PART TWO: Johann Hari: The Truth About Depression, GLP-1s and ADHD & Why Our Biology Is Not To Blame

Is Big Pharma really healing us — or profiting from keeping us sick? NYT best-selling author Johann Hari (Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, Chasing the Scream, Magic Pill) returns with a powerful breakdown of the real causes of depression, anxiety, and the global attention crisis. Johann Hari reveals why only 2 of the 9 causes of depression are biological, exposing how Big Pharma, social media addiction, and modern lifestyle traps are fueling mental health issues. He dives into the dark rise of GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic) and society’s toxic beauty obsession, while uncovering the overlooked role of sleep, community, and social connection in healing. Hari shares his personal experience with antidepressants, and explores how childhood shame and trauma drive addiction, weight gain, and despair. You’ll learn why even pets are being diagnosed with ADHD, what Silicon Valley insiders confessed about attention-hacking technology, and how our loss of focus is sabotaging relationships, careers, and democracy itself. If you’re ready to challenge the myths of mental health, regain your focus, and take back control of your mind, don’t miss this eye-opening conversation with Johann Hari. Check out all of Johann Hari's Books: ⁠https://johannhari.com/⁠ https://johannhari.com/ Our first episode with Johann Hari: ⁠https://youtu.be/JKFuI96biDU⁠ https://youtu.be/JKFuI96biDU Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:06Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our conversation with Johann Hari, the author of, I mean, so many books. "Lost Connections," about depression, "Chasing the Scream About Addiction," "Stolen Focus," "Why You Can't Pay Attention," and "How to Think Deeply Again." So many things that we've been told about depression, anxiety, ADHD, are actually being, in many cases, manipulated and co-opted by so many different aspects of industry that Johann's going to speak to us about.

• 0:35Jonathan Cohen?

  We break down some of the perverse incentive structures that are really hijacking our attention, causing us to lose our focus, to be sick. In many cases, these companies are knowingly producing products for their incentive structure. And Johann has an amazing perspective on this. And he also talks about cultures that don't have these experiences of ADHD, places in the world where these conditions don't appear, and what are the factors that are happening there that we can really learn from. He also has an amazing amount of hope about what it's going to take to create the change in our world that will benefit all of us.

• 1:16Jonathan Cohen?

  I was so touched by the way that he inspires us to create change.

• 1:21Mayim Bialik?

  We're also going to spend some attention on how far the ADHD conversation has gone. It has gone into conversations about medicating people's pets. And we're going to talk about some of the implications about that and also what that looks like.

• 1:34Jonathan Cohen?

  If you haven't already checked out Mayim Bialik's Breakdown on Substack, that is our Breaker community, where we release exclusive content and have the opportunity to ask Mayim or Jonathan questions. Please take a look at it. Join Mayim Bialik's Breakdown on Substack. And can't wait for you to join us there.

• 1:54Mayim Bialik?

  We hope that you've heard part one of this conversation. We cannot wait for you to hear part two. Without further ado, here's part two of our conversation with Johann Hari.

• 2:04Jonathan Cohen?

  So the people who are supposedly in charge of the forefront of the most advanced medical system in the world are failing because it doesn't pay them to send people to a community group, to a walking group, to going out in nature, you know, as much, whatever you say about Canadians, they prescribe.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I'll give them that.

• 2:25Jonathan Cohen?

  They'll give a prescription to go out in nature. Now, it would be much better if they went out in nature in a group, on a hiking group, as you say, because these studies exist, yet they have failed to be implemented into the larger healthcare system. So what is the incentive? To keep people sick or to find the best possible treatment, whether that be in a pharma option or in a combination of both, where you're getting a social connection? And this is where it begins to be hard to not see that there is an incentive in keeping people sick.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  So it's a failure at two levels. You're right that there's a failure in the medical system, but that failure is happening because of a failure at a higher level, which is a failure of the political system, right? The political system is bought and owned by the health insurance companies. Literally, you know, you look at the first day of the Obamacare negotiations, it's both parties, they're literally funding the Republican and Democratic side, the same sides, because they want the politicians to work for them, right? So this is a system built entirely around profit and entirely around these dysfunctional incentives, where, yeah, a better solution that doesn't cost anything will not be considered compared to a worse solution that makes profit, right? So I say that's the overarching system, and you know, the answer to that is a political solution. Don't **** tolerate it, right?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  I completely agree with Bernie Sanders in that part, I don't agree with him on everything, but I absolutely, this is 100% right, that I'm constantly amazed that Americans don't burn down the system of healthcare in this country. It is an outrage. So obviously, I live half the year in Britain, half the year in this country. Even thinking about we mentioning Ozempic. When I buy the Ozempic in London, it's like £150 a month, so that's about, what, about $200. Here it's $800, right? You are constantly being ripped off. So unbelievably rich people can be even richer. It's why you get this. I was very disturbed by the rage around Luigi Mangione because the support of him I found very frightening.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  In a democracy, we do not murder our political opponents and we do not celebrate murder. And it's awful and appalling and that was still a human being. But it's a symptom of the crisis of democracy that everyone is being fucked over. And in a functional democracy, the democracy offers the solution, right? The democracy goes, you are being fucked over. And this is happening with depression, it's happening with attention problems, it's happening with fucking giving insulin to diabetics, happening across the board, right? You have to go, okay, the answer to that is a democratic solution where politicians compete to offer better solutions. But if they're all bought and owned by the pharma companies and by the healthcare companies, that they have a lock on the political system.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  And the way you break that is you elect politicians who will challenge that break on the lock, right?

