If you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals. I want to read this book or a bigger goal. I want to write a book. I want to set up a business.
I want to be a good dad, whatever it might be. Whatever your goals are, if you lose your ability to pay attention, you cannot achieve those goals. That's true at a personal level and that's true at the level of a whole society, right? A society of people who are at Adlod and can't pay attention won't be able to achieve collective goals either.
Johan Hari, welcome to the show. Hey, Chris, good to be with you. Really glad to have you back, man. I'm very excited.
Hurray. Yes, precisely. So you say that each book that you write is trying to solve or work out a different mystery. Why did you get interested in the mystery of attention?
God, for so many years, I thought my own attention getting worse. I looked at so many of the people I knew and I could see their attention was getting worse. But I was responding to that by saying really by blaming myself, like everyone else, I knew it was blaming themselves and thinking, you know, you're just weak, you're not strong enough, you don't have enough willpower. And then I also reassured myself by saying, well, every generation feels like this, right?
You can read letters from monks almost a thousand years ago, where one of them writes to the other one and says, oh, my attention ain't what it used to be, right? It's not exactly the quote, but that's the gist of what they said. And I thought, OK, so this is just, you know, you get older, your attention gets worse. But really, it was looking at the young people in my life and some young people I love that made me think, you know what, this really does feel markedly different.
And then I started looking at some of the studies of this. There's a small study, for example, of American college students that found that on average, they focus on any one task for 65 seconds. And the average office worker focuses on any one task for three minutes. I thought, it's something deeper going on here.
So I ended up going on this huge journey all over the world, fortunately pre-play. I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts in the world about focus, what causes it to boost, what causes it to deteriorate. I went from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne. And I went to places that have been affected by this attention crisis in all sorts of different ways, from our favela in Rio de Janeiro, where attention had collapsed in a particularly disastrous way, to an office in New Zealand, where they found an incredible way to boost attention.
And what I concluded, having met the kind of leading experts in the world, is there's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that can boost or degrade your attention. Loads of those factors have been really significantly increasing in recent times. And we are in a real and acute attention crisis, which is actually on course to get even worse, unless we deal with these deep underlying causes of the crisis. So it is a modern phenomenon.
I'd say it's a result of very specific things that are happening in the modern world. It's not just the modern world in itself. We could have the benefits of the modern world without most of this, if we make the necessary adjustments. But it's definitely, to some degree, this is a perennial human dilemma, but it's got much worse and response to specific things that are happening now.
What was the trip that you took where you sequestered yourself before the plague? You decided to take yourself away with a special need to be put in phone and throw yourself on an island. What happened there? It was a response to something else that happened actually, and that was really the reason why I wrote the book.
So when he was nine years old, my god, son, developed this brief obsession with Elvis, I know about this, I know about this, but he would start obsessively singing the Velas Vegas and Sous Vision's Minds. And it was particularly cute because he didn't know that I'd become like a cheesy cliche, so he was doing it with this heart-catching sincerity. And he kept telling the story of Elvis's life. And obviously I tried to skip over the bit where Elvis, you know, shits some sort of death on the toilet.
But one night when I was talking him in, he said to me, very intensely, he said, Yo Ham, will you take me one day to Graceland? And I said, yeah, sure, in the way that you've done, I'm not on your own, so don't forget it the next day. And he said, no, do you really promise you'll take me to Graceland? And I was like, yes, absolutely promise.
And I didn't think of it again until 10 years later when so many things had gone wrong. So when he was 15, he dropped out of school. And by the time he was 19, he was just constantly alternating between his iPad, his laptop, and his iPhone. And his life was just a blur of WhatsApp, YouTube, porn.
And one day, you can't see it, but the sofa just behind the laptop where we're talking. We were sitting there. And I was trying to talk to him, and it was like he was wearing at the speed of Snapchat. It was like nothing's still or serious to touch him.
And it was really distressing. And it was distressing, partly because I could feel the same thing happening to me. It wasn't this extreme, but I could feel the same thing. I was sitting there and keep my own phone.
And I suddenly remembered this moment from all those years before. And I said to him, hey, let's go to Graceland. And he was like, what? I didn't even remember this thing that happened.
And so I reminded him, and I said, look, I'll take Graceland. We've got to break this numbing routine. But when we go there, you've got to leave your phone in the hotel while we're away. You can't just be taking it everywhere.
And I promise I'll do that. So two weeks later, we flew from Heathrow to New Orleans, which really went first. Anyway, a couple weeks later, we arrived at Graceland. And when you arrive at Graceland, even pre-COVID, there's no person to show you around.
What happens is they give you an iPad, and you put in earbuds, and the iPad shows you around. So it says, go left, go right. And every room you're in, it tells you about that room. And in every room, there's a digital representation of that room on the iPad.
So we're walking around Graceland noticing that what happens is everyone just walks around Graceland, staring at the iPad. OK, more and more tense. And we got to the jungle room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland. It's kind of loads of fake plants.
And there's this Canadian couple next to us. And it's a husband turned to the 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 looked at him and laughed. And then him and his wife just started swiping back and forward. And I turned to him and I said, sir, there's an old fashioned form of swiping you can do.
It's called turning your head. Because look, we're actually in the jungle room, right? You don't have to look at digital representation. We're literally there.
And they clearly thought I was insane. I'm sort of back to where I understand to believe. And I turned to my god son to laugh about it. And he was just standing in the corner looking at Snapchat.
Because for the minute we landed, he was just constantly looking at it. He couldn't keep his promise. And I just lost it. I shouted at him and I said, you're afraid of missing out.
But this is guaranteeing that you're not being present at your own life. I tried to grab his phone off him and he sort of stomped off. And I wanted to raise land on my own. And then that night, I found him in the heartbreak hotel down the street where we were staying, where there's a swing pool shaped like a guitar.
And he was sitting by the swing pool. And he's just looking at his phone and I apologized to him and he said, look, I know something is really wrong. But I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, I'll fuck, I need to look into this.
And at first, I thought, well, this is a purely personal problem, right? He can't stop looking. I can't stop looking. The solution is to do something personal.
I thought the problem lane me and in my phone. So I did this very drastic thing. I just I booked a little place in a beach house in Provenstown and Cape Cod. And I said, everyone, I'm going to completely offline for three months.
