Exposed: The Real Reason You Can't Focus Anymore with Johann Hari

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I read your book Stolen Focus. We do have an attention deficit. In fact, it's more than that. It's a bloody crisis.

I could feel my attention was getting worse and I was just really angry with myself. I could see it happening to lots of other people around me. It's everywhere. It's the air we breathe. Sick with guilt, the people at the heart of Silicon Valley feel. I thought they were kidding, so I laughed. They looked at me like I was deranged and backed out of the room. It sounds almost like a conspiracy theory. This can't be right. This happened because of really big invasive forces. Why can't you discipline yourself more? Why don't you have better willpower?

I'm addicted to my phone. I looked at my screen time and I was shocked.

Smartphones were invented. They fucked me over. I know something's really wrong and I don't know what it is. Sustained focus and attention is at the heart of all human achievement. This is our superpower as a species, right? We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds. One of the real bombshells for me was.

Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion and now international keynote speaker and high performance leadership trainer. Each week I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you lead your life and business purpose. Thanks for helping us be a consistently number one ranked show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I hope you enjoy today's show.

The Lead on Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz. You are in for an absolute treat. Today's special guest is none other than Johann Hari Johan is leading the field when it comes to focus and attention. His book, which I'm going to hold up right now for those that are viewing, is Stolen Focus. Absolute best selling book. It's one of many books he has written, all of which have been bestsellers, one of which was turned into an award winning Academy nominated film with Samuel L. Jackson. But when Oprah Winfrey says, you've got to read this book, I always listened to Oprah. I read the book. It really changed my thinking around what's going on with focus, what's going on with attention, what is happening in this world with digital technology, with pollution and with so many other things. One of the best research books and certainly one that I recommend to all my clients. So today you are in for an absolute treat, Johan. A huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Hey James, I'm so excited to talk to you. I feel like I should apologize to your audience immediately because you are speaking at like, is it 6:45 in the morning? And I'm recovering from COVID So we're both going to be. It's going to be like a conversation between two people in an old people's home who are like 95, right. Which is based a fog of confusion. But I'm very happy to do it anyway, cheers.

Oh, you're a legend.

I'm very impressed by how perky you are. I think the biggest division between human beings is not like atheists versus religious people or like left wing versus right wing. It's morning people versus everyone else. And I will never understand morning people as long as I live. Right. So you.

I'm a morning person. I'm that awful guy that's happy to get up at 4:30 and get on with it.

Fuck me.

You're obviously there. Late night owl.

Oh my God. I recently read a biography of Elvis that said that in the last year of his life he had a doctor who would come and inject caffeine directly into his veins every morning. And I was like, I need that doctor. My friend was like, yeah, what happened to Elvis next year? And I was like, yeah, good point. Didn't work out.

I would do that. Johan.

I bet he was productive in that last year though.

Hell yes he was. We're actually going to talk about Elvis in just a bit. I imagine he's going to feature. So look, I read your book Stolen Focus. I'm going to hold it up for those that are watching. Amazing book. I've read it two or three times and every time I'm on a stage. I recommend this book because we do have an attention deficit. In fact, it's more than that. It's a Bloody Crisis. And Stolen Focus, the title, it suggests that focus has been taken from us. And that to me in itself is very interesting. So that's what made me lift the book like, oh, it's not Just me being worse at focusing. Actually, something is being taken from me. So what actually inspired you in the first place to want to write Stolen Focus?

