't be interrupted. Make sure it's a meaningful goal to you and push yourself to the edge of your abilities but not beyond it. You hugely increase the chances of activating this deep form of focus that exists inside all of us. But even as I say that, you can see how it comes back to Professor Nigg and the idea of an attentional pathogenic environment. You can see how our environment is undermining that. Just hurdle one, set aside a load of time to do one thing where you're not going to be interrupted. That's really hard, which is why we need to look at the ways we can change our environment to create those circumstances. Obviously, I go through that a lot in the book.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. And it it comes back to one of the points that I like underlined massively. It's it's not just enough to strip out distractions because I think you describe it as that just creating a void that needs to be filled. And so if you have those extra elements like the meaning, the challenge, all those different elements, I I guess that's how you would get more into it. And it and it it it one of the other things that I think was really impactful for me as someone who has sort of tapped into productivity porn quite a bit, you know, it's rife online, particularly in the startup community, like you're just trying to pack in as many things you can do. Like on my walk, I'm listening to a podcast, I'm reading a book on a train, I'm trying to pack into as many things. And actually the the impact of mind wandering, the impact of creating space for you to actually be bored as something that is useful for productivity in the long run. I wonder if you can talk a bit about that because I think that for me in particular, someone who tries to cram as much information into my brain as possible in the hope that I'm, you know, doing my doing better, would be really useful to hear about.
Johann Hari: For a minute there, I thought productivity porn might be some like heterosexual genre I've never heard of, like some secretary who's like alternating between doing emails and doing other work. I was like, okay. Feel free, no judgment. But um, no, I think you're totally right that so if you think about productivity, this is something I found really, really challenging. We have got our concept of productivity deeply wrong in our culture. So we think the productive worker, and I thought this about myself, so I'm not saying this is an external thing, right? We think the productive worker is the worker who works himself or herself to the point of exhaustion. It's the worker who's constantly available to answer your questions, to be interrupted. It's, you know, the worker who's constantly cramming their head full of information. And actually all of those things are wrong, right? And at some level we know that because, you know, no one, think about your football team. No one wants their football team to walk onto the pitch exhausted, knackered, having slept five hours the night before, having their phone in their hand to be doing two other things during the game. No one thinks that, right? You would, in fact, you would regard that as insane if your players did that, right? They'd be fired immediately. So at some level, we know that that's not how you achieve excellence, because we wouldn't want it for our team. And yet, it's what we apply to ourselves. So you you raise a really interesting one, which is mind wandering. So as as you alluded to, very early in the writing of Stolen Focus, I was still stuck in this very individual story about my own attention. So I did this experiment on myself. I was in this very lucky position where one of my books got made into a big Hollywood film, so I had a lot of money. And I was sitting at home not able to focus and I thought, oh, why am I doing this? I'm just getting out of here. So I went to a place called Provincetown in Cape Cod for three months and I had no phone that could get online and no laptop that could get online. So I was completely internet free for three months. And lots of really interesting things happened to me there, but the thing that happened, one of the biggest revelations for me was something that really surprised me. So for the first, I don't know, month maybe that I was there, I was really kind of, my attention got much better. My kind of spotlight focus got much better. I was amazed by how much better it got. I mean, I could read for like 10 hours a day. And what I was doing was sort of fattening my my my brain. I thought of myself as like a foie gras goose that's being force-fed information. I was like cramming information into my head, right? So I had brought an iPod because I had no way to get onto the internet. So I was like listening to audiobooks, reading books, talking to people all the time, finding things out. And then about a month in, I just started, Provincetown is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I started just going for these really long walks with nothing to listen to and nothing, you know, I had nothing, right? I didn't have my phone obviously. And at first I thought, oh, you're kind of cheating. You came here to focus. But I noticed this really odd thing that on these long walks where my mind was just wandering, I was having the most creative ideas that I had during the day. They were