PBD Podcast | EP 121 | Mental Health Expert: Johann Hari
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PBD Podcast Episode 121. In this episode Patrick Bet-David is joined by addiction and depression specialist Johann Hari and Adam Sosnick.
Check out Johann's book here: https://amzn.to/3gaMQ0v
Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N
Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list
About Guests:
Johann Eduard Hari is a British-Swiss writer and journalist. He has written for publications including The Independent and The Huffington Post, and has written books on the topics of depression, the war on drugs, and the British monarchy. Connect with him on Instagram here: https://bit.ly/35s69An
Adam “Sos” Sosnick has lived a true rags to riches story. He hasn’t always been an authority on money. Follow Adam on Instagram: https://bit.ly/2PqllTj. You can also check out his weekly SOSCAST here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw4s_zB_R7I0VW88nOW4PJkyREjT7rJic
Connect with Patrick on social media: https://linktr.ee/patrickbetdavid
About the host:
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media, the #1 YouTube channel for entrepreneurship with more than 3 million subscribers. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Bet-David is passionate about shaping the next generation of leaders by teaching the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and personal development while inspiring people to break free from limiting beliefs to achieve their dreams.
Follow the guests in this episode:
Johann Hari: https://bit.ly/35s69An
Adam Sosnick: https://bit.ly/2PqllTj
To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: info@valuetainment.com
Check out PBD's official website here: https://bit.ly/32tvEjH
Okay, so here's the interesting fact about today's interview, folks.
Brace for impact.
You got to wait eight seconds before you say, I'm not sure if I like this guy or not.
So his TED Talks have been viewed 78 million plus times, 80 million plus times.
His books have been translated in 37 different languages.
He's gotten praise.
Wait for it from Hillary Clinton, but also from Tucker Carlson.
He may be the only guy that has gotten praise by Hillary Clinton and Tucker combined.
Actually, in the little Venn diagram, there's Hillary Tucker Carlson, Oprah, and Noam Chomsky, and I'm the one person who's ever been praised by those four.
Don't forget Elton John.
I want them all to form an a cappella band and sing about my songs, but Elton's not up for it.
I don't know why.
Well, he would be the main guy, and everybody would just stand there.
He would mainly stand there.
But let me give you a couple of, here's what Hillary Clinton said.
In his unique voice, Harry tackles the profound dangers facing humanity from information technology and rings the alarm bell for what all of us must do to protect ourselves, our children, and our democracies.
Elton John says, if you have ever been down or felt lost, this amazing book will change your life.
Do yourself a favor, read it now.
I don't know if you saw his movie, by the way.
Did you see Elton John's movie?
What a movie.
Incredible movie.
I recommended that movie to so many friends who were having a hard time with alcohol because it was a, I don't know if you saw the movie or have you seen the movie?
I did, yes.
Ridiculous.
Rocket Man.
Rocket Man.
You're ridiculous.
Rocket Man.
Go ahead.
Go, sorry.
Yo, Hunway.
Sing me something.
Fun fact.
Here's a fun fact.
So my dad is 79 years old, hardcore Middle Eastern guy with old school tendencies.
I wouldn't say hardcore.
He's like the nicest guy ever.
He is the nicest guy.
You're making him out to be like some sort of tears.
He's just hitching Saddam Hussein now.
The most hardcore guy ever.
He's more like a Gandhi.
He's more like a Gandhi figure than anything.
He is more like a Gandhi than Saddam Hussein.
He's hardcore in his principles.
He's soft in his personality.
What I'm trying to say is he's very conservative, okay, in his way.
So one day we're staying at the Palazzo Suite.
It's like 15,000 square feet, and it's at the Rio.
And we're putting an event there.
And the hostess comes and he's given us a tour.
And he says, just so you know, Sir Elton John stayed here for two months.
You're the first family to stay here after Elton John.
I'm like, great.
So my dad's like, who?
Elton John.
He's a little bit worried.
He says, sir, just so you know, the bed you're sleeping in, this Elton John slept here last night.
My dad is like, Elton John slept here last night.
It was all trippy for him.
Anyways.
Your dad cannot be more conservative than my dad.
To give you a sense of my dad.
My dad thinks that Donald Trump is like a liberal, right?
My dad, I was very lucky because I'm gay and my dad.
My dad thinks Donald Trump is a liberal.
I was very lucky because I'm gay, and my dad's a bit homophobic, but fortunately, he hates women more than he hates gays.
So when I told him, when I told him I was gay, I just than a homophobe, he said to me, ah, son, it is Gujarat Faggot.
It means you don't have to deal with these bitches.
I was like, wow.
That's really real.
Did you really see that?
He did.
He meant it nicely.
He's actually a very nice person.
He would never be actually nasty to anyone.
My dad just got canceled by like so many people.
Oh, my God.
Is he a fan of Elton John?
He does love Elton.
Even like the most hardcore, the fucking Taliban people who think gay should be so lovely.
I'll tell you one quick story.
When I used to be in Nightlife, Miami, I used to hire DJs.
This one, you brought up the word Rio.
I don't think you meant from Brazil.
No, no, no.
So there was this one Brazilian DJ, and he goes, hey, Adam, guess who my favorite musician is ever?
Ever.
I'm like, just start guessing?
He's like, I'll give you a guess.
I'll give you a hint.
It starts with an H. I'm like, H?
I don't know, like Whitney Houston.
I'm thinking, you know, the H-Town boys, he goes, Herton John.
I go, that's Elton with the lead.
So anytime I think of Elton John, I think of Herd on John.
He's been to Halton, John, and back.
Yeah, that's hilarious.
Anyway, so today, we're going to talk about your latest book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again.
Now, the stuff you've written about and talked about, I watched both your TED Talks.
And by the way, what's so crazy is this weekend I was having my son watch some videos on focus.
And I'm like, here, go watch this video.
And I had no idea the video I had him watch was a video by you until afterwards.
I'm like, wait a minute, he's on the podcast this week.
So it was so interesting because your videos got a lot of views.
You get a lot of praise for him.
And it's mainly a lot of this stuff is about mental anxiety, depression, how to stay focused.
But now you've just addiction and we'll cover some of that stuff.
But tell us what inspired you want to write this book, Stone Focus.
Well, I noticed that with each year that passed, things that require deep focus, like reading a book, were for me getting harder and harder.
It was getting more and more like running up a down escalator.
You know what I mean?
Like, I could do it, but it was getting harder.
And I just, I was really uncomfortable with what was happening.
And I was really uncomfortable with the fact that this seemed to be happening to everyone around me.
And particularly the young people in my life.
A lot of them seem to be almost whirring at the speed of Snapchat, right?
Where nothing's still or serious.
I'm really curious about talking about your kids in this respect because a lot of the book is about kids.
And I want to figure out, well, is something unusual happening to our attention?
And if so, what?
And what can we do about it?
So I used my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to travel all over the world from Miami to Melbourne to Moscow to interview over 200 of the leading experts on focus and attention and just really deeply dig into their science to figure out what's going on here.
And I learned that there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse.
And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely rising in recent years.
We are in a real and massive attention crisis.
I reached the conclusion.
Just think about some simple facts.
For every one child who was diagnosed with attention problems when I was seven, and I think we're pretty much the same age, there's now 100 children given that diagnosis.
And that's because they're identifying a real problem.
The average American office worker now focuses on any one task for only 65 seconds.
So we're sorry, for only three minutes.
For college students, it's 65 seconds.
So we're facing a real problem here.
And I think what people need to understand is if you're struggling to focus and pay attention, as almost all of us are, your attention didn't collapse.
Your attention has been stolen from you by some very big forces.
And once you understand what's really happening to us, it opens up a different set of solutions that we can all achieve together.
And what is that?
Who has stolen it away from you?
So there's a huge range of factors.
And I'll give you one example, right?
You've got a phone here, and you might get some messages on it.
I assume it's about the show, right?
So I went to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, a guy named Professor Earl Miller, who's at MIT.
And he said to me, there's one thing you've got to understand about the human brain more than anything else.
You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time.
That's it.
This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain.
The human brain hasn't changed in 40,000 years significantly.
It ain't going to change on any time scale any of us are going to see.
You can only think about one or two things at a time.
But we've fallen for a massive delusion.
The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time.
But what happens is scientists get people into labs and they say, okay, do loads of things at the same time.
And they monitor them.
And what they discover is you can't do more than one thing at a time.
What you do is you juggle very quickly between them.
go from, wait, what was that Facebook message?
What did Patrick just ask me?
What's this on WhatsApp?
What's on the TV over there?
You juggle, you juggle, you juggle.
And it turns out that comes with a huge cost.
The kind of fancy name for it is the switch cost effect.
When you switch between tasks, you think you're doing lots of things at the same time.
So you're talking to me, you're looking at your phone, you're looking at the screen.
It turns out you will do everything you're trying to do less competently.
You make more mistakes, you remember less of what you experience, you're far less creative, and this sounds like a small effect.
When you first hear about it, you're like, yeah, I get that, but that's quite small.
It was shocking talking to the scientists to realize what a big effect this is.
So I'll give you an example of a pretty small scientific study that's backed by a wider amount of evidence.
Hewlett-Packard, you know the printer company?
Even the words paper jam make my whole body fucking tense up anyway.
Hewlett Packard, the printer company, got a scientist in to do some research on this.
And he split their workers into two groups.
And the first group was told, just get on with whatever your task is and you're not going to be interrupted.
And the second group was told, get on with your task, but you're going to have to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls.
So pretty much how you, you, me, how we all live most of the time, right?
And at the end of it, they gave an IQ test to both groups.
What they discovered is the group that had not been interrupted scored 10 IQ points higher than the group that had.
To give you a sense of how big that is, if the three of us sat down now and smoked a fat spliff together and got stoned, our IQs would go down by five points.
So being interrupted all the time in the way that we are is twice as bad for your intelligence as getting stoned.
You'd be better off sitting at your desk, getting stoned and doing one thing at a time than you would sitting at your desk, being constantly interrupted and not getting stoned.
To be clear, you'd be better off neither getting stoned nor being interrupted, obviously.
This is a huge effect.
If you're interrupted, it takes on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus that you had before you were interrupted.
But most of us never get 23 minutes spare.
So we're constantly operating at this diminished level of brainpower.
A different study found just getting eight text messages an hour, that doesn't sound like much to me, don't know if it does to you, that diminishes your ability to remember what you're experiencing and to answer questions about it by 30%.
This is why Professor Miller said we are living at the moment in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of all these interruptions.
Now that's one of the 12, one of many examples, but does that ring true to you guys?
I'm curious about your own lives.
Yeah, so I'm curious when I hear that, because I've heard that a lot with multitasking, you know, whether it was the yellow book, The Power of Habit, was it The Power of Habit by Hewick?
What was his name?
Anyways, there's so many books you can read about focus, right?
But at the same time, here's what I think about.
You ever seen the statistic of how much TV people used to watch 50 years ago versus 30 years ago versus 20 years ago?
It's like, oh my gosh, people watch 45 hours of TV per week.
This is insane.
This is ridiculous.
It's the end of the world.
We have lost focus.
We no longer have relationships.
We no longer have this.
And I'm like, wow, so TV ruined everything.
We go back.
You know, radio, people listen to 45 hours of radio prior to radio.
We used to go outside and we used to play with our families and we used to do this.
Okay, I can see that part.
But I think distractions have started since radio, right?
I mean, I would assume.
So I'm just speculating.
I don't know the, I've studied the numbers on radio and TV and we can pull it up.
But then it comes today with this being a distraction, which you're fully absolutely right.
But I would be curious to know, is the amount of TV we watch 30 years ago before this showed up, has that been replaced by the amount of phone entertainment we watch every week?
So there's interesting, there's research on this.
No, actually what we're doing is we're doing both.
We're watching TV and we're tweeting about it.
Actually what's incredible is TV viewership has not massively gone down.
What's happened is we're switching all the time between the two, which is one of the factors that's fucking up our ability to focus.
And I think, and there's a wider thing about, it's absolutely true, when you look at the evidence that our attention is getting worse, a lot of people, totally understandably, and this was my initial response, go, you know, isn't this a bit like a bit of a, what's called a moral panic, right?
A moral panic is when a change happens and people shit themselves and go, this is terrible.
And then actually in the long arc of history, you look back and you go, was that really so bad?
So think about, for example, in the 1950s, loads of kids were reading violent comic books.
And at the time, there's this huge panic about it.
There's Senate hearings.
And now we look back.
And if your kid's reading a comic book, we're like, seems very innocuous to us now.
So one way of thinking is that it might be like that, but a different way of thinking about it, and I think the evidence suggests it's more like this.
And I learned about this in part from Professor Joel Nigg, who's one of the leading experts on children's attention problems in the world.
This is more like where we were with obesity in the 1970s.
So if you look at a photo of a beach in the United States in, say, 1960, it's really weird to us because everyone is what we would call buff or slim.
Everyone.
And you look at it, you're like, where's everyone else, right?
And you look at the research, there was basically almost no obesity in 1960.
And then a whole series of changes happened in the way we live.
The food supply system completely changed, right?
What we eat bears no relationship to what our grandparents ate.
We built cities where it's impossible to bike and walk around, right?
And we became much more stressed, which makes us want to come for eat more.
And all these big changes caused an obesity crisis.
But when people started warning about this in the 70s, a lot of people said, ah, you said the sky was falling when we read comic books.
You know, you said the sky was falling when radio came along.
But this is just a moral panic.
But it turned out actually if we'd listened to them and made the changes they recommended, we wouldn't be in this obesity crisis now, which is so bad for people's health.
And I think what's happening is a kind of obesity epidemic for our minds.
Now, it's really important to understand it doesn't have to be this way, right?
And one of the reasons why this is so important is I would just say to anyone watching or listening, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life, right?
Whether it's starting a business like you guys have, whether it's being a good parent, whether it's learning to play the guitar, whatever that thing you're proud of is, it took a huge amount of attention and focus, sustained attention and focus.
