#57Johann Hari - Stolen Focus

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Chatting with CandiceJohann Hari
Episode Run Time: 1:11:36
Our guest is Johann Hari, writer, journalist, and author of “Chasing the Scream”, “Lost Connections”, and his most recent one entitled “Stolen Focus”. We talk about our waning attention spans and how this is affecting our children, how his trip to Provence Town changed (or didn’t change) his life, and how Google is stealing our attention.
00:00:00 00:01:35 Johann’s Article in the Guardian on Attention
00:08:50 Crisis of Being Present, Lenore Skenazy’s “Let Grow”, and Children’s Attention
00:19:33 Professor Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels” and the Decline of Violence
00:24:57 Earl K. Miller and Larry D. Rosen on Attention and an Experiment on Hewlett-Packard
00:29:49 Johann’s Trip to Provence Town and Dr. James Williams
00:35:33 The Lead in Lead Paint in Google According to Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin
00:49:47 Minds, Freedom, Le Burnout, and the Personal and Collective Responsibility
01:09:12 Where to Find Johann
“Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.”
Johann tells the story of his godson Adam who, once was a curious, precocious child obsessed with Elvis Presley, now has become glued to his phone, and won’t stop checking Snapchat. There is an ongoing crisis right now with children with short attention spans, are not independent, and are being locked away at home in fear of their safety or of kidnappings which in turn stunts their social skills and ability to think on their own, even before the pandemic started. This led to Johann advocating for Lenore Skenazy’s LetGrow.org non-profit where she promotes “free-range kids” who can do things on their own, like take the subway alone. According to psychologist Steven Pinker who wrote a book called “Better Angels”, violence has declined over the past few decades which Johann agrees with in helping create more independent children.
Burnout and Our Collective Responsibility Against Social Media
We’ve been getting our sense of fulfillment externally on social media, which harms our ability to focus. Johann went to MIT to interview Professor Earl K. Miller who explains that the human brain can only consciously think about one or two things at the same time. We’ve fallen into a collective delusion where we can do more one thing at once leading to a culture of overworking and burnout, also called the switch-cost effect. Hewlett-Packard did an experiment between two working groups in the company and saw that the group that had been uninterrupted by calls and e-mails scored 10 IQ points higher. In France, a phenomenon called “Le Burnout” let to the government implementing a legal right to disconnect. Tristan Harris of Google was shocked by the addicting effects they built within Gmail and together with Aza Raskin formed Center for Humane Technology. Just like the moms who banned lead in paint, we can collectively fight against the ongoing phenomenon of our losing focus by not banning Google and Facebook, but by having an individual and collective responsibility to find the root of the problem and challenge these ideas and concepts of the way we work in our hyper productive world.

Links and Resources:
Johann's Website https://johannhari.com/