almost always the most creatively and intellectually productive, you know, couple of hours of my day. I thought this is a bit weird, but it was only after I left that I I I interviewed lots of the people who've pioneered, there's been this, didn't pioneer, but there's been a huge rejuvenation in the study of mind wandering in the last 20 years, partly because of brain scans, we can we can study it more efficiently now than we ever could in the past. It's obviously an inherently hard thing to study. And what what's been discovered by people like Professor Jonathan Smallwood at York University, Professor Nathan Spreng at McGill University in Montreal, is we think of mind wandering as like a waste of time, right? When you're at school, if you go to parents' evening for your kid and they teacher says, oh, little Johnny mind wanders all the time, it's not a compliment, right? And yet it turns out that mind wandering is a crucial form of thinking. When you let your mind wander, you're processing the past and making sense of it. You're anticipating the future and preparing yourself for the future. And you're making connections between things that you otherwise wouldn't see the connections between, which is absolutely where creativity comes from. So actually mind wandering is completely crucial to your ability to make sense of your life, right? And mind wandering is one of the things we have most squeezed out. There will be people listening to this podcast in a queue at the supermarket. Look around you, there is not one person standing in that supermarket who's just looking around them, letting their mind wander, right? I mean, just walking around the street now, it's quite rare you see people who are just letting their minds wander, right? So you can see, and look, I don't want to overstate my ability to overcome this. I find this really challenging, right? We are raised with this puritan model of productivity that you have, that I have. And even like, I think about the other day, I had a day where I from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, I was just endlessly doing research, reading. At the end of the day, I went to bed and I was like, well done, Johann, you've you've completely fucking exhausted. You've you've and I felt a little puritan rush of pleasure like you could not conceive even though I know everything I've just said to you, right? So there's a real wrestle within all of us because we're raised in this culture with this dysfunctional story of productivity that ruins our attention. I mean, just think about our lack of sleep. Dr. Charles Czeisler, who's arguably the leading sleep expert in the world, who's at Harvard Medical School, said to me, you know, we sleep 20% less than we did a century ago. And even if nothing else had changed, except that we sleep so much less, that alone would be causing an enormous crisis in attention and focus. So you think about, well, our our craze for productivity is so great that it leads us to deprive ourselves of even one of the most important things in life, which is sleep. You know, like, which no one doubts they need sleep, right? I mean, there's other things that are corroding our sleep that we can talk about. But yeah, so I think you're on to a really important thing there.
Dr Rupy: How do you insert mind wandering into your day? Is this something that you do daily now? Because this is something I think I'm going to struggle with, the fact that I could go on a walk for 45 minutes without entertaining myself. And I want to be clear, like, I say to myself, I'm being productive, but in reality, I just want to be entertained. The thought of like going out without my phone or anything is kind of scary. My my wife actually forces me to do it sometimes when we go on a walk together, but I'm being entertained by her. And that so there's a difference. I you know, I'm constantly consuming something. So is this something that you have started doing yourself?
Johann Hari: Wherever I am in the world, I mean, a lot of the time I'm in Las Vegas because I'm writing a book about some crimes that have been happening in Vegas. And even in Las Vegas, I will go for at least an hour's walk a day where I don't take my phone, I don't take anything. I take a little notebook in case I have any good ideas I don't want to forget. But apart from that, I just don't take anything. And like you, I found that incredibly hard. I in fact, I don't think I could have started doing it if I had not, I don't think I would have started doing it had I not been in Provincetown in that situation where my phone was like, you know, hundreds of miles away on the other side of the in Boston Harbor. Um, but I would give you a tip, I think that might help you to to begin to do that. So for all of the 12 factors that I write about in Stolen Focus that are harming our attention, I write about these two ways we've got to tackle them, defense, things we can do as individuals, and offense, stuff we can do to take on these forces. So I'll give you an example of one of the defensive things that I think might help you to take this walk. I don't know if you've seen one of these before. I can hold it up to the camera. Have you seen a K-safe before?
Dr Rupy: The K-safe. Yeah, you described it in the book, but I didn't know what it looked like. That's really good visual.