Yeah. I think the way you frame that is really important because, like you, I could feel my attention was getting worse and I was just really angry with myself. I was like, oh, fuck. You know, why? Why can't you discipline yourself more? Why don't you have better willpower? Pull yourself together, you know, I thought it was a problem with me. And I also was kind of conflicted because I could see it happening to lots of other people around me. Right. Kind of bit torn about it. A bit conflicted. And there was a moment when I really realized I needed to research and investigate this. So I've got a godson. I call him Adam. In the book. That's not his real name. Who. When he was 9, he developed a brief and unbelievably cute obsession with Elvis Presley. And the reason it was so cute is he seemed to genuinely not know that impersonating Elvis had become a kind of cheesy cliche. I think he was the last person in the history of the world to do a tightly sincere version of Jailhouse Rock. And every night when I would tuck him into bed, he got me to tell him the story of Elvis's life over and over again. Obviously, I skipped over the bit at the end where he dies on the toilet and. And one night I mentioned Graceland, where Elvis lived, and his whole face lit up and he said, what you mean? Because I'd mentioned that people go there. So do you mean people could, like, go there to visit? And I said, yeah. And he said, johan, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I said, sure, the way you do with nine year olds, knowing, like, next week you'll want to go to Legoland or the North Pole or whatever. And he said, no, do you really swear one day you'll take me to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely promise. And I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years until so many things had gone wrong. So when he was 15, he dropped out of school. By the time he was 19, this will sound like hyperbole. It's not. He was spending almost literally every waking moment alternating between his iPad, his iPhone, his laptop, and his life was just this blur of WhatsApp, YouTube porn. And it was really like he was kind of spinning at the speed of Snapchat. This is before TikTok, you know? And it felt like nothing kind of still or serious could touch him. And One day we were sitting in my flat here in London, and.

All day I was trying to get a conversation going with him and I just couldn't, right? I just.

I couldn't. And to be totally honest with you, I wasn't that much better, right? I was staring at my own devices.

And I suddenly remembered this moment all these years before. And I said to him, hey, let's go to Graceland. And he looked at me completely blankly. Didn't remember this thing all these years before, but I reminded him and I said, this is no way to live. Let's break this numbing routine. Let's go on a road trip all over the American South. But I thought ahead. I thought, okay, you got to do one thing. You got to promise something in advance. You got to promise me that if we go, you'll leave your phone in the hotel during the day, because there's no point going if you're just going to look at your phone the whole time. And he really thought about it. He wasn't happy living the way he was. And he said, you know what? I want to do this. And I think it was literally like two weeks later we took off from Heathrow to. We went to New Orleans first. And a couple of weeks later, we got to the gates of Graceland. And when you get to Graceland, now this is even before COVID there's no human being to show you around. What happens is you arrive and they hand you an iPad and you put in earbuds and the iPad shows you around, right? It says, go right. It was bizarre. And every room you go in, there's an image of that room on the iPad in front of you.

And there's a voice kind of telling you a story about that room. And it has this really weird effect that people just walk around Graceland staring at the iPad. And I'm getting a bit kind of pissed off as we're walking around, because I'm like, well, you know, people traveled a really long way to get here. Why are they not looking at the place? And we got to the Jungle Room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland. It's got loads of fake plants in it. They've left it as it was when he. When he was alive. And I'll never forget then there was this kind of middle aged Canadian couple next to us. And the man turned to his wife and he said, honey, this is amazing. Look, if you swipe left on the iPad, 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 they were kidding, so I laughed and I turned and looked at them and they were just swiping back and forth and I leaned forward and I said, but sir, there's a, an old fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning your head. Because you realize we're, we're in the jungle room, right? You don't need to look at it on the Internet. It's literally all around you. And they looked at me like I was deranged and backed out the room. And I, and I turned to my godson to laugh about it and he was standing in the corner staring at Snapchat because from the moment we landed, he could not stop. He literally couldn't stop. And I, I did that thing. That's never a good idea with teenagers. I tried to grab the phone out of his hand, unsuccessfully. And I said to him, I know you're afraid of missing out, but this will, this is just guaranteeing that you'll miss out. You're not present at the events of your own life. You're not showing up at your own existence. And he stormed off, understandably. And I, I wandered around Memphis on my own that day. And I found him that night in the Heartbreak Hotel where we were staying. He was sitting by the huge guitar shaped swimming pool looking at Snapchat. And I went up to him and I apologized for getting so angry. And.

He, he didn't look up, but he said, I know something's really wrong and I don't know what it is. And I realized in that moment we came away to get away from this problem of distraction, but there was nowhere to escape to. It's everywhere. It's the air we breathe. The average office worker now focuses on any one task for less than a minute. For every one child who has identified with serious attention problems, when I was seven years old, there's now 100 children who've been identified with that problem. And I thought, you know what? This isn't just a problem in me or a problem in him. There's something going on here that I need to understand. Which is why, for the book, I ended up going on this big three year journey all over the world, including to New Zealand, where a really important part of the picture came into place for me. And I really radically changed how I think about what this problem is and crucially, how we solve it.

