The Attention Crisis: Collective Action for Change

The attention crisis is a serious threat requiring individual and collective action to address invasive forces and structural changes.

### Stolen Focus: Understanding and Addressing the Attention Crisis
* 🧠 The attention crisis poses serious consequences at the individual, societal, and species level, with the average office worker now focusing on **any one task for less than three minutes**.
* 🔦 Dr. James Williams' conceptualization of attention crisis layers includes the **Spotlight** (narrowing focus to immediate tasks), **Starlight** (ability to achieve long-term goals), and **Daylight** (figuring out long-term goals), with Johann Hari adding the **Stadium lights** (societal ability to formulate and achieve collective goals).
* 💪 Cynicism towards the hard work of recovering attention can be attributed to feeling powerless in the face of the crisis, but the belief that **effective solutions exist** can challenge this attitude.
* 🧠 Understanding that the human brain can only consciously think about **one or two things at a time** and that **multitasking is a delusion** helps debunk common misconceptions about attention.
* 🚫 Multitasking comes with a significant **switch cost effect**, as demonstrated by a study where chronically interrupted workers scored **10 IQ points lower on average**.
* 🎯 Optimism about addressing the attention crisis is warranted, as many of the factors harming attention are recent changes, and both **individual and collective actions** can help **reclaim attention**.
* 📴 While strategies like digital detoxes can provide temporary relief, addressing the **root causes of the attention crisis** is essential for **long-term improvement**.

### How to Defend Your Attention and Democracy Against the Forces of Negativity
* 📱 Individual actions like using tools such as the K-Safe and the Freedom app can help protect your attention, but the attention crisis is primarily caused by **powerful forces invading your attention**.
* 🇫🇷 In France, **40% of workers felt they had to be constantly available on their phones and email**, leading to burnout. Collective action by French workers led to the introduction of the **"right to disconnect" law**, which specified that workers **don't have to check their work messages outside of work hours**.
* 🇬🇧 In the UK and South Korea, ordinary people, particularly mothers, played a **crucial role** in driving collective action to address the crisis of leaded gasoline, which was **poisoning children's brains**.
* 👁 One of the main causes of the attention crisis is the business model of social media companies, known as **surveillance capitalism**, which profits from **scanning and manipulating users' behavior** to keep them scrolling.
* 💰 Alternative models to surveillance capitalism include **subscription-based services** and **public ownership independent of the government**, with the latter being akin to owning "**information pipes**" collectively.
* 🌐 Social media companies will not voluntarily transition to alternative models, so **collective action is necessary to drive systemic change**.
* 🔃 Negativity bias, the tendency for humans to pay more attention to negative information, is a fundamental aspect of human nature that social media algorithms **exploit to keep users engaged**.
* 🗳 Defending democracy requires countering the divisive and anger-inducing effects of social media, as the platform's algorithms amplify **hostile and extreme voices**, undermining the ability to find **common ground and compromise**.

[Music] I think um good place to start this conversation is to talk about how serious the consequence of the attention crisis is. We're gonna take action, we're gonna um approach this problem very seriously, but let's say in a counterfactual world, we don't really take care of this issue. We don't take this seriously and we neglect this issue for long term. What do you think is going to happen in five years, ten years at the individual level, but also at a societal level, and looking a little bit further in the future at the human species level? It's a really important question. I would say to anyone watching, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. And when your abilities of focus and pay attention breaks down, your ability to achieve your goals is diminished, your ability to solve your

problems is diminished. You feel less competent because you in fact are less competent. You know, attention is at the heart of all human achievement, whether it's personal relationship achievement, artistic achievements, sporting achievement, right? Attention is our superpower as a species. Our attention crisis is already very acute and is getting worse. The average office worker now focuses on any one task for less than three minutes, and for every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now a hundred children who've been identified with this problem. But if we don't fight to get our attention back, if we don't fight at lots of different levels that we're going to talk about, then we'll see this continued degeneration. And you know, as you asked that, I was thinking about someone I interviewed, a really extraordinary person I got to know and become friends with, called Dr. James Williams. I think it could probably come up a few times in this conversation, but he had developed this way of thinking about attention that I think is really

important clarifying for understanding the stakes in your questions sunny right so he said that there are three layers to our attention crisis. I would argue there's actually a fourth. Um, I know he agrees with this because we talked about it. So the first layer of attention is what we mostly think about when we think about the problem of distraction, and it's what he calls your Spotlight, right? You think about you're talking to me from Stanford. I can see I can picture exactly where you are in Stanford, and I can see that behind you, you know, there's a um, road, there's trees. I'm in my apartment. I can if I look around me, I can see all my books around me. I can hear my AC. I'm filtering out all of that, and I'm narrowing my focus down to you. What did Sonny just ask me, right? And she asked me about what would happen if we don't deal with this crisis. Okay, I think we could all feel that our Spotlight, our ability to narrow down to one immediate task, is being disrupted, and again, that's