I'm going to have a phone that can't access the internet. I'm going to have a laptop. My friend, MTS, gave me his old broken laptop that couldn't get online. I'm just tired of being wired in this way.
I'm out of it, right? And so I went to Provenstown for three months with no phone. And it was this kind of it taught me a lot both about the strengths of that approach and the weaknesses of it. And what were they?
Well, the first few weeks were like a haze of decompression and this incredible sense of relief. And it's a very funny place Provenstown for people who don't know it. It's a little kind of gay resort town. It's a place where more than one person makes a full-time living, dressing as Ursula, the villain from the Little Mermaid and singing songs about kind of lingers.
So gives you some sense of what it's like. So it's sort of a haze of decompression. I think, oh, this is so good. Thank God.
It was like, and then about two weeks in, I had this really bitter crash. I was walking down the beach and Provenstown, like Grace and I like every place you'll ever go now, was just full of people who were using Provenstown as well as beautiful places in the world, which is using Provenstown as a backdrop for their selfies. You're seeing these people, particularly painful to see parents with children doing this, who were just never looking around them, who were just constantly looking at their phones. But instead of thinking, oh, you don't know how to be present, I start thinking, give me that phone.
I fucking want it, right? And I felt this tremendous craving. And I realized that for so many years, I had been exposed throughout the day to the kind of thin, insistent signals of the internet of the web, of the current apps that were used. And when those were gone, this is a very pretentious way of saying it.
But Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher, said that when she became an atheist, it was like the world had gone silent. And that's how it felt. It felt like the world had gone silent, like crucial signals that I needed were gone. And even if you're getting on well with people and I was getting on well with people in Provenstown, they're not, you know, people don't fludgy with hearts the minute they meet you, right?
So I realized after that, actually I had created a vacuum where previously the signals that the internet were, and it wasn't enough to just separate my, it was necessary for a period to separate myself from that. But then what I needed to do was fill that vacuum with something. And I started to learn a lot, I had already learned a lot, and I started to read more and later met the leading scientists who learned about flowstates, which I can talk about in a minute. But I was amazed that once I got through that, the haze of decompression and then the dip, what amazed me was how much my attention came back.
I thought, yeah, I thought you do. I thought, surely my brain is serious a bit. You know, actually, my attention was as good as it was when I was 17. I was lying there reading books for like eight hours, not feeling, not attention or atrophying.
And I remember towards the end of those three months thinking, this is amazing, I never want to go back to that way of being. And then within a couple of weeks of getting back to Boston and getting my phone back, my attention was as bad as it ever been. And I had to really explore, okay, what's happening here? Why is it so hard to sustain those lessons in our normal lives?
And how can we begin to do it? The interesting thing you say about your Godson and that sort of frenetic, very sort of anxious, bouncy attention that you had, I read a, I want to say it was a Washington Post, huge op-ed piece from a psychology high school teacher or university teacher that went to go and live with some of the most famous Tiktokkers in a cloud house. Oh, fascinating. So he goes and lives with them.
And he tells the story about how they, one of the evenings, they would go and play basketball. And they were saying, right, let's go and play a game of basketball, let's organise it. And it's all, everything's a bit kind of hyper and it's like everyone's on e-numbers and too much caffeine anyway. But these people have ridiculous numbers of followers, you know, that some of the most followed Tiktok accounts on the planet.
And then they spend time organising people into groups and picking who the teams are going to be. And then just as they're about to play the game, someone walks off the pitch, walks off the basketball court. And then slowly everybody else walks off as well. And he turns to one of the guys and he says, hang on, you guys just made all of this time picking teams and saying that we're going to play a game of basketball and now one person's walked off and a bunch of other people walked off and now it's not going to happen.
And he says, oh yeah, this happens all the time. People just start something and then they can't even hold their attention on the thing that they just began to do. And they get distracted and walk off. And there's something, we all experience the degradation of our attention inside of our brains, right?
But what I find so strange is when it manifests physically, you know, when you see someone local themselves from one location to another because they simply couldn't hold on to, I'm supposed to be doing this physical thing. It feels like when it manifests physically, it feels like another degree of insanity. I love that story because it's like a parable about what I think is the worst aspect of this attention crisis, which has two levels. So if you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals, but not anything, right?
So a personal level, anything you want to achieve, from a small thing, I want to go to the shop and buy some Diet Coke or a bigger thing, I want to read this book or a bigger goal. I want to write a book, I want to set up a business, I want to be a good dad, whatever it might be. Whatever your goals are, if you lose your ability to pay attention, you cannot achieve those goals. That's true at a personal level and that's true at the level of a whole society, right?
A society of people who are adored and can't pay attention, won't be able to achieve collective goals either. So I think you're absolutely right, that's the chilling thing. And you're also right, when it manifests physically, it's more disturbing because of the 12 causes that I learned about, a lot of them are in relation to the body, which surprised me, that we sleep 20% less than we did 100 years ago, that is a physical process we desperately, physically need. And even if that was the only thing that had changed, Dr.
Charles Sizer, the leading expert in the world on sleep, the Harvard Medical School said to me, even if nothing else had changed, that alone would be causing a huge crisis in attention. Children sleep 18 minutes less than they did 100 years ago, that alone would be causing a huge crisis in children's attention. There's loads of evidence that the way we eat, the kind of standard Western diet has a catastrophic effect on people's ability to focus and pay attention. There's a whole range of these which are physical, I mean, the fact that we are the first human society ever in the last 100 years, who think it's either possible or sensible to get small children to sit still for eight hours a day, when all the scientific evidence shows children's attention grows when they can run around and exercise.
So again, these may seem like no shit Sherlock insights, but we don't live in, we're not acting on these insights. We have a society that's radically disconnected from these insights. So I think there's so many things in that parable that you've just said about, the parable of the Tiktok is that, yeah, I love that. How have you come to understand how attention works then?
After all of this research, how do you frame what attention is and how it works? There's so many ways of thinking about it. And I was surprised by how complex a phenomenon of attention is. And it's a physical process, like we just said, requiring all these things.