• 5:14Jonathan Cohen?

  Because how many times are we going to have a study that proves that five minutes with a doctor can change the course of someone's life? How many studies do we need to prove again, oh, it's in Norway, oh, it's in Sweden, oh, they're showing here and here. But it just stays in these little pockets and people hear about them on podcasts and they then don't really go anywhere. It's maddening.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  With all of those, there are very powerful vested interests who benefit from the system being as it is and all of us getting sicker. It's not that they want us to be sick, that's going too far. It's just that they profit from our sickness and therefore the system is built around it. And it can feel overwhelming, you can hear that. I can sense people hearing what you just said and going, fuck, we're never going to challenge that. And when I hear that, I think about two things. I think about a friend of mine who I just spent a load of time with called Andrew Sullivan. A lot of your listeners and viewers will know his work. He's an amazing writer. So in 1993, Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive at the height of the AIDS crisis.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  He'd just watched his best friend Patrick die. As far as he was concerned, there was no hope in sight. He thought, well, I've got a few years to live. What am I going to do? So he quit his job. He was the editor of The New Republic and he went to Provincetown in Cape Cod to do one last thing before he died. He decided to write a book about a crazy, wild, utopian idea that nobody had ever written a book about before. And he's like, well, I'll never live to see this idea put into place. No one alive today will ever live to see it, but maybe somewhere down the line, someone's going to find my book and find this idea. The idea that he wrote the first ever book about was gay marriage.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  And when I get depressed, I try to imagine going back in time to, to, to that year when Andrew's writing Virtually Normal, that book. Saying to him, okay, you're not going to believe me, but 23 years, I think it is from now. A, you'll be alive. That would have fucking blown his mind. B, you'll be married to a really hot man because that will be legal. And I'll be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States quotes this book, when it makes it mandatory for every state in this country to introduce gay marriage rights. And the next day, you'll be invited to our White House lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you and so many other people have achieved and to have dinner with the president. Oh, and by the way, that president, he's going to be black, right?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  That would have sounded like the most fucking absurd science fiction, right? It happened. Why did it happen? It didn't happen because gay people went and blew anything up. It didn't happen because we raged at people or cancelled them. It happened because we appealed to people in a spirit of love and lots of very brave gay people spoke out and lots of very brave straight people opened their hearts and sided with us. And, you know, you think about how unlikely that is. You've got 2,000 years of gay people being imprisoned, burned, murdered. And in the space of a very short period of time, I don't want to underestimate, we've still got challenges, but that comes crashing down, right? To the point where even current, really right wing Republicans are not trying to reverse give the gay marriage ruling, right? I think a lot about my grandmothers.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  I really loved my grandmother. I was raised by one of my grandmothers because the addiction in my family.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  And I'm 46. When I was 46 years old, I think about my grandmother's lives. So one of them was a Swiss peasant woman, living in a wooden hut on the side of a mountain. And the other one was a working class Scottish woman, living in really tough circumstances. Her husband had just died, which is the age I am now.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  I think about what their lives were like.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Legally, they were not allowed to have bank accounts in their own names. Right? It was it was legal for them to be raped by their husbands, as it was legal in every country in the world for a man to rape his wife. My Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote. Right? My grandmother's lives were permanently disfigured by that misogyny. Right? My grandmother, my Swiss grandmother, she loved to paint and draw.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  And she was taught to shut the fuck up and get into the kitchen. Right? And by the time I knew her, she broke her heart to draw because it made her think about the life she could have had. Right? Now, even the most crazy, way out misogynist is not saying women shouldn't be allowed to have bank accounts and it should be legal to rape them. I mean, maybe there's someone out there. We're probably getting there, but like, no one in, you know, if any Republican congressman said such a thing, they would have to resign. Right? How did that happen? You've got, again, thousands of years where men controlled essentially every institution of power. And then groups of women just said, we're not taking it anymore. No, you can't do that to us. Right? And it took an enormous fight.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  And obviously, this fight continues. And I'm very conscious that I'm a man looking at you, man, explaining this, which is extremely irritating. But so, however powerful the healthcare companies are, and they are really powerful, they are not a tenth as powerful as men were in the year my grandmothers were my age. They're not a tenth as powerful as homophobia was for the whole of fucking human civilization, pretty much. Right? Hugely powerful concentrated.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Interest can be taken down when enough people challenge them. And we've got to level with people about how big the challenge is. The factors causing depression and anxiety and our attention problems are really big. Let's be honest with people. It's not a matter of do five minutes on a meditation app or just swallow one pill. Although pills can help, meditation apps can help. There are really big things, but we need to listen to the signal and honour the signal that we're being told and act on it, even if that requires us to do big things.

• 10:58Mayim Bialik?

  The more people I know with young children in schools, the more I'm hearing about conversations about ADD and ADHD. My kids were home schooled and I would say if you took all the homeschoolers in our community, I'm sure all of them would meet a diagnosis, you know, by standardised school, you know, measures. In many cases, in many cities, schools are essentially maximising the number of young people who are on medication for ADD. And it makes for a more efficient school day. It makes for class management. In many cases, you know, the statistics of boys and female teachers is not one to be ignored.

• 11:41Mayim Bialik?

