Your Attention is Being Stolen — and Here's How to Take it Back | Johann Hari

Summary

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The High Performance Podcast

Episode Title: Your Attention is Being Stolen — and Here's How to Take it Back
Guest: Johann Hari
Date: March 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this compelling episode, hosts Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes sit down with New York Times bestselling author Johann Hari to unravel one of the greatest challenges of our era: the systematic theft of our attention. Drawing on his years of research for books like Stolen Focus and Lost Connections, Johann explores how powerful technological, social, and economic forces are eroding our ability to concentrate, connect deeply, and perform at our best. The conversation journeys from Silicon Valley's guilt-ridden insiders to actionable solutions at individual, family, and societal levels. Hari challenges listeners to see attention not as a personal failure, but as a superpower under attack — and to unite in reclaiming it.

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Key Points & Insights

1. The Nature of Attention and Why It Matters

• Attention as a Superpower
  • “Attention is your absolute superpower. You can try having self control, but every time you do, there are 10,000 engineers on the other side of the screen trying to undermine your self control.” — Johann Hari (00:02)
  • Without sustained attention, our achievements, happiness, and creativity crumble.
• The Systemic Hijacking of Our Minds
  • Silicon Valley insiders are “sick with guilt and shame” over what technology has done to human attention (00:08).
  • Our society has cultivated values and digital environments that make it harder than ever to focus.

2. Rethinking Mental Health: Beyond the Individual

• From “Broken Brain” to "Unmet Needs"
  • Johann describes (01:27–01:52) his own journey, rejecting the message that "there's something wrong with your brain," and exploring how depression often signals valid, unmet needs.
  • The focus should shift from medicating away symptoms, to identifying and addressing underlying needs — socially and collectively, not just individually.

3. Values, Consumer Culture, and Meaning

• Case Study: Deconstructing Junk Values (02:03–05:00)
  • Johann recounts an experiment run with schoolchildren fixated on brands like Nike and iPhones. Standard budgeting lessons failed; instead, values themselves needed to be examined.
  • Through group reflection, kids and parents recognized that desires for status items masked a deeper longing for connection and belonging.
• Practical Exercise: Johann now convenes monthly conversations with friends, exploring “what did we do this month that was meaningful? What was bullshit?” (05:25).
  • “Meaning is contagious. Just like suicide, the loss of meaning is contagious.” — Johann Hari (06:01)
• Collective Solutions Required
  • We don't expect crash victims to solve traffic safety alone; why put the burden of emotional health purely on individuals? Society must create environments that support well-being (06:51).

4. Attention, Despair, and Society-Wide Consequences

• Despair Clusters and Populism
  • Research links clusters of despair—depression, suicide, addiction—with the rise of far-right political movements, emphasizing untreated social malaise (07:38–08:14).
  • “It's fucking cruel for a start. Don't be cruel to suffering people.” — Johann Hari (08:24)
• Workplace & Organizational Reflection
  • The hosts resolve to integrate more meaningful reflection into their own team's culture, not just talk about performance but about what brings genuine fulfillment (09:01).

5. Technology, Kids, and Taking Back Control

• The Parental Dilemma
  • Parents grapple with giving kids phones for connection, knowing those same devices expose them to endless comparison and manipulation (12:14–13:10).
  • Tech designers themselves avoid the worlds they’ve built: “If there’s anyone here who wants to live in the world we’re creating, please put up your hand. And nobody put up their hand.” — Dr. James Williams, reported by Johann Hari (13:40).

Three Practical Steps for Families

1. KSafe: A timed physical phone lockbox — Start with 15 minutes/day unplugged as a family (16:00).
   • “The pleasure of someone actually listening to you...is so much greater than whatever shitty update you're gonna miss on TikTok for 15 minutes.” (17:24)
2. Freedom App: Blocks distracting apps/websites for set durations. Johann blocks all social media from his own devices (17:36–18:17).
   • “Once you push the button, if you try to go to that website, it will just say you have been set free.” (18:14)
   • On relapsing into usage: “I spent a week where, again, I was like, oh, I'll just use it for five minutes a day. And yesterday I was on it for like an hour and I was like, fucking block it again.” (18:47)
3. Light Phone: Minimalist phone for calls, music, and maps, but no internet — especially for teens (19:39).
   • "You're not living in some weird, Amish land... but you're not plugged into that constant comparison machine." (20:20)

Cultural and Structural Solutions

• The root problem isn’t just bad personal habits, but “a fucking massive machinery designed by unbelievably clever people” (15:27).
• Market Models for Social Media (24:32)
  • Surveillance Capitalism: (now) – “We’re not the customer, we’re the product.”
  • Subscription Model: You pay for a healthier experience (e.g., Netflix); platforms serve your interests.
  • Public Ownership: Like sewers, for the "information pipes" underpinning attention and democracy.
• Hope from History: Moms led the fight to get lead out of petrol—didn’t ban all petrol, but changed the system. Similar grassroots efforts can change tech's environment (28:07–29:43).

6. The Algorithms of Division and Bullying

• Why Banning Smartphones Reduces Bullying in Schools (33:45–36:42)

  • Algorithms maximize "engagement" by maximizing negative emotions: “If it’s enraging, it’s engaging.”
  • Banning phones means removing kids, for part of the day, from an environment that amplifies cruelty and bullying.

• Consequences for Democracy

  • The same engagement-maximizing tech that rewards bullying in kids also fuels political polarization and radicalization (37:20–38:11).
  • Facebook’s own researchers admitted its model “inherently promotes hatred.”

7. Rules for a High Performance Life

During the “quick-fire” section (39:25 onward), Johann shares personal, actionable guidance:

Three Non-Negotiables

• “Be curious about other people. Listen to people, be kind to them.” (39:30)

Best Advice Ever Received

• “Never let anyone think they're worth more than you and never let anyone think they're worth less than you.” (39:44)

To His 14-Year-Old Self

• “Your pain makes sense. The reasons you're distressed are totally understandable... There's nothing wrong with you. There's something wrong with what’s being done to you.” (40:15)

Greatest Strength/Weakness

• Loves connecting with others; risk of becoming emotionally distanced by always viewing life as a story to be told (41:00–42:14).