If you disturb yourself physically, to use one example by eating foods that cause energy spikes and energy crashes, which I do, that's going to fuck your attention. There's a physical process. There's many layers of attention. There's a wonderful guy who really helped me to think about this, called Dr.
James Williams, who was a Google designer for many years, very senior at Google, became profoundly disenchanted with what they were doing to the world's attention, quit, and is now, I think, the most important philosopher of attention in the world, I interviewed him in Moscow. He was living there because his wife works with the World Health Organization. And James has created this kind of a typology of attention, I think is really helpful. He says there are three layers of attention.
I would actually suggest a fourth as well, which I think you would agree with. So the first level of attention is what we call the spotlight, right? This is the dominant way we think about attention. So your spotlight is, so I'm in a room now where in the corner over there, there's my television, my phone is somewhere in this room, I've hidden it, so I can't see it when I'm talking to you.
There's noise in this room, you know, I can see people out my window, but I'm filtering all of that out and I'm narrowing my spotlight onto you, right? And I'm looking at your face and thinking, what if Chris just asked me? So the spotlight is your ability to attend to immediate short-term tasks by filtering out all the shit around you, right? And we all know how that works.
That's actually generally most of the debate about attention, when we think, oh, I can't pay attention, we think I've been distracted in that sense, right? I sat there to read a book, but my phone rang, I was trying to spend time with my kids, but you know, my boss emailed me, we think about that immediate form of disruption of spotlight. So Dr. Williams just says a second layer, which is what he calls your starlight.
And your starlight is your medium to long-term goals, right? So it's not, I want to read this book, answer this email, it's, I want to set up a business, I want to be a good dad, I want to write a book, it's your medium to long-term goals. And the third, it's called the starlight because when you're lost in the desert, you look to the stars and figure out where you're going, right? The third layer is what he calls your daylight.
And your daylight is how you even know what your long-term goals are. How do you know that you want to set up a business? How do you know what kind of business you want to set up? How do you know you want to write a book?
How do you know what it means to be a good parent, right? How do you know what it means to be a good parent, right? How do you know what it means to be a good daylight because you can only see clearly when the room is flooded with daylight, right? How do you know these things, if your life is dissolved into 65 second and three minute pellets, like a hail storm is constantly going on around your attention?
How do you know who you are, if you never get time to think and contemplate away from being constantly disrupted, and fucked with, right? And he argues that we're not just being disrupted at the level of the spotlight, which is what we think about, but our ability to achieve longer-term goals is being profoundly disrupted, and our ability to even know what our longer-term goals should be is being profoundly structured. I would argue there's a fourth layer, which I would call our stadium lights, which is how we see each other as a society, how can we achieve sustained goals, right? There's all sorts of crises facing our society.
But if we can't focus, it's not just that you can't achieve your goals, we together can't achieve our goals. It fucks us at every level. So I think at the moment, all four of those forms of attention are being profoundly disruptive for us and for our children. But the reason I'm most optimistic about this is that I think that our way's back from this.
The problem is that there's a trickle-down effect, right? That if you fracture and fragment the spotlight, that means that you don't ever make progress towards your meaningful long-term goals. And as you start to do that, the cohesive narrative that you make around, who am I? What am I?
What am I? Why am I here? That begins to get fractured and fragmented so much. And then over time, as you spread that out across a bunch of individuals that cohes together to make themselves into a society, they don't get to do it.
There's a line in, it's either digital minimalism or deep work, where Kal Newport says, he's talking about Twitter specifically, and he says Twitter fractures our days into slivers so small that we can't get anything meaningful done. Because we're just constantly task switching from one form to another, and we'll get on the task switching. In fact, let's talk about that. What's the issue with speed and switching and filtering?
Yeah, this is one of the first interviews I did for the book, and it was so big. Almost the very first interview I did with the book really fucking sober me. I just before I get to switching, you just maybe think of it. There's a guy called Professor Roy Baumaystow, who's a professor at the University of Queensland.
He's a legend. One of the most distinguished psychologists ever. But people who've heard of the marshmallow test, he's the guy who invented the marshmallow test. So he's the lead by far leading expert in the world on willpower.
He wrote a book called Will Power, right? So go into him and I say, oh, you know, first of all, I think you're writing a book about whether people are struggling to pay attention. And he said, you know, there's not exactly where it's in the book. He said, you know, essentially, you say that because I've just found I can't really pay attention a lot of the time now.
I just play video games on my phone all the time. And I sort of say that. I'm like, right, didn't you write a book called Will Power? This is the godfather of willpower and he's struggling.
I was like, fuck me. If you can't pay attention, this is really happening to everyone. So I was really, I remember walking down to you a bit of days, right? I was like, it's like you go to Yoda and Yoda just goes, I don't know, right?
Yeah, I'm just playing Clash of Clans over here on my phone. Sorry. It was really dispiriting. But then one of the moments it started to fall into place meets.
So this, this calls that you're talking about. I went to a guy called Professor Elmilla, who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. He's MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Professor Miller said to me, you've got to understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else.
You can only think about one thing at a time. That's it consciously. Right? That's it.
This is a fundamental aspect of the structure of the human brain. The human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years. And you're going to change on any timetable. Any of us are going to see.
You can only think about one thing at a time. But he said we have fallen from mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at the same time. But what happens is when Professor Miller's colleagues get people into labs and they test them, they say, OK, they get them to do it.
Think they're doing lots of things at the same time. Well, they always discover is that if you're doing more than one thing at a time, you're juggling. You're very quickly alternating between tasks, right? Your consciousness papers over it gives a seamless impression that you're just doing one thing, but actually you're juggling.
And this comes with a really significant cost. It's called the switch cost effect. And it turns out when you're juggling, it degrades profoundly, degrades your ability to do any of the things you're doing. And there's lots of forms of harm we can talk about.
But I'm sure there's two studies that really, two small studies that help me to think about this. Hewlett Packard, the printer company, a commissioner scientist to do a study where they got a group of their workers and split them into two groups. First group was told, just do whatever your task is for the day. And we won't interrupt you.
Second group was told, do your task for the day. And you're going to have to respond to a lot of emails and phone calls. And then they tested the IQ of both groups. The group who was not distracted, not interrupted scored 10 IQ points higher than the group that was to give you a sense of how big that is.