So, Johan, my understanding is that you actually went off grid, like fully off grid, old school, left your devices that attached you to the Internet at home, and you started to discover your own sense or lack of, of attention. And that led you to writing this book. And of course you traveled the world for the research aspect of it. Most of us suffer, I think, from Ram syndrome. W R A M World revolves around me. Most of us have Ram syndrome. So the person that's listening right now is going to go, what do I need to worry about attention for? What's in it for me? So when you think about the everyday human, what's the costs involved for letting our attention diminish?

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

I would 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 huge amount of sustained focus and attention. In fact, sustained focus and attention is at the heart of all human achievement. You know, we're speaking in the middle of the Olympics. All sporting achievement comes from sustained attention. But really all achievement, artistic achievement, business achievement, cultural achievement, just emotional achievement, being a good friend, being a good partner, being a good parent, it all comes from the ability to sustain your focus and attention. This is our superpower as a species, right? And the evidence is very clear that when your ability to focus and pay attention deteriorates, your ability to achieve your goals deteriorates your to ability, your ability to solve your problems deteriorates you. You feel worse about yourself because you actually are less competent when you can't pay attention. And when you get your attention back, it's, it's, it really is like regaining your superpower. And you mentioned that. I kind of went offline because at the start of writing Stolen Focus.

I was really locked in thinking this was an individual problem, right? I thought, well, there's something wrong with me. What's wrong with me is probably.

The Internet. The smartphones were invented. They me over, right? I've got to separate myself from smartphones. So in this lot, I was in this lucky position that one of my previous books had got made into a big Hollywood movie. So I had a load of money. So I thought, right, I'm just gonna get out of here. So I went away for three months to a place called Provincetown, which is at the tip of Cape Cod. And I had no Internet. I had no laptop that could get online. I had no smartphone. And there were many ups and downs in that journey. But the thing that most struck me is I was stunned by how much of my attention came back, Interestingly, not just because of the lack of access to the Internet. There are many other factors there. In fact, 12 factors I learned that affect our attention, and many of which I realize now were playing out in Provincetown. But it was incredible. My attention went back to being as good as it had been. When I was 17, I could sit and read all day if I wanted to. But.

I mean, it was stunning and joyful. And then I left Provincetown, got my phone back, and quite quickly went back to being almost as bad as I've been before. And I realized, look, it's a wonderful luxury if you can go away for a while without your phone. But the answer to this crisis is not going to be all of us joining the Amish or all of us renouncing our phones. We have to find a solution that exists within our lives. And that's why, after being in Provincetown, I went on this big journey all over the world, from Moscow to Melbourne to Miami, not just the cities that begin with the letter m. I don't know why I keep doing that. To interview over 200 of the leading experts on focus and attention. And like I say, what I learned is the scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse. And they range really widely, actually. The food we eat, the way our offices work, the way our kids schools work, there's an incredibly broad array of factors that can positively or negatively affect attention. And loads of the factors that can harm your attention have been massively rising in recent years. So if you're struggling to focus and pay attention, if your kid is struggling to focus and pay attention, it's not that there's something wrong with you or something wrong with your child. There's something wrong with the way we're living. But once we understand these factors, we can begin to get our attention back in ways that are backed by the science.

Yeah. What I just really loved about the book is that you literally sat down with the who's who, the world's best researchers. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow. The studies were mind blowing. And as I read it, I started to look at my own existence and realized that I'm addicted to my phone. I looked at my screen time and I was shocked at how much time I spent on apps that brought me next to no joy. But I spent hours and hours on them. So I started thinking about flow more and more and how to achieve that. And clearly, focus and attention is at the crux of achieving flow. So what do you think stops us from getting into flow state? What are the behaviors and environmental issues that actually hinder us?

So everyone listening will have experienced a flow state at some point in their life, although they might not know that term. Flow state is when you're doing something and you just totally get into it. You get into the zone and it's like, you know, time falls away, and when it's over, you're like, whoa, is it five o'? Clock? That went quickly. Right? And different people get into flow, do different things. For me, it's writing. For some people, it's making bagels or brain surgery or whatever it might be. The way one rock climber put it is when you. When you're climbing a rock and you get into flow, it's like you are the rock you're climbing. Right. And you mentioned Mihaly Csikszentmihai. I'm so glad I learned how to say that. It took me a long time, so I'm gonna keep saying it. She accepts me high. Who was the scientist, absolutely extraordinary scientist who coined the phrase flow states and spent 60 years studying them. And I actually did, sadly, the last interview he ever did because he died shortly afterwards.