  Meaning the distribution of men versus women who are in boys' lives has really shifted in the last, I don't know, half century or so. People medicating their kids for days when it's important, but they can be themselves on the weekend and all summer. But that fundamentally to fit into this society, young people in particular are being encouraged and parents are being encouraged to medicate children. And in many cases, adults are saying, "Oh, I have it too. I can be much more productive if I'm on Adderall." What is going on?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  So the reason I wrote my book, Stolen Focus, about this is that I could feel my own attention was getting worse, right? With every year that passed.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Things that require deep focus that are so important to me, reading books, watching movies, having long conversations, were just getting harder. It was like trying to run up a down escalator. Do you know what I mean? I could still do it, but like it was getting harder. And I could see that happening to pretty much everyone around me. And I was particularly worried about the young people in my life. And I had this real epiphany about this. I've got a godson. And when, when he was a little boy, when he was nine, he developed this brief and unbelievably cute obsession with Elvis Presley. And the reason it was so adorable is that he seemed to genuinely not know that impersonating Elvis was a kind of cheesy cliche. So I think he was the last person ever to do a totally sincere version

• 13:08Speaker 02

  of Joe House Rock. It was super [BLEEP] cute. And every night when I would tuck him into bed, I would tell him the story of Elvis's life over and over again. Obviously, I skipped the bit where he [BLEEP] himself to death on the toilet. And, and one day I mentioned Graceland, where he lived, that people go and live, people go and visit Graceland. And his whole face lit up. And he said, "Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?" And I was like, "Yeah, definitely." The way you do with nine year olds, because next week he'll want to go to like the North Pole or something. He's like, "No, do you really swear one day you'll take me to Graceland?" And I said, "I absolutely promise." I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years until just so many things had gone wrong.

• 13:48Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:17Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:19Speaker 02

  When he was 15, he dropped out of school. And by the time he was 19, this will sound like an exaggeration, I promise you it's not. He spent literally almost all his waking hours alternating between his iPad, his iPhone, and his laptop. And his life was just this blur of WhatsApp, Snapchat, porn. And it was like he was kind of spinning at the speed of Snapchat. Do you know what I mean? Like, and I remember one day I was sitting on my sofa with him in London.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  And all day I was trying to get a conversation going, he's really clever. I was trying to get a conversation going with him, and I just couldn't. He was just... And to be totally honest with you, I wasn't much better, right? I was staring at my own devices. And I suddenly remembered this moment all these years before, and I said, hey, let's go to Graceland. And he looked at me completely blankly. He's like, what are you talking about? He didn't remember this Elvis obsession, so I reminded him. And I said, we can't live like this. This is no way to live. Let's go on a road trip all over the South.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  But I thought ahead, you've got to leave your phone in the hotel during the day if we're going to go, because there's no point in us going if you're going to look at your phone the whole time. And he wasn't happy living like this. He's like, let's do it. And I think it was literally two weeks, maybe three weeks later, we took off, we went to New Orleans first. And a couple of weeks later, we got to the gates of Graceland. Have you been there? So it's really worth going, but when you get there, this is even, this was before COVID. Now, there's no human being to show you around Graceland. What happens? You arrive, they hand you an iPad, you put in earbuds, and the iPad shows you around. It says, you know, go left, go right. Every room you go in, there's an image of that room on the iPad in front of you, and it tells you a story about it. So we're walking around Graceland.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  And everyone is just staring at the iPad and I'm getting a little bit tense like, come on everyone, you know, you travelled a long way to be here, look at it. And we got to the jungle room that was Elvis's favourite room, it's got loads of fake plants in it, they kept it just how it was. And I'll never forget then, there was this middle aged Canadian couple next to us. And the guy turned to his wife and said, honey, this is amazing, look. If you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right. And I laughed because I thought they were kidding and I watched them and they were just swiping back and forward.

• 17:34Mayim Bialik?

  You could just turn your head.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Well, this is what I leaned forward and said, but sir, there's an old fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning your neck because you realise we're in the jungle room, you don't have to look at it on the internet. It's literally around us in three dimensions. And they looked at me like I was insane and backed out of the room. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it. And he was standing in the corner staring at Snapchat. Because from the moment we landed, he just could not stop, he couldn't stop. And I went up to him, I tried to grab the phone out of his hands, never a good idea with teenagers. And I said to him, look, I know you're afraid of missing out. But this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out. You're not present at your own life, you're not showing up in your own existence.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  And understandably, he stormed off and I walked around Memphis on my own that day. And I found him that night by the big, we were staying at the Heartbreak Hotel and he was by this huge guitar shaped swimming pool. Looking at his phone and I went up to him and I apologised for getting so angry. And he didn't look up.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  But he said, I know something's really wrong and I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, oh, we came away to get away from this problem of distraction. But there's nowhere to escape to, it's everywhere, right? It's the air we all breathe. And that's why I went on this big journey for Stolen Focus where I interviewed, you know, hundreds of the leading experts all over the world on attention. And what I learned is the scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse. And loads of the factors that can harm your attention have been hugely rising in recent years. Your attention did not collapse, your attention has been stolen from you. By really big and powerful forces. And again, we're being told this oversimplified story, which is, oh, it's just a biological malfunction. And there is a biological contribution

• 19:15Speaker 02

  for some people that we can unpack. But what an amazing coincidence that this biological malfunction happens to have blown up at the same time that we're all exposed to technologies that are designed by geniuses to hack and frack our attention. At the same time, we're all exposed to chemicals in our food that have been proven to harm attention. At the same time, go down the list, these 12 factors. We've got to understand this in this wider context, rather than just sort of seeing it again as a sort of technical malfunction. You know, even just, I think about one that you said about dads, right? I interviewed a wonderful man called Dr. Sammy Tamiming. He's a doctor in Britain, and he took over a doctor's practice. He noticed about, if I remember rightly, the figures are in the