Johann Hari: I'll describe it to I know some people are hearing this and not seeing it. So, um, K-safe is a plastic safe, as you can see, it's kind of big. I mean, not that big, it's about the same size as my laptop. Um, same height as my laptop. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial at the top, you can set it to either five minutes or 24 hours or anything in between. You push the button at the top and it shuts your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day, right? I use this every day for three hours a day to lock away my phone. I won't sit down and watch a film with my partner unless we, you know, both put our phones in the phone jail. I won't have my friends around for dinner unless we all put our phones in the phone jail. So I would recommend you get a K-safe and before you go for a walk, just put your phone in the K-safe. So you've just got no choice after that but to go for a walk without it, right? It's a way of, it's called pre-commitment. It's where you're worried you might crack in the future, so you lock yourself in, right? And I go through, as you know, dozens and dozens of things like this in the book that people can do immediately in their own lives to protect and defend their attention. But I want to really level with people. I don't want to be like Nir Eyal, right? I want to really level with people. I am passionately in favor of these individual changes, but on their own, they're not going to fully solve the problem because we've got to also take on the forces that are doing this to us, which I know sounds very fancy. So I if it's okay, I can give you lots of examples of places that have already done this, but let me just give you an example of one. In France, in 2018, they had a huge crisis of what they called le burnout, which I don't think I need to translate. And the French government, under pressure from labor unions, they would never have done it if French workers hadn't pressured them, set up a government inquiry to figure out, well, why is everyone so burned out these days, right? And the inquiry discovered something really shocking. They discovered that 40% of French workers felt they could never stop checking their phone or email while they were awake, because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night. And if they didn't answer, they'd be in trouble, right? This is an incredibly recent change. I mean, in my entire childhood, I don't think my parents were ever once contacted by their boss outside of work hours when they came home, right? Um, you're younger than me, but do you remember did that happen to your parents when you were a kid?
Dr Rupy: Um, my, uh, I didn't see my parents very often actually when I was growing up because they were working so hard. Um, so my my dad started his own business. He was away for like seven days a week. And my mom used to work in the city. Um, so my earliest memories are actually of them not being around, but I can imagine a lot of, uh, because I'm 37 and a couple of years younger than you. Um, I can imagine that it would have been a rarity for for people my age growing up.
Johann Hari: Well, I think pretty much the only people who were on call when we were kids were doctors and the Prime Minister, right? And doctors weren't on call all the time, right? So we've gone from almost nobody being on call to almost half the economy being permanently on call, right? And for those people, I can give them all the lovely self-help advice in the world about, you know, buy a K-safe, go for walks. I can go down the list of all the things I talk about in the book. If their job depends on them not doing it, that advice won't be friendly and helpful. It's a taunt, it's cruel, right? It becomes a form of cruel optimism, which is why we need to actually collectively solve that problem. And it's how the French did it, right? So, again, under pressure from labor unions, French workers said, look, we don't want to live like this, right? And we've been seeing in the news how much militantly French people defend their rights. Um, the French government introduced a new law to deal with this. It's very simple. It's called the right to disconnect. It says that for every French worker, your work hours need to be written down in your contract. And when your work hours are over, they can't tell you to check your phone or look at your email. So when I was in Paris just before the plague hit, um, Rentokil, the pest control company, was fined 70,000 euros for telling off one of their workers for not checking his email an hour after he left work. Now, you can see how that's a collective change, one of many collective changes we need, which make it possible for people to begin to pursue the individual changes, right? Now, there might be some people listening who are incredibly powerful and influential in their companies or their workplace, and they can go in and go, you know what, guys, I'm not checking my email after 5 o'clock from now on. But I doubt there's one in a thousand people listening to this podcast who can do that, right? That is not something you can do as an isolated individual, but it is something that we can do as a society. France is not a fictional place. It's a, it can be a bit weird, but it's real. It's 40 miles off the coast of Britain. It's there, right? So you can see how that's one of many collective changes that we need to pursue in order to begin to get our attention and focus back.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I I in the book you're going through through so many different things. I mean, we won't have time to touch on everything, but uh, pollutants I think is a very important area that you talk about, um, one that perhaps is getting a bit more attention considering um, uh, what happened with a young, uh, child who who um, passed away as a result of poor air pollution in London. Um, we've talked uh, to Professor Swan on the podcast as well about environmental pollutants, particularly in cookware, um, and uh, in in a city's. Um, and you you spoke to um, first of all, it was amazing to hear about how many places you've been to uh, whilst you were interviewing people around on the book as well. It was it was awesome. But you spoke to uh, Dr. Uma and Dr. Drew Ramsey who've been on the pod as well talking about nutritional psychiatry. They're fab. They're great, great people. Um, I'm seeing them later on this year as well.