If you and me smoked a fat spliffing out together and got stoned, our IQs would go down by five points. So just being chronically interrupted had twice as bad an effect on your IQ was getting stoned. You would be better off in the short term. There's a debate about the longer term effect to kind of be some IQ.
In the short term, you'd be better off sitting at your desk, getting stoned and doing one thing at a time than sitting at your desk, not getting stoned and being bombarded with emails and phone calls. Just to quickly say another study, the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Lab did a really interesting study. They got 138 students. They split them into two groups.
They got all of them to do the same exam. But one group was told just doing normal exam conditions and the other group was told, you can have your phone on and you can send them a safe text. Now, instinctively you would expect the second group to do better because they could have cheated, right? In fact, the second group on average did 20% worse because being interrupted ruins your ability to think.
Professor Michael Podner at the University of Oregon found that if you were interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus you had before. But most people never get 23 minutes of uninterrupted time at work, right? You said that it was on average three minutes and 30 seconds for people that are in a workplace environment or 65 seconds for a uni student. And this goes right to the top.
The average CEO of Fortune 500 Company only gets 26 uninterrupted minutes a day, right? So at every level of the economy, every level of the society, well, the way Professor Miller put it to me is we're living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of this constant interruption. And again, I'm believing that interview. I'm feeling pretty fucking sober thinking, because one thing to have this suspicion of something's happening here.
But when you go and you keep interviewing like the leading scientists in the world on these questions and they're saying, no, this is really bad, right? I'm embracing Professor Barbara Domeni, who's one of the leading scientists in France. She won the Leggion Donner, which is the biggest civilian award you can get in France. And her just saying, well, there's no way you can have a normal brain today and thinking, fuck, this is, you know, but so that can feel when you hear it and what to me when I first learned it very overwhelming.
But the reason why I feel why I think there's reason to be optimistic is because there are solutions to these problems and I think they have to happen at two levels. So one level is the personal, there are personal solutions we can pursue as isolated individuals in our own lives and we can talk about lots of the logic. One example, you can't see it from here, Chris, but in the corner of the room over there, I've got, it's called a case safe. This company should start fucking paying me a commission because I've said this in every blog, but they're not exactly.
So a case safe is a plastic safe. You take the lid off, you put your phone in, you put the lid on, you turn the dial at the top and it will shut your phone away for anything between five minutes and a week. And you lock it and you can't get your phone. I mean, if there was a fire or something, you could just smash it, but then you have to buy it on the case.
So I do, I use that for four hours a day. I would not have been able to write my books if I didn't do that. Also on the laptop, I'm speaking to you on, I have an app called Freedom, which can cut you off even the specific websites you tell it to if you were addicted to say Twitter or just the entire internet. And I use that for the same four hours every day.
So there's lots of personal things we can all do in our lives to defend ourselves and our children against the systematic invasion of our attention. But I want to be honest with people, the evidence shows that that can improve your attention, but it will only get you so far because at the moment, it's like we're living in an environment where someone is, by the way, tech is of the 12 causes, not the biggest, which surprised me. And we are living in an environment that is constantly pouring itching powder on us. And it's a bit like at the moment, the person pouring itching powder on us is going, you know what, mate, you might want to learn how to meditate, then you wouldn't scratch so much.
And yeah, I'm a favourite meditation, but fuck you, we need to stop you pouring itching powder on us, right? So we've got to have another level of response which together we are taking on these forces that are fucking with our ability to pay attention. And that can sound a bit abstract, so can I give a quick look at a specific example of a place that did that? So France in 2018 was having a big crisis of what they called Le Burnout, which I don't need to translate.
And the French government under pressure from the trade unions got a guy called Bruno Metling, who was the head of Orange, one of their biggest telecoms companies to figure out what was going on. And he found in loads of research and he discovered that 35% of French people thought they could never turn off their phones or stop checking their emails when they were awake, because their boss kept messaging them at any time of the day or night. And if they didn't reply, they were in trouble. So you can give those people all the sweet self-help lectures you want in the world about how you'd be much better up by a case, they can't do it, right?
You remember thinking when I learned that figure, you know, you're younger than me, Chris, but I remember when I was a kid, the only people who were on call were the Prime Minister and doctors. And even doctors went on call all the time, right? Now, 35% of the economy is just on call all the time. And many people are burdened by this, many more people are burdened by this.
Sorry, Bruno Metling proposed a very simple solution, which the French government then introduced into law. It's called the right to disconnect. Just as two things. You have a legal right to have your work hours defined in your contract, and you have a legal right to not have to check your phone or email outside those work hours.
That's it. I went to Paris to interview people about this. Just before I was there, Renter Kill, the pest control company, got fined 70,000 euros because they tried to get one of their workers. They told off one of their workers for not responding to an email an hour after his work hours ended.
Now, you can see how that's a collective thing. Companies are never going to do that unless we make them do it. Some might do it as a benefit, but that's going to get a few benevolent bosses, but most are not. That's something where you can't do that on your own.
You can go to your boss and say, I want to write to disconnect and they'll go fuck off, right? But we can do that collectively by banding together and fighting for that to be introduced. So that's one of many things we need to do collectively. So we've got to all these problems that we tackle at both levels.
The individual things we can do, which will get us to a certain level, and then the collective things we can do, which will make it possible for many more of us to do those individual things. Does that ring true to you, Chris? Yeah, it does. So we had this discussion when we talked about Lost Connection to your last book on depression.
And I think that this belies a bias that I have where such an only child, right? So radical personal responsibility and never ever looking to anything else outside of me for a solution. It always surprises me when you talk about how systemic changes can influence the individual because that's a solution that doesn't often come very true to me. One of the things that I'm not that I'm concerned about, but one of the things that I think it would need to be, and you put it across well in the book, it needs to be laid at people's feet.
Like, look, you need to do everything that you can personally to be able to try and sort your attention out. And then we can band together to try and make these changes occur long term because they're not going to happen straight away. One of the concerns I would have is that it's potentially easy for people to fall into a victim mentality. Well, look, Johan's book said, look at this environment that I'm living in, I'm being forced to teaching how to be in hold on me.