mostly what we think about we think about these low-level irritating interruptions and distractions and that's important. But Dr. Williams argues there's a layer above that, which he calls our Starlight. And that's not your ability to achieve an immediate short-term goal like going to the fridge to get a drink. That's your ability to achieve a long-term goal. I want to write a book, I want to set up a business, I want to set up a charity, I want to be a good parent, right? It's called your Starlight because when you're lost in the desert and you don't have GPS, you look to the Stars to remind you where to go, right? And he argues that we're so jammed up that it's not just our Spotlight that's being disrupted, it's our Starlight. But then there's a layer above that that he calls our daylight. And that's not your ability to achieve a long-term goal, that's your ability to even figure out what your long-term goals are. How do you know what book you want to

write how do you know what business you want to set up? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? To get to that knowledge, you have to have rest. You have to have time to think. You have to let your mind wander. It's called your daylight because you can see a room most clearly when it's flooded with daylight. And he argues that that is being disrupted. I would argue as a layer even above that, which I would call our Stadium lights. And that's not just your ability as an individual to achieve formula and achieve a long-term goal. That's our ability as a society to formulate and achieve Collective goals that we all achieve, right? I don't think it's a crisis that at the same time as this enormous crisis in individual attention, we're having an enormous crisis in democracy all over the world in countries as different as South Korea, Britain, and Brazil. Hard to imagine countries more different, yet we're having very similar crises for reasons I'm sure we'll explore as well.

would argue, if we don't deal with this problem at every level of our lives, it's not that, you know, the world will end. It won't. But at every level of our lives, we'll be less able to understand what's happening to us, formulate clear goals, and achieve those goals. I really like the conclusion part, and you mentioned these lights in your conclusion, and one question that I have toward that is, um, how are we going to motivate people to recover their attention when I see a lot of cynicism around the hard work? So, I am very interested in what motivates people to consistently do the hard work, as you mentioned, writing a book, starting a business, or becoming good parents, for example, right? It takes a good amount of effort, and sometimes it's physically and mentally demanding. I mean, usually, physically demanding work is mentally demanding, and vice versa, and I think it usually takes cognitive patience, so there will be a lot of difficulty, so you should troubleshoot, and then it takes time to achieve that. But I see this

cynicism going on growing around doing some hard work for a long time. It is not a cool thing. For example, cool thing to do is to make a lot of passive income. For example, and do what you really like. That includes traveling around the world without working nine to five and doing like hard scientific research, for example, or eating some delicious food, with watching some good television show on Netflix, and so on and so forth. The image that I have is that I am holding some margarita, and right next to the infinite pool, and I'm not really working, and I am making a lot of passive income, for example. So in that kind of society, it is really hard to emphasize the importance of recovery of attention. I feel like, what do you think is the problem of this line? I'm thinking, I think it's a really important question. I think to a significant degree, the attitudes that you're describing, which are very real, are a product themselves of the debasement of attention. Not entirely, there's always been some people who were lazy and shallow, right, who read books.

about ancient Rome there are people who are lazy and shallow. They'll always be some human beings like that, but I think the kind of attitude you're describing, the kind of spread of it, you know, it reminds me of um, as myself odd analogy but Susan Sontag, the Great American intellectual. She wrote a book about an incredible book about photography, and she was talking about uh, War photography, and when people were first seeing images from war, right, and terrible images of atrocities, which of course people had never seen before, and people started to talk about compassion fatigue, and she said, it's not the compassion that fatigues you, it's the sense that there's nothing you can do about it, right. Actually, Aid workers who are seeing atrocities don't get compassion fatigue. I mean, they might get traumatized, but they don't get compassion fatigue. If you feel you can do something about it, actually seeing something terrible makes you act more, right. It's when you look at these photos, you think, oh, there's nothing I can do.

about this situation in wherever the atrocity is happening right. In the same way, I think that kind of cynicism you're talking about can largely be the product of feeling there's nothing you can do about it. Right about the attention crisis, and there's absolutely a lot we can do about it. I traveled all over the world, from Moscow to Miami to Melbourne, and interviewed over 200 of the leading experts in the world on attention and focus. Um, and I learned from them that there's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse. Some of them are factors in our technology; many of them are factors I'd never even thought about. They range very widely from the food we eat to the way our offices worked, the way our kids' schools work. There's a very broad range of factors, and crucially, loads of the factors that can harm your attention have been hugely rising in recent years, right. The book is called Stolen Focus because your attention did not collapse; your attention has been stolen from you by.

some very big and powerful forces. But once we understand what those forces are, we can begin to deal with them to some degree as individuals and to some degree collectively. I think if you're in a state like I was when I started doing the research for the book, well actually you blame yourself for the fact that your attention is getting worse. You're like, Oh, there's nothing wrong with me. I must just be weak. I must just be lacking in willpower. It's easy to just get into a cynical mindset of like, Oh, I'm never going to get my attention back. I may as well just, you know, like you say, try to get a load of money for posting garbage on Instagram. But when you understand that actually this isn't your fault, this has been done to you, and we can fight back and get our attention back in very targeted ways, it creates a very different relationship with the problem. I went to MIT to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, an incredible man named Professor Earl Miller.