And when our ability to focus breaks down, as it clearly is, I think, your ability to achieve your goals and your ability to solve your problems, they also start to break down.
You can also, when anyone who has a kid who can't focus, and there was an experience in my life like this that I can talk about if you like, one of the reasons it's so painful is you can see, oh, this kid is going to find it much harder to find their way through the world because they're not going to be able to sustain focus.
They're not going to be able to stick at difficult things or even with conversations, you know.
So yeah, I think this is a big crisis, which is a response to big changes that are happening from social media, some aspects of social media to the way we eat, from the hours we don't sleep to the hours we overwork.
There's a big range of factors going on here.
But crucially, when you understand these factors, we can start to get a handle on them.
And I'm sure we're going to get to that.
Well, Johan, you brought up social media.
So I wanted to ask, you know, Pat brought up radio, we talked about TV, even computers, even video games, anything that fits in that category.
That's all stuff you did at home.
And then it was time for you to get out the house, walk away, and then go live your life and do what you got to do.
Now, this goes everywhere with you.
Okay, so my question is, how much of that is related to this goes everywhere with you?
And how much is the, like, there's so many pros and cons you can talk about with the phone, but is this the biggest culprit these days?
You know, this is something I thought about a lot because I actually, at the start of researching Stolen Focus, I basically had two stories about why my attention had gotten fucked.
One was, I thought, well, you're just, you're lacking in willpower.
You're weak.
Why aren't you strong enough to just not look at this shit, right?
And the other story I had was, well, someone invented the smartphone, right?
That was, so, and fucked me that way, right?
Right?
So, because those were the two stories, I later learned it's much more complicated what's going on, and we need a different kind of solution.
But at the start, my response was, okay, I'm just sick of this.
I'm tired of being wired.
I want to get my brain back.
So, I went away for three months with no smartphone and no laptop.
How did you survive for three months?
It was really, it's fascinating.
I was really lucky because the film writes to one of my previous books, this also had a bit of money, and I went to this place called Provincetown in Cape Cod.
And it was interesting because there was lots of ups and downs.
But the thing that amazed me, and I think really speaks to your question, is, you know, I was nearly 40.
I thought, oh, maybe my attention is worse getting older.
My attention went back to being as good as it had been when I was 17.
I could sit and read a book for eight hours and not get straight.
It blew my mind how much my attention came back.
And at the end of, and I later realized there were lots of changes I made, like to what I eat in those three months that were also affecting my attention.
And I learned about this from scientists later.
But I remember at the end of those three months, just saying to myself, well, I'm never going to go back to how I used to live.
Why would I go back?
This is amazing, right?
The pleasures of focus are being able to follow through on a goal, the pleasures of being able to think deeply, have deep conversations, are so much greater than the shitty rewards of getting likes and whatever.
I'm never going to go back.
And then I got a boat across to Boston to my friend who I'd left my phone and my laptop with.
And within a month, I was, I never quite went back to as bad as I'd been, but I went like 80% back to where I'd been.
And I only really understood why when later I went to interview an amazing man named Dr. James Williams.
Dr. James Williams had worked at the heart of Google, part of the machinery that is fucking up our ability to focus and pay attention.
And he was really uncomfortable with what they were doing.
One day, he spoke at a tech conference to the people who are designing the things that obsess your kids and, you know, and all of us.
And he said to them, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, put up your hand now.
And not one of them put up their hand because they are all being hijacked by their own creation.
This was in a group of students.
No, this is a tech conference.
They're tech designers who are designing the stuff that you use all the time, right?
And he quit, and he became, I would argue, the leading expert on attention in the world.
And he said to me, look, the mistake you made when you went away for three months and just thought you could hide from it, he said, it's like thinking the solution to air pollution is for you personally to wear a gas mask, right?
I mean, if I lived in Beijing, I'd wear a gas mask, right?
There's a case for gas masks.
But we've actually got to solve the problem instead of just trying to hide from it.
You know what you're making me think about?
Let me ask you this.
What currency do you value the most?
We're all about the same age.
We're all one year apart, the three of us, okay?
You're 79, you're 79.
I think you're 79, 79, yes.
No, you're the year you're born is what I'm saying.
I'm sorry, I thought you were saying we're 30 years old.
You're 79, you look like your fucking skincare ratio is in person.
You look like you're 30 years old, but you look like a- I was born in 1979, yeah.
Okay, so you're 80.
80, okay, 78, 79, 80.
We're just two years apart, right?
So I've come to realize, let me just ask the question open-ended from you.
I'm curious to know what you're going to say.
What currency do you value the most?
Meaning, not currency as in, you know, I value Bitcoin or Ethereum or fiat or gold.
I'm talking about what currency do you value the most?
Is it happiness?
Is it stress-free?
Is it super intense engaged?
Is it in the hunt?
Is it serve?
What currency?
Do you have an answer?
I want to see what he's going to say.
I want to hear his, what currency do you value the most?
You know, I had such an interesting conversation with a guy called Dmitry Leontiev about this.
He's one of the leading psychologists in Russia.
And he said to me, you know, when Russians, he said, when we look at Americans and British people, you know, American and British philosophy is all about the pursuit of happiness, right?
It's even in the founding documents of the country, right?
We want to be happy.
And he said, you know, Russians, when we hear that, we just laugh.
He said, children want to be happy.
He said, you'll have no control over whether you're happy in your life.
Very minor amount of control.
He said, life is about meaning and the pursuit of meaning.
And if you have meaning, that'll carry you through a shit ton of unhappiness, right?
Or think about something as simple as going to the dentist, right?
You go to the dentist, you've got a toothache, and you know the dentist inflicts terrible pain on you, but that has meaning to you because you know it'll stop your tooth hurting, right?
If you took away that framework of meaning, if I just put a drill into your face now, Patrick, that would not be a lovely, you know, I went to the dentist and it helped.
It would be a form of torture, right?
So meaning can carry you through terrible forms of pain.
So for me, it's about pursuing meaning.
And this is really important for attention as well.
Attention evolved to attach to meaning, right?
A frog will stare longer at a fly than it will at a stone because the fly is meaningful and the stone isn't to a frog because they can eat the fly, right?
And part of one of the reasons we're struggling to focus so much now is that a lot of the stuff we're being asked to focus on is meaningless bullshit, right?
Your attention will slip and slide off meaningless bullshit.
Think about our school system, right?
The school system has been redesigned so it is overwhelmingly about getting kids to memorize meaningless shit that doesn't mean anything to them for tests that are also meaningless, right?
Now, after that change happened, when President, the first, the second President Bush introduced No Child Left Behind, the reform that made this, ADHD diagnoses went up by 24% in the next four years because kids can't focus on meaningless shit.
We can't focus on meaningless shit.
Obviously, the last quarter of the book is about how we can help our kids get their attention back, which is partly about restoring meaning.
There's lots of other things.
But does that ring true to you, Patrick, about meaning?
Yeah, so what I'm doing is I'm not trying to, I listen to everything you said.
I'm looking at this.
I'm trying to find this book I read where he said the opening line, I'll never forget, it was a very, and I want to hear what yours is, by the way, the currency.
I'll never forget.
We're reading this book.
I'm in this phase of reading Buddhism.
And it's like 2006, 2007.
And I'm just studying everything I can.
I'm just like, I want to know how to live more of a meaning life.
And the opening, I wish I knew who did.
I'll find it by the time we're done here.
He says, happiness is to suffer less.
Okay.
Happiness is to suffer less is what this author says.
And he's a pretty legendary author.
He's not like a regular guy.
And one of the guys that's sitting next to me, whom he and I started the office together, he says, you know what?
That makes all the sense in the world to me.
We're here in background.
Is your phone ringing?
All right.
Ironically, we're being interrupted by your phone, which is the subject's about Holzamberg.
Very interesting.
What do you say?
He's looking at this.
And you see, now it's going to take you time to refocus your mind.
And I'm not saying this smugly, like we all face together, but it's going to take time for you to refocus your mind.
It's so there right now because I remember the scene.
He's locked in right now.
He's sitting next to me and he says, you know what?
That's why I'm going to stop being a business owner and I'm going to go back to college because I want to suffer less.
And I sat there, I was, whatever 2007 was, 15 years ago, I sat there.
I'm like, is that really the purpose of life?
To suffer less?
And he's like, I think that's what it is.
What the hell are we doing?
Why are we chasing this?
Why are we going through this?
So I think a lot of times, based on what you're saying, is whatever your currency is, you're going to solve for that.
Adam, you were going to say your currency is what?
I just think the most valuable currency, the biggest asset you have is time.
You know, they say time is money.
Like you've gone and you've interviewed hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people.
I have done the same thing, but more with a different angle, more on a financial angle.
And because my whole story was I was a nightlife South Beach comedian, goofball, Miami.
I said, I'm making no money.
I got to get my shit figured out.
When I was in my, by age 26, I got a job in finance.
10 years later, I was like, oh my God, I've got all this money.
I've got all this time.
I'm working from home.
What do I want to do with my free time?
And I started interviewing guys like Pat who made it in business, financial advisors, and just basically understanding how money works.
And ultimately, what happened was I figured out, okay, you've got to have a budget, you have a game plan for your money, get out of debt, save your money, invest, insurance, protection.
And then I started asking questions about retirement, retirement.
And then I realized that people who are wealthy, they don't just sit around and do nothing and wait to die.
They do something with their time.
And then this kind of gets into your meaning.
And then if you ask people, if you had millions of dollars in the bank, that, you know, for some people, a million bucks is a lot of money.
For some people, 100 million bucks, whatever the number is.
But if you can own your time and if you can do whatever you want with your free time, I said, what would you do?
And everyone said the exact same three to four responses.
Number one, they would travel, right?
Who doesn't want to see the world?
Number two, they would pursue a passion, something that has meaning in their life.
They would do it for free, whether that's photography, art, stand-up comedy, play baseball, whatever.
They would do it for free.
Number three, they would give back or donate their time to causes they care about, right?
Whether that's homeless, you know, women's shelters, kids, anything.
They would do that.
And the biggest thing was leaving a legacy.
And so you can, quote unquote, live forever, have kids, family, philanthropic endeavors, whatever it is.
But at the end of the day, that's what they call you're chilling.
You can do whatever you want with your time.
But Adam, I think what you're saying is so important.
And I think for whatever your currency is and whatever your set of goals are, and I would agree with all of those goals that those people are putting forward, you've got to be able to pay attention to achieve any of them.
Dr. Williams, who I mentioned before, gave me a really good metaphor.
He said, imagine you're driving somewhere and someone throws a huge bucket of mud over your windshield.
Doesn't matter what you've got to do whenever you get where you're going.
The first thing you've got to do is clean your windshield, right?
Because you're not going to be able to get anywhere or achieve anything if you don't do that.
And in a way, when our attention breaks down, that's like mud on the windshield, right?
You're just your ability to get anywhere or do anything.
And you mentioned suffering, Patrick.
This is a real source of suffering, right?
When your attention breaks down, the way I would put it, and this really became clear to me in Provincetown when I had that time off and I began to be able to focus again, was it's like you become a kind of stump of yourself, right?
You can sense what you would have been if you'd been able to apply yourself, but you feel like you can't get that.
And that's why when you understand these 12 factors that are damaging our focus, it opens up there's two different ways we can respond to this, right?
We've got to do both.
The first is there are all sorts of things as isolated individuals, I think of it as offense and defense, right?
So we've got to play defense.
We've got to protect ourselves and our kids from these factors that are pouring acid on our attention all the time.
So I'll give you a go through dozens of examples in Stolen Focus, but I'll give you one example.
I should have brought it.
It's in my case outside.
I've got a plastic safe.
It's called a K-Safe.
You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put the lid on, you turn the dial, and it will lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day, right?
I won't sit down to watch a movie with my partner unless we both imprison our phones.
I won't have dinner with my friends unless everyone agrees to imprison their phones.
Oh, you make these demands before people get together.
Because it's difficult at first, but then people start to get the pleasure of, it's difficult for me.
But then you start to get the pleasure of a deep conversation, of deep engagement.
Yeah.
So that's one level of response.
Yeah, I think there is an area for what you just said.
I fully like that.
Like, you know, Jennifer and I, right now, when we go to dinner and we're with the kids, here's what else I say, babe, put my phone in your purse.
Okay.
Oh, wow.
And that's kind of like, hey, put the phone in your purse.
It's not my purse.
And boom.
After dinner, we have good conversations.
We talked.
I really enjoy talking to the kids.
And I'm the one that's always asking questions.
But I will say this to you.
So we've lost focus, right?
We're saying that focus is less, which I don't disagree, but I'm a little bit skeptical about it.
And challenge me on this.
Challenge me.
Please, I want to hear the challenge.
Yeah, so because to me, it's the way I see it is, would you say innovation is better today, 50 years ago, or 100 years ago?
When would you say innovation is better?
It's hard to measure these things.
Like advancement and innovation.
It's very hard to measure these things.
There's far more human beings now than there were 50 years or 100 years ago.
So, you know, you've got 8 billion people's brains on it now, as opposed to a billion people's brains 50 years ago.
I think it's very hard to compare.
I don't know if it was a billion 50 years ago.
I think it might have been a lot of people.
I think the democratization of technology is higher than ever.
Think about it.
They say, you know, that the phone you have in your pocket, that's the exact same technology that NASA used to get people in the space into the 60s.
And now everybody has it.
Not just NASA.
So this is what I'm trying to say.
Like, you know, okay, so for example, I did these two tests.
Okay, so I went and bought this.
I didn't buy it.
Greg Dinkin, shout out.
He got this for me as a gift.
He says, Pat, you got to put this ring on.
I say, okay, so aura ring, I put it on, and he looks at my stuff more than I look at my stuff.
Half the time I'm running out of batteries, and he says, you got to charge it.
But the other day, we're sitting there, we're having, and like, hey, Pat, how can you go off of four to six hours of sleep?