Look, I can never get out of this suboptimal, attentional environment, right? And I think that it's important that people realize, yes, there are challenges that you have in the environment. You need to do the things that you can and over time we can try and make the environment become better. And I think that the blend between the two is correct.
But it always surprises me how many solutions are actually out there that can be done, that are going to assist people with what they can do personally, because almost all of the solutions that I look to immediately are, right? I'll try and fix it. I'll try and come up with some sort of a solution. But I mean, to try and run through some of the ridiculous ways that I sort my attention out, I sleep with my phone outside of my bedroom.
I have two separate phones. One has social media on, and the other one is for messaging. The one that has social media on has no SIM card. So that one's always attached to the Wi-Fi in my house.
I have intimate and fasting for my phone. I don't use it before a certain time. I don't use it after a certain time. I have an app called Cold Turkey on my laptop, which locks me out of my laptop after a particular time at night.
And I can't get out of that. There's an option on that called Frozen Turkey, which literally just shuts your laptop down. There's nothing that you can do to stop it. I've gone away on holiday and not enabled data roaming so that I don't ever use my phone as soon as I leave the apartment.
I just pick your endless notifications have been turned off, go on Grey Scale mode on the phone. And there's an awful lot of tricks and tips and stuff that I've put together to try and constrain how much my attention can be distracted. And yet for the fact that I didn't realize maybe there is something systemic out there. I think it was almost like, you know what it was?
It was almost like learned helplessness. I think it was almost like I don't think that we can enact change. These big tech companies are going to be so powerful and they have so much influence and they make so much money. There is no way that we're going to be able to actually do anything to impact them.
So it's all on me. Like I'll carry the boat, David Goggins style. And I think that that was kind of where I got to. And I really do hope that we can try and make a better potential environment because it worries me how nerfed the human species growth has been due to the fact that in the space of ten years, ten years ago, around about 2011, 2012, I think we had the optimal amount of information available on the internet.
Briefly, for a two month period in like the autumn of 2011 or something, we had the right amount of information available. And then very quickly we went from a world where information was a scarcity that you wanted to get more of because it would help you survive. It would make you more competitive. It would make you more attractive.
It would mean that you had better life. Very quickly went from wanting more to needing to filter less. The best people on the planet, the smartest people on the planet now are not the ones that can forage for information. They're the ones that can sort signal from noise.
They're the ones that can discriminate between what they don't need in the wealth of information that's hitting them in the face and what they do need. And that skill is just not one that we've got. I'm sure that you've heard about information foraging that that's, I think it's the same neuroscientist that you spoke to earlier on that talks about that. The fact that we're constantly on the lookout for information because it was so scarce and so important and so useful to us in our past.
And yeah, man, some systemic changes would also be pretty nice. Well, it's about, I love what you just said. I think it's so interesting. I just want to think through a few of the things you've said, Chris, because I'm just processing them.
And I think what you're saying is really important because I had a similar sort of dialogue with myself where, so I was going into being, I'm giving example, like Professor Joel Nick, who is the leading expert on children's attention problems in the US. And he said to me that we're living in what he thinks we might be now living in what he calls an attentional pathogenic environment, which is where, for everyone, forms of deep focus like reading a book are getting more and more like running up and down escalator. And one of the worries about that is it's not like we will even remain at the current level of invasiveness of our attention. Many of the factors of owning our attention are going to get much worse.
Paul Graham, one of the leading Silicon Valley. Unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah.
And a hugely prominent thing, the green Silicon Valley said that the world is on course to be more addictive in the next 40 years compared to the last 40 years. If we don't regulate the way this stuff works, that's me adding the course if we don't regulate my him. So I thought a lot about this because when you hear that initially, it can feel exactly what you said. The last thing I ever want to do with anyone in my writing about addiction, depression, or, or attention is to inculcate a victim mentality.
If people read my book and thought, well, I'm fucked then, then I have failed completely because you're genuinely not fucked. And I think part of the problem is, I'm going to put this. People feel like it's about the question is about asking people where your power lies, right? So if you think about people feel like, understand very understandably feel like I have power over my immediate behavior to some degree.
But if something is bigger than me, I have no power over that, right? And a big part of what I want to communicate to people because I think the evidence is very clear that it's true is that you have power at many levels. Now, you have power at the level of your individual behavior. And even people in the most horrendous environment, if you are in solitary confinement for the rest of your life, you still have some power over what you do, right?
A Victor Frankel wrote about how he exercised agency in the concentration camps when he was imprisoned there by the Nazis and his family were murdered. You always have some agency, but also at the individual level. But you also have power at a collective level when you band together with other people. And I want to give a very practical example.
And I really urge people to think about their own families in relation to this as well. I think a lot about my grandmothers. Partly I was raised by my Scottish grandmother because my mother was ill when I was a kid and my dad was in a different country. So my grandmothers, I'm 42.
My grandmothers were 42 in 1963. One of my grandmothers was a working-class scotch woman living in a Scottish tenement, and my other grandmother was living in a wooden hut on the side of a mountain in Switzerland. And in 1963, neither of them was allowed to have a bank account because they were married women. Neither of them was allowed.
Well, both of them could be legally raped by their husbands. In practice, their husbands could beat the shit out of them because the police never did anything about domestic violence. My Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote. Both of them had left school when they were 13, even though the men in their families carried on going to school later because no one gave a shit about girls being able to learn anything.
My Swiss grandmother, she loved to paint and draw, but they were like, why are you doing that? Fucking sharp, getting to the kitchen. So I think about their lives, right? When they were the age I am now, I knew them.
I loved them. This is very recently, right? And then I look at my niece, who's 17, who loves to draw on paint. She never knew my grandmother sadly, loves to draw on paint.
And when she draws on paints, we're like, you should go to art school. This is brilliant, right? And even like no one, you'll be regarded as a deranged maniac. If you said, my niece should not be allowed to have a bank account.
It should be legal for her to be raped. She shouldn't be allowed to vote. I mean, it'd be unthinkable, right? No one would ever, literally no one says that, right?
It's crazy as far this fringe, but like almost nobody. How did that change happen, right? At the level of my grandmothers, in 1963, I can well imagine them saying, fuck me. We're never going to take this on, right?