Golden Rule for Attention & High Performance

• “All your achievements will be the sum total of the things you paid attention to.” (42:31)
• Dr. James Williams' analogy: A windshield covered in mud (distractions); before driving anywhere (achieving anything), you have to clean the mud away.
• “We are not medieval peasants begging at the table of King Musk and King Zuckerberg for a few little shitty crumbs of attention from their table... We own our own minds, and we can take them back if we want to.” (43:38)

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Memorable Quotes with Timestamps

• On Tech’s Intentions:
  “You can try having self control, but every time you do, there are 10,000 engineers on the other side of the screen trying to undermine your self control.” — Johann Hari (00:02, 15:37)

• On Social Media’s Purpose:
  “All this AI... is geared towards literally one thing, figuring out, how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible? That's it.” (23:03)

• On Blame and Society:
  “We need to stop blaming ourselves and our kids and start blaming the people who are doing this to us.” (43:33)

• On Solutions:
  “The average British child is 3 to 5 IQ points higher than they would have been had we not banned leaded petrol... That’s a really great model.” (29:59)

• On Hope:
  “We don’t have to accept this being done to us and our children. There are lots of practical steps.” (31:53)

• On the Power of Attention:
  “All your achievements will be the sum total of the things you paid attention to.” (42:31)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [00:02]–[01:27]: Introduction, the urgency of attention, and the societal manipulation of self-control
• [01:27]–[06:51]: Redefining depression, unmet needs, and the importance of group meaning
• [07:10]–[09:01]: Social despair, populism, and workplace culture
• [13:10]–[20:11]: Parents, children, and fighting tech overexposure: practical interventions
• [20:11]–[24:45]: Social media economics, business models, and why individual fixes are not enough
• [33:45]–[38:54]: How algorithms fuel bullying and democracy’s crisis
• [39:25]–[43:55]: Quick-fire: Johann’s rules for living, advice, golden rule
• [43:55]–[44:48]: Host reflections and steps they're planning to implement

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Actionable Takeaways

• Monthly Meaning Conversations: Regularly ask yourself (and friends): “What did I do this month that was meaningful? What was bullshit?” (05:25)
• Family Tech Detox: Use a KSafe for regular family screen-free time and make it a joint practice (16:00)
• Install Digital Boundaries: Apps like Freedom can enforce digital rest; be disciplined about relapses. (17:36–18:47)
• Push for Structural Change: Advocate for schools and governments to rethink tech’s role (31:55); push for healthier platform business models (24:32)
• Community Action: Remember, as with banning lead from petrol, collective grassroots advocacy works — don’t accept things as “just the way they are” (28:07–29:53)
• Be Kind, Be Curious: Emphasize human connection — it’s a cornerstone of both attention and resilience (39:30)

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Tone and Final Message

Throughout, Hari's tone is passionate, urgent, no-nonsense, and practical, balancing sharp critiques of Big Tech with optimism for meaningful, collective change. His language is direct—sometimes explicit—but always human and relatable.

Final rallying cry:
“We are not medieval peasants... We own our own minds, and we can take them back if we want to.” (43:38)

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This episode offers an urgent call to reclaim attention—not just as individuals, but as families, workplaces, and societies. It is a toolkit for anyone ready to cut through the noise and refocus on what truly matters.

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Transcript

[Johann Hari]

Attention is your absolute superpower. You can try having self control, but every time you do, there are 10,000

engineers on the other side of the screen trying to undermine your self control. Something I kept seeing with people in Silicon Valley, the people who designed this world, is how sick with guilt and shame they feel about what they've done.

Know that your attention is being stolen from you by some really big and powerful forces. And know that we can take it back.

[Podcast Host]

What if your phone isn't just distracting you, it's actually making you depressed? Our guest today is Johann Hari. He's a New York Times best selling author whose TED talk has been viewed over 80 million times. He spent years traveling the world investigating depression, anxiety and why we can't pay attention, interviewing neuroscientists, Silicon Valley insiders, and leading psychiatrists to understand what's really going wrong. And his conclusion is as comfortable as it is urgent. Our attention is being systematically stolen. Our values have been corrupted. The society we've built is making us sick. But he also offers solutions. And that's where we want to start this conversation. One that will change how you see your phone, your mind and your life. Welcome to High Performance, Johann Hari.

[Johann Hari]

The first thing is we say to someone who's depressed and anxious, not the same. What my doctor said to me, lovely doctor, by the way, good person, well intentioned.

But my doctor said to me, there's

something wrong with your brain.

You just need to drug yourself.

What that did is it made me

doubt the signal I was receiving, or

in fact, not even doubt it, completely disregard it. So instead of saying something wrong with your brain, we start to say, okay, you've got unmet needs. How can we support you? How can we help you to get

those deeper needs met?

There's lots of ways to do that and lots of levels at which we can do it. So some of them are very local things you can do as an individual

and some things, you know, bigger things that we have to do as a society.

So I'll give an example of a small thing. So there was a guy called Nathan

Dungan who was a financial advisor in Minneapolis. And one day he got approached by

a school, kind of middle class school,

and they said, look, we've got a big problem. Will you come in and talk to the kids?

And the problem they had was loads

of the kids were getting obsessed with getting the latest Nike sneakers or the latest iPhone. If they weren't getting it, they were going mental.

And it was causing problems at the

school and problems at home.

They said, will you Just come in

and teach these kids about budgeting and what their parents can afford.

So he comes in, gives them a

load of lessons about budgeting, and quickly discovers these kids don't give a shit about budgeting.

They should be like, whatever, I need the fucking sneakers, right? So he learned about Professor Kasser's research and thought, actually, what's happened here is something's gone wrong with their values, not

just with their understanding of how much their parents can afford.

So him and Professor Kasser did this really interesting experiment. If I remember rightly, details are in the book, it's every couple of weeks for quite a few months.

The kids came in with their parents and they sat together in groups. And the first time they met, Nathan

said to the group, just write a list of everything you've got to have. And he said, I'm not going to define that for you, just whatever you think that means, right? And at first they.

They obviously says, like, we've got to have water and food and that. But quite quickly, people started saying things you have not got to have, like the latest iPhone. And the parents were the same. They would name, like, expensive shit, right?

And then he said to them, okay, let's.

They go down to that thing on the list, not water or whatever.

And they say, okay, tell me how

your life would be better if you got this thing.

How would your life change? So let's say Nike sneakers. What was interesting is none of the kids said, oh, I'm a basketball player

and if I get these sneakers, I'll be able to jump higher. No one said that.

They said things like, well, if I get these sneakers, other people will want

me to be part of their group

or other people will envy me. They only need to get people to say that out loud before they realize, oh, what's going on here is I want to be part of a group, right? So it was a little bit of sort of deconstructing their junk values.

But the next bit is what I think was really most important.

Then they would say, write about a

moment in your life when you've had

a feeling of meaning and connection. And different people would describe different things. Moments at work when they helped someone,

being on the beach with their kids, learning to play the guitar, whatever it might be.

Then they said to them, okay, how can you build more of your life

around pursuing these moments of meaning and

connection and less around these.

This shit you don't need, that doesn't make you feel good, right?