I'm like, I don't honestly have a clue, but I can pull it off, right?
You're saying he knows your sleep schedule?
Yeah, no, no.
So because it tells you everything, your readiness, all this other stuff, right?
And so, and by the way, we're not doing a sponsorship, anything.
So this is not like a sponsorship deal I'm doing.
I'm just telling you guys what this experience was like.
So then we sit down and we look at it with the guys and they say, Pat, you slept five hours, but you were in REM deep sleep for three and a half hours.
And I slept seven and a half hours and I was in REM only two and a half hours.
I'm like, okay, maybe we need to learn our bodies better.
So you're able to have deeper sleep than I'm having deeper sleep.
I have lighter silvers.
Okay, I don't know.
So then Dinkin comes and he introduced me to this other guy.
We're talking about at lunch yesterday, the DNA company.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't know if you heard about the DNA company.
They take your saliva and they come back and they tell you everything, your temperament, you know, how you will go here one second pissed off.
Two seconds later, you're telling a joke and you're just laughing about it.
You forgot about you moved on, right?
And your bone density, your testosterone, your estrogen, your food, what you should eat, what your body doesn't.
And I'm listening to the CEO of the company.
And I'm like, so I had my wife and I, because, you know, a lot of time when these guys say they're just trying to sell something, I'm very skeptical.
And I'm like, that made sense.
And Jennifer's just like, what?
Have you guys ever had, I've never met this guy before.
This made sense.
That made sense.
This made sense.
Okay.
So it made me think about a couple of different things.
I don't know if everything 100% applies to everybody because when I think about an athlete, so football's going on right now, right?
You think about a linebacker, you think about a quarterback.
A quarterback is in huddle.
He's looking at the situation.
The guy is speaking to him.
Audience, the fans are screaming and hollering.
Defense is running around.
Blitz is coming from here.
The guy's stepping back.
Are they going to do the blitz?
My guy's going behind me.
I got to step out.
I come back.
I got three, four seconds to look at my three different receivers, not lose the fumble.
I'm getting all this situation.
So that's, to me, that's all like 50 different multitasking.
Almost no one can do it.
The reason why the great guy is almost impossible.
So that goes to a point which I want to put it on you is, is one multitasking a muscle that we can improve in, but we're always going to do better if we're doing on one thing fully.
I fully believe that, you know, the one thing, like, you know, that's the best way to do it.
You're going to be better focused on one thing.
But is multitasking something we can get better in?
And if yes, is that someone's wiring?
Is it some, you know, the nurture versus nature with the DNA, the individual that some can handle it more than others?
What would you say to that?
So I asked the leading experts on this, I looked at the research and it was kind of depressing.
You can get very slightly better at it, but the truth is you can't get much better at it.
But I want to just, something you said, Adam, that I think is really important.
There were loads of things what you said about sleep as well, Patrick.
Remind me to come back to that.
But you said this thing that's really important, which is, oh, you know, the phone you use has the technology that NASA were using like 30 years ago.
That feels like democratization and in some ways is.
But you've got to ask yourself, what is that technology being deployed for?
Is it being used to make your life better or is it being used to invade your attention?
Now, it could be used to make your life better.
We could democratize it.
At the moment, it isn't.
So, and this was explained to me by some of the people who designed these apps, some of the leading figures in Silicon Valley, who've subsequently kind of spoken out because they're horrified by what they've done.
So let's say you pick up your phone now, Patrick, and isn't it funny how it even feels quite invasive to touch someone's phone?
Sorry, I don't mean to feel like weirdly personal.
Like I've touched your phone.
They're private.
Exactly, exactly.
Don't mean to me now.
Let's say you open your Facebook now or any of the major social media apps.
Facebook or whichever one you choose immediately starts to make money and it makes money in two ways.
The first way is obvious.
You start to see ads.
We all know how that works.
The second way is much more important.
Everything you do on Facebook is scanned and sorted by their algorithms because they're building up a profile of who you are.
So let's say that you like Donald Trump, Bette Midler, and you tell your mom you just bought nappies.
Okay, so I think anybody's going to be like the fucking Altman Dora Clinton Tunnel Castle Mom, but let's imagine.
So it'll figure out, okay, you like Donald Trump, you're probably conservative.
You like Bette Midler, if you're a man, you're probably gay.
And you're talking about diapers.
OK, you've got a baby.
It's building up an enormous, imagine it's got tens, if not hundreds of thousands of data points about you.
It's learning all about you.
Data, data, data, in order to be able to manipulate you.
Because you are not the customer of Facebook.
You're the product they sell to advertisers.
So the reason why they make the big bucks is they go to an advertiser and they say, we can target someone so directly.
You're selling diapers.
Okay, we can make sure your ads don't go to me.
I don't have a baby.
We can make sure the ads go only to people.
You want to target conservative gay people with babies?
We can get you there, right?
That's why they're so lucrative.
But what this means is every time you close Facebook or TikTok or Snapchat or any of them, what happens is those revenue streams disappear.
So the business model of all of the existing social media companies is very simple.
All of their engineering power, all of their algorithms, all of this genius they have is geared towards one thing.
Figuring out how do we get Patrick and Adam and their kids to pick up their phone more often and scroll for longer, right?
It is designed to invade our attention.
Sean Parker, one of the biggest initial investors in Facebook, said, yeah, the Napster dude, said, we designed Facebook specifically to invade people's attention.
We knew what we were doing and we did it anyway.
Something new?
Yeah.
Well, it's a much deeper form of invasion.
So you think about a TV ad.
Let's say you place an ad during the Johnny Carson tonight show, right?
That's a blanket thing that's going to, whatever it was back then, 50 million people.
That's very different to something that knows what you messaged your mom about last night.
That's learning all these deep patterns about your mind.
I think the DM part, the private conversations, that's your, that's my privacy.
But it's not a privacy thing.
Privacy is part of it, but it's that they can learn how to hack your attention much more accurately.
They're learning the weaknesses of the people.
Do you think that's innovative?
Do you think that's innovation or do you think that's manipulation?
Well, it's a form of innovation, but it's a form of innovation that harms our attention and has all sorts of negative outcomes.
And it's important to understand we can have all the good stuff about social media without this.
This aspect that is designed.
I like that.
And I watch Social Dilemma, right?
You remember Social Dilemma.
I'm sure you've seen it.
Yeah, I watched it.
Yeah, everybody.
You guys got to watch Social Dilemma.
Oh my gosh, it's the end of the world.
So I want Social Dilemma.
And I sat there and I said, okay, I can see that.
Got it.
The movie that made the biggest impact wasn't Social Dilemma to me.
It was a movie called Disconnected, which we can talk about the movie Disconnected, but let's stay on Social Dilemma.
So I watched this movie, the documentary, Social Dilemma.
I was like, oh my gosh, former president of this and former president of that, and these guys are doing this, and here's what we're doing.
Our intention is to do this.
I'm like, okay, what's new about this?
Like, okay, so for example, my kids, what do parents do?
We look for markers on how to gather data and intel on our kids to get them to stay focused because I can't say, son, let me tell you, here's a book.
Here's a biography of Aristotle.
I want you to read it.
That would never work.
But here's the diaries of Wimpy Kid.
Oh my gosh, I'll read 50 of them.
So I think the same kid that is obsessed with reading diaries of Wimpy Kid and the parent only targets what interests him, we're now that big kid that's interested in different things that it just adjusts.
And great marketers know how to penetrate that interest.
So the difference is, the difference is about the goals that you have for the individual.
So when you're learning what your kid wants, your goal for your child is for your child to be able to flourish, to have a good life, to be able to focus, to be effective in the world, right?
When Facebook or TikTok are learning about your child, those are not the goals that Facebook and TikTok have for your child.
They have one goal.
Let's make your child scroll as long as possible and pick their phone up as often as possible.
That's the only goal they have.
Just like the head of KFC, his only goal is, can I get your kid to eat KFC?
The only goal they have is can we get them to scroll?
So the issue isn't do you learn things about people in order to guide them?
That's a good thing in many contexts.
In the context specifically of learning things about people in order to guide them to scroll as often as possible and pay as little attention as possible, that's a bad thing.
Now that's bad for individuals and bad for the society.
So but go pull up McDonald's and go to type in McDonald's pineapple burger.
I can be hungry here.
I had a McDonald's breakfast this morning.
Did you really?
Let me put it to you.
You can tell from my chins.
I'm going to tell you, I would, the last time I had a Big Mac, check this out.
Go to, just type in McDonald's, go to images.
Oh, man.
Yeah, let me tell you.
So they came out with this idea.
Everybody gave this guy some McDonald's.
Years ago, they came out with this idea of McDonald's pineapple burger.
It was such a massive failure because they thought the healthy people are going to be interested in this pineapple burger.
And it failed, right?
So McDonald's goes and brings Ronald McDonald, okay?
And Ronald McDonald used to be a big kid.
If you went to McDonald's, it was everywhere.
Now, what was McDonald's strategy with Ronald McDonald's?
Here's what Ronald McDonald did.
They knew if they got kids addicted to Ronald McDonald, kids can't get in the car to come to McDonald's.
They have to tell mommy and daddy to go to McDonald's.
If they persuaded and won the kids over, they're automatically going to get a family of four or five.
So kids' meal, Ronald McDonald, next thing you know, it's a business model.
And by the way, here's what's crazy about it.
Do you know McDonald's for 30-something years, they profited every year for 30-plus years until one year when the whole Obama and Michelle Obama Obama and Romney were going at it.
And you remember that one thing when Sandy Hook happened and then Romney's about to become president and Benghazi's situation.
He's just really the third debate.
He destroyed Obama.
It was terrible.
It was not a good thing for Obama.
And the fourth debate, I'm on a flight with Bill O'Reilly and Dennis Miller.
They're doing a show.
We're going to Vegas because they're doing a show.
I'm like, Bill, what happened or Romney?
And he said, let me tell you what happened here.
Here's what happened here.
He says, the consultants of Romney said, you don't have the votes of single women.
And you have to stop.
Maybe talk.
They don't like it when you bash Obama with Benghazi.
Kick back on the fourth debate.
And he did that.
He lost.
Guess what?
McDonald's said, we're going to start selling salad.
Is there any way you could take this off the screen?
Because it's genuinely giving me great things.
Sorry, yeah.
No, no, it's making me hungry.
Yeah, so they went to salads.
They said, we're going to do salad.
Do you know the year McDonald's went to salad first, they lost money because they forgot who their customer was.
Their customer was the kid that forced parents to take them to McDonald's, which I've done many, many times, based on the kids' meal.
So I think that's called capitalism and innovation.
And some of the guys today, the way they're doing it, it's way more intrusive.
Totally agree.
It is intrusive.
But it's a business model.
It's not just that it's intrusive, it's that it leads to catastrophic outcomes.
So we all know about the obesity crisis.
It means that people die.
I think the figure is seven years earlier than they otherwise would.
And you're right.
Part of how this works is, so for example, more 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own last name.
So from the moment we're born, we are taught to associate positive feelings with unhealthy food.
And as you can see from my chins, I'm as much a victim of that as anyone, right?
But I think it's important to understand.
So I think part of what you're arguing, Patrick, which is really important to think about, is, okay, there's some harm here, but we just choose this.
This is capitalism.
We choose it.
And what I would argue is we're choosing it in a context that is absolutely loaded against us.
If I covered you guys with itching powder right now, you would scratch.
And at some level, you would be choosing to scratch, but equally, you wouldn't have chosen to scratch if I hadn't covered you with itching powder, right?
So you made a choice, but not in an environment that you chose.
In a similar way, there are all sorts of things that are happening to us that we don't choose that are making us much more vulnerable to making these bad choices.
And people can feel that, you know, people are choosing it, but they're unhappy with it.
In the same way that, you know, when I used to eat at KFC every day, I had a period in my 20s.
Yeah, I liked the KFC.
I didn't like being so overweight that I couldn't walk upstairs, right?
So in a similar way, we're making these choices, but this is way more invasive than anything that KFC can do to you, right?
I mean, KFC can put an ad on the TV.
They can show that tempting burger image.
McDonald's can.
But this is, and I think there are lots of things happening to us that are making us more vulnerable to this.
Remind me to come back to sleep because I really want to talk about your point.
But even let's just think about how the way we eat is affecting our ability to focus and pay for it.
So watch this.
I think you are social dilemma.
I think you are a form of social dilemma.
Let me explain.
I think you are a form of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and I applaud you for it.
And here's what I mean by it.
I'm on TED Talk's YouTube channel right now.
Okay.
And I'm on 11 days.
Give me, let's go to, let's, yeah, go to TED Talk's YouTube channel and scroll down to a video from, I don't know, go two weeks ago, okay?
Now, TED Talks, so everybody knows, now go to TED Talks, not TED, there's another one.
Type in TED Talks, okay?
And they have another channel with 32 million.
So go a little lower, go a little lower, go a little lower, a little lower.
No, no, what did you do?
Did you click on that?
Okay, right there.
Click on that.
Okay.
So how many subscribers?
Can you zoom in a little bit to show how many subscribers that is?
34 million subscribers.
Now go to videos, go to videos, and just keep scrolling down to like two weeks.
Keep going down.
Just scroll, scroll until it goes like to a month ago.
Okay, keep scrolling, keep scrolling.
What are you doing?
Okay, go type in videos.
click on the videos at the top, your videos, and just keep scrolling down.
Yeah, keep scrolling down, going, keep going until we go to like two weeks, okay?
Go to two weeks code.
This is a 33 million subscriber channel, okay?
33 million subscriber channel, tens of millions of eyeballs, okay?
Now zoom into somebody right there.
You went away from videos again.
I don't know why you keep doing that.
Okay, so go here to say, go to one of them right there.
All right.
395 views on a 33 million subscriber channel.
Zoom in a little bit so we can see the amount of money.
It's crazy, a thousand views.
Zoom in.
395 views.
I don't care.
790 views on a 33 million subscriber channel.
