I have no doubt you are going to love this conversation with international bestselling
author Johan Hari that includes a discussion about the fact that Ozempic is being used as
the wonder weight loss drug and the potential impacts it has here in Australia. So precisely
because these drugs haven't arrived in huge numbers in Australia yet, except the
diabetes, I really urge Australia can get this right in a way that Britain and the US have not
so far. These drugs absolutely should be prescribed, but they should be prescribed
very tightly. When it comes to Australia considering itself the lucky country
that we live in down under, statistically Johan Hari says our nation is at the top end for anxiety
and loneliness. Already in the Western world, we're the loneliest society there's ever been.
How many close friends do you have who you could turn to in a crisis? And when they started doing
it years ago, the most common answer is five. Today, the most common answer
None. And Australia is just off the scale on loneliness.
Johan Hari has had an extraordinary journey of his own in recent times,
has led him to strike up a friendship with the one and only Oprah Winfrey.
I was profoundly shaped by watching the Oprah Winfrey show every day for years and years and
years, right? But at the end of this message, she says, well, because your answer machine
doesn't have your voice, I'm not sure this is actually your number. So I don't want to leave
my number on a random answer machine. So I'll call you back, right? And then she phoned me one
day. We are friends.
We're going to see her in Montecito in a few weeks.
It's people like Johan Hari that inspire the work we do at Alita. We would love you to check
out our Alita Connect signature program. We bring together groups of five to six people
from around the globe to connect, to learn, and to share. Head to alitacollective.com
to check it out and book a discovery call with us today. Big thanks to Jason Nicholas
and his team from Temper Bedding. NASA approved, world's best in bedding. If you purchase a
Temper Bed, it will change your life.
Johan Hari is an internationally bestselling author whose books have
appeared in 38 languages. His first book, Chasing the Scream, was made into an Academy
Award nominated film and an eight-part TV series presented by Samuel L. Jackson.
His second book, Lost Connections, was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller.
His TED Talk on addiction and depression have been viewed more than 93 million times,
and his two latest books are absolute must-reads. Hillary Clinton says this about style and focus.
Johan Hari tackles the profound dangers facing humanity from information technology and rings
the alarm bell for what all of us must do to protect ourselves, our children, and our democracies.
His latest book, Magic Pill, gives an incredible insight and deep dive into the weight loss drug
ozempic and others like it, literally sweeping the globe to the extent that ozempic's manufacturer,
Nova Nordic, is a Danish pharmaceutical company and now the most valuable business in Europe
with a valuation of around 700 billion Australian dollars. It's a great pleasure to speak to you
this morning. Thanks for joining me. Well, chuffed to talk to you. I'm always happy to talk to people
who are in Melbourne because I had the closest thing I've ever had to a religious experience
in Melbourne, which was, it must have been, I don't know, eight years ago. I went to, came to
Melbourne for the first time and I went to the set of Neighbours. I went to Ramsey Street, it's
Pinnock Court, and because me and my grandmother every day religiously watched Neighbours when I
was a little kid, and my grandmother sadly is no longer around to do this, but I went there and I
thought to her that would have been like the most insane thing, the idea that I could have gone to
this side of the world and gone to Ramsey Street. She would have been so fucking happy. That's my
equivalent of like a Muslim going to Mecca or something. It's the closest I'll ever get.
So that is just brilliant. We forget in Australia that we export these things out sometimes to the
UK and we assume that no one remembers them, but clearly that's had an impact on you and your
upbringing. You've literally become one of the voices of our time and it feels to me as though
you've picked the number of the biggest issues facing the world and you've got a unique way of
explaining them the way very few people can.
Can you share with me what led you to wanting to write the way that you do?
That's very nice of you to say that. Thank you. Cheers, Luke. For me, every book I ever write,
I always start with a mystery that I want to understand for myself. So I'm not an expert,
right? I'm a journalist. I was trained in social sciences at Cambridge University,
so I've got pretty good training in that stuff, but I'm not an expert, right?
So I started with my first book, Chasing the Scream. It's about addiction. We had a lot of
addiction in my family. Nothing I was doing was helping. I was really concerned.
I wanted to figure out, well, what causes addiction? What can you actually do about it?
What actually solves this problem? So I ended up going on this big journey all over the world for
my book, Chasing the Scream, trying to figure that out. I think I found some really interesting
and important answers on that. My second book, Lost Connections, is about depression and anxiety,
right? At the time that I started writing it, I was about to turn 40 and every single year that
I've been alive, depression and anxiety had massively increased in Britain, in the US,
across the world.
Actually, particularly badly in Australia, for reasons we could talk about, if you like.
I wanted to figure out what's going on, how do we reverse that trend? So I ended up going on this
big journey for that. And the book I think we're going to talk about today, Stolen Focus, was really
a very basic problem. I could feel that my own attention was getting worse and worse,
and I could see this happening to loads of the people around me.
In fact, the figures on it are pretty shocking about the level of crisis we're in.
The average office worker now focuses on any one task for less than a minute,
and that's what we're talking about today. So it's a very basic problem, but it's a very big problem.
I was seven years old. There's now a hundred children who've been identified with that
problem. And I could feel it happening to me. I was quite ashamed and embarrassed. I thought there
must be something wrong with me. And that's when I kind of started realizing, okay, I need to
investigate this. I need to figure out what's actually happening here.
Yeah. And you just said depression, anxiety, particularly challenging in Australia,
and the evidence is there to suggest it. What's your...
What's your theory as to why, in what we often call the lucky country down here,
we have such an epidemic as we do in the rest of the world, but why particularly in Australia?
It's really interesting. I spent a lot of time in Australia, and I've interviewed a lot of experts
in Australia, and I absolutely love Australia. It's why I'm so excited to come back in October
for this speaking tour. I think the answer is complicated and we don't totally know,
but I think we've got a few hints. So what I learned from my book, Lost Connections, is that
there's scientific evidence for
brain factors that can make depression and anxiety, can cause it or make it much worse.
And some of them are in our biology. You know, there are real brain changes that happen when
you become depressed that can make it harder to get out, and your genes can make you more sensitive
to these problems. But most of the factors that cause depression and anxiety aren't factors in
our biology, they're factors in the way we live. And there's one in particular in Australia that's
shockingly high, which is loneliness. Already in the Western world,
we're the loneliest society there's ever been. There's a study that asked Americans,
how many close friends do you have who you could turn to in a crisis? And when they started doing
it years ago, the most common answer is five. Today, the most common answer is none, right?
I think the figure before the pandemic was 42% of Americans agreed with the statement,
no one knows me well. Like what is life like when no one knows you well,
you have no friends to share your joy or your pain with. And Australia is just off the scale
on loneliness for kind of complicated reasons. A lot of the other factors are going on as well,
the other factors that I wrote about. So yeah, I think that's a big thing that's going on there.
It's a real tragedy when you think, isn't it, that most people have got not one person in a crisis
they can call to support them or someone to turn to. And those numbers are, as you said, alarming,
particularly here in Australia. So much of what you write resonates, and you wrote this in Style
and Focus. At the moment, we think we are prosperous. If we are working ourselves ragged
to buy things, we're not going to be able to do that. We're not going to be able to do that.
We're not going to be able to do things, most of which don't even make us happy. We could
redefine prosperity to mean having time to spend with our children or to be in nature or to sleep
or to dream. Do you think we need to have a look at what success actually means?
