John Interviews British-Swiss writer and journalist Johann Hari who has written for The Independent and The Huffington Post. They discuss his book "Stolen Focus: Why You Can"t Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again". Next, he has a chat with radio host, producer, and actress Kelly Carlin - the daughter of comedian George Carlin. They talk about her work on the special 4 hour documentary "George Carlin's American Dream" which is available on HBO Max.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
this is the John Fuvel saying podcast the greatest stand-up comedian America has ever produced and now has the best yet stock and entry of his life and career you've heard of it already it's George Carlin's American dream that's a two-part film directed by our friend Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio and I am so happy to welcome one of our favorite recurring guests and humans back to the show Kelly Carlin who is someone I can turn to for the big questions and the intricacies of minutiae she is a public speaker and an educator she's a healer she's a great broadcaster and podcaster her book of Carlin home companion and the solo show she did for it are both essential and highly praised and we are always thrilled to welcome the great Kelly Carlin back to the show hi Kelly hey John I always feel like I'm coming home when I'm here like really this is home because you know I feel like we're family so thank you for having me and I'm excited to talk about this particular project with you because we're both you know it's kind of holds everything we both love which is comedy and looking at society but also the personal journey and evolution of a human ourselves and others so looking forward to this today well I'm thrilled I love the film and I told Judd that my only critique is that I deeply wanted it to be a lot longer how has this press tour been and how many times have you been asked if your dad was alive today what would he say about what's going on it can you get a rough number of how many times you've been if your dad was here what would he say about all this stuff I can't believe 145,629 times I've been asked that over the last 14 years yeah it's the big question and of course but no this has been great it's been it's been an honor to talk about this project because it is it's everything I wanted and that's so exciting when something works out like that and you know John my path has been to tell my own story to speak my own truth and to speak the family's truth on stage and on the page and I had this revelation after I saw the the fine cut of it and I said I thought to myself wow this wouldn't be the shape it is without me having done my personal work with all this stuff and then my artistic work because I got to show up in the documentary with my heart wide open being able to speak the truth about our family's history and our family's struggles and our family's triumphs and do it in a way which is what my work has always been about and your work too which is inviting people's humanity and their authenticity like giving people permission to open themselves up and to share our shared struggle with things yeah yeah and so I'm super super proud of that part of it and of course the other part of it which Judd and Michael wrangled and Joe the editor with you know 60 years of archival footage it's just profound and amazing well I mean that's the whole thing right one thing you and your dad consistently have had in common is destroying bullshit but keeping the humanity and keeping it entertaining and not preachy and that is a very hard balancing act and it's something that I admire and go for in in my life and I'm I know you had many requests over the years to do the documentary I thought Judd's movie about Gary Shandling in 2018 the Zen Diaries was the best film of that year so I've been so looking forward to this were there any specific bits or any specific elements that you knew going into it you wanted this film to include well I mean I didn't I really said to Judd like this is yours go do it we want the full human being we don't want anything pretty around the edges and it's because we like you said the Shandling documentary I knew Judd was capable of that there was nothing in particular but I did want him to make sure to never put his finger on the scale politically one side or the other I didn't want this to become the you know well we're progressives and we are you know let's admit it we're progressives my dad was 99% progressive he was a libertarian when it came to free speech and I think you and I are kind of probably in that that pod too but I didn't want to like I didn't want to be heavy-handed in that in any way so you know I kept an eye eye on that and you know made sure that that wasn't when I watched the rough cut I had a couple of notes about that but other than that I really wanted them to kind of go for it and and the only other thing I said to them is I don't want to I don't want a cavalcade of comedian heads talking about my dad because there's so many documentaries like that and it's like charming it's okay but you know you watch five of them and you you start to get cross-eyed with it exactly and when they and Judd said when he got when they got access to the Tony Hendra tape so Tony Hendra and my dad sat down I think it's 23 27 hours of tapes to talk about my dad's life because Tony was kind of the ghost writer ghost shaper of last words my dad's sort of biography as he called it and when Judd got a hold of those they knew that my dad could narrate his story and I think that's what's so fantastic about the documentary is basically my dad really does narrate it no it's beautiful it reminded me a lot of the John Lennon documentary imagine which John narrated himself and there's so much you just said that I want to get to but let me start off by praising how the film covered your mom how the film showed that because again in a lesser hands this would have been a document oh the seven dirty words you know it's like I've heard about the seven dirty words so many times this film goes into the other stuff which is what I care about the film goes so deeply into your mom it completely shows that your father success probably wouldn't have happened without her his genius would have happened his success probably wouldn't and I knew right away that this was going to be a great film when it went into your father forbidding your mother from getting a job and I have to say I think your father would totally approve of you being specifically critical of him and loving at the same time and that sets the tone for the whole film and completely reflects his work to me yeah my dad taught me to be a truth teller and there were some truths that were uncomfortable for my dad and I go into that extensively in my show and my memoir that was our dance that the personal stuff was uncomfortable for my dad don't know if it was generational don't know if it was his own personal guilt which I know part of it was that but that wasn't his thing I'm an Oprah generation girl he was not an Oprah you know he's not used to that so that was difficult for him but I know in the end and like I used to say on my solo show that people love my dad more when they see warts and all when they see the parts of him that weren't the most progressive woke evolved human being and you know that thing was that thing with my mom he just didn't he was trying to protect me from being a latchkey kid like in his mind it made perfect sense he was being a good dad being a good man he was be he was being a good dad and in the 60s men didn't even think about the consequences of what that means to a woman who's as creative and who's as hungry to change the world and to be a part of the world didn't even think about what shutting that down meant to her you know and of course my mother was not you know my mother was already propensity for alcoholism before that this just like lit the fire of it of course yeah of course you know you mentioned the politics of it and to me your dad has always been like Jesus and the Tocqueville in that he is claimed constantly by both the left and the right and I know you're routinely peppered with people saying can you believe this routine of your dad's from this special is so prescient today but we saw it all