So watch this.
How is it that Johan here is able to get 80 million plus eyeballs on the same channel that thousands of other people can't even crack a thousand views?
Here's what I think.
I think your messaging is more innovative than others and you're able to connect to us as the audience than them.
How many of them have a book that they're publishing that would love to be sitting here right now so we can sell a few thousand books?
So the point I'm trying to make is I think we're in the game of attention and you've gotten the attention of former president, your former, you know, Hillary Clinton, Elton John, Tucker Carlson.
How did you get their attention?
So I think credit goes to the innovator who's able to get the eyeballs.
I don't see a difference between all of us here in social dilemma.
I may be wrong, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm all ears.
So I think you made a really important point.
I want to just think through it carefully.
So if this was an argument about is tech good or is tech bad, I'd be on your side.
Tech is good.
We don't want to all convert and join the Amish.
No disrespect to any Amish people.
I guess they're cheating if they're watching right now.
That's not the debate.
The debate, tech is good.
We want to have the technology we have.
We want to be able to reach people the way you and I do.
The debate is what tech designed for what goals working in whose interests.
So I think there's an analogy that can help us to understand.
I stress again in the book.
I go through loads of things that we can all do as individuals to protect and boost our attention.
And the last quarter of the book is particularly what we can do for our kids' attention, which I know will be very important to you as a dad.
So maybe we can talk about that as well.
But I think there are things we also have to do collectively.
Because at the moment, it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then leaning forward and going, hey, buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate.
Then you wouldn't scratch so much.
To which the logical response is, okay, well, fuck you.
I'll learn to meditate, but we need to stop you pouring itching powder on me.
So there's a very practical example, all within capitalism, of a historical analogy that I think could help us to think about this.
There's something in the past that was fucking up people's attention and we dealt with it.
And I think it can teach us how to deal with some of the things that you're talking about, where we can keep exactly the good stuff that you're in favor and I'm in favor of, Patrick, without this harm.
So you guys are going to remember, because we're the same age, it used to be normal that people put leaded gasoline in their cars, right?
I remember my mom putting leaded gasoline into her little red mini that she had, right?
And it was discovered that exposure to lead fucks your ability to think and pay attention, particularly for children.
It's a disaster, right?
It's actually known about going all the way back to the 1920s, but the lead industry funded kind of bullshit denial for a long time.
But in the end, by the 70s, by the time we were kids, the early 80s, it was just undeniable.
So a group of moms got together and they said, okay, why are we allowing this?
Why are we allowing these companies to fuck our kids' ability to focus?
You're saying with the gas?
Yeah, with the, so what happened is that?
Is it lead in pencils in schools?
Not anymore.
Because exposure to lead is so bad for you.
I mean, it still is a bit, but they're not in a way that you can suck on it like they used to.
Because exposure to lead is terrible.
It used to also be in paint.
People used to paint their houses with leaded paint, right?
What these moms did not say, and it's really important to think about what they didn't say.
They didn't say, let's ban all gasoline.
They didn't say, let's ban all paint, right?
They said, let's ban the specific thing in the gasoline and the paint that is fucking our kids' ability to focus, which is the lead, right?
They led a campaign, they succeeded, right?
There's no more lead in paint and gasoline.
As a result, the Center for Disease Control says the average American child had a boost of between three to five IQ points because they were no longer exposed to this pollutant, right?
Now, I think, and it doesn't really matter what I think, what a load of the experts that I interviewed think is there's an analogy with social media, right?
So go back to what we were saying.
What's the equivalent of the lead in the social media?
How do we have the social media?
Dopamine, addiction.
What would you say?
Well, I think it's the business, the current business model, right?
Which is one form of capitalism that could be replaced by a different form of capitalism.
So going back to what we said, right?
At the moment, you open Facebook.
Every minute you scroll, they make more money.
And every minute you put your phone down, the revenue stream disappears.
That's it.
So the whole machinery is designed and for TikTok and for Snapchat, the whole fucking lot of them.
It's all designed, how do we raid your attention the most, right?
That's it.
That's their model.
But when I interviewed lots of the people who designed key aspects of the internet, like a guy called Aza Raskin, who designed something called Infinite Scroll, it's the heart of most websites, including YouTube, the one we just looked at.
He said to me, look, the solution here is very simple.
When it comes to the tech component, I stress again, there's 12 elements I write about in the book.
But for this component, you've got to ban that business model just like we banned the lead in the paint.
Just say a business model that is designed to secretly track you in order to figure out the weaknesses in your attention, hack them, break your attention open, break your kids' attention open.
And I remember saying to Aza, I shook my head like you just did, Patrick, and I said, wait, wait, A, that seems like a really big thing, but B, what would happen if I opened Facebook the next day?
Would it just say, sorry, guys, we've gone fishing?
He said, of course not.
What would happen is they would move to a different business model.
And there are two different business models that are happening in this building right now.
The first business model is subscription, right?
Everyone here, there'll be some people here who've got Netflix subscriptions, HBO subscriptions.
We all know that's a form of capitalism.
You'd pay a small amount for access, right?
Or the second is one that's definitely in this building because I used it before we came here.
You've got a sewage system here, right?
Now, before we had sewers, we had shit in the streets, we got cholera, so we all pay to build and maintain the sewers together, and we all own the sewers.
You own the sewers here in this part of Florida.
I own the sewers in London and Las Vegas, the places I live.
We all own the sewers.
Now, it may be that like we own the sewage pipes together, we might want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the equivalent of cholera for our brains.
But the really important thing about this is what changes, and it comes back to what we were saying, like you were saying about your son, with goals, right?
At the moment, the only goal of social media, the way it's designed, is to invade your attention, break it open, and keep harvesting it, right?
But under this different business model, whether it's subscription or a sewage-like system, what happens is all the incentives change.
Suddenly, you stop being the product that they sell and you become the customer.
So I'm like, what does Patrick want?
Oh, Patrick wants to be able to meet up with his friends offline.
We'll design Facebook to make that easier.
Adam wants to be able to pay attention.
Okay, we'll design Facebook to heal his attention instead of hacking it.
But to get there, you've got to change the business model, which is entirely within capitalism.
This is not an anti-capitalist.
I don't know because I get how it upsets some people because of the amount of power.
The area that concerns me with these virtual governments is a complete different thing than what concerns that individual you were talking about.
Because to me, I've bought a lot of products that was based off a great ad.
I've seen and been inspired by many stories.
If it wasn't for the algorithms, my son would have never watched a video from you, right?
The video, if it wasn't for the algorithms to buy certain products for myself, okay, so I'll be- This isn't an argument against algorithms, just to say, this isn't.
This is an argument against the ads.
It's like saying, so an algorithm is like a recipe, right?
An algorithm decides what order you see things in in social media, right?
But you're saying Facebook shouldn't make money based on the ads because they're gathering intel based on me to show me products that I'm going to buy, and that becomes a business model that Facebook, we should change that model.
No, they shouldn't have a business model that's designed to maximally invade people's attention.
You can still have algorithms in the different models.
You need to have algorithms.
But it's like saying, because I agree with you.
Do you know what I mean?
It's like saying I don't have a problem with eating a KFC bucket.
I love eating a KFC bucket, but I know that it comes with the cost that I become obese.
So the thing you're describing has some benefits, of course, just like eating KFC has plenty of benefits to me.
I love it, right?
But it comes with a cost.
The question is, is the cost outweighing the benefits?
Should we eliminate that from people?
Should we eliminate from people hurting themselves?
Like, should we eliminate, you know, the four?
Okay, so maybe let me ask you this.
What do you think about the system of capitalism?
I think markets are a really important tool.
Every society that's ever abolished markets regresses to extreme poverty.
I don't think markets should be everything.
I think there are other forces that are really good and healthy in this society as well.
The two most popular institutions in the United States are Medicare and the military, neither of which are run according to markets.
So, you know, you want to have a mixture.
You want to have a really strong market economy and really strong countervailing forces that operate on different models.
So it's not about, this isn't about being anti-capitalism.
This is about saying the current model we have, and this isn't, by the way, just true of this one factor of the 12 that I wrote about in Starliner Focus, the harming our attention.
It's true of lots of them.
We can talk about the food industry, for example, or air pollution.
There's a whole, or the factors that are causing us so much stress.
Stress destroys your ability to focus and pay attention.
But the question is not, are these things good?
The question is, do they come with costs?
And do the costs outweigh the benefits?
And a model that is destroying.
Think about the fact that one small study, for example, backed by a wider body of evidence, found out that the typical American college student now focuses on any one task for only 65 seconds.
Children with attention problems are blowing up, right?
Think about the fact the average American office worker only focuses on any one task for three minutes, right?
Imagine your whole life passing in a hailstorm of three minutes here, three minutes there, three minutes there.
What was that?
What was this?
This is the texture of our everyday lives.
And at the moment, we're in a race, right?
At the moment, to one side, you've got all these 12 factors that are causing attention problems, many of which are on course to get much worse.
Paul Graham, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, said that the world would be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40.
Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to your child than Facebook, right?
So these forces are on course to learn how to hack our attention in ways that will make Facebook look like a fucking Tetris on a game board.
Sorry, you had a point with capitalism.
I'm sorry, I cut you off.
Sorry.
No, no, no.
I think that's where we were.
This is good.
I like that.
This is the banter we're having.
I don't want you.
I want you to get.
This is like the, we're learning.
We're getting to a place.
Yeah, where I'm going with this is like I'm sitting with Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon, right?
And I'm interviewing this guy.
And, you know, we all know Lululemon.
And they, by the way, they started off being 88% of their clients were only women.
And now it's like 55%.
45% of their customers.
Would you have ever thought like 40-something percent?
I still think it's 80-20.
And he said this.
I was at the Lululemon store the other day.
I got a couple shorts.
I think I don't understand.
I don't know if we bought Lululemon or Nikes.
He would know us because he picked them up.
But we wrote the Lululemon.
I'm like, you know what?
I would probably sport that.
I would probably wear that for a workout.
The material is good.
I'll sport it.
But here's what he said to me.
He says, 20 years from now, being in shape will be irrelevant.
I said, tell me why.
He says, everyone's going to be in shape 20, 30 years from now.
I said, explain that to me.
That doesn't make any sense because everything nowadays about sitting down, not moving, you're not doing this.
What do you mean we're all going to be in shape?
He says, because you know how everyone's got a smartphone right now?
I said, yeah.
He says, everyone's going to have smart clothes.
I said, what do smart clothes mean?
Smart clothes are going to say, here's where you're at.
Sit down, stand up a little bit, move.
You got to do this.
Your temperature, you're going to look at your shirt.
It's going to say, here's where you are.
You drank too much.
You know, drink more water.
Take a sip of this.
Smart clothes are going to get us to be more aware of what we're doing.
He says, the idea of being in shape is going to be nothing.
Like today, you see somebody with a six-pack, maybe not even today, because today we see so many people that are in shape as well.
You'll see somebody with a six-pack, so you'll be impressed.
He says, in 20, 30 years, you're going to be like, yeah, whatever.
Everyone's in shape because what we're wearing.
Now, is he right or wrong?
I don't know.
Is innovation advancing where they're seeing problems where entrepreneurs like himself are sitting there saying, how can I be the solution to this problem that this person's having?
I think innovation wins.
I think the part that concerns me is the following.
The part that concerns me is when, like, you know, in 2000, I don't know what year it was, I went and sat down with a psychologist.
I had a lot of stress in my life.
I'm like, man, what the hell is going on?
Like, is this business stuff worth it?
Why is this so much stress?
One night I come home, two o'clock in the morning, my body's bouncing off the ground.
My wife's like, what is going on?
She calls my dad.
My dad comes over.
I go to the hospital.
He's like, I think he's having a heart attack.
They're like, no, this guy's not having a heart attack.
What have you done the last few weeks?
I said, I've been just on the road, busting it, going on three, four hours of sleep.
He says, dude, your body's exhausted.
Okay.
This has happened a handful of times in my career, right?
And so they put on a couple IVs on me.
And then I went to work.
But I was kind of like, is this worth it?
Is it worth you working as hard as you're working and being in the hunt?
I'm like, dude, I wouldn't want it any other way than being in the hunt doing something big in my life.
But I think sometimes, you know, we try so hard to move the pain and the challenges away.
I want to have pushback.
I want to have some being in a moment where it's stressed.
It's probably stressful to be in a fourth quarter and performing.
It's probably stressful to have kids.
You know, last night I'm sitting down with Dylan and Tico, and I said, Dylan, how many kids do you want to have when you grow up?
And Dylan's like, Daddy, I think I just want three.
Last night, I'm talking to Dylan about this.
Just three.
Yeah, I said, why three?
He says, honestly, daddy, because I think four is a lot of work.
I'm like, what?
He says, you guys got four.
And I see it.
It's a lot of work.
I think I want to have one less.
So you want to have one less.
By the way, he's got an eight-month grow.
Yeah, this eight-year-old kid is telling me that he wants to have only three kids.
But I think the name of the game is overcoming an obstacle or a challenge or some of those things.
These distractions are never going to go away.
It's been the job of everybody to distract them.
What concerns me is when the big pharmaceutical companies, when I go and met with the therapist, it's like, yeah, take this medication.
It's going to solve it.
I'm like, no, bro, I don't want this.
Give me a real permanent solution.
You know, why don't you take this over here?
Why don't you take that over here?
Why don't you take this over?
I'm like, is this really the solution?
I lost a friend one time to my best friend in the world.
I lost because he was taking 50 Vicodins a day in front of me.
He took eight in front of me.
The guy got three.
What do you call it when you're driving under the influenced?
He wasn't drunk.
He was on Vicodin.
He got into three car accidents in a week, went to jail.
We have to go get him.
I'm like, what are we doing?
Took him to a rehab place for two weeks.
And then eventually, you know, he died.
Just to go back, there's so many things in what you just said that are so important.
So like you, I am passionately in favor of innovation.
Innovation is the thing that moves the human race forward.