Totally. And I feel that conflict in me. The way I began to think about this, Luke, is that,
so we all know that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right? As you
can see from my chins, I'm not immune to that, right? I once got a Christmas card from KFC as
their best customer. I'm not immune to that, right? I once got a Christmas card from KFC as their best
customer. I'm not immune to that, right? I once got a Christmas card from KFC as their best customer.
It's not even a joke. And that wasn't even the fried chicken shop I went to the most.
But just like junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick,
there's this really interesting scientific evidence that a kind of junk values have taken
over our minds and made us mentally sick. But for thousands of years, philosophers have said,
if you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're going to feel like shit,
right? It's not an exact quote from Confucius or Schopenhauer, but that's basically what they said,
right? But weirdly,
nobody had actually scientifically investigated this until an incredible man who I got to
interview a lot named Professor Tim Kasser, who's at Knox College in Illinois, began to really dig
into this. And he discovered loads of things. But for the purposes of your question, I think the
most important thing he discovered is that the philosophers are right. The more you think life
is about money and status and showing off the kind of values that are just stimulated in you by
Instagram and advertising and so much of how we live, the more likely you are to become depressed
and anxious by it.
Quite a significant amount. And there's lots of reasons why, but one of them,
the way I began to think of it is we've been fed a kind of KFC for the soul.
We've been trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places. So at one level,
this is totally obvious and banal. Everyone listening knows none of you are going to lie
on your deathbed and think about all the likes you got on Instagram and all the shoes you bought
and all the money in the bank. You're not going to think about that. You're going to think about
moments of love and meaning and connection in your life.
But as Professor Kasa put it to me, we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what
is most important about life. More three-year-old children know what the McDonald's M means than
know their own last name. For the moment we're born, we're pumped with these images. You don't
feel good. There's an answer to that. Go shopping. Display it on Instagram to make people say,
OMG, so jealous. Then when you don't feel good, work even harder to buy even more shit you don't
need to display even that on Instagram, right? So we're in this kind of ratchet. The fancy way of
putting it is we're in a value of value. We're in a value of value. We're in a value of value. We're in a value of value.
We're in a crisis of values. And it's really a kind of spiritual crisis. I'm not a religious
person, so I don't mean that as a kind of like God-bothering way. But it's a crisis of values.
We are taught to value the wrong things. I learned really interestingly there are interesting
techniques you can use to profoundly change your values and regain this, your inner conflict.
One of the ways Professor Kasa puts it as well is everyone is a mixture of two kinds of values.
The fancy term for them is intrinsic values and extrinsic values.
So imagine you play the piano. If you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it
gives you joy, that's what's called an intrinsic reason to play the piano. You're not doing it to
get anything out of it. You're just doing it because that's a thing you love to do, right?
Okay, now imagine you play the piano, not because you love it, but I don't know, because your parents
dream was to be a piano maestro and they're massively pressuring you. Or to post the clips
on Instagram to get likes and impress a woman. I don't know, maybe there's some woman out there
who's a piano fetishist, right? Loves a pianist.
Or you play the piano in a dive bar that you hate to pay the rent. Those would be what are called
extrinsic reasons to play the piano. You're not doing the thing because you love it. You're doing
it to get something out of it further down the line. And we're all a mixture of intrinsic and
extrinsic values. And you should be, right? You have to be to get through the day and it's healthy
to have both. But what's happened is our lives have become hugely dominated by extrinsic values.
They're hugely crowded out, intrinsic values. Think about how many times you'll be on a beautiful
beach and no one's looking at you. You're not looking at them. You're looking at them. You're
looking at the beach. They're just fucking taking pictures of it and posting them on Instagram and
then sitting there scrolling to see who commented and liked. That'd be a really good example of
people being jolted out of intrinsic experience. It's an amazing thing to be on a beach and watch
the sunset and into an extrinsic experience. But that's happening to us the whole time.
A kind of ego itching powder is being poured over us the whole time that's jolting us out
of these intrinsic experiences. That's just one of obviously many aspects of this, but I think that
It's such a profound thing you're saying. I laugh and smile at times, but it's tragic really when
you think about it because we can all relate to that, can't you? You do sit on a beach now
somewhere beautiful in Hawaii and you look all around you and all it is is people taking photos
of themselves and not enjoying the moment for a second. I think your terminology again,
so that junk food for the soul is that our ultra processed foods killing us at one level, but
the same values that you just described are also poisoning.
People in horrific ways. We've got this anxious generation you talk about. Our kids are growing
up with more anxiety than we've ever seen before. Are you optimistic at all, Johan? Do you think that
there is a way to retrain ourselves? Because do you think we're taking the problem seriously enough?
I am optimistic. Well, I'm optimistic for lots of reasons, but one is it's like all the smoke
alarms are going off when depression and anxiety and addiction and attention problems are so
widespread in society. Obviously that's awful. It's
a distress signal. But as long as we learn to understand that these aren't signals,
that something deeper is going wrong, not just like purely biological malfunctions, like a
malfunction in a computer program or something, that they mean something, that your pain means
something, that it's connected to deeper problems and deeper unmet needs. Once we begin to understand
that, these problems can become fuel for actually changing and sorting out these problems.
And one of the reasons I'm optimistic, because
all my books, all the problems I write about, I don't write my books because I think of this as
like always an interesting intellectual problem, right? I mean, you know, I'm interested in
understanding the problem, but the reason I'm interested in understanding the problem is because
if you understand the problem differently, you get to different solutions, right?
There's a moment that's really fell into place for me. I'll never forget it. I was interviewing
this South African psychiatrist called Dr. Derek Summerfield, a great guy. And he told me this
story. So he happened to be in Cambodia in Southeast Asia in 2001, I think it was, when they
introduced chemical antidepressants for people in that country, they'd never had them in Cambodia
before. And he was like, he was with the doctors and they said to him, what are antidepressants?
And he explained. And they said to him, oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants.
And he was like, what do you mean? He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal
remedy like St. John's wort or ginkgo biloba. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer
in their community who worked in the rice fields.
And one day he got his leg blown off by a landmine that was left over from the war with the U.S.
So they gave him an artificial leg. They're good at that in Cambodia. And a few months later,
he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's very painful to work underwater
when you've got an artificial limb. And I'm obviously guessing it was pretty traumatic to
go back and work in the field where he got blown up. The guy started to cry all day. After a while,
he refused to get out of bed. He developed what we would call classic depression. The Cambodians said,
that's when we gave him an antidepressant. And Dr. Sommerfeld said, what was it?
They explained that they sat with him. They listened to him. You only had to listen to him
for five minutes to see why he was so distressed. One of the doctors thought, if we bought this guy
a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so
much. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month,
his depression was gone. It never came back. They said to Dr. Sommerfeld,
so you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right?
Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that sounds like
a weird joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant. She gave me a cow. But what
those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively from this kind of individual unscientific anecdote
is what the leading medical body in the whole world, the World Health Organization, has been
trying to tell us for years. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not
crazy, you're not in the main.
