Johann Hari is a writer and journalist. He has written for The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, and other newspapers. His TED Talks have been viewed over 70 million times, and his work has been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey to Noam Chomsky to Joe Rogan.
Johann Hari
In this episode, I talk to the brilliant Johann Hari.
In our fascinating conversation we discuss some of the biggest shifts in modern society that have had detrimental effects on our attention and the attention of our children. The good news is that each of these shifts can be corrected. However, to do this we have to decide that we value attention and we have to fight for it.
Relisten: Attention Crisis: Kids & Parents - Johann Hari (342)[494]
Read the Transcript 🡮
*This is an auto-generated transcript*
[00:00:00] Hunter: Hey there, it's Hunter, and welcome to Throwback Thursday. Most Thursdays, we are going to re release one of my favorite episodes from the archives. So unless you're a longtime listener of the show, there's a good chance you haven't heard this one yet. And even if you had, chances are that you are going to get something new listening to it this time around.
[00:00:17] Johann Hari: We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds, and we do not have to tolerate our children being hacked and invaded in this way. and we can take our minds back. But the only way to do that is going to be if we fight for it.
[00:00:33] Hunter: You're listening to the Mindful Mama podcast, episode number 342.
Today we're talking about the attention crisis in kids and parents with Johan Hari.
Welcome to the Mindful Parenting podcast. Here it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. I'm Mindful Parenting. We know that you cannot give what you do not have, and when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clark Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children.
I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years, I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting course, and I'm the author of the international bestseller, Raising Good Humans, and now, Raising Good Humans Every Day, 50 Simple Ways to Rest Pause, Stay Present, and Connect with Your Kids. Welcome back to the Mindful Mama podcast.
Listen if you haven't done so yet. Hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if, uh, if you've ever gotten value from this podcast, please do me a favor, go over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review. It helps the podcast grow more. We're closing in on almost 2 million downloads.
This is because of you. So please help us go by leaving a rating and review. It takes a minute of your time and I greatly appreciate it from. The bottom of my heart. In just a moment, I'm going to be sitting down with Johan Hari. He is a writer and a journalist. He's written for the New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, other newspapers.
His TED Talks have been viewed over 70 million times. And his work has been praised by an incredible range of people, from Oprah Winfrey, to Noam Chomsky, to Joe Rogan. He is the author of three New York Times bestselling books, including the newly released Stolen focus, why you can't pay attention. And this is an incredibly powerful book.
I have to say, I tore through this and our fascinating conversation, we discussed some of the biggest shifts in modern society that have had detrimental effects on our attention and the attention of our children. And the good news is that each of these shifts can be corrected, but we have to decide that we really value our attention and fight for it.
So I want you to listen for three important takeaways. Why sleep and the food we eat is incredibly important for brain function. Why childhood independence and exploration is so critical to optimizing attention. And the dangers of the technology and the endless scroll that's designed to steal our attention.
Now, join me at the table as I talk to Johan Hari. So, Johan, I've got a question for you. Beginning of your book, you describe what is, to me, a nightmare for the mom of a 14 year old, and it's just your trip with your nephew to Memphis, and you like ask your nephew to kind of like, we're going to be a little bit screen free or something.
I forgot how you said it. before the trip and then on the trip he's like checking Snapchat and like everybody's just sort of having this mediated experience even in Graceland nobody's really present and it's and you're you use it as a vehicle to describe this like crisis of attention. that we have that you've noticed all around us and, and the great implications it has.
Um, what was it that, I mean, for you that really brought this crisis to the forefront of your mind?
[00:04:08] Johann Hari: Oh God, even hearing that story relayed back to me is making me feel stressed. Yeah, it was, it was a real turning point for me. So for a long time, I've been thinking about attention because frankly, my attention was getting much worse.
With each year that passed, things that require deep focus, like having deep conversations, reading books, were getting more and more for me, like running up and down escalator, right? I could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. And I noticed this seems to be happening to more and more people.
I saw the evidence about this. It was quite shocking. You know, for every one child who was identified with serious attentional problems when I was seven years old, there's now a hundred children who've been identified with that problem. The typical American office worker now focuses on only one task for only three minutes.
But it was really this moment you describe Hunter that made me think, you know, I have to look into this. So I have a godson who I call Adam in the book. I changed a few details to stop identifying him. When he was nine, um, my godson developed this brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis. And it was particularly cute because he didn't know that Elvis had become this kind of cheesy cliche.