The single, if you look at all the research about innovation, all serious innovation requires deep thought, it requires periods of mind wandering, it requires really sustained focus and attention.
So if you're in favor of innovation, as we both are, passionately, the thing you most want to get right is attention.
Because humans who can't pay attention can't innovate, right?
If you can only think in 65 second bursts, good luck thinking of something new, right?
You'll never get there.
So if I think about all the really impressive innovators I've ever met, from Oprah to Noam Chomsky, they are people who make space to think deeply, to really properly pay attention.
So I think, and I wanted to just go back to something you mentioned before.
I also really want to talk about childhood because I'm really fascinated that you've got an eight-year-old and I think this is, there's specific elements that are destroying our children's attention that I think will really vibe with, the solutions will really vibe with you.
But let's think about sleep because you've mentioned that a few times in exhaustion, right?
So we are in the United States, a chronically sleep-deprived society.
Only 15% of us wake up feeling refreshed.
It was one of the weirdest things that happened to me in Provincetown when I took those three months off.
I remember one morning about a month in, I woke up and I went into the kind of kitchen.
I was like, I feel really weird.
What do I feel?
And I couldn't place it.
And I realized I had woken up and I wasn't tired, right?
It was the first time I remember that happening to me in my adult life because we live at such a level of exhaustion.
40% of Americans are chronically sleep deprived.
So I interviewed loads of the leading scientists on sleep, people at Harvard Medical School and other places.
And there was a few bits of science that really threw me on this.
If you stay awake for 19 hours, which sounds like nothing, right?
19 hours, you will be as, your attention deteriorates as badly as if you got legally drunk.
There was one experiment done by a guy called Dr. Charles Seisler who I interviewed at Harvard Medical School.
He put together two forms of technology.
There's a technology that can track your eyes to see what you're looking at.
And there's a technology we all know about that can scan your brain.
So it gets tired people and he puts them into this machinery.
And what he discovered was a complete headfuck.
You can be awake, you can be looking around you, you can appear to be as awake as you and me, but whole parts of your brain kind of gone to sleep, right?
You know what we use that phrase, I'm half asleep.
Turns out that's not a metaphor.
A lot of us are literally half asleep a lot of the time.
And this is so important because Professor Roxanne Prichard, who's at the University of Minneapolis, explained to me a lot that when you're sleeping, your brain is repairing.
It's healing itself.
So throughout the day, something called metabolic waste builds up in your brain.
It's what she calls brain cell poop, right?
And when you sleep, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open up and a kind of water rinses through your brain and it clears out all this shit that builds up during the day.
If you don't sleep properly, if you don't get eight hours sleep a night, which feels like a luxury to a lot of people in the United States, if you don't sleep eight hours a night, your brain does not clean itself.
This is why people who sleep less are far more likely to get dementia.
You literally build up with shit in your brain.
Your attention will be much worse.
You know that kind of hungover feeling you have when you're tired?
It turns out that's because your brain is literally clogged up.
So the single best thing you can do for your attention, along with exercises at an individual personal level, is get more sleep, right?
So yeah, the science on this is really clear and pretty shocking.
Now there are some, and it sounds like you might be one of them, there's some natural genetic variation in terms of how much sleep people need.
And some people are really lucky and just naturally need less sleep, but it's quite a small part of the population and some people are unlucky and need a shit ton more.
I actually agree with you.
I agree with you that, you know, the more and more.
And by the way, even the bodybuilding world, this gentleman you spoke to that said sleeping helps with mental, like you're taking a mental shit, like you're releasing all the toxins out of your body.
That should have been the name of the book.
So, you know, the same thing happens when you're sleeping.
Your muscles don't grow when you're working out.
Your muscles grow when you rest.
Your muscles, when you're sleeping, your muscles are growing.
So I can actually see that.
You know, going back to focus, so let's talk about focus because you said I fully believe that if, you know, Noam Chomsky and Oprah went free to innovate at the highest level, you have to learn how to be fully focused.
I 100% agree with that part.
So let's talk about somebody that's right now, you know, got all the distractions we all got.
They got one of these, they got an iPad, they got kids, they got family, they got, you know, their jobs, they're trying to get a side hustle, they got, you know, all these other things that they're doing, and they're having a hard time to stay focused.
What is the basic formula for want to stay focused?
So there's lots of things, and I go through dozens in the book, but I'll give you an example of one that really helped me in my life, and I think will help people in that position.
So I learned a lot about the science of something that are called flow states.
Everyone listening will have experienced a flow state.
A flow state is when you're doing something that's really meaningful to you and you just get into it and you're in the zone and it's like time falls away and your ego falls away and you're just in it.
The way one rock climber put it is a flow state is like when you feel like you are the rock you're climbing, right?
So for me it would be when I write.
For someone else it might be when they make bagels or they do brain surgery or they play the guitar.
But a flow state is really important for attention for two reasons.
A flow state is the deepest form of attention you can bring, right?
When you're in a flow state, you are deeply focused.
And a flow state is the easiest form of attention.
Once you get into it, it's not like memorizing facts for an exam.
It's like, you know, like, oh shit, how do I do it?
Why are you in that state?
You're in it.
It's not even, you don't even have to once in it.
There's no effort involved.
You're just, it's called a flow state because you are just flowing, right?
So I wanted to understand, given this is the easiest form of attention once you're in it and the deepest, shit, how do we get more of this?
I went to interview Professor Mihali.
Cheek sent me high.
You have no idea how long it took me to learn how to say that.
Who is the leading ex was that sadly died, sadly died recently.
But he was the leading expert on flow states.
He studied them for over 50 years.
He's the man who coined the phrase.
And he discovered a shit ton of stuff about this.
But I think there's three that would really help the person you're talking about.
Three key facts.
If you want to maximize your chances of getting into a flow state, and there's no guarantee, but if you want to maximize your chances, you've got to do three things.
Firstly, you've got to narrow down to one goal.
If you're trying to do more than one thing at a time, you'll never get into flow.
Choose one goal.
Secondly, it's got to be a goal that's meaningful to you, right?
If it's not meaningful, you won't get into flow.
And thirdly, it will really help if you choose a goal, and this is counterintuitive at first, it will really help if you choose a goal that's at the edge of your comfort zone, at the edge of your abilities.
So let's say you're a medium talent rock climber, right?
You don't want to just try and climb over your garden wall.
It's not going to get you into flow.
Equally, you don't want to try and suddenly climb like one of those mountains in Colorado that's really high or just shit yourself.
You want to choose a rock face that is slightly higher and harder than the last rock face you climbed.
So if you do these three things, choose one goal, make it a meaningful goal, make it one at the edge of your abilities, you massively maximize your chances of getting into a flow state and being able to do that deep form of attention.
But there's lots of other things that we can do.
I recommend really long social media breaks.
I take half the year completely off social media and I'm so much more productive in those six months than I am in the six months when I'm on it.
I sleep much more than I used to.
I mentioned the K-Safe.
I bind myself in.
I lock that shit away.
I, you know, because I know that I'll crack if I just leave it sitting there.
But there's one about kids that I think is really important as well, because in a way, if we're not building the baseline of focus and attention for children, this is going to be an even bigger problem 20, 30 years from now.
You're saying kids that get into a flow state or just generally for children and attention.
Before we get kids, I know we're going to spend time on that.
Want to talk about that flow state because we have a lot of entrepreneurs on our channel, people that are in business.
Some of the things you were talking about they have a have a very much similarity to what we talk about here.
What you talk about here is, rather than doing a handful of tasks, gets you know, focused on that, and what we call that is being a specialist being versus being a jack of all trades.
It's the first thing I thought of.
It's like okay, if you want to be good at something, focus on one thing and be great at that one thing.
Everyone wants to talk about having, you know, double sources of income and like multiple uh, incomes coming in.
It's like no, let's just get one income solidified.
And then, number two, you said what, um?
Meaningful goal, meaningful goal.
So for that, they say, you have to work about something that you're passionate about.
You don't have to.
You don't have to.
You know, patch passion is baseball cards, but it's not, wasn't he's?
Or baseball, it wasn't gonna be a baseball player or collect baseball cards for a living.
Understand American sports, no matter how long.
It's a fucking excuse me.
But basically, you know, choose something that you know you're you'll specialize in, that you're passionate about and then, last but not least, your comfort zone will kill.
You, push yourself to the point where you're like, I don't know if I really want to do that, but i'll go for it.
But so it seems to be an analogous to to basically the business stuff that you talked about, did you?
Did you?
Did you kind of pick that up when you were saying Title?
Just pulled something up.
David, if he can show this uh, how to take Bill Gates' think week to recover from life?
Every year he takes a week with Bill Gates.
He goes to a cabin, no phone, no laptop no, nothing.
And you think about guys like Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, all the multi-billionaires that are innovators.
What do they do every morning?
They wake up and they meditate.
They don't have their phones, they don't have their eyeballs, or they read, they sit, they think.
Well, there's speculation that a friend of them would meet them at this think week place, but that's a different conversation.
But let me, let me go.
I, I think, I fully.
There's a story that I want to hear offline, but i'm no longer married.
What I like about this is I fully subscribe to this.
I, you know, I sometimes would say hey, i'm going over here.
I'm going to be here for a day.
Don't bother me.
If you need to get a hold of me, here's my room number.
Here's this.
Well, you said the story about when you went to Harvard Business School and what did the business go?
He says, don't touch your phone, don't worry about it.
We got this thing, we're gonna take care of it.
Just how hard was that for you to do?
Mathematically impossible.
You do not regret it, do you was one of the best things I did.
But this is, this is why you know it's so interesting about touching a phone.
The average person touches their phone 2617 times a day right, and it used to be 150 just 10 years ago.
I know it's a massively exposed number, 2617.
It's probably higher now because that was that research was done before the pandemic.
So you think about you, excited about the reason the subtitle for the book is and how to think deeply again is for exactly this reason right, because you we were talking before about some of the benefits right, and there are real benefits from the speedy way in which we live.
It's very important to acknowledge that.
But one of the costs is when you go really fast, you lose depth and you and all innovation and all originality and all creativity come from depth, right?
So what happens is we're constantly living in in the shallows In these kind of manic mode.
So if you don't make space, and we've got to be honest with people, you know, the way Professor Joel Nig, who I mentioned before, one of the leading experts on children's attention problems, put it to me, is he said, we live in what he called an attentional pathogenic environment, which means this is an environment where it's very hard for people to do the right thing and focus deeply.
The number of people who can do what Bill Gates does is very small, right?
The number of people who can do what we're proposing currently is small.
And the only thing I think, in this whole conversation, I think the only thing where I've disagreed with, and I understand why you say it, because part of me thinks it is, you said before, I can't see where I wrote it down, but you said something like, this is never going to change, right?
You're going to always be in an environment that's going to be, and of course there's always going to be some distractions.
You're right about that.
There's always going to be a human struggle between, you know, you can go back to monks a thousand years ago and they still struggled a little bit with, well, I could be distracted by this thing or I could do this other thing.
But we're living in an environment now that is hugely damaging our attention, right?
And I do think we've got to understand that because A, we can protect ourselves and our kids better when we understand it.
But B, because the environment can change, right?
Think about leaded paint, right?
When we were kids, we were exposed to lead.
That damaged our attention, right?
Damages everyone's attention.
You could have said then, I'm sure you wouldn't have, but someone could have, people did say then, oh, you know, this is always going to be a problem, right?
How are we ever going to deal with it?
But actually, we did deal with it, right?
And for all of the other 12 factors that we're talking about, there are very practical solutions.
So let's think about the ones that relate to kids in particular, because I'm fascinated by, so we can look at the school system, but set that aside for a minute, right?
There's a huge change that I think we're really well suited to see, people our age.
So tell the story in the book of a woman called Lenore Skenazi, who you guys should totally have on.
You'd absolutely love her, hero.
So Lenore, Lenore grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the 1960s, and kind of normal suburb.
And from when she was five years old, she would leave home on her own to go to school and she'd walk on her own to the school, which was 15 minutes away.
She'd generally bump into the other kids, they'd all walk together.
When they got to the school gate, there was a 10-year-old boy whose job was to help the five-year-olds cross the street, right?
She'd go into school, she'd stay there till 3 o'clock or whatever the time was.
She'd leave on her own, she'd play games with the other kids in the neighborhood, and she'd find her way home by like 6 p.m., right?
By the time Lenore had kids of her own in the 90s, she was living in Queens in New York, that had completely ended, right?
She was expected to walk her child to school and be waiting at the school gate when he came out.
By 2003, only 10% of American children ever played outside, right, without an adult.
Ever.
And I think of the 10% who did, the average amount of time they did was like 12 minutes.
So basically, childhood suddenly moved, even before COVID, to be something that happened basically in imprisonment, right?
Children are hidden behind closed doors.
The only place they ever get to explore anything is on Fortnite and World of Warcraft.
So we can hardly be surprised they become absolutely obsessed with them, right?
And it's not a coincidence, I think, that this complete transformation of childhood, which we were just on the cusp of, like I played outside, did you guys play outside?
Yeah, of course, all the time.
Exactly.
Completely.
We're basically the last people in the Western world who as kids got to play outside.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that this huge transformation of childhood coincided with an enormous increase in children's attention problems.
Because if you look at this unprecedented change that's happened, there's never been a generation of human children ever who were kept inside their homes.
When we were kids or when our parents were kids, if someone kept their child locked away all day, I mean, that would have been regarded as child abuse, right?
This transformation contains all sorts of smaller changes that have fucked people's attention.
Think about a really simple one.
Exercise.
The evidence that exercise is good for your brain is overwhelming.
It massively improves your attention.
If you're struggling to focus, go for a run, right?
We have prevented our children from exercising.
Only 73% of elementary schools in the United States have any form of recess, right?
73% have any, so that's 27% have no recess.
So three out of four do have recesses.
Yeah, but even those, it's very small, right?
And a quarter have no recess at all, right?
So you can see.