through the pandemic with that bid he did about swimming in the Hudson and not catching polio because he was tempered in raw sewage from you are all diseased back in 99 you know I'm still shocked to see just as right-wing guys can read the second amendment and ignore the well-regulated militia part they can watch that whole special and just say oh Carlin's got to be anti-vaccine and ignore the rest of everything he stood for your dad was so pro-science and yet like Jesus they'll take one little bit out of context and use it to claim him as their own yeah and then I found out from my uncle that they've got the polio vaccine to of course they did every kid in America got it on the show got it on the sugar cube like you know like come on people like it's just so amazing to me and you're right you know I my dad is a war shock test right your confirmation bias will be confirmed by George Carlin because that's where we're at as a culture and as a as a species really I think America is really looking for a moral center again and we can't find it because all of our institutions have been deteriorating for 50 years those used to be our moral center we used to be able to believe in God and the country the flag that all came apart 60s 70s 80s 90s and the whole well thing so there's no moral center we're we're every single one of us is looking for it even in people like Donald Trump they were looking for the answer in that man and and so you know they turn to someone who's like my dad a great orator a great thinker and they're they're searching they're looking please please confirm please please help me find my center and the reality is is that my dad had his own moral center certainly and like you said if you if you listen to all of it you can clearly see it but you have to take the whole package exactly in order to find it yeah well likewise you know your dad railed against political correctness but his whole game was grounded in compassionate especially compassionate for the least fortunate so so many people will take his rantings against PC culture and use that to justify their own indifference to the suffering of others and that's with comedy too I think about the when your dad was on Larry King and Larry asked him about about dice and and your dad gave one of the best you know delineations of punching down comedy how dice went after marginalized people for a cheap laugh I mean I think if your dad was alive today I hate that phrase I'm sorry but I think if he was here today I don't think he would dig Chappelle picking on trans kids but I think he would totally support Chappelle's right to do whatever material he wanted is that roughly about where it would be yeah that's what I've been saying John he would like he said about dice clay you know I will you know I will support and protect his right to say anything my dad was a pretty much a First Amendment absolutist you know but there are limits to speech from the government we know that I've studied First Amendment law it's a fascinating thing but punching down you know people who are struggling to a feel safe in the world to stay alive that don't have privilege around them to do that and don't have a sense of belonging in the culture he would certainly have something to say about that and I doubt my dad I think my dad would have something to say about the speech around pronouns probably or things like that he would probably say something like look I respect that people want to be called certain things or you know that you know I have a name or something like I get that but he would find this is the problem he's not here he would find a unique way into that conversation to let us at least question the overriding control people want to have on people's thoughts and speech that's where the line would have been drawn by my dad we're gonna take a quick break we'll be right back with the great Kelly Carlin will be right back after this I'm John Fiegel saying this is progress after dark you know a lot of people always talk about your father and by the way I think maybe my favorite move part in the whole film is this bit when you're a toddler and your father's on tape interviewing you about the Vietnam crisis I think it's all that's it the whole the whole movie is right there in that scene the whole relationship it's it's all it's all there all the promise and all the peril but I want to ask you about something I've always heard people say oh well there was the old George Carlin the clean cut guy who did variety shows and then he had this transformation and became the hippie and I get that but I always thought that there was another transformation that I think began with a jamming in New York album that's where your dad said he he stopped being a comic and became an essayist I think there's really I mean he was always evolving but there's three George Carlin's there's the first two we always hear about and then there's the man he became in the early 1990s after the first deeply popular Persian Gulf War I've always felt jammed in New York and the follow-up back in town were the real markings of when the third wave began for him yeah and he even talks about it which I love they found some really small little interviews I don't even like on people's phones I don't know what the hell that they were from but where he talks about how he finally felt like a writer like that's such a that's such a mind-blowing thing here's a man has been writing his material already for 25 years or whatever it was you know well since 1960 so 30 years he'd already been writing and then he finally felt like a writer and like you use the word essayist because I always use that word too I really do think he constructed five or six essays per special like that was his thing and yeah and he you know he even talks about that jamming in New York where you know the word artist finally comes up for him and and you know he's not a man to say pretentious words about himself but he claimed that word for himself because it is a different level it's not just entertainment and it's it's not just look at me or look how smart I am there's always that part of it and he talked openly about the need for approval and acceptance and things like that but there was this thing about I've been thinking I've been looking at the world this way and I have to share it no matter what no matter who shows up no matter how many people show up luckily he was a guy where he could make it also funny and a lot of people still showed up for it so but yes 100% and you know and then if there's and then there's that next era starting you know with that area but late 90s early to early 2000s where people complain about him being so nihilistic I know and so dark and really what I've figured out just in the last few weeks John by talking about this and seeing the documentary like having Judd and Mike really lay it out for me because you know I've been wrestling with this narrative for 14 years trying to figure it out myself and to find myself in it and to understand him more as a person but I what I really get is is that he was so comfortable with being on the outside that thing that he did where he kind of gave up on the species that we all see and I certainly did too I saw it is nihilistic I saw it is like dad I could have lived on this planet give me some fucking help you know but he got so comfortable there and that was such a gift for us because he was just seeing what was and what had always been and he was unafraid to say it out loud make it into funny humor moments sometimes not so funny and we we were the ones who were afraid to look at it so we decided to call it dark and angry and nihilistic yes and here we are now here we are now John the last five years it's all happening right before our eyes every single day and we're we shouldn't be shocked because it's always been here and so really the question for me and for you because you and I are so also dedicated in in the evolution of consciousness you know my dad had a personal evolution of consciousness he wasn't so interested in this societal he kind of gave up on I don't think we can't evolve as a species but here we are in a moment where we are asking the question okay so this is real this is really happening we can't pretend anymore we can't distract ourselves anymore even though we keep trying what