So he was doing it with all this kind of heart catching sincerity of a little boy who believes he's being cool. And when I tucked him in at night, kept getting me to tell him the story of Elvis's life. And I tried to skip over the bit where Elvis dies on the toilet. And, and one night he looked at me very intensely and he said to me, Johan.
Will you take me to Graceland one day? And I was like, sure. Yeah. In the way that you give promises to nine year olds, you know, next week it'll be Lego land or whatever. And he said, no, do you really promise? Will you take me to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely promise. And I didn't think about that promise again for 10 years until so many things had gone wrong.
He dropped out of school when he was 15. And by the time he was 19, he seemed to just spend all his time alternating between WhatsApp, YouTube, Porn, Snapchat. His life was just this. of these things. And one day we were sitting on my sofa, um, and I was trying to talk to him all day and there was just nothing was getting any traction in his mind.
And I suddenly remembered this moment from all these years before. And I said, Hey, do Let's go to Graceland. And he's like, what are you talking about? He didn't even remember this thing that happened all those years before. I said, no, let's, we've got, we've got to break this numbing routine. Let's get out of here.
Let's go to Graceland. Let's go all over the South. But you've got to promise me one thing, which is that when we leave the hotel, you'll leave your phone in the hotel, because there's no point going. to be staring at your phone all day. And he absolutely promised I could see it, excited something in him.
And two weeks later, we flew from London Heathrow to New Orleans. And a couple of weeks after that, we arrived at Graceland. And when you get to the gates of Graceland now, it's even before COVID, there's nobody to show you around. What happens is they give you an iPad and you put in earbuds and the iPad shows you around.
It says go left, go right, whatever. And in every room you go into, there's a picture of that room on the iPad in front of you. So what happens is people walk around Graceland, just staring at their iPads. And I'm looking around getting more and more tense because no one is looking up, right? And we get to the jungle room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland.
And there's a Canadian couple next to me. And the man turned to his wife and he said, honey, this is amazing. Look, if you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right. And I thought he was joking. So I burst out laughing. I thought it was a really funny joke.
And I tend to look to them and they're just swiping back and forth. And I said, Hey, sir, there's an old fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning your head. Cause look, we're actually in a jungle room. You don't have to look at it. I bet you a bit. We're actually there. And they looked at me like I was completely insane and backed away.
And I turned to my godson to laugh about it. It's kind of, isn't this funny? And he was just standing in a corner, looking at Snapchat. Christian, the minute we landed, he could not stop. Um, and I went up to him and I said, look, I know you're afraid of missing out. But this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out, right?
You're not being present at your own life. You're not showing up at your own life. This is no way to live. And he stormed off, though familiar to lots of parents listening. And I, and I found him that night, we were staying at the Heartbreak Hotel, which is across the street. And I found him that night. And he was sitting by the swimming pool, just staring at his phone.
And I went up to him and I apologize for this. I'm sorry. And he was looking at his phone and he just said, I know something's really wrong here and I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, okay, I need to figure this out. So I ended up going on a big journey all over the world for three years, using my training in the social sciences at Cambridge university to interview over 200 of the leading experts.
On focus and attention. And what I learned from them is the 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 hugely increased in recent years, particularly for our children. And we've got to understand our attention didn't collapse.
Our attention has been stolen from us. Once you understand the factors, the 12 factors that are stealing it, we can begin to deal with them.
[00:09:26] Hunter: And what I appreciate about what you've written about is that we are often confronted with this idea of our attention and different things we can do. But what I so appreciate about your perspective and the way you took it is We're not looking at it from this individualist lens.
You're looking at it from this very holistic lens. Yes. In The Twelve Factors we're going to talk about technology, but there's a lot of other things in here. There's Uh, there's, you know, includes confinement of our children, our diets, our, our surgeon stress, all kinds of different things, even sort of the, the time, et cetera.
But it's there, we often blame ourselves, like I should be able to, I should be doing this. I know I should be doing this. I should be doing this. And there are things we should be doing and you admit that, but there's the idea that, that it's stolen from us. Can you kind of explain the, this idea of the attention economy and, and why it's so hard, why it's so hard for us to, to take some of those steps that we know we should do.
Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcast right after this break.
