Episode Details

Johann Hari is an internationally bestselling author and journalist whose work - including Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, and Chasing the Scream - delves into the structural and societal drivers behind attention collapse, depression, anxiety, and addiction. Moving beyond individual blame, he explores how digital architecture, surveillance capitalism and the erosion of human connection are actively reshaping modern minds.

Johann and I discuss why material progress has failed to deliver psychological fulfilment, how our 19th-century factory-model education system deadens curiosity in children, and why depriving youth of unsupervised, risky play has fuelled a global spike in anxiety.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The Kind Are Muffled, The Cruel Get A Megaphone

00:05:31 - The Room In Monaco

00:08:52 - AI Is Like Fire

00:18:35 - The School With No Lessons

00:28:12 - Am I Preparing My Kids Wrong?

00:32:03 - The Hewlett Packard Experiment

00:40:11 - Flair, Football And Changing The Game

00:45:11 - Negativity Bias On Steroids

00:49:15 - Dance To The Algorithm Long Enough

00:55:03 - We're Building A Worse World For Our Kids

01:02:30 - Lead Made Us Dumber

01:11:17 - Half Of Britain Used To Smoke

01:18:30 - It Would Have Sounded Like Science Fiction

01:29:03 - We Built A Fort

01:38:45 - Oasis 1995 vs Elton John 2019

01:44:28 - I Know Exactly How To Get To 5 Million

01:56:59 - Let's Not Murder Each Other

02:07:14 - The Thing I Suppressed

02:15:39 - Almost Every Rich Person I've Met Is Miserable

02:25:16 - It's A Wonderful Life

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CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact

› Email – me@petermccormack.com

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CONNECT WITH JOHANN HARI

› Website – https://johannhari.com/

› Stolen Focus – https://stolenfocusbook.com/

› X/Twitter – https://x.com/johannhari101

SPONSORS

› IREN – https://www.iren.com/

› Venice – https://venice.ai/

› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter

› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter

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