Johann Hari: Oh, I love both of them. Send them my love.
Dr Rupy: I will, absolutely. Um, so people should definitely pick up the book and uh, and and and and dive into it. I wanted to sort of um, get your opinion on a couple of things as we bring this to a close actually. So one of the things that's getting a lot more attention in the news right now is the potential of banning uh, TikTok. And you see what China have done within their own country, banning video game use, I think for a certain uh, age range of their children because of the impact it was having on their attention. Obviously, that's quite an authoritarian approach to things. Um, but do you think it would take a massive legislative change like that to have a tangible impact on on uh, the the attention levels of of our kids? What what what are your thoughts on that?
Johann Hari: So the Chinese government, as I'm sure you agree, is a communist tyranny and I don't want our governments to be anything like them. They're it's a horrific regime that is putting Wegas in concentration camps and, you know, crushing freedom in Hong Kong and it's I don't admire the Chinese government in any way. Although there's, you know, like everything in the world, they're not all all bad, but you know, I I that is not a system of government I want. Um, what I want are in addition to everyone making individual changes, are, I mean, I slightly jokingly call it an attention rebellion, but what I want to see is people in our free and democratic societies saying, we're not going to tolerate you doing this to us, right? The way I think of it at the moment is we're in a race, right? On the one side, you've got these 12 forces that are hacking and invading our attention from the and they are getting stronger from the big tech to the food industry. And, you know, Paul Graham, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley said, um, the world is getting, the world is on course to be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40. I mean, think about how much more addictive TikTok is than than Facebook, right? Now imagine the next crack-like iteration of TikTok in the metaverse. Um, so that's one side of the race, these factors that are going to invade and hack our attention. On the other side of the race, I would argue there's got to be a movement of all of us saying, no, no, you don't get to do that to us. No, you don't get to invade our minds. No, you don't get to screw up our kids. No, of course we choose a life with lots of technology, but we also choose a life where we can think deeply, where we can read books, where our kids can play outside. Now, if we want that, we can get it. I'll give you an example of something that again, you'll remember from our childhoods, a really important model of how that can help us to understand how we get there. So when we were kids, the only form of petrol you could buy was leaded petrol, right? And it was discovered by scientists that exposure to lead is really bad for people's brains and particularly bad for children's ability to focus and pay attention. And if it's in the petrol, obviously it's in exhaust fumes, everyone was breathing in extraordinary, historically unprecedented levels of lead when we were children with terrible effects on attention and focus. So what happened was a group of ordinary mums, what at the time were called housewives, led by a woman, a housewife called Jill Rutter here in Britain, said, well, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing these companies to screw up our kids' brains, right? And it's important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, so let's ban all petrol, let's get rid of cars, right? Just like no one is saying, quite rightly, we're not saying, let's get rid of tech, right? What they said is, let's deal with the specific elements in this petrol that are harming our kids' brains and move to a form of petrol that doesn't do that to them. And these mums, they fought like hell for their kids. And it followed the classic movement of all political, sorry, followed the classic pattern of all political movements as described by Mahatma Gandhi. First they ignored them, then they laughed at them, then they fought them, then they won. As everyone listening knows, there's no more leaded petrol. As a result, the average British child is three to five IQ points higher than they would have been had we not banned leaded petrol. Now, to me, that is a great model for us to follow what those mums taught us, right? If there are things in the environment that are harming our ability to focus and pay attention, let's get them out of the environment and replace them with comparable things that don't harm our attention and focus. Now, we can do that. We can regulate big tech to force them to move from a model where they hack and invade our attention and indeed that's their entire business model, to one where their devices are designed to help and heal our attention. I can talk about how we could get there. With all of these factors that are undermining our attention, they are relatively recent changes. They are the results of quite small numbers of people making decisions that benefit them at the expense of the rest of us. And we can put this right. You know, we can fix those problems. To quote Dr. Williams again, we're talking about him a lot today. He's a great person. He often says, you know, human beings had the axe for 1.4 million years before anyone said, guys, should we put a handle on this axe? The entire internet has existed for less than 10,000 days, right? We can fix this shit if we want to. And I went to places that have begun to do it. But first of all, we have to really shift our psychology on it. We need to stop blaming ourselves and start getting angry with the forces that are doing this to us and our children and putting those forces right.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I I I know this is going to be a really big question again to end our conversation here. But because you because you've spent a lot of time chatting with people in Silicon Valley, um, I'm really intrigued in your opinions on generative AI. Um, Sam Altman was recently on Guy Raz's How I Built This lab. I know, I know you know Guy Raz and you've been on there as well.