You're a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need
is love and practical help to get those deeper needs met. So it's a very different way of thinking
about this. Of course, there are biological contributions. Of course, chemical antidepressants
can give some relief to some people. Anyone listening, if you're taking them and they're
helping you, carry on. But precisely because this problem goes deeper than our biology,
our understanding of it and the solutions to it need to go deeper. So of course, what I began to
ask is, well, what's the cow for the things that are screwing us up, right? And also go through a
lot of things in Lost Connections. But yeah, once you reframe with all these questions, addiction,
depression, attention problems, our weight problems, the subjects in my books, when you
understand what's causing these problems, it opens up a completely different set of solutions,
ones that actually work. And you do a brilliant job of that, Johan. You lift the lid for people
and you show them, yeah, our focus didn't just disappear. The fact that it's stolen focus is the
title of one of your books, meaning it's not the fault of the individual.
You give some great stats that people touch their phone 2,167 times a day. It's an actual stat that
you give us. You mentioned earlier, the average office worker can now focus on a task for maybe
one minute at a time. Our kids' attention spans have been obliterated, really. Do you think that
helps people understanding that a lot of these things are actually factors out of their control?
I would put it slightly differently. I think you phrased that really well.
It's not that they're out of your control. It's that when we're in a situation where we're in a
we reframe them, we have to understand where our control lies. So to be honest, I'd felt my
attention was getting worse for a long time. I was really worried about some of the young people that
I love and have particularly disturbing experience with one of them that I can tell you about in
Graceland. To be honest, I put off investigating this for a long time, this subject, because I
thought the reason my attention was getting worse was obvious. I thought, well, you're just not
strong enough. You're lacking willpower. You're weak. You should have the strength to resist
these temptations. You should have the strength to resist these temptations. You should have the
So I thought maybe I'm just getting older. Maybe it's just that someone invented the smartphone
that fucked me over. I was very self-critical, self-blaming. Actually, for Stolen Focus, which
as you know, I'm coming to loads of Australian cities to talk about, I went on this big journey
all over the world from Moscow to Miami to Melbourne, your hometown, not just to cities
that begin with letter M. And I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus.
And what I learned is, in fact, there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your
attention better or can make it worse.
And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely rising in
recent years. So if you're struggling to focus and pay attention, if your kids are struggling
to focus and pay attention, there's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing wrong with them,
but there is something wrong with the way we're living. And once you understand what these 12
factors are, you actually begin to regain your power. There's sort of two levels at which you
can regain your power. There are individual change. The way I think of it is defense and
offense. There are loads of things that you can do immediately to defend yourself and your children.
Against these factors that are harming our attention, I go through loads of them in the book. I'm sure
we can talk about them. And then there's also offense. Because the truth is, and I want to
really level with people because I don't feel most people communicating about attention are
leveling with people. I'm passionately in favor of these individual changes. I'm sure we can talk
about them. I love them. I do them myself. They've massively improved my life. They'll massively
improve yours. On their own, they won't fully solve this problem. Because the truth is, this
didn't happen because you and me didn't do it. It didn't happen because you and me didn't do it.
It didn't happen because you and me had bad habits or our kids have bad habits. This happened
because some really big forces fucked with us for very clear reasons. And at some level and at some
point, we have to take on those forces that are doing this to us. I went to places that have begun
to do that, from France to New Zealand, and I saw how it's begun. So I think when you understand the
problem, it's not a problem located in you. I mean, you can have failings as well, like we all do.
That's not why this crisis suddenly blew up in our lifetimes, right? Because we suddenly all got
bad habits. Once you understand what's causing the problem, you can begin to actually locate
where your power really lies, which to some degrees in defensive measures as individuals
and families, and to some degrees as banding together as societies and taking on these
bigger forces. Yeah. And I speak to a lot of people in this format who have really,
really powerful habits and they can articulate them and identify them really clearly. And often
patterns in them. Most of them have a really clear exercise routine. Most of them have some
form of mindfulness practice, whatever that shows up like for them. They've got organisational
skills. They have a great understanding of sleep. For parents listening, I think for most of us as
parents, I think that's where the emotion kicks in. We're fighting with our kids on a daily basis,
trying to get them off their smartphones, trying to get them to live a healthier life.
What would you say to parents listening to this? What are the places where you would start to try
and support our kids to live a healthier and more focused life?
It's such an important question. It's something I think about a lot about the young people that I
love. I would start by saying why it matters, because I think we can see it more easily in
our kids than we can see in ourselves. I'll just say to anyone listening, think about anything
you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business,
being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is. That thing that you're proud of
required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. And the evidence is clear that when
the focus and pay attention breaks down, your ability to achieve your goals diminishes. Your
ability to solve your problems diminishes. You feel worse about yourself because you actually
are significantly less competent when you can't pay attention. Attention is our superpower as a
species. At the moment, we're surrounded by kryptonite, to extend this analogy probably too
far. But when you get your attention back, it's a feeling of regaining your competence. And we
can particularly worry about this with our kids, because we can see if your kids can't pay
attention, they're going to die. They'll be okay.
But they're never going to be what they could have been if they could have paid attention.
Think about in every domain, like we're speaking just after the Olympics, it's during the
Paralympics, I was just watching them before we spoke with my god sons. Think about the incredible
amount of achievement that goes in. That achievement comes from unbelievably hard and
sustained focus over really long periods of time. That's true of all achievement. You can't pay
attention, you're going to achieve much less in your life. So in terms of how we have that
conversation, obviously it's a conversation I have all the time with my nephews, my god
sons, my niece. What absolutely does not work, and I understand the temptation to do it, and I've made
this mistake myself, so I'm not judging anyone who's done it, is standing over them saying,
there's something wrong with you. Because there's nothing wrong with them. There's something wrong
with the environment we've allowed to be built for them. I never approach them in a spirit of,
hey, listen, Sonny, I've got to tell you what's wrong with you. I always frame it as we're in a
shared struggle here. I've got this problem.
You've got this problem. And we all have that conflict where we're drawn to massive amounts
of distraction. And by the way, we want some of these distractions in our lives. I'm not saying
we should all go and live in a monastery, right? I want this to be part of our lives. We just don't
want it to dominate our lives in the way that it currently does. So you start from a position of,
we've got a shared problem here. What do you like about this stuff? What don't you like about this
stuff? How can we keep some of the stuff you like without all this stuff you don't like?
And then how can we build from there? In terms of advice I would give to parents, I would start,
there's loads of things, and we can go through.
There's many layers to this, but I would just start with one personal thing, and then we can go
to bigger stuff if you want. So this is something, I'm holding up something called a K-safe. As you
can see, it's a plastic safe. Go online, it's about a hundred bucks in Australian money. You take off
the lid, you put in your phone, you put on the lid, you turn this dial at the top, and it'll lock
your phone away for however long you tell it to, between five minutes and a whole day. You push
that button, it locks. You can't get your phone out, right? I use that for three hours a day to
I would have finished none of my books. I would recommend if you've got kids, get a K-safe and
just start with 15 minutes a day where you all put your phones in the K-safe and have to look
into each other's eyes, like in ye olden times. And it'll be really hard at first, right? But
the thing about attention is having someone actually listen to you and you actually listening
to them is so much more rewarding than whatever shitty update.