[00:10:47] Johann Hari: I really appreciate you saying it that way, Hunter, because for me, at the start of this journey, I really just blamed myself, right, for my own attention problems. I was like, well, you just don't have enough willpower. You're not strong enough. Why aren't you strong enough? Why aren't you good enough? Right.
And I sort of looked at my guts and thought, well, there's something wrong with you. Right. But what I actually learned when you really dig deeply into the science of this is. What's happening to us at the moment is it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then leaning forward and going, Hey buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate.
Then you wouldn't scratch so much. And you want to go, okay, I'll learn to meditate, but you need to stop pouring itching powder on me. Right? So these deep factors that are invading our attention is particularly important for children. Um, because this is playing out in a more extreme way for children. Um, these factors are bearing on the worst and.
If you don't develop attention when you're a child, it's going to be much harder to develop it as an adult. Right. So it's particularly important. Um, and I think that it's interesting because I like the way you put that then about it being systemic in relation to all these factors. So the way I began to think of it is when I started working on the book, I thought it'd be primarily a book about the aspects of our technology that are designed to hack and invade our attention.
And there are many such aspects and they are really harming us. And I talk about the solutions in the book. And actually the way I started to think about it is. If you picture this technology as a virus, to use now a very familiar metaphor, if you picture this technology as a virus, right, it's got its own power and it would have been powerful at any time, but it came along a moment when our immune system for attention was really down, when loads of things had already changed.
That would have made us even more vulnerable to this thing that came along. So we've got to deal with both. We've got to deal with the aspects of the tech designed to hack our attention. We've also got to deal with our immune system. So let's, that can sound a bit fancy and weird and abstract. So I'll give you a very concrete example that everyone immediately understands.
Children now sleep 85 minutes less than they did a century ago. Adults sleep 20 percent less than we did a century ago. And I interviewed the leading sleep experts in the world. Um, Dr. Charles Seisler, who's at Harvard Medical School, arguably the leading sleep expert anywhere, said to me. Even if nothing else had changed, even if the only thing that had changed is we sleep 20 percent less, that alone would be causing a really serious attention crisis for us and our kids.
And of course, it's not the only thing that's changed. Think about how much more likely you are to kind of mindlessly scroll through TikTok for hours if the night before you didn't get a good night's sleep, right? But many of us are chronically sleep deprived. 40 percent of Americans get less than seven hours sleep a night.
We are chronically sleep deprived. Only 15 percent of us. Um, wake up feeling refreshed, which is staggering. 15 percent of us, right? It rains for a lot of experts, but why is sleep so important to retention? In fact, they've shown if you stay awake for 19 hours, which doesn't sound like very much, um, your ability to pay attention suffers as much as if you had got legally drunk, so this is a huge.
Uh, uh, force that is, is weighing on all of us. There
[00:14:01] Hunter: is this like achievement oriented thing, right? This achievement oriented society, this like push to get more done in fewer hours that is pushing, pushing this. And, and also as well, you even described the economic impact of like, if we did get enough, that was boggled my mind.
I was like, well, I mean, I get enough sleep. I'm one of the rare people who does, but like that we would lose X amount of dollars because people would be spending less on Amazon or whatever because we'd just be sleeping. It's crazy.
[00:14:32] Johann Hari: Yeah, this is, and it was so interesting talking to these experts about why is sleep so important because And this particular book, I know, obviously, of course, focuses on children as well.
And most of the book, a big part of the book is about what's happening to our kids attention, part of it's about ours and part about our kids. And, um, in adults, tiredness will usually manifest as drowsiness. In children, tiredness often manifests as mania. And running around a lot, right. And, and hyperactivity.
Um, and it was interesting because one of the reasons it's so important, there's many reasons why sleep is so important, but professor Roxanne Prashad, who you should totally have on the podcast, great person, she, I remember her explaining to me, you know, one of the key factors is when you're sleeping, your brain is repairing.
When you're awake throughout the day, something called metabolic waste is building up in your brain. She calls it brain cell poop. And what happens is when you go to sleep, sleep is an incredibly active process. You might think you're doing nothing. It's incredibly active. And your brain is cleaning itself.
A watery fluid rinses through your brain, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open, carries this brain cell poop out of your brain, down into your liver and out of your body. If you don't sleep properly, your brain is literally clogged up, right? You know, that feeling when you thought almost hung over and clogged up and you haven't slept.
