Your Attention is Being Stolen — and Here's How to Take it Back | Johann Hari
The High Performance Podcast
High Performance
4.6 • 4.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Johann Hari has spent years doing what most of us don't have time to do — travelling the world, interviewing the world's leading neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and Silicon Valley insiders to find out why depression, anxiety, and loneliness are rising every single year. What he found will change how you see your phone, your mind, and your daily life.
Today we re-visit this impactful conversation with Johann, but it's not all doom and gloom! Johann is one of the most solution-focused thinkers we've had on the show, and he leaves you with concrete, practical steps you can take today.
You'll hear Johann on: what the people who built Instagram and TikTok privately think about what they've created; the three things every parent should do right now about their child's phone use; and the leaded petrol analogy that explains exactly how we fix the attention crisis.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Attention is your absolute superpower. You can try having self-control, but every time you do, |
| 0:07.6 | there are 10,000 engineers on the other side of the screen, trying to undermine your self-control. |
| 0:13.8 | Something I kept seeing with people in Silicon Valley, the people who designed this world |
| 0:17.7 | is how sick with guilt and shame they feel about what they've done. |
| 0:21.4 | Know that your attention is being stolen from you by some really big and powerful forces |
| 0:26.1 | and know that we can take it back. What if your phone isn't just distracting you, it's actually |
| 0:34.7 | making you depressed. Our guest today is Johann Harri. He's a New York Times best-selling author whose TED Talk has been for you. It's actually making you depressed. Our guest today is Johann Harri. He's a New York Times best-selling |
| 0:39.9 | author whose TED Talk has been viewed over 80 million times. He spent years traveling the world |
| 0:45.6 | investigating depression, anxiety, and why we can't pay attention. Interviewing neuroscientists, |
| 0:51.5 | Silicon Valley Insiders and leading psychiatrists to understand |
| 0:55.1 | what's really going wrong. And his conclusion is as uncomfortable as it is urgent. |
| 1:00.3 | Our attention is being systematically stolen. Our values have been corrupted. The society we've built |
| 1:07.2 | is making us sick. But he also offers solutions. And that's where we want to start |
| 1:13.3 | this conversation, one that will change how you see your phone, your mind and your life. Welcome to |
| 1:20.9 | high performance, Johan Hari. The first thing is we say to someone who's depressed and anxious, not the same wrong, |
| 1:31.6 | what my doctor said to me, lovely doctor, by the way, good person, well intentioned, |
| 1:35.8 | but my doctor said to me, there's something wrong with your brain, you just need to drug yourself. |
| 1:39.1 | What that did is it made me doubt the signal I was receiving, or in fact, not even doubt it, |
| 1:43.6 | completely disregard it. So instead of saying, something wrong with your brain, we start to say, okay, you've got unmet needs, how can we support you, how can we help you to get those deeper needs met? There's lots of ways to do that and lots of levels at which we can do it. So some of them are very local, things you can do as an individual and some things, you know, a bigger things that we have to do as a society. So give an example of a small thing. So there was a guy called Nathan Dungan, who was a financial advisor in Minneapolis. And one day he got approached by a school, kind of middle class school. And they said, look, we've got a big problem. Will you come in and talk to the kids? |
| 2:18.6 | And the problem they had was, |
| 2:32.5 | loads of the kids were getting obsessed. We're getting the latest Nike sneakers or the latest iPhone. If they weren't getting it, they were going mental. And it was causing problems at the school and problems at home. They said, will you just come in and teach these kids about budgeting and what their parents can afford? So he comes in, |
| 2:34.2 | gives him a loan lessons about budgeting, |
... |
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