Johann Hari: I love Guy. Great guy.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, it's a he's a a brilliant interviewer. Um, and he sort of likens the position to Sam Altman being in Zuckerberg's position 2004 where he can't predict uh, the positive or the potential negative impacts of what they're creating today. It's there's just so many variables that are uh, along the journey of of AI and you know, not just open AI but all the other companies working on this. What what are your what are your thoughts around uh, um, artificial general intelligence? Because there is a position whereby we might not even be able to impose any of these compassionate techniques when it comes to designing technology because it's almost designing itself. Um, so yeah, do you have any thoughts on that?
Johann Hari: I've got a few thoughts about it. In addition to writing a book about Las Vegas, one of my long-term projects is I'm writing a book about Noam Chomsky, the founder of, I'm writing a biography of him. So he's the founder of modern linguistics. And um, I'm quite persuaded by Noam's arguments. Um, he's highly skeptical of the fears about AI. He argues current models of AI do not in any way resemble human intelligence, right? That we we we understand so little about how humans use and process language. And these technologies are not at all built on that, right? Even what we do know, and we know a lot more thanks to Chomsky's work and the building up of linguistics in the past 60 years, um, these computers are just doing a whole other thing, right? And some of it's impressive, it's, you know, big data, it's built around, you know, processing of enormous amounts of data. I Chomsky is very skeptical that this is anything like intelligence, right? It's or anything like human intelligence. Now, there are other people I hugely respect. You mentioned my friend Tristan Harris, who worked at the heart of Google, who is very worried. And just wrote a very good piece with um, Yuval Noah Harari and um, my friend Aza Raskin for the New York Times, warning that, you know, this could run away from us very quickly, that these forms of AI are very sophisticated. So I veer more towards the Chomsky model than Tristan, but where I do agree with Tristan, um, what I agree with Tristan on almost everything else in the world, but where I agree with Tristan on this question is the key thing for me is not the technology itself, it's the incentives that underpin the technology. So, for example, at the moment, all the incentives for social media companies, like we were talking about before, are the longer you scroll, the more money they make, right? That's it. So, all of this machinery they're building is designed to do that one thing. They're unbelievably good at it. As Tristan says, you can try and have self-control, but in the current model, every time you do, there are 10,000 engineers on the other side of the screen working very hard to undermine your self-control. It's why we need to change what they do, not much more than we need to focus on what we do, right? But, um, so if you think about, if we have a model of AI that is built around incentives of figuring out, how do we hack and invade human minds to keep people scrolling longer and longer, that's very worrying. If we have a model of AI that's designed around, say, as you'll know better than me as a doctor, let's get really good at detecting cancer on x-rays. And we now know that, you know, there's some models of AI that are better at it than even specialist humans. That's a fantastic use of AI. So to me, the key things underpinning the AI revolution are, A, what are the incentives of the underlying systems within which the AI exists? Even in the best system, I would agree with my friends, like my friend Sam Harris, you'd still have to have some restrictions and you have to have, you know, there's still precautions you need to have in place even with the best incentives. But we are so far from having the best incentives, right? You know, I mean, I would compare what we have at the moment, you think about the incentives to uh, of the pharmaceutical industry at the moment, right? Again, you know much more than this about this than I do, but there's a drug, I'm blanking on the name of it. There's a drug, so enormous numbers of people die every year in Africa of something called sleeping sickness. I've seen people who are sick with sleeping sickness in the Congo. It's a terrible illness. There's a drug that treats sleeping sickness. It also has a side effect. It makes your eyelashes very curly. And the company that owns the patent do not allow it to be used for medicine because there's no money to be made out of dying people in the Congo. They use it to make a product that makes your eyelashes curl, right? Now, you can see that's an insanely dysfunctional set of incentives. I doubt there's a single human being listening who would say, yeah, use the drug for eyelash curling, not for the people