That's not a metaphor. You are literally clogged up when you haven't slept properly. So you think about that. That's one of many factors. I think about the food we eat and the food we give our children is profoundly damaging our ability to pay attention. There were so many of these factors until I did the research.
I hadn't ever, really ever thought about. So there's this huge new movement called nutritional psychiatry, a psychiatrist who is studying how the ways we eat affect our ability to think and use our brains fully. And so I interviewed lots of these nutritional psychiatrists and others, and they've discovered three key ways in which the way we currently eat, which is not what we chose, the food industry did this to us to a large degree, is profoundly damaging our focus and attention.
The first way is, imagine you grow up, eat, you have. In the morning, the standard American or British breakfast, you have a sugary cereal or you have white bread with butter, right? What that does is it releases a huge amount of energy really quickly into your brain, releases a huge amount of glucose. And at first it feels great.
You're like, ah, the day's begun. I'm awake, right? What happens is you get to your desk or your child gets to the school desk a few hours later, and you will experience a very severe energy crash. You know, you, you'll just sit there and what you then get when your energy crashes is brain fog. Brain fog is where you just can't focus very well until you have another sugary carbohydrate.
So the way we eat puts us on a roller coaster of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day. Which gives us long patches of brain fog. The way Dale Pinnock, one of Britain's leading nutritionists put it to me is it's like putting, it's like we're putting rocket fuel into a mini. I think about that with your kids, right?
The rocket will go really, the mini will go really quickly and they'll just stop, right? And so you can see how this is happening to us. Whereas if you eat food, that releases energy more steadily, like say oatmeal in the morning. You won't, you won't experience patches of brain fog in the same way. You'll be much more likely to be able to pay a steadier form of attention.
Think about the second way. Your brain needs certain nutrients in order to develop an option and operate fully. And the diet we eat currently deprives many of us. Of the nutrients that we need. A famous example is Omega 3s, which we get in fresh fish, which we lack in our diets. And it turns out supplements just don't cut it.
Your body doesn't absorb nutrients for supplements in the same way it absorbs them from food. The third way is to me, the most disturbing. It's not just that our food. The diet we eat in the moment currently lacks things we need for our brains to operate. Our diet also contains chemicals that act on our bodies like drugs.
[00:18:38] Hunter: When my family and I went to Ireland, At the, I, at the airport in Dublin, we said, here, use these last few euros. They went and bought some Starburst candies. They came back, and the candies were pale. They were like, the lemon was just a white cube, and like, the, the, the, the colors like, we were like, wow, this is really interesting.
That's because in the European Union, they, they ban these. dies that here in the United States, they're fine with us having, right? Is that one of the factors?
[00:19:11] Johann Hari: Exactly. And we banned it in the European Union. I say we, Britain is no longer part of the European Union sadly. In the European Union banned it precisely because of an experiment that showed the effect on children's attention.
So it was a big experiment in a British city called Southampton in 2007. So what they did is they got 297 kids. And they split them into two groups. And the first group was just given water to drink. And the second group was given water laced with loads of the food dyes that appear in all kinds of food.
You get at the supermarket, candies, all kinds of things. And then they monitored the kids and the kids who consumed the food dyes. Were significantly more likely to become manic, to become hyperactive, to not be able to pay attention, which is why in the European Union they then banned all these food diet, but in the US they have not been banned.
Right? I'm sure that's one reason why there's a big gap between European and American rates of A DHD in children. So you can see how these factors. Uh, that we don't think of as related to attention. I never thought about food as, why would my ability to pay attention be related to why I ate that day?
Didn't even really, incredibly naively where I think about it, didn't think about sleep as being particularly related to it, but to me, the biggest factor, because your podcast is so focused on kids, for me, the biggest factor, of all the 12 factors that I write about in Starboard Focus, for me, the biggest, is childhood and the transformation in childhood.
And I tell the story in the book, partly through the story of one of the great heroes of the book, a woman called Lenore Scanozzi.
[00:20:39] Hunter: He's been on the podcast twice. Isn't that you love her? We love her. Yes.
[00:20:44] Johann Hari: I think Lenore, every now and then in life, You meet someone who just think you are the solution. You are the kind of person who, we can diagnose problems, right?
That's not too hard. It takes a really impressive person to build a solution. And Lenore I think is a key part of the solution. So I tell Lenore's story in the book. Lenore grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the 1960s. And from when she was five years old, she would leave home on her own every morning and walk to school on her own.
