right?

You choose the addicted state because it gives you some relief from the pain and distress you're in.

And the reason I often call these values a kind of junk values.

You know, we all know that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick.

But at the same time, a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick.

From the moment we're born, we are immersed in this machinery that teaches us, if you don't feel good, there's an answer to that.

Work hard at a job you don't like, to buy shit you don't need, to display on social media, to make people go, OMG, so jealous.

I think people are just so exhausted with like the performative happiness because it's just not real.

Hmm.

Um, and, and, and this is a big worry.

Jens Juels Holst, who was one of the scientists who designed these drugs for Novo Nordisk, said in an interview with Wired magazine, you know, "This is gonna make these drugs unsustainable.

People just can't live without the pleasure of food.

After a couple of years, people are like, 'This is too boring.

I'm gonna give it up.'" Weirdly for me, and I wanna stress I know I'm an outlier, it had the opposite effect, but for a slightly weird reason.

So I grew up eating [censored], right? And I ate huge amounts of [censored].

Get everybody matched at littlesleepies.com. Little Sleepies, soft on kids, easy on parents.

What world are we preparing her for?

So this is exactly what I noticed.

With all of my godsons, who I'm very close to because their dads aren't around, with my nephews, with my niece, whenever I was helping them with their schoolwork, they were all bright, curious, interested.

And I realized that I had to make them stupider to do well on the tests, right? Because they were curious.

They wanted to ask lots of questions about it.

And you basically have to go, no, no, don't ask questions.

Just memorize this pointless shit, right? And that was my education.

We as the adults are responsible for this, which is why I say, am I the bad guy? Am I one of the bad guys? I don't want to be

So somewhere in the conversation about focus and paying attention, you have to talk about being in that state of flow, you know, that, that state where you're so focused, you're so, you're so paying attention, when things are going so well because that's kind of the opposite of what we've been talking about so far.

Flow states are really important for understanding the debate about attention because a flow state is both the deepest form of attention that human beings can provide, and once you get into it, the easiest form of attention to provide.

It's not like, I don't know, memorizing facts for an exam where you're like, "Oh, what year did President Lincoln get killed?" It's not like that.

It, it just comes very easily.

So obviously I want to think about this, right? If this is a gusher of focus that exists within us, it's pleasurable.

Most people experience it at least once in their life.

Where do we drill to get this gusher? So I went to interview Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Claremont, California, who's the man who first dis- first identified flow states in the 1960s and spent 50 years studying them, a completely amazing, one of the most important psychologists of the last hundred years.

It's like just a different way of life than it used to be.

Hmm.

Um, and, and, and this is a big worry.

Jens Juels Holst, who was one of the scientists who designed these drugs for Novo Nordisk, said in an interview with Wired magazine, you know, "This is gonna make these drugs unsustainable.

People just can't live without the pleasure of food.

After a couple of years, people are like, 'This is too boring.

I'm gonna give it up.'" Weirdly for me, and I want to stress I know I'm an outlier, it had the opposite effect, but for a slightly weird reason.

So I grew up eating [censored], right? And I ate huge amounts of [censored].

Yeah.

It's an example that you have in your book about basically the way that the food industry addicts us to food that's not really good for us, and there's, uh, there's this story about the rats that basically find themselves gorging themselves on cheesecake and can't stop that, you know, my wife and I have now started to take in-- Uh, we, we've started to-- When, when we're eating dessert nonstop, we just look at each other and we're like, "Oh, no, cheesecake rat." So what is the cheesecake rat and the Cheesecake Park?

Well, we're in this incredible position.

47% of Americans wanna take these new weight loss drugs because they produce an incredible amount of weight loss that I'm sure we're gonna unpack.

And in a way, when you first hear that, it seems like a kind of mind-blowing moment.

The first time in human history that almost half of us would want to take a drug in order to stop ourselves from eating, right? So you think, "Well, how did we get here? What happened to us?" And actually, understanding how we got here is very important to understanding the later question of how these drugs work.

Um, and I guess the way I would get into explaining the experiment you're alluding to is I would say to everyone, just stop for a moment, pause this podcast, and Google something for me.

Google photographs of beaches in the United States in the year I was born, 1979, and just look at them for a minute and then come back.

Uh, can you talk a little bit about why that might be?

Yeah, sure

... which very few people can.

Um, no, in the longer term, we've got to take on the forces that are, that are doing this to us.

So some of that's individual.

Give you an example of a very simple thing.

I'll give you two examples.

I go- give loads in the book.

Mm.

See it in action at gendigital.com.

In my new book, I talk about this trial that, um, took place in Norway when there was...

You know, Norway has so much less crime, so much less violent crime than the United States does.

They incar-incarcerate way fewer people.

They incarcerate them less, in less harsh institutions for much shorter periods of time.

Um, and it's very rare for them to have, like, a mass shooting event, and but they did.

They had this guy, Anders Breivik, who, um, shot I think sixty children on a, um, an island.

Yeah.

Yeah,

exactly.

And everyone was like, wow, you saved her life.

Her family were ringing Dr.

Fleet to go, oh, you saved Susan.