• 19:56Speaker 02

  book, about 60 of the kids were being given stimulants for attention problems. And he said, well, this is a very serious drug. We don't actually know the long-term effects of giving children stimulants. There's no long-term research on giving these kids, giving these kids these drugs in the long term, which is a staggering fact. He thought, I should do due diligence. I should bring these kids in, see what's going on with them. And he noticed, for example, lots of them, again, he asked that question, Dr. Felitti asked lots of them, he would say, when did your attention problems begin? Lots of them, it's when their dads left the home. But this is interesting. What's going on there? So he decided to phone their dads and say, hi, I'm your son's doctor. Your son really misses

• 20:38Speaker 02

  you. He's been having a lot of attention, can't really focus when you're not around. Would you be able to come and see him once a week? The dads started getting involved, not all of them, but a lot of them started getting involved again. As the dads got involved again, he found he could take the kids gradually off this medication. Their attention problems did not recur. Now, that's not happening with every kid. There's lots of things that can cause these problems. But again, it helps you to see, when you expand your understanding of what causes the problem, you can expand your sense of what the solutions are in a way that actually serves particularly, we're talking about children here, right? Particularly serves children better. So we've got to understand what's really happening to us. It is not a coincidence that we're all struggling to focus at the same time.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  That is not a coincidence. Spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing the people who designed the stuff that does this to us. But a lot of time speaking to food scientists. You can go down the list. Look how our schools work. I went to an Amish community called Alcart La Grange. Amazingly, Amish kids don't get ADHD. The phenomenon does not exist. Fascinating. Right? Go and talk to them. Why is that? They would say, well, we have some kids who don't like to sit still. They're the ones who help us hunt and fish and run around. We love those kids, right? We are the first human society ever to try to get children to sit still for eight hours a day. No one's ever tried to do that before because it's such a fucking dumb idea, right? Amazingly, when you, and it's even, you said, you know, we're giving these kids these drugs to improve how they're doing. You know, I know you were sort of paraphrasing how people speak.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  Amazingly, and there's lots of research on this, it doesn't even improve their test scores to give them these stimulant drugs.

• 22:13Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, it's, to me, it's about class management. It's about behavior management. I mean, look, I taught sixth grade Hebrew school when I was in college and most of my job was behavior management. And I enjoy, I enjoyed it very much. I mean, I enjoyed being a teacher. I enjoyed the material and it was at a very lovely synagogue. But I could tell what was going on in the homes of the kids who had the most trouble focusing. Many came, many came from very, very wealthy families. They weren't getting a lot of attention.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  This will sound ridiculous and crazy. You, you won't believe me, but if you look this up, it is really happening. Maybe you will believe me because you live in LA, so you will see it. And there's been an explosion in pets being diagnosed with ADHD.

• 22:54Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  So I went to interview the guy who pioneered this, a guy called Professor Nicholas Dodman.

• 22:59Mayim Bialik?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Actually, perfectly nice man. And it was so interesting.

• 23:04Mayim Bialik?

  Do you like how easily I was like, oh, yeah, I've heard of this?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  You're like, yeah, of course.

• 23:07Mayim Bialik?

  I live in LA and know people.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're literally feeding Ritalin to your dog right now.

• 23:11Mayim Bialik?

  No!

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Are pets supposed to focus? Well, this is.

• 23:14Mayim Bialik?

  This is, well, it's kind of like saying, you know, pets can experience depression. They can experience anxiety. You know, very, I mean, birds are very, very smart. I had one for 12 years. They will pluck their feathers out. They will self mutilate if they're upset. When an animal's depressed, I mean, my, my cat, I came home, I was away for the weekend seeing you. Every single meal was vomited up. Every meal, all over the house. Anxious stomach. My cat has an anxious stomach and he's very jittery and he's very, like, that's an anxious animal, so...

• 23:44Jonathan Cohen?

  But that's different than focusing on his math homework.

• 23:46Mayim Bialik?

  No, but, but we're on a spectrum, we're on a spectrum of conversation about chemicals and chemistry. And yeah, you would be able to tell the difference between a dog who cannot, let's say, sit still to focus on eating, to focus on cuddling, like, that has anxious energy, that's always moving, like me.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Exactly, but what was so fascinating, right, so exactly as you say, before I went to interview him, I thought he would say, he would give an explanation for sort of animal ADHD that was like the kind of explanation you would get from a doctor about your child. There's something biologically wrong here, we need, and the drug is a biological solution to a biological problem, which is what most parents are basically told, right? To, here's to his credit, he didn't say that. He described, for example, dogs are meant to run for about six hours a day. Dogs are pack animals, they're not meant to be on their own. But most pet dogs get a tiny fraction of that walking every day and they're left alone for a lot of the day.

• 24:38Mayim Bialik?

  And usually while they're being walked, this is one of my pet peeves, their owner's on the phone. They're not even giving them attention while they're walking their dog.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 24:46Mayim Bialik?

  Really bothers me.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  So the dogs act up, right? Because they have unmet needs and they're acting up. And he said, and I said, so when you give them Ritalin, does that solve the problem? He said, no, of course not. It just makes them more manageable, right?

• 25:00Mayim Bialik?

  It's the same thing with humans. You've just described the problem with humans.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Exactly, it's the analogy...