It was about 15 minutes away. And she would bump into all the other kids who everyone walked, every child walked to school on their own. Same
[00:21:23] Hunter: thing for me.
[00:21:24] Johann Hari: Exactly. And me, right? And she would, um, when they got to the school, there was a 10 year old boy whose job was to help the five year olds cross the street, right?
Going to the school. I know it's so cute. And then school would end at 3 PM. She would leave. She would go, um, and she would play in the neighborhood with all the other kids, right? Freely. And then she would find her own way home at like five or six when she was hungry. This is what, what, what, what, what, What did early human childhood look like, right?
Before then, essentially with a handful of exceptions, like when children were made to work in factories, early children played freely with other children most of the time. And then suddenly in the space of one generation, that ended. By the time you get to the nineties, Lenore is a ma'am in, in Queens, in New York.
She's expected to work her children everywhere to stand and wait and be waiting there at the gate when they finish at the end of the day, right? By 2003, only 10 percent of American children. Ever played outside without adult supervision. Ever. A staggering transformation. And, and, um, and Lenore was very well aware that this change, it's not a coincidence that this transformation happened at the same time as an explosion in children's attention problems, right?
Um, it turns out there are various sorts of things in that childhood that we have taken away that were essential for children to develop focus and attention. To give the most obvious example, exercise. Children need to run around, right? When children run around, I mean, it's, it's ridiculous. It drives
[00:23:01] Hunter: me crazy.
Like we, we know that as dog owners, we have to walk our dogs, right? Why do we think as humans we don't need
[00:23:11] Johann Hari: that? So what Professor John Ligg, one of the leading experts on children's attention problems in the world has shown children who get to run around develop more brain connections, they can think more clearly.
Um, we are the first human society to do that. Ever in the history of our species to try to get children to sit still for eight hours a day. Crazy, right? Even if you set aside the exercise component, which we shouldn't, um, when children play freely with each other without adults supervising them. As Dr.
Isabelle Benquet, the great Chilean scientist has shown, they learn how to exercise their attention. They learn how to deploy their attention. They learn how to persuade other kids to focus on things. They learn how to wait their turn. They learn all sorts of things that are just essential for being a person who can focus and pay attention.
And we took all that away. But the reason why Lenore is such a hit, and that was even before COVID, obviously COVID then hugely accentuated that. And the reason Lenore is the hero of the book, one of Five or six heroes of the book is because she building the solution to this. And it's a solution everyone watching or listening.
I really urge you to get involved with. She runs an organization called Let Grow. It's letgrow. org and what they do. So at first, when we were around all this, and she's like, okay, I'm going to persuade parents to let their kids play outside. Generally, she would start by saying to people, what is something that you loved doing when you were a child?
That you do not allow your own kids to do. And I would let every parent listening just think of something they would talk about. I would go into the woods. I would ride my bike by a cliff, all sorts of things. Right. But she discovered if you're just trying to persuade people, individual parents, it doesn't work because if you're the only parent sending your kid out, the kid gets scared.
You look like a crazy person. In fact, people might even ring the police. Right. Um, so what she did is what she does, what Let Grow does. Is they, they go to whole schools and whole communities and persuade those whole schools and communities to give children increasing levels of independence, building up to playing outside their home, freely without adults.
So I went to go and look at a load of their projects. I spent a load of time with their projects on Long Island. And I think of all the conversations I had for my book, Stolen Focus, possibly the most moving was with a 14 year old boy in Long Island, to give you a sense. This was a big strapping boy. He was taller than me.
And until this program had begun, I think nine months before his parents had never let him out of his home on his own. He wasn't even allowed to jog around the block. I asked him why? And he said, my parents are scared of all these kidnappings. That was the phrase he used. This is a town where the French bakery is across the street from the Honourable oil store.
No one has ever been kidnapped in that town. And he had a level of fear that would be appropriate if he lived in Syria. And then this program began and he started to meet his friends outside his house. They started to play outdoors. And I said to him, what did you do outdoors? And they said, describe lots of things.
They played ball games. And then he said, and then we went into the woods. And even though our cell phones didn't work in the woods, we still went there. To him, that was a huge deal. And they built a fort, right? Watching this boy describe the joys of building something and being away from technology and being with his friends away from adults.