How is this ever going to change? In 1963, every single country, company, police force, all of them were controlled by men and have been ever since those things were invented thousands of years before, right? Except for a few hereditary queens that we now and then, right? At the level of the isolated individual, you could say to my grandmother, no, you have some agency.
I mean, she could have, there were certain things, adjustments they can make in their behavior, but the truth is that the margin for them to make changes in that society were very limited. So how do we get to the change where my niece does have lots of margins? My niece just, she was going out with a boy, didn't treat a well, she told him to fuck off. All the boys around sided with her.
A complete transformation. Well, not thinkable to my grandmothers, right? How did we get that? It didn't happen because lots of women made isolated individual changes.
It happened because lots of women banded together and plenty of sympathetic men as well. And said, we're not going to fucking take this anymore, right? No. And I would argue, I think that's really important about people knowing where their power lies.
Go strongly, and I know this is your instinct as well. We have power as isolated individuals, but we also have power. We band together. And in a way, I don't think of those things.
You can overdo the separation between those things, right? So you can think there's, there's, I have power, all the collective has power, but the collective is you. It's you banding together with everyone else. That's how changes happen and we're all the beneficiaries of those changes, right?
Think about something that we used to take the granted and was in place for a long time. The weekend. The weekend isn't some natural thing that just appeared. The week we have a weekend because workers who used to make two works seven days a week for fucking 40 years and got shot and fucking fired and beaten up by the police until they achieved the weekend.
Right now, the weekend is being eroded again. We can talk about that if you want. But so we are all the beneficiaries of these big collective struggles. And there's no, there's no tradeoff between those two things.
The more you gain control of yourself personally, the better able you are to participate in a collective struggle. And the more the collective struggle succeeds, the better, the more we can set people free to do the things that will empower their attention anyway. I know that might seem viscerally. It's not doesn't match with your gut instinct, but does it?
Can you see that there's a truth in that quiz? I feel like you can. Oh, yeah, absolutely, man. I mean, you know, you are a part of the whole.
There's an emergence and a synthesis that goes on between what you can do as an individual and the environment that you're in and then you get more agency as an individual and become more aware. You can contribute to the people around you. You know, my friends make me a better person. Why?
Well, because they do a thing, they gain some agency, they learn about something and then they influence me. Just scale that up across a country or a nation or a world, right, a species. So, yeah, I agree, man. I just, that's something that maybe me and also a lot of the people I think are in.
I think that listen to podcasts probably need to be conscious of that personal responsibility is something which is spoken about so much that it can actually be not to a detriment, but it can blind you to some other solutions that could be useful, you know, collective solutions. And yeah, it's an interesting one. What about what about the relationship between attention and well-being and how we actually feel? Does it have a relationship to how we feel about ourselves?
Oh, totally. So, and it goes by thinking about something like anxiety, right? So as your ability to pay attention, degrade, you're less able to achieve your goals. You have less of a sense of what's called an internal locus of control.
If I know this relates very strongly to what you were just saying. So, there's a locus of control. There's your ability to feel you can change things in your world, right? You're immediate world or the wider world.
And there's lots of evidence. So, if you have an internal locus of control, you're somebody feels I can make things happen, right? And, and if you have what's called an external locus of control, that's why you feel like whatever I do, nothing will ever change. I can't make things happen, right?
And there's a, as your attention gets worse, your locus of control begins to break down because you're not, think about your tick tockers, you couldn't even play a basketball game, right? What can they make happen? Okay, they can make their followership rack up on the tick tock, which probably does give them a sense of agency, but they can't make things happen outside that realm. You're going to feel incompetent.
There's actually lots of ways, particularly young people that our environment makes people feel incompetent. The way our school system works makes boys particularly feeling competent and is really damaging their attention, their sense of having a locus of control. There's a whole range of things we can think about in relation to that. So, there's one level at which, okay, you can't achieve the goals, you become more anxious because you're just not as effective a person in the world.
There's also another direction where as you become more anxious, anxiety itself undermines attention, stress undermines attention. I think a lot of this is happening at the moment with, with COVID where, I'll get into the debate about COVID because I can't bear that. If you think about, if you think about, I think it's happening to all of us, whatever you think about the response to COVID, there's a one called Nadine Burke Harris, amazing woman. She's now the surgeon general at California, the leading medical officer in the state.
And she explained this thing to me. It's how we think about why so many people haven't been able to focus during COVID. I remember at the start, lots of people going, I'm going to finally read that 900 page book I've been meaning to read and no fucker I know read the 900 page book during COVID, right? And Nadine said to me once, it was not that long before COVID, although we didn't know it, she said to me, okay, imagine one day you're attacked by a bear, you're just going about your business and you're attacked by bear.
In the weeks and months that follow, involuntarily something will happen to your attention, it will flip, it will scan the horizon for potential risks and dangers, right? Just this is just a natural thing. Some things hit you out of the blue, so you're going to be on the lookout for other things that might come out of the blue. So it'll be harder for you to focus on like a book, say, because a little bit of your brain or a big bit of your brain is going, what the fuck's going on, right?
Is there another danger around the corner? Okay, now imagine you're attacked by a bear again. Then you might flip into what's called, you're likely to flip into a state called hyper vigilance, where immediate focus on tasks like reading a book will be really hard, because you're just like, fuck it, I don't know what's going on here. I need to scan for risks, right?
There was a great child psychiatrist that interviewed in Adelaide in Australia called Dr. John Dredini, who said to me, you know, deep focus is a really good tactic when you are safe, right? It will help you grow, it will help you develop your mind, it will become a better person. But it's a fucking stupid strategy if you're in danger, right?
If you're in, you'd be a fool to sit at the battle of the Somme and read War and Peace, right? You're going to get shot in the head, right? So deep attention is something we can provide when we feel safe, and the kind of weird instability of COVID, I think has a lot of people into a state of vigilance and hyper vigilance, partly about the virus itself, partly about their work, partly just about what the fuck's happening, where are we, right? So I think, I forgot what your question was, Chris, what was that, how did I get onto this?