And then literally just every couple of weeks, they came and had that Conversation. They talked about what they'd done the previous two weeks. Because we're living in a culture that's constantly diverting us towards the bullshit. So just meeting. We don't have these conversations in our culture, right? Just meeting and going, oh, you know, I could have spent all that time, you know, working extra hours to buy

this handbag and making my friends jealous,

but instead I spent it with my daughter or learning French or whatever it might be, right? So it was almost like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for the bullshit values we're given as a culture.

Right?

And what was fascinating was just having those conversations led to a really marked shift in people's values, which we know correlates with lower depression and anxiety. So after I learned this one thing I do, we do it once a month for a long time.

We had to do it over zoom, for obvious reasons because of the pandemic.

But me and three of my friends, we have a zoom, and we just have that conversation because it's so easy to get diverted onto bullshit and tell

[Damien Jay]

us again the questions you ask each other.

[Johann Hari]

So we talk about what did we do this month that was meaningful? And in retrospect, what did we do that was bullshit? That was chasing the stuff that isn't meaningful, Right? And if you don't have that conversation, just having that abstract insight. Look, I know that if I'm not anchored and I then think ahead to

it, I think, oh, Jess is going to say that if I do this.

Oh, no, I want to, you know, so you want to be anchored in these meaningful values. And the way you get anchored in meaning of any kind, it's very hard

to sustain meaning on your own. Right? Very hard.

Some people can do it to some degree, but it becomes a thousand times

easier in a group. Right?

Meaning is contagious. Just like suicide, the loss of meaning is contagious. Right. I actually think the cruelest thing we do about depression and anxiety is put the onus of solving it solely on the depressed individual who's least able to. We don't do that about car crashes, right? So as a society, we know, okay, car crashes are terrible. So we have seat belts, we have airbags, we have A and E. We have all these things that solve the problems. We don't say the job of solving car crashes is on a guy who's just being cut out of a mangled wreck on the M25. Right? We don't do that. That would be crazy. But it's like we put the job of solving depression solely on the Depressed person. We've got to be doing it much more as a society, as a group. Right. Because something, the truth is, if you're depressed and anxious, something did not primarily go wrong for you as an individual. Of course, there are individual psychological factors

and I go through them in the

book, and especially about releasing shame around trauma. There are lots of important psychological factors, of course, there are biological factors. But the reason depression and anxiety have increased, you've got to see the connection between all these things that are happening. The best definition of depression I was ever given was by a wonderful, incredible

British woman called Dr. Tyrrell Harris, who

made a series of breakthroughs in the

1970s on depression, world changing Discoveries. Along with Professor George Brown.

She said to me, best definition of

depression is very simple.

Everyone experiences hopelessness sometimes. Depression is when that hopelessness spreads over

your whole life like an oil slick.

Right. And we are seeing these indicators of despair all over the developed world.

It's not a coincidence.

And there's many indicators of despair.

You know my first book, Chasing the Screams, about addiction, there's a brilliant pair of scientists called Professor Anne Case and Professor Angus Dayton.

They've shown, if you look at suicide, addiction, depression, violence, they all cluster in the same places, Right? They're all highest in the same places, by the way. So is support for Trump in the same place. Support for far right political parties in France.

Right.

They all cluster in those places as well. Those are symptoms of despair. It's why it's so unhelpful to call

those people stupid or racist or insult them.

That is not the way we get out of this.

Right.

Although of course, I would ask them

not to make the choice they've made. The way you do that is not by insulting them and mocking them and being cruel to them.

[Damien Jay]

It just exasperates their problem.

[Johann Hari]

Yeah, well, it's fucking cruel for a start. Don't be cruel to suffering people. And secondly, yeah, you're absolutely right, it

[Damien Jay]

adds to their feeling.

[Johann Hari]

Exactly. And they're not wrong. We're calling them losers. Fuck me.

[Damien Jay]

And you know these questions. Just one quick thing, like we, let's say here on High Performance, right, there's almost 20 people that work on this show and really we just talk about the show, we talk about work, we talk about the next guest, we talk about the KPIs, the targets. We should be having this kind of a conversation, shouldn't we, once a week as a team? Like, what have we done this week that's not for show, that is purely for us as individuals.

[Johann Hari]

I would really recommend it. And for me, it was a real shift that I made in my own life.

Because before I'm as much of a product of this culture as anyone, when

I would feel these feelings coming of depression, anxiety, what I would do is

I would double down on external achievement, right?

You know, I'm someone who's, you know, I was good at exams.

I'm, you know, I've done well in my jobs.

I would sort of double down on. I must work harder to get this achievement, to get that, to get this, to do that. And now there's still a big part

of me that's like that. And there's a part of me that, that's driven intrinsically. You know, I'd like to think I

write my books because the questions I ask are meaningful, but there's also a

bit of me that's extrinsic and ego, of course.

But now I also try to have a really big part of me that, when I feel that coming thing, okay, what can I do for someone else now? And very often, you know, I'm not Oprah.

I can't turn up and give them a car.

But very often the best thing you can do for someone in such a lonely and isolated culture, leave your fucking phone at home and go and sit and listen to someone and really sit and listen to them and think about what they're saying and look into their eyes. That is the biggest gift you can give anyone, right? And very often, when you can't feel good about yourself, you can still make someone else feel good, right? It's a surprising thing. It comes back to the thing about,

you know, your vote is a gift

you give to someone you love. You can. When you can't summon your energy or strength to do something for yourself, you often can. You know, the most depressed parent in

the world will get up to save their child's life, right?

You can usually do something for someone else even when you can't do it for yourself.

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[Parent/Interviewer]

Thinking about that message about doing it for somebody else and yeah, my next question is prompted by that great example of how do you get people to vote think about doing it for your kids. It's a bit of a selfish question of in a time of junk values, how do we help our children get out of this? Because I have the issue with my son where he's like he's on a phone and our decision to give him the phone was about the social connection of that's what all his friends were doing. So how does he keep in touch? And yet I can also see that the apps, Snapchat, Instagram are dragging him into the swamp of a comparison culture of looking at the things that we recognize are not healthy and don't lead to long term happiness. What advice would you give to any parents listening or watching today, Johan, about how we can start to influence the next generation to maybe break this cycle?

[Johann Hari]

Yes. I wrote a book about this, as you know, called Stolen why youy Can't Pay Attention. And as you're saying, that flashed a moment in my, in my mind. So I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing the people who designed the stuff your kids are using. Right. Never forget there's a guy called Dr. James Williams who'd worked at the heart of Google and one day he spoke to a tech conference who were the audience is literally the people who Design the apps that your kids are using right now. And he said to them he was feeling really uneasy.

He said, if there's anyone here who

wants to live in the world that we're creating, please put up your hand. And nobody put up their hand. And not long after, he quit and became, I would argue, one of the most important philosophers of attention in the world. He's Oxford now. You should have him on. He's a brilliant guy. And this is something I kept seeing with people in Silicon Valley.