Maybe this sounds melodramatic, but it was like watching a child come to life, right? And I thought of all the children I know who never get that. Most of our kids, the only place they ever get to explore anything is on fortnight. So it can hardly be surprising if they become obsessed with the one place they get to ever explore anything.
Essentially, Lenore was with me that day. And when that boy left, She said to me, think about all of human history, all of human history, young people had to go out and explore, they had to seek, they had to build things. And in the space of one generation, we took all that away. And that boy and his friends, given a little sliver of freedom, went and built a fort.
There's something so deep in humans, we want to do this. And it's such a deprivation. So if we want our kids to be able to focus, and I think we desperately need them to, there's dozens of things we need to do that I go through in Stolen Focus. One of them is we need to restore human childhood. And I would argue every school in the United States needs to have a Let Grow program.
This is a cultural change we can build. It costs nothing. It's free, right? This is low hanging fruit. I think you could be the most liberal person or the most conservative person and you can see the truth of what I'm saying. This is something we can really unite around. We can rebuild childhood for our kids if we want to, and that will have many positive effects.
It will reduce obesity and it will massively improve their ability to focus and pay attention.
[00:28:11] Hunter: Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcasts right after this break.
And I love what you point out in Stolen Focus about how like with the pandemic, we're We had been kind of like the frog in the proverbial pot, where it'd been getting warmer and warmer and warmer and warmer as far as our lives changing, or it seemed like that. Maybe it's just a generation, but it seems like that.
And then with the pandemic, we were like, oh, this is really what a completely two dimensional screen Um, mediated life is like, and we didn't like it, right? Like, it's not like something we love. And so we can use that feeling and that energy, I think, as motivation. But I, I, I agree with all of those things, but you also talk about the things, and I think it is important to, you know, pull out the pieces about our kids confinement and our, our diet and our sleep, especially for us.
And then we've talked about a lot of these issues here, but also this idea that the tech, I would love to pull out the idea about the technology and that it isn't our fault in a lot of ways that this piece of It is designed to manipulate you and, and I think that this is so important for parents to, and all of us, I think just as individuals to understand this, to kind of get a like a handle of us on the scope of our relationship with these powerful things we hold in our pockets.
[00:29:40] Johann Hari: Yeah, there's a, this may sound strange at first, but there's a thing that happened in the past that really helped me to think about the aspects of social media that are damaging us. So Sean Parker, one of the biggest investors in Facebook said. We designed Facebook to maximally invade your attention. We knew what we were doing and we did it anyway.
God only knows what it's doing to our children's minds, right? That's what the people at the heart of Facebook themselves have said, right? And I think about, well, what can we, what's happening here? What can we do about this? And there's an analogy that you'll remember. I think we're about the same age Hunter, I remember.
When we, when we were kids, the normal form of gasoline was leaded gasoline, right? I can remember the smell of it, right? My mother used to put it in her car. And a bit before our time, it used to be completely normal that people painted their homes with leaded paint. And then it was discovered that exposure to lead really damages your brain and in particular damages children's ability to focus and pay attention.
So what happened? The science was explained to ordinary people and ordinary moms, and it was overwhelmingly moms across the United States, banded together and said, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing this poor profit industry to destroy our children's ability to focus and pay attention? This is crazy.
So it's important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, let's ban all paint. They didn't say, let's ban all gasoline, right? They said, let's ban the specific element in the lead in the gasoline that's damaging our kids attention. And they thought and they thought, and they succeeded. And as a result, according to the Center for Disease Control, they were Every American child has on average three to five IQ points more than they would have had, had we not banned lead.
Right. Incredibly successful. So they identified a pathogen that was harming our attention and they got it out of the environment. It's a great medal for what we have to do with the 12 factors that are now harming our attention. And this applies to social media because very often when we think about it, the way big tech wants us to think about this is, are you pro tech or anti tech?
Right. And that just makes you feeling fatalistic. It makes you feel fatalistic because you're like, well, I'm not going to drink my own ish. Yeah. I'm not going to, what do you mean? I'm going to give up my tech, right? That is totally the wrong way to think about it. We can have all the tech we have, but it not be designed to maximally invade our attention.
In fact, it can be designed to heal our attention, but that requires a big shift. At the moment, social media has been built entirely around one particular business model. Now business model is really simple. Every time you open Facebook or your kid opens TikTok, that app starts to make money. And every time you put it down, that revenue stream disappears.