• 25:04Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, if you believe your own book. You've just described the problem with humans.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Well, I was so struck with that. And I remember he would describe times when there were dogs with ADHD who would chase their own tails obsessively, running around, and then they would, because they lived in tiny apartments, and then they were sent to live on a farm. And amazingly enough, their ADHD disappeared, right? Now, it's important to stress again, there is some biological spectrum with attention. There are some people who biologically are less inclined to pay attention. By the way, those people are hugely fucking valuable. We want them in the human tribe, we need them. But the environment we're living in is driving all of us to struggle much more with attention and focus. Think about the obvious one, which everyone will be thinking about, which is technology, right? One of the things that most struck me, so I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  And when I spoke to the people who invented this world we live in...

• 25:54Speaker 02

  The thing that most struck me is how sick with guilt they feel about what they've done. They know what they've done, right? Give you an example, it's an amazing guy called James William. So James worked at the heart of Google, was very uncomfortable with a lot of what was going on. And one day, he was speaking to an audience of tech designers, who literally are the people who design 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. And he's like, I can't do this anymore. And he quit and became this really important philosopher of attention at Oxford University. But the people who designed this machinery kept explaining to me why it's having this effect on us and how we can fix it, right?

• 26:38Speaker 02

  So they explained, if you now, if you open TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, which I refuse to call X, Instagram, whatever, right? And you begin to scroll, they make money out of you immediately in these two ways. The first way is really obvious. You see advertising, okay, we all know how that works. The 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 who you are and what makes you tick. What makes you happy? What makes you angry? What makes you horny? What makes you sad? And it knows, if you've been using them for a while, it knows.

• 27:15Mayim Bialik?

  For me, they're all the same thing.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  And it's his beard. The, you know, it knows far more about this, about you than your neighbors. Cause your neighbors aren't reading your so-called private messages at 3am, right? It knows a huge amount. So let's say you've ever indicated on any of these apps that you like, I don't know, Bette Midler, Donald Trump, and you've told that you just bought some nappies, right? Diapers. Okay, so it's gonna figure out, if you like Bette Midler and you're a man, you're probably gay. No disrespect to any straight men who like Bette Midler, I don't actually believe you, but okay. You like Donald Trump, you're probably conservative or right wing. And you just bought some diapers, you've got a baby, right? It knows all this stuff about you, right? And it's learning that. For lots of reasons, but the most important is to figure out what to show you next to

• 28:01Speaker 02

  keep you scrolling. Because every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money because you see ads. The longer you scroll, the more money they make. Every time your kid opens the app and begins to scroll, they begin to make money. The longer your kid scrolls, the more money they make. Every time you or your kid close the app, their revenue stream disappears. That's a disaster for them. So all this genius in AI, all this Silicon Valley genius with the algorithms and the AI is geared towards one thing and one thing only, figuring out how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. That's it. That's all they care about. Head of KFC, I'm sure is a very nice person, but all he or she cares about is how often did you go to KFC this week and how big was the bucket you bought? And if you become

• 28:45Speaker 02

  obese and get diabetes, that's not their problem. In exactly the same way, all these companies care about is how much of your attention are we monopolizing? The more, the better. It is a machinery, as my friend Tristan Harris puts it, designed to frack and hack your attention. Not because they're evil Bond villains, they're not. Purely and simply because of this incentive structure, the longer you scroll, the more money they make, right?

• 29:10Mayim Bialik?

  So then when you talk about content, you get to layer on this other level of our favorite word, shame. If you layer content with body positivity challenges, right? If you layer that algorithm, right? Especially for young people, for young women, with all of these other components, you then get a shame generator.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  And when the reason that's so important, I'm so glad you said that because there's an even deeper dynamic to this, which is catastrophic at both an individual and a societal level, which is actually the biggest reason why we need to act on this. So the way I put it is picture two teenage girls go to the same party and go home on the same bus. And they both open TikTok. And one of them does a video going, we had such a great night. We danced to Taylor Swift, loved it. The algorithm is constantly scanning for the kind of words you use. It's going to put that video into a few people's feeds. Okay, now imagine the other girl opens it and goes, Karen was a fucking skank at that party. I don't know if teenagers still say skank. If they don't, they absolutely should.

• 30:13Mayim Bialik?

  They don't. They have other words that don't.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  We need to rehabilitate the word skank, but Karen was a fucking skank at that party. Her boyfriend's a prick. Just angrily denounces everyone, right? It'll put that video into far more people's feeds for a very simple reason. There's a quirk of human psychology, which you know about called negativity bias, right? Human beings evolved to stare longer at things that make us angry and upset than we did at things that make us feel good. If you ever saw a car crash on the highway, you know what I mean. You stared longer at the mangled car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. This is very deep in human nature. 10 week old babies stare longer at angry faces than smiling faces. And, you know, you can see why we would have evolved like that. Our ancestors who didn't look out for the angry face got eaten, right? I mean, it's a slightly crude way of putting it, but you know what I mean, right?

• 30:58Speaker 02

  So that's always been part of our psychology. But when it combines with technologies that intimately learn your wants and likes and angers and hatreds, it has a catastrophic effect, right? It's one of the things that's supercharging antisemitism at the moment because rage-based content, but it's supercharging anti-democratic forces across the world, right? Imagine a culture, think about TikTok. The nice girl is muffled, the nasty girl is given, is supercharged, right? Now imagine that happening to a whole country where the nice people, the decent people, the people who don't hate each other, want to find ways forward, want to find empathy.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  They're muffled and the meanest, angriest, most hateful people are pushed to the front and dominate the conversation. Except you don't have to imagine that because we see in countries as different as the United States, Britain, Burma, Brazil, attention is being fucked across the board by these forces, but democracy is how we pay attention together. You cannot have democracy in an environment where people are constantly being primed for hours every day to nihilistically hate their fellow citizens. So we need to deal with these underlying forces and I can talk about how, absolutely urgently for our kids, because they're really struggling, for us, because we're struggling, for our work, because our work is struggling, and for our democracies.