On Instagram, you're going to have to wait 15 minutes for, right? But you start small, you build
up those muscles. Now I can talk about lots of other, that's just one of dozens of things I would
say to parents, but I would start with that. I would say install on your phone and your kid's
phone, an app called Freedom. Do this with them. Don't impose it on them. Freedom can block you
either from specific websites. Let's say you're addicted to Instagram or eBay or TikTok or Porn
Hub, whatever it might be. You can say, don't let me go on that specific website for the next five
minutes, the next whole day. In fact, you should actually block porn sites,
even if your kids want them, but with the other stuff, negotiate with them. You can say for five
minutes for a whole day, you can say, give me an hour's window once a day. And then if you try to
go on it, it just says you have been set free and you can't get on it, right? So I have social media
permanently blocked on all my devices because I just don't want people to say at my funeral,
yeah, Johan spent a lot of time on Twitter. I just do not want that to be the life I had, right?
Your life is the sum total of the habits you had in that life, right? And there's no use saying I'm
the kind of person who reads books and runs on the beach. If hour by hour, you're spending your
life scrolling through TikTok. If you're the guy who spends your life scrolling through TikTok,
how you spend your hours is how you spend your life, right? I could say many, many more things,
but that's where I would begin the conversation. And then there's lots of other things I would
talk about. Yeah. And you've touched on that a few times. The regret of the dying is,
and I wish I loved and connected more and worked and strive less, or as it turns out,
maybe scrolled through my phone less. And I love some of the practical things you described there.
I did want to move on to your
book, Magic Pill, because it's such an important conversation to have. And I thought I'd just give
a little scene setter for those that maybe haven't had a chance to read. I'd encourage you to do it
because this is going to be the conversation of our times. In January, 2023, you started to inject
yourself once a week with Ozempic, one of the new drugs that produces significant weight loss.
And you're far from alone. There's some predictions that you talk about where potentially one in four
in the UK and the global population going forward will be taking a version of one of these Ozempic
80% of diets fail, but someone taking one of these new weight loss drugs can expect to lose a quarter
of their body weight in six months time. The drugs defenders will say this is a moment of liberation
from a condition that massively increases your chance of diabetes and cancer and early death.
I understand you still feel really conflicted about these Ozempic style drugs. Do they really
work as well as they sound? Are they a magic solution or a bit of a magic illusion you write
about? You found that the drugs alongside the massive benefits also have 12,
significant potential risks that you write about. I just wanted to ask you,
can you tell us a bit about your own personal journey with taking Ozempic?
Yeah, I remember so vividly the first time I learned about their existence.
It was that moment when the world was reopening again at the end of 2022. And I got invited to a
party for the first time in ages because no one had had any parties because the world was shut down.
And I thought, oh yeah, I remember them. Okay, I'll go. And I was in an Uber on the way there.
I'm not saying this just to name drop, it's relevant. This party was thrown by an Oscar
winning actor. And I was in an Uber on the way there. And I was feeling a bit kind of
self-conscious because I was quite fat when the pandemic started and I gained quite a lot of
weight during the pandemic. I thought, oh, it's a bit embarrassing. And then I thought,
oh, wait a minute. Actually, loads of people I know gained weight during the pandemic.
This party is going to be really interesting. I'm going to see all these Hollywood stars with a bit
of like podge on them. This is going to be fascinating. And I arrived and I started walking
around and it was the weirdest thing. It's not just that they hadn't gained weight. Everyone was
like gone. Like everyone was like markedly thinner and not just the stars, but like people I'd known
before, their agents, the screenwriters, the screenwriters, kids. Like I was like, wow.
And I bumped into a friend of mine on the dance floor and I said to her, wow, it looks like
everyone really did take up Pilates during lockdown. And she laughed. I didn't know why
she was laughing. And she said, right, well, you...
You know, this isn't Pilates, right? And she showed me a photograph of an Ozempic pen. And I
then learned in the next few days that, and obviously spent a lot of time researching this
for the book, there has been a staggering medical breakthrough. Sometimes I've seen in the Australian
press, this is still being referred to as if it was like a fad or, you know, a diet craze. It's
really important people understand. There are lots of things to be worried about here, but this is
not a fad. For the first time, we have a drug that means the average person who takes it loses
about a quarter of their body weight within a year.
It is staggering. And it's not a diet drug in the conventional sense. It radically dials down
your hunger. I can explain how. And I remember as soon as I learned about this, I felt two
completely conflicting things. The first thing I thought was, well, this could save my life
because I was about to turn 44, which is the age my grandfather was when he died of a heart attack.
Loads of the men in my family get fat and die of heart attacks. My dad had terrible heart problems.
They didn't die of them. My uncle died of a heart attack. As I said, my granddad died of it.
And I thought, well, I knew then that obviously obesity makes heart disease much more likely. It
actually makes over 200 known diseases or complications. It either causes them or makes
them much worse. So I thought, wow, if we've got a drug that can reverse obesity, that's
a big deal. But I also thought, oh, wait a minute. This sounds way too good to be true.
What effortless weight loss. Come on now.
So for the book, I went on this big journey all over the world, from Iceland to Minneapolis to
Japan, to interview the leading experts, the biggest defenders, the biggest critics of the
drug, to dig into how we got to this point as a society where so many people want to take these
drugs, what the alternatives to these drugs are. What I learned is there's a lot to be worried
about here. There's some really big risks, but there are staggering benefits to these drugs.
It's a complicated picture, but people should be really excited. For people with obesity,
this is a staggering game changer. There's a lot to worry about as well, but there's a lot to be
excited about. I want to touch on that because at the end of your book, you still say you can't
be in favor or against a Zempik because you outline 12 potential side effects. Fascinating
to hear you say now that for people with obesity, we know that the life expectancy and the issues
are complicated. But you talk about in the book,
about diminished muscle mass, fears about the prevalence of the increase in eating disorders.
Can I ask you this question then? What scares you the most about these Zempik-style drugs?
The way I would put it is these drugs are an unbelievably powerful tool. This is slightly
over the top, but only a little bit. The way I think of them is a bit like fire. Fire is a really
incredible tool. It's a great tool if I use it to warm my house up. It's a pretty shitty tool if I
use it to burn your house down. It's a pretty shitty tool if I use it to burn your house down.
And when you get an incredibly powerful new tool, it will obviously have great strengths and great
drawbacks. So we know that if you are, as I was pretty much all my adult life, obese, if you take
these drugs and you cease to be obese, as I have, I've gone from being, I'm sorry, I know this doesn't
work for Australians, but I was 14 and a half stone. I went down to I'm a little bit more than
11 stone now. I can never do pounds. I'm sorry, barbaric colonials will have to do the conversions
yourself. But we know that that reduces your risk of heart attack. And I think that's a really good
thing to do. And I think that's a really good thing to do. And I think that's a really good thing to
do. And I think that's a really good thing to do. And I think that's a really good thing to do.
stroke by 20% in two years. Incredible, right? Might well be saving my life. And there are huge
benefits like that for health. But there are also some pretty significant risks. In terms of what
worries me most. Well, there's what worries me for myself. And then there's what worries me
for the society and distinguish them a bit. What worries me most for myself, I've decided to
continue taking these drugs. Because the heart disease risk in my family is so great. Frankly,
out of vanity, like I prefer it now my neighbor's hot gardener hit on me within three months of like
taking them. There's loads of great things about not being fat, right? Which are not to do with
health. But so I tell myself it's primarily the health benefits. Some of my friends are like,
yeah, I can get real. Yeah, health benefits are nice. But come on, let's level with yourself.