Very simple. All of their algorithms, all of their artificial intelligence, all of this engineering power is built around one thing, figuring out how can we get you and your kid to pick up the app more and scroll as long as possible? That's it. That's the business model, just like the head of KFC. All he cares about in his professional capacity is, did you make KFC today?
All these apps care about is, did you scroll the maximum amount of times? Did you pick your phone up as often as possible? So the whole machinery is designed to addict you and get you to pick it up frequently, to interrupt your attention as much as it possibly can. That's it. It was fascinating. I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, interviewing some of the people who designed key aspects of the apps that obsess our kids, right?
The endless scroll you talked about. Yeah, well, you know, there was this moment, there's a wonderful guy called Dr. James Williams, who'd been at the heart of Google, had this real turning point where one day he spoke at a tech conference. So the people who are designing the apps that are hooking our kids.
And he said to them, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, please put up your hand. And not one of them put up their hand. So speaking to these people in Silicon Valley, about how do we solve this? What's the equivalent of the lead in the lead paint? It became very clear to me.
So I'll give you an example. Aza Raskin, who designed a key part of how the internet works. And, um, his dad, Jeff Raskin actually invented the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. Asa said to me, look, when you're going to deal with the tech component of this, solution is very simple. You need to ban the current business model.
A business model that is based on monitoring you, tracking you, finding out the weaknesses in your attention and marketing those weaknesses to advertisers so they can hack you. That is just, that's like lead in lead paint. It's fundamentally inhuman and immoral, and we should not allow it. I remember saying to Aza and lots of the other people who'd been at the heart of this machine, it took me quite a long time to understand this.
Cause it's like, well, okay, let's imagine we do that. What happens the next day when I open Facebook? Would I just say, sorry, everyone we've gone fishing? He said, of course not. Well, what happened is they would have to move to a different business model. Crucially would work on our attention in a completely different way.
So everyone listening has an experience of one of those two business models. The first one is subscription. We all know how that works. HBO, Netflix, you'd pay a certain amount and you'd get access to Facebook or TikTok or whatever it is. The other option is something that literally everyone listening has experience of, which is think about the sewers.
Before we had a sewer system, we had shit in the streets. We got cholera. So we all pay to build the sewers and maintain the sewers. And we all own the sewers together. So you own the sewers in Cincinnati. I own the sewers in London. We own the sewers in common, right? Now it might be that like we own the sewage pipes together.
We want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the equivalent of cholera for our attention. Well, whatever alternative model you choose, key thing is. All the incentives change. At the moment, the side business incentive is let's get Hunter and her kids to scroll as much as possible.
That's one of the reasons why my godson was in the degraded state he was in. When we move to these different business models, the incentives are different. At the moment, you are not the customer of social media. You are the product they sell to the real customer, the advertisers. If we move to subscription or some form of shared ownership, suddenly you become the customer.
So they have to ask, okay, What does Hunter want? Hunter wants to be able to pay attention. Let's design Facebook to heal her attention. Oh, Hunter wants to meet up with her friends offline. Let's insert a button that says, I'd like to meet up with my friends, anyone nearby. Let's make it so that instead of getting people to doom scroll through each other's photos, it encourages them to look into each other's eyes face to face.
This is very technologically easy to design. It could be done tomorrow, right? But the incentives have to change. And just like the lead industry was never going to one day go, you know what guys, I think we've made enough money, but let's stop poisoning kids, right? That's not how it works, right? They had to be made to do it by a movement of ordinary moms.
I argue in the book, what we need is an attention movement, just like we needed and need a feminist movement to reclaim women's bodies and lives. I argue we need, we all need an attention movement to reclaim our minds and it requires a shift in consciousness. We need to stop blaming ourselves or asking solely for little tweaks.
There are lots of things we can do as individuals. I'm passionately in favor of them. I talk about dozens of them in the book, but we've also got to take on the forces that are doing this to us. And to do that, we need to stop. We need to realize. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table.
We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and we do not have to tolerate our children being hacked and invaded in this way. And we can take our minds back, but the only way to do that is going to be if we fight for it. It's not going to happen on its own, right? We have to decide that we value attention and we have to fight for it.
And if you want to think about why we need to value attention, I would just say to anyone listening, think about anything you've ever done in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is. That thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of focus and attention.