the hell do we do with this and this is our generations you know moment to sit with this and see what happens yeah well yeah I love that you say that because the last act of the film really deals with that and that's that's my favorite debate and that's how you can tell this film is made by people who love Carlin because they go into it I mean your dad would always say he was rooting for the comet rooting for the comet then you and I've talked about this I never really bought it I thought that was the persona there was too much compassion I liken it to how Bob Dylan keeps writing all these apocalypse songs every Bob Dylan album there's usually two songs about had the unholy apocalypse upon us old testament shit raining down but like your dad Dylan makes it entertaining it's not nihilistic it's entertainment it's actually fun to consume I always thought if your dad didn't care about humanity he would have just been a rich successful hack yeah because the passion to do what he did which was to think all day about this stuff and to take this stance and as you know don't we've talked about this I you know and I even say it in the documentary you know dad if you really don't care if you've really given up and why the fuck do you get on stage I the fuck you know and that's when he like was like okay to shake it oh you know you got me you know scratch the surface and there is this broken-hearted man disappointed in his fellow man and what we're doing with this disappointed that we all turn towards our own selfish needs our own accumulation of goods and material items and money in the bank it kind of wired in and it's part of what made it so successful as homo sapiens but we are reaching this very intense bifurcation point where the system is either going to fall into chaos which it's the edges are here the chaos is happening it's either going to fall apart or it's going to reorder itself into a higher order and this is what systems theorists talk about and it's something I study I know my dad studied it we used to talk about it and so for I think part of him rooted for the chaos because at least we'll know then where we at are we gonna reorder into a higher order and move on to the next level of species whoever whatever that's gonna be homo whatever or are we going to just fall apart and maybe only have a million people left on the planet and then maybe there's a chance again for the planet and for humanity who knows yeah I I think that's actually the one consistent theme of the Bible order in chaos there is order man keeps fucking it up and going into chaos and God keeps saying okay you get one more chance the garden the flood killing his son it's the one if you view the Bible is literature which I'd like to do it's the one consistent theme and we all we always get another chance and that's where the science and the morality come together for me I you know I you also have to say this documentary does touch on your father's heroic cocaine habit I think the first time I ever saw you perform first time I ever saw you perform you were doing a spoken word show in North Hollywood and without mentioning his name you did a incredible performance of a story that was dark and horrifying and totally hilarious and entertaining about your father bringing you out to the front lawn to watch the sky on fire I have to believe again that your dad would totally respect that the film didn't put he foot around that part of his life yeah yeah because in the end you know he was sober and he was in AA meetings in the end and he knows that the power of sharing your experience strength and hope and that's what 12 step meetings are about tell your story in order to inspire the person who's struggling that day with their exact same story you know maybe the details are not the same but the struggle is the same and I love that the film is called George Carlin's American Dream because this is part of the American story mental health issues and addiction chaos even domestic abuse my parents went after each other a couple of times you know it was horrific to be a kid in that situation to be an only child especially we had it all in our in our household yeah we had privilege yeah we had money and my dad had this genius artistic thing but that that that trauma that terrifying space that that kind of chaos that personal chaos um a lot of us have lived through that on one level or another and that's why I do my work I do my whole mission in life is to tell people it's okay to take your mask off it's okay to share your suffering your vulnerability because we're all in it together that's right and your story can lift someone else's story up and no one is perfect here and one of the things about this is is we put celebrities up on a pedestal so that we can pull them down and make them human again always always right what I love and the the turnaround that I've decided on reframing this as is we're not taking my father off of a pedestal we're merely lifting ourselves up to his level that you can be a genius and a lost soul at the same time and find your way through it if you're willing to keep your heart open and your love for those around you alive that really makes the difference I love how this new film goes into your father's childhood and I was so sorry for the recent loss of your uncle Pat I was so thrilled to have gotten a chance to meet him but I realize I'm raising my horrible child in the neighborhood where your dad grew up which he called White Harlem I think they called it albino Harlem when I moved in but you know I didn't know how abusive your dad's dad had been that was something a part of the narrative that I really didn't know much about and I'm curious it seems like you are the archivist right you're the gatekeeper you must know everything but I bet that you even you keep on finding out new things about your dad I think this even just this whole experience of watching this documentary and just seeing these other layers of him and and making the connection between knowing his father was an abuser and abused his brother knew that his entire life and then when my dad doing a lot of cocaine and my mother was a crazy woman on alcohol and they used to go at it at each other his own inner struggle with that you know that like I can't become this raging guy because it lives inside of him because you can see it on stage he he had a turn on the rage and service of his art and really him having to learn how to manage that for himself and and of course he didn't have a father he did not have a father figure and so when it came to being a father I can't imagine what that was like I have this empty void of well I don't really have this role I just had this very entertaining narcissistic mother who tried to be both to him and and she was you know and she did she did a good job you know but yeah clearly clearly um and I think that's also one of the most fun moments of the documentary is watching my grandmother Mary on the Mike Douglas show with my dad it is it is she someone said to me the other day she she was alive today she'd have her own reality show and I'm like oh and wouldn't it be great I'm curious you know we we talk a lot about it seems like the big new vote thing is to say oh look at this clip from Carlin how how pressy and was he look at this clip he was so ahead of his time and it's more relevant today than ever do you have any theories on why Lenny Bruce has not achieved that longevity I mean if you try to play a Lenny Bruce album for a millennial the Christ and Moses bit would hold up but so many of the bits just sound more like archaeology than modern entertainment I think Lenny was at a very particular time and he was struggling and really talking about religion in a time when it was illegal to talk about these you know first of all the words were illegal it was very much more harrowing and then you know the reason he got half sold was because of going after the church in very Catholic cities you know Chicago and New York being two of them so there was the power of what he was up against systemically and I think it became a personal fight for him so I think it's a different thing whereas my dad never let it be a personal fight and my dad always talked about it in a more abstract academic way in the sense that he talked about the big forces within a