Producers’ Pick | Johann Hari: Addiction is a connection problem, not a drug problem

Hey, welcome back, everybody. It's my privilege to bring in Jon Hari, author of Stolen Focus, why you can't pay attention, except for this show, and how to think deeply again. He just released an audiobook of Chasing the Scream, which Johan read himself, and we focus on addiction. So Johan, welcome back.

Hey, Brian, great to be with you again. First off, just to outline, for people that don't know your best-selling book Stolen Focus, everybody listening right now can relate to this. Because whether, unless you have a flip phone, you are texting, you are listening on the phone, you're playing down videos, you're playing down news, you're playing down anything, you might be playing games on it. But what has all this technology done to our lives? Yeah, it's not just technology. I mean, I wrote the book because I noticed that my own ability to focus and pay attention was just getting worse and worse, right? I could feel it happening with each year, things that require deep focus that are so important, like reading books, having proper long conversations, watching movies, just getting harder and harder. And this is happening to a huge number of people all around us. And I was particularly worried about the young people in my life who I love. And you know, attention is so important, because I would just say to anyone listening, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. And the evidence shows, when your ability to focus gets worse, your ability to solve your problems gets worse, your ability to achieve your goals gets worse, you feel worse about yourself, because you actually are less competent.

So I wanted to understand why is this happening to all of us? And what can we do about it? So I ended up going on this big journey all over the world from Moscow, to Miami, to Melbourne, to interview over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus. And actually, what I learned surprised me, there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better, or can make it worse.

Some of them are in our tech, it's not all of our tech. Some of them are things I've never even thought about, like the food we eat is really affecting the way we feel. It's really affecting the way we focus and pay attention, the way our offices work, the way our kids' schools work.

It's a whole array of things. But crucially, once you understand these 12 factors, you can begin to deal with these problems, both for yourself and for your kids. But the key thing to understand is, if that's happening to you and your children, it's not your fault.

It's not their fault. This is happening to almost all of us. The book is called Stolen Focus, because your attention didn't collapse, right? Your attention has been stolen from you by some really big forces.

Understood. So there's things you could do. So don't reject your phone. Maybe if you want to have dinner and talk to people, you put it in a tub when you walk in the room.

When you happen to have a meeting, you don't give people even the temptation to look. So for all of the 12 factors that I write about in my book that are harming attention, I go through lots of things that we can do. So I'll give you an example, if it's okay, Brian, of one of the problems and then some of the things we can do about it. Because this is all much easier when you understand what's actually happening to you, right? So I went to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, an amazing man named Professor Earl Miller. And he said to me, look, you've got to understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously do one or two things at a time. Think about one or two things at a time.

That's it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. Human brain has not changed for a very long time, ain't going to change on any time scale we're going to see. But what's happened is we've fallen for a kind of mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time, and the rest of us are not that far behind them. So what happens is scientists like Professor Miller get people into labs, and they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time, and they monitor them and they see the results.

And what they discover is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time. You can't think about more than one thing at a time.

What you do is you juggle very quickly. You're like, wait, Brian, what did you just ask me? What is this message on WhatsApp here? What does it say on the TV over there?

What is this message on Facebook? Wait, Brian, tell me again, what were you just asking me? So you're constantly juggling. The kind of fancy term for it is the switch cost effect. When you're switching between tasks, it comes with a cost, and it's a really big cost. Being constantly interrupted is twice as bad for your intelligence in the short term as smoking cannabis, right? This is really screwing with us. It's why Professor Miller says we're living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted. So if you think about that one of the 12 causes, right, there's loads of things we can do about that.

Some of them are at an individual level and some are at a bigger level. So I'll give you an example. I've got, stupidly I'm pointing at it, but it's the radio. No one can see what I'm doing. Over in the corner of the room there, I've got something called a case safe.

It's very simple. 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 locks your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. I won't sit down and watch a film with my partner unless we all imprison our phones. I won't have my friends around for dinner unless everyone agrees to put their phone in the phone jail. You can also install on your phone and sync with your laptop an app called Freedom, which will cut you off either from specific websites, say you're addicted to Instagram or whatever it might be, or it can cut you off an entire internet, however long you tell it to. So I recommend everyone with kids buy a case safe, install Freedom on your kids' phones, let them have some time on tech, but it shouldn't be their whole lives.