• 32:22Jonathan Cohen?

  This is where it does feel like there is ill intent.

• 32:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Because there is research and it's been revealed that there were studies at these large platforms that knew that they were causing increase in suicidality, increase in bodily harm, especially amongst young women, increase in depression, and yet they chose to continue to make them as sticky and as intense to drive attention as possible. So yes, do they have a requirement to their bottom line? Okay, but at what cost? And is there no safeguards? I don't think you can regulate safeguards into these organizations. They should be held responsible in the court of public opinion as well.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Picture a factory that's pumping pollution into a river and downstream it's giving people cancer, right? Does the factory want to give people cancer? Obviously not, they're not psychopaths. But once they know they're doing it, do they bear moral responsibility? Or even before they do it, if there was a risk that happened, do they bear moral responsibility? Absolutely. So absolutely people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have moral responsibility for this. Did they want to create a machinery that supercharges anti-democratic forces and antisemitism? Of course, Mark Zuckerberg's own family fled genocidal antisemitism and he is the individual in the world now who is most responsible for supercharging genocidal antisemitism. Is that his intention? Of course not. But is he knowingly doing it now?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Yes. And you look at a guy called Guillaume Chasselot. So Guillaume Chasselot is, he worked at YouTube for a long time and he was the person who blew the whistle that basically because YouTube recommendation videos, you watch a video about, a documentary about the Holocaust that is a factual and accurate documentary about the Holocaust, it wants to recommend other videos, but it wants to keep you engaged. So it'll recommend escalating the angry videos. So he showed from the inside that it created a chain where if you watched a factual documentary about the Holocaust, within a chain of six videos, it would always lead you to Holocaust denial, right? Now, to be fair to YouTube, they have, they have changed that.

• 34:37Mayim Bialik?

  I thought you were gonna say, "To be fair to Holocaust deniers."

• 34:38Speaker 02

  To be fair to the Holocaust, you know, wow. But the, so you see that once they know that's happening, it's not why they set up that mechanism, of course not, but once they know it's happening, absolutely there's a moral responsibility. But the primary responsibility, look, these companies are never going to regulate themselves, right? That's not how capitalism works, right? Companies don't voluntarily restrain themselves from making more money. What absolutely can be done within capitalism is democratic regulation. And there's an example from our lifetimes, where every single person watching and listening has a better attention span because of something that happened in our lives, right? So when we were kids, the only kind of gasoline you

• 35:19Speaker 02

  could get in this country was leaded gasoline, right? And it was discovered that exposure to lead fucks your brain and particularly harms children's ability to focus and pay attention. So what happened was a group of ordinary moms, what at the time were called housewives, banded together and said, why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing the lead industry to fuck up our kids' brains? It's important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, so let's get rid of cars, let's, you know, go back-

• 35:47Mayim Bialik?

  Let's burn down the gas station.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. Let's all go back and join the, let's all convert to the Amish. No disrespect to any Amish you're watching, you are kind of cheating if you are, but they didn't say that. They said, let's replace this thing that is harming our kids with something that does the same job but isn't going to harm our kids. And these mothers, this is forgotten now, they fought like hell for their children and all of us. And it followed the classic pattern of all successful political movements that was described by Mahatma Gandhi. First they ignored them, then they laughed at them, then they fought them, then they won, as we all know, no more leaded gasoline in the world. As a result, the CDC has calculated, the average American child is five IQ points higher than they would have been. Now, to me, that's a really important model. In my book, Stolen Focus, I go through loads of things we can do at an individual level.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  To improve your own attention and our kids' attention. And I'm passionately in favor of those individual changes. But we also need to deal with it at a collective level. This attention crisis didn't happen because you had bad habits or your kids have bad habits. It happened because extremely large and powerful forces are benefiting from making our attention worse. And we need to take on those forces like we took on the lead industry. We need to regulate them.

• 36:58Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I thought also, you know, when we were kids, they literally used a cartoon camel to sell cigarettes. Like, that seemed like a normal way to advertise cancer sticks. And when it came out that Philip Morris and the cigarette industry, they knew. They were adding things to make cigarettes burn faster, so you smoke more. They were adding addictive components so that it was even more addictive than tobacco naturally would be because of its nicotine content. There's a lot of conversation now, in particular regarding things that many in the holistic community, like, you know, wacky homeschool people, home birth people like me, have been talking about for a long time. And I wonder if you can touch on it,

• 37:43Mayim Bialik?

  because it's entered conversations about politics because RFK Jr., who in many cases, I think, does a lot of lunatic things. In other cases, he talks about certain aspects, for example, of food dyes, of additives and preservatives that most of the Western world does not use in food because they are known to be bad for the brain. These things have become so politicized. How do we have conversations around things like food dyes, additives, preservatives, without it becoming, oh, well, that's a political issue and that's the conservatives trying to take our red M&M's away or whatever?

• 38:27Mayim Bialik?