And when focus and attention break down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down, your ability to solve your problems breaks down. This is why it's so heartbreaking to see a child who can't focus because you know, they're not going to be effective in the world. We don't have to tolerate this happening to us.
These are very recent changes, right? We can put them right. Dr. James Williams, who I mentioned before, he'd worked at the heart of Google, said to me one day, the axe existed for 1. 4 million years. Before anyone thought to put a handle on it. The entire internet has existed for less than 10, 000 days. Right.
Think about these factors that do this is we can remember a time when children played outside. We can remember our grandparents can remember a time when we ate completely differently. We don't have, for all of the 12 factors I write about in style and focus. We don't have to accept this. These are not forces of nature.
These are human decisions, and we can change those decisions and restore our ability to focus and pay attention.
[00:39:11] Hunter: I just want to say amen to all of that. Yes, yes, yes. I love the way you describe it. There are models for how to change it. I think that I'm, I would love for us all to get on board. Dear listener, I would love for you to get Stolen Focus.
It reads like a wonderful, fun story and is incredible writer. And I really, really believe in all the things behind it. And I recommend it highly. Thank you so much, Johan, for taking the time. Oh, no, I'm so grateful to be here. And I really, really appreciate your work and everything you've done.
[00:39:43] Johann Hari: I know it sounds ironic, but I really appreciate you paying attention to the book in this way.
And, um, I'm really grateful to you. And yet I'm also meant to say people can also get the book as an audio book or physical book if they want. And, um, yeah, this has been so great. Thank you so much, Hunter.
[00:40:03] Hunter: Wow, what a powerful conversation, right? And there's so much there. I really recommend his book. And we need to be protecting our attention. I really want us to start to shift the way things are, right? You know, it's incredibly important, right? Because what we pay attention to, this is like what creates our lives.
It's crazy. So listen, if you love this episode, please do me a favor. Share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in it at MindfulMamaMentor. And you might as well follow me there and fill your feed with Awesome, Mindful Parenting inspiration, so share on your Instagram stories and let me know your thoughts and your takeaways.
And I'm wishing you a great, great week. Listen, my friend, spring has sprung here. I'm looking at this little Pot of tiny daffodils on my desk and loving it. They're so cute and cheerful and I think the last cold spell has left Delaware. I'm knocking on wood right now and I think it's getting nicer here.
So I hope that you have some Little pieces of joy to enjoy wherever you are. And hey, I hope you'll join me at the Mindfulness Challenge for Parents on April 26th. So I thank you so much for listening. I'm so glad you were able to join me for this episode. Again, love to see your takeaways. Share it on your Instagram stories.
Tag me at MindfulMamaParenting. And I will give you a little high five there and I'm wishing you a great week, my friend. Thank you so much for listening. Namaste.
[00:41:46] Mindful Parenting Member: I'd say definitely do it. It's really helpful. It will change your relationship with your kids for the better. It will help you communicate better and just, I'd say, communicate better as a person, as a wife, as a spouse. It's been really a positive influence in our lives, so definitely do it. I'd say definitely do it.
It's so worth it. The money really is inconsequential when you get so much benefit from being a better parent to your children and feeling like you're connecting more with them and not feeling like you're yelling all the time or you're like, why isn't things working? I would say definitely do it. It's so, so worth it.
It'll change you. No matter what age someone's child is, it's a great opportunity for personal growth and it's great investment when someone's there. You can continue in your old habits that aren't working, or you can learn some new tools and gain some perspective to shift everything in your parenting.
[00:42:50] Hunter: Are you frustrated by parenting? Do you listen to the experts and try all the tips and strategies, but you're just not seeing the results that you want? Or are you lost as to where to start? Does it all seem so overwhelming with too much to learn? Are you yearning for community people who get it, who also don't want to threaten and punish to create cooperation?
Hi, I'm Hunter Clark Fields, and if you answered yes to any of these questions, I want you to seriously consider the Mindful Parenting membership. You will be joining hundreds of members who have discovered the path of mindful parenting and now have confidence and clarity in their parenting. This isn't just another parenting class.
This is an opportunity to really discover your unique, lasting relationship, not only with your children, but with yourself. It will translate into lasting, connected relationships, not only with your children, but your partner too. Let me change your life. Go to MindfulParentingCourse. com to add your name to the wait list so you will be the first to be notified when I open the membership for enrollment.
I look forward to seeing you on the inside. MindfulParentingCourse. com
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