You know, there's all sorts of very practical things, dozens of them that I go through in the book. So what does the Freedom app do? It stops what sites from coming through? So you install it, and then you can tell it what apps to cut you off. So say your obsession with Instagram, right? You could say, don't let me go on Instagram for the next three hours, and then once you push the button, if you go to Instagram, it just says the site is blocked, you're free, go spend your life doing something useful, right? So it's a very helpful thing. Or you could use it to cut you off from the entire internet. But the key thing is, it's about locking in your future self, right?

You know, I don't want to eat these cookies, but I'm going to crack if I have them in my kitchen, right? It's similar to that. It's saying, it's helping you to control and discipline yourself. Because the truth is, and this is why we think about this at a bigger level, right?

I'm really passionately in favor of all the individual changes that I talk about in Stolen, focused on massively help you and your children. There's also got to be another layer to this. Because the truth is, at the moment, it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day. And then leaning forward and going, hey, buddy, you should learn to meditate, then you wouldn't be scratching all the time.

And you wouldn't say, well, to hell with you, buddy, I'll learn to meditate, but you need to stop pouring this damn itching powder on me. So we've got to understand why, think about this factor, for example, out of the 12. I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing people who designed key aspects of the world in which we now live.

Give you an example. A guy called Dr. James Williams, who worked at the heart of developing Gmail and Google. And one day he was speaking at a conference where the audience are literally the people who designed the stuff your kids are using today. And he said to them, 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. Not long afterwards, he quit.

He was so horrified. So speaking to a lot of people in Silicon Valley, they kept explaining to me and to be honest with you, you know, I actually took quite a long time to really believe this. They specifically have designed these apps we use to hack and invade our attention and our children's attention for a specific reason.

Anyone listening, please don't. But if you open TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram now, those companies immediately begin to make money out of you in two ways, right? The first way is really obvious. You see advertising. Everyone knows how that works.

Second way is much more important. Everything you ever do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out one thing. They're figuring out what can we push at you that will keep you scrolling? Because the longer you scroll, the more ads you see, the more money they make. So all of this genius in Silicon Valley, all of these algorithms, all of this artificial intelligence is geared towards one thing and one thing only. Figuring out how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible? How do we get your kids to open the app as long as possible and scroll as long as possible? And they are unbelievably good at it. Another friend of mine who worked at the heart of Google, Tristan Harris, said you can try having self-control.

Your kids 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, which is why we've got to regulate big tech. From the Fox News Podcast Network, I'm Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor and editor of the transom.com daily newsletter. And I'm inviting you to join a conversation every week. It's the Ben Domenech podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to Fox News podcast dot com.

You know what I noticed too? What is so brilliant about you is that what you do, you're telling people this, maybe for the first time, and then people are going to have some pride. And they'll say, wait a second, I want to think for myself. I do not want to be manipulated by my phone, by my iPad. I don't want to be manipulated by social media. Once you, there's a lot of people listening right now will say, I'm taking action today. I will decide when I'm going to be going on my apps, when I'm going to be looking down and instead of engaging with the people right next to me. The other area of your expertise is addiction.

And you have a new audio book out that you just did called Chasing the Scream. And essentially the headline is everything we thought about addiction is wrong. Yeah, you know, this was a very personal subject for me. We had a lot of addiction still do in my family. And one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was too young to understand then why. But as I got older, I realized we had addiction in my family.

And like a lot of people who've got someone they love with an addiction problem, there's going to be loads of people listening in this situation. I didn't know what to do. I didn't feel like what I was doing was helping.

I didn't know what would help. So I wrote Chasing the Scream because I wanted to figure out, I wanted to understand addiction and I wanted to understand what would help. So I ended up going on this really big journey all over the world to research the book. And I learned a huge amount of things. But I think one of the most shocking to me was that I had actually misunderstood the addiction that I had seen right in front of me all my life.