and he said to me, Look, 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 has not changed significantly in 40,000 years. It's not 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 what's happened is we've fallen for kind of mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. The rest of us are not far behind them. So what happens is scientists like Professor Miller, they get people into Labs all over the world, including in South Korea, and they get people to think they're doing more than one thing at a time, and they monitor them, and what they discover is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you juggle very rapidly between tasks.

what did Sally just ask me? What is this message on WhatsApp? What does it say on the TV over there? What is this message on Facebook? Wait, Sonny, what did you just ask me again? So we're juggling very quickly and it turns out that juggling comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you do all the things you're trying to do much less competently. You make more mistakes. You remember less of what you do. You're much less creative. And I remember when I first learned that and I was reading the scientific studies thinking, okay, I get it, but that's a small effect, right? It isn't a big deal. It's a really big effect. To give you an example, there's a small study backed by a much wider body of evidence that was carried out by a scientist called Dr. Glenn Wilson. So he was hired by Hewlett Packard, the printer company, and he came in and he split their workers into two groups. And the first

group was told just get on with your task, whatever it is, and you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told get on with your task, whatever it is, but at the same time, you've got to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls, right? So pretty much how most of us live. First group's just do what they've got to do with no interruptions. Second group's being interrupted a lot. And at the end of it, the scientist Dr. Wilson measured the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher than the group that had been interrupted. To give you a sense of how big that is, if you and me smoked out, sat down together now and smoked cannabis together, um, our IQs would go down in the short term by five points. So in the short term, being chronically interrupted in the way we all are is twice as bad for your intelligence as getting stoned. This is why Professor Miller says we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive

degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted. Now, that's not the fault of the people you're describing. They didn't invent an environment where we're exposed to technologies that are designed, for reasons we'll talk about I'm sure, to hack and invade our attention. We live in an environment where air pollution is profoundly harming our ability to focus, where the food we eat is profoundly harming our ability to focus, whether we've gone to schools that have harmed our ability to focus. They didn't choose any of that, right? They're the product of those processes of degradation, and degraded people often wallow in their own degradation because they don't see the alternative. But once you give, explain to people that there are alternatives, it doesn't have to be this way, you can get your superpower back. I think it begins to challenge. I don't want to act like it magically solves that cynicism you're describing. It clearly it doesn't, but over time, it can begin to erode cynicism. The opposite of cynicism, it seems to me, is optimism.

right what I learned for stolen focus is that we can be really optimistic about this because we we these are relatively recent changes right as Dr. Williams who mentioned before said to me you know human beings had the acts for 1.4 million years before anyone said guys should we put a handle on this ax right the entire internet has existed for less than 10 000 days right we can check and these other factors that are harming our attention the other 11 factors many of them are very recent changes right you and I are not so old and we can remember a time before some of them so absolutely we can be optimistic about this but it's it requires a big shift in our understanding of what the problem is and what we do about it okay so I want to talk a little bit more about that the willpower and what else can we do to make a larger scale movement but before doing that I want to go down a little bit of tangent I wanted to talk to Dr. Erb Miller about multitasking but

didn't have a chance. I am curious if you had a chance to talk with Dr. Miller about this. So, whenever we talk about multitasking, I wonder what exactly the task is. For example, if we listen to music while working, is that multitasking too? And I know that a lot of people around me, sometimes including myself, I should confess, they play YouTube or Netflix in the background when they work, and sometimes they feel like they work better if that's um playing. I'm not sure if that's our delusion. Have you ever had a chance to talk about that kind of thing? They should definitely talk to Professor Miller about this, and he's wonderful. I think it's a very important question. It's even just worth saying about the term that you use there, multitasking, which lots of people use. The term multitasking was invented in the 1960s to describe computers. Computers can multitask, right? They've got more than one processor. They can literally multitask. We're not computers. The term does not

apply to human beings we can't multitask. What we can do is we can juggle. So there's basically two systems of attention. There's what's called bottom-up attention and top-down attention. So top-down attention is when you are consciously focusing on. We're both paying top-down attention to each other, right? I'm consciously focusing on your questions. You're consciously focusing on my answers. We're having a conversation. But there's also bottom-up attention. If a bomb went off outside my window, that would completely interrupt my top-down attention. I'd be like, Whoa, what just happened? And I'd turn and look, right? However interested you are, however powerful your top-down attention is for listening to me, you're gonna look around and focus on the alarm for a second, right? But, oh, the fire alarm's going off. There's lots of studies of it. What's called involuntary noise exposure. So we know that children who are in noisy schools, like that are by busy roads, do worse on exams, right? And learn less because what you're having to

do is you're having to activate that top-down system more powerfully, right? If I'm in a very, very loud environment, I mean, it's having takes some mental energy to do the top-down, um, focus, and some mental energy to block out the bottom-up noise that's just invading me, right? Um, the way one scientist, Professor Adam Gazzaley, put it to me, it's like you've got a picture that you've got a bouncer at the front of your mind, right, like a nightclub bouncer, and that's your prefrontal cortex, and that can work really hard to keep out stuff, but it could only work so hard, right, because the bouncer can only keep a certain number of people at the nightclub. In the end, if there's a hundred people, it'll overwhelm the demand, sir, that's involuntary noise expression. Now what you're describing is voluntary noise exposure, for which there's less research, but given every all the other research shows, I'm afraid I do think it's a bit of a delusion that would make you focus.