I would ditch.
So, but the reason why Lenore is such a hero is because, look, I can tell that to you, and you're a parent, and I'm sure you think, yeah, that's true.
But also you're like, if I'm the only person who lets my kid go out to play, the kid gets scared like a crazy person.
So Lenore built a big part of the solution.
So that obviously most of my book Stolen Focus is about how we solve these problems.
And Lenore, I think, pioneered a key part for kids.
So what she does is she goes to whole schools and whole neighborhoods.
She runs something called Let Grow.
Any parents listening, go to letgrow.org.
She goes to whole schools and neighbourhoods and persuades them to let their kids go out, to let them...
She believes that for children to be able to become functioning adults, they have to be able to experience increasing levels of independence in their lives, right?
You have to face challenges.
You become resilient.
Exactly what you're saying.
You have to have a little bit of suffering.
You have to get lost in a resilience.
You were literally just saying this yesterday at lunch.
You have to climb the tree.
And maybe you're going to hurt yourself.
What we've done is we've taken that away.
So what Lenore does, they go and they persuade whole communities to start to restore childhood.
And one of the most moving experiences I had with the book was I spent a lot of time with the Let Grow projects.
I went to one in Long Island and there was a boy there, a 14-year-old boy.
And I'll give you a sense of this.
He's a big, strong 14-year-old boy who, until this program had begun, his parents had never let him out of his home on his own, right?
They wouldn't even let him go for a jog around the block.
They said it was, I asked him why, and he said it's because they're afraid of all these kidnappings.
He said, to give you a sense of this, this is a town in Long Island where the French bakery is across the street from the olive oil store.
And he had a level of fear that would have been appropriate if he'd lived in Colombia at the height of Pablo Escobar's terror, right?
It was insane.
So this program began.
Him and his friends start to go outside without their screens.
They start to play with each other, which they'd never done before.
And after a few months, what these boys did, they went into the woods and they built a fort.
And they went there, even though their cell phones didn't work there, because the pleasures of building something, of exploring the real world.
And I remember when that boy left, Lenore said to me, Lenore was with me that day, she said, think about all of human history, right?
Young men had to go out.
They had to hunt.
They had to seek.
They had to build things.
And in the space of one generation, we took all that away.
And those boys, given just a little bit of freedom, what did they do?
They went and they built a fort, right?
This is so important for attention to be able to explore and build.
If you just blunt a child, and it was so sad because I was thinking about all the kids I know who don't ever get that.
Does that all ring true to you guys?
Of course it does.
I mean, I lived in Germany.
In Iran, my dad wouldn't let me play outside because he was so worried about what they were doing.
The climate wasn't healthy for kids to play outside.
Although my dad would take us out on Friday to Parque Shawan Shahi.
It was the Shah's name.
They changed their name since there.
And we would play outside.
He would always want her to take us outside, except not without him.
Once we went to Germany at a refugee camp, I was out in the streets till 10 o'clock at night.
My mom had no clue where I was at.
And let me tell you, my maturity from being a boy who was timid and couldn't be around people to being a man happened in Germany at a refugee camp from 10 years old to 12 years old.
If it wasn't for those two years at Germany playing with Catherine and Katarina Staff and Jan and all those guys, Johan from Poland and learning about Yugoslavia, a friend of ours was from Ana Maria was her name and they live in Canada.
Now we found each other on Facebook.
It just wouldn't have been the same.
I totally agree with you on the dependence side.
I want to get into gaming, but before I go into gaming with kids, breaking news, Tom Brady officially announces retirement for people in America.
That's a big deal.
I understand.
I fucking live here.
I know about that.
If you can pull up his tweet, go to his Twitter account.
He posted a picture.
And I just want to read this.
Click on Tom Brady.
Go on his Twitter profile.
He put a picture and under it, he put a note.
Okay.
So, no, go to Tom Brady's.
Yeah, go right there.
Okay, you can't do it.
I'll just read that to him then.
That's fine.
Okay.
So if you want to zoom in a little bit, Tyler, are you okay?
Just zoom in a little bit.
There you go.
Okay.
I've always believed the sport of football is an all-in proposition.
If a 100% competitive commitment, it's a hundred percent competitive commitment isn't there, you won't succeed.
And successes of what I love so much about our game.
There is a physical, mental, and emotional challenge every single day that has allowed me to maximize my highest potential.
And I've tried my very best the past 22 years.
There are no shortcuts to success on the field or in life.
This is difficult for me to write, but here it goes.
I'm not going to make that competitive commitment anymore.
I have loved my NFL courier and now it's time to focus my time and energy on other things that require my attention.
So apropos.
What's the fucking word?
This is our time.
Focus.
It's official.
He is gone.
And there's another picture of him reading this book.
I don't know if folks have seen this.
He read this book yesterday.
He made this announcement.
Pay attention.
I'll get Oprah to text him about it.
By the way, it is very ironic that signs off with, and it is now time to focus my time and energy on the other things that require my attention.
I think not to hammer this point home too hard, but I do think that's because when you think about a good life, when you're re-evaluating, obviously Tom Brady, and I will never understand this fucking sport no matter how many times I watch it, no matter how many times it's explained to me, but I understand he's good at it.
When Tom Brady is reconsidering his whole life, what does he turn to?
He says, I want to focus my attention, right?
We know, I think most people watching know that our attention is getting worse.
They can feel it.
They can see it in their kids.
And I think most people know that's a bad thing.
And what I want to say to people is it doesn't have to be this way, right?
We can deal with the things that are doing this to us, but it requires a shift in our consciousness.
Partly we have to make individual adjustments to us and our kids.
And partly we need to make these collective solutions.
But also we need to see, you know, we are not fucking medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table, right?
We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and we can take them back if we want.
I agree.
We own our minds and our bodies and we should choose what to do with it.
I totally agree with that method.
Those things are being invaded at the moment and fucked with, right, in ways that we can resist, but we've got to know where our power lies, right?
Some of the power lies in what I can do as an individual, what you can do as an individual, what you can do as a parent with your kids, what I can do with my godsons, my nephews and my niece.
But also some of our power lies in what we can do together to take on these forces that are doing this to us.
And I think we've got to do both because just like we took on the lead industry, if we'd never taken on the lead industry, they'd still be fucking the lead industry would have one day gone, you know what, guys, I think we've made enough money.
Let's stop poisoning kids' brains.
They would never have said that, right?
Can we focus just right there?
Let me just ask one question.
So who concerns you more?
Who concerns you more who wants to make us do what they want us to do?
Does the government concern you more or these virtual governments that have become very powerful, meaning the social media companies?
Who concerns you more?
Government or the big capitalist?
I mean, it depends what issue.
You know, there's some, look, government can do good things and government can do bad things.
These social media companies can do good things or can do bad things.
So I think it just depends on what the issue is.
It's not about being blanketly opposed to any of these things.
There are good things these companies have done as well as really harmful things.
Think about something as simple as gay kids can find each other now, right?
In a way that was much harder when they were, you know, 20, 30 years ago.
There's all sorts of things that have changed that are much better, right?
All sorts of positive transformations.
But we're also facing these real forms of harm.
So essentially, I can't remember if we haven't talked about food, have we?
We talked about obesity, but we didn't talk about the way food is actually harming attention.
Do you want to talk about that for a minute?
Because I think it might help people to think about this.
You know what I would like to talk about?
I would like to talk about gaming.
So if you should pull up that link I sent you.
Yeah.
So gaming.
So esports has blown up.
Okay.
Last year's international 2021 tournament, the total purse payout to kids and people playing video games was $40 million.
Okay.
That's $40 million.
Totally.
All the kids.
Now, here's the thing.
What do you think first place got?
What do you think first place got out of the $40 million?
I'm curious.
Because he's going to show it to you right in a minute.
What do you think first place got out of the $40 million?
$10 million.
Okay, go click on first place, click on it.
Guys, so first place, make it a little bigger.
First place, $18 million.
48% of it, baby.
Yeah, so now here's what's going on at the same time.
So there's more people watching the last, there's a number that they showed that live streamed it.
More people watch the championship of esports than the Super Bowl.
Okay, so this is now.
My mind just exploded.
Yeah, I don't know if you've seen it.
There's brains all over the world.
Oh, by the way, the sponsorships they're getting, multi-million dollar year sponsorships being given to 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds, 14-year-olds, 22-year-olds.
They're making that kind of money right now.
These gamers are, right?
So this is the challenge.
The people that are struggling with this the most are parents, okay?
Because parents are sitting there and they're saying, dude, I grew up in a phase where you went and played games.
You went and played football.
You went to play basketball.
You want to play soccer, football, you know, whatever the game may be that you're doing.
Now my kids coming home.
All he's talking about is Roblox.
He's talking about League of Legends.
He's talking about all of these tournaments that are taking place.
And what do I do?
Don't play video games because that's what we're supposed to do.
I grew up in Sega Genesis.
I grew up on Super Mario Brothers.
I grew up in all these things.
Technical.
All these crazy things that we grew up in Jackson.
Yeah, yeah, the Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat.
These were the games, Archive, right?
We shouldn't do that.
Versus now, they're now, you know, looking at this as an industry.
This could be their jobs.
Kids could make video games.
Kids could be gamers making $100,000, quarter million, half a million, a million dollars a year.
And that's their passion.
That's what they love.
What do you say to parents who worry on how to handle video games with their kids, especially now that it's no longer just a game that you're playing, it's becoming an industry?
It's funny when you said that about the games when we were kids, because about maybe six months ago, I was playing Fortnite with one of my godsons, Joe, who was 10 at the time.
And I said to him, hey, Joe, do you want to see what video games were like when I was a kid?
And he's like, yeah.
And we played, do you remember Frogger?
Do you remember this guy?
So we played Frogger for like three minutes and he turned to me and he put his hand on mine and absolutely sincerely he said, Johan, I'm so sorry things were so shit when you were a kid.
I'm so sorry.
Ted, he looked at me.
He looked at me like the way if I'd taken him to like a wooden shack where he lived in shit.
Do you know what I mean?
So I think with video games.
It's like a black and white TV versus a new HD, everything that you're gonna say.
Totally different.
So, I think with video games, there's a few.
I have a few thoughts.
So, one is there's loads of good things about video games, right?
Firstly, it gives a lot of people a lot of pleasure.
That's a good thing in itself.
Secondly, it improves hand-eye coordination.
There's all sorts of really great things.
My view is: video games are a good thing in a balanced diet.
Really?
They are.
So, there's no problem.
I have no problem.
Go to KFC once a week.
It's fine.
Just don't go to KFC three times a day, right?
And the same way.
So, the Chinese government, and I want to stress, I do not support this because the Chinese government is a communist tyranny and it's awful.
But the Chinese government has introduced a rule saying that kids are allowed to play video games to three hours a week, right?
And it's a strict rule, it's enforced.
But that seems to me, although I wouldn't want to have a communist tyranny imposing it, I'd want parents to choose it.
That seems to me like a perfectly sensible three hours a day, that's fine.
Three hours a week, rather.
That's fine.
Obviously, most American kids are doing way more than that.
The thing I'm worried about much more is the context in which they're playing the video games.
Because, like we were saying, if a child never gets to go outside, right?
If the kids are sort of imprisoned and all they've got is the video game, well, I'm not surprised they become obsessed with it, right?
Children need to explore their environment, right?
Our children don't get to explore their environment, they don't get to go off on their own and play in the park and play in the woods and just do all the normal things that we did, right?
They don't get to do that.
So, what do they do?
They become obsessed with the one form of exploration they're allowed to do, right?
Now, being obsessed with it isn't good.
A balanced diet is fine.
You know, going to KFC every now and then, play video games.
How do you deal with because you see your kids play video games, yeah?
Only on the weekends.
Okay, so that's my question.
Sensible rule.
How do you manage expectations with them to say, All right, guys, if you get your stuff done during the week, the weekends, you can choose to do it, like choose what you want with your free time.
If they choose video games, great.
If they want to go play outside, how do you deal with your kids with that?
Oh, I mean, you know, you've known what we do with the structure with the kids.
Every day, if you want to play video games or if you want anything, the currency in our house is books.
Right.
So, after you read 20 pages, after you move your body, exercise, and then you can play.
So, you have to watch a documentary.
So, we've gone through The Men Who Built America.
We've gone through a Last Dance documentary.
We've gone through history of capitalism.
We're going right now through Man in the Arena with what do you call it, Tom Brady?
Tom Brady.
So, 20 minutes, doc, exercise, moving your body, then you get to play video games.
But it's their ultimate reward to say, Yeah, that's if that's what they wanted to do.
But no, the other day they said we wanted to go to such-and-such park, which I went there and we were at the park for an hour, didn't want to play video games.
We went to the park, it's a sick park, and they played with these kids with the nerf guns.
They had a blast what they did at the park.
But, you know, I think about myself.
Were you a gamer?
Did you play games or no?
Were you?
I was more the kid that was playing football on the sidewalk.
Yeah, so I played Fester's Quest, which if you do you remember Fester's Quest?
If you remember Fester's Quest, you're either my age or like type in Fester's Quest.
This was my game.
This is like a bizarre game.
I'm so not in tune with games.
That's the game I played.
I was never addicted to Fester's Quest.
Zelda came from Zelda.
I was addicted to Zelda.
I was addicted to Final Fantasy.
Final Fantasy RPG games.
I was addicted to it.
So you were a gamer.
I would say I was a gamer for two years.
And then I went to the Army.
We played FIFA soccer.
And then one day I had zero interest when I got out of the Army.
Like zero interest.
I'm like, dude, I have no time for this.
I'm done.
And I dropped it and I moved on.
I want to give you some statistics and I want to get your thoughts on this.
So Psychiatric Times wrote this article.
Is video game addiction a disorder?
In Ohio, a 17-year-old boy shot both of his parents, killing his mother.
Because what a great story you put here, Tyler.
Thank you for the soft story.
He's feel good classes.