Wow.

And.

Professor Csikszentmihalyi, he discovered a huge amount of things about flow, enormous number. But I think there's three that really answer your three core things that answer your question. So. And flow is really important for understanding attention because flow is both the deepest form of attention human beings can provide, and once you get into it, it's the easiest form of attention to provide. It's not an effort. It's not like, you know, if you said to me now to memorize facts about the Civil War or something.

So also I wanted to understand if this is a gusher of attention that exists within all of us, where do you drill to get it? How do you get it? Right. And like I say, discover many things. But I think the core is if you want anyone listening. If you want to maximize your chances of getting into flow, there's no guarantee, but you can really increase the odds by doing three things. Firstly, you need to set aside a significant amount of time to do one thing. If you're trying to do two, three, four, five things at the same time, you'll never get into flow. Secondly, you need to make sure that that goal you're trying to pursue is meaningful to you. Right. Attention evolved to attach to meaning. The more meaningful something is to you, the more likely you are to flow into it. We can come back to that if you like. And the third way, it seems, when I first learned it, to me anyway, a bit counterintuitive. It helps if you push yourself to the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them. So let's imagine that you're a medium strength, medium talent rock climber. You don't want to just try and climb over your garden wall. That's too easy. You won't get into flow. Equally, you don't want to suddenly try and climb Mount Everest. It's too much. You'll be overwhelmed. You want to climb a slightly higher and harder rock face than the one you did last time. If you do these three things, set aside a significant amount of time to do one thing.

Make sure it's a meaningful goal, and push yourself to the edge of your abilities. Because flow begins at the edge of your comfort zone, you hugely increase your chance of doing that. But even as I say that, let's go to hurdle one, Set aside a significant amount of time to do one thing right. Most of us fall. Hurdle one. Right. We're constantly interrupted. I can go to more stats and evidence about this, but the average Fortune 500 CEO only gets 28 minutes a day to himself to think or herself to think. Right? And they're the Fortune 500 CEOs, never mind the rest of us. Right? So we live in an environment that's actually designed to constantly interrupt us. I can explain why. And so even at hurdle one, we're falling down on that deepest form of potential.

Yeah, 100% get it. And I want us to think a minute. Like, one thing that blew me away was this idea that Stanford has essentially a human persuasive lab that they want to understand how to persuade humans to do certain things. Essentially manipulate us is how I read it. So tell us a little bit more about the distractions around us that we kind of just go, ah, it's a reminder. It's a notification. What's the detail behind that? Why do we have those things? And what does it do to our focus?

Of all the facts I learned for the book, the one that most haunts me is one that was discovered by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon. And there's lots of haunting facts, but this was the most haunting he discovered. 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, for example, I'm talking to you now, but behind my laptop is my phone. Right now, when you're asking me a question, I could just glance at my phone for a second if I wanted to, right? There's a little bit of me that would think, oh, just take me three seconds to glance at my phone. It's not much. Three seconds. If I could, I could even text back, it would take me, what, another five seconds? It doesn't take you three seconds. It takes you three seconds plus the 23 minutes it then takes for you to refocus your mind. And I spent a lot of time interviewing kind of people who've studied this. And one of the real bombshells for me was when I went to interview an amazing neuroscientist, one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, a man named Professor Earl Miller. His MIT, where I interviewed Feed him. Professor Miller said to me, look, there's one thing you need 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 we're going to see. But what's happened is we've fallen from mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at the same time. And the rest of us are not 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 can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you juggle very rapidly between tasks. So you're like, what did you just ask me, James, what is this message on WhatsApp here? What does it say on the News just happened on the TV over there. What is this message on Facebook? What's this new email? Oh, wait, James, what did you just ask me? And that juggling comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it, and this is a term everyone should learn, is the switch cost effect. When you switch between tasks, it comes with a cost, and the cost is really significant. You make more mistakes, you remember less of what you do, you're much less creative. And I remember when I learned that thinking, okay, I get it, but that's a small effect, right? It's not a big deal. The switch cost effect is huge. 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 in to study their workers, and he split them into two groups. And the first group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is, and you're not going to be interrupted. Just do what you 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 tested the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored 10 IQ points higher than the group had. To give you a sense of how big an effect that is, if you or me sat down together now and smoked a fat spliff and got stoned, our IQs in the short term would go down by five points. So at least in the short term, being chronically interrupted in the way so many of us are is twice as bad for your intelligence as getting stoned, right? You're better off sitting at your desk doing one thing at a time and smoking a spliff than you would sitting at your desk being constantly interrupted and not smoking a spliff. Now, I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Obviously you'd be better off doing neither. And if you were a chronic long term stoner, then that would probably damage your IQ more. But you begin to get a sense of how significant this thing that seems like a very small thing. I'm a little bit distracted, I'm a little bit interrupted, in fact, affects us at so many layers of our effectiveness and makes us really profoundly.