Just looking at how it is that focus and attention relate to our sense of wellbeing, but what you've identified there is that it's a reverse, it's that our sense of wellbeing can influence our ability to focus, which makes sense. Think about any time that you've had an impending awkward conversation and you're trying to do something to assuage the feelings of anxiety about the upcoming terrible discussion with your boss or girlfriend or whatever, mate. It's impossible. It's absolutely impossible.
And you talk about flow states as well, right? Yeah, I think about those in both directions. Flow states are an instant example of a form of attention that we know massively boosts mental wellbeing. A flow state is when you're doing something and you're meaningful to you and you really get into it and your sense of time falls away and your sense of ego falls away and your attention just comes so easily, you're not even thinking about paying attention.
One rock climber said flow is like when you feel like you are the rock, you're climbing, right? And flow states are the most deep and precious form of attention human beings can provide, and it's particularly important form of attention because it's not an effortful form of attention. When you get into flow, it's not like when you're trying to learn something for an exam, you're like, oh, fuck you, okay, this happened then and how do I memorize that? It's completely effortless.
So obviously I was thinking a lot about how do we get into flow, right? How do we get into states of flow? If this is like a gusher of attention that we all have within us, where do we drill to get that gusher, right? So I went to Intellima Harley Cheeks at me, he was the, you have no idea how long it took me to memorize that name, who was the, he's an, I think I did the last interview he ever did.
He was sadly died not long afterwards. Incredible man. So he was a Hungarian psychologist who discovered coin for the flow states and spent 50 years investigating them. And he discovered lots of things.
He discovered crucially, if you're question about well-being, the more flow states you experience, the better you feel about yourself. And interestingly, although in the state of flow, you have no sense of ego, afterwards you have a healthier sense of self. So people, there are some people, about 15% of people, very rarely experience flow states, and that correlates very highly with things like depression and anxiety. And the more flow states you experience, the happier you are.
And the more importantly, the more fulfilled you are. And so I was talking to him a lot about, you know, what, what's going on here? How can we get flow states? And he discovered an enormous number of things about this.
But I think the purpose is to listen to him, to maximize their flow states. There's three things I would recommend from his that he learned in his incredible 50-year body of research on this. The first is, there's three things you need to do to get into a flow state. The first is you have to choose one clear goal, right?
If you're trying to do more than one thing, you'll never get into flow, right? So I can't say I'm going to read this book and I'm going to watch the latest episode of whatever, the one will undermine the other. I mean, you know, get that in. So interruption, distraction or multiple goals, fuck flow.
The second is the goal has to be meaningful to you, right? And this is very important. You can't flow into something that doesn't matter to you. So you could say to me, you know, I'm painting this canvas or play this guitar or climb this rock and I would never get into flow with that, right?
The guitar would stand like I was killing an animal and the rock would just fall off the rock and die. So that would be a flow state because the blood would flow out of my body, but that would not be great, right? So it's got to be something that matters to you. And a lot of the times when people struggle to pay attention at work, it's often because their work is not meaningful to them and we can talk more about how you can build meaning into work.
If you're like, the third, and this is the one that most helped me. If you want to maximize your chances of getting into flow, choose something that's at the edge of your abilities. So if you're a medium talent rock climber, you don't want to climb by a garden wall, you're not going to get into flow over that. But equally, you don't want to suddenly try and climb Mount Kilimanjaro, you're going to just be overwhelmed.
You want to choose a rock that's slightly higher and harder than the last one you climbed. So clear goal, meaningful goal, edge of your ability. There's one person who said life begins at the edge of your comfort zone. And I think flow states begin at the edge of your comfort zone.
When you do that, you maximize your chance of flow. But I would argue in the book that we're living with a crisis of flow states. Given what Mahali said, and scientifically proved, that to get into flow, you have to be able to do one thing and not be distracted. Given that we know the enormous quantity of interruption that we're all exposed to, I think we expect to quickly know flow states, which is one of the reasons why.
It's not the only one by any means. It's one of the reasons why we've got high levels of anxiety and depression and a lot of these other problems. So feed, what gets you into flow, Chris? What's your...
Podcasting is probably the closest I get to it when it's a really good conversation and everything just gets forgotten about. And you're just here. I found it's easier for me with physical practices and mental ones. Reading a book, reading a good book is...
I can get there, but it's usually fiction. I struggle to get into a flow state with a non-fiction book. I find it a narrative and you can imagine the landscape of whatever's going on inside of your mind. But I play pickleball, for instance, for the first time, which is kind of like miniature tennis with paddles and a big ball.
And I played that for the first time in Austin while I was out there, and we went for three hours. And that, for me, I can drop into flow state in a physical practice super easily. I learned wake surfing while I was out there. I went shooting, tactical shooting at targets.
That all of those things I can drop into very easily. For me, it's much harder to do mentally. But I had Steven Kotler on from the Flow Research Collective. So he looked at the biology of flow and he said exactly the same thing.
You have, if you task switch, you're looking at between 15 and 20 minutes, 23 minutes for you to be able to get back into that. We also said that any type of emotion, emotional response, will knock you out of flow very quickly. And this is why turning out notifications is so important. Or if you're doing something where you're trying to get into flow, having a constrained environment where you don't get external stimuli, someone sends you an email.
Even if the email is basically neutral in terms of what it means to you, the fact that it's popped up will probably give you a small sense of annoyance. You notice it, or maybe there's an excitement or there's annoyance or whatever. And that emotion is enough to kick you out of flow. So that's the same as the task switch.
Your attention goes up, you notice something, maybe it annoys you, maybe it makes you happy, maybe it doesn't do anything, but there's just a little bit of something. And then you're out. And to get yourself back into that biologically optimal state for flow, it takes too long. And yeah, our days become fractured into segments so small that we can't get anything meaningful.
But we also can't get into a state that makes us feel meaningful. We can't get into a state that makes us feel good. So, yeah, it's... I think that's such a good way of putting it quiz.
I'm just thinking about that. I think you put that better than I did. I'm just thinking about there's so many aspects of that. Also, part of what's going is what's happening is that we're exactly what you just said, that process where we're so broken up, we can't find meaning.
Also, we're plugged into a machinery that diverts into a form of meaning that is mostly bullshit, right? So you think about the craving for likes and retweets, which everyone is on Instagram and Twitter will experience, right? And you feel good when you've got them. And it's really interesting how this...