What worries me for myself, there's a few things. One of them is that we don't know the long term
effects of these drugs. So diabetics have been taking them for people who don't know in addition
to having this incredible effect for weight loss. These drugs also treat type two diabetes,
and they stimulate the creation of insulin. So they've only been used for weight loss for a
couple of years, but diabetics have been using them for it'll be well 19 years now. So they
haven't been used for that long. There could be some long term effect of these drugs that we just
don't know about. Right? Especially since we know that these drugs work primarily by changing how
your brain works. That's pretty sobering, right? One of the obesity experts saying,
I interviewed a woman in New Orleans, brilliant woman called Dr. Shauna Levy, who's at the Tulane
University School of Medicine. She's an obesity specialist there. She said to me, we don't know
the long term effects of these drugs. But we do know the long term effects of obesity, and they
are catastrophic. So the long term effects of these drugs would have to be really bad to outweigh
the harms of obesity. Obesity makes pretty much everything we fear in medical terms much more
common. Dementia, heart disease, stroke.
Diabetes, cancer. I mean, I was embarrassed to say I was stunned by quite how bad for your obesity is
the evidence about this. That's my biggest worry for myself. My biggest worry for the society is
different. This is not something I think I'm saying I'm confident will not happen to me. But
I'm really worried about young girls with eating disorders getting hold of these drugs, which has
already begun. So I think got distinguished between people who take these drugs, who are obese,
who take them to come down to be a healthy weight for which there's a strong case, although there
are still significant risks. So I think we've got to distinguish between people who take these drugs,
who are obese, who take them to come down to be a healthy weight, for which there's a strong case,
and then there are people who are already healthy weight or indeed skinny who take them to be super
skinny. Like I was on a show recently with one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey who said we're
all on it and they were already skinny, right? Now, I don't judge anyone for doing that. Women
are made to feel like shit about their bodies, whatever they do. So I'm not standing over them
wagging my finger. I don't feel that way. But I am worried about that. And for a lot of people,
for lots of reasons, you mentioned loss of muscle mass, it can harm you. There's health risks to
being super skinny, right? Particularly as you age. But I'm most worried about girls with eating
disorders. I'm sure you've known, pretty much everyone has known someone with an eating disorder
in their life. Think about anorexia. If you're anorexic, there's a conflict going on inside you.
There's the biological part of you that wants to stay alive and therefore wants to eat.
And then there's the psychological part of you that for complicated reasons wants to starve yourself.
And what these drugs can do, if you take them at a high dose, they can just amputate your appetite.
They can just cut off that biological part of you that wants to eat. Obviously, you're taking too
high a dose if that happens, but that's what they want, right? If you have an eating disorder. And
there's already a, this is happening, Dr. Kimberly Dennis, one of the leading eating disorders
experts in the United States said to me that these drugs are rocket fuel for people with eating
disorders. So precisely because these drugs haven't arrived in huge numbers in Australia yet, except
for people with diabetes.
I would really urge Australia can get this right in a way that Britain and the US have not so far.
These drugs, I absolutely believe should be prescribed. More importantly, the world's
doctors and medical authorities think that, doesn't really matter what I think, but they should be
prescribed very tightly. So at the moment, right, I can look at you, you absolutely do not qualify
for these drugs, right? You do not meet the criteria. You are obviously not obese. I guarantee
you, you could get an appointment with a doctor on Zoom and pretend to be in Britain, get an
appointment with a doctor on Zoom or pretend to be in Britain. You could get an appointment with a doctor on
Vegas or anywhere in the US and you would get them delivered to an address in Britain or the US.
We need to do not allow them to be prescribed on Zoom in Australia, right? You should have to go
to a doctor. The doctor should weigh you and make sure you meet the medical criteria or you have
type two diabetes. If you don't meet the medical criteria, they shouldn't give it to you. And if
you're trying to get it, you're too skinny. They should be referring you for eating disorders,
counseling and help. I worry that in addition to the massive benefits for people like me,
and there will be many people in the world whose lives are
saved by these drugs, there will be no doubt about that, and whose lives are massively enriched
by it. The statistics that are emerging are staggering for the health benefits. I worry if
we don't fix the regulation, there will also be an opioid-like death toll of young girls. And for
complicated reasons, eating disorders mostly affect young girls, obviously sometimes boys,
sometimes older women, but it's overwhelmingly young girls. There'll just be a massive death
toll of young girls who would not have been able to starve themselves to death without these drugs,
but who will successfully starve themselves.
So yeah, and that's just one of the 12 drawbacks in addition to the benefits that I write about in
the book. I'm not normally on the one hand, on the other hand kind of person, but these drugs are
so powerful that the effects are complicated and we've got to level with people. The book is called
Magic Pill because there's three ways these drugs can be magic, right? The first way is they could
just solve the problem of obesity. I've got to level with you, Luke. There are days when it
feels like that. My whole adult life I've been obese. Now I inject myself in the leg once a week,
barely even feel it, tiny little scratch with an EpiPen.
I'm not fat anymore, right? It's mad. I don't feel hungry very much. I don't overeat. So it could be magic like that.
The second way it could be magic is more disturbing. It could be like a magic trick. It could be
like a magician who shows you a card trick while they pick your pocket. It could be that
over time the 12 risks associated with these drugs outweigh the benefits. I don't think
that's the most likely scenario, but you definitely can't rule it out. The third way it could
be magic is I actually think the most likely. Think about all the stories of magic that
Think about Aladdin. You find the lamp, you rub it, the genie appears, the genie grants
your wish. And it comes true, but never quite in the way you expected. It has all these
unpredictable effects. And we're already seeing incredible, unpredictable rippling effects
throughout the economy in the US, where now half the population want to take these drugs.
So yeah, I think it's most likely to be magic in that third way. It's going to be unpredictable.
And for anyone that's considering it, you need to read Magic Pill because the brilliance
of Johan Hari is you go and speak to the best experts in the world. And there is no judgment
in your writing. You just present the facts as you hear them and see them. And it's a
complex one, this one. As you said, three-year-olds understand the McDonald's symbol before their
own surname often. We're filling the advertising world with these ultra-processed ads for McDonald's
and fast food chain. And then at the other end now, we're saying, here's a drug we can
inject yourself into.
So, it's a complex time, isn't it, for young people?
It's so interesting you say that, Luke, because actually, when I was thinking about that,
that whole thing you're talking about, there's a really interesting moment in the history
of Australia that I think helps us to think about this. So on the one hand, you look at
this and go, this is fucking crazy. How did we get to the point where half of Americans
want to inject themselves with a drug to stop themselves eating? That just seems so bizarre.
How did we reach this point?
And I would just say to everyone,
just stop listening to this podcast for a second
and Google something for me.
Google, you can, I found it online.
When your prime minister drowned in,
I think it was 1966, Harold Holt.
So I'm sure people remember,
but he disappeared off a beach and was never found.
Just Google the beach, video the beach that day.
There's news footage of it.
So loads of ordinary Australians were just at the beach.
They looked for him.
And you look at this beach,
just look at the people on that beach for a minute
and then come back, right?
It's really weird.
Everyone on the beach that day
looks to us to be skinny or ripped.
You look at it and go,
huh, where was everyone else on the beach that day?
Was it like a skinny person convention
that Harold Holt was attending?
And then you look at the figures for Australia.
That's what people look like in 1966.