capitalistic system that are oppressive that are broken that are authoritarian and when you can talk about systems that way he could have been talking about that a hundred years ago because those systems are the same systems and then certainly the last half of the 20th century certainly after the you know Nixon and the Reagan era the corruption of those systems and and the dismantling of them in the 80s by the Reagan era that's why he's so prescient and that's why it's so relevant and until we form capitalism until we transform all the different systems that he talked about education military health care treating you know minorities brown people women gays the whole lgqbt thing with respect we're gonna still have in these conversations yeah so yeah I think in many ways Lenny was the John the Baptist we had to have so your dad and and prior could be the jesus's um yeah I want to I want to pay you a compliment that might not sound like one at first but in many ways I have viewed you as being sort of like Yoko Ono in the most positive way in that you both you sustain the legacy of your loved one who is a great beloved artist while also creating your own very distinctive very unique work at the same time and I thought this of you for a long time that that you you keep his flame alive while you also you know bring your own light to the world and I love what you do and I love your writing and broadcasting and I'm curious how do the two influence each other you being the keeper of Georgia's flame and you shining your own light it seems like the two do feed each other a lot in your work yeah you know I am inspired for whatever reason maybe because I feel like I disappeared so quickly in my life in order to be of service to my family and so finding who I am and figuring out who I am has been my life journey that has been my work first personally just to survive and have mental health but I also see it I mean I you know Spalding Gray and Karen Finley are my two artistic heroes those are people who unzipped themselves on stage and let us see all of their neurosis and all of their pain and suffering inside of them and that changed my life by seeing them I suddenly felt like I was I actually belonged on this earth yes so for me my my personal inner revelations and you know detective work is my news my dad looked out at the world to find his muse and I do I'm fascinated by the world too I love to figure out how the world ticks and I think that's why I studied Jungian psychology because with Jung both of you are looking internally but it's always the individual and the collective there's always a conversation between these two things so I am fascinated by the collective too but in a different way I don't need to talk about the systems and the forces of our modern society so much that doesn't interest me but this disfiguring out who I am and the detective work I do about unfolding myself is is my joy is the thing that I get excited about and then what I realized is that that's really just all my dad has ever done also he just kept always being super curious and looking within but that thing he talks about in the documentary where it's like oh I'm not here to make people think I just want people to see what I've been thinking about I get that same little thing too like oh I can't wait to share this revelation I've had because I think it really reflects the human condition in a more global way and I think people will find themselves in it but I'm proud that I figured it out and that I also having the gift of GAB I mean you know my grandparents my Irish grandparents my father gave me this ability to articulate complex abstract ideas in a way that can really land in people's minds and heart that's right I honor that gift and so for me it's just a dance back and forth you know honoring him showing his humanity honoring my own process showing my humanity we're all just playing the same game here which is find the truth share the truth and I've been using this quote a lot lately but it keeps coming up rom-doss famously said we're all just trying to walk each other home and that's what I feel is both my work and my father's work in the end Kelly what is next for you well as you know the last three years I've been doing this amazing work building on my own personal evolution I've turned it into a coaching program for women it's called women on the verge so I've been doing that for three years that is evolving that is growing I'm learning how to be an entrepreneur and run that part of it and how to feed the world in that kind of way while feeding myself but I am ready John to get back on the stage get back on the page I'm ready to once again take my own life of inspiration and dig into it because I really want to talk about what I've just lived through the last 15 years which was coming out of the shadow finding my own way into the light my light and to talk about the struggle that I had and the joy and the opportunity to express myself and to find my to literally find my voice and could not have done it without my father obviously and at the same time it's not about him it's about my own personal evolution and revolution and this is the work I've been doing with these women for three years and this is this is what I teach which is about authentic agency finding your most authentic self and then having the courage to go out into the world to share it whatever shape that is and so I'm going to start writing some personal essays again and personal stories about that and hopefully get a book and probably have some sort of some sort of version of a stage show around it dynamite I can't wait listen this platform is always open to you I always love talking with you about this stuff I think you carry on your father's legacy in the most positive possible way and and I learn from you every time Kelly it's so good to see you thank you for joining us George Carlin's American Dream is on HBO now and streaming on HBO Max Namaste and all that shit Namaste motherfucker as I like to say we will be right back I am so delighted anytime we can get Johan Hari to come back and talk to us about pretty much any subject he's a writer and journalist we've talked with him about his excellent books chasing the screen lost connections he's written for the New York Times Le Mans the Guardian his TED talks and now this viral video have been viewed almost 100 million times and man's been praised by everyone from Oprah to Noam Chomsky he was also executive producer of the awesome after nominated the United States versus Billy Holiday and forthcoming TV series with Samuel L. Jackson but his new book is one that is going to garner him so many new fans in every corner of the world and one of my favorite things about Johan is that he's very upfront about his beliefs but his work is such that it appeals to every possible ideology and demographic and his new book stolen focus he gives us a terrifying and fascinating examination of why we are losing our focus as people and how we might get it back why did teenagers find themselves only able to focus on one task for 65 seconds why are office workers on average only able to focus on things for an average of three minutes this book is an epic journey to show how we got here and how we might get back if we can concentrate on it just long enough Harry welcome back to Sirius XM I was so happy to all be joined cheers that's such a nice introduction I feel like I should just give up now it's lovely to see you and I'm so glad to see you albeit by a zoom before we kick off how are you how is your family how have you been during this very curious and menacing time you know it's it's weird doing book promotion on the internet because by this point in a book coming out I would normally be talking to audiences I've been looking into their eyes I'd be seeing the ideas land I'd be giving loads of speeches and it's just not the same on zoom as everyone knows literally nobody has ever said the words oh great another zoom call actually it's kind of related some of the reason in the book but the but yeah so I'm okay you know on the scale of all the people who suffered in the pandemic I'm pretty low on the list and I spent most of it in Vegas which is a very weird place to spend a pandemic because I'm researching a book a series of crimes that have been happening