In fact, one of the most striking

things about them, the people who designed this world, is how sick with guilt and shame they feel about what they've done. And I'll sort of unpack that a bit, but you're absolutely right. Instagram, TikTok, these are machines designed to get people into comparison mode, right? One of the first things your son will notice when he posts on Instagram is, how many likes did I get?

Right?

How many people? What do people say on TikTok? So if you wanted to supercharge these values, this is the machinery you would design as indeed it has. I go through, in style and focus, nine factors that are harming our attention, causing these problems. And for all of them, except for one, there's sort of two levels at which we've got to deal with this.

I think I think of it as defense and offense. So there are loads of things that

we've got to do as individuals to protect ourselves and our children from these factors that are harming us. Right? And I'll talk about some in a second.

But I want to be really honest with people because I do not think most people who communicate about these problems

are leveling with people. I am passionately in favor of these individual changes. They will make a really big difference. They've made a big difference in my life, in my godson's lives, in my nephew's lives.

They're really important. On their own, they will not fully solve the problem. Because the truth is, this didn't happen because your son had bad habits or I had bad habits. This happened because a fucking massive machinery designed by unbelievably clever people is systematically

targeting and undermining us. Right?

As my friend Tristan Harris said when

he testified before the Senate, he was also at the heart of the machine.

You can try having self control, but every time you do, there are 10,000

engineers on the other side of the screen trying to undermine your self control.

Right? So when you think about that, we

talk about the personal stuff you can do first. So I would recommend Every parent do three things.

First thing is several things.

I mean, I go through loads in the book, but I could list like 20, but I'll just stick to a few.

First thing is buy something called a KSafe.

I should have brought it along as a demonstration.

It's plastic safe.

You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial, push the button and it locks your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day.

So what I recommend about the Kaysafe

is everyone with kids and this is

going to be a long process, right? It's not going to happen, it's not going to be solved overnight. Just start with all of you putting your phones in the KSafe for 15 minutes a night.

And you have to actually look into

each other's eyes like in the olden times. And they will reject it at first. But the thing I always say to people about attention is 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, right?

Focus and attention are at the heart of all human achievement. When you can't focus or pay attention, your ability to achieve your goals diminishes, your ability to solve your problems diminishes. And when you get it back, it's

like regaining your superpower.

So I would frame it to them like that. If attention is our superpower, you are

surrounded by kryptonite, right?

So I would start with that. Like just use the K safe 15 minutes a day, gradually stretch it a bit more. It's difficult at first, but the pleasure of someone actually listening to you and paying attention to you is so much greater than whatever shitty update you're gonna

miss on TikTok for 15 minutes, right?

So start with that. Build it into your collective routine. Cause it's no good you standing over your kids saying use your phone less

while you're staring at your own devices, right?

Secondly, I would say install on your phone, your laptop and your kids phones and laptops an app called Freedom. Very simple app. So let's say you were addicted to Instagram Pornhub, well indicated to you. Pornhub.

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How did you.

[Johann Hari]

Someone got a text. I mean, it has been playing throughout this entire interview, but you know, didn't want to let you know whatever it is, right? Let's say you've got one particular website you're addicted to. You can say to it, no, I'm not looking again. You can say, block me from that website for the next five minutes, the next whole day, however long it'll be. Or you can say, block me from the entire Internet for the next five

minutes, the next 24 hours.

And once you push the button, if you try to go to that website,

it will just say you have been set free and you can't look at it anymore.

So I permanently, on my phone, have blocked all social media because I do not want people to sit at my funeral, stand up and go, yeah, Johan spent a lot of time on Instagram, right? So I have an assistant who does my.

It sounds very fancy, but I have a sister who does my social media.

[Podcast Host]

Do you ever go on there, look

[Damien Jay]

at updates and see what's going on, or.

[Johann Hari]

Well, I found out just in the last week, so I had to get it unblocked on my phone because I

did an Instagram live with Davina McCall

and I didn't put the blocker back on.

So I spent a week where like,

again, I was like, oh, I'll just use it for five minutes a day.

And yesterday I was on it for

like an hour and I was like,

fucking block it again. So I've blocked it again, right?

Because it's very hard to. This is a phenomenon called pre commitment.

Pre commitment is when you know you want to do something in the future,

but you also know you're going to crack, right? So we just had a break and

you and me had an Oreo.

I do not allow Oreos in my house. I will never buy them because I know I will wake up at two o' clock in the morning and stuff

my fucking face with Oreos, right?

Even on a Zenith, because I am. It will still happen, right? So my form of pre commitment is

I never bring it into my house, right?

So I buy the.

Johan in the supermarket knows that Johan at 2am is not going to be as strong as he is now. So I don't let it. So it's a form of pre commitment. Freedom is another form of pre commitment.

So download Freedom, sync it to your phone and app. You know, give them an hour a day. Thirdly, I would say buy them a light phone.

It's.

It's about 200 quid. It's not cheap. But a light phone is a phone

that is a phone. You can call people on it.

You can have. I think it's 200 songs. You can have maps, but you cannot

get onto the Internet, right?

So again, Let them have their smartphone. I would say build up. So that eventually the ideal is we don't want to get rid of technology. Obviously they should have their smartphone for an hour, maybe 90 minutes a day. The rest of the time it lives in the caseafe. And the rest of the time they

have a light phone.

Right? Because light phone they've still got. You can still do the chat group chats.

You know, my godsons have this.

They're not completely cut off, but you know, you're not living in some weird

Amish land where you never get, you know, you don't get that connection.

So yeah, I would say those are three things you should do immediately as individuals. But we've also got to do the big social stuff, which I'm happy to talk about.

[Damien Jay]

Can I ask you a question as Johann Hari the individual, not Johann Hari the expert.

[Johann Hari]

Right.

[Damien Jay]

You mentioned your godsons. How worried are you about their use of technology and how worried should we be about our kids use of technology?

[Johann Hari]

I'm profoundly worried. They're being hacked and invaded by extremely

sophisticated people who have their own set of motives for our kids, which are not our motives.

And I think that really connects up

to the other thing I was going to say, which is the social component,

if you want to understand what I just said, because it sounds a bit weird or even conspiratorial.

I kept interviewing people in Silicon Valley

and they kept explaining this to me. The core of what's happening here with

this element, there's nine factors that are harming our attention. This is only one of them. It's obviously one of the biggest.

And it took me quite a long time for it to land because I kept saying, how can this be right?

So they kept explaining to me, bear

in mind, these are people who'd worked

at the heart of these companies.

They said to me, if you open

now, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or X, whatever the fuck you meant to call it now, right?

Those companies begin to make money out

of you immediately in two ways.

The first way is really obvious, you

see, advertising, okay, everyone knows how that works.