There were almost literally no fat people
in Australia in 1966.
6% of British people were obese.
Now it's 27% and rising rapidly, right?
Between the year I was born
and the year I turned 21,
And then in the next 20 years,
severe obesity doubled again.
This is really strange.
Human beings exist in our modern form
for about 350,000 years,
between 300 and 350,000 years.
And obesity happens sometimes,
but it was not the case.
It was the case of obesity.
It was the case of obesity.
It was unbelievably rare.
And then literally,
I think we're probably about the same age, Luke,
in your lifetime and my lifetime,
it has blown the fuck up.
This happens everywhere that makes one change.
It's where people go from mostly eating a diet
of fresh whole foods they prepare on the day
to mostly eating a diet of processed
and ultra-processed foods,
which means foods that are built in factories
out of chemicals in a process
that isn't actually even called cooking.
It's called manufacturing.
It's called manufacturing food.
And it turns out that new kind of food,
which never existed before,
your great-grandparents never had one mouthful of it,
nor did anyone listening,
unless you're very young.
That new kind of food affects our bodies
in very different ways to the old kind of food.
And I go through lots of reasons why in Magic Pill,
but there's an experiment that to me really nailed it,
done by a guy I interviewed called Dr. Paul Kenny.
He's the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai,
a great scientist.
It's a super simple experiment.
You can all try it.
It's at home if you're feeling a little bit sadistic.
He got a lot of rats and he raised them in a cage.
And all they had to eat was the kind of natural whole foods
that rats evolved to eat over thousands of years.
And when that's all they had,
the rats would eat when they were hungry
and stop when they were full.
They never overate.
They never became fat.
Then Dr. Kenny introduced them
to the kind of modern American diet
that's spreading all over the world,
almost all the world.
He fried up a load of bacon.
He bought a load of snacks.
He bought a load of Snickers bars.
Crucially, he bought a load of cheesecake.
And he put it in the cage.
And the rats went apeshit for the American diet.
Actually, I don't know if rats can't go apeshit.
The rats went crazy for the American diet.
They literally would dive into the cheesecake
and eat their way out
and just emerge completely slicked with cheesecake.
They ate and ate and ate and ate.
The way Dr. Kenny put it to me
is within a couple of days,
they were different animals.
And within a few weeks,
they were all severely obese.
Kenny tweaked the experiment again
in a way it feels a bit cruel to me.
He took away the American diet
and left them with nothing but the healthy food.
And he was sure he knew what would happen.
He thought they would eat more calories
than they had before.
And this would prove that exposure
to the American diet expands
the number of calories you eat in a day.
That is not what happened.
What happened was much weirder.
Once they'd had the American diet
and they stopped,
they refused to eat anything at all.
It was like they no longer recognized healthy food
They literally only went back to eating healthy food
when they were actually starving to death.
I've nicknamed that experiment Cheesecake Park.
I would argue we are all living
in a version of that experiment.
We're all living in Cheesecake Park.
Processed and ultra-processed foods
undermine your ability to feel full
and to get the signal from your body,
hey, stop eating now.
You've had enough.
And what these drugs do
is they give you back that feeling of fullness.
I actually realized when I started taking Osempic,
I had never really felt,
I had never really felt full in my life.
I'd felt stuffed.
I'd felt so stuffed I couldn't eat anymore.
But I'd never felt full,
not in the way I do now.
But obviously that comes at a cost, right?
So obviously the deeper solution is
let's not fuck up our kids
by feeding them this shit.
Now again, that's not something that you...
because I went to Japan
where they don't allow that to be done to their kids
and there is literally no childhood obesity in Japan.
It's a statistically negligible amount.
It's a very weird thing
to walk around a school of a thousand children
and there be not one child.
One single fat child in that school.
It's bizarre, right?
I talk about how Japan achieved that in the book,
but we should follow Japan's lead.
But for someone like me,
it's too late for that, right?
Like I would love to wind the clock back to my childhood
and do that, but I can't do that, right?
So I face this difficult choice,
but we should not tolerate that being the choice forever.
We can solve the problem at root.
You have to take on the food industry.
You have to take on all sorts of factors.
You have to do what Japan has done,
but we can do that.
Japan is not a fictional country.
It can feel like...
It can feel like it a bit at times, but it's not.
So yeah, we've got to solve the deeper problem.
But in the meantime, we face a difficult choice, right?
And some people go,
well, you know, I thought this myself.
Am I being hypocritical taking the drugs?
Because I talk all the time
about how we've got to solve these deeper problems.
So it's a hypocrisy.
But the way I began to think about it is,
you know, I spend a lot more time in the US.
I'm passionately in favor of gun control,
partly because of the lesson we have in Australia.
You haven't had any massacres since the Port Arthur massacre
because of what John Howard did.
And the Australian people supported.
I'm in favor of gun control.
Someone I know was murdered in a 7-Eleven in Vegas
Random gun violence.
Not very long ago.
I'm passionately in favor of gun control,
but if I had been there when my friend Tommy was shot,
I would not have stood over him and said,
well, guys, we've got to close the gun show loophole
and we've got to ban bump stocks and we've got to...
No, I would have phoned an ambulance, right?
Like, in the same way,
of course, we should deal with the deeper factors
driving up the obesity crisis,
but if you're someone who's already been fucked
by the fact we're in this situation,
I'm not going to stand over you, wag my finger and say,
well, we've got to deal with the deeper social factors.
I'm going to say, yeah,
let's make sure we all live to fight another day
and then we can deal with the deeper social factors.
I can't deal with the deeper social factors
if I die of a heart attack, right?
Yeah, brilliantly said.
And you articulate that in a really fair and unique way.
I have to go back and comment on Harold Holtbrief.
I'm sitting about 45 minutes from that beach
and I have looked at that vision before
and it is stark to see how different, you know, 1966.
In a classic Australian one,
only Australians can then name swimming pools
after a former prime minister who's drowned.
It makes me so happy.
And the Harold Holt pool is about 10 minutes
from where I'm sitting.
One of the many things I love about Australia,
if you ever say to someone you want to distill
the Australian spirit into one thing,
I wouldn't show them Uluru,
I wouldn't show them a fucking koala.
Here's the Harold Holt swing pool.
Why is it called that?
Because that prime minister fucking drowned.
It'd be like having a JFK shooting range or something.
Like, what are you doing?
And the fact that you can disappear off that beach
and never be seen again
is still one of the great bizarre mysteries of life.
I love this saying, Johan, that success leaves clues.
And I'm curious to fire a few questions your way
and just around what successful people like you
and you've had an incredible, fascinating, interesting life
and this idea of self-leadership.
But you've overcome your own fair share of challenges
in your life when you read about your history
before becoming this incredible, successful and trusted author.
You have battled your own addiction,
which you're incredibly open about.
And you resigned from your dream job as a columnist
and you had some public challenges with that.
And we know it's incredibly hard to lead other people
and do what you're doing without an understanding of yourself.
How would you describe the way that you lead yourself now?
It's interesting.
I don't know why, but that concept of leading myself doesn't,
it's not how I think about myself.
So I've got to think about it for a moment.
But I pursue things that I find incredibly meaningful.
So for me, when you get knocked off course, as we all do,
you face challenges, you face drawbacks.
Every book I ever write, very early on in writing it,
I write on top of it a paper, why does this matter?