in Vegas and Vegas is a weird place at the best of times but during a pandemic yeah it's full of people whose response to a global pandemic is to say well this is the perfect time to go to Vegas so you're surrounded by charmingly insane people but it's been great it's also always the perfect time to smoke indoors with no ventilation um certainly you know I know I I I want to say it's prescient that this book is coming out right now when so many of us have spent our lives so far away from so many people and so intimately connected to our devices our digital world has been expanding non-stop for two years and our analog real world has been contracting but what motivated you to write this book now were you working on this before lockdown began long before so I noticed that my own ability to pay attention and think deeply was deteriorating it felt like with each year that passed things that require deep focus like reading a book we're getting more and more like running up a down escalator you know what I mean I could still do them but they were getting harder and harder and I started to look I had a kind of disturbing experience with a young person in my life that you can ask me about in a minute if you want but I started to that really led me to think you know what this I've got to look into this and I started looking at some of the early research it's disconcerted me for every one child who was identified as having serious attention problems when I was seven years old there's now a hundred children identified with that problem and the average American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes so I think well could that be something changing yes it has it really always been like this so I decided to go on a big journey all over the world I spent three years traveling from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne to use my training in the social sciences at Cambridge to to interview over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus and what I learned from them is there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make your attention worse and loads of the factors that have been proven to make your attention worse have been hugely rising in recent years we really are in a deep attention crisis in fact professor Joel Nigg one of the leading experts on children's attention problems said to me that we need to start asking if we're living in what he calls an attentional pathogenic environment an environment which all of us almost all of us are finding it harder to focus and what I learned is your attention didn't collapse your attention's been stolen from you by these big and powerful forces and to take that back we're going to have to defend ourselves and we're going to have to go on the offense against these forces that have done this to us well I'd love to talk about that and unpack it a bit because you do talk with Silicon Valley dissidents who actually talk about how they have learned how to hack human attention and your entire book is about how we got here it's not simply a matter of doctors who can't focus just giving out more and more ADHD diagnoses no I mean we are changing as a species and you mentioned the young person I'm guessing this is the young person who had a fondness for Elvis once we're talking about yeah this is my god son I call him Adam in the book and you know when he was nine he developed this brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis and everyone understood where it came from and what was particularly cute about it is that he didn't know that Elvis had become a cheesy cliche so he did it with all he was singing like Viva Las Vegas with all the heart-catching sincerity of a nine-year-old who believes he's being cool and at nights when I would tuck him in he would get me to tell him again and again the story of Elvis's life I tried to skip over the bit of the end where Elvis shits himself to death on the toilet and one night he said to me looked at me very intensely and he said yo ham will you take me to Graceland one day and I said yeah sure in the way that you do with like nine-year-olds knowing that tomorrow it'll be lego land or whatever and he said no do you really promise one day you'll take me to Graceland and I said I absolutely promise and I didn't think of that again for ten years until everything had gone wrong so Adam had dropped out of school when he was 15 and he just by the time he was 19 it's it was like he had fractured it was like in that decade so many of us had fractured it and it happened in quite an extreme way to him he spent literally all almost all his waking hours alternating between YouTube, WhatsApp, Snapchat, porn and it was like he was sort of whirring at the speed of Snapchat where nothing still or serious could touch him and one day we were sitting on my sofa and I was trying to talk to him in the morning and I just couldn't get any traction and to be honest I wasn't that much better I was sitting there looking at my devices and I suddenly remembered this moment from ten years before and I said to him hey let's go to Graceland and he was like what he didn't even remember this moment when he was a little boy of course and I said no no let's go we've got to break this numbing routine let's go one over the south but you've got to do one thing when we go you've got to promise you'll leave your phone in the hotel because we cut there's no point going if you're just gonna be staring at a screen all day and he promised and two weeks later we took off we landed in New Orleans we went there first and a couple of weeks after that we arrived in Graceland and when you get to the gates of Graceland now this is even before COVID there's no physical person to show you round anymore that's right what happens is they have you been John many times but not the last ten years not in the last ten years but many I see so so as you know they they hand you an iPad right and you put in the earbuds and the iPad shows you rounds it says go left go right go you know in each room it narrates something about the room and everywhere you are it shows you a representation of that room on the screen so I'm walking around Graceland and everyone is just staring at their devices and I'm getting more and more sort of tens I've tried to make eye contact with someone to go oh this is funny we're the two people who traveled thousands of miles and actually looked at what we traveled to but I was finally able to make eye contact with someone and then I realized he had only he'd only looked away from the iPad in order to take out his phone and take a selfie so we got to the jungle room which is Elvis's favorite room was Elvis's favorite room and there was a Canadian couple next to me and the husband turned to his wife and he said honey this is amazing look if you swipe left you can see the jungle room to the left and if you swipe right you can see the jungle room to the right and I first out laughing I thought he was kidding and then I look and they're just swiping back and forth and I said to him but hey and they're in the room they're in the room this is exactly what I wanted I was like wait sir there's an old fashioned famous weapon you could do it's called turning your head because we're literally in the jungle room you don't need to look at it on your screen look it's actually here and they just backed away and I turned to my godson to sort of laugh about it and he was in the corner looking at Snapchat because for the minute we landed he could not stop and I stormed up to him and I tried to grab the phone off him unsuccessfully and I said look I know you're afraid of missing out but this is guaranteeing that you're miss out you're not showing up at your own life you're not present at the events of your own existence and he stormed off so I wandered around Memphis on my own for a while and I found him that night in the heartbreak hotel where we were staying across the street and I apologized to him he was sitting by the swimming pool and he was just staring at his phone flicking from app to app and he said to me I know something's really wrong but I don't know what it is and that's when I thought you know I need to start looking into this and that's when that three-year journey which involved meeting all these scientists involved taking three months completely