dying, right? Unless you're a real psycho if you think that, right? But because the incentives of the system are purely money-making, that pharmaceutical company is acting rationally within the incentive structure we've created. It's just the incentive structure is fucking crazy, right? Now, my worry is that AI is going to be on comparably insane incentive structures, as we know from the fact that the current incentive structures for tech are so dysfunctional. They're about maximizing time spent looking at shit, not figuring out how people feel good, right? So, I'm much more concerned about dealing with the social and environmental uh, regulatory structure than I am about the specifics of the AI, although the specifics of the AI are going to be obviously very important as well and we should listen to people like Tristan for sure about that.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it even, you know, if the incentives for AI are truly altruistic, like improving environmental pollution, for example, the output could be, well, it's the pesky humans, let's get rid of the pesky humans. Uh, you know, there's a whole,
Johann Hari: Yeah, let's get rid of them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The Skynet effect. Yeah, which I know I'm catastrophizing a bit about it, but
Dr Rupy: So I have a slightly weird perspective on the Skynet effect because, um, so for people who don't know, Skynet is a term from the film Terminator where, uh, it's, it imagines a world, I'm giving slightly spoilers to Terminator, but you have had like 35 years to watch it. Um, it's, uh, basically, humans create computers that become so sophisticated, they decide to regard us the way we regard wasps or whatever, and they turn on humans. And a brave human resistance emerges, and to undo this human resistance, uh, they send a terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger at his very hottest to go back and kill the mother of the leader of the resistance before he's even born, right? And I have a slightly weird perspective on this because Arnold Schwarzenegger recently chose my book as book of the month, his book of the month. And Arnold Schwarzenegger was my absolute foundational sexual obsession when I was like 10. I would almost certainly be heterosexual if it was not for, I would be performing cunnilingus right now if it was not for Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator. And I'm like, look, if the situation is we get AI that wipes out most of humanity, but I get sent Arnold Schwarzenegger as he was in the first Terminator film, that is a price I am very happy to pay. So, Skynet effect, bring it on, right? On that bombshell, I think we'll we'll finish up the podcast. I've never, I don't think in the history of podcast or media, there's ever been a tenuous link from Noam Chomsky to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Johann Hari: I'm getting like, I'm so excited about the fact that he read my book though. It's like my 10-year-old self would literally have just been like incoherent with joy that Arnold Schwarzenegger had read anything I ever wrote. So I'm very happy.
Dr Rupy: That's fantastic. Good for you, man. I'm glad your childhood dreams are coming true. That's fab.
Johann Hari: I mean, to be fair, my dreams were not quite him reading my book, but they're, you know,
Dr Rupy: I think I think we get that. Brilliant. Johann, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure uh, chatting to you. I feel like I've got to know you very well as well, which is great.
Johann Hari: Well, it's been totally my pleasure. Thank you so much. And um, thank you for your hair care tips before we came on air that were super helpful. And um, yeah, cheers. I really appreciate it. It's really enjoyed this. Thanks so much.
Dr Rupy: Oh, thank you for such good questions. I really appreciate that. And um, and thank you for your hair care tips before we came on air that were super helpful. And um, yeah, cheers. I really appreciate it. It's really enjoyed this. Thanks so much.
Johann Hari: I'm meant to say on my publisher's tase me that anyone who wants to know where to get the audiobook, the ebook or the physical book can go to www.stolenfocusbook.com. I have this ludicrous thing I'm meant to say, which is, you can also find out what Oprah, Hillary Clinton and many other people said about it. But yeah, you can um, anyway, you can I can't read out the rest of their blog because it makes me sound like such a dick.
Dr Rupy: No, no, Stephen Fry. I remember seeing Hillary Clinton. I was like, Hillary Clinton, wow, Stephen Fry, amazing. It's it's I mean, there's a reason why it's because it's fantastic, Johann. So you deserve all the praise.
Johann Hari: Oh, thank you for such good questions. I really appreciate that. And um, and thank you for your hair care tips before we came on air that were super helpful. And um, yeah, cheers. I really appreciate it. It's really enjoyed this. Thanks so much.