better um, I know for me, if I list this completely anecdotal, but if I can listen to classical music when I'm writing or reading, but I cannot listen to something with words because the words then start to sort of infiltrate my conscious mind, that I'm start going like, why have I just randomly typed out the lyrics to Spandau Ballet in the middle of my, you know, essay about attention problems. It may be that you're sitting in a busy cafe or a busy open plan office, and you put on Netflix because you'd rather be able to hear Netflix than the annoying colleague next to you having some dumb phone conversation, so that's more like picking your poison, right? I can see in that situation maybe better Spandau Ballet than your colleague, but I'm afraid that the evidence is pretty clear that you would be better off if you could just focus on one thing. That makes a lot of sense as I listen to what you said now. I feel like I got an

answer if some like if context of switching happened that's bad. If I care about Netflix for five seconds and come back to work, and then go back again to Netflix, and you know if that happens that's really bad. But like classical music, I don't feel like that happens when I listen to that while working. Like it just flows, and I just focus on work, and it's better probably. Yep, that's a great answer. I think we knew maybe. I don't know about you. I know very I quite like listening to classical music. I know nothing about it intellectually. Like I think if I was like, Oh, this composer didn't do a good job, they did that wrong. Yeah, I think if it engaged me intellectually, then I think it probably would start to distract me. But because I know happily nothing about it, it doesn't do that. But you're right about distractions. That just say one very brief thing, which is that um, there's a study by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon that found if you're interrupted.

could be something as simple as a text message. It takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you interrupted. But most of us, many of us, never get 23 minutes without being interrupted, so we're constantly operating at this lower cognitive capacity. So I think if you were saying, Well, I'm doing five minutes of focusing on Netflix and five minutes on that, that is just going to come at the cost of you. What you lose there is depth. What we lose whenever we're focusing, whenever we're not focusing deeply on something, is we lose depth, right? You will have more shallow thinking, less creative thinking. You'll remember less of what you do. It is a quite significant effect. I want to come back to this argument around the willpower and attention problem. So yeah, of course, we think, we thought that it was our willpower issue, and I think there is like common approach that people take. Step Zero, they feel like something is going wrong. My memory is not as good. I cannot focus as well.

there is something going on, and I look at my phone, and my phone says I spent like seven hours a day with my phone. So this is wrong. So step one that they do is they do like digital detox, no smartphone Challenge, and I think that's what happened to you in Provincetown, probably right. And then while we were doing it, we feel amazing. I did no smartphone challenges several times, and like it's like one week, or it could be 30 days. It was amazing while I was doing it. I really like it. This lifestyle is it like I want to live like this. But after that, what happens is that I come back to the normal life, and I had to juggle between emails and slacks and Messengers and social media and news and everything. And I don't know, it takes like three months, and sometimes less than that, to come back to square one, and I get frustrated. There's nothing that I can do here to overcome this issue. I'm just broken here. Something is going wrong. That frustration is huge. So I talked to near

and near had this like four-step approach or 10 min a technique. It was a really detailed way of doing the discipline so I got some understanding and it was really helpful. But what your book is saying is that that kind of purchase is still good but it's a little bit limited and then we can do something else to change the root cause of this. So I want to talk a little bit more about that. Can you explain a little bit more about that? Sure. It's funny whenever anyone asks me about willpower, I always think about this moment that happened in the writing of the book that really disconcerted me. There's a brilliant scientist called Professor Roy Baumeister. He's at the University of Queensland in Australia who I went to interview, and he's the leading expert in the world on Willpower, right? He's for people who know the famous marshmallow experiment. He did that experiment. He wrote a book called willpower. So go to interview him, and it was quite early in the research for the book.

and I said, you know, I think you're writing a book about attention problems. I'm really interested in how your science could help me to understand it. And he said something like, the exact words are in the book, saying like, yeah, it's interesting you asked that because just found I can't really pay attention anymore. I play Candy Crush on my phone all the time. I just don't really pet it. And I was saying that I was like, what? Like it doesn't make, didn't you write a book called Will but aren't you the leading expert in the world on Willpower? And you're telling me you play Candy Crush all day. I was really like, it was like that moment in the Invasion of the Body snatches where they realized everyone's been body snatched. And I was like, I remember leaving and being really depressed with that interview, thinking, well, that's it then, right? What I realized is for all of the 12 factors that are harming our attention that I write about in stolen Focus, there were two levels at which I think

we need to deal with them. I think of them as defense and offense. There are loads of things that we can do as isolated individuals immediately to protect ourselves and our children. A lot of books about our kids as well from these factors that are invading our Focus right so obviously. I go through dozens in the book. I'll give you an example of a few. In fact, I will give you a visual demonstration if you don't mind me just leaving the screen for a second. Hang on. Um, I have here something called a k-safe, right? Okay, safe. People who can't see it's a plastic. I don't know I'm holding it right. It's a plastic safe. You take off the lid. You put your phone in there. Put on the lid. You turn the dial at the top. You push the button down and it locks your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day, right? I use it three hours a day to do my writing. I won't sit. I won't sit down with my partner to watch a film unless