Profoundly cognitively lowers us. As my friend Tristan Harris says it, it's a form of human downgrading, right? And that's just one of the factors that's harming our attention.

And it's quite cunning, actually. When you go back and look at the detail, some of what they're designing, like infinite scroll, like, we think of that as such a great thing, but actually it's quite cunning. The colors that they use on our notification bell, that bright red with Facebook and Instagram, they're doing this because they know at a very subconscious cellular level, we will hit that thing, we will stay hooked. Isn't that right?

It took me a long time to really.

Absorb the truth about this. I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing the people who designed key aspects of the world in which we now live. One of the things that most struck me was how sick with guilt the people at the heart of Silicon Valley feel. Many of them give you an example of a great guy called Dr. James Williams you should interview. By the way, remind me to introduce you to him. He's a wonderful person. So he worked at the heart of Google.

And one day he was speaking at a tech conference where the audience are literally the people who design the stuff your kids are using today, right? 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 nobody put up their hand.

Wow.

Not long afterwards, James quit. He became, I would argue, one of the most important philosophers in the world now, based at Oxford University.

And people in Silicon Valley kept explaining to me what's being done to us.

And although it's not that complicated, I. I frankly didn't get it. I thought, this is too simplistic. It sounds almost like a conspiracy theory. This can't be right. And then they kept going, look, but. But we literally are the people who did this, right? Take it for us. Right? So the way it works is if you open now, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, 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 is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and what makes you tick, what makes you happy, what makes you horny, what makes you sad, what makes you angry. And it's learning that information for lots of reasons. But the most important one is to figure out what to show you next. That will keep you scrolling for a really simple reason. Every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money. Because you see ads, the longer you scroll, the more money they make. So all of this genius in Silicon Valley or this AI, all these algorithms, when it's applied to social media, 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, right? It was one of them. Put it to me. Just like the head of kfc. Maybe a perfectly nice person in her personal capacity, but all she cares about in her professional capacity is how often did you go to KFC this week? And how big was the bucket you bought? And your obesity and diabetes are not her concern. Right. In the same way all these companies care about is how often did you open the app and how long did you scroll? How often did your kids open the app and how long did they scroll? That's it. And they have created machines that are unbelievably sophisticated at hacking and invading your attention and keeping you scrolling. Your attention is their fuel, it's the product they sell right to the advertiser. So it's a machinery designed to do that. When you first hear that, if you're like me, I guess.

You just think, well, shit, it's like we're trapped in the matrix. Actually, one of the things that can be really empowered is to understand, okay, once you understand the factors that are harming our attention, you can begin to see the solutions which sort of exist, I would argue, to two levels.

Let's talk about those two levels, because the natural one I go to is, cool, turn your phone off, put it on flight mode, put it away. That's the easy option. But actually that's not easy and it's not our only option. What are the two levels you see?

So there are two levels of which I think we've got to deal with this, right? I think of them as defense and offense. There are loads of things we can do immediately in our personal lives to protect ourselves and our children from the factors that are invading our attention. I go through loads in the book. I'll give you an example of one, in fact, I would demonstrate as a prop, because I kind of peek something.

So I have here.

This is a K safe. Have you seen one before?

I have. These are brilliant.