off the internet myself but what was interesting is one of the most surprising things I learned and then a huge amount about the tech component of power attention is being invaded but I also know that that's only one of the twelve factors that's doing this to us there's a much broader array of factors that are harming our ability to focus and pay attention from the food we eat to the hours we work from the sleep we don't get to the air we breathe which is filled with pollutants that damage your ability to focus that actually tech is not the biggest although it's although some components of tech are really important I came to think that well I was persuaded by Professor Barbra D'Amonee at one of the leading scientists in France who said to me it's not possible to have a normal brain today because of the ways our brains are being invaded but the most important thing is there are solutions to this which I'm sure we'll get to I'd love to but yes and she's one of France's most distinguished scientists I mean is she right that there is no way we can have a normal brain today I think if we don't change I think she's right but as Professor D'Amonee would say we can absolutely deal with these factors but it's going to require we've got to respond with all of the twelve factors that are damaging our attention and focus we've got to respond at two levels there's all sorts of things we can do is individuals isolated individuals to protect ourselves and our kids we can play defense right and that will help to some degree and there's passionately in favor of it but we've also got to go on offense we've got to take on the forces that are doing this to us at the moment it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then they're leaning over and going hey buddy you might want to learn how to meditate then you wouldn't scratch so much now you want to go right I'll learn to meditate but we need to stop you pouring itching powder on me motherfucker and this is why we've got it we've got to deal with these deep underlight factors this can all sound a bit fancy so should I give a specific example well sure yeah I mean you're yeah I want to go through some of the causes but but but please do because I mean this book is I want to just quote one of the experts you talk to Professor Earl Miller of MIT calls it a perfect storm of cognitive degradation and what I like about the approach of the book and why I wanted to go deep on it with you is that most of us probably see our inability to focus as a personal failure and an inability to pull ourselves away from our screens and back into our lives and a lot of us of a certain age are very hard in ourself for this because you're the first person to actually come out there and actually talk about how our focus has been stolen so yeah please I'd love to talk about some of these 12 causes you know socially you say that socially say that John because when I started working on this book I thought that the problem was basically that I was weak that I just didn't have good enough willpower and I had a really sad moment very early in the research for the book there's a guy called Professor Roy Baumeister who's at the University of Queensland in Australia and he's the leading expert in the world on willpower he wrote a book called willpower right he's done a huge number about research on this so I went to see him I said you know I'm thinking this book about attention and he said oh it's interesting you should say that because I've just found I can't really pay attention anymore I just play candy crush on my phone all day and I sort of say that I was like wait did you write a book called willpower if you guys you're saying they're saying you play candy crush all day you know and I just sort of realised actually when you look at the evidence if people listen to this they can't focus they can't pay attention it's really thwarting their lives this is not your fault this is happening to all of us you mentioned Earl Miller who explains the really Professor Earl Miller who explains a really interesting example of one of the 12 causes that I write about installer focus so Professor Miller is one of the leading neuroscientists in the world I went to interview him at MIT and he said to me there's one thing you need to understand about the human brain more than anything else you can only consciously think about one or two things at a time that's it this is a fundamental limitation of the human brain the human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years it ain't going to change on our time frame you can only think about one or two things at a time but what's happened is we've fallen for a mass delusion the average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time so what happens is Professor Miller's colleagues get people into labs and they get them to think they're doing lots of things at the same time and when they do that they always discover the same thing which is you can't do more than one thing at a time what you do is you juggle very rapidly between those tasks but it turns out that comes with a really big cost the kind of technical fancy term for it is the switch cost effect when you try and do more than one thing at a time you will do all the things you're trying to do much less competently you'll make more mistakes you'll remember less of what you do you'll be much less creative you just you're much more likely to screw it up and this feels like a small effect like if I just glanced at my text messages now where I'm talking to you I won't do it but if I did does that such a small thing what it's 20 you know three seconds are glanced and they come back to you but that requires me to refocus my brain on the text message oh my friend Rob just texted me right then I have to refocus on you and it turns out there's a there's lots of evidence that this has a really big effect just receiving eight text messages an hour causes a 30 reduction in your brain power the ability to retain what you've done which think about one small experiment that really drove it home for me it's a very small experiment but it's backed up by wider evidence Hewlett Packard the printer company got a scientist in and he split their workers into two groups and the first group was told just do whatever your task is for the day and you're not going to be interrupted and the second group was told do whatever your task is and you're going to have to answer a fairly heavy amount of email and phone calls so basically the lives most of us live and then at the end of it they tested 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 at comparison point if you or me sat together now and got stoned we just smoked a fat split our IQs would go down in the short term by five by five points so being distracted as 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 then sitting at your desk doing lots of things at a time and not getting stoned obviously if you really want to focus do neither but this is why as you quoted Professor Miller said we're living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation there's a guy called Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon who discovered that if you're interrupted it takes on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you're interrupted but most of us never get back to never get 23 minutes spare so we're constantly living at this depleted level and I think a lot of people listening will sort of know something's going on with their attention but it's hard to connect it to a feeling of malaise they happen I would just say the reason I think the subject one of the reasons I think the subject is so important so it's so to anyone listening think about anything you've ever done in your life that you're proud of whether it's starting a business being a good parent learning to play the guitar whatever the thing you're proud of is it required a lot of sustained focus and attention and when attention and focus break down and there's good evidence they're breaking down your ability to achieve your goals and solve your problems breaks down now that's bad enough at a personal level we're also seeing that a big collective level as anyone who's watched the news in the last five years will have noticed and this is why this is such an urgent question and it's why we really