And I write a list of reasons why it matters, why I'm doing it.
Why is it important?
And then when I have moments of writing,
I don't like it when writers go, oh, writing is so hard.
My grandmother left school when she was 13.
She spent her whole fucking life cleaning toilets.
I would not go back in time and say to my grandmother,
God, my life's so hard.
I think when writers say that, I say, get a fucking grip, mate.
Go look at how the rest of the world lives.
Yeah, there are challenges in our job, but we're really fucking lucky.
So with that caveat, when my job is hard,
I re-anchor myself.
I re-anchor myself around meaning.
Meaning gets you through a lot.
I interviewed a really amazing Russian psychologist in Moscow
who said to me once, you know, Russians,
when we look at Anglo-American philosophy and psychology,
we just laugh because you talk all the time about,
oh, you know, life is about pursuing happiness.
You know, it's even there in,
is it the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution?
I forget the Declaration of Independence, you know.
So this is just, to us, this is a joke.
Happiness will come and go and you have very little control over it.
Life isn't about pursuing happiness.
Life is about pursuing meaning.
And when you've got meaning, you can absorb a huge amount of pain.
Just think about, this is a trivial example,
but I went to the dentist last week, right?
It was fucking agony.
But because that pain happened in the context of a system of meaning,
the dentist said, I'm going to inflict terrible pain on you,
but it's so that you don't feel more pain in the future
and so that your teeth look nice and you're not fucked up.
Actually, I was able to endure that pain pretty easily.
Now, if someone broke into my house now
and stuck a drill into my mouth for no reason,
that would literally be torture.
I would be like traumatized for years, right?
So you see the difference is, what's the difference between the two?
So only one thing, which is the system of meaning surrounding it.
If you have a system of meaning, you will be able to absorb a lot, right?
So for me, I think,
one of the reasons, one of the ways I sort of lead myself
is I establish, I work on things that are very meaningful to me
and I anchor myself in that meaning
and I systematically remind myself of the meaning of what I'm doing.
Yeah, Johan, and the next sort of dimension I want to talk to you about
I mean, you've had a global impact on the way people think
and given people practical advice
and really important information in ways they haven't had before
and things that are incredibly challenging for those of us living
What's your advice on how people can impact the way that you've been able
to go about other people or to be able to lead the teams of people
You write books and it's a bit of a solo pursuit that you're in,
but do you think about that impact that you have on others
in the work that you do?
I do think about it.
It wouldn't be honest if I said I didn't.
I was told something in the zoo in Sydney once.
Koala is obviously the only thing they eat, it's eucalyptus leaves,
but they're so thick that if the eucalyptus,
eucalyptus leaves are not above them,
they don't recognize it as food.
So the person said to me that a koala would starve to death
in a room full of eucalyptus leaves if they were just on the floor.
I don't know if that's actually true.
I'm going to look it up.
But the reason I mentioned that is because I think in a way,
a lot of us are a bit like those koalas.
The thing that drives me forward most is curiosity.
I'm really curious about other people.
I like almost everyone I actually meet.
And everyone you meet, you just think every single person you ever meet
knows stuff you don't know.
And they've had a life you haven't had.
And if you can tap into that,
if you can just be curious about people and develop skills
to kind of help people talk about themselves,
the world is like infinitely abundant.
You're just surrounded by riches.
But I think a lot of us, because we're in this culture,
again, it's not our fault, encourages us to be narcissistic,
to think about ourselves, to be kind of,
you know, sealed off in our own egos.
We're a bit like this hypothetical koala that's in a room full of eucalyptus leaves
but just doesn't even recognize it and is starving to death, right?
So I think the more you can be genuinely curious,
I think some people think that leadership is standing above people
and directing them, right?
And of course, there'll be times when leaders have to be like that, right?
A general on a battlefield is not conducting an open seminar the whole time, right?
The more you can be driven by curiosity,
the more you genuinely listen to people,
I think the, firstly, just the smarter you'll be.
Like, you learn stuff from everyone, right?
But also, the more people will lean into you,
particularly in a very narcissistic age,
when actually very few people feel listened to,
very few people are listened to,
I think the core of the answer to what you're,
I'm not quite getting at it,
the reason I think I'm effective in so far as I am
is because I'm genuinely curious about these questions
and that means that I'm also eager once I've learned it
to communicate it to other people, right?
So I think a lot about how to communicate with people.
I don't talk in an,
you know, also partly, you know,
I'm from a working class family,
my dad was a bus driver,
my mom was a nurse
and then worked in shelters for victims of domestic violence.
I was mostly raised by my grandmother
because my mother was ill,
my dad was in a different country,
so most of the time,
I was raised by my grandmother
left school when she was 13,
was a fucking amazing person.
I want to communicate
with the widest possible range of people.
I would always want to write a book
that my grandmother could have read, right?
A lot of people think kind of,
well, the wanky term,
even I even hate to use it,
but like thought leadership,
a lot of people think thought leadership
is making things complicated.
You know, you don't want to simplify things,
but real intelligence comes from,
from making complicated things comprehensible,
not from making simple things incomprehensible,
which is how many people seem to think of it.
Which is the genius of your writing for me
is that you take these complex issues
and you write them in a way
that we can understand that very few can.
I want to pick up on that curiosity
because you strike me
as one of the most curious people
I've ever had the pleasure of speaking to you.
Could you give an example of a rabbit hole
you've gone down recently
where that curiosity just takes you
into a different direction?
Well, the last 15 years,
I've been investigating a series of crimes
that have been happening in Las Vegas.
My publishers will taser me
if I talk about it too much, but...
Is that the next book?
And I've been working on it a really long time.
It's a really strange story, but...
And so on that, without giving away,
which you won't with the book to come out,
is it just a story that takes you
and that's enough to send you
on a mission to uncover more?
I mean, so it feels like,
a very different genre for you to go down.
It's just curiosity's got you
and you want to tell this story?
I learned that there were people living
in the drainage tunnels beneath Las Vegas.
So I went there in 2011
and I met this amazing couple
who I really kind of fell in love with
who were living there.
And they brought me into this world
and then we discovered some really
strange things were happening
And I kept going back.
And it was curiosity.
It was concern for them.
It was something in myself.
I think a lot of people
who spend a lot of time in Vegas,
Vegas attracts people who have a wound
and don't quite know what it is.
That's a very pretentious thing to say,
but I do think it's true.
Benny Binion, who was in one of the
iconic casino owners of Vegas,
if you have a weakness,
Las Vegas will find it.
Which I thought was a very true thing to say.
But yeah, I think there are lots of things.
So, I mean, that's been a bizarre rabbit hole
for a big part of my life.
And there's something about...
You get a depth of understanding
when you work on something
for such a long time.
Although I did the other day,
get someone I know
who lives in one of the tunnels saying,
have you still not written your book yet?
I'm being chided on unproductivity
by one of our J's who lives in the tunnel.
This is not a good sign, but...
who's been the greatest leader in your life?
Oh God, there's so many.
It was a great human being.
Two people come to mind.
My friend, Dorothy Byrne.
So lots of British people
will know who I'm talking about.
Dorothy is an absolute legend
in British television.
She was the first woman
to run orchestras
for Current Affairs and News
for a British TV channel
for Channel 4 News in Britain.
She ran it for 20 years.