Because they took away his Halo, because they took away his Halo 3 video game.
His defense was that he was pushed to the brink by his addiction to video games, often playing for 18 hours straight.
In South Korea, a couple was arrested for being so obsessed with video games that their infant daughter died of malnutrition.
Okay, now this is, these guys have issues 18 hours a day.
In response to statistics like this, the World Health Organization in 2018 officially included Internet Gaming Disorder, ICD, in the International Classification of Diseases, noting that this disorder resulted in marked distress or significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational functioning.
WHO further noted that associated health concerns, including insufficient physical activity, poor diet problems in eyesight with eyesight and hearing, sleep deprivation, aggressive behavior and depression, as well as poor psychological functioning in 2020, consumers in the US spent $57 billion on video games, beating 2019 by 27%.
Projections that by 2023, next year, that $57 billion is going to be $217 billion.
How much of this is on the kid?
How much of this is on the society?
How much of this is on their parents?
I think there's a bigger debate about addiction we can come to in a second, but if you think about these video games, this is going to be too negative an analogy, but let me say it and then I'll explain why it's a bit too negative.
If you think about them as a virus, right, that come along that would be compelling in any situation, they've arrived at a moment when kids' immune systems are already down, right?
So they're more likely to be infected by the virus and for it to take them over.
So I'll give you two examples.
Children now sleep 85 minutes less than they did a century ago.
Now you all know, we all know if we've had a night where we haven't slept, you're much more likely to just spend the next day mindlessly scroll through TikTok than you are to read a book, right?
So partly our kids are severely sleep deprived and that is making them more vulnerable to this stuff.
Also, the diet our children eat, the food we feed our kids, makes them much more vulnerable to this stuff as well.
And I stress again, some of the video gaming is good.
But think about how we eat, there's three big ways in which the way our kids eat and the way we eat, in fact, is damaging our ability to focus and making us more vulnerable to the kind of things you're describing.
The first is, so imagine you have the standard American British breakfast, the kind of thing I grew up having, I'm sure you guys did, kind of sugary, or in Germany, sugary cereal or white bread with butter or whatever, right?
What that does is that releases a huge amount of energy really quickly into your brain, right?
And it feels great.
You're like, I've fucking woken up.
You know, you've got a rush of glucose.
But what happens is you'll get to your desk or your kid will get to their school desk an hour or two later and you get a huge energy crash.
Because, you know, the way Dale Pinnock, one of the leading nutritionists in Britain, put it to me, is it's like you're putting rocket fuel into a mini with those little British cars, right?
It'll go really fast for five minutes and then it'll just stop, right?
So the way we eat causes energy spikes and energy crashes, which leaves you with brain fog.
When your energy crashes, you get brain fog.
You just can't think clearly until you have another sugary carbie snack, right?
So one of the things that we're doing is by contrast, if you eat food that releases energy steadily throughout the day, which is what almost all our ancestors ate, you're able to pay attention more evenly and you're less likely to just get into these slumps where just anything that wants to fuck with your attention will seem appealing.
Second way our diet is damaging our ability to focus is that your brain in order to develop properly needs certain nutrients and the diet we currently eat is lacking a lot of those nutrients like omega-3s and supplements don't cut it because your body doesn't absorb supplements in the same way.
Third way is to me the most shocking and I think to you as a dad most relevant, although they all are, which is a, it's not just that our diets lack things we need.
They contain chemicals that act on us like drugs.
So there was a study in Britain in a city called Southampton in 2007.
They got nearly 300 kids and they split them into two groups.
The first group was just given water, and the second group was given water laced with a load of the food dyes that occur in the kind of food you get in the supermarket, in MMs, that kind of thing.
And then they monitored them.
The kids that drank the food dyes were significantly more likely to become manic, to run around, which would have made them more vulnerable to the kind of things you're talking about.
So you can see how, and these are just two of the many factors that I talk about in the book that are affecting our kids' attention.
So you can see how that's like lowering your immune system so that when something that wants to fuck with your attention comes along, it's easier for it to infect the child.
Which is not to say there aren't healthy uses of video games.
There totally are.
I'm not opposed to video games, just like I'm not opposed to technology or the internet more generally.
But we've got to look at these things.
But there's a bigger debate about addiction that I can talk about, where I think this video game addiction stuff, how would I put it?
I think it can be interpreted, this is not what you're doing, but I think it can be interpreted simplistically.
And this is because I went on a long journey about learning about addiction for a previous book I wrote called Chasing the Screen, where there's a lot of addiction in my family, one of my earliest memories.
It was mostly prescription drugs.
So one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to.
And funny enough, it's similar places, Iran and Germany, where two of the countries my family lived in as well.
So similar to you.
And when I started doing research on addiction almost exactly 10 years ago, if you had asked me about, let's say heroin addiction, because that was also close to me.
If you'd asked me what causes heroin addiction, I would have looked at you like you're an idiot.
And I would have said, well, Patrick, the clue's in the name.
Obviously, heroin causes heroin addiction.
We've been told this story for 100 years that's become totally part of our common sense.
I thought it was, I mean, I thought I'd seen it unfold in front of me, right?
So we think if we kidnapped the next 20 people to walk past your offices here in Florida and we injected them every day with heroin three times a day for a month, say, like a villain in a saw movie, at the end of that month, they'd all be heroin addicts for a simple reason.
There's chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to get used to and then their bodies would start to desperately physically crave them.
And so at the end of it, they would have this tremendous physical hunger for the chemical hooks, right?
That's why we call it being hooked, right?
You want the chemical hook.
It turns out that story's not wrong.
Chemical hooks are real, but it's a really small part of what's happening with addiction.
And when you look at the bigger picture.
And I only really began to understand this when I went to Vancouver and interviewed a man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who did an experiment that has transformed how we think about addiction.
So he explained to me the story we got in our heads, addiction is caused primarily or totally by the chemical hooks, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century.
They're really simple experiments.
Your viewers can try them at home if they're feeling a little bit sadistic.
You take a rat, you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles.
One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine.
If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself within a couple of weeks.
It'll overdose.
So there you go, that's our story.
The rat tries the drug, wants more and more of it, dies.
But in the 70s, Professor Alexander came along and said, well, hang on a minute.
You're putting the rat alone in an empty cage.
It's got nothing that makes life meaningful for rats.
All it's got is the drugs.
What would happen if we did this differently?
So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats, right?
They've got loads of friends, they've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of coloured balls, they can have loads of sex.
Anything a rat likes in life is there in Rat Park.
And they've got the drug water, the normal water and the drug water.
And of course, they try both.
They don't know what's in them.
This is the fascinating thing.
In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water very much.
None of them use it compulsively.
None of them overdose.
So you go from almost 100% compulsive use and overdose when they don't have the things that make life worth living to no compulsive use and overdose when they have what you were talking about before, meaning, purpose, the things that make life worth living for them.
And what I learned from this, there's loads of human examples we can talk about.
But what I learned from this is that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, valuable though that is to many people, the opposite of addiction is connection.
And the reason I say this in response to this video game addiction stuff you read out, Patrick, is I think it's too simplistic to say, oh, the video game, this boy that you described, I forget how old he was.
17.
Yeah, the 17-year-old boy, it's way too simplistic to say the video game did that to him, right?
The video game did that to him in a context where all sorts, I'm sure, obviously I don't know the story, but I'm sure all sorts of things were fucking him up.
And every addictive behavior, whether it's video games, cocaine, porn, whatever it might be, is an attempt to not be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be, right?
You want to not be present, so you obsessively use the porn, you obsessively play video games, whatever it might be.
That helps us to understand, by the way, why what we do here in the US is such a fucking disaster with the war on drugs.
Because what we do is we get addicted people and we say, oh, we need to inflict more pain on them in order to give them an incentive to stop.
But when you know that pain is the fucking fuel, pain is the driver, you can see sometimes we say it doesn't work.
Truth is much worse.
It makes the addiction worse, right?
What do you make of that?
I'll curious about your thoughts.
The first thing that popped in my mind, you said, is, all right, they're in a cage.
So the thing that comes to my mind is we've seen the stats on what's happened since COVID.
Everyone's been locked in their cage, right?
Other than maybe here in Florida and certain other states.
So if you have the choice of just sipping on water or sipping on water with heroin, if you're the rat and you're in your cage, you're going to take that heroin.
Using a human example, if you're sitting in home alone doing nothing, you know, you have to work, apparently.
Maybe you're not.
Maybe you're collecting unemployment.
You're getting stimulus checks.
Maybe you get a hop on a Zoom, do work, but you're locked in your proverbial cage.
Okay, there's some liquor in the cabinet.
There's some pot over there on the desk.
Maybe there's some harder, you know, pills, opiums, they're sitting there.
You're in your cage.
So I'm sensing this cage analogy is what analogy is what leads to people saying, well, based on the two options I have of sipping on water or doing some drugs, I'm in this cage anyway.
Let's party.
Is that part of what this rat cage analogy is?
Yeah, I've got a friend.
So as you know, we want to read this comment before you go, which validates your point.
Crypto Trends 101.
I used to be addicted to meth.
I know, sad, but it's true.
The environment and things worth living for are what made me better.
Yeah.
I think this really fits with what you're saying, Adam, which is that, so a lot of people watching will know in the last year we had the highest overdose deaths ever.
And that's staggering because just before the pandemic, people thought, well, it can't go higher than it is now.
And my friend, the writer Andrew Sullivan said to me, it's like we did an experiment to see if you were right, right?
I've been saying for 10 years, the opposite of addiction is connection.
If you increase disconnection, you'll increase addiction.
And here we are, right?
We increase disconnection in what may be a justified cause, but it has caused a horrific increase in not just addiction.
And this fits with a wider way of thinking, right?
Which is that everyone listening and everyone watching knows that you have natural physical needs, right?
Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air.
If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast.
But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs.
You need to feel you belong.
Human connection.
You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose.
You need to feel that people see you and value you.
You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense.
And if you deprive people of their psychological needs, that will manifest in all sorts of problems.
You'll have increased suicide, which we have.
You'll have increased homicide, which we have.
You'll have increased addiction, which we have, and overdose deaths.
And you can see this.
This is why some of the best people who've studied this, Professors Anne Case and Angus Dayton, called the opioid crisis deaths of despair.
When a factory shuts down in a town, over the next five years, the death rate among people who work there more than doubles, right?
Now, that's not difficult to understand.
Anyone who hears that knows immediately why, right?
So it's not, of course, the drug plays a role, just like the video game may in this case, I don't know anything about this particular case, but the video game may play a role.
But the drug and the video game enter in a context.
And most people who use even quite hard drugs, and this really surprised me because it wasn't the experience of my family, but if you look at the evidence from people like Professor Carl Hart at Columbia University and others, most people who use even quite hard drugs, like even meth and heroin, do not become addicted and are not harmed by it.
Now, of course, there's a minority who are harmed who need our love and support.
But why can some people do it and not others?
There's some biological contribution.
Some people have a little bit more of a genetic vulnerability.
But most of it is about these bigger psychological and social factors.
If your life's going well, you know, and you're happy and you want to be present in your life, you can probably snort a line of Coke, you'll be okay.
If the factory shut down and you're stuck in a place like Monadenock, New Hampshire, where I went, where people are in deep despair through no fault of their own, you know, well, it's going to be a lot more dangerous for you because you're going to want to not be present in your life.
This is why, by the way, there is a solution to this.
And one of the things that makes me so fucking crazy, so as you guys know, I've been spending a lot of the pandemic in Vegas.
In fact, a lot of the last 10 years in Vegas because I'm writing a book about Vegas that I'm not meant to talk about very much.
My publishers will tase me outside in a minute.
But I was spending a lot of time with people with addiction problems in Vegas.
And someone I really love died last summer.
And one of the things that makes me so crazy is in the research from my book about this, I went to places where my friend Tommy and so many other people would have lived and not died.
So Portugal, for example.
In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in the whole world.
1% of the population was addicted to heroin, which is mind-blowing, right?
So you walk down the street, one in every hundred people had 1%.
Staggering.
They were top of the European league tables for 27 European countries at the time, top of all the league tables for death, right?
And overdose and addiction.
And every year they tried our way more, the American way more.
They arrested more people, they imprisoned more people, they shamed more people.
And every year the practice of-classic war on drugs that has failed here in America.
Exactly.
It's worked so fucking well, hasn't it?
Exactly.
And then one day, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition got together and they were like, look, we can't carry on like this.
What are we going to do?
So they decided to do something really radical, something no one had done in more than 70 years since the global war on drugs began.
They were like, should we ask some scientists what we should do?
So they set up a panel of scientists and doctors led by an amazing man I got to know in Portugal named Dr. João Gulao.
And they said to them, you guys go away, figure out what would solve this problem.
And we've agreed in advance with all the political parties that we'll do whatever you recommend.
So it just took it out of politics.
So the panel goes away.
They look at all the evidence, including Rat Park, the experiment we were just talking about.
And the panel comes back and says, you're going to think we're crazy, but here's what we're going to do.
We're going to decriminalize all drugs, from cannabis to crack, everything.
But, and this is the crucial next step, we're going to take all the money we used to spend on fucking people up more, shaming them, imprisoning them, arresting them, putting them on trial, and we're going to spend all that money instead on helping them turn their lives around.
And interestingly, it wasn't mostly what we think of as drug treatment in the US.
They did a little bit of residential rehab, which has value.
Most of it was about getting people back to work.
Say you used to be a mechanic, you've got an addiction problem, they go to a garage, they say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages.
The job, the goal was to say to every single person with an addiction problem in Portugal, we love you, we value you, we're on your side, we want you back.
And by the time I went to Portugal, it was 13 years since this had begun, and the results were in.
Best research was done by the British Journal of Criminology, Don't Have a Dog in This Fight.
They found that Portugal had gone from having the worst overdose death in the European Union to being almost the bottom of the league table.
Addiction was down by more than 50%.
Overdose deaths were down by more than 80%.