I've appeared in my life where I've been successful on those metrics and it gave me a sort of rush, but it never made me feel good the way of the flow state does. And when I was in Provincetown and I had this dream on top of the internet, I was really able to think about that. And I've sort of had this slightly wanky epiphany where I was thinking a lot about... Because when I was away for this, for as long as I've been since they were invented, right?
And I was trying to think, why do I feel so much better when I'm, for me, reading a book? Or different people have different flow states where it's playing the guitar or surfing or whatever it might be? Why do I feel so much better when I'm doing those things than when I'm even when I'm sort of winning at social media, right? And I was thinking about this Canadian philosopher called Marshall McLuhan, who in the 60s said this famous thing that I had never understood.
And he said the medium is the message, right? Which I've heard. I never in a new way meant. And I started reading when I was out there and he's been dead for many years.
And McLuhan said that basically he was talking about television. When a new medium, a new way of humans communicating is invented like television. There's obviously the specific TV show that might have a message in it, right? You can watch the wire, that's got one message, and watch a wheel of fortune, that's got a different message, right?
But whether you watch the wire or wheel of fortune, the medium itself has a message in it. If you watch a television, you begin to see the world as being like television. Even if you think about something as simple as like how we think about our own memories as like flashbacks in a TV show, right? Like when you think about your childhood, you picture it, I picture it as like a flashback in a TV show.
People didn't think about memory that way before television was invented. They had memories and they process them in different ways, right? So when a medium comes along, it changes how you see the world. It's like putting on a new set of goggles and you start to see the world through that medium.
I think that's what he was saying. I couldn't be misunderstanding him. But I started thinking about that in relation to say Twitter or Instagram, right? Because what is the message hidden in the medium of Twitter?
Right? Doesn't matter if you're Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or Bubba the Love's Munch. When you tweet, you are buying into an implicit set of messages. The first is the world can and should be described in 280 characters.
That is a useful, valuable way of predominantly thinking about the world, right? And the second is that what matters is whether people immediately agree with your 280 character characterization of the world, right? Or think about Instagram where the message is what matters is how you look and whether people immediately like how you look. And I was thinking about it, and I mean, I like looking at people who look good, but with Twitter, I said, what?
One of the reasons I don't feel good even when I'm winning in that game is because I don't think that's true. I think that underlying message is really wrong, actually. I don't think many things that are useful can be said in 280 characters. In fact, almost nothing.
Maybe if you're a fucking Japanese haiku artist, right? But I don't see many of them on Twitter. And actually, whether people immediately agree with you is a very bad metric for measuring the value of what you think and say. Actually, almost everyone I admire, the first time they started saying what they said, people didn't agree with them.
If everyone immediately agrees with you, it probably didn't need to be said, actually. Everyone already knew it, right? And the same with Instagram. There's a value in people looking good.
But if that becomes, you know, it's just a reminder about depression, lost connections. I don't think that's how you, how many messages I got on Instagram from people with enormous Instagram followings. These like stunningly beautiful, you know, porn stars, sadly, all women. If the male porn stars want to get in touch, they're very welcome to you.
Who just feel like shit. And if you look to that Instagram, they're the ones that are winning in the game, right? Because this is a very bad metric to dominate your life. It's a perfectly good metric some of the time.
In a way, I don't think it's ever a good metric. I think looking good is good. But these messages are not good. And then I thought, well, when I read books, I feel very physical books.
I feel quite different. And I was the message in a book. In respect to the specific words of that particular book, the message is, firstly, slow down, right? Just slow down.
Think about one thing. But like, you know, a book, it'll take you seven, ten hours, whatever it is. It's worth thinking about just one thing for ten hours. That's a pretty radical message in the world we live in, right?
And secondly, you might want to think, it's what you said about fiction. One of the messages is, think about other people's internal lives. Stop and think about this. You might read a novel about someone who's really different to you.
But they've got an internal life just like you realize that we're incredibly similar. I just want to talk about like a Chinese peasant. You know, you've written by somebody, I've been a Chinese peasant. You know, you start to see the similarities and the differences.
To me, the message is about slowness and depth. Those are things that are actually worth having. People get them in different ways. They don't have to be a physical book.
But slowness and depth are things that are worth having. If everyone is listening, if you think about something you've achieved in your life, it will be because you slowed down, you focused deeply, you paid attention. It will not be because you've thought in quick, rapid fucking verse, and loads of people gave you hearts. That's not, if you are happy with that, if you think that's a great achievement, you're going to have quite a happy life.
Right? Does that ring Shoot-Shoot-Shoot-Shoot-Shoot? Yeah, man, there's a quote from Nival that says, Play Stupid Games win stupid prizes. I love that.
What he means is, what's Nival Ravakant is an investor from Silicon Valley and just one of the smartest guys on the planet. And Play Stupid Games win stupid prizes. What is the prize that you get for winning at the game that you're currently playing? What's the prize that you get for always keeping your Instagram DM requests folder at zero?
What's the prize that you get for always being the person that replies the quickest in the WhatsApp chat? What's the prize that you get for being the person that gets retweets on Twitter? Okay, like, you know, if you're trying to grow your company's fucking Instagram account because you think that you're going to be able to change the world and clean up the seas because that's what it does. Maybe, you know, that's a good way to do it, but most people don't realise what the prize is for winning the game that they're playing.
And if you looked at it, you wouldn't want to win that prize anyway. What's the prize for texting while you drive because you want to be the first person to respond in the group chat to that shit meme that you've seen before? Like with a fucking emoji. Like, we have to question around what it is that we're trying to do and why we're playing those games.
You mentioned that you're actually about sleep. What's, how does sleep relate to focus? Well, I spent a lot of time interviewing some of the leading experts on the world on this, and it's fucking chilling. The guy I mentioned before, Dr.
Charles Sizler, who's a Harvard Medical School, an amazing man. He did this experiment that really haunted me. He combined two bits of technology that have not been combined to look at sleep before. One is there's a technology that can scan your eyes to see what you're looking at, and there's another kind of technology that can obviously scan your brain.
And he put them together and he put them into this machinery, which was tired, not completely fucking knackered. They've been awake for 19 hours. And what he found was really chilling. So basically, you can appear to be awake.