Right. So if you'd said to me when I started researching the book 10 years ago, Brian, let's talk about heroin addiction because it's close to me but applies to all the others. You said to me, what causes heroin addiction? I would have looked at you like you're an idiot.

And I would have said, well, Brian, the clue's in the name. Obviously, heroin causes heroin addiction. We've been told this story for 100 years that's become totally part of our common sense.

It was certainly part of mine. So we think if you kidnap the next 20 people who walk past your studio and every day you injected them with heroin three times a day, like a villain in a Saw movie. At the end of that month, they'd all be addicted to heroin for a simple reason. There's chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically crave. And at the end of that month, they'd be addicted.

Right. They'd have a tremendous physical hunger for the chemical hooks in the drug. First thing that led to me to the fact that something not right about that story is in Britain, where I'm from, as you can tell from my weird Downton Abbey accent. If you guys step out into the street now and I get hit by a truck and I break my hip, I'll be taken to hospital and they'll give me a lot of a drug called diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It's medically pure heroin.

It's much better than anything you'd ever score on the streets. People in Britain are given medically pure heroin for quite long periods of time. If anyone listening has a British grandma who's had a hip replacement operation, your grandma has taken a lot of heroin. If what we think about addiction is right, that it's caused primarily or entirely by the chemical hooks in the drug, what should be happening to all these people in British hospitals? They should be leaving after being given heroin and trying to score on the streets.

This has been studied very carefully. It never happens. And when I learned that, I just thought, well, that cannot be true. It doesn't make sense to the opioid crisis in the U.S., doesn't make sense of anything. How could you have a situation where you've got someone in a hospital bed that'd be given a lot of medically pure heroin. They do not become addicted.

And you've got someone in the alleyway outside shooting up who does. How could that make sense? And I only began to understand it when I went to Vancouver and interviewed an incredible man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who did an experiment that has transformed how we understand addiction. So Professor Alexander explained to me the story we've got in our heads, that addiction is caused primarily or entirely by exposure to the chemicals in the drug, the hooks in the drug, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple experiments.

Anyone listening at home, you could try them yourself. You take a rat, you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine.

You probably shouldn't do this at home. And you leave the rat. And the rat will try both. And it will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself by overdosing within a few weeks. You might remember there was a famous advertisement in the 1980s, an anti-drugs ad that showed these experiments, right? Right. So there you go.

That's our story. The rat tries the drug. It gets obsessed with the chemical hooks. It wants more and more of them until it eventually OD's.

In the 70s, Professor Alexander came along and said, hang on a minute. You put these rats alone in an empty cage. They got nothing that makes life worth living for rats. All they've got is the drugs.

What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically like heaven for rats. Gotcha. They've got loads of friends. They've got loads of cheese. They've got loads of coloured balls.

They can have loads of sex. Anything a rat likes is there in Rat Park. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water.

And this is the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They hardly ever use it. None of them use it compulsively. None of them overdose. So you go from extremely high rates of overdose when they do not have the things that make life worth living to no compulsive use and overdose when they do have the things that make life worth living.

Now, there's lots of human examples of this. This is playing out all around us. Where is the opioid crisis happening? It's happening in the places where despair is highest, right?

Where all the other indicators of despair is why one of the experts on it called them deaths of despair. If you want to understand why people are taking painkillers, you've got to understand why they're in such pain. The most important thing I learned from this, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. Valuable though that is to many people, the opposite of addiction is connection. The core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is such a painful place to be. And once you understand that, you can see why what we do is not working. Because what we do is the war on drugs, right?

Well, people who are addicted, we've got to give them an incentive to stop by punishing them. But once you understand that pain is the cause, pain is the driver, you begin to see that actually makes the problem worse, which there are policies that can actually save the lives of the people I love and the people that people listening love as well. Johan, you've helped a lot of people with those two great topics and all your research, Stolen Focus and Chasing the Scream.

Go out and get it. Johan, Hari, thanks so much. Cheers, Brian. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Back at you, back in a moment.