need to look at the solutions that are out there that i've seen in practice and can work we're going to take a very quick break we'll be right back this is progress welcome back this term that's only really come around in the last 20 years multitasking has come to have connotations of virtue inherent in it how well can you multitask and it seems to be part of the overall hacking of our minds that has led us to this new normal i mean you give your your 12 causes behind our lack of focus i'm not going to ask you to deep dive on everyone people should read the book but you know number one is the increase in speed switching and filtering which is not the same as your fifth one the disruption of mind wandering is it what is the distinction between mind wandering and then just the increase in the switching and filtering and speed one of the factors was i just hugely slowed down there's an enormous amount of evidence the way we live has been speeding up and speeding up we talk faster than we did 20 years ago we walk faster than we did 20 years ago the one study one small study found a typical american college student only does any one task for 65 seconds we're in this tornado of speed and there's really good evidence the more you speed up the less you can pay attention the less deeply you can think and just slowing down profoundly restored my focus but it was interesting because you asked about mind wandering which is one of the one of the real kind of revelations to me in province town so i thought when i went to province town but i was going there to clear out all these distractions in order that i could do sort of what's called spotlight focus so spotlight focus is when you filter out everything around you and narrow your focus down to one thing like i'm in a room a hotel room i can see you know i can hear the aircon i could look out the window and see people by the pool and i'm not doing any of that and filtering all of that out and i'm spotlight narrowing on to you because we're talking right so that's one important form of focus and that massively improved in province town uh talking about how we can all get to that situation because obviously no one listening can just quit there what life for three months but one of the things that surprised me was that a different kind of focus became just as important to me in province town so after i had been there for about a month i started just going away i had brought um an ipod which seemed like such a futuristic invention when i first got it and then by the time i went it was like something from the arc i would take my ipod and listen to audiobooks but then i decided after about a month i'm just going to leave that and i'm just going to go for really long walks with just nothing to stimulate me and at first i felt kind of guilty i was like well this is not why you came here you came here in order to so you focus right but actually on these walks where i was mind-wandering i was having so many new ideas i felt so fertile i felt so creative when i left province town i interviewed loads of experts on mind-wandering and it turns out mind-wandering is really essential mental activity for making sense of the world when you're just wondering around and your mind isn't focused on anything in particular yes and your mind is processing the past it's anticipating the future it's making sense of your life and what we've done is we we're in the worst of our worlds we're neither spotlight focusing nor mind-wandering we're just jammed up all the time it's switching what did that go just say on facebook what's on the tv there what was this text what's just happening oh wait what did that notification say we're constantly jammed up which means that we we we feel like our lives aren't making sense because we're not thinking deeply and we're not getting the space to process what's happening to us so we're jammed up and jammed up all the time which is terrible for your ability to just feel good and to make sense of your life yes i completely i i missed about half of that because i was on instagram but uh yes well no but how many how many times have people thought okay i want to go for a walk what podcast should i listen to and again even when you're trying to do something for yourself what external electronic media sources am i going to use to lubricate my time as a human but i'm very glad you mentioned that it's it is not just tech because you talk about our deteriorating diets and rising pollution i think our deteriorating diets are of course a subject that need to be discussed in relation to a host of social ills but what did you discover in your research in terms of the human attention span and the stuff we put in our bodies this is so interesting to me and i've got to be honest this is the one of all the causes the one i most struggle with and you can't see this job but there's a kfc bucket in the corner of this room which will give you some sense of how much i struggle with this um so i interviewed no i can listen i've had i've had british food i understand why you want that go on please i'm actually miami at the moment and it's uh it was a particularly um disgusting kfc bucket i just say that the first time the first time i ever went to a kfc in my life was in london i never did it here and i was there once and i got desperate and in islington yes but please please come on so i had to be delighted these uh there's this new movement called nutritional psychiatry a psychiatrist are investigating how what we eat affects our mental capacities so interviewed loads of these nutritional psychiatrists and i learned that the way we eat is profoundly damaging our ability to focus and pay attention in three really important ways the first is the way we eat let's imagine you have a typical american or british breakfast you have a sugary cereal and what or white bread right what that does is it releases a huge amount of energy into your brain really fast it feels great they're like oh i'm finally awake yeah what that means is that when you get to your desk or your child gets to the desk and the last quarter of the book is all about our kids and what's happened to them when you get to your desk you get a huge energy collapse right because you've um the way one nutritionist put it to me is it's like we're putting rocket fuel into a mini it'll go really fast and then it'll just stop and what you then experience when your energy crashes is what's called brain fog where you just can't think very clearly your head is foggy um and what's happening is because of the way we eat we're living on a roller coaster of energy spikes and energy crashes because we have these long patches of brain fog throughout the day whereas if you eat food that releases energy more steadily your attention of focus will be much better the second way is the current food supply system we have hugely deprives us of the nutrients that you need to feel a brain to develop optimally and the third way which even more disturbing is that the food we doesn't just lack the nutrients we need it actually contains chemicals that act on us like drugs there was a really disturbing study in Southampton in Britain now in 2007 they got 297 kids and they split them into two groups one group was just given water and the other group was given a cocktail not alcoholic obviously a water laced with the food dyes that are contained in the kind of stuff our kids eat every day from supermarket candies and the kids who drank the food dyes were significantly more likely to become manic hyperactive so you can see how the food we eat it and there were so many factors that I learned about for my book stolen focus but I didn't even think of as being related to attention which are actually profoundly linked to our to our ability to focus and pay attention what I what I love the most is and you know this in the book to really solve the problem we need to see this is a structural issue that requires societal solutions which you take on on how we can go about attacking this on a community level but just for our listeners and and I'd love to have you back again Johan because I barely scratched the surface and I'd love to go even deeper on this book it's so important right now but if I could ask you briefly what advice would you give to individuals that are struggling to regain their