we both put our phones in the phone Joe. We'll have my friends around for dinner in this they agree to imprison their phones. Um give you an example of another one. There's an app called Freedom that you can get. It's a few dollars a month to subscribe. It syncs with your, uh, if you want it to your laptop and your iPhone. You can tell it, Don't let me go on Instagram for the next five minutes, the next five hours, the next 24 hours, and it blocks it. And then if you try to look at Instagram, it'll just say, You are free, right, you've been set free, and you just can't get on right. I go through loads of things like this in the book that we can do immediate practical things. I am passionately in favor of these individual changes. They will really help you, but I want to be really honest with people because I don't feel most books about attention, and this is the core of my disagreement with near all leveling with people. The truth is this crisis in attention did not happen.

because you had bad habits, or I had bad habits, or our kids had bad habits happened because of some very big invasive forces, which are designed in many cases, not all of them, to hack and invade your attention. And at some point, we have to go on the offense against these forces, which are invading our attention, right? So, in France, in 2018, they were having a huge crisis of what they called La burnout, which I don't think I need to translate. And the French government was trying to figure out why is everyone so burned out. So, they set up, under pressure from labor unions, they would never have done it without that pressure. Um, they set up a government inquiry led by Bruno Medlin, who was the head of Orange, their big telecoms, got one of their big telecoms companies, and it's trying to figure out what's going on. And he discovered the key reason, one of the key reasons, which is that 40% of French workers felt they could never stop checking their phone or email the whole time they were awake. Because

their boss could message them at any time of the day or night. If they didn't answer, they'd be in trouble. This is a really recent change. When I was a kid, the only people who were on call were the Prime Minister and doctors. And even doctors weren't on call all the time, right? So we've gone from almost nobody being on call to almost half the economy being permanently on call. So I can give those people all the lovely self-help advice in the world, right? Buy a k-save, install free look. I can go through a dozen dozens of things that I do in the book. That's no use to them if their job depends on them not doing that. That's not helpful advice. It's like a taunt. It's like a cruel taunt, which is why we have to deal with that problem at its source and many of the other bigger problems. And there's a very good solution to this again because French workers, because they'd set up this inquiry and because French workers organized to defend their rights, the government.

introduced a very simple French government introduced a very simple legal reform. They gave every French worker legally what was called the right to disconnect. It's very simple. Everyone's work hours have to be written down in their contract. And when your work hours are over, unless they're paying you extra, you don't have to look at your phone or check your email. Right when I was in Paris, Rentokil, the pest control company, got fined 70,000 Euros for complaining that one of their workers hadn't checked his email an hour after he left work. Now you can see that's a big collective change, one of many we have to make. So many of these factors, many of them can be dealt with individually to some degree, but most of them have to be dealt with at this additional upper level as well. So we absolutely need both. I really like how you put it in this word. I think there are a lot of method in the discipline out there, how to do the defense, but no one really ever talked about how to offense it's really clear.

from your explanation what we should also do along with doing the box and you know setting the app to limit the time that we use the device and so on and so forth. I'm still a little bit not clear what can we do as an individual to make that Collective change. I can be an activist and I can make it like social group but I'm not Christian Harris like. I'm not as they're asking for example I'm an officer worker and I just do the everyday work and I struggle with this problem everyday basis what can I do who as an individual to contribute that to that structural change so there's a really important question and I would start by talking about a moment in the past in South Korea and in my own country Britain when people Ordinary People did exactly what you're talking about when I was a child the dominant form of gasoline Petrol in South Korea and in Britain in fact everywhere in the world was leaded gasoline it was discovered that exposure to lead is really bad for people's

brains, and particularly bad for children's ability to focus and pay attention. And if it's in the gasoline, obviously it's in the air everyone was breathing in huge amounts of lead. Actually, it's worth saying when they first introduced leading gasoline in the 1920s, an amazing female scientist called Dr. Alice Hamilton exactly predicted what was going to happen. She said lead is really bad for people's brains. We've known that going right back to Vitruvius in ancient Rome. If you use leaded gasoline, it will poison people's brains. There's a different form of gasoline we could use. You don't have to do this. She was mansplained out the room, and for the next 70 years, we have this catastrophic formulated gasoline. But it's worth remembering there's usually at the start of any disaster a woman telling you what you should be doing differently, and we all ignore her. By the time you got to the late 70s, the evidence was just ABS. The evidence that Alice Hamilton had been arguing