So it's a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, put on the lid, you turn this dial at the top and you push the button. And it will lock your phone away for however long you tell it to between five minutes and a whole day. Once it's locked, you can't get your phone. I mean, if there Was some. There's a fire in here or something. I guess I could stamp on it and it would break and I would have to buy another one. But you don't want to do that. So I would say, everyone buy a case save. I use it for three hours a day to do my writing. I wouldn't get my books written if I didn't do that. Everyone listening. Download now an app called Freedom. It's very simple app. It can sync to both your laptop and your phone. So say you were addicted to, I don't know, Instagram or Pornhub or eBay or whatever it might be. You can say to it, don't let me go on Instagram for the next hour or 24 hours, whatever you decide. And then if you go onto Instagram, it will just say you have been set free and you got to look at it, right? Or you can use it to cut you off in the entire Internet if you want. You can say specific websites or you can say social media, or you can say the whole damn web if you want, right? So there are loads of things like that that we can do. I'm passionately in favor of them. They will make a really big difference to your life. And I go through, as, you know, dozens in the book. But I want to be really honest with people because I do not think most people who are communicating about attention are being honest with the public. These changes are individual changes are really important for us and our children on their own. They are not going to fully solve the problem. Because the truth is, this didn't happen because you had bad habits or your kids have bad habits. This happened because of really big invasive forces. And at some point we're going to have to take on those invasive forces, right? I know that sounds very kind of fancy or bizarre and abstract, but again, I went to places they've done it. At the moment, I feel like what's happening is someone is pouring itching powder over us all day, and then they're leaning forward and going, you know what, mate? You should learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch all the time. And you want to go, fuck you. I'll learn how to meditate. That's really valuable. But you need to stop pouring this itching powder on me all day, right? So we have to take on the forces that are doing this to us. And I go through in the book lots of ways in which we can do that with the many factors, the food industry, the way we eat, is profoundly negatively affecting our attention. The way our Offices work the way our kids, schools work, the, the, the way. I mean, there's a huge array of factors that are harming our attention. For each of them, there are both. For almost all of them, there are both defensive and offensive strategies that we can do. And I went to places that have done them right.

Yeah, I really love the depth that you went to. I'm going to hold a book up again for anybody that's watching. I'm going to just a big call out to everyone, please go and buy the book. Get a paper copy. There's nothing like actually reading it. Go and support a local bookstore. If you want to go to Amazon, I'm going to put links down below where you can get it globally.

I had a really weird experience in New Zealand in a bookshop in the fantastic Timeout Books in Auckland. I went in. This is only ever happened. This has ever happened to me in any bookshop in the world. I was browsing in Timeout Books and a woman came in and asked for my book, said, do you have in stock style of focus? And I was like, like literally like the scene in Annie hall with Marshall McLuhan. I was able to appear and go, well, actually, not only do they have the book, they have the author. That's amazing experience. Yeah. So I have very fond memories of Auckland for that and many other reasons.

Well, we must bring that up as well for a second. You're actually coming down here to Australia and New Zealand. You're doing a tour. It's going to be incredible. I'm going to put a link where people can get their tickets. I have certainly got my ticket. I will be there with the bells on. Can't wait. But people need to come and see you, not just for themselves, but for their teams, for their communities, for their children to understand what attention is all about and how we can actually improve it. So, yeah, as I say, people, please buy the book. The link is below. Get your ticket and come to the event. I will see you there. But Johan, I just want to ask you something about pollution because there's something very interesting in there. And it was maybe in Canada they had a study where people who lived within a certain distance, like a very close distance to a main road, had attention issues and deficit issues because of pollution. What. What was that all about?

This is totally fascinating. Of all the 12 factors that I learned about for the book, I think this is the one that I least saw coming and most surprised me. And actually some of the really pioneering research on this has been done here in Britain by a brilliant professor called Barbara Ma, who's at Lancaster University. So basically, if you live in any major city, you are exposed to a huge. In the world at the moment, you're exposed to a huge amount of air pollution and that physically affects your brain. So there's many factors, but one thing that happens is if you. If, for example, I'm sitting here in London, which has absolutely terrible air pollution. I mean, it's not as bad as somewhere like Mexico City, but it's. It's bad, right? And so I breathe in just as a Londoner, I breathe in a lot of, amongst other things, iron just through my nose. And that goes to my brain. And when iron hits your brain, nothing in our evolution prepared us for iron hitting our brains. You, you, you get brain inflammation, which is bad for your attention in the short term and absolutely disastrous for your brain health in the long term. In fact, it's one of the reasons why people who live in more polluted places actually have significantly high rates of dementia, obviously, which is the worst kind of attention problem you can have. There's studies in Madrid, kids in poor neighborhoods and Madrid and Mexico City, kids in poor neighborhoods had tangles and plaques in their brains like dementia patients, even when they were children, because as a result of pollution. So, yeah, this is a really big issue. Unfortunately, it's the only one of the 12 factors for which there isn't that much you can do individually. I mean, maybe you could go and move to some rural area, I guess, but that's not realistic for most of us. So that's the one where the only opt. Solution is really societal. I mean, you could wear a face mask as well, but. And you, you know, if you can avoid walking by busy roads on your way to work or whatever, do it. But the individual agency there is relatively limited for that. We have to deal with that collectively and to some degree we've done that in London. We've got low emission zone people get charged more for driving in the city. There are big solutions to that we can do and obviously the move to electric vehicles is going to have a big effect on that as well. So yeah, that, that, that really surprised me. We really need to accelerate the move to course for lots of reasons, but that's, that's one of them, 100%.