The second way is much more important. Everything you ever do on these apps,

including your so called private messages, is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence

algorithms to figure out who you are and what makes you tick, what makes you happy, what makes you sad, what makes you horny, what makes you angry. They're learning all of that. So let's say you've ever indicated on

your, in any of these messages that you like, I don't know Nigel Farage, Bette Midler, and you told your mum you just bought some nappies, okay? It's gonna figure out if you like Nigel Farage, probably right wing. If you like Bette Midler and you're a man, you're probably gay, no disrespect to any straight men who like Bette Midler, don't actually believe you, and you

bought some nappies, okay?

You've had a baby, right?

So if you've been on these apps for a while, they know tens of

thousands of things about you, right?

Vastly more than many of your friends,

because your friends aren't reading all your messages at 3am, right?

And it's harvesting that information for several reasons, but the most important is it's figuring out what to show you next that will keep you scrolling, right?

That is the key thing is learning.

And it's learning that for crucial 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, every

time you close the app, that revenue stream disappears.

Every time your kid opens the app and 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, all this AI or these algorithms are geared towards literally one thing, figuring out, how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible? That's it. The people at the heart of the machine who'd been there, I kept saying, well, it must be more complicated than that. And they were like, the head of KFC might be a perfectly nice man or woman, right? And may care about many things, but in his or her professional capacity, they care about one thing. How often did you go to KFC this week? And how big was the bucket you bought? That's it. I don't give a shit about anything else, right? If they cared about anything else and they started acting on it, they get fired and be replaced by someone who only cared about how much chicken you bought. In the same way, these are machines designed to harvest our attention and they are getting better and better at it, right?

Paul Graham is one of the biggest

investors in Silicon Valley, said that the world will be more addictive in the

next 40 years than it was in the last 40.

On this current trajectory, think about how much more addictive TikTok is to your

kid than Snapchat was or certainly than Facebook was, right?

So imagine these crack, like iterations that are coming out. So at first, when you hear that,

especially when you hear it from the people at the heart of it all,

I thought, well, fuck, we're just screwed.

Then it's like we're living in the matrix.

[Damien Jay]

I'm thinking, can we ever win?

[Johann Hari]

So what's really important to understand about that is there is a solution, a really important solution. And there's an analogy that happened in our lifetimes that I think really helps

us to get to this solution.

So if you want to understand what

we've got to do about this that gets us out of this matrix, like, we're trapped thing, got to understand that

there are basically three ways you can

fund social media, right?

There's three models. There's the one we've got now, the fancy technical term for it is surveillance

capitalism, which comes from Professor Shoshana Zuboff, brilliant person at Harvard.

So basically what happens now is you and your kids appear to get TikTok

and Instagram for free.

You don't pay anything up front, but you pay with your attention, with your time.

And I would argue with our democracy though, remind me to come back to that pretty important thing.

So you're not paying upfront, but you're being harvested and you're basically, your attention is being sold to the highest bidder. You know, these companies, they've all got customer service departments, we can't phone them. You try ringing the customer service department, they won't talk to you. Right? Because we're not the customer, we're the product. They sell to the real customer, who's the advertiser, right? So that's one model. There's some benefits to that. You don't pay up front. That's something, right? People's budgets are tight. I don't sniff at that. But you pay with a huge number

of other things, right?

So that's one model. The second model is something that I'm guessing pretty much everyone watching has some experience of. It's very simple.

It's subscription.

Think about Netflix. You pay a small amount in return, you get access. The key thing to understand about a

subscription based model, so you would pay a small amount to get on, is all the incentives change in a subscription based model.

In a surveillance capitalism model, the model is how do I hack and invade you in order to keep you scrolling as long as possible? Because you're not the customer, you're the product. Suddenly in a subscription model, you actually are the customer. Suddenly they have to go, oh, what do you want? Turns out you feel good when you sit opposite people face to face and talk to them in the real world, not when you doom scroll through their photoshopped images. Okay, let's design our app to maximize meeting offline.

You can design the app so it

pings if you've turned it on. Ah, Bob's up the road. Bob wants to have a coffee. Do you want to have a coffee with Bob? My friends in Silicon Valley could design in a day a set of social media that's designed to maximize offline engagement. That would make us all feel better, right? But you have to change the incentives to get to that, right? If the longer you scroll, the more money they make, they're going to discourage you from meeting up offline and keep

you doom scrolling, which is what they do.

So that's the second model subscription. The third model is one that literally

everyone has experience of.

The fancy term for it is public

ownership independent of government.

Think about the sewers. Before we had sewers, we had shit in the streets. People got cholera.

It was terrible.

So actually, just up the road from where we are now, first sewers were built. We all live in London, we own the sewers in London together with all the other citizens of London, and we pay to maintain the sewers together, right?

Because we don't want to get cholera and all the other stuff you get when you don't have sewers.

It might be that just like we want to own the sewage pipes because

we don't want to get cholera, we

might want to own the information pipes together because we don't want to get cholera for our attention, for our democracy. Now, you want to be very careful that that would have to be independent of the government.

We can all imagine what it'd be like if an authoritarian leader owned the

pipes of the Internet. That's not what we want. So I would argue we need to move from surveillance capitalism to either subscription or some kind of public ownership independent of government. Now, if that sounds very kind of

fancy and like, oh, good luck to

that, I would give an analogy from our lifetimes, right, that we can remember. So when we were kids, the only

form of petrol you could get was leaded petrol, right? I'm sure you remember your parents putting it in the car.

And it was discovered by scientists that exposure to lead is extremely bad for

people's brains and particularly bad for children's ability to focus and pay attention.

Right?

And obviously, if it's in the petrol, it's in fumes. Everyone was breathing in huge levels of lead. It's why there was a big Spike in many of these problems, actually a big spike in violence because exposure to lead disinhibits people and makes them more violent. It's why the murder rate went up in the 70s, because there was such a big increase in lead exposure.

So what happened was a group of ordinary mums, what at the time would

have called themselves housewives, led by an amazing woman called Jill Rooney, banded together

and said, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing the lead industry to fuck up our kids brains?

They probably didn't say fuck up, they

were sweary as me, but whatever, why are we allowing this? And it's really important to notice what those mums didn't say. They didn't say. So let's ban petrol, let's get rid of cars, let's go back to living

in the 19th century. No one said that.

Just like none of us are saying

let's get rid of technology, let's all convert to the Amish.

That's not what we want, right? I'm pro tech, right? What they said is let's get rid of the specific kind of petrol that's screwing up our kids brains and replace it with a kind of petrol that won't fuck up our kids brains. And it followed their fight. That was a really difficult fight. They had to fight for years. And it followed the classic pattern of all political fights that was described by Mahatma Gandhi. First they ignored them, then they laughed

at them, then they fought them, then they won.

As we know, ain't no more leaded petrol anywhere in the world. Venezuela just became the last country to

get rid of it in the whole world.