about right at the start was just completely overwhelming. So what happened was a group of ordinary mothers, what at the time in Britain were called housewives. Here in Britain, the campaign was led by a housewife called Jill brunette. These mums just banded together and said, Why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing these for-profit companies to screw up our kids' brains? And it's really important to notice what these mothers didn't say. They didn't say, Let's ban all gasoline. Let's get rid of cars, right? Just like none of us are saying, Let's get rid of social media. Let's get rid of technology. That's not what we're saying, right? What they said was, Let's get rid of the harmful form of the gasoline and move to a form of gasoline that doesn't have this negative effect on us. And it followed the classic pattern of all successful political movements that was described by Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of Indian independence. First, they ignored them, then they laughed at them, then they

fought them than they won is everyone watching knows there's no more little gasoline. Venezuela was just the last country in the whole world to get rid of it. It doesn't exist anymore. As a result, the Center for Disease Control in the United States, where you are, has calculated that the average American child is three to five IQ points higher than they would have been. Have we not got rid of leaded gasoline? Now, if we go back to the start of that crisis, right? If we go back to, well, let's say not the start, but let's say the 1970s when their campaigns began, you can well imagine perfectly reasonable people going, We've had less leaded gasoline for 50 years. I'm just a housewife. What can I do about that, right? But almost all change in democracies comes from Ordinary People banding together, fighting, making it a political issue, making the issue visible, demanding politicians act. That's how political change happens. So in a democracy, you have agency. I have agency with ordinary citizens can put issues on the

map do direct action do raising it with their elective Representatives through constantly talking about it in public spheres. Um and these Transformations absolutely not only can come from Ordinary People but almost always do come from Ordinary People. In that sense I think I'm also optimistic too but that doesn't mean that we don't have anything to do from here. We have a lot of things to do together right a huge amount but I'm still so optimistic because we saw that happening in the past. So I really like your book in that sense I think so. You talked about this importance of collective action so we gotta do something together um the ultimate change is not gonna happen if you just keep taking individual action. If you're just using cookies or maybe it will solve today's problem but it's not going to solve the problem for our children. When I started researching stolen Focus I think I just thought well hey I thought I was weak and B I thought the thing that screwed me over was just the existence of the

smartphone, right? And that's not true. There's something more subtle, more complex, and more fixable going on, right? You think about the lead petrolish, the lead petrol analogy. One of the things I was asking people, I wanted to find out, is effectively, if we take that analogy, what is the equivalent of the lead in the lead paint, right? What do we need to get rid of in order to start to deal with this element of the attention crisis? And it was really explained to me by lots of people before I got it, um, and so for example, Aza Raskin, who invented a key aspect of how many websites work, a wonderful person, his dad Jeff Raskin invented the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. Asia said to me, Well, I'll tell you what the equivalent of the lead in the lead paint is. We've got to ban the current business model for social media. And we're thinking, What the hell are you talking about, right? And explain to me there are essentially three ways in which social media can be funded.

the current model is what Professor Shoshana Zuboff called surveillance capitalism brilliantly. So, the way it works is, anyone watching, please don't for the reasons we've talked about. If you suddenly opened TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, now any of the mainstream social media apps, they immediately begin to make money out of you in two ways. First way is really obvious, you see advertising, okay, no one needs me to explain that to them. Second way is much more important. Everything you ever do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out what makes you tick, what you like, what you don't like, what makes you sad, what makes you angry. And they are scanning everything, including your so-called private messages, and they're learning about you. And they're learning it primarily. There's many reasons, but one, the key reason is they're learning what to show you next that will keep you scrolling, right? And they're learning that for a really simple reason. Every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money.

the longer you scroll, the more money they make because the more ads you see, and the more they learn about you. And every time you close the app, that revenue stream disappears. Every time your kid opens the app, begins to scroll, they begin to make money. Every time your kid closes the app, that revenue stream disappears. So all of this genius in Silicon Valley, when it's applied to social media or they say I or these algorithms, is geared towards one thing and one thing only: figuring out how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. That's it. And they are unbelievably good at it. You mentioned before my friend Tristan Harris, one of the most heroic and admirable people I've ever met, who used to work at the heart of Google. It became a very outspoken critic of what Silicon Valley is doing in this respect. He said when he testified before the Senate, You know you can try having willpower, but every time you do, there are 10,000 engineers on the other side.

of the screen working very hard to undermine your self-control. Right so you've got that one model surveillance capitalism. You appear to get the product for free but in practice you pay with your attention your privacy has some benefits it's free it really is. You don't pay up front but it has very big costs the second and every single person watching I'm pretty sure will have an experience of the two alternative models so the second model is subscription. Okay everyone knows how Netflix works you pay a certain amount in return you get access key thing is all the incentives then change at the moment when social media is approaching you they're like okay how do we hack and invade sunny in order to keep her scrolling as long as possible right that's their disposition towards you because you're not the customer you are the product they sell to the real customer The Advertiser your attention right all these companies Tick Tock Facebook they've got customer services departments we can't phone them try ringing them they won't talk to you.