And as you say, it's working collectively. It's not an individual solution there. It's like, how do we all work together to actually change things at a macro level? It's huge. So, Johan, I just want to be.

It's a really great historical example for this. And it's true so many of the factors that affect our attention. So a lot of people hear this, right? Oh, we need collective solutions. And they're like, yeah, yeah, good luck with that, mate. We're not living in a time of great political optimism anywhere in the world.

When I get pessimistic about that, I think about something that you'll remember. I remember, right, because you grew up in Britain, but also everyone in New Zealand and Australia will remember. So when we were kids, anyone who's our age will remember. When we were kids, the only form of petrol you could buy was leaded petrol, right? I remember my mum putting it into a red Mini and it was discovered that exposure to lead is really bad for your brain and particularly bad for children's ability to focus and pay attention, right? And obviously if it's in the petrol, it got into the fumes. Everyone was breathing in an extraordinary amount of lead. So what happened? A group of ordinary mothers, what we used to call housewives at the time, banded together and said, well, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing these for profit industries to screw up our kids brains, right? And it's really important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, so let's ban cars, let's get rid of petrol, right? Let's all go back to horse and car. That's not what they said. Just like none of us are saying let's ban technology, let's, you know, go back to the world before that. Neither desirable nor possible, right? What they said is, let's get rid of the specific form of petrol that's screwing up our kids brains and replace it with a form of petrol that isn't going to screw up our kids brains.

So what happened? These mums, they fought like hell for their children. And it followed the classic pattern of all major political movements 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 loaded petrol. Venezuela just became the last country in the world to get rid of it. As a result, the average child in New Zealand is 5 IQ points higher than they would have been had we not got rid of loaded petrol. Now to me, that's a really important example. In addition to all the individual defensive moves we've got to make, we can also collectively change our environment to get the factors that are screwing our attention out of the environment as much as possible. Right? Now we can do that. I went to Places that begun to do it. In fact, an amazing company in New Zealand that moved to a four day week. I spent a lot of time with the CEO Andrew Barnes, and interviewed everyone in their offices in Rotorua. There's a lot we can do to deal with these deeper structural factors that are harming our attention. We can do it individually and we can do it collectively, and we have to do it right. But it requires a shift in psychology. We need to stop blaming ourselves and our children and being angry with ourselves and our kids, and we need to start challenging the forces that have done this to us. But it requires us to realize, you know, we are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg and King Musk for a few little tiny crumbs of attention from their table. Or we are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and we can take them back together if we want to.

I'm with you on it. I'm willing to stand and fight because I've got a little boy, he's eight. And I'm with you. Let's do this. Johan. I want to make sure that he grows up in a world where he can decide who to be and how to be and where he places his attention and talking about attention. Mine's on the clock right now because I want to be mindful of your time. I know you've got another engagement right after this, so just one last question before we wrap up. If you were to fast forward many years into the future, you are highly aware that it's your very last day here on Earth, and a young person who you love comes into the room and says, johan, how do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

Would tell them a story.

About someone I know and love.

So I'm writing a book. I've been working on it for an insane amount of time, for 13 years, about a series of crimes that happening in Las Vegas. I'm not allowed to talk about it too much because my publisher will taser me. But.

It'S partly about there's many thousands of people who live in the drainage tunnels beneath Las Vegas. Homeless people. It's related to that. And.