And then one day something happened that no one expected.

Susan cracked.

So I think the solutions are completely aligned with what you're saying, which is that we need to reset our expectations of society and going from this nonstop 24-7 access to compartmentalizing our life with our phone i think that's the key thing for me is literally changing the way you live your life on your phone and seeing it as a tool that you're picking up just like you'd pick up an axe for a couple of hours to chop trees but once the job is done that tool is no longer of service and we're going to go have dinner with our family see our friends in person

[laughs]

And she just laughed at me, right? And I didn't know why she was laughing and she pulled up on her phone an Ozempic pen.

So I learned in the next few days that there's been this incredible medical breakthrough.

As one of the scientists who developed Ozempic put it to me, "We've cracked the code of what regulates human appetite, and as a result, we now have a drug that causes incredible levels of weight loss." If you take Ozempic or Wegovy, you lose on average 15% of your body weight in a year.

If you take Mounjaro, which is the next in this class of drugs, you lose 21% of your body weight on average.

And if you take Triple G, which will be available next year, you lose on average 24% of your body weight, just below bariatric surgery.

So this is, like, a staggering change.

So I spoke to Johann about this and what the dangers are for people who don't have any reason at all to be on these drugs.

Have you seen any cultures where, where they have managed to retain that sense of community in that way?

I think the place that taught me most about home i- i- is an in-incredible place that I, I went to.

I'm gonna go there soon again, actually, later this year.

So in 2011, on a big anonymous council estate in Berlin- A J-- Turkish German woman called Nuriye Cengiz climbed out of her wheelchair, and she put a sign in her window.

So Nuriye lived on the ground floor in this estate.

Uh, there's a lot of, um, what we would call tower blocks.

And, um, the sign Nuriye put in her window said something like, "I got a notice saying I'm gonna be evicted next Thursday, so on Wednesday night, I'm gonna kill myself." So this, this, this council estate, it's called Kotti, is in Kreuzberg, for people who know Berlin.

Please.

Is this the same as the way we probably don't need our appendix? Is this process almost natural? Johann says no and identifies a more sinister mechanism behind all of this.

[gentle music] The most important thing for people to understand about our current attention crisis is that your attention did not collapse.

Your children's attention did not collapse.

Our attention has been stolen from us by some really big and powerful forces, and the evidence is very clear that when your ability to focus and pay attention deteriorates, your ability to achieve your goals deteriorates, your ability to solve your problems deteriorates.

You a- feel worse about yourself 'cause you actually are less competent when you can't pay attention.

Attention is our superpower as a species, and at the moment we are surrounded by kryptonite, right? It feels so intuitive that your attention is something under your own control, right? You think, "Well, if I'm not paying attention, that's a failing in me." I'm weak.

I'm not good enough.

Finding meaning in our lives.

And then on the flip side, you get some of the Scandinavian countries where they're doing it very differently, where there, you know, there isn't homework and they are looking at, you know, teaching poetry and creative studies, which is obviously very, you know, niche-y.

Well, look at Finland, right? Finland has some of the lowest diagnosed attention problems in the world.

What do they do? There's no homework because by the way, all the evidence is homework is complete waste.

The kids start school when they're seven until then they just play.

Every 45 minutes, they have to get down.

They get 15 minutes to run around, you know, and again, not only do they get, do they have very low diagnosed attention problems.

They have really happy kids who are doing really well and learn loads, right? Because stress gets in the way of kids, miserable children don't learn well.

So I think that's them actually protecting my mental health to say certain things I don't think I can handle human words.

Mm-hmm.

And what I learned in Kotti, you know, I remember Tania saying to me one dayWe were sitting outside Zublock and I could see all these people.

And she said to me, "When you're all alone and you feel like shit, you think there's something wrong with you.

But what we did is we came out of our corner crying and we started to fight, and we realized we were surrounded by people who felt the same way." And to me, I can talk to you about many of the things I learned about depression and anxiety when I was working on Lost Connections, and loads of the science, and loads of the science about how we can solve it.

But to me, the heart of so much of it, not all of it, but the heart of so much of it I saw in Coti, you know, we need a sense of home.

We need a sense of belonging.

We need to be seen and valued.

Mm.

Yeah.

I'll never forget, there's a, 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 at Oxford now.

You should have him on.

How worried are you about their u-use of technology, and how worried should we be about our kids' use of technology?

(laughs)

Like I'm dysmorphic, but I was learning that, and, you know, if you take these drugs if you were overweight or obese at the start, within a year your risk of heart attack or stroke goes down by 20%.

And there's loads of other amazing benefits, and people keep looking, loads of huge benefits that are emerging from taking these drugs, and some people are like, "Oh, wow, this drug has all these hundreds of effects." Actually, I think it's more likely just that it has one big effect, which is it reverses obesity, and obesity is really bad for you.

Now, it doesn't license anyone to bully or be cruel to people who are overweight or obese as I was for a lot of my life.

Absolutely not.

We all need to resist that.

But I was really sobered by, A, the evidence about obesity, and B, the evidence about, wow, these drugs, by reversing obesity, massively improve health.

Mm-hmm.