because you're not the customer right unless you're paying to place ads uh then you become the customer but suddenly in a subscription model you are the customer suddenly they have to go not how do we hack and invade Sunny to keep her scrolling suddenly they have to go what a sunny one turns out Sunny feels good when she stares into people's eyes in the real world where she meets up with her friends okay let's design our app to maximize her meeting up with her friends and seeing people online instead of her Doom scrolling through people's photoshopped images right I have a question about that subscription model though so if we have to pay for some service there is inevitably it causes some kind of inequality some people cannot afford that and some people can afford it and there will be a gap between those two people like what do you think about that I think that's true but and that's partly why I prefer the third model that Matt talk about model one causes a catastrophic um inequality right if you look at the

figures for poor children so the average American child uses TikTok for 100 minutes a day. But the poorer you are, the more minutes you're using it, right? I can assure you Mark Zuckerberg's child is not allowed to use TikTok, right? Um, Elon Musk's kids ain't using TikTok. Rich people are not letting their kids sit there all day on TikTok, right? So there's an enormous class inequality built into model one. There's a significant class inequality built into number two. It's not a trivial thing. You're absolutely right. It's why, with some reservations, I—and there's cost to all of these models, benefits and costs to all of these models—it's why probably on balance I prefer model 3. So model 3 is public ownership independent of government. So think about the sewers. Before we had sewers, we had in the streets, people got cholera, it was terrible. So we all pay to build and maintain the sewers together. If someone is watching in Seoul, you own the sewers along with

everyone else in Seoul. I live in London and Las Vegas. I own the sewers, along with all the other people of London or Las Vegas, right? And I pay to maintain them. In those places, we own the sewers together, sewage pipes together, because we don't want to get cholera. We might want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the equivalent of Cholera for our attention and our politics right now. It would be very important for that to be independent of the government, right? Obviously, we can all imagine how horrific it would have been if Donald Trump, for example, had owned the internet, right? We did not want that, right? An imperfect but I think very good model is the BBC, the most trusted media institution in the world. So every single person in Britain has a television, pays a license to the BBC. The BBC is independent of the government, it works for the British people, it's funded by the British people, and it's owned by the British people. Not a coincidence, I think, that it is the most trusted news source.

in the world, it has its problems. It has its imperfections, to be sure, but it's pretty good. I think you're right. Personally, I prefer the third model, although there are drawbacks to that. How do you have something that's owned by the people but independent the government? There's complicated. The BBC itself, its independence is constantly being challenged, and Britain is a very stable democracy where the BBC is very popular. So all of these models are imperfect, but I think the imperfection of surveillance capitalism is just so clear and so overwhelming that we do need to be looking at these two alternative models. Now, the other important thing to say is we will never get to those. Those companies will never navigate to those alternative options on their own any more than the lead industry was going to go, you know what, guys, I think we poisoned enough kids' brains, let's stop doing it, right? They would never have done that and needed that movement of ordinary mothers who fought like hell for their children and then the government responding to this movement of mothers and regulating the land.

industry effectively regulating it out of existence when it came to petrol although it continues in other that would be my uh preference but again you can see how that reframes the whole debate if you're sitting there thinking oh what's wrong with me why is my kid so annoying why are they just sitting there all day staring at tick tock that's a very different disposition to the problem than to go oh these really sophisticated people are developing unbelievably uh sophisticated techniques to hack and invade me and my child and have been doing that for years and are going to get better and better at it if we don't act that's a completely reframing the problem completely Alters the understanding I think you can really see how Silicon Valley will want to present this problem right they create this problem a significant part of the problem there are 11 other factors that the book is about but they create this element of the problem and then they want to transfer the responsibility for solving that problem onto you this is from

um online bookstores people shared and then sum up the comments about your books. And you know people really write a lot about, you know, your book and what they felt, what they learned after reading it. So this person is talking about exactly the thing that we were talking about. This is not individual crisis anymore, and this is a sire problem, and we should read this together and then contemplate about this together. A lot of people really liked your book and appreciated your book. So I think the last question of today is if there is any comments and anything that you want to share with Korean readers. If there is anything that you want to say, please share that with Korean readers. I think, you know, ow the incredible achievement of South Korea in how I think about how hard one your democracy was right and how precious that democracy is to South Korean people. I think we really need to get that fight, that passion that drove the fight for democracy in South Korea in really dangerous and difficult circumstances where it required incredible courage.

that's the spirit we need to summon in defense of ourselves. Partly for ourselves as individuals, we want to be the best we can be, but also because the factors that are harming our attention and focus are also factors that are harming our democracies and indeed making democracy really endangering the long-term potential for democracy. These social media companies, they are set up just to keep us scrolling. That's all they care about. How do we keep you scrolling? So they're set up. They don't care what it is that keeps you scrolling. They care about the content of it. All they care about is the fact that you keep scrolling and you see ads. So all this machinery was set up to just scan everyone's behavior and figure out what is it that keeps people scrolling. And they bumped into, they uncovered a truth about one aspect of human behavior that's actually been known about for like 70 years by psychologists. It's very simple. It's called negativity bias, right? It just shows human beings will stare longer at something that makes you angry.