As a result, the average British child is 3 to 5 IQ points higher than they would have been had we

not banned leaded petrol.

Now to me that's a really great model. In addition to all the individual stuff that I go through my book Stolen Focus that we should do. And there are dozens and dozens of things I talk about that we can do immediately. We've also. Because I really want to level with people because I don't feel most people

who are talking about this crisis are leveling with people.

There's an analogy I always think of. It's a bit of a distasteful analogy,

but when you hear these tech people promoting meditation or whatever, to me it's

like someone is leaning over and pouring

itching powder over us all day and

then they're saying, you know what mate, you should learn how to meditate, then you wouldn't be scratching all the time. And you want to Go, all right, I'll learn to meditate. Very valuable. I'm in favor of that. But you got to stop pouring this fucking itching powder over me, right? So these individual solutions are important, but in the scale of the level of profound disruption to our attention and thought that is happening, you know, they're pretty feeble, our individual solutions.

They're important.

I do them, they make my life better. But we've got to also have, and I slightly jokingly call it an attention rebellion, but I absolutely think we've got to do that, and we can do that. And I went to countries that have started to do it, from France to New Zealand, countries that have begun to take these steps. And absolutely we can do this. Right.

I would argue we have to do it.

We can't continue. You know, for every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when

we were 7 years old, there's now 100 children who've been identified with that problem.

Today, the average office worker now focuses on any one task for less than a minute. Right. There is a lot indicating we're in a serious attention crisis. The solutions are there. We can do it. We have to do it. And when governments have stood up, it has worked. I can give examples, but so we don't have to accept this being done

to us and our children.

There are lots of practical steps also. You talk about what parents can do. Absolutely. Fight to get smartphones out of your kids. Schools do not allow them in places that have done that. And I interviewed the scientists who studied this in Spain, in Norway, I went to schools that have done it in California, all over the world. The evidence is very clear. You get a massive improvement in learning

and a massive fall in bullying.

Right.

I can explain why the bullying if

you want, but, like, so, absolutely we can do this. We don't have to tolerate our kids

being put up with this.

But the first thing we have to do. So I think at the moment, we're in this sort of zone where we're like, oh, this is bad.

But it's just the modern world, it's just, you know, doesn't it suck to be like this? Right?

But isn't it bad the world went in this direction? No, it didn't have to go in this direction. It doesn't have to continue going in this direction. We can sort this out. We can fix this. And, you know, this is in the interests of everyone. Oh, no, my coffee.

[Sponsor Voice 2]

Bronnie.

[Johann Hari]

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[Sponsor Voice 2]

Wow.

[Johann Hari]

Gotta get clean shirt. Do you Wear plaid, Ronnie. Summon the strongest.

[Sponsor Voice 3]

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[Parent/Interviewer]

So tell us about the bullying one.

[Johann Hari]

Oh, so there's a really interesting thing that's going on. It's a funny thing. It links up both individual bullying and the crisis in democracy in a funny way. So, like I said, if you open these apps now and begin to scroll,

they begin to make money, and they want you to scroll longer and longer.

So the algorithms are designed to figure

out, how do we get you to keep scrolling?

They're agnostic about what they show you next. They don't care specifically what it is.

All they want is for you to keep scrolling. So the algorithms are trained on literally 3 billion people.

Figure out what keeps people scrolling. And those algorithms bumped into an underlying truth about human psychology that's actually been

known about for what, 80 years now?

So it's called negativity bias.

It's very simple.

Human beings will stare longer at things that make us angry or upset than

we will at things that make us feel good.

Right? If you've ever seen a car crash

on the motorway, you know what I mean? You stared longer at the mangled wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. This is very deep in human nature,

and that's always been part of our nature. But when it combines with algorithms that learn specifically what pisses you off, what

you care about, what makes you angry,

it leads to a horrendous effect. So imagine you've got two teenage girls

who go to the same party and leave and go home on the same bus.

And they both open their phones and

do a TikTok video.

And one of them says, ah, we had a great night. We danced to Ariana Grande. I fucking loved it. Right? That video will go into some people's feeds.

The algorithms are always scanning the kind of language you use.

Put it into a few people's feeds, you know, few people will see it. Imagine the second girl opens a video, makes the video, and says, karen was an absolute skank at that party and her boyfriends are pregnant.

Teenagers still say skank.

Might be they come to. We wouldn't know exactly. Well, rehabilitate the word skank. But, you know, her boyfriend's a prick and just does an angry rant about

everyone at the party.

Because it's scanning the words you use. The algorithms know if it's enraging, it's engaging. Right? If it makes you angry and upset, more people will look at it, more people will look at it for longer, and more people will engage. What do you mean?

Karen's a skank?

You're a fucking skank. They'll have an argument, they'll have a fight, Right? I'd like to think that what I'm saying to you is interesting now, but if outside that door that we can see through, if someone started having a fight, you would definitely stop listening to me and watch the fight, right? So you can see how that incentive is having a catastrophic effect in algorithms designed to show you the thing that

will keep you scrolling, right?

So it is showing people things that make them angry, upset, hurt. You could then begin to see why in schools that banned smartphones, there was less bullying. Because the kids are, for at least eight hours a day, taken out of that Nexus where the mean comments are given a megaphone and pushed to the front and the kind comments are muffled

and pushed to the back.

Now, that is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls on a bus. We all know what's happened to teenage girls. Mental health, my friend Professor Jonathan Haidt

has done amazing work on this.

But now imagine that being applied to a whole country, except you don't have to imagine it. So we're living in a dynamic where the cruelest people are being pumped up and promoted, and the people who say, let's not hate each other, yeah, we might disagree on some important things, but we still all live together and we still love each other and we still got things to value. Those people get muffled. And don't take my word for it. In 2016, after the election of.

Well, after the Brexit vote and the

election of Donald Trump, Facebook set up a group of its own data scientists

to figure out, God, did we play a role in this. They didn't tell us they'd done this. We only know this because a brilliant whistleblower leaked it. And their own data scientists said that

Facebook algorithms maximizing engagement by maximizing anger had massively promoted far right material. In fact, a third of all the people in Germany who joined a far right group joined because the Facebook algorithm specifically recommended it. You might want to join, it said,

followed by a far right group.

And Facebook's own scientists said, we just have to abandon our current business model because our current business model inherently promotes hatred. Right. And Mark Zuckerberg disbanded the group and

told them to never bring him any findings like that ever again.

So you see, it's such an interesting thing when I did the research for

Stolen Focus, that when you start looking

at attention, it seems like a small thing, distracted.

It takes me longer to get things done than it used to.