focus beyond reading your excellent book what what is something that people can begin to do because this is about changing habits which can be the hardest thing for homo sapiens so I go through two and I go through dozens of examples but I'll give you an example one that I'm doing literally now you can't see this from the angle right John so I give you an example of something I'm doing literally now so in the corner of my room over there I've got something called a K-safe it's a plastic safe you take off the lid you put in your phone you put on the lid you turn the dial at the top and it will shut you off it'll lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day I use that three hours a day I will not sit down to watch a film with my partner unless we both imprison our phones I try to force my friends when they come around for a meal let's all lock away our phones and it's really hard at first but then you start to experience the pleasures of focus and the pleasures of focus are so much greater than the pleasures of being distracted and being addled but I want to stress to people I'm passionately in favor of these individual changes I've made lots of them but on their own they will only get you so far we've got to take on the forces that are doing the stress so think about one as simple as which we all know about social media all social media companies are currently designed on one business model it's very simple John the more times you pick up your phone and the longer you scroll the more money they make that's it that's their business model get you to pick up your phone more and scroll longer so all of their engineering power all of their algorithmic genius is geared towards one thing figuring out how to do that how to make you pick up your phone more and scroll longer and more importantly how to do that to your kids but social media doesn't have to work that way I spent a lot of time interviewing the people who designed key aspects of the world in which we live and there's an analogy that really helped me to think about this so you'll remember John I can just remember it it used to be totally normal that people had leaded gasoline in their cars and they painted their homes with leaded paint right remember my mother buying leaded gasoline and it was discovered the exposure to lead in the air from gasoline and paint fucks up kids brains particularly damages their ability to focus and pay attention so there was a movement mostly of moms who just said we're not going to tolerate this you're not going to do this to our kids brains ban leaded paint and ban leaded gasoline now it's important to notice what they didn't say they didn't say ban paint ban gasoline right you're in a home that's been painted so am I they banned the specific element that was raiding and fucking their kids' attention that's right in the same way with social media we don't want to ban social media social media has many good things about it we're not all going to convert and join the armage what but what we can do is target the specific aspects at the moment because of that business model social media is designed to hack your attention this isn't my view this isn't the view of the distance this is what they admit Sean Parker one of the biggest initial funders of facebook investors said we designed it to maximally invade people's attention we knew what we were doing and we did it anyway God only knows what it's doing to our kids brains so I interviewed Asa Raskin who invented a key part of how the internet works and he said to me look the first step of the solution is simple we've got to ban the current business model just like we don't allow lead we don't allow us and our kids to be exposed to lead we should not allow a business model that is premised on figuring out the weaknesses in your attention hacking them and selling them to the highest bit of just ban it and I said to him but wait if we do that what happens the next day do I open facebook and it says sorry guys we've gone fishing instead of course not what would happen is they would have to move to a different business model and there's plenty of other models one is subscription we all know how HBO or Sirius XFM work one is subscription another model think about the sewers before we had sewers we had shit in the streets and people got cholera so we all pay to build the sewers and we all own the sewers together now it may be that like we own the sewage pipes together we want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the equivalent of cholera for our attention but whatever different model we move to the key thing is all the incentives for social media change suddenly these companies aren't asking how do we raid and invade John's brain how do we raid and invade his kid's brain suddenly they're saying what does John want oh John wants to be able to pay attention okay let's design a app to make it easier for him to pay attention oh John wants to be able to meet up with his friends okay let's design it so it actually connects people offline rather than keeping them staring at screens and feeling like shit there's all sorts of ways in which this industry of course these companies will not change of their own accord any more than the lead industry was going to go one day that's right guys i think we've just made enough money right that's not how it works i argue in stolen focus permanently for individual changes but also i argue that just like we needed a feminist movement for women to recl and still need of course feminist movement to for women to reclaim their bodies and their lives i argue we need an attention movement to reclaim our minds and it requires us to get into a different frame of mind about our attention if you're struggling to pay attention it's not your fault this is happening to all of us and we've got to make small changes but we can't stop there because we are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table we are the three citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and we can reclaim them from the 12 forces that have been stealing them from us we do not have to tolerate living in a society where the average work of focus is for three minutes and where our kids with each year that passes are becoming more and more adult and unable to focus it doesn't have to be this way we can fight back we've got to fight back attention is one of the most precious powers that human beings have and to let it crumble in our hands would be madness we've got to fight back and we can reclaim our attention i went to so many places that had begun this fight for the book we absolutely can do this Johan Hari it is always a great joy in order to have you with us i love this book i didn't think i could prefer one to your last two but it's so dynamite and it is so the right book at the right moment we had even talked about half of the subjects you cover and and i'd love to have you back and talk about the role of dopamine and all this and decoyed and deeper on your wonderful book again and write this down if you can't focus the book stolen focus stolen focus why you can't pay attention and how to think deeply again Johan Hari thank you for joining us and thank you for a great public service in this latest excellent book i can't see what comes next yes photogenic getting people emailed and again i don't have enough attention to read your book could you send me a brief summary good like no they can read the audio book i say i send them into the link to the audio book it's so funny because i have actually designed a really convenient app so everyone can get a digest of a nugget of each one of the chapters every day so it's it's fantastic you got to keep coming back for more but it really works it's square thank you so much Johan thank you so much (upbeat music)
John Interviews British-Swiss writer and journalist Johann Hari who has written for The Independent and The Huffington Post. They discuss his book "Stolen Focus: Why You Can"t Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again". Next, he has a chat with radio host, producer, and actress Kelly Carlin - the daughter of comedian George Carlin. They talk about her work on the special 4 hour documentary "George Carlin's American Dream" which is available on HBO Max.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