  Because many people do report significant behavioral changes when dietary changes are made. And many of them revolve things that are now being kind of politicized. Where does that fit into the conversation? To me, that's such low-hanging fruit.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're totally right. You have to start, what's the thing my mona di said? Speak the truth, whoever listens. You know, like, you just have to start from... We cannot give in to this insane tribalism that is consuming the country and the world, partly because of these factors that we're talking about. We just have to start from, okay, what's actually true here? And the evidence is overwhelming that the kind of foods that American kids are fed is disastrous across the board, but is having a really negative effect on their attention. For example, in Britain, in 2009, there was a study called the Southampton Study. A pretty simple study, I write about it in Stalin Focus. They got 191 kids and they split them into two groups.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  The first group was just given water to drink and the second group was given water laced with the kind of additives that kids are being exposed to the whole time. Then they monitored the kids. The kids that were given the additives were significantly more likely to be hyperactive and struggle with focus, right? And that's just a very low exposure. So this is why the EU subsequently banned a lot of these dyes, but obviously we haven't hit. If everyone wants to do an interesting experiment, next time you go to Europe, before you leave at the airport, buy some M&Ms. And then when you land in the airport, buy some M&Ms and open them next to each other. You'll notice the American and European M&Ms don't look like each other. The American ones **** glow, right? Like whereas the European ones look kind of dull and, you know, because they don't have these crazy dyes in them.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  So I don't care if, you know, who wants to articulate that truth. Obviously, I disagree, I'm sure you can guess, very strongly with RFK Junior on many things. But if he wants to take on the food dye, those companies, all credit to him and we should all entirely support that aspect of his agenda while opposing others. I don't, to be quite frank, I don't actually believe he will take on those forces, but I want to be proven wrong on that. I don't, I don't see much willingness on the part of the Trump administration to challenge vested power interests, right? And they are a very powerful vested power interests, but... I think we should go further and say he deserves credit for saying that, by the way. I think one of the difficult things is, you don't think Ronald Reagan, again, not someone I, not my part of the political spectrum.

• 40:49Mayim Bialik?

  But don't we miss that kind of Republican?

• 40:51Speaker 02

  But, but he said, you know, my 80% friend is not my 20% enemy. And I think one of the things we have to get better at is engaging with people who we may not agree with on 10 things, but we agree on the 11th thing, right? And this idea that almost like a pollution-based model where, no, you're contaminated. I'm really proud, actually, Lost Connections is the only book that was ever praised by both Hillary Clinton and Tucker Carlson.

• 41:16Mayim Bialik?

  Amazing.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  And I'm really, really proud of that, actually. And, and by Noam Chomsky, you had people from completely different parts of the political spectrum. And some people were like, how could you put on your website a quote from Hillary Clinton? Or how could you put a quote on your website from Tucker Carlson? No, this is exactly what we need. We need to find the areas where we agree. Look, we could just nihilistically say, okay, we're dividing into two tribes and let's just.

• 41:39Mayim Bialik?

  No, but, but to me, that's about truth with a capital T. I'm not a person who believes in, let's say, the truth of one religious, you know, denomination over another. That's not the kind of truth I'm talking about. What you write about is true and that shouldn't fall on partisan lines. And the, the kind of hijacking of our humanity to make us make decisions based on who your mom and dad told you to vote for is actually not the way that we have progress, you know?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  It's obviously not the case. I have my own politics, we all have our own politics. But it's obviously not the case that all of human wisdom is concentrated in one place on the political spectrum. But that, that, no, it's not a credible thing to claim, right? The, of course, we all have our commitments, we all, but, but this kind of, so I would go further. Actually, I was holding back and I'll be, I'll say, while I would vehemently contest some of the things RFK Junior says, I would also, Tim, absolute congratulations to you that you are fighting on this cause. And on this cause, people like us will back you 100% of the way.

• 42:43Jonathan Cohen?

  I really admire the level of optimism you bring. And I do believe that there is reason to be optimistic. When I talk about the, you know, forces of, of negative influence and the systems that are incentivized to keep people sick. I think it is important to do so because we need to be realistic about what we're up against in order to have that. Um, one of the. Three things that we talked about a little earlier was the way tech is designed, the way food is designed, and then the way the school systems are designed. And you know, you hear Eric Weinstein, for example, talk about how we are removing creativity from the school system.

• 43:26Jonathan Cohen?

  We're removing the ability for those people who are going to think differently, who aren't able to sit still, to be successful. And we're sort of driving towards this middle of the bell curve whereby the people who are going to be the most creative and think most outside of the box and potentially provide the largest number of solutions to some of our greatest problems are being excluded from the system. I'm wondering how you see that and if you see any solution for it.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  This is one of the things I feel most strongly about. It sounds fancy, but it's actually very straightforward. Attention evolved to attach to meaning. It's much easier to pay attention to something that is meaningful to you, right? A frog will pay attention to a fly, not to a stone, because the fly means something to the frog, right? We all know that about ourselves. If you gave me a book about 1970s American politics, I'm reading a biography of Gerald Ford right now, I'm ripping through it, I find that really interesting. If you gave me a book about, I don't know, Formula One, I would really struggle to read it, I don't give a about Formula One, it bores me, right? We all know that. The more meaningful something is to you, the easier it is to pay attention. And yet, we have designed our school system to strip out meaning.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  We've designed a school system which is built around getting kids to memorize meaningless, contextless facts for tests that measure nothing of any value, that we've stripped out pretty much everything except that. Memorize this garbage for this test that measures nothing, doesn't measure intelligence, doesn't measure creativity, doesn't measure anything we value, right? That's been happening for a long time now. So there's that. We've stripped meaning from education. We make kids sit still the whole time. Finland has one of the lowest levels of ADHD in the whole world. They never require children to sit still for more than 45 minutes without giving them 15 minutes to run around. Amazingly enough, their kids pay attention much better than ours.