But then you realize that every level

of our lives, in our children's lives,

in our own lives, in work, in our offices and the highest levels, these factors are screwing over our ability to be who we want to be actually to achieve high performance. Right? Good luck achieving your highest performance. In a society where the rule of law is unraveling, where basic democratic ideas are unraveling, we've really got to deal with these underlying factors.

And the good news is that we

can, that there are solutions, that they're very practical, they're not fancy, they're based on things that have improved all of our lives in the past. But we've got to really acknowledge, God, we're in a crisis.

Right.

All the smoke alarms are going off. It's time to. Just like we were saying, we've got to listen to the signal on depression. We've also got to listen to these signals.

[Damien Jay]

We've reached the point in the interview for our quick fire questions.

[Johann Hari]

Oh, yes.

Right.

Okay.

Quick fire. I'm not good at this.

[Damien Jay]

I bet you are.

[Johann Hari]

Okay, let's do it.

[Damien Jay]

The three non negotiable behaviors that you think are most important.

[Johann Hari]

Be curious about other people. Listen to people, be kind to them.

[Damien Jay]

Lovely. That was quick. See?

[Johann Hari]

Okay, they've done it.

[Parent/Interviewer]

Well done.

[Damien Jay]

There's a lot more.

Okay, what's the single best piece of

[Parent/Interviewer]

advice you've ever received and why?

[Johann Hari]

From my grandmother. She said, never let anyone think they're worth more than you and never let

anyone think they're worth less than you.

[Parent/Interviewer]

And why is that so important?

[Johann Hari]

Because no one is worth more than

you or less than you.

Every person you ever meet knows loads

of things you don't know and has

had all these unique experiences. And when people behave badly, it's because of things that have happened to them that are also interesting and that you

can understand and empathize with.

[Damien Jay]

If you could give your 14 year old self one piece of advice, what would it be?

[Johann Hari]

Your pain makes sense. The reasons you're distressed are totally understandable. There's nothing wrong with you. There's something wrong with what's being done to you. And you can get help for that.

[Parent/Interviewer]

What's your greatest strength and your biggest weakness?

[Johann Hari]

My greatest strength is probably that I really like other people.

I almost never dislike anyone I actually meet. So I think whatever the opposite of misanthropy is, I suppose it would be philanthropy. But we call that means something else.

I really, really like people, and I

have a lot of energy for listening

to people, and I'm very curious about them. My biggest weakness, it's a function of a strength, but it's a downside of a strength.

I'm good at telling stories and structuring stories.

And when you're good at that particular. If you're a writer, it can have a weird effect where you become quite

distanced from your own life and the people around you. For the last how many years, since 2011, I've been working on a book about a series of crimes that are happening in Las Vegas, where I've got to know some absolutely incredible people over the last 13 years. And there's a thing where, okay, that's a. Vegas is a particularly weird environment anyway, but where you can be so in the mode of thinking of it as a story that you sort of become almost distanced from it.

And sometimes I can do that with my own life.

It's almost like I'm looking at my

own life from a distance, and I'm

seeing it as a story and a narrative, and I have to really reconnect. It's also a way of protecting myself. I developed it when I was a kid because I grew up in a family where there's a lot of addiction and craziness.

But it can mean that I get

kind of quite distanced from my own life.

And I sort of see it in

quite a clinical way. And that can kind of cut you off from your own emotional responses.

And I have to sort of work

at constantly rerouting myself in my own life.

So that can be a weakness.

It can cut you off. It can have a weird psychological effect, I think.

[Damien Jay]

And the last question, Johan, you're one golden rule for living a high performance life that you'd like to leave people thinking about.

[Johann Hari]

I suppose it would be about attention.

All your achievements will be the sum total of the things you paid attention to. Right. There's an analogy that Dr. James Williams, who I mentioned before, said to me that really helped me with this. He said, imagine you're driving somewhere and you've really got to get to your destination, and someone throws a massive bucket of mud over your windshield.

Doesn't matter what you've got to do.

When you get to your destination, the first thing you've got to do is get the mud off your windshield or you ain't going anywhere.

Right?

And I think the attention crisis is like that. We're all experiencing an attention crisis, and the attention crisis is like the mud on the windshield. I'm sure you've got much better things to do than deal with your attention problems.

If you don't deal with your attention problems, you're going to just struggle to

do all the things you want to do.

So I would say know the value of your attention. So I would say know that attention is your absolute superpower. Know that your attention is being stolen from you by some really big and powerful forces and know that we can take it back, but it requires a shift in psychology. We need to stop blaming ourselves and

our kids and being angry with ourselves

and with them and start blaming the

people who are doing this to us.

And I guess my rule would be, we are not medieval peasants begging at

the table of King Musk and King

Zuckerberg for a few little shitty crumbs

of attention from their table.

We are the free citizens of democracies, and. And we own our own minds, and we can take them back if we want to.

[Damien Jay]

What a powerful way to finish.

[Johann Hari]

Hooray.

[Damien Jay]

Johan. Thank you so much,

Damien Jay.

I've really enjoyed that. But it was a bit like kind of having a machine gun of information sitting across the table from us, just firing constant bullets of knowledge the whole time. I mean, his brain moves a million miles an hour. His mouth moves a million miles an hour. But it means that for the audience that have just listened to and watched that conversation, I really hope they realize the incredible value that Johan has just given us.

I know psychologists often talk about we go where our attention goes. And I think his point there around attention being our superpower, that if we start to take it back, we start to create the environments where we can pay attention to the things that really matter. We can all achieve our own definition of high performance.

[Johann Hari]

How.

[Damien Jay]

How addicted are you to picking up your phone and looking at it? Truthfully?

Yeah, truthfully, Yeah. I. I think I'm on a journey of getting a lot better. So you know that I sort of deleted a lot of the sort of social media apps and things.

I still see you go on Instagrams. I always know when it's one of your Instagram updates. You still go on there now and then.

[Johann Hari]

Yeah.

[Damien Jay]

But it's not a moment when someone annoys you.

Yeah. So it's Not, I always tell you,

put up some, like, pointed thing. It's not on your phone.

No, no, no, it's not on my phone.

How do you update Instagram? Not on your phone.

So I've got a work phone and a personal phone and when I'm not at work, I don't have any apps on it or anything like that. So to answer your question, I'm a recovering phone addict, so I still lapse, but I work quite hard at not doing it. And part of it is like the conversation we had with him there around for our children, but it's more the idea of just trying to role model better behaviors. I can't keep hectoring my kids not to be on the phone and then be a hypocrite. So I'm just trying to do it for them, if nothing else. Like the voter example. Who are you voting for to help your kids?

I mean, I like the fact that we kind of ended with him giving us reasons for being optimistic. As humans, we can change this. And it's a really good point, isn't it? Like, why are we begging for crumbs at the table of these big social media superpowers? Like, there's billions of us, let's all get together and say, we don't want this, we don't want our kids to absorb this, we don't want to be derailed, we don't want to end our days thinking we spent hours and hours on social media.

