I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time.

Taking time to be more fully present. Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now.

John Horry, hello. Oh my God, I'm so happy to talk to you again. Thank you so much for having me.

I am excited because your new book still in focus. Why you, I was thinking why we can't pay attention and have a think deeply again.

It's another New York Times bestseller who ray for you. And I think that this book is exactly what the world needs right now because we're all, all of us are feeling as I turned out.

I'm just saying, as I turned every page, I went, oh yeah, okay, that's me, that's me. Feeling this lack of focus, like you say.

It feels like it's being stolen. But first I want to tell everybody, listening, that we're not going to get to this entire wonderful book that is going to bring great insight to you about your life.

We're not going to get to all of it. I can't, I can't do it. So I want you to pick up this book and dive in and go way deep into the forces that are working against us and our attention.

Okay, because this conversation is just going to be the tip of the iceberg. So I hope everybody actually buys the book and really thinks about and learns from the experiences about the flow actually of this book provides for everybody.

And I promise you, I promise you, I do not recommend books that I don't believe in myself and haven't benefited from myself. And I promise you, it will be worth your time and certainly worth your focus.

So let's get started.

Okay.

I can die happy now you said my life is complete.

I want people to read it. Why did you decide to collect our to actually attack our collective lack of focus? Why did you decide to attack this in this moment?

There were a few reasons, but one of them was really personal. You know, I could feel that my own ability to focus and pay attention was getting worse. With each year that passed, it felt like things that required deep focus that are so important to my sense of self, like reading a book, watching a movie, having proper, deep conversations,

we're getting more and more like running up a down escalator. You know what I mean? Like I can still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. And I can see this was happening to so many of the people around me, particularly a lot of the young people that I loved.

And I kept thinking, well, why is this happening? So I wanted to really understand this. So I ended up going on a really big journey all over the world from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne to interview over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus.

Look to all sorts of different aspects of this problem. And I learned from them, there's scientific evidence, but 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make your attention worse. And they range really widely from some aspects of our tech to the food we eat, from the sleep we don't get to the hours we overwork.

But, but crucially what I learned is your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some really big and powerful forces.

But once you understand those 12 forces, we can begin together to take them on. So it totally changed how I thought about the problem.

Yes, I mean, I had such so many big a haze in this because what we're going to discover in this conversation and certainly what you'll discover when you dive into stolen focus yourself is that this was done to us.

This was legitimately done to us in a way that we didn't know what's happening. And now that we know it's happening, feel that we can't stop it.

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