She's one of the wisest people I know.
She's one of the funniest people I know.
One of the wisest people I know.
And she's a really...
If people Google Dorothy Byrne,
She gave something called
the McTaggart Lecture in 2019,
which is like one of the funniest
and most brilliant talks you'll ever see.
And you get a sense
of what an incredible human being Dorothy is.
But she's someone I've...
We've been friends for 20 years.
She's someone I go,
I go to for advice a lot.
She's got a really interesting style, Dorothy.
She's just an incredible human being.
Another one is someone in Vegas,
my friend Paul Votrino
and my friends Paul and Rob,
Paul and Rob used to live
in the tunnels beneath Vegas.
They now run a group
which people can donate to online
called Shine a Light
where they go back into the tunnels every day.
They give out supplies,
sanitary products,
stuff people need,
but also most importantly,
they offer people help.
So if you want to get out,
They've got hundreds of people
out of the tunnels
and back to a healthy life.
They're just the best people I've ever met.
They're amazing people.
And they're like a real model of...
I was thinking about a model of leaders.
They're, fuck me,
Rob and Paul know how to lead.
In a funny way, like Dorothy,
they lead in a very...
They're hard-headed people,
but they lead very much
in a spirit of love and compassion.
Dorothy's very much like that.
what I love about Dorothy's style of leadership
and Rob and Paul's style of leadership
is they're people who are very focused
on the people who most need help.
I'll give you an example.
there was a paedophile in Britain
called Sidney Cook
who was one of the worst child abusers
in British history.
And Sidney Cook was about to be released.
And Dorothy went into the NEWS meeting
and they're having all this conversation about
where's Sidney Cook going to live
when he's released
and how that's going to be handled.
And Dorothy said to them,
you're all asking the wrong question.
The question isn't
where will Sidney Cook live
when he's released?
why the fuck is Sidney Cook being released?
He's one of the worst paedophiles
in British history.
Let's find all his other victims
who haven't come forward
and make sure he never gets out of prison.
So she then makes a film about that.
He never got out of prison.
I mean, I could tell you
like a hundred things like that
that Dorothy did and led.
Lots of Australians will have seen
she made the documentary
Leaving Neverland
about Michael Jackson.
That was her idea.
She was one of the producers.
She made the recent documentary
about Kevin Spacey
with my other amazing friend
Patrick Strudwick
I mean, Dorothy has just
fearlessly taken on
very powerful people
in the interests of powerless
or people who don't have much power.
And Rob and Paul are the same.
Always focused on, you know,
hard to imagine less powerful people
than people literally living in the drains.
They are focused every day on
they are rightly as valuable
as every other person in Las Vegas.
how do we get them
the help they need
to live the lives
that they deserve to live?
Yeah, brilliant answers.
I love asking that question.
You know, you went to your grandma
and then these extraordinary people
and that's what fills me with optimism
is there's great people
doing extraordinary things.
And, you know, for someone like you
to shine a light on that
as you do is a really powerful thing.
We're a bit obsessed with collaboration.
We feel like the world
had gone into silos
and people, as you described,
loneliness is a huge issue
and great things happen
when you connect people together
From different backgrounds,
a bit like your answer there, isn't it?
Two people living
in the drains of Las Vegas.
Most of us didn't even know
there were drains in Las Vegas,
let alone a community living down there
and exceptional producers
changing the world.
Is there been someone you thought,
God, I'd love to collaborate with them
or another passion of yours
or another area of your life?
Is there a name that comes to mind?
Clearly you've had access
to interesting people over the journey,
but has there been anyone
that you've been curious about?
I've been like freakishly
lucky on this front.
For my book, Stolen Focus,
I did this experiment
where I went off the internet
for three months.
I had no smartphone.
I went to this place
in Cape Cod called Provincetown.
It's kind of very up and down experience
that I described in the book.
But when I got reunited with my phone,
for a couple of weeks,
I didn't listen to all the voicemails.
And there was a voicemail.
I was going through
the unidentified numbers
and I was just deleting information
like, you know, just spam.
and I almost didn't listen to this one
that was an unidentified number.
hi, Johan, this is Oprah calling.
I read your book.
And it was this long message from Oprah.
And I, because my friends know
how much I fucking love Oprah, right?
Like, I know everyone likes Oprah in that way,
but like, I mean,
I was profoundly shaped
by watching the Oprah Winfrey show every day
for years and years and years, right?
I'm like an Oprah mega fan.
And I thought this is one of my friends
taking the piss, right?
God, they've done a really,
Really good impression of Oprah, right?
But at the end of this message,
she doesn't, she says,
well, because your answer machine
doesn't have your voice,
I'm not sure this is actually your number.
So I don't want to leave my number
on a random answer machine.
So I'll call you back, right?
Three fucking months passed.
I did not get a call back from Oprah.
I was like, well, I said, I fucked it, right?
This is, I've missed my one chance.
She'd never got off the internet.
And then she phoned me one day.
I find this slightly surreal to say,
but we are friends.
I'm going to go and see her
in Montecito in a few weeks.
And probably the two people
I most admire in the world
are Noam Chomsky.
In fact, probably the three people
kind of public figures,
are Noam Chomsky, Oprah,
who a lot of people won't know
because she wrote the vagina monologues,
but has done many things.
And I'm friends with all of them.
So that's been a really bizarre,
like I've cooperated with Chomsky
he's sadly not well now,
but he, for many years,
I've been writing his biography,
another long-term project.
He's now 95 and I'll probably be older
than he is now by the time I finish.
So I've been really,
really lucky with all three of them
to get to know them well
and sort of collaborate with them
she's interviewed me a few times.
I'm going to go and see her
because she's interviewed me again.
If you had told my 10-year-old self
well, I wouldn't know what texting was
when I was 10, I guess,
but you'll be like texting with Oprah
I would have been like,
yeah, and you'll have a device
on which you can push a button
and someone will deliver KFC
And you'll have a massive television
on which you can watch any film
that's ever been made.
I would have been like,
What you're telling me
is I will live in Nirvana, right?
My life will be entirely complete
and I'll be in a state
of constant ecstasy until death, right?
So yeah, I've been very,
very lucky with that.
What a brilliant note to finish on
and I've thoroughly enjoyed
our conversation.
I could talk for hours.
So curious about the many things
that you do and really excited
to see you here in Australia.
Hopefully you get to catch up
I know you're doing a lot of stuff.
You're doing a great tour.
Yeah, come to the Melbourne show.
I should say to people
or my publicist will taser me.
But yeah, I'm speaking
about our attention crisis,
why it's happening in Australia,
what people can do about it,
very practical level,
how we can all get our focus back.
I'm doing it in Sydney, Melbourne,
Perth, Adelaide, Canberra.
We'll put all the dates out
on the show notes on this show
and hosted by the beautiful
Sarah Grimberg, who's a champion,
who's going to be sensational.
And Johan, it's a great contribution
that you make every day.
We've all been inspired by your work
and real pleasure to speak to you today.
Thanks for your time.
Oh, I really appreciate it.
And I should just say as well
that anyone who wants to know
where to get the audio books,
physical books and my books,
you go to johannhari.com.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of the Empowering Leaders podcast.
Huge thanks as always
to our great friends at Temper.
And we encourage you to check out
our Leader Connect program.
New episodes are out
every Wednesday morning at 6am.