[Johann Hari]

It's just crap.

[Damien Jay]

Yeah.

And I've feared that it won't change. Personally, I'll try and do what I can for my kids, but I also know that by the time they get to 15, 16, which is where your kids are, they're actually.

[Johann Hari]

They have to be in control.

[Damien Jay]

They have to make their own decisions. And how can they ever win against the mines of Silicon Valley? That's the fear.

[Johann Hari]

Yeah.

[Damien Jay]

But then his example of the leaded petrol in the 70s. It's not a battle that'll be won overnight, but to change the narrative around it and make it healthier for our generation, just make it more regulated. I think that's where we'll eventually get to. My feeling is sometimes we speak about this, about the Mad Men test of. We look back on the TV series Mad Men in the 60s and wonder, how did people get away with being sexist or racist or drinking in the workplace? And we laugh now. And I think in 2050 we'll go, why did we ever allow social media to access my kids?

You know, you're only going to ever have two kids.

Yeah.

And they've both been born in this period where social media dominates. And that is a shame.

Yeah. And that upsets me. And that's why. So the selfishness of interviewing Johan, there's was thinking about how can. How, like, how can you make that small difference in your own life? And hopefully people listening and watching this might be able to use it in their lives as well.

Thanks, mate.

Thank you, mate.

[Podcast Host]

The three things that I'm taking away from this, I'm going to download an app like Freedom to block unwanted websites. I'm definitely going to get a KSAFE actually, to lock the phones in the house. My wife Harriet and I have been talking about doing that for so long. And most importantly, we're going to start having that monthly conversation with people that we trust about the meaningful things in our life, rather than just that noise

[Podcast Host 2]

of, hey, how are you?

[Podcast Host]

Oh, I'm fine. Me too. It's just meaningless and it's time it changed. Look, I really hope this one landed for you. If you took something away from it, please share it with someone that you think would find it useful. Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to speaking to you soon.

[Podcast Host 2]

The next part of today's show is

[Podcast Host]

brought to you by.

[Podcast Host 2]

Indeed. I'm just looking at what's coming up in the script and actually made me think of something. We're going to be talking about hiring someone for a role on the basis of them having a degree. And actually of all the conversations we've really had on this, this podcast, we don't often talk about degrees, which I think is actually really interesting when you stop and ponder it, because getting a degree is obviously a huge achievement and something to be proud of. There's no doubt about that. But as time has gone on, and by the way, I say this as someone that didn't go to university and doesn't have a degree. Degrees are not the only route into a great career or being a high performer. When I stop and reflect on the conversations that we've had on this show, it rings true. Like, I immediately think about Bear Grylls. And I remember when we asked him, you know, what high performance means? His answer to us was resilience. And then we start talking about how you can build the muscle of resilience. And interestingly, in a world where we put success and achievement and accolades and trophies and awards and victory so high up the list, what Bear spoke about was the power of failure. I love to encourage my kids to fail. I think failure early on in life is so vital for people because if you don't fail early on, you almost have this false impression that you're some kind of superhuman. You've got a golden touch for success, which is false of anyone, and then later in your life or your career, you do fail and suddenly you can't cope with it because you've not experienced failure. And Bear Grylls spoke brilliantly on High Performance about how important it is at an early age, as a young person at school, to fail to not get the marks that you want, to not make the sports teams that you need, to not get the accolades at school that people think are really important. That is building the most important muscle for life, which is the muscle of resilience. And as vital and as important as higher education and degrees are, they don't always build that muscle of resilience. You know, sometimes the best thing in life is to have of a punch in the guts and have to pick yourself up and get going again. And I thought, it's so interesting that when I ask someone about the skills you need for life, they don't say a first or three A levels or amazing exam results or a gleaming, glistening cv. They talk about something that you really can't measure, which is resilience. And then I remember the brilliant Johnny Wilkinson, we asked him, what does high performance mean to you? And he said, to explore. And that's actually something that's really important. I've learned over the last few years to really hold my beliefs lightly, particularly when it comes to education. You know, we have created a foundation from high performance where we're working with young people in schools to give them the exploratory mindset, that ability to fail and struggle and grow the resilient muscle

[Damien Jay]

so that you've got the resilience to

[Podcast Host 2]

thrive in the future. And Johnny Wilkinson's message of what high performance looks like was simply exploration. This is a really interesting thing. When we talk about CVS or experience or hiring people. How do you know if someone's an explorer? Well, sometimes I think the way you know is that they've done things in a different way to other people. They haven't actually followed the well, trodden path. I think it's really vital. Who else else? Dame Stephanie Shirley. I mean, she came over to the UK on the Kindertransport, escaping Nazi persecution, did go to university, created a tech business that was in the end worth billions and she gave the business to her staff before she sold it. And people don't realize that it was a female only business. And the first black boxes for Concord were coded by housewives at their kitchen tables in the 1960s. And her message for us when it came to high performance, again, it wasn't about the outside victories. It wasn't about the things that you can write on a piece of paper. She spoke, spoke to us about risk. She said risk is not as risky as you think. If you don't live a life of risk, then you restrict yourself so much and you don't really know what you could actually achieve given the opportunity. And I think again, it's a really powerful and fantastic lesson from someone as incredible as Dame Stephanie Shirley that we can so often write down the skills that we have. But when you speak to high performers on this podcast, the things that they talk about are not the hard skills, they're the soft skills. And out of all of those lessons and many more that we've got discussed, having a degree didn't come up once. And I don't think it's ever been discussed on our show. Remarkably, and I'm again not saying it's not important to get a degree or to be well educated, but I just want you to understand that success is down to so much more than just one factor. You can't show your true self just on a piece of paper or with an exam result. I actually think it's dangerous to hire someone just because they've got good exam results. I think that businesses lose out on top talent because they assume unless someone's got great exam results, they're not relevant. It isn't true. I think that we think that degrees or higher education qualifications tell us everything about everyone. It's not true. If you want to understand a person's skills, you need to find out how they actually perform in the workplace. Hiring the right person is not just hiring the perfect cv. Let me just explain one really important thing to you at this point. I got an E, an N and a U for my three A levels. I didn't get good enough grades to go to university. I don't have a degree. I've ended up creating multiple businesses and having an amazing broadcasting career. And I think that's because for so many reasons, getting noticed in the job market shouldn't mean just having a degree, which is what indeed is actually so good at. Because as indeed profile lets you showcase what really matters. Honest indeed, you can get notice for the important things like your real world experience and skills, not just a piece of paper, which is so important as it means it's fair on job seekers and employers can filter candidates based on actual skills, which results in a more diverse team. So, to find the job that's right for you, create your Indeed profile today by downloading the Indeed. APPLAUSE.