There was just an enormous transformation.
And one of the ways you know it works so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back.
I went and interviewed a guy called Schwal Figuera, who was the top drug cop in Portugal at the time of the decriminalization.
And he said what loads of people totally understandably say when you say let's decriminize all drugs.
He said, this is insane.
We'll have a huge increase in children using drugs.
This is a nightmare.
We can't do it.
He said to me, everything I said would happen didn't happen.
And everything the other side said would happen did.
And he said he felt really ashamed when he looked back, that he realized he spent so many years making people's lives worse when he could have been helping them make their lives better.
And this is something I saw all over the world, from Uruguay to Switzerland to Portugal.
When countries move beyond the war on drugs, at first it is super controversial.
People think you're fucking insane.
And then people see the results, right?
Switzerland legalized heroin.
Since then, there have been, more than 15 years ago now, since then there have been zero heroin overdose deaths on legal heroin.
None, not one person, right?
More people have died of heroin overdoses in this country since we started talking than on legal heroin in all the years they've had it now in Switzerland.
All these countries, because they help people, right?
Policies based on shame, stigma, and punishment make addiction worse.
Policies based on love, compassion, and regulating the market, bringing the market away from criminals and under control, massively reduce the problems.
They're not a magic bullet, they still have some problems, but they work so much better.
Have you done any research on what they've done in Oregon?
Yeah, yes, this happened after decriminalize and legalize all drugs.
So decriminalized.
Yeah, yeah.
So the difference between decriminalization.
Here in the United States.
So what has your research shown on that?
So I'll just explain the difference between decriminalization and legalization.
So decriminalization is where you stop punishing users and people with addiction problems, but they still have to go to armed criminals to get their drugs.
Got it.
Legalization is where you open up some legal route for people to get their drugs.
And that should be different for every drug, obviously.
No one wants there to be a heroin island CBS.
That's not the answer, right?
Got it.
So Oregon can decriminalize.
Unfortunately, they can't legalize because federal law.
I mean, they have decriminalized.
They've decriminalized the state.
So Oregon wasn't able to do what Portugal did so tightly, which is transfer the money they used to spend.
But we know that the outcomes in Oregon are pretty promising at the moment.
It's a very recent change compared to Portugal, where it's been in place for 17 years now.
But we know everywhere else in the world that's done it has had radical improvements.
And the truth is, you want to say anything in defense of the war on drugs?
You can say one thing.
We gave it a fair shot.
We did it for 100 years.
We spent a trillion dollars.
We imprisoned millions of our own citizens.
We destroyed whole neighboring countries or close by countries like Colombia.
And at the end of all that, we can't even keep drugs out of our prisons where we pay guards to walk around the wall perimeter the whole time.
That strategy has been tested to destruction.
There is no country in the world that anyone can point to where it has worked.
There are loads of countries where policy is based on love and compassion and order and regulation work.
So at some point, we've got to stop copying the countries that have disastrously failed and start copying the places that have succeeded.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
How about porn addiction?
Let's talk about porn addiction because some people in the comments section are very ecstatic about talking about porn addiction.
I wonder why.
Were they orgasmic about talking about that?
Yeah, well, they were on a different website and they just jumped on this different website we'll talk about here in a minute.
Psychology today, porn addiction.
More than 90% of young men report watching porn videos with some regularity, particularly in the United States.
Apparently, U.S. kids like porn more than other states.
Many of these videos depict acts that might never engage in themselves.
In other words, erotic fantasies.
On Pornhub, the world's largest porn website alone, well over 90 billion videos are viewed daily by more than 64 million visitors.
Apparently 90 billion with only 7 billion people living here.
Apparently aliens are watching this.
I don't know what's going on with that number.
64 million visitors daily.
26% of them are women, females.
Although viewing erotica is nearly ubiquitous, among males, some men and women regard watching internet porn as pathological and believe that at some time spent doing so may be a sign of porn addiction, although such a diagnosis is rejected by many psychologists and our treatment approaches based on addiction models.
So it continues to talk about all these other things on why it's good and why it's bad.
What are your thoughts on porn addiction?
Have you done any kind of research on that?
I did research this.
It's an amazing young guy.
Now what is research?
Does research mean you sit there for weeks watching porn?
What is research?
Because many have done research.
I'm actually a leading expert on the subject.
Can you imagine your profile says porn addiction experts?
Researchers.
You guys should have on this fantastic guy called Alexander Rhodes, who was part of my research.
We did not masturbate together, I want to stress.
He's in Pittsburgh.
He runs a site called NoFap, which is NoFap, yeah.
That he became obsessed with porn.
So there's a few things worth thinking about in relation to porn.
It's a bit like video games.
I'm not anti-porn, right?
Porn will meet a certain basic itch.
We all watch it sometimes.
I don't take an anti-porn position.
There's a lot of itches going on.
You've been talking about itching powder.
It fixes an itchy powder.
People are confused.
Listen, that's his English he uses, folks.
He's not saying, but go ahead and say that.
As you can tell from my weird Anton Abbey accent, yeah.
But you know, it's interesting.
I went to the first ever internet rehab center in the world.
It's a place called Restart Washington.
It's just outside Spokane.
And it's so interesting.
So they get all sorts of people in this internet rehab center, but they disproportionately get young men who become obsessed either with online role-playing games or with porn.
And it was so fascinating talking to these, particularly to Dr. Spoke to the young men a lot, but also Dr. Hilary Cash, who set up and runs Clinic.
He's a really wise person.
I remember her saying to me afterwards, she said, you know, you've got to, this relates to a video game thing as well.
She said, you've got to ask yourself, what are these young men getting out of these games, right?
Or we can think about this in relation to porn.
Should they're getting something they used to get from the culture, but they no longer get.
So they're getting, with the video games, a sense they're physically roaming around.
We've talked about that young people don't get to do that.
They get a sense they're good at something.
We have a culture that does not make young men think they're good at anything, a particular school system.
But what they get is almost like a kind of parody of those things.
And I started to think about it in relation to porn as well.
Because in a way, I think the relationship between social media and social life is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex.
I'm not anti-porn at all.
If your whole sex life consisted of just wanking over porn, you go around pretty pissed off and grouchy all the time because we didn't evolve to masturbate over screens.
We evolved to actually have sex, right?
No one after an hour looking at porn feels satisfied the way they do after having sex, at least if it went right.
So I think there's a degree to which what's the context in which this addiction is occurring, right?
The context is a context in which young men are often made to feel incompetent.
They're often made to feel they're not good at anything.
They're often made to feel frustrated.
Like if you look at what's happened in the wider economy, a lot of particularly working class people cannot earn enough to feel they can provide for a woman, for a family, right?
There's no city in the United States where a minimum wage worker can rent a one-bedroom apartment, not one.
There's none.
So I think if you create a sense of humiliation among young men, that makes them less appealing to women.
It makes women less interested in them.
You can see how that's a kind of environment where porn addiction begins to develop.
And I want to distinguish very clearly between someone who looks at porn every now and then and just to chill out or relieve some stress and people who become addicted.
That's a very different thing.
Just like we all know, if we go into the nearest bar to hear, most people there are going to be drinking alcohol to have a good time.
And there's going to be a small minority who have an alcohol addiction problem who deserve love and compassion.
So I think I would always want to, with every addiction, you always want to look at what's the context in which this addiction is occurring.
What's the problem the person is trying to solve?
What's the pain that they're in that they're trying to not be present with?
So in a way, if you think about the addictive behavior as almost like the surface phenomena, you want to deal with, well, what's the deeper question here?
Oh, you're lonely.
41% of Americans agree with the statement, no one knows me well, right?
This is the loneliest society in human history.
One study has asked people for a good few years, how many close friends do you have who you could turn to in a crisis?
And when they started doing it years ago, the most common answer was five.
Today, the most common answer is none, right?
Now, a lonely society is going to be a society where people are going to find opioids more appealing.
They're going to find just jerking off over porn half more appealing.
They're going to find obsessively doing it.
If you're cut off from the normal necessities of life, if your psychological needs aren't met, you're going to be more vulnerable to addiction, whether it's porn, cannabis, whatever.
There's two comments I want to give credit to.
One of them I don't understand.
The other one I think it's – one of them says – he says David Jones is his name.
Porn made my 10-year-old mind think if I did not look and perform like John Holmes, I was a failure.
What a travesty, right?
And Larry Medina says, my socks are pretty satisfying.
I don't know what they're doing.
So, mysterious comment.
Oh, I think there's a separate question about kids seeing porn.
And I definitely think we don't want to be in a situation where, I mean, I remember, speaking about going to the woods, I remember when we were kids, I remember the first time I ever saw porn, I was 11 years old.
Do you remember people used to leave porn magazines in the woods?
I don't know what the fuck that was about.
And I remember- They had like put out a little magazine every like a handful of meters to lure you into their little- Was that kind of false?
What was that?
Yeah, that was.
I think it must have been.
They must have not been.
Was there a van at the end of the...
But I remember...
Don't get in the van.
I remember seeing...
And what I saw was, like, very, very softcore.
Um...
And I remember not seeing it again until I was, I guess I found my brother's porn when I was like 14 or something.
I've got an older brother.
But the difference between that, you do not want your son's eight.
You don't want him in a couple of years to be discovering his first understanding of sex to be fucking gangbangs on porn hub, right?
So I do think there's a lot to be done with regulation when it comes to children.
There are some countries that have done it, so you have to opt in so you can see porn on your broadband option, which I think would embarrass a lot of people, but who cares?
So that you, you know, there are all sorts of ways you can block these things for kids.
We definitely don't want kids to be learning about sex from porn because porn is not, you know, the vast majority of porn is not a healthy or realistic picture.
You tell the story about Pamela Anderson and then the story that she had with her son.
Yeah, she sat her sons down and she says, listen, you know, she says, she's saying this in an interview.
She said, you know, I would go out and say, I'm meeting somebody and we end up having sex.
He says, many times I'm like, what are you doing?
What do you do?
That does not feel good.
You know, hitting me here doesn't feel good.
Pull on my hair.
I don't like it.
Then I would ask the person whom I'm having sex with, I'd say, hey, how much porn do you watch?
Are you thinking that you watch this in a video like a fetish, like it feels good for women?
So she was teaching her sons, what you see in porn doesn't feel good.
That's acting.
And she was kind of trying because she's saying like porn is traumatized men to think they have to perform at that level.
And that's coming from Pamela Anderson, who I think's probably been with more than one man in her life.
I don't know the exact number.
Or treat women disrespectfully.
Totally.
I don't like that.
That was the actual kind of she was taking.
There's a really good Canadian researcher on this called Lily Bois, who you guys should have on as well.
She's fascinating.
And she talks about this where, you know, the number of men who just wanted to choke her and slap her and just quite extreme, which is not to say there aren't some people who are consensually into those things and that's fine.
But the sort of expectation of those things, which is, and she's done, I can't remember the figures because it's a few years since I interviewed her, but she's done research that exposure to porn does increase, you know, people having unrealistic expectations of sort of fetishistic behaviors, that women will just be up for that.
And you definitely don't want, you know, you don't want your sons or indeed your daughters to be in this situation where these are the sort of that that's not that doesn't feel like a liberated and healthy form of sex, which is what we want for young adults as they start to develop.
You know, I mean, when they get to the right age, obviously.
We want people to have healthy attitudes towards sex that are not based around shame.
We don't, in a funny way, those feel to me more like the old attitudes.
This is where a lot of shame in wanting to be aggressive and violent.
And it feels to me like quite a conflicted attitude towards sexuality.
Not for everyone.
I don't want to kink shame anyone.
Whatever people are into, consensual behavior.
Of course, 100%.
People who are into consensual behavior, anything you want to do consensually with another adult, knock yourself out, literally if you want.
But I do think it's worth us thinking about the ways in which massive exposure to pornography for very young people, I do think can have a distorting effect on their sexuality that's unhealthy.
Not in every case, but that's the only bit I'm worried about.
Consensual adults, nothing they do worries me.
Well, Johan, I got to tell you, I had no idea you were this funny.
Okay.
I'm watching your two TikToks and I'm like, I had no idea you were so witty with a sense of humor and a personality.
I'm so glad we were able to pull this out.
Folks, if you're watching this, Tito, let's put the link below, both in the chat box as well as a comment section.
If you enjoyed today's interview, subscribe to the channel as well as go purchase this book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again to find out about those 12 triggers that he was talking about on how to become more focused.
Next time you're here, we'd love to have you on.
I'd love to do that.
I meant to say, or my publishers will tase me again, that people can also get the audiobook, the e-book, or the physical book if they go to stolenfocusbook.com.
And they can also listen for free to interviews with loads of the experts.
So not on Twitter.
So you want them to go to, what's the next one?
I meant to say you can buy any good food.
Stolen focus.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Stolenfocus.com.
Yeah, yeah.
I got in trouble at the end of a podcast a little while ago where at the end of the podcast, the guy said to me, this guy's about 50, he said, so what's your Twitter?
And I said it.
And he said, What's your Facebook?
And I said it.
He said, What's your Instagram?
And I said it.
And then he said, What's your Snapchat?
And I said, I am a 42-year-old man, right?
The only 42-year-old men on Snapchat are definitely pedophiles, right?
Why would they be there?
And he didn't laugh at all.
And then I, because he didn't laugh, I sort of leaned into the joke and I said, You know that show To Catch a Predator?
Yeah.
I said, The next season of To Catch a Predator should literally just be they go up to adult men in the street and say, What is your Snapchat handle?
And if they have one, just immediately put them on the cups, right?
The guy didn't laugh at all.
I later looked him up, and he has quite a big Snapchat.
Huge out Snapchat.
I'm glad I got through this interview without accusing either of you of being pedophiles.
I'm very glad we got, but I really enjoyed this.
Thank you for engaging so till we're doing it.
Really, really enjoyed it.
Thank you so much.
Absolutely.
Oh, China.
Next time we promise not to show you any images of McDonald's.