• 45:18Mayim Bialik?

  But do they have ADHD dogs?

• 45:21Speaker 02

  We've done so many dumb things to our school system. We've obviously massively underfunded them, we've massively stressed out the kids. It's just, stress is bad for, beyond a low dose, stress is very bad for attention. And it was so interesting, so I went to a lot of progressive schools for the, for the book. One of the things that was so interesting, I went to a place in Massachusetts that has a model that goes much further than I would, but it's essentially a model where the kids are taught absolutely nothing at all. They just play all day, right? Play all day and they can ask the adults to teach them things if they want to learn them. It essentially takes everything that we think of as education out of the education system.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  And I want to be clear, I'm not advocating that model, but what's fascinating, you go there, every kid there can read, every kid there can write, they go on to have good jobs, think, wow, we could take pretty much everything that stresses and upsets our kids out of the school system and the kids still can function. Now, I believe in teaching, of course, but just not the way we do it. So I wouldn't go as far as, as that school. But, but you begin to see, like, what we are doing is deadening kids. The part of our kids that can't pay attention to this boring, shitty, mechanical repetition is the best part of our kids. The kids who refuse to do it are the ones that we should be most proud of, right? This is not a good system. Now, of course, this is not in any way criticism of teachers who are heroic people and do amazing work,

• 46:46Speaker 02

  but they're being forced to work in this rigid testing-based system that is screwing them over and screwing over the kids and making it impossible for them to pay attention. So we need to really just completely redesign the school system from the ground up. We need to build it around what kind of kids do we want? You know, if you want kids who can mechanically memorize stuff, I've got news for you. We've got AI who can do it 100 times better than your kids. What we want is, what we will need is the kids who can do the things that the AI can't do. And that's creativity, that's empathy, that's listening, that's paying attention to each other. And we've got a school system that is literally destroying those capacities in favor of the thing the AI does much better.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  So we've got to just profoundly redesign the school system around places that actually do have good school systems, like Finland, where they have the smartest kids in the world and they're not doing any of this shit. In fact, kids in Finland, they don't get homework, they don't get any exams until they're 16. Just all the things that we're doing wrong that are pointless and deadening. They don't do them.

• 47:48Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, absolutely. I mean, the amount of psychological stress that kids are under in order to be, hit a mark that is actually absolutely pointless and doesn't provide any of the skills that are gonna help them navigate the real world.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  It's mind blowing. I remember when I was 11, when I first went in Britain, that's when you go to like the bigger school, it's different to the system here. I remember being given a timetable, looking at it and it's saying, you know, 10am, you're gonna do history, 11am, I'm going,

• 48:15Speaker 02

  who the fuck are these people to tell me what I'll be doing at 10am? I haven't committed a crime. Like, what the fuck? Like, what is this? Like, just being absolutely enraged. And I'm really glad that that part of me was not successfully deadened by the school system, although my god, they tried, right? I would not be sitting here with you now about to reenact the entire script of beaches if I had, if I had allowed myself to be deadened into that system, right? So it's a system that's, it really is a terrible system. Like, it's really, really bad.

• 48:43Jonathan Cohen?

  And if we're summarizing, when you talk about the deadening, what I'm hearing and what I believe to be true is, attention and lack of attention is a signal. Depression and feeling anxious, feeling a lack of meaning, a lack of purpose, a lack of drive is a signal. And if we're not looking at the context around that signal, then we're missing the mark entirely. And actually, that signal can be an indicator that things are on the right track. You may be depressed because there's something very wrong in your life that needs help and attention. You may be unable to focus because there are factors, either algorithmic factors or a lack of meaning in your life that you're not connected to and that when we see them as a signal, then we can begin to make

• 49:28Jonathan Cohen?

  the changes that are required to reconnect us to the vital parts of ourselves that actually wanna be alive and thrive and are reflective of our core capability and natural gifts that we have to contribute.

• 49:39Mayim Bialik?

  What can you tell us about what you're working on now? What can you reveal? What can we look forward to next?

• 49:44Speaker 02

  So I'm just finishing a book that I've been working on insanely since 2011 about a series of crimes that have been happening in Las Vegas. So I literally just came here from Vegas because of a legal proceeding that I had to be present at. So that is my next book.

• 50:01Mayim Bialik?

  Awesome.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I'm not meant to say any more than that.

• 50:03Mayim Bialik?

  When is it supposed to come out?

• 50:05Speaker 02

  It'll either be late next year or early the year after.

• 50:07Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, very exciting.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  It takes ages for... The legal process for this is going to be intense because I'm like describing lots of murderers and lots of criminals. And so it's, yeah, it turns out quite a high legal bar for accusing someone of being a serial killer. Who knew? Anyone who wants to know where to get any more information about the books, you can get my books as audiobooks or physical books. If you go to www.johannhari.com, you can see where to follow me on social media, but I won't see you back because I never look at it. But you can follow my stuff if someone else does it for me. And yeah, you can see where to get the audiobooks and ebooks. And you can watch the documentary, which is actually one of my books, and a lot of other stuff as well.

• 50:45Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you for being here in person. Thank you for continuing to be a friend of our podcast. And we just so appreciate your perspective and all the things we get to talk to you about. So thank you. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.