One of those people was a man I know called Rob Banghart. So Rob lived in a very deep part of the tunnels for seven years. He was known as Hobo Santa because it had a big beard. And he used to go and steal stuff and hand it out to everyone in the tunnels. And one day, something terrible happened to Rob. He was he was kind of low level dealer. And there was a gang who were known as the Cubans who thought he was dealing on their patch. So they lured him to an area near the train tracks, and they hit him in the head with an axe and they broke his skull open and they dragged him and left his body on the train tracks for the train to run over. And unfortunately, someone found Rob and he didn't die. And he was in hospital for nine months. And when he left, he went to work for a charity, incredible charity called Shine a Light, who are. Charity run by people who used to live in the tunnels, who go back to help the people in the tunnels to give them supplies like water and food and sanitary towels and so on, but also help them get out if they need, if they want rehab, if they want other things. And.

One day I spent a huge amount of time with Rob. And one day Rob got word that his friend Pickett had died. Pickett used to live in the tunnel with him, and Pickett had overdosed. So we went to Picket the tunnel they used to live in. And it was really weird. All the Picket stuff was still there. They'd taken his body away, all his stuff was still there. And.

And a woman came along who I hadn't met before, and Rob hugged her. And it was clear they both knew Picket. And they kind of cried and they talked for a while. And then Rob said, you know, he brought some supplies to hand out to people. He gave us some stuff. And he said, oh, who's. Who's in the next tunnel down? And she said, oh, you don't want to go there. And he said, why? Who is it? And he names. She named some people I'd never heard of. And he said, no, I'll go and give it to them. I don't really think about it very much. Anyway, a couple of days later, I asked Rob, what was that? What was she talking about? Who were those people? He said, oh, in this very downbeat way, he said.

They'Re the people who tried to kill me. They're the people who hit me in the head with an axe.

And I was like.

Rob, why did you help them? And he said, well, because they're people like me and you. They did something wrong. I've done things that are wrong. We've all done things that are wrong. They're still human beings. And I remember. I mean, that's an unbelievably high moral bar. Yeah, but. And not one I could ever meet. But.

I thought about. I would tell him about Rob and I would say we all have choices in our lives.

And we live in a culture which really pushes us towards narcissism, self aggrandizement, anger, bitterness, you know.

And you can give in to all those temptations. And there's pleasures in being angry and bitter and mean. There are. Or you can be like Rob. You can try to side with the least powerful people in the room. You can really listen to people, you can really honor people. You can try to reduce the amount of suffering in the world. You can set aside your ego and try to engage with people in a deeper way. And I think I've met some amazing people in my life. But I think of all the people I know, Rob has the most.

Rob is doing the most good. And Paul, who also runs Shine A Light with him, Paul Vautrinau, and the many other people who volunteer with Shine A Light, who are amazing people. And by the way, people can donate to Shine A Light online if just Google Shine Light Vegas. But.

So, yeah, I wouldn't try to give abstract advice. I would try to talk about Rob and I'm saying try and be more like him if you can.

Thank you for sharing that. And I'm going to make sure the team puts a link so people can go directly if they do want to donate. Thank you for bringing that up. And Johan, thank you for the work you do. I can't wait to continue reading your books as you and I grow up and grow old. You'll continue writing, I'll continue reading. So thank you. I really appreciate it and I look forward to seeing you in Auckland. Have an amazing time down here. The link is in the show notes. Go and get yourself a ticket. Get one for your friend. Bring your team along if you have an office. This is going to be an amazing event. Not to be missed, but Johan, for now, thank you so much.

Oh, what a pleasure. I meant to say, or my publishers will boot me. You can also find out where to get the audiobook, the ebook and the physical book@stolenfocusbook.com yeah, I really enjoyed this, James. Thank you so much. I regret that you've lost your Belfast accent slightly, because I love a Belfast accent. If you've done it as a thick Ian Paisley brogue, that would have made me very happy. But you know, tell me about how the punk was the Antichrist.

You're good at that.

Antichrist. Oh, Lord, cast out the Antichrist.

Our next podcast we'll do. I'll do entirely in character as Ian Paisley and you can do it in character as Martin McGinnis and bring it On.

That'll have millions of hits guaranteed.

Excellent. Cheers, James. Pleasure. Thanks so much.

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