and upset than you will at something that makes you feel good. If you've ever seen a car accident on the highway, you know what I mean. You stayed longer at the terrible car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street, right? This is very deep in human nature. 10-week-old babies will stare more at an angry face than a smiling face, and that's always been part of our nature. But when it combines with algorithms that are designed to feed you things that will keep you staring, it leads to a terrible outcome. So, picture two teenage girls who go to the same party and go home on the same bus, and they both open TikTok. And one of them does a video where they say, That party was so great tonight. We danced to Ariana Grande. We had such fun. I loved it. And the other one opens the phone and says, Karen was an absolute skank at that party, and her boyfriend's an... and just does an angry rant about everyone at the party. The algorithms are scanning

for the kind of words that you use, and they'll put, they'll put the first video into a few people's feeds, but it'll put the second video into far more people's feeds because of negativity bias. More people go, What do you mean Karen's a skank? You're a skank, wouldn't you? You're gonna have a fight, you're gonna argue, you're gonna keep going back. What do you mean? What do you mean? Right, the nice video makes you feel good, and you just move on. That nasty video makes you angry and keeps you scrolling, right, and engaging. Now, that is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls on a bus. We all know what's happened to the anxiety levels of teenage girls, but now imagine that being done to a whole society, right, where the nice people, the kind people, the people who are in favor of compromise and decency are muffled and pushed to the back, and the angry, mean, cruel, hostile people are given megaphones and pushed to the front.

except you don't have to imagine it because we believe in it. We've been living it for 10 years now. We cannot have democracy if we interact primarily through mechanisms designed to make us angry and hate our fellow citizens and think that compromise is evil and the other side are devils. We are coming apart and it's not only because of this. There are many factors going on, of course, but this is a really big fuel on the fire. So I guess I would say think about that energy that's transformed your country, that commitment to democracy, and you don't need me to tell you to fight to defend your democracy. You've done it much better than I could ever tell you to do, but my God, we need to summon that energy now. [Music]

스마트폰 중독 & 집중력 저하 방치하면 결국 이렇게 됩니다 (w. [도둑맞은 집중력] 저자, 요한 하리 쌤)

That Korean Girl 돌돌콩

The attention crisis is causing a breakdown in the ability to focus, leading to diminished problem-solving skills and a decrease in overall competence.

This crisis is not only affecting individuals but also has societal and species-level consequences, impacting human achievement and the ability to formulate and achieve goals.

James Williams identifies three layers of the attention crisis - Spotlight, Starlight, and Daylight - affecting both short-term and long-term goal achievement, as well as the ability to discern and pursue these goals.

If not addressed, the attention crisis will result in a decreased capacity to understand, set, and accomplish objectives at every level of life.

The Impact of Cynicism and Attention Recovery

Cynicism is growing due to a societal emphasis on passive income and leisure, making it difficult to prioritize attention recovery.

There are scientific factors affecting attention, including the inability of the brain to focus on more than one or two things at a time, leading to a significant decrease in productivity and an increase in mistakes when trying to multitask.

Understanding these factors can help individuals reclaim their attention and change their relationship with the problem.

The Impact of Interruptions on Intelligence

Being chronically interrupted can lower IQ by 10 points, which is twice as much as the short-term effect of smoking cannabis.

Constant interruption is causing cognitive degradation in today's environment.

The term "multitasking" is a misnomer, as humans can't multitask but rather juggle attention, and both involuntary and voluntary noise exposure can significantly impact focus and cognitive function.

The Impact of Distractions on Attention and Willpower

Classical music is beneficial for focus, while lyrics can be distracting, especially in a noisy environment.

Constantly switching attention between tasks, like watching Netflix and working, significantly reduces depth of thinking and creative thinking.

The common approach of digital detox and willpower struggle, as explained by Professor Roy Baumeister's own experience, is not enough to address the root causes of attention problems.

Strategies for Protecting Attention and Making Collective Change

Individuals can take immediate steps to protect their attention, such as using devices like the k-safe and the Freedom app to limit phone usage.

The crisis in attention is not just a result of bad habits, but also due to invasive forces designed to invade attention, requiring a collective offense against these forces.

Collective changes, like the "right to disconnect" law in France, are also crucial in addressing the problem of constantly being on call for work, and individuals can contribute to structural change by following the example of past collective movements.

The Impact of Lead Gasoline and Collective Action

Leaded gasoline had a catastrophic effect on people's brains, despite early warnings from a female scientist, Dr.

Ordinary mothers, led by women like Jill Brunette, played a crucial role in the movement to ban leaded gasoline, ultimately leading to a higher average IQ for American children.

Political change and societal transformation, including the ban of leaded gasoline, are driven by ordinary people banding together and demanding action from politicians in a democracy.

The Impact of Social Media Business Models

Social media platforms make money by keeping users scrolling for as long as possible, using targeted ads and surveillance.

The subscription model, while reducing surveillance, can create inequality in access to the platform.

The idea of public ownership of social media, independent of the government, is proposed as a more equitable alternative, similar to the BBC's model.

Social media platforms are designed to keep users scrolling by exploiting the human brain's negativity bias.

This algorithm-driven focus on negative content is contributing to increased anxiety and division within society.

The phenomenon is undermining democracy by amplifying anger and hostility, making it crucial for the public to rally in defense of their democratic values.